old and slow

I’ve been reading just now, a piece on the Punch about photoshopping pictures to make yourself look younger and more beautiful. For example, here’s a “real”, unaltered picture of a 50 year-old woman:

Quite a nice picture eh? She’s pretty attractive.

Here she is after photoshop:

Odd eh?

I’m beginning to think I need of photoshopping these days. In real life I can sort of wonder around in a blissful daze, providing I avoid mirrors, totally unaware of how I look. In pictures, however, it’s hard to avoid the awful truth. I take very few pictures for just this reason.

Here’s my most recent picture, also my new facebook profile shot, taken on Monday afternoon at the docks in Hobart:

Scary eh? Admittedly, I had was pretty grumpy and cold, hadn’t slept much and was feeling less than enthusiastic about going to some conference dinner.

Here’s an older profile shot, taken a few years back at Venus bay, when I was relatively young and fresh-faced:

It’s all going south rather quickly isn’t it? I blame years of hard living, destroying my skin’s youthful elasticity and dampening my joie de vivre.

Running
My joie de vivre is not the only thing a bit damp this morning. Some bright spark (me) thought it would be a good idea to go for a run early this morning. I was up at 5:20 and out the door quick-smart. Even at that time, it was warm and humid. I sweated around my usual 12.5km course in pretty much right on an hour. That’s 5 minutes faster than 10 days ago, but still 8 minutes slower than my PB.

When I finished, I was so sweaty there were complaints. Actually, the complaints were about the smell, but it’s the same general idea.

I use this morning’s course as a measure of my overall fitness. (here is is on mapmyrun.com) It’s 12.5km, but not at all easy. I could run that distance in a race at under 4 minute/km pace pretty easily, but I’ve never got close on this course. There are 3 sharp hills and a couple of long slow ones. They hills are all in the first 8km, so the trick is to keep it strong and steady through them, leaving enough energy to fang it over the relatively flat last 3km.

So that’s my goal (for the moment): pick up enough fitness and speed to be able to give 52 minutes a shot. I’d like to do it in under 50 minutes one day, but that’s a way off.

it’s christmas already

A quick glance at my calendar tells me it’s still October. True, we’re only a few days before the end, but it’s definitely still the tenth month.

So, why is it that Christmas has already started?

My son, who’s only 3, has already started telling my in a very serious voice the “Santa comes to good boys”. Strangely, he’s not so interested in what happens to good girls.

At work, the big boss has a fairly pathetic, fake christmas tree parked outside his office, perhaps in an attempt to seem ahead of the pack for once.

Then again, we’re a little confused at work. We still have a whole selection of blue, white, red and black balloons up in the kitchen, suggesting the footy season is still to reach its exciting climax. Then in the lift lobby there are ads for various people’s Cup sweeps.

I feel like saying “just pick a bloody season and stick with it”.

And if it’s okay – pleased don’t make it Christmas. Can’t we skip straight to Australia Day?

Running
A run around the tan this lunch-time. Ho hum.

in sunny Hobart

No joke: Hobart really is sunny today. Very sunny. Postcard picture sunny, I kid you not.

It’s deceiving though. Get yourself caught in the wind or, worse, in the shade and the world starts to feel rather arctic, or rather antarctic.

I’ve been here a few days for a work conference. The conference itself has been pleasurable in a wierd sort of way. It’s about the only place I can talk happily in work/technical jargon without being seen as some sort of leper. In normal life, grown men and women back away slowly when I start to talk about this stuff, and small children have been known to burst into tears. Even my own.

Apart from the conference, there have been some pissups work functions and a few runs. I woke up super early on Monday morning and ran from the city, up through the botanic gardens, over the big bridge and back. It was quite a nice run, if a touch on the invigorating side.

The bridge has footpaths on either side, but they’re a bit alarming. If you run like I do – with a clodding, thumping, heavy stride – the whole footpath seems to shake and shudder and it becomes apparent that it’s only bolted on to the side of the bridge as an afterthought. If a bicycle comes the other way, it gets a bit close too.

Still, I like Hobart, despite the fact that there’s NOWHERE open on a Sunday night (or any night, it seems). I could quite happily live here if I could find a job.

Maroondah Fun Run

I did end up running the Maroondah Fun Run this morning, for a laugh. I could hardly not, given the course runs pretty much past my house.

Given my fitness is at embryonic levels at the moment, I wasn’t expecting much of a performance.

It started at 8:30, so I was there about 7:45 to get signed up and then stand around getting rained on. Fun. Tiger Boy was there, along with a couple of other people I talked to but didn’t pick up their names.

As is becoming traditional at fun runs this year, the course was considerably short. At least they owned up from the start; apparently the local OH&S types didn’t like the look of one section of the course and excised it. Bloody do-gooders! If runners want to career full-pelt down a cliff risking certain death, I say let us!

When we finally started (15 minutes late) the running on the first lap was fine, the second lap was run pretty much solo and a bit slower. I finished in about 30 minutes or so, but I don’t really know as they didn’t have a clock at the finish. They did take my number, so I assume at some stage they’ll say what position I came.

Including the run to and from the race, I probably ran about 10km today, and the race bit was at a pleasing pace. So, I’m feeling okay about things.

I’m off to Tasmania this afternoon for a piss-up conference. That should be fun.

The only things is, I just looked at the Hobart weather forecast. 12 degrees, showers falling as snow on the hills. Eek! Better remember to take a jumper.

Passports

We’re taking a little family trip in a few months time. It’s out of the country (Vietnam, thanks for asking) so we’ve all had to get new passports. The kids because they’ve never had one before, and the adults because ours have expired.

Hoo-eee, has it been a difficult process.

Firstly, you have a go at getting 2 kids under 3 to stay still, not smile, not cry, have their mouth shut, hold their chin up etc. for a picture. It can’t be done, I’m telling you. Or at least it can be, but not without crying at such a pitch and volume that the whole shopping centre turns around at once to stare at you. And that’s just the adults!

Anyway, we got some pictures eventually, and I went down to my friendly local post office for the interview. It turns out one of the kids’ photos wasn’t right – the distance between the top of the head and the chin was less than 2 millimetres out. 2 mils! So we had to do it again.

Then there’s the form itself, which is available online. You can’t download it and fill it out by hand in your own time. No, you have to go through an extremely tedious wizard thing. At every second step it turns out you need some piece of information you don’t have at hand, so you have to do the whole thing again (because you forgot to write down the code they gave you at the start of the process).

I’m a little cheezed off with the whole thing, let me tell you. It might just be easier to stay home.

Running
A 10km run this morning, with AM. I’m not sure she (AM) was quite at her fleet-footed best, I know I wasn’t. So it was a pretty gently stroll along the river, but in lovely weather.

I’m tossing up doing the Maroondah Hospital fun run this Sunday morning. It pretty much goes past my house, so I should enter. I’m thinking about taking one of the kids in the pram. That might be fun???

things I don’t like

People who describe items of their clothing as “pieces”. I’m thinking mainly of people who have themselves photographed in MX magazine saying things like “I’m a vintage shop kinda girl. I like to find great unique pieces”. What this usually means is they wear exactly the same allegedly trendy, unflattering rubbish everyone else does, but they desperately want to sound cool.

People who says they “have a passion for fashion”. See above.

Dogs who whine and beg to be walked, pull your arm out of your shoulder socket in the first 5 minutes, but who can’t keep the pace up for more than 20 minutes. I made my sad excuse for a dog run 3km last night and I had to practically carry her for the last 2.8km and then give her mouth to mouth at the end.

People who work at cafes who ask you for your name. It totally steps over the line in the customer-barrista relationship.

Connex customer relations officers who stand with arms crossed, glowering, in a line across the barriers at Parliament station in the morning like they’re in the Gestapo.

People who call themselves “barrista”.

Catherine Deveny. To quote a particularly under-rated poet (Axl Rose) “I used to love her, but I have to kill her”. She was pretty funny about 12 months ago, in a straight-talking, tell it like it is way. Now, she’s just descended to far into contempt-for-fellow-man territory. See her latest article if you dare.

Packed to the rafters: I can’t work out why this show is so offensive to me. Is it the incessant cheeriness? Is it Michael Caton? Is it the awful musical stings they have at the end of each scene?

Kevin Rudd: the only thing I ever liked about him was that he wasn’t John Howard. Now, it’s starting to dawn on me that there are 20-odd million people just in Australia who also aren’t John Howard, therefore it’s probably not such a claim to fame. He’s smug, and prissy, and too full of his own intelligence, but nothing worthwhile actually gets done.

Running
Just a little one last night with the slow dog (sorry Sara – I don’t mean to steal your gag). I’ll try to run tonight.

work

It’s been a busy old week at work, this one. Today was one of those days when you get to work super-early to do some extra work, and look up from your computer to discover it’s 5 o’clock and time to go home. Where did the day go?

My “lunch break” was a frantic dash downstairs to the take-away, which was shovelled into my mouth while writing a report.

So, not much time for blogging.

I have, however, done a bit of running. 3 out of the past 4 days have included a run, and the fourth day had a swim. So that’s good. If I can keep up some regular running, even if it’s of average quality, the fitness should start to come back in a couple of weeks.

Tonight I’m catching up on the various bits of news I’ve missed. A lot of it seems to involve kids in bad situations: one baby feel in front of a train, a 6 year-old American kid who didn’t fly away in a balloon (not sure I understand the significance of that one) and some 16 year-old girl who’s sailing around the world.

Strange.

baby steps

I came to the conclusion today, while half way through a lap of Croydon Golf Course, that I was as unfit as I’ve been in the last 7 years. I have been swimming, but that’s really no good. With swimming, I can only really exercise for 30 or 40 minutes at the outside before I go completely spare and give up. Also, there’s been a fair bit of comfort eating during the dark, post-operation days. I’m probably 4kg over where I would be at peak fitness levels.

But at least, I thought to myself, I’m getting back into it. I am running, if you can call it that, and I can safely say a good level of fitness is ahead of me, not just in the past.

Today’s run was 14.25km, including a lap of the golf course, from my house to the mother-in-law’s place in Mooroolbark. It’s the kind of run that, six months ago, I would have done every day of the week, and faster. Today it was my “long run” and I was just happy to get there in one piece. I did get there, and even had a rush of blood with about a kilometre to go.

So, a few good things: a run over an hour, a couple of respectable hills and a good stride-out for a km or so towards the end.

AJH wrote about his goals recently (the memory of the original marathon has faded has it Andrew?). Six months ago, my medium-term goal would have been to run the 50km event at Maroondah Dam. That’s a bit unrealistic now, but the 30km may be possible.