Don’t wanna

I had a bit of a “don’t wanna” day today.

• When the alarm went off, I didn’t wanna get out of bed.
• Then I didn’t want to eat Rice Bubbles for breakfast, but that was all we had.
• I didn’t want to go to work
• I didn’t want to go for a run
• I didn’t want to run any faster

So, I didn’t want to do anything much (other than sleep), but as you can see I ended up doing them, partly out of habit, partly out of sheer stubbornness.

Running
16 pretty slack kilometres this morning.

making tracks

I had a little glance at my training program last night and discovered, to my shock, I had finished the “Hill Resistance” phase, and should now be in the “Track/Anaerobic Training phase”.

Oh dear! Have I really spent enough time resisting hills? To be honest, I feel they’ve been resisting me far more effectively that I resisted them.

And now, the track. The bloody track. I hate the place; I find it boring beyond belief. This in turn means I get distracted and slow down when I should be going fast. Therefore I’m not very good, which means I don’t like it.

Anyway, like the good little slave to the training program I am, I toddled off to the Croydon Athletics Track at 6 this morning and lumbered around in pitch blackness for a while. I had forgotten exactly what combination of distances I was supposed to do, I only remembered I was supposed to build up until I was running about 5km worth of fast bits.

So, I ran 6 x 800 metre fast bits, with 400 meter slow bits between them. Sort of like 3/5 of a Yasso session. I would have done more, but I had to run home and then get to work.

This phase has me doing this sort of stuff 3 times a week. Joy, bliss.

advertising, dreams and alternate states of reality

I wouldn’t have said off-hand that I was overly susceptible to advertising. Sure, I know Matt Preston likes to carry raw eggs over his head using a particular brand of paper towel, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what brand that was.

I do know Coke Is It, but that’s because of a lifetime of advertising which must have cost them billions to pay for. What’s more I don’t even drink the stuff, whether it’s “it” or not.

However, it seems advertising is working on a far deeper level than I suspected: on my subconscious. Sometime in the last week (I can’t even remember when – possibly on Friday, possibly Sunday) I passed a poster on a bus-stop while running. Given the speed at which I run (cough, cough) I must have only taken in the image for a fraction of a fleeting second.

It was obviously enough. The image was of Dave Hughes and Kate Langbroek, spliced together via the magic of photoshop to look like some god awful male-female entity. (I could include a picture here, but for the sake of yours and my sanity and eyeballs, I will refrain.) I remember thinking “my god, that’s feral” at the time before proceeding to think about more important things like “How am I going to stave off imminent dehydration?”

Last night the image came back in a dream. I remember it very clearly: Dave Hughes and Kate what’s-her-face and I were riding skateboards home from somewhere unstated. We were going down a particularly steep hill when Dave and Kate had a nasty collision, and somehow blended into one person.

It was strange at the time and disturbing now: whoever designed that bus ad penetrated my subconscious!

Still, I can’t remember what radio station they’re on, and I’m certainly not going to listen to them, so I guess I have the last laugh.

Alternate states of reality
More Twilight Zone stuff this morning. I went for a brisk 16km run at about 5am – brisk meaning fast AND cold – and got home while it was still dark. By the time I had showered, given the dog her cornflakes and patted the kids and set out for the train station, it was light. As I walked to the station I had the wierdest feeling of deja vu. Like I’d been there in a previous life! Of course I had been there, only 90 minutes earlier while running, but everything still seemed strange and unfamiliar.

I think I’m cracking up.

a christmas miracle

Perhaps it’s because some people are celebrating Christmas in July, but some sort of minor miracle seems to have occurred.

Everyone in my house – and I mean everyone, even the cat – came down with a fairly filthy little dose of the common cold last week. I held off valiantly for a few days, but my pitiful excuse for an immune system was never going to resist the combined germs of 1 snotty adult, 2 extremely snotty under-5s, an affectionate dog and a horrid little cat for long. So, by Thursday I was starting to feel sick again.

Sick again!!!! Why me???? I only had one week of being relatively healthy, and it comes right back! I said to my wife “I’ll bet you $100 by the weekend I’ll be at the GP being given a script for antibiotics”.

Well, that was one bet I was happy to lose. Amazingly, my body seems to have repelled the buggy invaders. Sure, I coughed a little and sniffed a lot, but I’m feeling better. No doctor, no pills.

I even managed to run for 31km today. It wasn’t a fast run, but it was fairly strong and steady over a pretty hilly, uninspiring course. There’s something deeply depressing about running past Chirnside Park shopping centre. There are no footpaths, it’s all uphill, there are thousands of boguns in hotted up V8s brumming around. The only good thing about running past the shopping centre is that you don’t have to go in!

Anyway, here’s the run on mapmyrun.com.

Chocolate
The chocolate and sweet things ban is still going. I’ve been tempted a few times – mainly when a colleague left a big block of toblerone in the middle of the table in a 6 hour training session – but I’ve managed to keep the new ascetic lifestyle going. I think it suits me.

The next logical step is probably horsewhips and the cilice.

Politics
For some reason, the mention of horsewhips and the cilice immediately made me think of Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard. I can’t think why.

The powers that be have decided the debate tonight is less interesting that a 21 year-old spotty boy sweating over some soup, a decision I entirely support.

hungry, cold, busy

I’m all of those things, but hanging on.

I ran this morning, waking up at considerably before the crack of dawn (5am) and heading out for a nasty little run. My word, it was cold. Unpleasantly so.

I did 14km all up, including just under 10km worth of hill reps of the streets near my place.

It took just on an hour and by the time I got back home and jumped in the shower, my ears and hands and other extremities were burning.

Even 30 minutes later, all rugged up in coat and scarf on the train platform, I was freezing, perhaps more so.

So, that accounts for the cold bit.

The hungry comes about because I had nothing to eat between 6:30 and 1pm, and the only thing I could have eaten was a great plate of Toblerone, which I had to avoid on the grounds it was made of chocolate.

Bastard.

Busy: well, I’m having one of those weeks when I have 3 meeting scheduled at once, all of whom need reports prepared in advance for which I have almost exactly no time to do.

Sigh.

Still, I can at least write a blog.

last year’s dad

A double-dose of news today, with this story:

Dean Jones’s award revoked.

On the plus side, it turns out Dean Jones was voted (presumably, although he may have been merely appointed) Father of the Year, 2007. That comes as news to me; a pleasing piece of news given I have such strong memories of watching him play cricket for Australia quite well in the mid 1980’s.

It’s good to see him making something of himself.

On the minus side, it turns out he has recently been stripped of his award, following news he fathered a child with an “on-off mistress”, who he has never seen. (He hasn’t seen the child, I mean. Clearly he has “seen” the mistress at least once.)

My first thought was that this was a bit un-fair on old Deano. Surely this just confirms how good he is at fathering children?

Sadly, this isn’t quite what the award organisers had in mind.

Oh well. Still, “Former Father of the Year” would look good on the CV.

Running
30 odd kilometres on Saturday afternoon. It was cold and windy and mostly up hill. All good stuff.

I also ran a lap of Albert Park lake this lunchtime at was is loosely called a “fast pace”. What with getting there and back it worked out around 12km.

not so sweet

I have always followed a fairly eccentric approach to diet. The way I figure it, if I’m running more than, say, 80km per week, I can eat whatever the hell I want.

And what I want generally falls into categories of:

• fattening
• junk
• sweet
• all of the above

And that has generally worked for me. I like coming home from a long run and tucking in to a whole packet of tim tams, deep fried in lard. And I would normally follow that with a barbecue, chased down with beer.

Then in the morning I would wake up with 4 or 5 strong coffees.

And so the days roll onwards, in a rather contented fashion.

Getting serious
Not this year though. From now on I’m serious. Hardcore.

I haven’t had a drop of alcohol this year. Not a single coffee, or even coffee flavoured milkshake have I swallowed in over 2 years.

Now, partly as a response to the recent dentist trip (his first words to me, immediately after “open wide”, were “ooooh, you have a sweet tooth don’t you!”) I’m cutting out sweet stuff too.

So, for the last fortnight I have cut out hot chocolates, chocolate of any sort, sweet biscuits, cake and icecream.

It makes life a bit duller, and has had some interesting effects on my digestion, which I won’t disgust you with. It has also left me with a bit of a quandary: if I don’t eat that stuff, what on earth will I eat?

Still, I’m sure I’ll be healthier for it.

Running
A good session yesterday, including 3 fast laps of the MCG concourse, each of which were within 3-4 seconds of each other, so I was able to keep the pace nicely. I then did 12 150m sprints uphill on the William Barak footbridge. 10km in total, including warmup and cooldown.

why being a prat doesn’t pay

My mood has been lightened in recent days by a couple of pieces of news that seem to indicate that, contrary to my experience, being a complete tool doesn’t pay.

Example 1: Kyle Sandilands splits with wife
Now, I don’t want to be making nasty comments about someone else’s marriage – what happens in a marriage is not my business. However, it is patently obvious that Kyle Sandilands is a tool of the first water. A tool, a prat, a moron, a loud-mouthed, hairy ijjit.

Up to now, he has revelled in the fact, and has made a career out of being offensively stupid in public. Sadly, it’s not quite working out for him right now:

Kyle Sandilands and Tamara Jaber wish to acknowledge that the past few months have been challenging due to their individual work demands which have required extended periods of time apart,” the statement said.

I don’t quite buy that story. If they had to spend long periods of time apart, and that’s what was damaging their relationship, surely the solution is to spend more time together? How does divorce help?

Anyway…

Exhibit 2: Mel Gibson
According to news reports:

Gibson, who’d been a subject of controversy after launching into a booze-fueled anti-Semitic rant in 2006, is in hot water again after tapes surfaced of him yelling obscenities and insults at his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, including a variety of vile racist slurs using what is known in polite society as the N-word. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has reportedly opened a domestic violence investigation into Gibson’s actions against Grigorieva, who has claimed that the actor abused her on several occasions.

Now, apparently “our” Mel is not the Mr Popular about Hollywood he once was. There’s real doubts now as to whether we even want to claim him as “ours”.

I’m not sure he cares about that. After all, he can always cry himself to sleep in a big bag of money. However, I also suspect he’s about to get hit for a humungous divorce settlement, the second in just a few years.

Idiot.

Running
A better run this morning. I didn’t feel wheezy or short of breath, so was able to shoot along at a reasonable rate. It was about 16.5km.