long-awaited long run

You will be relieved to hear, the New Years Resolutions are holding fast, after a grand total of 3 days worth of 2010-ishness.

“Only 3 days?” I hear you say. “That’s not worth much.” Well, that true, but what would you prefer? That I be caught in a compromising position with a bunch of ho’s and piles of white powder in an expensive hotel room after only one day? Clearly, no.

Anyway, today I did the first long run in a long time. I only count a run as being long if it’s over 20km, that’s just a rule of mine. In fact, looking back through the archives, the last run longer than 20km was on the 2nd of September, a week before the big operation.

Today was only 21.4km, but it was a touch hilly, and at least it was done. I started in Mooroolbark, headed up the back way to Montrose, then along Sheffield Road down towards the source of the Dandenong Creek Trail (like the source of the Nile but infinitely less interesting) then home. Here is it on mapmyrun.com.

It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t pretty, but it was done. It also lifted me above 60km for the week, for the first time in I don’t know how long.

I’m now savouring the beautiful feeling known only to distance runners – that Sunday afternoon post-long run sleepishness, ably assisted by the soothing sounds of leather on willow brought to me from Sydney by Mr Benaud et al.

Ultimate Fighting Championship is the stupidest sport ever

There are only a few sports I genuinely enjoy watching and fewer I actually play.

I was mulling this over last night when I should have been sleeping and I’ve come to a conclusion. In general, the simpler the premise behind a sport, and therefore the easier it is to explain to a complete novice, the better it is. Here are some examples:

Rugby
Take a bunch of big beefy blokes with no necks, give them a ball shaped like an egg so they can’t bounce, kick or catch it with any great confidence, have them run forward, but only allow them to throw it backward. Then at seemingly random intervals have them link up ear to hip with one another in a sweaty battering ram and push the other team around in a circle.

That’s my huge simplification of the “sport”. The reality is far more complicated, but in such a tedious way, I could scarcely begin to explain. It’s mystifying, it really is. Then they start saying things like “Rugby – the game they play in heaven”. No kidding. If that’s what they play in heaven, I don’t want to go.

Netball
A nice, simple game completely ruined by a bunch of stupid, arbitrary rules. Can anyone explain to me why you can only take 2 steps? What’s the point?

Golf
Take a long, skinny stick, whack a little white ball for hundreds of metres and somehow get it to land in a little white cup in the ground. Sounds simple, but it’s not. No thanks.

Soccer
A round ball, a rectangular field with a goal at either end. Two teams of 11 players on the pitch. The objective is to get the ball into the opposition’s goal, using your feet, legs, chest or head (but no hands).

Genuinely simple, eh? And the result: it’s a game loved around the world, and known universally as “the beautiful game”.

V8 supercars
Take 2 lots of popular Australian-made family cars, hot them up and gut them and give them to a bunch of morons with monobrows called Garth who like to wear badges on every square inch of their clothing, to drive around in a circle for 12 hours at a time.

Another pretty simple idea, but not simple enough. I have a sneaking suspicion the whole thing’s a front for the alcohol industry. If you’re sitting around on the side of Mount Panorama for a whole weekend, what else is there to do but get completely shit-faced?

Cricket
Cricket is the kind of thing no-one but the English could invent, and even then only the idle aristocracy from a certain period in history when young men had plenty of time to spend lolling around in a laudanum-induced stupor pretending to be shepherds. You need a life-long education to understand the game, and two lifetimes worth of indoctrination to care.

(I do care, strangely).

Athletics
Most athletic events are pretty simple concepts, when you think about it, which generally means they hold up well. Running, swimming and most cycling events can be summed up in 12 words: start from point A, proceed to point B faster than anyone else.

Cycling is the only one of these three to go a bit off the rails, and only really on the track, where they have events like the “Keirin”, which, if I understand it correctly, involves riding for 1500 metres as slow as possible without actually falling over before doing the last 50 metres at a hundred miles an hour. It’s not great television, it’s not great sport: it’s just not great.

The field events seem to be mainly about throwing things as far as possible -sometimes yourself – up, down, sideways or all of the above. That’s okay, I suppose, but I can’t get too excited about it. I’ve never needed to throw a hammer, and I can only imagine a limited range of situations when the ability to throw a spear 100 metres across a field would come in handy.

Ultimate fighting championship
Based on my theory, this idea should be a winner. It’s about as simple an idea as you could possibly get: put two guys in a cage, as naked as possible, and let them beat living hell out of each other however they want to. See: www.ufc.com.

It’s not clever; it’s not nice; it hardly speaks to the best side of human nature, but there’s an admirably primal simplicity to the concept.

So the show (it’s on TV now, on One digital) should be a winner. But why doesn’t it work?

The devil’s in the detail, as usual. Firstly – all the fighters seem to wear long board shorts, and that’s about it, as if they’ve just come from the beach. How can you take some dorky surfer seriously as the “Ultimate fighting champion”?

Then there’s the fights themselves. The fighters can do literally anything they want to in there. They can kick, punch, scratch, spit, use cutting sarcasm, do the pile-driver, whatever: it’s limited only by your imagination. But all they end up doing is 2 minutes of half-hearted kick-boxing before they both fall to the floor in an uncomfortable embrace that looks as close to homosexual sex as you’re likely to see on TV. (It’s strange how you can watch two blokes attempt to maim one another, but not play hide the sausage).

This goes on for a couple of minutes until one of the fighters realises he’s inextricably tied in some nasty knot and yells “uncle” or something.

My point is: if you’re going to call your show “Ultimate Fighting Championship”, you need to do a little better than a little low-key wrestling.

Last night, however, I did see a “good” bout. It was good, in the sense it was so awful I could barely tear away my eyes. There were two young blokes, wailing on each other (I believe that’s the correct term) for 5 minutes at a time, only stopping to high-five one another if they felt one of them had gotten in a good hit.

Psychos.

Then, just when it couldn’t get any more exciting, Fighter A landed a monster punch on Fighter B’s chest which literally broke 3 ribs at once – you could see his chest cave in. “A” decided to press home his advantage, and advanced on the hurting B with murderous intent, only to be knocked out cold by a surprise right hook to the chin.

It’s stupid, violent, nasty, low-rent stuff. Possibly the worst sport ever. In short, it’s perfect for TV.

AFL
I predicted a Geelong win last night, and for once I was right. AJH has asked me to predict another win for the Cats this weekend. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Andrew. I picked them last year, and look what happened then!

Besides, my tipping is based on a pretty simple, but unarguable idea: if a team has won a lot of games in the recent past, they’re probably pretty good. If they’ve lost a lot of games, they probably suck. Neither of Geelong of St Kilda suck to any great extent, but I’m told St Kilda won more games than anyone else this season, so they’ll probably win.

So there.

ACMI
We (my family) headed into the city today to hang out at ACMI. The kids weren’t all that impressed with the video games and were scared by the Bananas in Pyjamas. My wife, however, had to be physically dragged away from the Wii machine, even after I pointed out she had been beaten into 11th place by a 4 year-old.

They had a few cool things: an illusion using rotating toys and a strobe light, and a machine that did Matrix-style animations. Here’s my attempt: www.acmi.net.au.

Sorry for the long post. Verbal diarrhea.

no Ritchie, no

Heaven knows there’s been plenty to get upset about this month, but this has really got me where it hurts:

Richie Benaud has announced he will retire after 2010

Life won’t be the same without Richie. He’s one of the few people on television who’s opinion and wit I actually respect. Summer won’t feel the same, and it certainly won’t sound the same without his voice pattering on in the background.

Why did he have to retire now? He’s only a boy of 78, full of hopes and dreams and the best years of his life ahead of him.

Here’s a thought: perhaps he’s going to run for parliament. I’d vote for him. Perhaps he can run in Higgins against Peter Costello and chuck out the smirk forever.

Running
I don’t like running in the smoke, which has rather put a dampener on things. I ran 12.5km on Monday morning, and 10km on the treadmill last night, but that’s it.

inside word on AFL 2008 – Carlton are losers

I don’t know all that much about the AFL, and I care even less. I know about as little as it’s possible to know, while living in Melbourne and glancing at the sports pages every couple of weeks.

But I do have an idea of the rules and how it all works in a general sort of way. Which makes me worry a bit about the Carlton team, who I ran into on the tan this morning.

The first thing is they were walking up and down Anderson street in a big bunch, stretching right across the path. I thought at first they were afraid they might get lost, but decided on reflection they simply had no awareness of the other people trying to use the path.

Call me naive, but I always assumed positional awareness might be a good thing in an AFL player – to know where you are on the playing field and where everyone else is. Brendon Fevola clearly hasn’t mastered this, on this morning’s evidence.

Secondly, as I said above, they were walking. Aren’t they supposed to be elite athletes? Shouldn’t they be able to run? I did 6 reps of Anderson Street, and they only did two.

Slackers.

Running
Anderson Street reps this morning. 12km all up.

Cricket
It seems the Indian Cricket team have taken their bat and ball and are threatening to go home. As far as I can make out it’s because little Harbajhan called little Andrew a monkey. Or perhaps it’s because he didn’t call him a monkey. I’m not sure: it’s all a bit hard to follow.

Also, Ricky Ponting may or may not be a “cheater” and the umpires make the rules up as they go along (six and out and stuff).

They’re not alone in acting childishly of course: everyone involved seems to be a bit worked up, encouraged by armies of people writing in to the newspapers who clearly have too much spare time on their hands.

The sensible thing would be for India to shut up, play the next test and try to actually win for once. Seeing as we’re talking about people who can spend whole days discussing “googlies” and “silly mid-ons”, sensible probably isn’t an option.

cove

I had brief words to say yesterday about cricket, particularly its tendency to bore the pants off me. I stand by those comments, don’t get me wrong, but cricket does have its good points. Read this paragraph from an article in today’s Age, by Peter Roebuck:

It is the fate of some sportsmen to be underestimated. Constructed along the lines of a beanpole and inclined to lope between wickets in the manner of a lovelorn giraffe, Vandort belongs in that category. A harmless cove, he seems better suited to stamp collecting than staring down cricket’s most confrontational team.

It’s not every day you hear someone described as a “cove”, harmless or otherwise, let along as a “lovelorn giraffe”. I, for one, like it.

Cricket is so boring, and it goes on for so long, so only those with the most vivid imagination and creative approach to the English language make it through with brain intact.

Well, that’s my theory.

Our various meeja services would be much improved by a more creative approach to language. Wouldn’t you love to hear John Howard denouncing Kevin Rudd’s calumny? Or Mark Holden describing one of the Australian Idols as feculent slugabeds?

Running
The best part about yesterday’s run (apart from the kangaroo) is that today I feel completely rested and ready to do it all again. Well, I would be ready if it wasn’t for the minor detail of work. Ah well, I’ll try to schedule some quality running time tonight. It should be fun.

Trailwalker
I’ve been watching Clarkey‘s progress with interest as he trains for the trailwalker. I’m still not entirely sure how he’s going to manage running for 100k. I must admit, I wish I was doing it too, I don’t like turning down a challenge like that.

Ah well.

There’s another team entered called “the girls” comprising, well, a bunch of girls, including Em, Jaykay and presumably some more girls. I’m not sure how they’re going.

hard rubbish

As the title of this post suggests, it’s hard rubbish time around my house at the moment; a special time that comes but twice a year.

I’m quite fond of the hard rubbish period; there seems to be some sort of moral lesson in it about the value of thrift and the pointlessness of over-consumption. Or something.

I’m not one of your avid hard rubbish-scavengers, but I confess to having a peak as I went past this afternoon. All the good stuff seems to have been taken: all that’s left is fragments of dangerous looking antique electrical equipment and deeply disturbing discarded mattresses.

Oh well, 6 months to go ’till next time.

Cricket
I don’t care how many 36 degree October days we have: the season officially changes when test match cricket starts.

I’m not much of a fan of the game itself. It seems to involve about 4 and a half days of standing around in a field doing not much, followed by 2 minutes of abject terror as some great geezer chucks a hard missile at you at a hundred miles an hour.

The TV commentary manages to convey the 4.5 days of mind-numbing tedium quite well, but hasn’t really managed the excitement. Still, there is something soothing about the sounds of leather on Richie Benaud, or whatever it is they say.

Running
I was up with the birds this fine morning. Actually it wasn’t fine, it was considerably foggy.

I love the fog, I love the feeling of it on my skin and the eerie atmosphere. It’s also good to run in; being cool and almost completely without wind.

As I said, I started in fog, slipped down to the Dandenong Creek trail and then zoomed along to Kooma Park.

For a brief moment, when the freeway ahead of me and the power lines behind me both managed to be hidden from sight, it all seemed rather peaceful, especially when a kangaroo jumped out on the path in front of me.

I don’t know how far the roo went today, but I managed 22k. Quite comfortable, quite enjoyable.

Training, trains, cricket

I don’t mean to alarm you, gentle reader, but we may have on our hands an unsually long, unwieldy post today, so here are some anchor links that should, assuming I can hammer the technomalogically orientated stuff into shape, direct you to something a little interesting to you.

• Public transport going to hell
• Cricket, or something like it
  
• Marathon training programs

Or you could always read the whole thing in order, if you’re a glutton for punishment. Either that or go read something else, or you could go out and get some fresh air.

Public transport going to hell
As you can tell by the bold bit – I did intend to write a rather scathing couple of sentences about Connex and the Middleborough road bypass project, which is currently adding about an hour to my daily commute. It was going to be pretty caustic, pretty bitter and may or may not have featured the phrases “piss-up in a brewery”, “fiasco” and “incompetence”.

However, after reading this page on the Metlink site, I’ve completely changed my mind. Apparently, Connex have set up a “Kiss and drop” spot in Box Hill for people to drop off their partners. What a stroke of genius.

Anyone want to give me a lift to the station?

Cricket, or something like it
Keen Jruns readers will already know this, but recently I spent some time up in Sydney, soaking up the atmosphere and generally making a nuisance of myself. At the time, I do remember thinking there were an awful lot of English accents about. At first I assumed this was just some new fashion amonst Sydney-siders. But no, I was wrong. Eventually, I put 2 and 2 together and figured out they were there for the cricket.

They were a funny bunch, those barmy-army types. Half of them looked like Grant Mitchell from Eastenders. (If you don’t know who that is, picture a neanderthal-type with shaven head, bow legs, about 120kg and a nasty look in his eye; there he is on the right). The other half looked like toffs, the kind of people who use the word “rugger” in civilised company and send their kids, Harry and Charlotte, off on their gap year before heading off to Oxford.

Anyway, as I write this, the news is coming in on the wires that England have officially lost the test series 5-0. Good on the Barmy-army for turning up and having a good time, it’s a pity the team didn’t.

Marathon training programs
My post on the Ausrun forum yesterday provoked a few responses, as expected. Runners always like to talking about the length of their long runs.

There was some concern expressed that the long runs aren’t long enough: the longest is only 34km. I have some sympathy for that view – my longest run in 2005 was 36km, and I ended up hitting the wall at 38km on the day. It’s hard to know whether longer training runs would have helped though.

The program I’m going to use tries to get around this by getting you to do the last 30 minutes of the long run at a faster pace, to simulate effort while fatigued. I think I’ll stick with the program, and monitor how I’m feeling.

I’m feeling quite good about it. I’m slightly scared about all the training, but that’s as it should be. If it wasn’t a challenge, it wouldn’t improve my running and if my running doesn’t improve why should my PB?