finally hitting my stride

If my recent scribblings have come at all close to reflecting reality, you’ll probably have got the sense I’ve been a little distracted, what with major life events happening left, right and centre.

What? You didn’t? The whole marriage thing didn’t give you a hint?

Anyway – the marathon training has, of necessity, been squeezed and stretched into unfamiliar times and places (well before the crack of dawn, along the beach, long runs on Tuesdays etc.) It may be a touch unjust to blame all my troubles on wedding preparations, but the truth is, it’s been a while since I’ve had a truly satisfying run. If you were looking on my training log, you could file everything in March and most of February under the heading “hard slog”.

That’s all changed now. In the last three days I’ve had three of the best runs in a long, long time.

Thursday – down at Venus Bay. 10k on country roads, with a nice cool breeze and the clearest sky you’ve ever seen. What’s more, the running felt fast, but so fluent. You know those sorts of runs where your stride just seems so long, when you can feel yourself working hard, but you wouldn’t stop for anything. I finished with 6 strides, and I can say without exaggeration, that is the closest I’m every going to get to running 100metres in 10 seconds. Not very close, true, but still good for me.

Yesterday was a repeat, except I ran about 5k out on bitumen, then over the dunes and back along the beach. The tide is out. No sorry, the tide was out. I had a bit of a Blondie moment there.

Today, a few guys from the Eastern Suburbs Running Group and I went for a long run, starting and finishing at Croydon Aths track. Or to be precise, in the carpark beside the track, which is all fenced in at the moment. A quick and dirty attempt at gmap pedometer came out at 35k (I did a little extra at the end to pick up the paper and stuff).

It was quite a good run, except for PJ, who had a strange rush of blood and went through Ringwood at about a million miles per hour. Actually, it’s not that strange, I have that reaction a lot.

So I’ve just worked out my weekly ks, and it works out to be 124k for the week. Crikey, that’s a lot.

a good long run

It’s been a little while since I last posted. Apologies, gentle Jruns readers. You’re entitled to expect better from your humble correspondent. In future I will try harder.

So what’s been happening? Well, for one thing, it was the weekend; a time when, amongst other things, I am blessedly free of all things web-related. I have even been known to go without looking at a computer for days on end. True.

Also, I’ve needed to get my running mojo back, after a simply horrid week struggling with the flu.

In retrospect, it may have been wiser not to struggle so hard. I’m thinking particularly of an ill-advised 10k run last Wednesday, and an even more ill-advised 14k the following day. Neither of these really helped my recovery a great deal. In fact, I felt positively nauseous for most of last week.

Ah well, we live and learn. Or at least we live.

I finally saw sense last Friday and took the day off.

Saturday was much better. I had a very pleasing hill session, using the mobile phone to time 2 minute up-hill sections. Quite fun.

Yesterday I met a couple of guys from the Eastern Suburbs Running Group at Croydon Athletics track for a nice long run. The weather was good, the gods were in alignment and for once everything worked.

I think it’s been at least 2 weeks since I had an enjoyable run, it’s been pretty much a hard slog.

Yesterday was a real exception though. 31.7k done at around 5 minutes per k pace. I felt pretty good for most of it, with the exception of a section in Nunawading when I could feel my blood-sugar dropping. I pushed through it, and perked up a little later when we ran through a light shower.

Everything’s back on track, touch wood (and anything else you may have at hand).

leaving people behind

A double-barrelled post today, running and some thoughts of David Hicks.

Running
The main feature of the weekend passed was a jaunt along the Koonung trail from Springvale to Bulleen road and back. According to Em’s footpod/GPS/magic-whiz-bang thing it was 24.5k, which sounds allright to me.

The first half was quite relaxed and chatty; the return leg less so. That was mainly because the boys let Em drop off the back of the pack and pushed the pace up fair bit for a substantial negative split.

Others left behind – David Hicks
I’m not sure whether the weekend’s news on David Hicks qualifies as good news or not. I’m inclined to think it’s good news for everyone concerned. Not pleasant, but good. It’s like being in a dentist’s waiting room for 3 days, listening to the sound of drills and muffled screaming and then finally having your name called. It’s not good, but at least it’s closer to being over.

So David Hicks has been charged, finally. At least we know what we’re looking at now. Basically, one charge of aiding Al Qaeda. One count of attempted murder. Hmmm, I’ll come back to that in a minute.

A lot of people from my side of the political spectrum make the mistake of trying to defend Hicks himself. However much of a decent bloke his Dad is, David Hicks himself seems to have been an unpleasant, violent, deluisional, anti-semitic, brain-washed little prick. What’s more, he clearly spent a lot of time intentionally following around a bunch of lunatic mass-murdering fanatics.

As far as I’m concerned, if you can prove he’s committed a crime – murder, conspiracy, whatever – try him, convict him and lock him up. I have no problem with that. That’s justice.

The problem is, the US have never had much interest in justice in this case. They’re much happier to lock him up and throw away the key. And that’s an abuse of power.

Even now, I don’t think the charges are that impressive. In a normal court, with normal rules of evidence, would either of these charges stick?

Helping Al qaeda wasn’t a crime at the time. Can he really be convicted of something that wasn’t illegal? Attempted murder is iffy too. If he believed he was fighting for the government of Afghanistan (the Taliban) against another force, that’s war. It’s not murder. The US might want to define everything in the world as part of the “war on terror”, but I don’t think that would really wash.

Hicks’ lawyer, who’s no pushover, will probably appeal and drag the whole process out for a couple of years, until absolutely no-one wins.

The best thing to do is what they should have done from the start – try him in a proper court, or let him go.

The moral of the story is – even rabid monsters deserve justice.

fashion

My slow, inevitable decline into grumpy-old-man-dom continues unabated. Almost every second day something comes over the wires that has me sucking in my teeth, shaking my head slowly and mutteringly darkly to myself something involving the words “back in my day”.

Today, it’s the news that the male bouffant is back. I kid you not. According to those in the know, in the next 12 months anyone who is anyone will be wearing big hair and even bigger muttonchops. Which means, by my calculations, out where I live blokes will catch on to the fad sometime during mid 2010.

Now, I don’t like either big hair or big bushy sideburns. I once saw a guy who had muttonchops but no hair at all. It was quite bizarre. But, as Sarah Jessica Parker is reported to have said recently “let your freak flag fly”. I take that as definitive proof she (SJP) has completely lost the plot.

By the way, I quite like the word muttonchops. It has a comforting sort of feeling about it.

Running
An “easy” 10k on the old marathon program turned into 15k with 6 fartlek 60 second surges and one m*********er of a hill. Hey, it felt good, why hold myself back? Perhaps unknowingly I was letting my freak flag fly. That probably accounts for the strange looks from passing pedestrians.

The program is going well, 10 days in. I have a scheduled rest day tomorrow, then an easy and a long run to do on the weekend. The long run is planned to be with a few people from the ESRG at the Koonung trail, which starts, allegedly, at Springvale road. Not exactly an auspicious beginning, but we’ll see.