Change of plan folks!
As scheduled, I arrived in Melbourne early on Saturday afternoon and headed straight for the marathon expo at the famed Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) to downgrade my race registration from the half marathon to the 10K - something I’d foreshadowed in my last post due to my dodgy left calf.
I arrived there in plenty of time and joined the back of the well sign-posted ‘downgrade/upgrade’ queue. It happened to be an unusually lengthy and slow-moving queue, and as I stood there in contemplation, I decided I wouldn’t downgrade after all and would stick with my half marathon entry. Maybe it was some sort of epiphany. Maybe I got caught up in the hype surrounding these sorts of occasions. Or maybe I simply thought these sorts of opportunities don’t come along that often - so just do it!
Whatever it was, I stepped out of the queue.
I then decided that my race strategy would be to try and find the 2:20 pacers (the slowest of the scheduled half marathon pacers) and follow them around the course - even if I was feeling during the race that I could handle a faster pace. A 2:20 half marathon was the sort of pace I knew I could handle and it would probably give me a good chance of finishing without placing a huge risk on the calf. Of course, this strategy also exposed me to the perennial risk of not actually locating the pacers at the start-line, but I convinced myself that I was due some good luck on that score.
So having made the decision, I decided to buy some calf compression garments that were on sale at the expo to see if they could help. The salesperson who quickly took my $50 thought they might. I wore them around for the rest of the day to get used to them, and they seemed fine.
The next morning, as I stepped out of my hotel for the 20 minute walk to the starting area, I had a feeling it was going to be a good day. The weather was just about perfect, at around 12 degrees, still and overcast. As I got nearer the start, I spotted some groups of balloons off into the distance signalling that the various pacing groups were already lining up. It was actually an unusually simple exercise to find the 2:20 pacing team and I squeezed my way a short distance through the large crowds to end up standing right next to them. I introduced myself to one of them - an Indian chap, probably in his early 30s - and thanked him in anticipation for his selflessness. His colleagues were a tallish woman in her late 20s and an Asian guy of roughly the same age and they all wore ostentatious timing/GPS equipment - which gave people like me every confidence that the 2:20 goal would be achieved as efficiently as possible.
At 8:00am, after a stirring rendition of the national anthem, the gun fired. Two minutes or so later, the 2:20 bus crossed the start line and we were underway.
My plan was simply to run the entire race off the shoulder of the Indian pacer and see what happened. I’d never run in Melbourne before and didn’t quite appreciate how flat most of that part of the city is. The first half of the course especially was particularly flat, meandering along some very wide streets and then diverting into Albert Park, alongside a lake and at one point passing what looked like the F1 garages. Albert Park is home to the Australian F1 Grand Prix, but none of the road we were running on resembled what I thought a race track would look like.
There was a turn-around point at around 11K and some out-and-back sections, before heading back along the main thoroughfare toward the city. All the while, I was shadowing my pacer buddy, although at about 14K, I started running more alongside the woman (sadly, I can’t remember any of their names) who was a little more talkative. Not that I was talking much, but it was good to hear other people sharing their experiences and often articulating what I was feeling. While I was still running well, I could feel some fatigue coming on around the 17K mark. That’s roughly the point when you just want it to be over - there’s less than 5K to go, you’ve run so many 5K’s before in training, so just get the damned thing over with!
Around that stage, I moved ahead of the pacers by a few metres to take advantage of some less crowded running space and perhaps a slight change of scenery. I also had in the back of my mind that it might be an idea to bank some time in case I needed to slow more than I really wanted to at any point over the final stages of the race.
At 19K, and with the MCG in sight, the course started misbehaving, with a few undulations and longer uphill sections over bridges and the like presenting themselves. While it was nothing like that awful climb up to Observatory Hill at around the 38K mark of my very first marathon (Sydney, 2005 - I vividly remember every excruciating detail!), it was a bit of a surprise and seemed to catch out a few people who started to walk. On one of the corners, I looked back and noticed I had about 20 metres on the pacing group, so I slowed a fraction to recover.
Then all of a sudden, the course went beneath the MCG and around another corner before emerging into the stadium itself, where quite a noisy and appreciative crowd had gathered. The final 300 metres around the outside of the grassy surface were something to remember, and were punctuated by the pacers - who by that time had caught up - urging all those around to quicken stride to make 2:20. While I ran with them over that final lap, I wasn’t too worried, given that I knew they were all going off the gun time, when my only interest was the net time. Having started alongside them and taken a couple of minutes to cross the start line, I knew my net time would be well under 2:20.
As it happened, I crossed the line quite steadily in 2:20:13. Normally, I try and run as fast as I possibly can when the finish is in sight with the aim of collapsing over the line in a state of complete exhaustion. But this time, I was happy to linger a little and take in something of the scene as I trotted around. I was also very conscious - as I was throughout the entire race - of not aggravating the calf problem with any sudden accelerations. And on that front, it held up remarkably well.
Immediately I finished, I came across the pacers and took some time to acknowledge their efforts. Although they actually seemed to be more pleased for me, which just goes to show the calibre of people we’re dealing with here. Great job guys!
For the record, my net time ended up at 2:18:04. And my finishing position was 7,322nd of the 9,592 total finishers (the last place getter, a female in the 20-39 age group named Stacey Cadman, came home in a net time of 4:33:45).
Given the disjointed lead-up to this race, and my core strategy of just running a slow, disciplined and safe half marathon, I suppose this time will inevitably go down in my running history with an asterisk next to it. But I enjoyed it immensely and it really exceeded my admittedly low expectations. The course itself was excellent and the event as a whole now probably ranks just fractionally behind the Gold Coast as my favourite run.
Reflecting back on it, I’m so pleased that the ‘upgrade/downgrade’ queue was moving so slowly and that I decided to go for it. But I’m probably equally as dismayed that, up until that point, I had convinced myself not to run it. We live and learn.
Next stop - the Big Apple on Sunday 20 March 2016.
Monday, 19 October 2015
Thursday, 15 October 2015
A sorry tale ...
Well, my left leg has done it again folks. A dodgy left calf muscle this time has forced me to scrub the Melbourne half marathon attempt this weekend and instead convert my entry to the 10K event, where I’ll be aiming for a sub-60 minute finish.
When last we spoke, I was about to start putting in some reasonably heavy training weeks ahead of the Melbourne half and had flagged a couple of forthcoming events as well - the 3.5K Harbour Bridge run and a 10K time trial.
The Bridge run went quite well. It’s always fun to run across the main deck of the coathanger, and I finished in a time of 18:31. Which, amazingly, placed me 243rd of the 4,799 finishers. But after giving it a nanosecond’s thought, it occurred to me that a large proportion of the several thousand finishers were probably families walking the Bridge with prams and others equally less mobile making a day of it. If those groups were discounted, I’ve no doubt I would have finished in my usual mid-to-late pack position. But I'll take it!
The 10K time trial later that week was much more disappointing - 54:46. And in the words of the great Mr Gump - ‘That’s all I have to say about that’.
The day after, during a routine 5K training run with an increase in speed toward the end, I felt a significant tweak in the left calf muscle. It wasn’t as violent as the hamstring tear a few months ago, but it was sufficiently concerning for me to stop after 4.5K having not been able to shake it off. After a couple of physio visits that week, I tried to run again on the Thursday but stopped after it blew up after only 600 metres.
I managed a couple of very slow sessions the following week, and again this week - with two 3K gentle jogs, one today and one yesterday.
The injury is definitely on the mend, but the risk of it recurring with an increase in speed seems quite high. So with that, and the dent it’s put in my training (not to mention my confidence), I’ve decided to ditch the half and try the 10K event in Melbourne to see what happens. I also figured it’s a lot less distance to hobble home than it would be for the half marathon if things do come unstuck.
To illustrate the impact it’s had, my last seven weeks training distances have been 40.02K, 56.03K, 40.90K, 22.42K, 5.10K (first week of injury), 14.63K and 6K (final week before race).
Otherwise, my overall running base for this event hasn’t been too bad. Over the past 30 weeks, I’ve run 1,001K at an average of 33K each week, while in the past 60 weeks, the total has been 1,770K, at a weekly average of 30K. These numbers are very similar to the same periods before the ill-fated Gold Coast half marathon attempt back in July, which was aborted after the hamstring tear in the final week.
At least this time, I fly to Melbourne in the morning with something more to look forward to than a weekend in an ocean view hotel room catching up on some reading and box sets.
When last we spoke, I was about to start putting in some reasonably heavy training weeks ahead of the Melbourne half and had flagged a couple of forthcoming events as well - the 3.5K Harbour Bridge run and a 10K time trial.
The Bridge run went quite well. It’s always fun to run across the main deck of the coathanger, and I finished in a time of 18:31. Which, amazingly, placed me 243rd of the 4,799 finishers. But after giving it a nanosecond’s thought, it occurred to me that a large proportion of the several thousand finishers were probably families walking the Bridge with prams and others equally less mobile making a day of it. If those groups were discounted, I’ve no doubt I would have finished in my usual mid-to-late pack position. But I'll take it!
The 10K time trial later that week was much more disappointing - 54:46. And in the words of the great Mr Gump - ‘That’s all I have to say about that’.
The day after, during a routine 5K training run with an increase in speed toward the end, I felt a significant tweak in the left calf muscle. It wasn’t as violent as the hamstring tear a few months ago, but it was sufficiently concerning for me to stop after 4.5K having not been able to shake it off. After a couple of physio visits that week, I tried to run again on the Thursday but stopped after it blew up after only 600 metres.
I managed a couple of very slow sessions the following week, and again this week - with two 3K gentle jogs, one today and one yesterday.
The injury is definitely on the mend, but the risk of it recurring with an increase in speed seems quite high. So with that, and the dent it’s put in my training (not to mention my confidence), I’ve decided to ditch the half and try the 10K event in Melbourne to see what happens. I also figured it’s a lot less distance to hobble home than it would be for the half marathon if things do come unstuck.
To illustrate the impact it’s had, my last seven weeks training distances have been 40.02K, 56.03K, 40.90K, 22.42K, 5.10K (first week of injury), 14.63K and 6K (final week before race).
Otherwise, my overall running base for this event hasn’t been too bad. Over the past 30 weeks, I’ve run 1,001K at an average of 33K each week, while in the past 60 weeks, the total has been 1,770K, at a weekly average of 30K. These numbers are very similar to the same periods before the ill-fated Gold Coast half marathon attempt back in July, which was aborted after the hamstring tear in the final week.
At least this time, I fly to Melbourne in the morning with something more to look forward to than a weekend in an ocean view hotel room catching up on some reading and box sets.
Monday, 7 September 2015
Melbourne training update
Some steady running over the past couple of weeks.
I’m now in week 7 of the 12 week program for the Melbourne half marathon on Sunday 18 October. I’ve also been trying the two-sessions-a-day strategy for at least a couple of days a week now, and that’s bumped up the weekly mileage a little. In week 4, I managed 48.88K, followed by 48.61K and then 40.02K for the week just gone. That included an outdoor 7K Bay Run (40:36) as well as a 5K time trial this past weekend. I substituted the 5K at the expense of the programmed 10K time trial to try and make amends for the appalling 27:28 I’d recorded for the 5K three weeks previous.
This time, I was aiming for a sub-25 minute time and paced myself accordingly, starting out at 11.5km/h, and then periodically increasing the speed to reach 12.5km/h after 20 minutes. With the sprint finish over the last couple of minutes, I ended up with a time of 24:46 - a much happier outcome. Albeit it was still some way off the 23:52 time set back in March, or the 22:55 on Christmas Eve last year. On that, it’s instructive to compare the race-day weights for each of those runs, with 22:55 recorded with a weight of 92.3kgs, 23:52 at 94.4kgs, and 24:46 at 99.6kgs. I obviously have some work to do.
This past week has also seen the arrival of some new running shoes. I’d just passed the 700K mark on the old set (Mizuno Wave Enigma 4, size 11.5) and so went back to my regular Potts Point running shoe shop to get fitted for a new pair. This time, Alister, the proprietor, recommended the Asics Gel Fortitude 7 (2E), size 11. And what he says about my running shoes, goes. They feel fine after the first few outings and should see me through Melbourne next month and well into the lead-up to the New York half marathon next March.
By the way, there’s still no confirmation as to whether 20 March 2016 will actually be the date for that one. Evidently, it’s something to do with delays in nailing down all the necessary approvals from the various local authorities. But I’m trying hard to avoid the temptation to take advantage of some very attractive air fares and to pre-pay as much as possible now to cushion the fall-out from the rapidly sinking $A. I just hope they all get their respective acts together before all the convenient flights are filled and the $A crashes below $US0.50.
All going well, the next few weeks should see a few 50+K weekly totals as the second half of the 12-week program progresses. It will also include a final 10K time trial on 26 September (the goal is sub-50 minutes), and the 3.5K Sydney Harbour Bridge run on 20 September. I’ve only done five 50+K weeks in the past 78 weeks since I started preparations back in March 2014 for the Gold Coast half marathon in July 2014. And only once in that time have I managed consecutive 50+K weeks. So the likely increase in fatigue is yet another issue that will need to be managed.
I’m now in week 7 of the 12 week program for the Melbourne half marathon on Sunday 18 October. I’ve also been trying the two-sessions-a-day strategy for at least a couple of days a week now, and that’s bumped up the weekly mileage a little. In week 4, I managed 48.88K, followed by 48.61K and then 40.02K for the week just gone. That included an outdoor 7K Bay Run (40:36) as well as a 5K time trial this past weekend. I substituted the 5K at the expense of the programmed 10K time trial to try and make amends for the appalling 27:28 I’d recorded for the 5K three weeks previous.
This time, I was aiming for a sub-25 minute time and paced myself accordingly, starting out at 11.5km/h, and then periodically increasing the speed to reach 12.5km/h after 20 minutes. With the sprint finish over the last couple of minutes, I ended up with a time of 24:46 - a much happier outcome. Albeit it was still some way off the 23:52 time set back in March, or the 22:55 on Christmas Eve last year. On that, it’s instructive to compare the race-day weights for each of those runs, with 22:55 recorded with a weight of 92.3kgs, 23:52 at 94.4kgs, and 24:46 at 99.6kgs. I obviously have some work to do.
This past week has also seen the arrival of some new running shoes. I’d just passed the 700K mark on the old set (Mizuno Wave Enigma 4, size 11.5) and so went back to my regular Potts Point running shoe shop to get fitted for a new pair. This time, Alister, the proprietor, recommended the Asics Gel Fortitude 7 (2E), size 11. And what he says about my running shoes, goes. They feel fine after the first few outings and should see me through Melbourne next month and well into the lead-up to the New York half marathon next March.
By the way, there’s still no confirmation as to whether 20 March 2016 will actually be the date for that one. Evidently, it’s something to do with delays in nailing down all the necessary approvals from the various local authorities. But I’m trying hard to avoid the temptation to take advantage of some very attractive air fares and to pre-pay as much as possible now to cushion the fall-out from the rapidly sinking $A. I just hope they all get their respective acts together before all the convenient flights are filled and the $A crashes below $US0.50.
All going well, the next few weeks should see a few 50+K weekly totals as the second half of the 12-week program progresses. It will also include a final 10K time trial on 26 September (the goal is sub-50 minutes), and the 3.5K Sydney Harbour Bridge run on 20 September. I’ve only done five 50+K weeks in the past 78 weeks since I started preparations back in March 2014 for the Gold Coast half marathon in July 2014. And only once in that time have I managed consecutive 50+K weeks. So the likely increase in fatigue is yet another issue that will need to be managed.
Monday, 24 August 2015
Age grades
Thought I’d devote this post to ‘age-grading’, which is quite a nifty little calculation process that (among many other things) enables comparisons to be made in one’s running performances over time. Following is a useful description I’ve collected from a couple of running sites:
Age grading is a way to adjust an athlete’s performance according to age and gender. The age-grading tables were developed by the World Association of Veteran Athletes, the world governing body for track and field, long distance running and race walking for veteran athletes. The tables were first published in 1989. The tables work by recording the world record performance for each age at each distance, for men and women. Where necessary, the world record performances are estimated. For example, the world record for a 53 year old woman running a 10km is 35:01. So if a 53 year old woman finishes a 10km in 45:18, she has an age-graded performance of 77.3% (which is 35:01 divided by 45:18).
The purpose of age-graded tables is twofold:
• To correct a person's performance, no matter what his/her age, to what it would have been (or will be) in their prime years. By so doing, all kinds of interesting comparisons can be made. You can compare back to your best performances. You can compare your performances to other people of any age, such as open-class athletes, etc.
• To provide each individual with a percentage value which enables them to judge their performance in any event without bias to age or sex. No matter how old one gets, this performance percentage will always be judged against the standard for one's age. As your performances decline with age, so do the world standards that the tables use to calculate your percentage, giving a true measure of your performance.
The standards correspond approximately to world record marks for a person of that age and sex in that event.
• 100% Approximate World-Record Level
• Over 90% World Class
• Over 80% National Class
• Over 70% Regional Class
• Over 60% Local Class
The calculator seems to be updated every 4-5 years with the most recent update evidently published just this year. It is available at this link - http://www.howardgrubb.co.uk/athletics/wmalookup15.html
If you’ve never fiddled around with these tables before, I highly recommend it. Especially if you have some running times from years ago and want to see what sort of effort would be required at your current age to beat them, on an age-graded basis.
Ever since I discovered age-grading, I’ve had in the back of my mind a stretch goal of achieving a “65%” age-graded score for the times for each of my four main distances - 5K, 10K, half-marathon and marathon. At the universities I’ve attended, 65% is generally the start of a ‘credit’ grade. Not by any means world-beating, but a mark or score to be reasonably satisfied with.
Until a couple of days ago, my all-time best age-graded scores for those distances were as follows:
• 5K - 63.46%
• 10K - 60.92%
• Half Marathon - 55.32%
• Marathon - 52.53%
I had hoped to secure my first ‘credit’ score on 15 August when I lined up for a 5K time trial. At that stage, I hadn’t become aware of the 2015 version of the age-graded tables and so, based on a previous version, was aiming for a sub-22:52 time. Needless to say, I fared quite badly, blowing up after just 1K and staggering home in a lamentable 27:28 (which, for the record, equates to a score of 52.94%).
That said, under the new 2015 age-grades, I would actually have needed a time of 22:22 to achieve a credit score for the 5K distance.
The failure in that 5K run came hot on the heels of two other ordinary performances in the Bay Run and the City to Surf. All-up, it was a two week stretch that’s probably best put down to experience!
Finally, a couple of other developments to report.
First, I’ve now paid a holding deposit to my travel agent for entry into the 2016 New York half marathon. The tentative date is Sunday 20 March 2016, but for some reason, no one seems able to confirm that as being the official race day. Which makes it a little frustrating for those of us on the other side of the world who can’t yet take advantage of some very enticing airfares that seem to be on offer at the moment. On my list of scheduled races, the New York half is next in line after the Melbourne half marathon on 18 October 2015.
And second, I’ve signed up to run a short (3.5K) race over the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Sunday 20 September as part of the Sydney Running Festival (which also comprises a marathon, half marathon and a 9K race). I had planned to avoid that event altogether, but I’d also set myself a goal of running five competitive races in 2015, and with the hamstring tear forcing my withdrawal from the Gold Coast half marathon, I needed to find an additional race. Hence the Bridge Run. I have no particular expectations for it. I won’t be altering my scheduled long run (1 hour, 45 minutes) on the day before. And I doubt it will get much of a mention here. But goals are goals and they need to be ticked off! And, of course, it’s always difficult to pass up an opportunity to run across the main deck of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
On the training front, I’m now entering week 5 of the 12 week program for the Melbourne half. With the various races, mileage over the first four weeks has been up and down, with 36.28K the first week, followed by 26.81K, then 35.27K, and then 48.88K last week, when I started adding some additional 5K sessions to double up on a few of the days.
Loathe as I am to start tinkering with the great Hal Higdon’s program, I just felt I needed some more miles in the legs as well as an extra incentive to avoid junk during the day if I knew I was also going to be running that evening. Annoyingly, the fatigue this is inducing probably caught up with me on the weekend when I wasn’t able to complete a reasonably tough 90 minute run (I had to come back later in the day to finish it off). But I will persevere for a few more weeks and see how it goes.
Age grading is a way to adjust an athlete’s performance according to age and gender. The age-grading tables were developed by the World Association of Veteran Athletes, the world governing body for track and field, long distance running and race walking for veteran athletes. The tables were first published in 1989. The tables work by recording the world record performance for each age at each distance, for men and women. Where necessary, the world record performances are estimated. For example, the world record for a 53 year old woman running a 10km is 35:01. So if a 53 year old woman finishes a 10km in 45:18, she has an age-graded performance of 77.3% (which is 35:01 divided by 45:18).
The purpose of age-graded tables is twofold:
• To correct a person's performance, no matter what his/her age, to what it would have been (or will be) in their prime years. By so doing, all kinds of interesting comparisons can be made. You can compare back to your best performances. You can compare your performances to other people of any age, such as open-class athletes, etc.
• To provide each individual with a percentage value which enables them to judge their performance in any event without bias to age or sex. No matter how old one gets, this performance percentage will always be judged against the standard for one's age. As your performances decline with age, so do the world standards that the tables use to calculate your percentage, giving a true measure of your performance.
The standards correspond approximately to world record marks for a person of that age and sex in that event.
• 100% Approximate World-Record Level
• Over 90% World Class
• Over 80% National Class
• Over 70% Regional Class
• Over 60% Local Class
The calculator seems to be updated every 4-5 years with the most recent update evidently published just this year. It is available at this link - http://www.howardgrubb.co.uk/athletics/wmalookup15.html
If you’ve never fiddled around with these tables before, I highly recommend it. Especially if you have some running times from years ago and want to see what sort of effort would be required at your current age to beat them, on an age-graded basis.
Ever since I discovered age-grading, I’ve had in the back of my mind a stretch goal of achieving a “65%” age-graded score for the times for each of my four main distances - 5K, 10K, half-marathon and marathon. At the universities I’ve attended, 65% is generally the start of a ‘credit’ grade. Not by any means world-beating, but a mark or score to be reasonably satisfied with.
Until a couple of days ago, my all-time best age-graded scores for those distances were as follows:
• 5K - 63.46%
• 10K - 60.92%
• Half Marathon - 55.32%
• Marathon - 52.53%
I had hoped to secure my first ‘credit’ score on 15 August when I lined up for a 5K time trial. At that stage, I hadn’t become aware of the 2015 version of the age-graded tables and so, based on a previous version, was aiming for a sub-22:52 time. Needless to say, I fared quite badly, blowing up after just 1K and staggering home in a lamentable 27:28 (which, for the record, equates to a score of 52.94%).
That said, under the new 2015 age-grades, I would actually have needed a time of 22:22 to achieve a credit score for the 5K distance.
The failure in that 5K run came hot on the heels of two other ordinary performances in the Bay Run and the City to Surf. All-up, it was a two week stretch that’s probably best put down to experience!
Finally, a couple of other developments to report.
First, I’ve now paid a holding deposit to my travel agent for entry into the 2016 New York half marathon. The tentative date is Sunday 20 March 2016, but for some reason, no one seems able to confirm that as being the official race day. Which makes it a little frustrating for those of us on the other side of the world who can’t yet take advantage of some very enticing airfares that seem to be on offer at the moment. On my list of scheduled races, the New York half is next in line after the Melbourne half marathon on 18 October 2015.
And second, I’ve signed up to run a short (3.5K) race over the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Sunday 20 September as part of the Sydney Running Festival (which also comprises a marathon, half marathon and a 9K race). I had planned to avoid that event altogether, but I’d also set myself a goal of running five competitive races in 2015, and with the hamstring tear forcing my withdrawal from the Gold Coast half marathon, I needed to find an additional race. Hence the Bridge Run. I have no particular expectations for it. I won’t be altering my scheduled long run (1 hour, 45 minutes) on the day before. And I doubt it will get much of a mention here. But goals are goals and they need to be ticked off! And, of course, it’s always difficult to pass up an opportunity to run across the main deck of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
On the training front, I’m now entering week 5 of the 12 week program for the Melbourne half. With the various races, mileage over the first four weeks has been up and down, with 36.28K the first week, followed by 26.81K, then 35.27K, and then 48.88K last week, when I started adding some additional 5K sessions to double up on a few of the days.
Loathe as I am to start tinkering with the great Hal Higdon’s program, I just felt I needed some more miles in the legs as well as an extra incentive to avoid junk during the day if I knew I was also going to be running that evening. Annoyingly, the fatigue this is inducing probably caught up with me on the weekend when I wasn’t able to complete a reasonably tough 90 minute run (I had to come back later in the day to finish it off). But I will persevere for a few more weeks and see how it goes.
Sunday, 9 August 2015
A big week
Two big races - at least by my reckoning - in seven days was the menu for this past week.
I had a feeling going in that they weren’t going to be much to write home about. I’ve been in something of a funk these past few weeks after being thrown off course by the hamstring injury and a significantly interrupted training schedule, which resulted in the weight heading in the wrong direction and with aspects of my non-running life also perhaps not as motivating as they previously had been. All up, it turned out to be a pretty effective recipe for running mediocrity.
The Bay Run on Sunday 2 August was first cab off the rank. This was my first competitive Bay Run since 2006 when I managed a PB for the regular 7K loop course of 34:56. For this year only, the course morphed into an 8K out-and-back circuit with two crossings of the Iron Cove Bridge, which meant two reasonably steep ascents to get onto the bridge in each direction. I had only ever run the Bay Run - competitively or otherwise - as one single loop, so the return part of this year’s race revealed some unexpectedly tough inclines which I had previously only ever seen as gentle downhill slopes.
In all the circumstances, I wasn’t overly disappointed with the finishing time of 46:04. Happily though, my nervousness throughout the run about the hamstring injury was misplaced. Other than mentally, it just didn’t play a part.
Of course, the City to Surf the following Sunday (9 August) was its usual big, brash self. And also, as usual, it was held under clear skies with a chilly start. All up, it was a great day to share my 22nd trip to Bondi with almost 80,000 Sydney-siders and visitors - many of whom probably weren’t even alive when I did my first run to Bondi back in 1992 (in a time of 86:07).
I really wasn’t feeling as comfortable as I would have liked for the first half of this particular run and was starting to fear something of a blow-out. But I picked up over the tricky hills at the back section of the course and actually started to feel good - pushing it as hard as I could on the long downhill into Bondi and during that final, frustrating 1K along the beachfront and into the finish chute. Despite that, the damage had been done and my pre-injury hopes of a sub-80 minute finish were dashed as I finished in 84:19. Disappointingly, I wasn’t even able to beat last year’s time of 83:33.
The official timing breakdowns for the race confirm my suspicions of a sub-optimal start. Last year, I ran at a speed of 10.75km/h for the first 6.2K. This year, it was 10.40km/h - well over a minute slower for that section. Next, for the 1.6K Heartbreak Hill section, I ran 8.27km/h last year and 8.61km/h this time - a promising improvement. But the final 6.2K was run at near enough identical speeds (9.96km/h last year and 9.94km/h this year).
Compared to my competitors, though, I fared a little better this year. Last year, I finished 22,590th of the 67,562 finishers (66.56%). This year, I almost made it into the top 20,000, finishing in 20,908th position of 65,480 finishers (68.07%). But it wasn’t good enough to beat Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who was evidently leading a blind runner, and finished in a time exactly one minute quicker than mine.
So that’s the Bay Run and City to Surf for another year. Now it’s back to some hopefully uninterrupted training for the Melbourne half marathon in October, with a 5K time trial scheduled for this weekend.
I had a feeling going in that they weren’t going to be much to write home about. I’ve been in something of a funk these past few weeks after being thrown off course by the hamstring injury and a significantly interrupted training schedule, which resulted in the weight heading in the wrong direction and with aspects of my non-running life also perhaps not as motivating as they previously had been. All up, it turned out to be a pretty effective recipe for running mediocrity.
The Bay Run on Sunday 2 August was first cab off the rank. This was my first competitive Bay Run since 2006 when I managed a PB for the regular 7K loop course of 34:56. For this year only, the course morphed into an 8K out-and-back circuit with two crossings of the Iron Cove Bridge, which meant two reasonably steep ascents to get onto the bridge in each direction. I had only ever run the Bay Run - competitively or otherwise - as one single loop, so the return part of this year’s race revealed some unexpectedly tough inclines which I had previously only ever seen as gentle downhill slopes.
In all the circumstances, I wasn’t overly disappointed with the finishing time of 46:04. Happily though, my nervousness throughout the run about the hamstring injury was misplaced. Other than mentally, it just didn’t play a part.
Of course, the City to Surf the following Sunday (9 August) was its usual big, brash self. And also, as usual, it was held under clear skies with a chilly start. All up, it was a great day to share my 22nd trip to Bondi with almost 80,000 Sydney-siders and visitors - many of whom probably weren’t even alive when I did my first run to Bondi back in 1992 (in a time of 86:07).
I really wasn’t feeling as comfortable as I would have liked for the first half of this particular run and was starting to fear something of a blow-out. But I picked up over the tricky hills at the back section of the course and actually started to feel good - pushing it as hard as I could on the long downhill into Bondi and during that final, frustrating 1K along the beachfront and into the finish chute. Despite that, the damage had been done and my pre-injury hopes of a sub-80 minute finish were dashed as I finished in 84:19. Disappointingly, I wasn’t even able to beat last year’s time of 83:33.
The official timing breakdowns for the race confirm my suspicions of a sub-optimal start. Last year, I ran at a speed of 10.75km/h for the first 6.2K. This year, it was 10.40km/h - well over a minute slower for that section. Next, for the 1.6K Heartbreak Hill section, I ran 8.27km/h last year and 8.61km/h this time - a promising improvement. But the final 6.2K was run at near enough identical speeds (9.96km/h last year and 9.94km/h this year).
Compared to my competitors, though, I fared a little better this year. Last year, I finished 22,590th of the 67,562 finishers (66.56%). This year, I almost made it into the top 20,000, finishing in 20,908th position of 65,480 finishers (68.07%). But it wasn’t good enough to beat Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who was evidently leading a blind runner, and finished in a time exactly one minute quicker than mine.
So that’s the Bay Run and City to Surf for another year. Now it’s back to some hopefully uninterrupted training for the Melbourne half marathon in October, with a 5K time trial scheduled for this weekend.
Monday, 27 July 2015
Back in business
After a few too many dark days since my last post, I’ve been given the all clear to return to some running.
And so it was that last week I resumed with some slow, tentative, jogs of 2-4K’s at a time, capped off with a steady 5K at 8.5km/h, for a 20K week total. I also threw in a brisk 10K bush walk (from Spit Junction to Manly, alongside Sydney harbour) as a reward for being able to be physically active again.
By happy coincidence, this week happens to be week 1 of Hal Higdon’s 12 week advanced half marathon program which culminates in the Melbourne half marathon on Sunday 18 October. And so far, so good. Today’s 40 minute tempo run, peaking at 12.3km/h, was certainly a solid test. While I felt myself puffing a little harder than usual and constantly monitoring the left hamstring for any sign of trouble as the speed picked up, it went well.
All up, it was just over three long weeks between the time of the injury and getting back into it. The physio was comfortable with me continuing with the plan on the understanding that I maintain regular hamstring strengthening exercises. Which I have been - more or less.
Regardless, the next couple of weeks will definitely put progress with the rehab under the spotlight. This coming Sunday is the remodelled 8K Bay Run (bib no. 129), while the following Sunday is my 22nd attempt at the fabled City to Surf - a hilly, crowded and frankly quite tough 14K course from the Sydney CBD to Bondi Beach (bib no. 12199). And a few days after that is my next 5K time trial, where I’m aiming to break 22:52, the significance of which I’ll explain closer to the day.
It’s going to be an anxious period against a backdrop of some obviously sub-optimal preparation, but the show must go on.
And it's great to be back!
And so it was that last week I resumed with some slow, tentative, jogs of 2-4K’s at a time, capped off with a steady 5K at 8.5km/h, for a 20K week total. I also threw in a brisk 10K bush walk (from Spit Junction to Manly, alongside Sydney harbour) as a reward for being able to be physically active again.
By happy coincidence, this week happens to be week 1 of Hal Higdon’s 12 week advanced half marathon program which culminates in the Melbourne half marathon on Sunday 18 October. And so far, so good. Today’s 40 minute tempo run, peaking at 12.3km/h, was certainly a solid test. While I felt myself puffing a little harder than usual and constantly monitoring the left hamstring for any sign of trouble as the speed picked up, it went well.
All up, it was just over three long weeks between the time of the injury and getting back into it. The physio was comfortable with me continuing with the plan on the understanding that I maintain regular hamstring strengthening exercises. Which I have been - more or less.
Regardless, the next couple of weeks will definitely put progress with the rehab under the spotlight. This coming Sunday is the remodelled 8K Bay Run (bib no. 129), while the following Sunday is my 22nd attempt at the fabled City to Surf - a hilly, crowded and frankly quite tough 14K course from the Sydney CBD to Bondi Beach (bib no. 12199). And a few days after that is my next 5K time trial, where I’m aiming to break 22:52, the significance of which I’ll explain closer to the day.
It’s going to be an anxious period against a backdrop of some obviously sub-optimal preparation, but the show must go on.
And it's great to be back!
Tuesday, 30 June 2015
Bugger!
Remember how I said back in my first post when predicting the future course of this blog - “Doubtless too, there'll be a few gaps, perhaps some despondency, hopefully some steady progress…”? Well, folks, we’ve well and truly arrived at the first ‘despondency’ stage of this journey.
A torn left hamstring means I’m out of the Gold Coast half marathon.
It happened well into the taper with my last scheduled interval session at 5K+ pace. It was meant to be 1K at 9km/h; followed by six repetitions of 400M at 13.5km/h and 300M at 4.6km/h; finishing with a 500M jog at 8.5km/h. A total of 5.7K, all on a 1% incline. But at precisely 330M into the first 13.5km/h repetition, and without any sign of trouble, I felt a strong twinge in the left hamstring. It was similar to the one I’d felt in my right hamstring a few weeks back that I mentioned in my medical update post. But unlike then, this did not run itself out and I quickly shut down the treadmill for fear of being flung off the back as my hobble became more pronounced.
A quick visit to the physio, confirmed by an ultrasound, established a hamstring tear that needs about 4-6 weeks rehab to get right. I was also warned that any shortcuts would significantly elevate the risk of a recurrence down the track. And having lived through the frustration of repeated calf muscle tears in my previous running life, it’s a warning I need to heed.
I won’t even attempt to describe the hollowness I’m feeling right now.
I suppose this sort of thing comes with the territory, and I’ve been lucky not to have had any real injuries so far in this campaign. And I know there’s a fair chance I’ll look back on this time as one of those formative experiences that will propel me to even better performances going forward. But at the moment, that’s cold comfort.
So, with my Gold Coast flights and accommodation all booked and paid for, I’ll head up there all the same. I guess there are plenty of worse places in the world to spend a weekend moping around and feeling sorry for oneself ...
A torn left hamstring means I’m out of the Gold Coast half marathon.
It happened well into the taper with my last scheduled interval session at 5K+ pace. It was meant to be 1K at 9km/h; followed by six repetitions of 400M at 13.5km/h and 300M at 4.6km/h; finishing with a 500M jog at 8.5km/h. A total of 5.7K, all on a 1% incline. But at precisely 330M into the first 13.5km/h repetition, and without any sign of trouble, I felt a strong twinge in the left hamstring. It was similar to the one I’d felt in my right hamstring a few weeks back that I mentioned in my medical update post. But unlike then, this did not run itself out and I quickly shut down the treadmill for fear of being flung off the back as my hobble became more pronounced.
A quick visit to the physio, confirmed by an ultrasound, established a hamstring tear that needs about 4-6 weeks rehab to get right. I was also warned that any shortcuts would significantly elevate the risk of a recurrence down the track. And having lived through the frustration of repeated calf muscle tears in my previous running life, it’s a warning I need to heed.
I won’t even attempt to describe the hollowness I’m feeling right now.
I suppose this sort of thing comes with the territory, and I’ve been lucky not to have had any real injuries so far in this campaign. And I know there’s a fair chance I’ll look back on this time as one of those formative experiences that will propel me to even better performances going forward. But at the moment, that’s cold comfort.
So, with my Gold Coast flights and accommodation all booked and paid for, I’ll head up there all the same. I guess there are plenty of worse places in the world to spend a weekend moping around and feeling sorry for oneself ...
Monday, 29 June 2015
The next stop
It’s time. The Gold Coast half marathon - the second stop on this quest - is now just a few days away, so here’s my pre-race post.
This is probably my favourite race, maybe fractionally ahead of Sydney’s City-to-Surf, and certainly my favourite half marathon of the three courses I’ve run (the others being Sydney and Auckland). The Gold Coast course is quite flat, it’s always a good crowd, and the weather (at least for the very early starting half marathon) is invariably kind. And no matter how buggered you might be feeling at the time, it’s very hard not to love the views out over the water on that long stretch back to the start/finish line as the sun starts to rise. Magic!
If you can overlook their somewhat breathless hyperbole, the race website gives a reasonable description of the course:
The ASICS Half Marathon is one of Australia’s premier running events, providing both an avenue for those making the step up in distance and a stage for frequent half marathoners to strut their stuff on a world-standard course.
Starting at the race precinct in Southport, the course hugs the picturesque Broadwater, providing views of the Wavebreak, Ephraim and South Stradbroke Islands. Enjoy the sights as you run to Paradise Point along the flat, fast terrain.
Give yourself a small reward as you run through 10.5km and around the northern turn. Enjoy the thrill of heading for home as you once again take in the water views and the buzz of being half way there.
Cross the Loders Creek Bridge and you’ll know it’s only one kilometre until the end. Soak up the atmosphere created by your fellow runners and the on-course supporters as you reach the Gold Coast’s famous finish chute, the line and personal glory.
In addition, the race organisation is always excellent, and there are plenty of decent hotels nearby with a lunch buffet on which to binge after the race. This year, I’ve booked into the Grand Chancellor Hotel for the nights before and after. It seems to offer quite an enticing seafood buffet which starts daily at 5:30pm, albeit there’s no sign of lunch. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hold on that long with the race finishing around 8:00am, but we’ll see how it goes.
In any event, I’ll certainly be giving every encouragement to the marathoners, and keeping a particular eye on the 3:40 group as it goes past.
I’ll also be cheering Steve Moneghetti, who’s acting as the 3-hour group pacer. Kudos to the organisers for getting the great man involved in that way. It will certainly be one for the scrapbook for those 3+ hour runners who manage to follow him around.
This year, I’ll be flying up to the Gold Coast from Sydney on Saturday morning and expect to arrive well in time to check in to the hotel and then head to the Expo and bib collection at the Convention Centre. After that, it will be a very quiet Saturday evening to be ready for the 6:00am race start on Sunday. The organisers recommend that runners get to the starting precinct by 5:00am. With the hotel about 4K from the start line, I’ll probably leave before 4:30am to catch one of the buses, or perhaps the new tram, that will ferry people there. I have a morbid fear of arriving late for race starts and hence invariably end up getting there with far too much time to spare.
I’ve also made the all-important selection of the daggy jumper that I’ll be wearing to the start line and then tossing once the race gets underway. I’ve actually been wearing it much more frequently than usual over the past week or so, just to wring that last bit of wear out of it.
It’s always a slightly poignant moment having to say farewell to a faithful piece of clothing in that way. But it has to be done, and I suppose it’s a good way of refreshing the wardrobe. Thinking about it, I’ve probably got another two or three tops that I can dispense with at other races later this year, but after that, the remaining ones are mostly hoodies and such from various universities I’ve studied at over the years and I’d really like to hang on to them. It looks like I might need to visit to a charity clothing shop - to buy a jumper that will be immediately donated to a charity clothing shop!
I can’t remember exactly how I came to run my first Gold Coast half in July 2005. I do know that, by that time, I’d made the fateful decision to run my first marathon (in Sydney in September 2005), and my younger brother and his family lived in southern Queensland, reasonably close to the Gold Coast. So I probably just heard about it as one of those ‘must-do’ events and decided to incorporate it into the program. My time that first year was 2:00:13.
By the next year, 2006, I felt good enough to latch on to the 1:50 pacers and managed to stick with them for the duration before finishing ahead of them - but in a time of 1:50:07! It still rankles.
After several years’ hibernation, I lined up again last year and finished in 2:00:21. My plan was to stick with the 2 hour pacers until the final quarter of the race and then charge ahead to the finish. Sadly, as with Sydney in May, I couldn’t find them at the starting grid and had no idea how my pace was going during the race.
Those following this odyssey closely so far will also recognise a disturbing (actually, extremely bloody annoying!) pattern here of my being unable to beat key time barriers, with now four half marathons at times of 2:00:13, 2:00:21, 2:00:26 and 1:50:07. Sadly, I don’t have any with times of 1:59:xx. I’m not sure what exactly is going on here, but I’m getting a bit sick of it!
My training program for this - my 11th lifetime half marathon - has comprised the last six weeks of Hal Higdon’s 12-week advanced half marathon program. Basically, it’s been a mirror of the final six weeks of training for the Sydney half. In that same period before Sydney, I blew up quite badly in three reasonably significant training sessions and missed another entirely. This time around, I’ve got through those equivalent sessions, and most of the others, pretty much unscathed. While I missed one 5K session and had a minor stumble with a fast 6.5K session, I did convert one of the 5K Sunday sessions to an outdoor run around the 7K Bay Run, albeit I would have liked to have done a few more.
All up, I expect to have run 260.8K’s in the six full training weeks since Sydney, as follows - 47.92, 46.06, 35.52, 60.04, 52.40 and 18.90. In the period before Sydney, the corresponding weekly totals were - 39.77, 50.71, 22.40, 55.49, 47.91 and 18.90 (total - 235.2K).
I’m not really sure what to make of this general improvement compared to pre-Sydney. It’s probably a combination of a few changes - more miles in the legs, using gels immediately before each of the longer and harder runs (thanks Steph!), compression shorts, a weekly weights training session (good job, Corey), and sprinting toward the end of some of the shorter runs to get a feel for the extra speed and crank up the heart rate. There hasn’t been much of an improvement in weight or general nutrition, but I’m working on that.
In the last few days, I’ve also managed to pick up a bit of a sniffle in this near-arctic Sydney winter. It’s been getting down to almost 10 degrees (Celsius) overnight recently and not much more than 17 or 18 during the day, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I succumbed to something like that. Aside from forcing me to miss my scheduled Sunday outdoor run around the Bay, it hasn’t had any adverse effect and should be gone by the weekend.
Which leaves my plan for this race.
It’s instructive to look back at my Gold Coast times after having run Sydney 6-7 weeks previously. In 2005, I ran Sydney in 2:04:33 and backed up with a 2:00:13 at the Gold Coast. The next year, I ran Sydney in 1:54:16 and then the Gold Coast in 1:50:07. A 4+ minute improvement on both occasions. Which probably reflects the relative difficulty of the two courses, given I would have been in roughly the same sort of shape each time.
This year, I reckon the Sydney course was a good minute or two tougher than the course I ran on in 2005 and 2006, so on that basis alone, I’m probably looking at a 1:54-1:55 finish this time, based on my 2:00:26 in Sydney.
Once I factor in some very productive, confidence-building, training over the past six weeks, I find myself edging more and more towards the courageous option and starting with the 1:50 pacers to see what happens. I also know that if I’m going to get this BQ (a sub-3:40), I’ll effectively need to run back-to-back 1:50 half marathons. So if I think I have a fair shot at one now, why not go out with the pacers and try and hang on?
The website names the 1:50 pacers as Andrew Stolz and Mark Stella (don’t know them), and says they’ll be wearing red balloons and starting “in the middle of Zone B”, which is the place where those looking to finish between 1:45 and 2 hours are supposed to start. Given last year’s disappointment of not being able to find the 2 hour pacers, and the disproportionately large number of walkers who seem to line up well ahead of where they really should (I recall wasting plenty of time and energy last year dodging walkers and very slow joggers in the first kilometre or two of the event), I’m minded to start at the front of Zone B or even in Zone A, which is for those looking for a sub-1:45 time, to make absolutely certain of latching on to the 1:50 bus.
So 1:49:59 is the plan.
Which all sounds very logical and straightforward, but of course you can’t see the several drafts of these last few paragraphs I’ve written over the past few days reflecting my vacillation over this.
But now it’s done.
See you after the race!
This is probably my favourite race, maybe fractionally ahead of Sydney’s City-to-Surf, and certainly my favourite half marathon of the three courses I’ve run (the others being Sydney and Auckland). The Gold Coast course is quite flat, it’s always a good crowd, and the weather (at least for the very early starting half marathon) is invariably kind. And no matter how buggered you might be feeling at the time, it’s very hard not to love the views out over the water on that long stretch back to the start/finish line as the sun starts to rise. Magic!
If you can overlook their somewhat breathless hyperbole, the race website gives a reasonable description of the course:
The ASICS Half Marathon is one of Australia’s premier running events, providing both an avenue for those making the step up in distance and a stage for frequent half marathoners to strut their stuff on a world-standard course.
Starting at the race precinct in Southport, the course hugs the picturesque Broadwater, providing views of the Wavebreak, Ephraim and South Stradbroke Islands. Enjoy the sights as you run to Paradise Point along the flat, fast terrain.
Give yourself a small reward as you run through 10.5km and around the northern turn. Enjoy the thrill of heading for home as you once again take in the water views and the buzz of being half way there.
Cross the Loders Creek Bridge and you’ll know it’s only one kilometre until the end. Soak up the atmosphere created by your fellow runners and the on-course supporters as you reach the Gold Coast’s famous finish chute, the line and personal glory.
In addition, the race organisation is always excellent, and there are plenty of decent hotels nearby with a lunch buffet on which to binge after the race. This year, I’ve booked into the Grand Chancellor Hotel for the nights before and after. It seems to offer quite an enticing seafood buffet which starts daily at 5:30pm, albeit there’s no sign of lunch. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hold on that long with the race finishing around 8:00am, but we’ll see how it goes.
In any event, I’ll certainly be giving every encouragement to the marathoners, and keeping a particular eye on the 3:40 group as it goes past.
I’ll also be cheering Steve Moneghetti, who’s acting as the 3-hour group pacer. Kudos to the organisers for getting the great man involved in that way. It will certainly be one for the scrapbook for those 3+ hour runners who manage to follow him around.
This year, I’ll be flying up to the Gold Coast from Sydney on Saturday morning and expect to arrive well in time to check in to the hotel and then head to the Expo and bib collection at the Convention Centre. After that, it will be a very quiet Saturday evening to be ready for the 6:00am race start on Sunday. The organisers recommend that runners get to the starting precinct by 5:00am. With the hotel about 4K from the start line, I’ll probably leave before 4:30am to catch one of the buses, or perhaps the new tram, that will ferry people there. I have a morbid fear of arriving late for race starts and hence invariably end up getting there with far too much time to spare.
I’ve also made the all-important selection of the daggy jumper that I’ll be wearing to the start line and then tossing once the race gets underway. I’ve actually been wearing it much more frequently than usual over the past week or so, just to wring that last bit of wear out of it.
It’s always a slightly poignant moment having to say farewell to a faithful piece of clothing in that way. But it has to be done, and I suppose it’s a good way of refreshing the wardrobe. Thinking about it, I’ve probably got another two or three tops that I can dispense with at other races later this year, but after that, the remaining ones are mostly hoodies and such from various universities I’ve studied at over the years and I’d really like to hang on to them. It looks like I might need to visit to a charity clothing shop - to buy a jumper that will be immediately donated to a charity clothing shop!
I can’t remember exactly how I came to run my first Gold Coast half in July 2005. I do know that, by that time, I’d made the fateful decision to run my first marathon (in Sydney in September 2005), and my younger brother and his family lived in southern Queensland, reasonably close to the Gold Coast. So I probably just heard about it as one of those ‘must-do’ events and decided to incorporate it into the program. My time that first year was 2:00:13.
By the next year, 2006, I felt good enough to latch on to the 1:50 pacers and managed to stick with them for the duration before finishing ahead of them - but in a time of 1:50:07! It still rankles.
After several years’ hibernation, I lined up again last year and finished in 2:00:21. My plan was to stick with the 2 hour pacers until the final quarter of the race and then charge ahead to the finish. Sadly, as with Sydney in May, I couldn’t find them at the starting grid and had no idea how my pace was going during the race.
Those following this odyssey closely so far will also recognise a disturbing (actually, extremely bloody annoying!) pattern here of my being unable to beat key time barriers, with now four half marathons at times of 2:00:13, 2:00:21, 2:00:26 and 1:50:07. Sadly, I don’t have any with times of 1:59:xx. I’m not sure what exactly is going on here, but I’m getting a bit sick of it!
My training program for this - my 11th lifetime half marathon - has comprised the last six weeks of Hal Higdon’s 12-week advanced half marathon program. Basically, it’s been a mirror of the final six weeks of training for the Sydney half. In that same period before Sydney, I blew up quite badly in three reasonably significant training sessions and missed another entirely. This time around, I’ve got through those equivalent sessions, and most of the others, pretty much unscathed. While I missed one 5K session and had a minor stumble with a fast 6.5K session, I did convert one of the 5K Sunday sessions to an outdoor run around the 7K Bay Run, albeit I would have liked to have done a few more.
All up, I expect to have run 260.8K’s in the six full training weeks since Sydney, as follows - 47.92, 46.06, 35.52, 60.04, 52.40 and 18.90. In the period before Sydney, the corresponding weekly totals were - 39.77, 50.71, 22.40, 55.49, 47.91 and 18.90 (total - 235.2K).
I’m not really sure what to make of this general improvement compared to pre-Sydney. It’s probably a combination of a few changes - more miles in the legs, using gels immediately before each of the longer and harder runs (thanks Steph!), compression shorts, a weekly weights training session (good job, Corey), and sprinting toward the end of some of the shorter runs to get a feel for the extra speed and crank up the heart rate. There hasn’t been much of an improvement in weight or general nutrition, but I’m working on that.
In the last few days, I’ve also managed to pick up a bit of a sniffle in this near-arctic Sydney winter. It’s been getting down to almost 10 degrees (Celsius) overnight recently and not much more than 17 or 18 during the day, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I succumbed to something like that. Aside from forcing me to miss my scheduled Sunday outdoor run around the Bay, it hasn’t had any adverse effect and should be gone by the weekend.
Which leaves my plan for this race.
It’s instructive to look back at my Gold Coast times after having run Sydney 6-7 weeks previously. In 2005, I ran Sydney in 2:04:33 and backed up with a 2:00:13 at the Gold Coast. The next year, I ran Sydney in 1:54:16 and then the Gold Coast in 1:50:07. A 4+ minute improvement on both occasions. Which probably reflects the relative difficulty of the two courses, given I would have been in roughly the same sort of shape each time.
This year, I reckon the Sydney course was a good minute or two tougher than the course I ran on in 2005 and 2006, so on that basis alone, I’m probably looking at a 1:54-1:55 finish this time, based on my 2:00:26 in Sydney.
Once I factor in some very productive, confidence-building, training over the past six weeks, I find myself edging more and more towards the courageous option and starting with the 1:50 pacers to see what happens. I also know that if I’m going to get this BQ (a sub-3:40), I’ll effectively need to run back-to-back 1:50 half marathons. So if I think I have a fair shot at one now, why not go out with the pacers and try and hang on?
The website names the 1:50 pacers as Andrew Stolz and Mark Stella (don’t know them), and says they’ll be wearing red balloons and starting “in the middle of Zone B”, which is the place where those looking to finish between 1:45 and 2 hours are supposed to start. Given last year’s disappointment of not being able to find the 2 hour pacers, and the disproportionately large number of walkers who seem to line up well ahead of where they really should (I recall wasting plenty of time and energy last year dodging walkers and very slow joggers in the first kilometre or two of the event), I’m minded to start at the front of Zone B or even in Zone A, which is for those looking for a sub-1:45 time, to make absolutely certain of latching on to the 1:50 bus.
So 1:49:59 is the plan.
Which all sounds very logical and straightforward, but of course you can’t see the several drafts of these last few paragraphs I’ve written over the past few days reflecting my vacillation over this.
But now it’s done.
See you after the race!
Monday, 22 June 2015
Medical update 1
I thought I should devote at least a small part of this blog to a periodic update on how my body is holding together through all this. Of course, given I’m unlikely to ever write a post under this heading which simply says, “Nothing to report”, it’s a fair bet that whenever you see this heading, either something’s gone wrong, or - desirably - something that had been a problem is no longer.
This time around, it’s a bit of both.
Apart from getting my weight right, my major physical concern at the moment, and for some months really, has been the left Achilles. It started getting sore quite suddenly late in 2014 for no apparent reason. While it didn’t affect my running, it caused me to start hobbling around for several minutes whenever I stood up after having been sitting down for any length of time. This continued for a few months with the intensity of the pain slowly increasing and the hobble getting more pronounced. The first five minutes or so of any running session were also invariably quite painful, which I simply endured until it became just a mild, bearable, throbbing.
I finally went to see a physio about it in March
It felt like it was improving up to the Sydney half marathon, but went downhill again just after that race - probably because of the pounding it got there.
I’ve now been seeing the physio every couple of weeks. He prescribed some simple exercises that I'm ashamed to say I’ve been somewhat less than diligent in performing. He also suggested I see their podiatrist, who subsequently fitted me with some replacement orthotics just the other day. Aside from a few days of quite painful blistering, which even managed to drown out the pain from the Achilles, they seem in order.
Having heard my story, the podiatrist also suggested that I have some shock wave therapy at the clinic. More correctly known as “Radial Shock Wave Therapy” (RSWT), it is described on one medical website as “the application of a high-energy acoustic pulse transmitted into the tissue of the affected area of the body. Each RSWT treatment works to increase the metabolic activity around the site of pain or discomfort. This stimulates the body’s natural healing process, thus reducing pain and promoting the reabsorption of irriative calcium deposits in tendons.”
It’s also one of the most excruciatingly painful things I’ve ever experienced! And I’ve got a second session tomorrow morning to look forward to …
Otherwise, I did have a fairly tense moment during a recent, solid, 8.1K run at just over half-marathon pace (11.5km/h) where I felt my right hamstring play up for a few strides. It’s the first time I’ve encountered any issues there - apart from general hamstring and quad soreness during and after the Sydney run - and so I was more than a little worried about a sudden major tear rendering me unable to move the leg and end up hurtling off the back of the treadmill. I also have an indelible memory of the frustrations associated with a few left calf muscle tears in my previous running life. Anyway, that hamstring twinge has not reappeared, but I remain apprehensive about it.
And finally, a past malady that seems to have come good.
As it happened, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer back in April 2014. The thyroid is a gland in the front of the neck that regulates one’s metabolism and does a few other pretty vital things. I’d noticed a reasonable sized growth on the left side of the neck for a few years before I finally got around to checking it out. That primarily involved a biopsy, where an uncomfortably thick needle is inserted into various parts of the neck to extract tissue samples. Not a lot of fun, but you gotta do what you gotta do, I suppose. Evidently, one of the extracted samples was cancerous. There’s no indication about what caused it. I’m in none of the potential risk groups. It seems it was just one of those things.
At the time, I was in the middle of training for the Gold Coast half marathon, my first serious race after many years out. So, after some careful thought, I decided to postpone the surgery that was recommended to remove the entire thyroid. Instead, I went under the knife in July 2014, a couple of weeks after the race, and had some radioactive iodine treatment the next month to mop up any residual cancer.
Happily, the ultrasound results earlier this month indicate that I seem to have had a lucky escape with no sign of any lingering trouble-spots. But I’ll be staying in touch with the specialist for a few years yet just to make sure.
This time around, it’s a bit of both.
Apart from getting my weight right, my major physical concern at the moment, and for some months really, has been the left Achilles. It started getting sore quite suddenly late in 2014 for no apparent reason. While it didn’t affect my running, it caused me to start hobbling around for several minutes whenever I stood up after having been sitting down for any length of time. This continued for a few months with the intensity of the pain slowly increasing and the hobble getting more pronounced. The first five minutes or so of any running session were also invariably quite painful, which I simply endured until it became just a mild, bearable, throbbing.
I finally went to see a physio about it in March
It felt like it was improving up to the Sydney half marathon, but went downhill again just after that race - probably because of the pounding it got there.
I’ve now been seeing the physio every couple of weeks. He prescribed some simple exercises that I'm ashamed to say I’ve been somewhat less than diligent in performing. He also suggested I see their podiatrist, who subsequently fitted me with some replacement orthotics just the other day. Aside from a few days of quite painful blistering, which even managed to drown out the pain from the Achilles, they seem in order.
Having heard my story, the podiatrist also suggested that I have some shock wave therapy at the clinic. More correctly known as “Radial Shock Wave Therapy” (RSWT), it is described on one medical website as “the application of a high-energy acoustic pulse transmitted into the tissue of the affected area of the body. Each RSWT treatment works to increase the metabolic activity around the site of pain or discomfort. This stimulates the body’s natural healing process, thus reducing pain and promoting the reabsorption of irriative calcium deposits in tendons.”
It’s also one of the most excruciatingly painful things I’ve ever experienced! And I’ve got a second session tomorrow morning to look forward to …
Otherwise, I did have a fairly tense moment during a recent, solid, 8.1K run at just over half-marathon pace (11.5km/h) where I felt my right hamstring play up for a few strides. It’s the first time I’ve encountered any issues there - apart from general hamstring and quad soreness during and after the Sydney run - and so I was more than a little worried about a sudden major tear rendering me unable to move the leg and end up hurtling off the back of the treadmill. I also have an indelible memory of the frustrations associated with a few left calf muscle tears in my previous running life. Anyway, that hamstring twinge has not reappeared, but I remain apprehensive about it.
And finally, a past malady that seems to have come good.
As it happened, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer back in April 2014. The thyroid is a gland in the front of the neck that regulates one’s metabolism and does a few other pretty vital things. I’d noticed a reasonable sized growth on the left side of the neck for a few years before I finally got around to checking it out. That primarily involved a biopsy, where an uncomfortably thick needle is inserted into various parts of the neck to extract tissue samples. Not a lot of fun, but you gotta do what you gotta do, I suppose. Evidently, one of the extracted samples was cancerous. There’s no indication about what caused it. I’m in none of the potential risk groups. It seems it was just one of those things.
At the time, I was in the middle of training for the Gold Coast half marathon, my first serious race after many years out. So, after some careful thought, I decided to postpone the surgery that was recommended to remove the entire thyroid. Instead, I went under the knife in July 2014, a couple of weeks after the race, and had some radioactive iodine treatment the next month to mop up any residual cancer.
Happily, the ultrasound results earlier this month indicate that I seem to have had a lucky escape with no sign of any lingering trouble-spots. But I’ll be staying in touch with the specialist for a few years yet just to make sure.
Monday, 15 June 2015
Some useful progress
Completed a scheduled 10K time trial on Saturday 13 June. My 10K times have been progressively improving over the past year or so from 54:24 (on 24 May 2014), to 53:02 (21 February 2015), to 52:12 (4 April 2015), and to 51:30 (26 April 2015). So my target this time around was sub-51 minutes.
And, happily, I managed to achieve that, with what turned out to be a reasonably comfortable 50:35.
I’d calculated (from a very handy website) that the pace required to achieve that time was 11.76km/h, so I started at 11.6km/h for the first 20 minutes, then bumped it up to 11.7km/h for the next 10, and 11.8km/h for the 10 after that. I was still feeling quite strong and decided to increase the speed by 0.1km/h each minute from the 40 minute mark, to the point where I’d made up the small time deficit and then charged home, peaking at 16km/h for the final 200m.
I must admit I was a little worried going in to the run. My nutrition strategy during the previous week or so had been badly compromised by some pressing deadlines for a couple of university papers. I seem to have this terrible habit of eating a heap of junk when I'm in that sort of predicament, and as a consequence, my weight had been creeping up a little. So the relative ease of the run was a big, but welcome, surprise. Nevertheless, I think I'll put it down to a lucky escape rather than seeing it as some sort of precedent I should be maintaining.
This result means that the next 10K goal becomes a sub-50 at the time trial scheduled for 5 September. It’s still a long way from my all-time best 10K of 46:47 on 2 December 2006, achieved in the aftermath of the October 2006 Chicago marathon, but we’ll get there.
I’ve also made some progress, albeit limited, on the outdoor running front since my last post. To be precise, it was one Sunday morning Bay Run a couple of weeks back. I’d originally intended for it to be quite easy (around 45-50 minutes for the 7K distance) following a hard run on the day before, but the crisp morning, the crowds of fellow joggers, and the relative novelty of it all combined to get the better of me. I ended up pushing reasonably hard, running 37:18.
I missed last Sunday through a university deadline and next Sunday I’m out of town (on a brief visit to Canberra). But it really was fun - I’ll be back.
That said, one slightly off-putting side-effect the run did highlight for me is that I always seem to need to, ahem, expectorate quite a bit when I’m running outside. No matter how long I’ve been on a treadmill - and I was clocking up several 3+ hour runs back in the day - I’ve never felt the least inclined to do this. But for reasons I’ve never really been able to fathom, I needed to clear my throat virtually every kilometre or more often, running around the Bay. In races too. And of course, it also leads to some tricky etiquette questions, which I’ve always tried to be especially alive to when in polite running company.
Anyhoo, if the treadmill devotees out there have also been wondering about this, someone has been bold enough to raise precisely these issues with a guru on the Runners World website:
And, happily, I managed to achieve that, with what turned out to be a reasonably comfortable 50:35.
I’d calculated (from a very handy website) that the pace required to achieve that time was 11.76km/h, so I started at 11.6km/h for the first 20 minutes, then bumped it up to 11.7km/h for the next 10, and 11.8km/h for the 10 after that. I was still feeling quite strong and decided to increase the speed by 0.1km/h each minute from the 40 minute mark, to the point where I’d made up the small time deficit and then charged home, peaking at 16km/h for the final 200m.
I must admit I was a little worried going in to the run. My nutrition strategy during the previous week or so had been badly compromised by some pressing deadlines for a couple of university papers. I seem to have this terrible habit of eating a heap of junk when I'm in that sort of predicament, and as a consequence, my weight had been creeping up a little. So the relative ease of the run was a big, but welcome, surprise. Nevertheless, I think I'll put it down to a lucky escape rather than seeing it as some sort of precedent I should be maintaining.
This result means that the next 10K goal becomes a sub-50 at the time trial scheduled for 5 September. It’s still a long way from my all-time best 10K of 46:47 on 2 December 2006, achieved in the aftermath of the October 2006 Chicago marathon, but we’ll get there.
I’ve also made some progress, albeit limited, on the outdoor running front since my last post. To be precise, it was one Sunday morning Bay Run a couple of weeks back. I’d originally intended for it to be quite easy (around 45-50 minutes for the 7K distance) following a hard run on the day before, but the crisp morning, the crowds of fellow joggers, and the relative novelty of it all combined to get the better of me. I ended up pushing reasonably hard, running 37:18.
I missed last Sunday through a university deadline and next Sunday I’m out of town (on a brief visit to Canberra). But it really was fun - I’ll be back.
That said, one slightly off-putting side-effect the run did highlight for me is that I always seem to need to, ahem, expectorate quite a bit when I’m running outside. No matter how long I’ve been on a treadmill - and I was clocking up several 3+ hour runs back in the day - I’ve never felt the least inclined to do this. But for reasons I’ve never really been able to fathom, I needed to clear my throat virtually every kilometre or more often, running around the Bay. In races too. And of course, it also leads to some tricky etiquette questions, which I’ve always tried to be especially alive to when in polite running company.
Anyhoo, if the treadmill devotees out there have also been wondering about this, someone has been bold enough to raise precisely these issues with a guru on the Runners World website:
I just started running and I am training for a 10-K. I just ran my first 5-mile run outdoors and felt like I had to spit the entire time. Is that normal? It didn’t happen on the treadmill. And should I spit? (I did but was careful were I did it.)Otherwise, training since the Sydney half has been generally positive, with 20K in the recovery week after Sydney (basically, four easy 5K’s), followed by 47.92K, 46.06K and then 35.52K last week, which ended with the 10K time trial. This week, I expect to break 60K for the first time in many years, before the final two weeks tapering to the Gold Coast on Sunday 5 July.
I think what you're experiencing is the difference between running outside versus running indoors in a controlled climate. Running outdoors means exposure to the elements, like heat, humidity, and even air pollutants and allergens. The heat and humidity cause more sweating and water loss than running indoors. Thick saliva may be a sign of slight dehydration. It sounds like you need to increase your water intake throughout the week so you go into your outdoor runs well-hydrated. Pollutants or irritants in the air may also cause you to produce more saliva. If it continues to bother you, you may want to consider seeing your physician. Spit etiquette is a whole other topic! It is not uncommon to spit while running, but you do need to be careful when and where you spit so you don't hit other runners. When running in a pack, look around, then move to the outside of the group and spit away from runners. And, take into account the wind and runners that may be behind you, too. You may have to refine your technique of spitting if your saliva is thicker than usual; be prepared to wipe it off your face!
Monday, 1 June 2015
Back into it
Some steady, consistent, running post-Sydney in the lead up to the Gold Coast half marathon - the next stop on this quest.
Having emerged from Sydney largely unscathed (physically at least), and with a few easy 5K’s in the week after the race, I’m back into solid training and repeating the final six weeks of Hal Higdon’s advanced half marathon program. I blew up on a couple of those sessions in the weeks before Sydney, so it will be interesting to see if the corrections and precautions I’m making this time around will improve the outcome.
So far, it’s so good, albeit with a minor hiccup on a 6.5K run last Friday which was designed to be run at slightly faster than half-marathon pace. I started to conk out at 4.5K and had to slow down for a bit, but managed to regain some composure and finished strongly enough. I was therefore a little nervous with the scheduled one hour, forty-five minute run the next day, with the last 25 minutes or so to be run at half marathon pace. But I absolutely nailed it and added a sprint finish for good measure, clocking up 17.73K in the process.
I’ve also decided to add a weights session every Wednesday now, assisted by a trainer at my local gym. It’s been quite punishing and not something I’ve been all that keen to pursue previously. But I think it might have some beneficial impact with the weight and building some core strength, so we’ll stick at it and see what happens. And I’ve taken to sprinting for 400-500 metres at the end of the scheduled 5K runs to get the heart rate rapidly cranking up on what is otherwise a reasonably straightforward jog. It feels good to be conditioning myself to that sort of speed.
But, most radically, I’ve now decided to do one session a week outdoors.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but I do all my training on a treadmill at the gym (Camperdown Fitness in Sydney’s inner west - feel free to drop by and say hi! if you’re ever in the neighbourhood at the crack of dawn most days). I suppose I quite like the precision that running on a treadmill offers and the ease with which individual sessions can be incrementally amped up over time. I also like the ‘give’ in the running surface and the inoculation it tends to provide against wear and tear and injuries generally, and of not having to worry about the logistics of carting around water, keys and other essentials.
Strangely enough, it’s also quite a social environment, even though I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to any of the other runners/joggers/walkers in my entire time there, and only very rarely acknowledged their existence. But I do like the camaraderie associated with sharing a somewhat arduous endeavour at an odd hour with my fellow humans and of occasionally peeping over and checking out how fast they’re running and on what sort of incline (and momentarily feeling either awestruck or just ever so slightly superior).
And I love the passing parade too. The regulars who look the part, who seem to have been doing this all their lives, and who exude grace, confidence and purpose in their running. And then there’s the oncer’s. Those people of all shapes, sizes and ages who seem to pop in once, get quickly flushed-faced with the effort, and never seem to return. Perhaps they come back at other times, or maybe I’m just hopeless with remembering them. I do hope they keep at it. The changing of the seasons is equally fascinating. There’s an obviously inverse relationship between the early morning temperature, or the amount of rain, and the number of vacant treadmills.
But relying exclusively on the treadmill does come at a price. For example, I really felt the burn in my quads and hamstrings during and after the Sydney run. It was as if they were wondering what on earth this running business was all about. And it also meant that Sydney was the first time I’d actually run downhill since the City to Surf in August 2014 - a full nine months previously! Maybe that had something to do with the leg soreness.
My outdoor circuit will be the famed (locally at least) Bay Run in Sydney’s inner west. It loops around the shores of picturesque Iron Cove Bay, which is a sort of tributary to the slightly more picturesque Sydney Harbour. It’s just on seven kilometres long and, from past experience, tends to get a little crowded on Sundays when I plan to run it, but it’s very enjoyable and, I hope, will add some value to my training.
No doubt we’ll find out soon enough.
Having emerged from Sydney largely unscathed (physically at least), and with a few easy 5K’s in the week after the race, I’m back into solid training and repeating the final six weeks of Hal Higdon’s advanced half marathon program. I blew up on a couple of those sessions in the weeks before Sydney, so it will be interesting to see if the corrections and precautions I’m making this time around will improve the outcome.
So far, it’s so good, albeit with a minor hiccup on a 6.5K run last Friday which was designed to be run at slightly faster than half-marathon pace. I started to conk out at 4.5K and had to slow down for a bit, but managed to regain some composure and finished strongly enough. I was therefore a little nervous with the scheduled one hour, forty-five minute run the next day, with the last 25 minutes or so to be run at half marathon pace. But I absolutely nailed it and added a sprint finish for good measure, clocking up 17.73K in the process.
I’ve also decided to add a weights session every Wednesday now, assisted by a trainer at my local gym. It’s been quite punishing and not something I’ve been all that keen to pursue previously. But I think it might have some beneficial impact with the weight and building some core strength, so we’ll stick at it and see what happens. And I’ve taken to sprinting for 400-500 metres at the end of the scheduled 5K runs to get the heart rate rapidly cranking up on what is otherwise a reasonably straightforward jog. It feels good to be conditioning myself to that sort of speed.
But, most radically, I’ve now decided to do one session a week outdoors.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but I do all my training on a treadmill at the gym (Camperdown Fitness in Sydney’s inner west - feel free to drop by and say hi! if you’re ever in the neighbourhood at the crack of dawn most days). I suppose I quite like the precision that running on a treadmill offers and the ease with which individual sessions can be incrementally amped up over time. I also like the ‘give’ in the running surface and the inoculation it tends to provide against wear and tear and injuries generally, and of not having to worry about the logistics of carting around water, keys and other essentials.
Strangely enough, it’s also quite a social environment, even though I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to any of the other runners/joggers/walkers in my entire time there, and only very rarely acknowledged their existence. But I do like the camaraderie associated with sharing a somewhat arduous endeavour at an odd hour with my fellow humans and of occasionally peeping over and checking out how fast they’re running and on what sort of incline (and momentarily feeling either awestruck or just ever so slightly superior).
And I love the passing parade too. The regulars who look the part, who seem to have been doing this all their lives, and who exude grace, confidence and purpose in their running. And then there’s the oncer’s. Those people of all shapes, sizes and ages who seem to pop in once, get quickly flushed-faced with the effort, and never seem to return. Perhaps they come back at other times, or maybe I’m just hopeless with remembering them. I do hope they keep at it. The changing of the seasons is equally fascinating. There’s an obviously inverse relationship between the early morning temperature, or the amount of rain, and the number of vacant treadmills.
But relying exclusively on the treadmill does come at a price. For example, I really felt the burn in my quads and hamstrings during and after the Sydney run. It was as if they were wondering what on earth this running business was all about. And it also meant that Sydney was the first time I’d actually run downhill since the City to Surf in August 2014 - a full nine months previously! Maybe that had something to do with the leg soreness.
My outdoor circuit will be the famed (locally at least) Bay Run in Sydney’s inner west. It loops around the shores of picturesque Iron Cove Bay, which is a sort of tributary to the slightly more picturesque Sydney Harbour. It’s just on seven kilometres long and, from past experience, tends to get a little crowded on Sundays when I plan to run it, but it’s very enjoyable and, I hope, will add some value to my training.
No doubt we’ll find out soon enough.
Tuesday, 26 May 2015
Why?
For me, JFK summed it up best in 1962 when talking about another extraordinarily ambitious, unlikely, quest …
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
For someone with my pedigree, achieving a BQ will definitely not be easy. In fact, it’s going to be hard - ridiculously hard.
And it’s going to hurt. I fully expect there’s going to be more suffering involved here than I’ve ever previously come close to enduring.
But we only go around once, and it’s staring down truly monumental challenges like this that can really define who we are and what we're capable of.
Like Kennedy's challenge, it's one I intend to win.
Let’s see how we go.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
For someone with my pedigree, achieving a BQ will definitely not be easy. In fact, it’s going to be hard - ridiculously hard.
And it’s going to hurt. I fully expect there’s going to be more suffering involved here than I’ve ever previously come close to enduring.
But we only go around once, and it’s staring down truly monumental challenges like this that can really define who we are and what we're capable of.
Like Kennedy's challenge, it's one I intend to win.
Let’s see how we go.
Sunday, 17 May 2015
Race Report: Sydney Half Marathon - Sunday 17 May 2015
That’s one down and 13 to go! In a time of 2:00:26.
But I have to say I’m a little disappointed. My main goal was a 1:57-ish finish, and my second was a sub 2-hour run. Not to even break that barrier, and to finish even slower than my last half marathon (albeit by just 5 seconds), is very frustrating.
Overall, it was a great day for a run on a quite challenging, hilly, course around the Sydney CBD. I felt my overall preparation in the months leading up to it had been good - I’d give it a solid 90%+ mark - but my failure to make any real dent in my weight, my inability to find the 2-hour pacers at the start-line or during the race, and the unexpected difficulty of the course, all contributed to an outcome that was below expectations.
The key points:
Pre-race plan: As advertised, the plan was to stick with the 2-hour pacers until at least 15K, and depending on how I felt at the time, either leave and go for a 1:57 or so, or hang on for the best sub-2 hour time I could get. Of course, this all fell apart when I couldn’t find the pacers, so it was a case of just muddling through and making my own pace with absolutely no clue of how I was tracking. I didn’t wear a watch, but even if I had, there were no distance markers on the course. I had a rough idea of where half-way was, and a couple of other landmarks, but really no idea about my pace.
Weather: The forecast for race-day was for light winds, a 30% chance of a shower, and a maximum of 20 degrees with a minimum of 15. As it turned out, light rain was falling when I left home just after 5:00am, but it was dry, albeit a little overcast, when the race started. All in all, very good running weather. Certainly no excuses on that front.
Course: It was quite a different circuit from the Sydney half marathons I’d run in past years. All those had consisted of two loops of the northern part of the city with the start/finish area down on the harbour near what is now Barangaroo. This one-loop course started and finished at Hyde Park, and went out to Pyrmont before coming back to the city, and finishing off with the tricky run down and back to Mrs Macquarie’s chair. As I was to discover, the course contained quite a few reasonably short, but challenging, hills punctuated with longer flat stretches. A couple of days prior, I’d wandered down to the 15-16K mark in Kent Street, leading onto the Harbour Bridge ramp, and picked out the spiral loop down onto the Cahill Expressway, just after a longish incline, as probably the place to break from the 2-hour pace group. If I was up to it, of course.
Nutrition strategy: It had been a reasonably clean couple of weeks leading into the race, while in the couple of hours before the start on race morning I’d had a banana, bottle of Gatorade, and a gel. I also took a gel at the start line and decided against carrying one with me through the race. In terms of weight, my initial hopes of a sub-90 kilogram race weight proved forlorn when I weighed in at a tick over 94 kilograms early on race morning. Very disappointing and obviously something I need to keep working on.
Clothing: I decided to buy a new specialist running t-shirt a few days before the event. It’s a fairly garish lime and grey number but fits reasonably well. I would have liked to have reprised the old faithful shirt that I wore in each of my marathons, but it was looking a little worse for wear, and I thought maybe it’s just time to start a new tradition. I also wore compression pants (to the knees) for the first time in a race. I’d finally bought some a few weeks previously after thinking about doing so for some time, and they seemed to work well in the longer training runs. No complaints in the run itself either, although it meant an extra few seconds in the portaloo just before the start untying and tying them back up.
Pacers: Truth be told, after some great experiences with pace runners in many of my past races, I was a little apprehensive about them this time around. At the 2014 Gold Coast half marathon, I lined up where the 2-hour pacers were advertised as being, and by the time the gun went off, they were nowhere in sight. I ended up seeing them at the turn-around points way ahead, so obviously I hadn’t lined up far enough in front.
In addition, for this race, I was allocated in the green start group, which is described as “the first open group with no qualifying time required. Participants wishing to run the length of the course but have no prior race time are encouraged to enter into this group. This group is for those wishing to complete the course sub 140mins”. Next up the grid was the red group, which is described as being “for athletes who will complete the course in a qualifying time of sub 120mins”. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet the quite challenging qualifying criteria to get into that one, but I imagined there was a risk the sub-2 hour pacers would place themselves there and I would need to catch up to run with them.
Of course, in the half hour or so before the start, I learned for the first time that the different coloured groups would actually be starting at different times, with a few minutes separating each one, presumably to reduce congestion in some of the narrower sections of the course. Which started me worrying that if the pacers were in the red group, I’d never catch them. As it turned out, they must have been in the red group, because search as I might, I didn’t see any sign of them in the green starting pack - or anywhere else for that matter!
I thought I’d also share some interesting stats about my last two half marathons:
Sydney (May 2015)
• Race weight: 94kg
• 30-week running base: 995K (avge 33K/week)
• 60-week running base: 1,682K (avge 28K/week)
• Time: 2:00:26
Gold Coast (July 2014)
• Race weight: 93kg
• 30 week running base: 514K (avge 17K/week)
• 60 week running base: 574K (avge 10K/week)
• Time: 2:00:21
I'm not sure if it means anything much, but I'll keep track of this sort of information going forward and see where it leads.
Lessons learned?
Got to lose weight. Got to lose weight. Got to lose weight! Enough said.
Avoid putting all one’s eggs into one basket. The absence of the pacers threw me completely. I had no real idea how to pace the run and just settled for following some runners who were travelling at what I thought was a good pace for me, especially up the hills. But just thinking about, and guessing, how fast I was going was a major distraction. I need to get better at asking some ‘What if?’ questions.
The process works. It’s not really a lesson learned, rather one reinforced. I was able to sustain the effort when I needed to and recover after ascending a couple of very testy hills. So I’ll stick with it for a while yet.
And, finally, a big shout-out to my student colleagues and first time half marathon runners - the amazing Steph and Julie. Great job, both of you.
Onward and upward!
But I have to say I’m a little disappointed. My main goal was a 1:57-ish finish, and my second was a sub 2-hour run. Not to even break that barrier, and to finish even slower than my last half marathon (albeit by just 5 seconds), is very frustrating.
Overall, it was a great day for a run on a quite challenging, hilly, course around the Sydney CBD. I felt my overall preparation in the months leading up to it had been good - I’d give it a solid 90%+ mark - but my failure to make any real dent in my weight, my inability to find the 2-hour pacers at the start-line or during the race, and the unexpected difficulty of the course, all contributed to an outcome that was below expectations.
The key points:
Pre-race plan: As advertised, the plan was to stick with the 2-hour pacers until at least 15K, and depending on how I felt at the time, either leave and go for a 1:57 or so, or hang on for the best sub-2 hour time I could get. Of course, this all fell apart when I couldn’t find the pacers, so it was a case of just muddling through and making my own pace with absolutely no clue of how I was tracking. I didn’t wear a watch, but even if I had, there were no distance markers on the course. I had a rough idea of where half-way was, and a couple of other landmarks, but really no idea about my pace.
Weather: The forecast for race-day was for light winds, a 30% chance of a shower, and a maximum of 20 degrees with a minimum of 15. As it turned out, light rain was falling when I left home just after 5:00am, but it was dry, albeit a little overcast, when the race started. All in all, very good running weather. Certainly no excuses on that front.
Course: It was quite a different circuit from the Sydney half marathons I’d run in past years. All those had consisted of two loops of the northern part of the city with the start/finish area down on the harbour near what is now Barangaroo. This one-loop course started and finished at Hyde Park, and went out to Pyrmont before coming back to the city, and finishing off with the tricky run down and back to Mrs Macquarie’s chair. As I was to discover, the course contained quite a few reasonably short, but challenging, hills punctuated with longer flat stretches. A couple of days prior, I’d wandered down to the 15-16K mark in Kent Street, leading onto the Harbour Bridge ramp, and picked out the spiral loop down onto the Cahill Expressway, just after a longish incline, as probably the place to break from the 2-hour pace group. If I was up to it, of course.
Nutrition strategy: It had been a reasonably clean couple of weeks leading into the race, while in the couple of hours before the start on race morning I’d had a banana, bottle of Gatorade, and a gel. I also took a gel at the start line and decided against carrying one with me through the race. In terms of weight, my initial hopes of a sub-90 kilogram race weight proved forlorn when I weighed in at a tick over 94 kilograms early on race morning. Very disappointing and obviously something I need to keep working on.
Clothing: I decided to buy a new specialist running t-shirt a few days before the event. It’s a fairly garish lime and grey number but fits reasonably well. I would have liked to have reprised the old faithful shirt that I wore in each of my marathons, but it was looking a little worse for wear, and I thought maybe it’s just time to start a new tradition. I also wore compression pants (to the knees) for the first time in a race. I’d finally bought some a few weeks previously after thinking about doing so for some time, and they seemed to work well in the longer training runs. No complaints in the run itself either, although it meant an extra few seconds in the portaloo just before the start untying and tying them back up.
Pacers: Truth be told, after some great experiences with pace runners in many of my past races, I was a little apprehensive about them this time around. At the 2014 Gold Coast half marathon, I lined up where the 2-hour pacers were advertised as being, and by the time the gun went off, they were nowhere in sight. I ended up seeing them at the turn-around points way ahead, so obviously I hadn’t lined up far enough in front.
In addition, for this race, I was allocated in the green start group, which is described as “the first open group with no qualifying time required. Participants wishing to run the length of the course but have no prior race time are encouraged to enter into this group. This group is for those wishing to complete the course sub 140mins”. Next up the grid was the red group, which is described as being “for athletes who will complete the course in a qualifying time of sub 120mins”. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet the quite challenging qualifying criteria to get into that one, but I imagined there was a risk the sub-2 hour pacers would place themselves there and I would need to catch up to run with them.
Of course, in the half hour or so before the start, I learned for the first time that the different coloured groups would actually be starting at different times, with a few minutes separating each one, presumably to reduce congestion in some of the narrower sections of the course. Which started me worrying that if the pacers were in the red group, I’d never catch them. As it turned out, they must have been in the red group, because search as I might, I didn’t see any sign of them in the green starting pack - or anywhere else for that matter!
I thought I’d also share some interesting stats about my last two half marathons:
Sydney (May 2015)
• Race weight: 94kg
• 30-week running base: 995K (avge 33K/week)
• 60-week running base: 1,682K (avge 28K/week)
• Time: 2:00:26
Gold Coast (July 2014)
• Race weight: 93kg
• 30 week running base: 514K (avge 17K/week)
• 60 week running base: 574K (avge 10K/week)
• Time: 2:00:21
I'm not sure if it means anything much, but I'll keep track of this sort of information going forward and see where it leads.
Lessons learned?
Got to lose weight. Got to lose weight. Got to lose weight! Enough said.
Avoid putting all one’s eggs into one basket. The absence of the pacers threw me completely. I had no real idea how to pace the run and just settled for following some runners who were travelling at what I thought was a good pace for me, especially up the hills. But just thinking about, and guessing, how fast I was going was a major distraction. I need to get better at asking some ‘What if?’ questions.
The process works. It’s not really a lesson learned, rather one reinforced. I was able to sustain the effort when I needed to and recover after ascending a couple of very testy hills. So I’ll stick with it for a while yet.
And, finally, a big shout-out to my student colleagues and first time half marathon runners - the amazing Steph and Julie. Great job, both of you.
Onward and upward!
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
The Plan
On my current trajectory, I think my first realistic shot at getting a BQ will come at the Gold Coast marathon (in Queensland, Australia) in July 2019.
There’s a few reasons for this.
First, I’m in no real hurry. I’m in this for the long haul, and my only interest is getting it right. I realise, of course, that this extended time exacerbates the risk of another slide into inactivity as soon as the next significant life changing event pops up. And as it happens, I’m probably due for at least one over the next 12 months or so. I know I can never really inoculate myself against the impact that might have. But I’m going to have to try and deal with it. I expect that my accounting to you, ladies and gentlemen, through this blog will play a critical part in that.
Second, from my initial dalliance with marathon running almost a decade ago, it’s simply not feasible for me to expect to be able to run a reasonable time while carting around a whole lot of excess weight. For the marathons I did run, I usually weighed in at around 86-89 kilograms. For a normal BMI, I should weigh about 70, and it’s been a very, very long time since I’ve been in that sort of territory. But I need to get there - and I need to maintain it. I don’t want to run another marathon until I’m around the 70-75 mark. With my current weight hovering around 92-95 kilograms (albeit starting to trend down), that’s going to take time.
Third, the Gold Coast marathon is probably Australia’s fastest marathon course, and I ran my fastest half marathon there in 2006 (1:50:07). It really is a great atmosphere, but it does have a tendency to get uncomfortably warm later in the event and I much prefer running in the cold than the heat. Chicago in 2006 (4:04) was never above 5 degrees, while London in 2007 (4:32) was probably 20 degrees hotter, even costing one poor chap his life.
Fourth, from 2019, my BQ time is 3 hours, 40 minutes. Before that, it’s 3 hours 30 minutes.
So, to get to July 2019, I’ve decided to focus on running mostly half marathons - around 3 to 4 annually. I figure this will provide me with consistent, stretch goals against which I can measure myself and use as the basis for improvement. For example, if I can routinely finish half marathons in around 1:40 or 1:45, I know I can be confident of having a good shot at 3:40 for a full. It should also build a solid base from which to launch into full-blown marathon training when the time comes. And, apart from simply just enjoying the distance, it gives me the opportunity to do a few runs that have been on the wish-list for a bit.
With all that, and in the interests of full disclosure, here’s the schedule:
1. Sydney - May 2015
2. Gold Coast - July 2015
3. Melbourne - October 2015
4. New York (USA) - March 2016
5. Gold Coast - July 2016
6. Auckland (New Zealand) - October 2016
7. Hobart - January 2017
8. Sydney - May 2017
9. Gold Coast - July 2017
10. Great North Run (England) - September 2017
11. Hobart - January 2018
12. Gold Coast Marathon - July 2018
13. Melbourne Marathon - November 2018
14. Gold Coast Marathon (BQ attempt) - July 2019
First stop on the BQ train is my home town half on Sunday 17 May, in a little under two weeks. It will be my sixth Sydney half, with the previous races in 1996 (2:04), 1997 (2:28), 1998 (2:19), 2005 (2:05), and 2006 (1:54).
I’ve been specifically training for it since October 2014 using a succession of Hal Higdon running plans. I’ve been a fan of Hal’s since my marathon days and I like his style. So I’ve decided that, unless I find myself getting stuck in some sort of rut with my training or not making progress, I’m going to stick with him for the duration.
For Sydney, training started with the first four weeks of his intermediate 5k program (resulting in a 24:28 time trial). That was immediately followed by his 8-week advanced 5K program (resulting in a 22:55 time trial), and then the 8-week intermediate 10K program (with a 53:02 final 10K result).
The 12-week advanced half marathon program kicked off straight after that - towards the end of February 2015. That incorporated one 5K and two 10K time trials, where I recorded times of 23:52, 52:12 and 51:30 respectively.
Overall, the training has been going well. I’ve been largely injury-free (a nagging left Achilles, which is on the mend, hasn’t caused any real problems) and about 90-95% compliant with the overall programs (having missed very few days and stuffing up only a handful of sessions). Nonetheless, I’d prefer to be at least a couple of kilograms lighter, and a sub-90 weight come race day is still possible.
My average training kilometres per week for the first 20 weeks ended up being just over 31K. For the final 12-week half marathon program, average weekly distance will have probably exceeded 37K by the eve of the race.
I’ve decided that my strategy for the race is going to be to follow the two-hour pacers until at least the 15K mark, and then either take off (and aim to finish in 1:57 or so), or hang on to them for the best sub-2 hour finish I can manage.
With the work I’ve done since the 2:00:21 Gold Coast finish in July 2014, I think I’ll be very unlucky not to break two hours this time around. But if I’m feeling good during the run, I also need to be careful that I don’t lose discipline and go too early. This race is essentially a stepping stone and I need to be able to work to a plan and see what I’m comfortable with.
Either way, I fully intend collapsing over the finish line after a sprint finish having left nothing out on the course.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
There’s a few reasons for this.
First, I’m in no real hurry. I’m in this for the long haul, and my only interest is getting it right. I realise, of course, that this extended time exacerbates the risk of another slide into inactivity as soon as the next significant life changing event pops up. And as it happens, I’m probably due for at least one over the next 12 months or so. I know I can never really inoculate myself against the impact that might have. But I’m going to have to try and deal with it. I expect that my accounting to you, ladies and gentlemen, through this blog will play a critical part in that.
Second, from my initial dalliance with marathon running almost a decade ago, it’s simply not feasible for me to expect to be able to run a reasonable time while carting around a whole lot of excess weight. For the marathons I did run, I usually weighed in at around 86-89 kilograms. For a normal BMI, I should weigh about 70, and it’s been a very, very long time since I’ve been in that sort of territory. But I need to get there - and I need to maintain it. I don’t want to run another marathon until I’m around the 70-75 mark. With my current weight hovering around 92-95 kilograms (albeit starting to trend down), that’s going to take time.
Third, the Gold Coast marathon is probably Australia’s fastest marathon course, and I ran my fastest half marathon there in 2006 (1:50:07). It really is a great atmosphere, but it does have a tendency to get uncomfortably warm later in the event and I much prefer running in the cold than the heat. Chicago in 2006 (4:04) was never above 5 degrees, while London in 2007 (4:32) was probably 20 degrees hotter, even costing one poor chap his life.
Fourth, from 2019, my BQ time is 3 hours, 40 minutes. Before that, it’s 3 hours 30 minutes.
So, to get to July 2019, I’ve decided to focus on running mostly half marathons - around 3 to 4 annually. I figure this will provide me with consistent, stretch goals against which I can measure myself and use as the basis for improvement. For example, if I can routinely finish half marathons in around 1:40 or 1:45, I know I can be confident of having a good shot at 3:40 for a full. It should also build a solid base from which to launch into full-blown marathon training when the time comes. And, apart from simply just enjoying the distance, it gives me the opportunity to do a few runs that have been on the wish-list for a bit.
With all that, and in the interests of full disclosure, here’s the schedule:
1. Sydney - May 2015
2. Gold Coast - July 2015
3. Melbourne - October 2015
4. New York (USA) - March 2016
5. Gold Coast - July 2016
6. Auckland (New Zealand) - October 2016
7. Hobart - January 2017
8. Sydney - May 2017
9. Gold Coast - July 2017
10. Great North Run (England) - September 2017
11. Hobart - January 2018
12. Gold Coast Marathon - July 2018
13. Melbourne Marathon - November 2018
14. Gold Coast Marathon (BQ attempt) - July 2019
First stop on the BQ train is my home town half on Sunday 17 May, in a little under two weeks. It will be my sixth Sydney half, with the previous races in 1996 (2:04), 1997 (2:28), 1998 (2:19), 2005 (2:05), and 2006 (1:54).
I’ve been specifically training for it since October 2014 using a succession of Hal Higdon running plans. I’ve been a fan of Hal’s since my marathon days and I like his style. So I’ve decided that, unless I find myself getting stuck in some sort of rut with my training or not making progress, I’m going to stick with him for the duration.
For Sydney, training started with the first four weeks of his intermediate 5k program (resulting in a 24:28 time trial). That was immediately followed by his 8-week advanced 5K program (resulting in a 22:55 time trial), and then the 8-week intermediate 10K program (with a 53:02 final 10K result).
The 12-week advanced half marathon program kicked off straight after that - towards the end of February 2015. That incorporated one 5K and two 10K time trials, where I recorded times of 23:52, 52:12 and 51:30 respectively.
Overall, the training has been going well. I’ve been largely injury-free (a nagging left Achilles, which is on the mend, hasn’t caused any real problems) and about 90-95% compliant with the overall programs (having missed very few days and stuffing up only a handful of sessions). Nonetheless, I’d prefer to be at least a couple of kilograms lighter, and a sub-90 weight come race day is still possible.
My average training kilometres per week for the first 20 weeks ended up being just over 31K. For the final 12-week half marathon program, average weekly distance will have probably exceeded 37K by the eve of the race.
I’ve decided that my strategy for the race is going to be to follow the two-hour pacers until at least the 15K mark, and then either take off (and aim to finish in 1:57 or so), or hang on to them for the best sub-2 hour finish I can manage.
With the work I’ve done since the 2:00:21 Gold Coast finish in July 2014, I think I’ll be very unlucky not to break two hours this time around. But if I’m feeling good during the run, I also need to be careful that I don’t lose discipline and go too early. This race is essentially a stepping stone and I need to be able to work to a plan and see what I’m comfortable with.
Either way, I fully intend collapsing over the finish line after a sprint finish having left nothing out on the course.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
Thursday, 23 April 2015
Who am I?
Well, how about we start with who I’m not.
I’m not a born runner. Nor have I ever had any real pretensions to athleticism. Looking back, my post-teenage life seems to have comprised reasonably lengthy spurts of consistent and sustained physical activity, invariably followed by years of relative inactivity bordering on sloth.
The first of these spurts involved cycling around Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra most every morning for a few years while an undergraduate student at the great Australian National University.
After relocating to Sydney in the early 1990’s, I happened upon the annual City-to-Surf 14 kilometre road race from the CBD to Bondi Beach. In 1991, I stood - agog - adjacent to the startline watching the mass of humanity take off down William Street. The next year, I was amongst it, finishing in a quite respectable time of 86:07.
In the years since, I’ve missed competing only twice. The first was in 2000 when I was too sick to risk it, and the second in 2011 when I was in Melbourne having messed up the date of the race. In 21 City-to-Surf appearances, my times - in minutes - have ranged from 75:51 in 2006 to 188:56 in 1999 (when I was walking with a pram).
To put it all in some sort of perspective, the best time for the journey is held by my compatriot - the legendary Steve Moneghetti - who came within a whisker of breaking 40 minutes with his time of 40:03. No-one else has come close.
Aside from the 1999 walk, I’ve always set out to try and record my fastest possible time, no matter how painful and soul-destroying I knew it was going to be. So, in a way, the City-to-Surf has become a barometer of my fitness over the years. And with that yardstick, the grinding 152.01 in 2002 was the undoubted low point.
But as a full-time post-graduate student in 2003/04, I resumed a reasonably healthful life and even managed to complete five marathons between 2005 and 2007. I don’t know about your experiences with marathons you might have run, but I remember large segments of each of mine - the good, the bad and the ugly - as if I’d just run them this morning.
For the record, they were:
Sydney - September 2005 (4:40:43)
Honolulu - December 2005 (4:32:43)
Canberra - April 2006 (4:07:01)
Chicago - October 2006 (4:04:12)
London - April 2007 (4:32:40)
Back then, each of these races was designed as a link in a chain that would inexorably lead me to the holy grail - a BQ. But a disappointing run in an unusually warm London marathon, which coincided with a house move, work pressures blah, blah, blah (all the usual stuff), morphed into another prolonged period of inactivity.
This lasted all the way through to 2013 when I decided to snap out of it and set myself a goal of breaking 1:50 for the 2014 Gold Coast Half Marathon. In 2006, I’d managed 1:50:07 in that wonderful event, despite finishing well in front of the 1:50 pacer who’d been helping me along most of the way.
It was not to be.
Even with a solid training program, and the shedding of a reasonable percentage of surplus body weight, the sub-1:50 goal proved too ambitious, as I guessed it might be after several years out. Instead, I finished in a time of 2:00:21.
But I also finished with a firm belief that I was back. And the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this BQ thing could still be possible.
I’m not a born runner. Nor have I ever had any real pretensions to athleticism. Looking back, my post-teenage life seems to have comprised reasonably lengthy spurts of consistent and sustained physical activity, invariably followed by years of relative inactivity bordering on sloth.
The first of these spurts involved cycling around Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra most every morning for a few years while an undergraduate student at the great Australian National University.
After relocating to Sydney in the early 1990’s, I happened upon the annual City-to-Surf 14 kilometre road race from the CBD to Bondi Beach. In 1991, I stood - agog - adjacent to the startline watching the mass of humanity take off down William Street. The next year, I was amongst it, finishing in a quite respectable time of 86:07.
In the years since, I’ve missed competing only twice. The first was in 2000 when I was too sick to risk it, and the second in 2011 when I was in Melbourne having messed up the date of the race. In 21 City-to-Surf appearances, my times - in minutes - have ranged from 75:51 in 2006 to 188:56 in 1999 (when I was walking with a pram).
To put it all in some sort of perspective, the best time for the journey is held by my compatriot - the legendary Steve Moneghetti - who came within a whisker of breaking 40 minutes with his time of 40:03. No-one else has come close.
Aside from the 1999 walk, I’ve always set out to try and record my fastest possible time, no matter how painful and soul-destroying I knew it was going to be. So, in a way, the City-to-Surf has become a barometer of my fitness over the years. And with that yardstick, the grinding 152.01 in 2002 was the undoubted low point.
But as a full-time post-graduate student in 2003/04, I resumed a reasonably healthful life and even managed to complete five marathons between 2005 and 2007. I don’t know about your experiences with marathons you might have run, but I remember large segments of each of mine - the good, the bad and the ugly - as if I’d just run them this morning.
For the record, they were:
Sydney - September 2005 (4:40:43)
Honolulu - December 2005 (4:32:43)
Canberra - April 2006 (4:07:01)
Chicago - October 2006 (4:04:12)
London - April 2007 (4:32:40)
Back then, each of these races was designed as a link in a chain that would inexorably lead me to the holy grail - a BQ. But a disappointing run in an unusually warm London marathon, which coincided with a house move, work pressures blah, blah, blah (all the usual stuff), morphed into another prolonged period of inactivity.
This lasted all the way through to 2013 when I decided to snap out of it and set myself a goal of breaking 1:50 for the 2014 Gold Coast Half Marathon. In 2006, I’d managed 1:50:07 in that wonderful event, despite finishing well in front of the 1:50 pacer who’d been helping me along most of the way.
It was not to be.
Even with a solid training program, and the shedding of a reasonable percentage of surplus body weight, the sub-1:50 goal proved too ambitious, as I guessed it might be after several years out. Instead, I finished in a time of 2:00:21.
But I also finished with a firm belief that I was back. And the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this BQ thing could still be possible.
Tuesday, 21 April 2015
Let's get started!
This blog chronicles my quest to run a marathon in a time that will qualify me for entry into the Boston marathon.
And what better day for my first post than the day of the 2015 version of the great race (if, like me, you're on Australian time).
I decided to start it after having some success with the first ‘Quest’ blog I started a couple of years back. That one chronicles my efforts to break the seemingly impregnable world record high score on a 1980s arcade video game known as ‘Pengo’ ('PengoQuest’, if you’re interested).
So even with an abundance of desire, perhaps it’s the case that putting something in writing and sharing it with all you good folk out there adds that little extra motivation to get the job done. It certainly worked for Pengo.
In a way, this is probably just another running blog, albeit I’ve not really read too many others. While I'll endeavour to be as eloquent and interesting as possible, it’s probably going to get a little dry and tedious from time to time. I certainly won’t be submitting it for whatever the blogosphere’s equivalent of the Booker prize is. Doubtless too, there'll be a few gaps, perhaps some despondency, hopefully some steady progress, and - with a fair amount of effort and luck - some ecstasy!
Well, as they say, the longest journey starts with the first step.
So strap yourselves in, do a couple of quick stretches, have a sip of water, and let’s see if we can’t get to the start line in Hopkinton on Patriots’ Day sometime in the next few years.
And what better day for my first post than the day of the 2015 version of the great race (if, like me, you're on Australian time).
I decided to start it after having some success with the first ‘Quest’ blog I started a couple of years back. That one chronicles my efforts to break the seemingly impregnable world record high score on a 1980s arcade video game known as ‘Pengo’ ('PengoQuest’, if you’re interested).
So even with an abundance of desire, perhaps it’s the case that putting something in writing and sharing it with all you good folk out there adds that little extra motivation to get the job done. It certainly worked for Pengo.
In a way, this is probably just another running blog, albeit I’ve not really read too many others. While I'll endeavour to be as eloquent and interesting as possible, it’s probably going to get a little dry and tedious from time to time. I certainly won’t be submitting it for whatever the blogosphere’s equivalent of the Booker prize is. Doubtless too, there'll be a few gaps, perhaps some despondency, hopefully some steady progress, and - with a fair amount of effort and luck - some ecstasy!
Well, as they say, the longest journey starts with the first step.
So strap yourselves in, do a couple of quick stretches, have a sip of water, and let’s see if we can’t get to the start line in Hopkinton on Patriots’ Day sometime in the next few years.
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