It has rained nearly every day for the last six weeks here in Sydney. Everything is damp. Not just the roads and gardens and parks, but curtains and furnishings, clothing in cupboards, and every piece of timber has swollen with the unrelenting humidity of a hot summer's moist, biblical, watery plague. All of the windows in our house have swollen as if pregnant, and can no longer be opened, leading to a house more resembling a Turkish bath than a modest, suburban Sydney dwelling.

Monday, two days ago, the heavens did finally relent sufficiently for myself and three other blokes from work on a day off to hike around the coastal areas of Sydney for a few hours, to disassemble work issues and talk general, blokey talk. In all we covered a little over 30 undulating, mixed terrain kilometres, wreaking terrible and (I hasten to add) wholly hypothetical revenge on the psychopaths and Trumpesque egomaniacs that are our bosses, and who are as maniacs, destroying our work environment. They dismantle the very structures that support them (and employ us) for the promise of a 'productivity bonus' or a cushy promotion to some other area also ripe for wanton destruction in the guise of 'agile management' and the push for '21st century dynamism'. It makes one very literally sick.

This outing with the fellas was not only mentally therapeutic, but also gave my feet and ankles (in particular) a variable-surface workout they don't get on the treadmill, of course. On the downside, the day was especially humid, and all of us struggled with the conditions. It was muggy enough to make a Mumbai cabbie sweat, and the beers we consumed at the pub after our walk were well-earned and quickly vanquished.

Yesterday saw a return of the rain, and so I took once again to the treadmill, my sore feet and ankles demanding a 'slow, easy' and flat work-out. A two-hour, Maffetone method run it was, therefore, with just 15 kilometres covered, but done at such a low heart rate I could have fallen asleep, and this is the key. That I can now very comfortably run for two hours, and would barely have broken into a sweat but for the intense and relentless humidity, is extremely gratifying. Focusing more on time spent in training, rather than kilometres covered has transformed my thinking and given my training the kind of satisfying results rarely seen by me before. And as an antidote to the stresses and strains of work, it's a major blessing.

The latter part of my run coincided with the arrival of a severe thunderstorm, and as soon as I had finished I moved outside into our covered, alcove area with a bottle of pinot gris to enjoy the lightning show, the smell of ozone, a cooling breeze and the rapid reduction in the mugginess. Bliss!

I was also delighted to find the gentle massaging of the easy, long run had greatly reduced the soreness I was feeling in feet and ankles, and now, a little over twelve hours later and with a rest day to further relieve the workload, I feel fantastic and strangely eager for more.

Even the mad bastards at work can't destroy this mood. Thank you, Lord of Running.

von Bingen, roast chicken, and a bottle of grenache.

And still it rains.

It rains every day, sometimes drizzly and annoying, sometimes torrential and dreadful. One thing is for sure: we are all heartily fed up with it. Seven biblical weeks of rain and there's still no end in sight. If there's an ark being built somewhere near here, I'm on it. If I happen upon a man named Noah, I'm signing on as an intern labourer, I don't care; I just want out of this watery torpor.

Constant rain, like a prevailing Saharan sirocco windstorm, will drive man and beast mad with frustration, and this is what we face. Climate change or not, the effect of this weirdness is plain for all to see; with no-one immune it changes the behaviour of an entire city's populace, and the experts who dare to try and rationally define the cause are routinely slaughtered by a fed-up public, if not literally, then at least by character assassination on all forms of media, both on social platforms and the mainstream Murdochian monopoly.

The impact ripples outward into everything we do: work performance suffers; road rage is rife, and even our dreams take on a moistened hue. I dreamed the other night a dream within a dream; of hiring a dinghy for a day, and then the day after, having not returned it and with no means of transporting it back, I further dreamed that I had only dreamt the boat; or did I? After a restless night I was half way to the city on the 5:09 to work before I finally decided the dream of a dream was after all, but a dream, and that no angry boat owners were going to be calling me that day.

And after all that, my scheduled run in the rain was cut terribly short. One hour of soaked and unhappy painful plodding was all I could muster - the entry in my log being my first sub-double digit kilometre run since the Almeria post-race recovery jog through the old part of town seven weeks before. And it hurt, both mentally and in the physical realm; of that I did not dream.

And still here the rain comes down. 

Tonight I took out my frustrations on a chook: blinded by exhaustion and wet within wet, I went overboard, to use an appropriately nautical expression, and gave the poor bird that was to be roasted a taxidermist's attention to detail. Carefully separating the skin from the bird, I layered it with buttered garlic and then stuffed it to the gills - if chickens can have gills, and in this weather, I believe they can - with exquisitely caramelised onion and sage. Perfectly roasted (admittedly more by luck than culinary skill) it was consumed with gusto and a bottle of decade-old and beautifully cellared grenache, whilst the 12th-century mystic, polymath and composer Hildegard von Bingen's O Jerusalem Aurea Civitas played on the radio; the 20-minute piece perfectly matching the mood of the gourmands and the time required to consume the meal.

The sanity-restoring combo of mystics, poultry and aged red wine worked its magic, and soon I was back to Earth again. The rain stopped; the sawing of timbers for the planking of the ark ceased and life returned to normal at least for a moment.

But what of tomorrow? Like a paranoid conspiracist, I survey my training schedule and realise I can't do the 25km I have inked in for tomorrow. Or can I? A good night's sleep is all it takes, and of that, I am fairly well-assured. Following a week of early starts I am now on the night shift again, and sleeping in is de rigeur. I shall dutifully attend to the task at hand. But I am tired. Not just tired by work, but physically and mentally shattered by the rain, the park and other things ... no, wait, that's a Cowsills song from the 60s*.

Nostalgia aside, the tiredness remains. But then, I remind myself once more that this is like the end of any long running race: unable to go on, somehow we do, and tomorrow I must. And I shall.

Even if by chance it goes badly, I will have a nice roast chicken meal and a decent grenache to remember it by. And Hildegard von Bingen, bless her, from nearly a millennium ago.



*Their big hit from 1967, in fact.  The Cowsills were the inspiration for the 1970s TV show The Patridge Family.

The more I run, the more I feel humans are wondrous. 
(Post-race comment by Tsuyoshi Kabaruki, runner-up in the 2016 Ultra Fiord, a 100mile race through Patagonia, and considered by many to be the world's toughest ultra marathon.)

Something has definitely changed...

As usual, I awoke on long-run day already, as if by habit, searching for excuses. Also, as usual, it was a pretty simple matter to find them without even leaving my bed: I was still tired; it had been a hellish week, and I was at risk of over-training. Then a wave of confirmation affirmed the excuses I had already found: I had covered plenty of kilometres already this week; this should be a step-back week anyhow; and the trump card, my feet, knees and left hip hurt.

Still, feeling a little uncomfortable not with the pain, but at the ease with which my mind dreams up these feeble excuses, I arose and eased my way into the day. There was no particular rush this morning, so I was able to give myself time to more properly assess these reasons not to run that I'd woken with. Strangely and unusually I felt an underlying wave of confidence building, pushing aside the excuses as mere jokes, which really is all they were.

Breakfast consisted of left-over vegetables with a little melted cheese and some tarragon, a regular favourite meal of mine since quitting bread nearly six months ago. And then, quite unusually for me, I simply put on my running shoes and got on with it. I didn't think about it anymore, and I paid no heed to my achy knees and the odd, deep-seated pain in my left hip that comes and goes. I ran, and it was dead-set easy for all but the last half hour, which was genuinely but not overwhelmingly difficult. The pain in my knees and hip grew no worse, which was heartening. Even more heartening was the distance; a useful 25.5km which has me still on track for a 200km month, and gets the tricky long run out of the way in the difficult six-work-day week.

With my next race still eight weeks away, this is all simple base-building mileage, completed at no great pace and with little pressure, other than that supplied by my inbuilt excuse finding facility, usually at its most active upon waking in the morning. The relative ease of these runs conceals a hidden benefit: the rapidly growing endurance created by low heart-rate running which develops aerobic fitness with little risk of injury. The pain and soreness I felt this morning is only minor, and normally not worth even mentioning. It's certainly less pain than I feel with more regular, high-intensity training, and with greater distances covered and far more time spent in training.

There's a sort of high-fiving celebration going on inside of me just now. On the surface I appear merely satisfied; after all, these distances I'm covering are as nothing compared to serious athletes. But I know that for me it represents something far more significant, and inside I'm celebrating. At 55 years of age, I'm daring to think the previously unbelievable: that just perhaps it is actually possible that my best years of running are yet ahead of me.

Whether that's true or not, I intend to find out.

With some remaining soreness from the last long run and a lengthy, mad, 57-hour week of work, a slow, easy plod was pretty much the only possible run on the cards today. I still covered a useful 12.3km to bring my March total distance to 196km, just shy of my nominal target of 200km and with two more runs still to come. So, touch wood, this is shaping up to be my best month of running in quite some time. Slow, easy, base-building it may be, but that's exactly the point. It's something to build on, with the chances of injury being hopefully minimised by this carefully constructed base to my running pyramid.

The hip and knee soreness I mentioned previously has all but disappeared, so reasons to be positive only continue to multiply. We also finally have a break in the weather, although the forecast is for heavy rains to return the day after tomorrow.

I finally took my new shoes for a run, but to be honest, there was no discernible difference between them and the old ones, so I will use them alternately until the oldies finally show definite signs of giving up the ghost. They've now clocked up 1,065km and are still looking great, with plenty of tread and no discernible wear to the uppers at all. They really do seem to be making them to a higher standard these days.

Higher standards; now there's a worthy cause. Let's work towards that, then.

It's perhaps ironic that as the rain eases here in Sydney for a couple of days (but is forecast to return with vengeance tomorrow), in north Queensland they are suffering one of those monster storms that everyone dreads in the form of Cyclone Debbie. A category 4 cyclone packing winds of over 260kmh, it was made far worse by being both slow-moving (causing greater destruction as it lingered over regions for longer), and astonishingly wet. Now that it has moved inland and disintegrated into a low pressure system, it continues to dump hundreds of millimetres of rain and so even as areas that took the full force of the winds are counting the cost, greater swathes of Queensland and even northern New South Wales are preparing for possibly catastrophic flooding.

Last time a cyclone of this magnitude and destructive force hit Queensland (Cyclone Yasi in 2011) I was sent up there to help local staff who were, unsurprisingly, under the pump. The ramifications of these weather systems reach far further than the immediate impact zone, and as the 'emergency broadcaster' for such eventualities, we were stretched even further than usual. I'm not sure that will happen again on this occasion (due to changing circumstances), and I'll just have to wait and see, but I get the feeling I'll be staying put this time. At least not going won't curtail my training program, as it did six years ago, so for purely selfish running reasons, I'd prefer to stay here, if possible.

And speaking of training, today's run was a tad unusual. I've covered an awful lot of distance in recent weeks, leaving me somewhat generally fatigued. So this morning, feeling very drained and wondering if I'd really be capable of much once in the running kit, I postponed the session as long I could and finally thought I'd cut the session short, perhaps just putting in a half hour or so. I've plenty of runs in the log and am on the verge of over-training, so this wasn't really too much of a tough decision. In fact, it seemed perfectly sensible.

So why then, I now wonder, did this run turn into one of those inexplicable rippers that emerge out of the blue and leaves you feeling fantastic, but very, very puzzled? Almost as soon as I was under way, energy came flooding back, and I not only finished the full, scheduled session, but crunched out a hard, (relatively) fast-paced 13km with such a wave of adrenaline and endorphins that if I hadn't had a train to catch, I probably would have gone on even further and seriously risked an over-use injury. Where all that came from I have no idea, but it was a blast, and left me feeling pretty much on a high for the rest of the day.

I'm sure I'll never fully understand why this sort of thing happens, but I'm glad it does. Completely unexpected, and 100% positive, it's just the kind of boost when things are getting a little difficult that shoots the motivation even higher into the stratosphere. You don't get this from sitting around watching telly (or I don't, at least) or working out which pizza to order (well, maybe just a bit).

No, this feeling is most excellent. Do try it for yourselves.

Another nice long run of 20.6km rounds out the month which has totalled just over 229km, my best month of running in years, and perhaps ever. To put it, and my see-sawing history as a runner into perspective, this is some six kilometres more than I ran for the entire year of 2015, which, by contrast, was easily my worst year of running since taking up the sport back in 2003.

So, where to now? With a few weeks of solid base-building behind me since our return from Sri Lanka, it's perhaps time to focus on a couple of race goals. The next race is the Sydney Half Marathon, but that is still seven weeks away. So to get there, I will focus on yet more base-building, but also with some speed and strength work to help run a decent time at the Sydney Half, which is to say, something nearer to two hours than the two-and-a-quarter I ran at Almeria. Beyond that, it will be a case of building endurance with a view to running a full marathon at the end of July, if I can survive the winter with my training schedule more or less intact. Beyond that further still it is too far away to really seriously say what I should do, but I'd at least like to keep some options open by running a good marathon time. And one option I definitely would like to keep open is the Point To Pinnacle in November. Despite running this event four times already, I still feel as if I have unfinished business there, as I'd really to like run it feeling as though I'd put in my best effort, and breaking 2h30m for the race, which should be feasible if I don't skimp on the training.

But anyhow, as I say, there's a lot of water to flow under the bridge first. Oh, if only it were that easy - water flowing under a bridge sounds positively luxurious compared to the countless hours and many hundreds of kilometres that must be ground out in the running shoes between now and then. The water metaphor, however, is appropriate just now as the east coast of the country suffers serious, debilitating flooding in the aftermath of Cyclone Debbie. Some areas have received as much as half a metre of rain in 24 hours, catching even normally alert towns and hydrologists by surprise as river levels rise quicker, and far higher than ever previously thought possible. Fortunately, vigilance in the face of natural disaster is something this country has been forced to learn well over the years, and, if not perfect, then we have at least honed it to a very high degree, and the impact of these catastrophes is far less than in times long ago, even with a greatly increased population base at risk these days.

It's tempting to think that in a similar manner, I have weathered the storms of procrastination and sloth before and now know properly the way forward. The truth, of course, is far more complicated, but let's see where this heads anyhow. Whatever the destination might be, the journey will be interesting. As a sort of tabula rasa adventure, I think there will be plenty to write about in the coming weeks.