Two runs have kicked off April in reasonable-enough style. The first was another of those 'Gosh, where did that come from?' outings that began as a thought to do just half an hour of 'show up and save face' plodding, but which instead astonishingly yielded a solid 15.7km tempo run. And then yesterday, arriving home so tired that I simply wanted to fall on the bed and faint into a deep, abiding comatose state of near-death, I instead laced up the runners and somehow toughed out another 12.5km. Slow and unimpressive it was, but deeply satisfying for having been completed. It also left me buzzing and wide awake for another two hours before the crashing tide of fatigue overtook me and I gratefully fell into a decent night's sleep.

This is becoming almost routine of late. I'm generally pretty tired from the amount of running I've been doing in recent weeks, but just as your dog always knows the way home, when I put my tired body in running kit, it seems to know what to do by itself, taking off and completing the kilometres in even an apparently exhausted state. It is, it must be said, most gratifying and perhaps further evidence for the claim that fatigue is mostly in the mind and can be overcome.

Well, we shall see about that. This is my long week of the fortnightly cycle I'm currently working, which is to say my six-day, 60-hour week. Through March these proved difficult, with one cancelled run and another cut short because of the hours and subsequent fatigue. If yesterday proved anything, it shows that it's still worth lacing up the shoes and giving it a go anyway, no matter how tired I feel. All too often it yields a huge surprise and a big jolt of endorphin-fuelled bliss.

The rough plan for this month is to bolster my base-building with an increased number of tempo runs and some tougher hill climbs. The distance covered may be a little less than last month, but with an emphasis on better quality runs, that's not a problem. Anyhow, it's not much of a plan, but it will have to do. The daily routine of general mayhem that passes as my working life still takes precedence, and running fits in where it can.

Now, excuse me while I have a short kip.

Well I'll be ... another inverse running day to report. Again, it was a tidy 13km tempo run successfully undertaken after another exhausting work day. The only difference this time being that I was actually looking forward to it, despite struggling to stay awake on the train journey home after work and prior to donning the running shorts. And again I was left shaking my head as to how, well, how comfortable these runs have become, despite the difficulty of cramming them into a busy schedule. The post-run crash did come a little sooner this time, however, but at least it meant I slept well once again.

Running: a cure-all for work stress and insomnia. Who would have thought? 

Since writing my previous post, Donald Trump has decided to have a go at launching World War Three by lobbing some 59 Cruise missiles at Syria; not targeting ISIS, but now aimed squarely at a Syrian government airfield.

I'm not entirely certain what to expect from this point on, but the act has shaken me to my core in a way I've only rarely experienced before: the outbreak of Gulf War I (by George Bush Sr.) and the World Trade Centre attacks being two notable other occasions. I was at work when Bush Sr's first Gulf War was announced ... the email came through from our management that the U.S. had begun its offensive, and my colleague and I stared at the email in disbelief, before frantically disassembling our entire work schedule and re-arranging it to accommodate the new chaos of being once more at war.

Thanks to advances in global television news coverage, the World Trade Centre attacks are even more ingrained into my memory. This time I was at home, and sat on my couch glued to the television in utter astonishment and disbelief.

Like in those two circumstances, I'm left only with the feeling of cold dread and a certainty that the world will once more change drastically and murderously from this point forth. For this savagery I was again at work, but this time after the initial half hour of panic and chaos as everyone came to grips with the reality of the U.S. jumping on the landmine of potential global and quite possibly nuclear warfare, an uneasy quiet fell on everyone as we waited for the initial responses from Syria, Russia et al. The dread intensified, and my only solace is the hope that I'm grossly overstating the drama of the event, but I fear probably not.

A very nervous few days, weeks and maybe months lay ahead, I fear.

It's nearly London marathon time again, and I passed my long, slow jog on the treadmill today by watching the telecast of last year's race, conveniently downloaded from the interweb and watched on my tablet which sits at just the right height on a convenient ledge on the treadie. Eliud Kipchoge won the 2016 race in 2h03m05s, which then was the second fastest ever marathon over an accredited course, and just eight mere seconds outside the record mark set by Dennis Kimetto. This year Kipchoge will be absent, as far as I can tell because he's concentrating just at the moment on the hugely ambitious Nike 'Breaking2'  project to take the marathon record below the magical two-hour mark. Well, good luck to you, sir.

I shake my head at such super-human efforts, but still find it very inspiring stuff, which is why I happily watch it, especially when killing time on the treadmill. I take some solace in at least being able to run for as long, or longer than the elite athletes do in these marathons.

I mention London, but there'll be no April race of any sort or anywhere for me this year, not even the local 10km fun run due mainly to work commitments, but a May half marathon and a full marathon in July fits the schedule somewhat better in any case. My base building continues to put plenty of miles in the training log, and I'm now pushing things just a little with extra efforts on my tempo runs. I also added a 'fast finish' to today's long, slow effort which seems to be a fashionable twist to the training schedule these days. It seems worthwhile, although I'm not clear in my own mind as to why, but it does feel right and gave me a nice feeling of satisfaction today, so I guess it's a good fit with my training.

So today's 28km effort is my longest run since the Canberra marathon just on four years ago. It has been too long since I regularly ran these sorts of distances, but I'm once again churning out 20+ kilometre efforts on a weekly basis, and with my total weekly mileage now averaging well over 50km.  

Meanwhile, with Armageddon threatening to break out in Syria (or maybe it already started there some six years back), the world has grown an ever more uncomfortable place in which to try and thrive. Being able to focus instead on my running and have it yield such positive results is like a God-send, and I intend to make the most of it, race or no-race. I may not be able to make sense of what's going on in Syria, but for the moment, my running makes perfect sense.

Onward, then!

So spare me; here we have Donald Trump, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, the four horsemen of the apocalypse threatening to lead us into Armageddon and all of them claiming to have the moral high ground. As if bombing Syria wasn't chest-beating enough, President Trump has now sent the Nimitz-class carrier USS Carl Vinson to the Korean Peninsula as some kind of warning to Kim Jong-un. It was from the deck of the Carl Vinson, you may remember, that Osama bin Laden's body was famously dumped at sea following his death at the hands of U.S. special forces in 2011. Sending the Carl Vinson to North Korea will doubtless be a subtle reminder that the U.S. doesn't especially like despots, not that Trump will have left anyone, least of all Kim Jong-un in any doubt about the status of their friendship. The all-too real possibility that Trump has a mind to bomb North Korea's missile launching facilities and/or nuclear test sites as he did Syria's air base is a very worrying escalation of the current troubles.

I get that Donald Trump is a man of action: after all he attained the presidency on a platform of bold and ambitious promises to act where others had sat on their hands and refused to initiate any drastic reforms. He clearly had a mind to show the world that the Bond villain Vladimir Putin and the economic thuggery of China would no longer be tolerated by a Trump presidency, and I understand why some might think that is commendable. But setting fire to your neighbour's cat as a warning when they're being particularly unpleasant is not only cruel to the cat, it's just a tad inadvisable if the neighbour's best friend and business partner is the local Mafia mob boss who also just happens to have a few tactical nuclear weapons stashed out the back somewhere.

In the game of How High Are My Morals?, al-Assad, Putin, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump are not exactly your likely finalists battling it out for the Karma Award and a Nobel Peace Prize for the trophy cabinet. That three of the four have nuclear weapons and the fourth is (apparently) substituting chemical weapons to compensate for his lack of a nuclear arsenal, whilst China also sits there calmly reminding everyone that they too have a gigantic array of nuclear winter options available to them, rather suggests that world peace and the contented humming of global harmony is not going to be gently singing us to sleep anytime soon. In fact I think about the only option left to us might be to buy in a crate of Polmos Spirytus Rekltykiowany over-proof vodka and drink ourselves to a merciful oblivion before a less-anaesthetized version of oblivion rains down on us from above.

So as the USS Carl Vinson steams toward Korea with its crew of 6,000, its cruise missiles and some 90 aircraft, doubtless Kim Jong-un is considering his options, while the rest of the world looks on in horror and possibly also, like me, considers boosting the coffers of Polish vodka producers. There seems to be very few other options available to us.

The optimist in me says this will be simply a case of sabre-rattling and that things will quieten down in a few days. But then I look at the global stage and realise we've not seen a bunch of extremists like Trump, Putin, Jong-un and al-Assad facing off like this before, at least certainly not in the nuclear age. With Trump feeling forced to act, it's not even a Mexican standoff and you can almost see Trump in cinematic slow motion, having broken the impasse and now reaching for his gun. What happens next will be intense. I just hope someone, somewhere is smart enough to broker some kind of peace deal or at least a workable compromise before these turkeys do something we will all regret.

There's a duality of solace in my existence these days which consists of the binary agents called running and music. Just at the moment, as the US fleet heads north toward the Korean Peninsula for a confrontation with the would-be ultimate nuclear bad guy Kim Jong-un, this cure-all for the flooding downer that is the evening news takes on particular significance. Having survived my own nuclear winter that is the six-day working week of mixed early-morning and graveyard shifts, bending my back to the coal face whilst the boss laughs hysterically behind my back as he whips his devilish tail and sharpens his horns, the running schedule is simultaneously both the sedative and the cure for all that seems wrong and insane with the planet, at least in my admittedly limited sphere of understanding.
 
It is therefore doubly gratifying that I can attest to the brilliance of the endorphins and adrenaline coursing through my veins this evening as a result of this afternoon's tempo run, which kicked off in accompaniment to Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road, and only got better from there. What began as a simple, easy log-filler to appease my tired mind and aching muscles instead yielded one of my best runs of late and was almost dangerous as I overcame a desperate urge to continue on well past the scheduled finish and add yet more kilometres to what was already a greatly inflated pace to that which had been scheduled or expected.

So no, unlike the headstrong policies of certain despot leaders scattered about the nuclear-edged world at the moment, I resisted the urge to go beyond the world of sane, sensible normality and completed an immensely satisfying, yet risk-free 13km run with a small, but valuable bonus at the end in the form of a brilliant little sprint that gave the mind and legs a brief flirtation with the endorphin-fuelled feeling of flying. It was, it must be said, an absolute-bloody-sensational way to finish a run.

Thoughts of invincibility now flash before my eyes, and even the drenching, cold-water face-slap of a post-run real-world return to reality still sees me seriously contemplating the possibility of PBs and greatly enhanced running goals. These must now be tempered still further if I am not to undo all the great work I have undertaken to date. In one sense this is what the running log spreadsheet does so well for me: I can see the reality of what I am trying to achieve and the cold-hearted numerical analysis of the accountants' computerised number-cruncher waters down the heightened enthusiasm of my runner's high to far more realistic levels. And this then leaves me with a bizarre, yet still greater feeling of satisfaction as I appreciate that even with the harsh light of data analysis upon me, I can, in all honesty, say that I am running very well and progressing even better.

And no-one, not even Trump, nor Putin nor Kim Jong-fucking-un, can take that away from me.

And should the doubts that circle us like wolves around a camp fire at night still encroach upon the positivity of otherwise undeniable optimism, there is always this: it's a bit of a darling on social media at the moment, but for worthy-enough reasons, and it's a great track to run to, or to even just lift your spirits a little, and at the moment, it's extremely topical. Enjoy:

So, as the USA and North Korea saddle up for a jousting tournament of possibly nightmarish proportions, albeit with only one possible clear winner, we must somehow continue on with our daily lives as if all this were normal. Right-ho, yes of course. This is about as normal as finding a clean empty seat on the peak hour train during a bus strike.

But, let's attempt to divert my mind from such matters for a short moment, at least. Something that has become worryingly normal is my seeming ability to pump out better, stronger, faster runs nearly each time I step into the running shoes just at the moment. Another ripper run today saw a further 13.5km go in the running log and left me wondering where the next bad run is going to come from. I'm not used to this constant string of successful outings, and it seems to me almost as if that stinker of a run; you know, the one that destroys all motivation and enthusiasm in one fell swoop, has vanished from the scene. Perhaps it's lurking just around the corner, luring me into a false sense of security, I don't know. It's true that I'm pushing myself just a little harder than perhaps I should, and risking over-doing it somewhat, but everything has been going so well that I feel I can do so.

Well, more likely it's just perfectly normal paranoia on my part, so I'll press on for now, but I shall pay particular attention to any squeaks or rattles that come from odd places in the body ... no, wait, that's the car. I'll pay particular attention to any aches or pains that pop up unexpectedly about my anatomy, but thus far all is quiet on the injury front ... touch wood.

I am approaching 100km for the month already, and the runs are harder and faster now, so I am regaining some of my form from a couple of years back. Where it leads, we shall see.

I used to wake up screaming on long-run day, but lately, those long slowies not only don't scare me but are actually incredibly motivating. Today's run, however, whilst certainly not a bad one, was rather laboured and generally tough going. A more than useful 26.6km (16.6 miles) goes satisfyingly into the running log, where I find that I've covered a total of 81.5km over the last six days, which might go some way to explaining why I found today's effort rather harder than usual, and my brain and body rather more than usually tired, post-run, as well.

I had awoken to the news that whilst he was waiting for Kim Jong-un to make a false move in North Korea, Trump and his generals thought they may as well bomb Afghanistan again, which enabled the military to blow the cobwebs off one of their biggest bombs, and the cover off one of Islamic State's key positions, apparently. This is all supposed to end with victory to the U.S. and defeat for al the bad guys in the world. Well, a noble ideal I suppose, but the history lessons of recent times do rather tend to suggest that it isn't going to be that simple.

The only way I can make sense of it is to undertake my own theoretically simple, but in practical terms, exceedingly difficult task of running my heart out which leads me to a state of, well, if I'm honest, let's call it pleasant exhaustion, where I no longer have to be troubled by things outside of my control, aka US global policing.

So, as we await the next strategic U.S. cataclysm, I'll keep running. I might take the next run a little more easily though. 81.5km in a week is just a bit much. A little like Trump's policies, I guess. I'll blame him. Why not?

Wow, how about that Daniel Wanjirup, eh? Holding off the mighty Kenenisa Bekele the way he did makes him one classy runner, and one of the great marathon finishes I can remember seeing. And Mary Keitani leading the women's race almost from the gun, and closing in on Paula Radcliffe's world record time! Well, OK so there's still a bit of daylight there perhaps, but Paula's time is not looking quite so impossible now as it was for so long.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, here in midlife crisis land it has been a far less dramatic running affair, with a step-back week meaning just 41km were entered into the running log across my last three runs over the seven days; not quite the full marathon distance. My legs are thanking me for it, however, and it's actually pretty damn exciting to be able to consider, probably for the first time in my life, 40+ km as being a step-back week. It is a gear lower than I have been running at in recent weeks, however, so quite timely and probably very necessary as well.

The only problem with step-back weeks is that, like an injury time-out, they see me losing focus, and therefore motivation, so I need to be mindful to ramp it up again this week.

But that Daniel Wanjirup! That was really something to see, especially as Bekele is renowned for his strong, fast finishes, and really looked as if he was going to reel him in. Let's not forget too, that Bekele has run the second-fastest time ever at 2h03m03s, and looked thoroughly determined to make amends after bombing out of the Dubai marathon in January where he was attempting to break the world record. In those final few kilometres Wanjirup looked as anxious as heck, and kept looking over his shoulder at the calm champion storming after him. At just 24, he really had no business fighting off the champ, but he did, and in very, very fine style.

OK, well, there you go. I think I just found the motivation I need for another big week of running. Let's see how it goes.

I was genuinely saddened to learn this week of the death of Robert Pirsig, author of that famous tome Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I had in only recent times attempted to re-read this book, my first reading of it being many years ago. I found it then to be something of an epiphany. A workmate and friend had encouraged, and then ostensibly forced me to read it by giving me a copy. Not only was it a brand new pressing of the book, but he gift-wrapped it in brown paper, upon which he produced some extraordinary artwork, the essential quality of which, plus the irony of producing quality art on a disposable wrapper of course directly corresponded to the subject of the book. Those of you who have read Zen and the art... will understand what I mean. Needless to say, I kept both the book and the wrapper.

Pirsig's pursuit of quality as a philosophy of life is both humbling and revelatory, and I was transfixed by that first reading. I think it's fair to say too, that it was a not insignificant influence in my decision to take up running, or at least reinforce the idea as being a good and worthy one.

I say that I tried to re-read it just recently but found it impossible. The book is also immensely sad in many respects, and re-reading it is very difficult because of that. From the obituaries I have seen, it seems I'm not the only to have found a return to the story troublesome. Despite that, it remains on my list of extremely personally influential and inspirational books, right up there with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and works of the great authors such as Hemingway and Dostoyevsky.

Quality, then, is important in any number of ways. Maddeningly indefinable, as Pirsig points out, we may not be always able to quantify it, but we invariably know it when we see it. So it is with running. We know when we've run well, even if sometimes the logbook shows it as just another run. It was ever as much today, with my long run impressive enough, I suppose, but not, on the whole, a seemingly brilliant effort compared to past glories. I knew though, that this one was, in fact, something special. I had set it up well enough, with two good tempo hill climbs earlier in the week. These had been good outings, and I was looking forward to the long run today, although not knowing really what to aim for other than something a bit longer than 25km. In the end I covered 30.5km at about marathon race pace, i.e. on or about PB effort, although, as we know, it's those last 10km of a marathon that really matter. Anything you've done to that point counts as nothing, really. It is, however, 30.5km covered in really good form, and I'm marking it down as a 'quality' run, because it was a good run, and I must doff my hat to Pirsig for showing me, all those years ago, that the pursuit of quality in whatever we do, is a worthy and life-affirming task. When you get it right, it zings, and you know that it's a rare accomplishment, if only at a personal level, which in some ways makes it even more worthy of note.

The month of April, therefore, has rounded out with 222km covered, my second consecutive month of 200km plus, setting me up nicely for the races ahead. Next up, the Sydney half marathon in three weeks time.