Adelaide Marathon Campaign - Week 7 of 16

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Day 43/112. Shin pain came and went through the day. Bad at times but mostly OK. If it continues to improve tomorrow I'll risk an abbreviated return to training the following day.

I'll lose some kilometres, but hopefully I can regain enough training to still complete the bugger in ten weeks time.

Wish me luck/say a prayer/burn a candle/have a pint of Guinness for me ... in the order of your choice of course.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Still sore, but improving. This is good.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Still improving: now the soreness is gone but I still get a stabbing pain when I attempt to run or walk down steps. Another day or two hopefully will see the end of it. In the meantime I'm hoping to get back on the bike. Unfortunately the weather has been foul so no bike play yet. I'm trying not to think about how much time or fitness I've lost, as it's too depressing.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

A touch of ultra-weather descended here today, with cold, wind, rain and snow settling in for a determined stay. We reached our maximum temperature just after midnight and then the temperature just fell and fell and kept falling all day! Really bizarre stuff. Unluckily I had to traipse around the city in the morning and got completely soaked, so I'm putting it down as cross-training because it's exhausting work.

One of the reasons for traipsing around the city was to visit my doctor who had less than brilliant news re recent blood tests. A doubling of the medication I'm on made no difference to my condition other than to massively ramp up the side effects (mainly the insomnia I keep prattling on about). However the good news is that because it was a botched effort I can now take a complete four weeks off the drugs altogether for a bit of recovery before we launch into a new batch of guinea pig trials. So, at least I should be able to get some sleep again before that all starts.

Walking around in the cold and the rain wasn't ideal therapy for my shin splints and the buggers did do some serious moaning and whingeing for a while. Can't say however that I'm missing running just at the moment as the weather really is very foul. Today we had more rain in 12 hours than we've had in the whole of June to date, for example.

Well we can only wait now and see what tomorrow may bring.

[Sweder]

Could use some of that rain down my way Cobber. I'm fed up with watering the garden into the wee small hours. Lewes has a microclimate - Eastbourne (ten miles away) got a dousing last night - we're still drier than a Salt Lake satirist

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

A strange, mentally bewildering kind of day, but ultimately rewarding. This is what comes from trying to isolate the genius of Martin Hannett's production methods... er, that is the mental bewilderment results from exploring Hannett's records, not the ultimate reward bit, which Hannett really had nothing to do with. I suspect actually that it's pretty much impossible to fully appreciate a producer like Hannett without first understanding his lifestyle, which was by all available evidence what led to his early demise, so not really a course of action I'd recommend or undertake myself.

Is that a goat?

What's it doing in Manchester?

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

I've not slept now for two days so all seems a bit ... woolly. The shins are sore, but then things always seem worse when you're tired, so maybe they aren't so bad. I dunno for sure. Except that I do know I'm not running today.

At least the goat's gone.

I hope he's alright.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

I am not a fan of biorhythms, but I will concede that sometimes certain things unknown come together and spawn pivotal moments in time which can seem absurd, profound or perhaps just plain weird ... and sometimes combinations of all three. Even more bizarre, when you do get a seemingly endless stream of profundity, the occurences of said profundity seem to have nothing in common other than their simultaneous appearance in time. Other times they have common elements but absolutely no apparent reason for cropping up in your life just there and then.

A rough example: my discovery of the secret to making the world's best ever spinach and feta pizza coincided to the minute (well, +/- 5 minutes, shall we say) with discovering why our esteemed guru El Gordo never eats seafood. The common element here being the avoidance of seafood - I eat seafood everyday (but not other forms of meat) but set out this evening in particular to make a totally vegetarian gourmet pizza par excellance; in fact the world's best ever vegetarian pizza, a noble task in which I completely succeeded. I can safely say that now of course because the evidence is now safely eaten and therefore can't be disproven ... and anyway, blow me down if in doing an RC forum search on "Kathmandu" whilst eating said pizza par excellence I didn't stumble upon the reason for EG's abstinence from fruits de mer... an example of synchronicity which at times like this seem to happen on a regular basis throughout the day/days.

I mention this because I seem to be going through such a phase right now, and that was the only example with which you might tentatively relate, as very few of the others seem to have anything to do with running.

[digress] I feel a little guilty with that claim of "world's best" vegie pizza. I should clarify that the wine with which it was consumed probably had a fair bit to do with the claim. Suffice to say that I would highly recommend consuming a spinach/feta pizza with classy, herbaceous cool-climate cabernet sauvignon. This will magnificently amplify the claims to greatness of the pizza. [/digress]

The only thing that annoys me about the above claim is that the tv (an object of derision I try to avoid, by and large) is currently telling me the best method of cooking chicken livers with bacon. I have moral and medical reasons for avoiding chicken livers (and dare I say it, even bacon*), and so this grates somewhat. Even more grating - this is more a digression than the other signposted digression above. And now I feel I am getting completely off track.

In fact, this is so off-track now that I am going to complete this some other time. Maybe tomorrow.

See below for further moral dilemmas re pigs and chickens, or tune in again next week for more exciting MLCM adventures.

But do find yourself a nice cool-climate cabernet sometime, won't you?

MLC Man.


*As much as I have enjoyed bacon in the past, I have never fully enjoyed eating pig because when I was a child, I went to a school beside which was the spur line to the local abbatoir. Each morning we would see a train roll past with live cargo on its way to slaughter. The sheep and cows that the train hauled seemed completely oblivious to their fate. The pigs however, apparently understood where they were going and were obviously panic-stricken. I might agree with the cynic who says that pigs were just sacred of train travel, except that some of my school mates later went on to work in the aforementioned abbatoir and told horror stories about the pigs, who really did seem to know what was happening to them. Suffice to say, I feel a lot better now for not eating the poor animals. After all, there's always Guinness.

[Sweder]

I might agree with the cynic who says that pigs were just sacred of train travel . . . After all, there's always Guinness. [/SIZE]

I suspect you might have meant 'scared' but there again there are many on this planet who would concur with your original statement whatever the mode of porcine transport. I confess that at time of reading/ replying I am consuming both pig and Guinness, parked as I am in O'Neils at LHR Terminal 3. All before 10 am too. Life is good.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

I suspect you might have meant 'scared' but there again there are many on this planet who would concur with your original statement whatever the mode of porcine transport. I confess that at time of reading/ replying I am consuming both pig and Guinness, parked as I am in O'Neils at LHR Terminal 3. All before 10 am too. Life is good.

Indeed. As Spike Milligna, the world-famous typing error would ahve said "it was jist a tupo."

I too have consumed pig with Guinness. Though perhaps not before 10 a.m. But I am sure that would only be because the opportunity had not presented itself... clearly I need to get out more.

[El Gordo]

..... why our esteemed guru El Gordo never eats seafood. The common element here being the avoidance of seafood - I eat seafood everyday (but not other forms of meat) but set out this evening in particular to make a totally vegetarian gourmet pizza par excellance; in fact the world's best ever vegetarian pizza, a noble task in which I completely succeeded. I can safely say that now of course because the evidence is now safely eaten and therefore can't be disproven ... and anyway, blow me down if in doing an RC forum search on "Kathmandu" whilst eating said pizza par excellence I didn't stumble upon the reason for EG's abstinence from fruits de mer... an example of synchronicity which at times like this seem to happen on a regular basis throughout the day/days.

More spookiness:

Driven by curiosity to see what I'd written about that Nightmare on Freak Street, I see it was written while experiencing a painful attack of gout. Well bugger me, I thought, that is precisely what is happening to me this weekend, for the first time in a long time.