Nooooooooovember

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

As promised, here are a few snaps from the big day...


1. Race pack in hand, stocking up for rehydration.


2. Relaxed at the start.


3. With the marina and the mountain behind, shrouded in cloud.


4. A sea of uncertainty just before the start.


5. About 3km in ... still looking fresh.


6. Leaving the city, headed for them thar... um... hill.


7. Bringing up the rear.


8. About 6km in, not now looking quite so fresh.


9. Somewhere on the slopes.


10. The Chalet. 1000m above sea level, with 270 more to go.


11. The medals!


12. Post-race Guinness. Of course.

[Sweder]

I really really really love number 12.
Damn.

[Antonio247]

Well deserved medals and beers. The former a great motivation but the latter could be too much temptation for those on the wagon.

[suzieq]

Love #12 as well...and it's full of healthy vitamins (iron). On another note - can hardly tell you and your son are related... !

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

... How's the recovery going?

Quite well. I took a whole ten days off, during which I ate and drank without a thought to the consequences, and it did me the world of good. Yesterday I took to the waters again for a gentle hour's jog and felt fine. I'm actually raring to go again, but my chief coach (Mrs MLCM) has sternly warned me to not overdo things for a while. So gently gently for the moment. Don't want to lose form though. Not too much, anyhow!

9km 1h00:56

YTD: 1,296.7km

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Officially it is the last day of spring down here, but already the days are long, hot and humid and punctuated by occasional thunderstorms. In short, summer is upon us. I was therefore up well before dawn this morning to log another run in the spreadsheet before the heat of the day set in. And while the temperature was a balmy 22C, the humidity was a wretched 93%. Accordingly I settled for a shortened version of my main street circuit, but it was still tough going out there.

To make matters worse I had decided to wear one of those ‘fake’ tech tops. You might have seen them – they look like a tech top, feel like a tech top and have a famous athlete’s name emblazoned across them. But they only cost A$5 (as opposed to about A$40 for the genuine thing) and are made in Bangladesh from (it seems) recycled battery acid and polymers extracted from mutant alien body parts. Unsurprisingly therefore, within a kilometre I was drenched in sweat and the cheap top was sticking to me like a lawyer.

The heat also seemed to make everyone grumpy – hardly any of the other runners and walkers out there this morning returned my greeting. Or perhaps they were just suffering more than me, I dunno. But suffering is what it was, and I have been only rarely more glad to make it home again than I was this morning. I returned home redder than an embarrassed beetroot, and had to sit slightly dazed on a bench for several minutes before I was sufficiently revived to hit the shower.

There’s a positive aspect to a hot, steamy run however. It certainly cleans out the sinuses as well as the pores, and also afterwards my joints always feel fabulous. I think getting the knees and ankles moving in hot weather somehow opens them up and gets them operating smoothly again.

Apart from the weather, the other thing that got me up so early on an otherwise carefree day off was a family dinner the other night. I found myself seated with my marathon-running sister-in-law, another sister-in-law who is an age category champion kayaker and also a GP, together with a niece who is a junior champion in javelin as well as a junior national representative in softball and is studying (is that the right word for a sports scholarship?) at one of the better US sports colleges. In such elite company the talk of course turns to all matters sports-related and I took the opportunity to ask a few pertinent questions, particularly about training and sports nutrition. The suggestions they all agreed for me personally were interesting: that I should do more upper body strength work (together with core strength of course) in order to improve blood supply to the running muscles (I still don’t fully understand the science behind this, but they all insisted it works) and that I should start using energy gels (especially the Gu brand) to ensure I overcome the stomach problems I had in the Sydney marathon and because the energy release from gels is predictably slower than anything I can concoct in the kitchen. Well, with regrets and apologies to Caballo Blanco I’ll give it a go.

They said lots of other interesting things of course, as athletes are prone to do, and they were extremely motivating, but the other thing we all agreed on was that early morning is simultaneously the hardest time to train but also the very best. And so it was today – up and out the door before my brain had time to register what I was doing.

Well it worked, and now I feel fabulous. Physically invigorated and mentally chuffed. What a great way to start the day – I can barely remember the suffering of it at all.

12.75km, 1h18:38

YTD: 1,309.4km

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

BTW, here's one more P2P pic ... a screenshot of my GPS elevation chart.

Motivating, isn't it?