Long March Rocket

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Today's scheduled easy 8km started out like that, but the heavy legs I was still feeling after Sunday's long hilly effort soon passed and I turned it into a tidy little tempo run, my fastest 8km effort in probably a couple of years or more.

Things really are working out well just now. I'm taking this as a good omen for March. With two races scheduled for next month (including the Canberra half marathon) I'm ready to build on a decent February and really crank things in March.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Ma, my legs are all tingly!

A tough ol' hill climb today. 8km at a steady 4% incline, all the while slowly, slowly building the pace. If that wasn't an honest effort, I don't know what is. My God it feels good afterwards - I don't know what it is floating about in my legs but it feels like a million angels tickling my muscle fibres. Very nice. And I haven't even had a drink yet!

TdJ: A perennial favourite, and appropriate today, I think.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

The view from Bruce's deck.

More night shifts and continuing hot weather mean that running in the heat of the day requires the use of B.R.U.CE., my ever-trusty servant treadmill. When the schedule calls for an 18km long run and it's nudging 30C and 90% humidity outdoors, B.R.U.CE. really is the only option.

The distance brought to mind one of my stalwart long routes, the Lane Cove National Park, always a genuinely testing effort with two big hills and many smaller ones. Slopes of 7% are common and being able to run this beast requires a respectable degree of running fitness. And so I called into action one of the treadmill's cooler features, which is the ability to simulate any run that you can enter into the software via a map. This I did, B.R.U.CE. then converting the data into equivalent inclines as you progress. Another nice feature of this function is the ability to follow your progress via Google street view on a laptop or tablet, which is what I did.

Of course, one drawback is that Bruce doesn't do declines, so there was no downhill to help recover from the steeper climbs. I thought this wouldn't be a big problem, but the net result was that this run was far tougher than expected, and certainly harder than I recall the run in the real world ever being. So those who consider treadmill running to be easier than road running (and to a certain extent I do somewhat agree), when you factor in the lack of downhill, it can in fact be far harder. That was certainly my experience today, and I struggled through the last three kilometres at a reduced pace and pouring sweat. I "returned home" after 18.5km feeling not just done in, but even a little nauseous, but also with a wonderful sense of achievement. This was after all my hardest run in absolutely ages, and great preparation for both my next race, the savagely hilly local 10km "fun" run on April 3rd, and the Canberra half marathon a week later.

I am once again I think "half marathon ready", and that's a great feeling to have returned to this level of fitness in a relatively short period of time. I'm not race ready exactly, i.e. I'm not going to set a great pace and any thought of a PB is certainly out of the question, but I don't doubt the distance does not present a problem, and that's a a tremendous feeling after a year or more of patchy running at best, with no real goal or motivation.

Anyhow, here's a pic I took from the deck of Bruce about five kilometres into today's run, inside the Lane Cove National Park. At least in the virtual sense, that is. Cool, eh?




And as for today's track du jour, nothing really grabbed me that much, except for maybe this one. It seems appropriate anyway, so for the first time I think, a classic track from Madness.

[Sweder]

I remember that Lane Cove run (at least, the section you showed me), a cracking run with some very decent incline/ decline sections. B.R.U.C.E. is indeed a clever old stick.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

I remember that Lane Cove run (at least, the section you showed me), a cracking run with some very decent incline/ decline sections. B.R.U.C.E. is indeed a clever old stick.

And I remember you handling the aforementioned killer hills with great aplomb. A man of the inclines you are, indeed. Hopefully we'll get to run it together again someday, friend.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Of boxing and burning heat.

My Dad was a boxing fan. He didn’t like a lot of sports, but he did love boxing, and when I was a kid he sometimes took me to the Hobart City Hall where the “big” small town boxing and wrestling events were held, and so early on I fell prey to the weird fascination that boxing holds over so many people.

Those were the days when Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali were the kings. Every heavyweight title was televised and was big news, and so everyone, whether they liked boxing or not knew who held the current world heavyweight championship.

It’s all so different now of course. Back then the only global boxing organisations were the WBA and WBC, and it didn’t much matter because the holder of both world championships was invariably the same person, at least when you spoke of the heavyweights. But in the ‘80s and ‘90s the boxing world seemed to go mad. As the list of boxing champions grew – Tyson, Spinks, Holyfield, Lennox Lewis and so on, so did the number of boxing organisations grow, each with their own “world” championship title. First there was the IBF with their champ Larry Holmes head-hunted from the WBC. Then came the WBO and the IBO, both trying to change the rules and ratings methods of the sport. Their motives might have been good, but it quickly became all so very confusing. Boxing began to disappear off free-to-air television and keeping track of it all became too hard. Mike Tyson did his best to keep boxing in the headlines with jail time and acting roles, while George Foreman found his way back onto telly with constant ads for his fat-free grills. Of course, it only seemed to belittle boxing, and the endless parade of WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO champions began to look more like a cattle show than a glorious sporting world title. And so to my eyes, boxing sort of lost its way, and I lost interest.

Yesterday however, something very unusual happened that had me watching it again. For the first time an Australian won a world heavyweight boxing title. Blink though, and you might have missed it, for it was, by one commentators count, the fifth world heavyweight championship bout in just the last six months. And so the victory in the tenth round by Aussie boxer Lucas “Big Daddy” Browne over the more highly favoured and current WBA “regular” heavyweight champion Ruslan Chagaev made Australian boxing history. Mind you, if you were relying on the news media to find out about it, you had to skim past stories of a new species of octopus, and that of the appearance of packaged, ready-peeled oranges in U.S. supermarkets before you found the story about Browne’s historic win. The world of boxing, with its disparate “regular”, “super” and “undisputed” championship titles is so very, very different now, and I for one yearn for the simpler days. But then, those simpler days were (apparently) far from fair, which is why boxing became so fragmented and confusing. As Don King, the famous boxing promoter was fond of saying, in the world of boxing you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Talent alone won’t cut you a deal, my friend. Not even now.

The (very) tenuous link with my scheduled short easy run today was the self-talk and negotiation required with myself  to do even this simple, six kilometre leg-loosener following on from Saturday’s long run. The compression skins had, it is true, done their job well and my legs were totally fine all day yesterday and again today. My feet however, were sore enough to leave me hobbling slightly. And this soreness was a little weird, because this wasn’t the usual kind of pain you can name, such as my old friend plantar fasciitis, an Achilles strain or my more common problem of late, arthritic metatarsal pain. No, this was pain on the tops of my feet, which is something I’ve never experienced before and don’t recall ever even hearing about really, certainly not as a running strain. I can only guess this was due to my new and different shoes and new orthotics combination perhaps.  Maybe. Whatever caused it, is was somewhat uncomfortable.

On top of that, the weather here continues weirdly tropical: daily maximums around 30 Celsius with humidity around 90% and none of the usual relief in the form of evening storms. We’re now approaching the third week of this, with another relentless week of it still to come according to the weather boys. I mean, I’m not complaining really, it’s pretty good summery sort of weather, but combined with night shift it means just at the moment I’m left with only the hottest part of the day in which to run. Hence the necessary self-negotiation I mentioned a paragraph or so ago.

Luckily, or perhaps cunningly, I have written about this very problem only a handful of weeks ago. These are the very runs (the short, easy, recovery runs) which cause me so much grief, because they come at a very difficult time with the double whammy of hot weather and night shifts, but also because it is so damn easy to simply give them a miss. After all, they’re just short, easy runs of no great consequence in the greater scheme of things. This however is actually all the more reason to knuckle down and do the bastards, because otherwise I invariably slide down that fireman’s pole into the pit of languidness and the training schedule sidles off into the background where it lays ignored and undisturbed on a pile of cushions somewhere. And I grow fat and lazy again.

So, there was nothing else for it. Up and on with it was the call. And you know what? That short easy six kilometre jog turned out to be a real bastard after all. Exhaustion and hot weather take their toll on even the simplest of runs, and so it proved to be today. It was not fun, it was not easy and everything about it annoyed me. Which brings me neatly back to the boxing. Lucas Browne won the title, but he had a pretty ugly time of it. He was cut up and knocked down in the sixth round by Chagaev and seemed to struggle after that to get back into the bout. Then quite suddenly in the tenth he just seemed to get sick of it all. With less than a minute remaining in the round, he snapped out of the zone he was in and crunched the Uzbek with a solid, furious right straight out of hell. Chagaev stumbled just slightly allowing Browne enough of an opening to unleash a furious onslaught that had the defending champion on the ropes. Within seconds Chagaev had stopped fighting and was a mere punching bag for Browne before the referee rightly stepped in and stopped the bout before Browne killed the poor guy.

And that’s how I felt toward the end of my run. Fed up with the whole damn thing I just upped the pace to heart-stopping level and finished off the bastard and got the hell out of the ring.

Some days are just like that. I’m glad I did it, but I’m sure as hell glad it’s over.

As for the Track du jour, this is one I don’t think I’ve encountered before on a run. It’s actually a beauty, and whilst it gets played every so often in Chez MLCMM (off Led Zep's Presence album), I’d never considered it a running track before. I was wrong, it's a beauty! This live version is especially great, and given the ferocity with which I finished today's run, perhaps somewhat appropriately titled...

 

 

[Sweder]

Of boxing and burning heat.
As for the Track du jour, this is one I don’t think I’ve encountered before on a run. It’s actually a beauty, and whilst it gets played every so often in Chez MLCMM (off Led Zep's Presence album), I’d never considered it a running track before. I was wrong, it's a beauty! This live version is especially great, and given the ferocity with which I finished today's run, perhaps somewhat appropriately titled... 

The opening lines from ALS formed the opener to my TOM report
Cracking tune

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Of boxing and burning heat.
As for the Track du jour, this is one I don’t think I’ve encountered before on a run. It’s actually a beauty, and whilst it gets played every so often in Chez MLCMM (off Led Zep's Presence album), I’d never considered it a running track before. I was wrong, it's a beauty! This live version is especially great, and given the ferocity with which I finished today's run, perhaps somewhat appropriately titled... 

The opening lines from ALS formed the opener to my TOM report
Cracking tune

Zep's No Quarter might have been more appropriate for me today, lyrics-wise:

They choose the path where no-one goes.
They hold no quarter. They ask no quarter.

The pain, the pain without quarter.

They ask no quarter.

The dogs of doom are howling more!

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Disaster! I only managed one of my scheduled eight kilometres today before the body went on strike - soaring pulse rate, leaden legs, sweating profusely despite a very slow pace. I had to chuck in the towel before the body broke down completely. What a mess! I'm pretty sure though it's just the combination of a lot of kilometres run (for this stage of my return anyhow), the night shifts and the stinking hot, humid weather that has combined to demand an extra rest day.

Oh well, this usually happens once or twice at least in any campaign, so I'm not unduly bothered. At least, as my good wife pointed out, I attempted it.

There's always tomorrow...

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

A scorched Sydney summer runner writes...

Curse this continuing, wretched, infernal heat. Even at 7 a.m. it was so hot and humid I could only complete nine kilometres of my scheduled twenty kilometre long run before throwing in the towel, which by then was so saturated it could have filled a substantial bucket with my sweat. I really have had enough of this weather - especially the humidity.

So, this week has suddenly transformed into an unscheduled step back week. No bad thing in itself, but extremely frustrating even so.

In one of those strange twists of fate, two songs came up on the iPod in succession which succinctly summed up my attitude: Phil Collin's I Wish it Would Rain Down, and The Walker Brothers' The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore. Yeah, well, one can hope.

I think Phil wins the TdJ this time (with Eric Clapton on lead guitar). I've always loved this song, and the video is a nice self-deprecating piece of nonsense. This is the shorter version, but a lot of fun, and exactly matches my sentiment at the moment. Please, let's have some god-damned rain and cooler weather!

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Following five weeks of what is now officially the longest, hottest dry spell through March in Sydney, we have had a very small amount of relief with (finally) some rain. However, it remains hot and humid, and combined with the unreasonable demands placed upon a poor, starving, middle-aged shift worker like me, there has necessarily been a little dent in the training schedule.

Fear not though, dear viewers, for the running hath continued unabated, it's just that the all-important long run has been delayed. Still, my last four alternate-day runs of 9, 6, 5 and 5 kilometres have kept things alive, as difficult as it has mostly been to don the sweat-filled running shoes at all.

Inspiration to keep going has come from not just the astonishing Moyleman marathon in the Sussex Downs, but also from MLCMM son #2, Stephen, who completed his own hilly marathon the very same weekend - a walked 42 kilometres from his house in Adelaide to the top of Mount Lofty and back. Stephen is a big boy, so this was no mean feat, and he's now talking of a return visit to the Point To Pinnacle in November of this year. Which of course means his old man might have to tag along as well. Gulp. All the more reason to keep up the training.

Sometimes the pressure can get to a guy. I need a drink. Oh look, I already have one. Lucky I've already done my run for the day...

Cheers, fellow runners.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Running Canberra by remote control.

Phew, finally an end to the night shifts and hot weather has enabled me to complete a long run for the first time in two weeks. I fired up B.R.U.C.E.'s simulation mode and completed the Canberra half marathon course that I'm racing in three weeks time. Today was quite possibly the slowest half marathon I've ever run, but given recent conditions and the necessarily brutal transition from night shifts (finishing at 6 a.m.) to early mornings (which start at 6 a.m.) with just one day off in between I'm quite exhausted and therefore more than a little satisfied that today's effort was a job well done.

Well, to be honest I struggled over the last three kilometres or so, but I didn't let the pace (such as it was) drop and did the deed without a walk break. It's good to have familiarised myself with the course too, thanks to B.R.U.C.E.'s ability to hook up via wi-fi with Google maps and street view. It doesn't give the opportunity to look around and admire the scenery (which is the prime reason for running Canberra); and it's a bit like running with blinkers on: eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead, but it's good to get a feel for the course which has changed a bit since the last time I ran there three years ago.

The week ahead of early starts at work will see a few very early, pre-dawn jaunts around the local streets with probably a few hill reps sessions and maybe a return visit to one of my old favourites, the Pacific Highway run. With only two weeks until my first race of the year, the local 10km fun run with its murderous hills, followed a week later by the Canberra half, this could be just the ticket.

Oh, and as for the Track du Jour, I very nearly gave this to Gary Moore's "Too Tired", coming as it did upon the old lug holes just as I was really struggling into the last three kilometres, but let's put a more positive spin on it without ignoring Moore and acknowledging his days with Phil Lynott. This was a beauty and quite apt:

[Bierzo Baggie]

Wow, this Brucey gadget sounds like one amazing toy!

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Lifeless in Sydney.

No fancy technology this morning. It was just me, my running shoes and the elements at a little before 5 a.m. The night had been horrid; very, very wet and windy with it. The rain had eased a little by the time I headed outdoors, but it was still revolting weather and sane, sensible people were still tucked up in bed, and even those less endowed with common sense were swimming in heated pools or working out at an indoor gym. Not me though. Uh uh. I was out in in the pitch dark on the streets for four or five laps of my hill repeats course I whimsically call "Burgoyne". So wet and utterly miserable was it that the only other sign of life out in the open was a rat, scurrying across the road in front of me on lap two. Usually I see rabbits, possums, the occasional cat and hear plenty of frogs as I run parallel to the creek in Burgoyne Avenue, but not this morning. Everything had gone to ground and slept in it seems, apart from little ol' dedicated me.

My right foot was really quite sore following Saturday's long run and then an evening in formal shoes that were too tight, but after the first lap things loosened up a bit and I began to actually enjoy the run, despite the conditions. I had to cut it a touch short at four laps (eight hills) as I was running out of time after a tardy start and very slow first lap, but it was a decent work out and I was happy with my form on the hills.

An hour later the heavens really opened up again, so my timing had been pretty good. So, not a bad start at all to the week and I look forward to a few more early morning trots, though perhaps without all the dampness, nice though it is to have some rain after weeks of intense heat and humidity.

And the foot feels fine now. Go figure!

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Starry, starry night...

The full moon was shining brightly, low in the western sky. Below it, hanging like a drop earing was Jupiter or Venus - I don't know which - looking gorgeous against the dark of the night. Not looking gorgeous, and feeling even worse was myself, contemplating (as ever) why on earth I was out on the streets in my running kit at 4:30 a.m.

Well I knew why fundamentally I was there, which was to run a testing hill reps session. What I couldn't quite fathom was why my mind rejected that answer and kept screaming at me "No! Really, why...?"

Sighing inwardly, I turned right and got started on the first of what was to be six laps of my hilly course. As slight compensation, the weather was superb: cool, calm and without a hint of the stickiness that has made running so difficult in recent weeks, even at this early hour. As a result, there was a huge spike in non-driver human activity on the streets this morning, and I counted four walkers, two other runners and a cyclist during my 7.6km jaunt up and down the hills of my neighbourhood. The possum and fruit bat index was also substantially higher this morning, although unusually there were no rabbits to be seen. In Burgoyne Avenue the frogs were croaking happily again.

Speaking of Burgoyne Avenue, for the first time since I've been running this circuit (on and off for several years now) I had to stop and step off to the side of the road as a car came through on this dark, narrow and footpath-less road. Oddly, not only was this the first time I'd encountered a vehicle here, but literally just the previous evening Mrs MLCMM had questioned the wisdom of my running this road in the dark and I had countered that it was perfectly fine as I had never yet encountered a car there at this time of the day. Sometimes the world does work in extremely weird, synchronistic ways.

Hill session complete, I skulked back home and tried to feel good about it. I didn't though. It was slow and awkward and my knees hurt. No endorphins coursed through my veins and the feeling of smugness I usually enjoy as a result of this madness had vanished along with the rabbits. It is however, another tough little session in the running log and an important conditioning run prior to the hilly 10km fun run I have entered in ten or so days time. A kind of dull satisfaction is slowly seeping in as I write this, so I am still pleased to have completed it. Even these tough, non-stimulating sessions are worthwhile.

Yes, of course they are.

Run on, friends.


P.S. Oh, and remember Lucas Browne, the Aussie heavyweight boxing champion I wrote about a week or so ago? Well, he's just failed a drug test, his "A" sample returning a positive result for that old favourite performance enhancer, clenbuterol. And so once again the gloss fades from boxing's glamour. Damned shame. And to think he inspired me to get through a particularly tough run. Booooo!

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Good Friday Running

A while ago when I was in the thick of marathon training, I frequently ran a 10km run in the mornings along the Pacific Highway near to my home, 5km out and 5km back, and at the time it seemed almost as nothing. Hardly worthwhile, even. It undulates for all of its length, but none of the hills are severe and it's a fast run along a good path.

But that was then. This morning ... 4:30 a.m. to be precise (4:30 a.m. is rapidly becoming my new friend) ... it was much tougher. I felt the inclines, and my sweat and heavy breathing gave away the fact that this is no longer a run I can consider "hardly worth the effort". I was thinking about this as I pounded out the last few kilometres, my feet no longer gliding over the concrete but now slapping it loudly as if I was wearing clown shoes, and I realised that "back then" I was running upwards of 200km per month. Now I'm running about half as much, and so I calculated that it should hurt a bit, as it is still a reasonably tough outing. While there are no serious hills it is unrelentingly undulating, and the return 5km leg is net uphill, so my rapidly elevating heart rate was not unwarranted.

In the end, it was unsurprising that this was one of my slower runs over this course, but what was a surprise was that I completed it in negative splits, so a pleasing effort after all.

I had wanted to do this run in particular because I don't recall ever running it on Good Friday before. I assumed, naively as it transpired, that the highway would be relatively quiet, but no, the traffic roar was still without let up, although the number of trucks was probably much less than usual.

A little later, when I arrived in the city for work it was crawling with people, mainly travelers. The coffee cart at Central Station was doing a brisk trade, and the excited chatter of hundreds of scouts apparently heading off to a camp in Canberra (the train on platform 3 ominously signed "Canberra - Scouts only!"), and causing a chaotic confusion as they mixed with a thousand other suitcase-hauling wanderers looking for the airport line train.

This chaos and confusion had me thinking back to my run, when I used the relative mindlessness of it to mull over the bombings in Brussels last Tuesday. And this brought me straight back to the turmoil I was seeing in the train station. I had long considered Sydney's Central Station a likely probable target for terrorism, and it's true that there is a permanent and quite strong police presence there, but on mornings like these, it would be all too easy for people to bring suitcase bombs and weapons into the station and cause unfathomable destruction.

However, there's little point really in over-contemplating these things. In troubled times of terrorism like these I think it's increasingly important to carry on as normally as possible. And so I run, and I have to say it's going well. I'm still really only in a base-building phase, but I feel good and have every right to feel optimistic about where I'm headed. And (to return to the over-contemplation for a moment) with the third anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing coming up very soon, I think it's doubly (triply?) important to keep on running.

And so I am.

Bugger the terrorists.

[Sweder]

I was moved by the tale of the only Brit confirmed dead in the Brussels attacks. He'd been in the airport when the first two bombs exploded. He texted his family to say he was OK, jumped on the metro and was killed in the third attack. I reckon when your number's up, it's up.

With a daughter living, strudying and traveling, at rush hour, in central London, a city at the top of many a terrorist's hit-list, such thoughts are rarely off my mind. As we did when Gerry Adams's brave freedom fighters were leaving bombs in station waste bins during the height of the 'troubles', we 'beat' these wretched people by carrying on. It doesn't mean we don't fear for our loved ones, every single day.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

An idiot's guide to long, slow running.

   It's at times like these that I really wished I had listened to what my mother told me when I was young.
    Why? What did she tell you?
    I don't know, I didn't listen!
                - Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect about to be thrown out of an air lock into the emptiness of space. (Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy.)

How many times have you read the instruction that on long, slow runs you should run at a slow enough pace to be able to carry on a conversation? Probably a great many times; I know I have. The idea is that you keep yourself in the aerobic heart rate zone which simultaneously builds endurance and burns fat, rather than glycogen, or something like that.

But do I listen? No, I do not. I usually end up pushing myself well into the anaerobic zone and finish the run sore and tired and having done precious little to boost my endurance. Well that all changed today. In my new-found sense of discipline and commitment to some sort of semi-rigid training programme, I ran 15km well within myself, keeping down in the aerobic training zone, and had there been someone with me to share my training, I could well have maintained a steady banter about training methods, the Brussels bombings or CC5's recent bout of psychotic Easter egg gathering.

The result was that I ran my fifteen kilometres without once feeling as if it was getting difficult and quite confident of having been able to continue for many kilometres more, and possibly would have done so if we hadn't needed to be at my mother-in-law's house by midday for a superb Easter Sunday lunch of glorious, perfectly cooked medium-rare rib eye steaks accompanied with a very acceptable 2010 Coonawarra cabernet sauvignon. Yum.

It was a run that left me feeling very satisfied. It's a long time since I last ran that sort of distance quite as easily as I did today. Sure, it was flat and slow, but that's the idea of these longer runs, and that I ran it so easily has given me a huge boost in confidence, especially after a big night on the turps which saw my weight and body fat head rapidly in the wrong direction when I jumped on the hi-tech bathroom scales this morning. The foggy head and thumping brain probably also helped ensure I didn't go off at a cracking pace, and often in the past when I've run in a hung-over state, once I've sweated out the over-indulgence and start feeling great again, I tend to take off at a gallop as if to compensate for a reckless evening the night before. Today however I maintained my early, sedate pace and had a wonderful run. Why I didn't listen to the countless experts who have all been saying the same thing for aeons, I don't know. Well OK, I do know; it's because I'm a pig-headed fool. Now that I have seen the truth of it, I'm dead keen to repeat the experience, and I'm sure I will.

As regards to long runs, I am formulating a plan, and I'm now reckless enough to go public with it. These half marathons I've entered (Canberra in two weeks, and Sydney a few weeks later) are all well and good, but I've come to the realisation that I really do want to run another marathon, and run it well. By well, I mean not finishing the thing feeling like death, and actually being able to run the entire distance at least without having to walk lengthy portions of it.  To that end, I'm thinking my weekly long run needs to be in the order of 20 - 25km, except once per month when I extend that to 30 - 36km.

At least, that's the plan hatching in my head just at the moment. It may also require adding an extra run per fortnight, bringing the number of runs to eight per two week period rather than seven. But we shall see. I'll creep up on this plan slowly, and adapt it as needs be.

This morning's run brought my total for the week to 38km, the most of my campaign to date, and still well short of the 50km per week I think I'll be needing as a minimum to seriously consider another full marathon. I am however feeling fantastic, and pinching myself with disbelief that I've run 38km, as it seems hardly anything, so straight-forward and routine has it now become ... even if that does require several 4:30 a.m. efforts through the working week to get it all done.

Got to be happy with that!

[Sweder]

I like ambitious plans, and this is a good one. Even though I've abandoned hope of running another City Marathon I really want to run the Moyleman 'one day'. I say 'one day' like that because, holy hell, the way my BMI is headed we may have to add Cheese Rolling to the possible categories in order for me to qualify (as a cheese). My anthem is currently 'I Get Around' (Something SP has never been terribly good at without strong-armed persuasion), with the emphasis very much on 'round'.

Yes, if a Moyleman is to occur a few things need to change. It's not like the gods will change them for me, unless they unleassh a plague to destroy all burgers and beer on the planet. The other thing is, I want to run the Moyleman the 'wrong' way around. Why? Why not? Call me quirky, just don't call me collect.

Excellent posts like this keep me in the game. Thanks Cobber.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Excellent posts like this keep me in the game. Thanks Cobber.

Well mate, it's nice to be able to return the favour. Your running exploits have inspired myself and others many times before, so thank you.