I have an interesting aside to one of my runs to tell you about. This morning I did something I had long wanted to do but had thus far failed to actually do. It was a simple matter: I weighed myself, completed a 12.7km run, and then weighed myself again, making allowance for the precisely one litre of water that I drank in between the two weigh-ins. Now, I sweat easily and profusely, and I expected to have shed about as much weight from sweat as the water that I drank during and immediately after the run i.e. around 1kg of weight. I was more than just a little astonished therefore to find I weighed 800 grams less than before the run. In other words, allowing for the 1 litre (1kg) of water, I lost 1.8 kg during the 12.7km run!
Of course, most of that will have been reinstated through normal hydration, but it's interesting to see just how much fluid you can lose during a run and why it's important to replace it.
As my mate and science media guru Dr Karl (below) is quick to point out, sweat does not equate to fat loss, as the majority (84%) of burned fat is exhaled as CO2, and the rest is expended as sweat, and not given off as heat, as I had thought. So you need to run a hell of a lot further than 12.7km if you want to shed any substantial amounts of fat. The majority of your sweat needs to be replaced with water and electrolytes fairly quickly of course.
I'm now properly into my new training schedule, and it's all going very well, thank you very much. I've upped my short runs to between 12-15km and thus covering quite a respectable weekly distance, and more importantly, am spending a decent chunk of time on my feet each week, and feeling fantastic for doing so. I'm not in PB territory yet by any means, but I feel I'm in with a chance. At what distance remains to be seen.
March is already shaping up to be a great month for me (touch wood). I aim to keep it so.
Congratulations, MLCMM! You seem to be quite motivated and in good shape. That's great. It's good for us too since it infects us with that motivation which is so necessary. By the way, my right calf is already well and I'm also motivated with training although my runs are shorter, just six or seven kilometres but looking forward to doing another half in which I'll follow your strategy going form less to more if I feel well.
The music world, especially Pink Floyd fans, audiophiles, record producers and sound engineers all took note last week when the London auction house Bonhams announced it was selling off the EMI console used by Pink Floyd and Alan Parsons (their sound engineer at the time) to record their 1973 monster and one of the biggest selling and most influential records of all time, Dark Side Of The Moon. Recording consoles, whilst not as visible to the fans as the instruments musicians use, are every bit as important to the recording process, and so items such as this one are much sought after. But this isn’t a story about that particular console. Rather, it was just the catalyst that caused a major rift in my personal space/time continuum which I shall now attempt to explain:
As often happens, this kind of news item gets journalists thinking about similar stories they might uncover and write about while the topic is still current. It transpired that one such piece popped up just the other day, and into which I and a friend were immediately embroiled.
Now it sometimes also happens that you see something, perhaps just a glance, but you immediately know that you don’t actually want to know about that particular something, and you look quickly away, pretending you didn’t see it. You convince yourself that what you saw wasn’t what you initially thought it was, because if it was in fact what you thought it was, then there was almost certainly some very bad news waiting for you. This is what happened to me, and although I saw the item (an almost inconsequential local news story) several times, I managed to skim past it and pretend it had nothing to do with me. It was a simple piece about a lost recording console, accompanied by photos that rang alarm bells with me and which caused me to look away and to pretend that I hadn’t seen what I knew to be a very uncomfortable truth.
However, my friend Steve (the one who cycled 900 kilometres from Melbourne to Sydney, raising funds for kids with cancer after his own successful, but brutal battle with the disease) in this instance was my partner in crime, so to speak, and eventually made me fess up to what we had done. It’s not that we did anything illegal, or intentionally hurt anyone in any way, but rather that we missed one of those great opportunities that only very rarely, if ever, present themselves; a once in a lifetime chance, you might say. And it gets still worse, but first, I must take you back in time, to those early years following the release of Dark Side Of The Moon and the birth of the punk rock era…
The mid-1970s saw the unbridled proliferation of punk spreading rapidly across the planet, like something from the first chapter of a Stephen King novel. Bands such as The Sex Pistols and The Damned in the U.K., The Ramones in the U.S.A. and The Saints from Brisbane in Australia burst on to the scene with an impact not seen since the likes of Elvis Presley and The Beatles, later leading Sir Bob Geldof to comment that ‘rock music in the seventies was changed by three bands: the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and The Saints’.
It was The Saints first self-funded single, (I’m) Stranded that launched them as an ‘overnight’ success. They were in fact already an underground fixture in their home town of Brisbane where they played without a manager, and without ever playing the same venue twice due to always losing their ‘security bond’ (having booked the venue as a ‘dance band’) and routinely ending their gigs prematurely as a result of police intervention. It wasn’t that they were pointlessly violent or gobbing on their audiences as the Sex Pistols did, but rather they were incredibly loud and represented the groundswell of opinion that was bubbling away under Brisbane’s skin, that groundswell being in general unconventional and certainly not conformist, nor pretty. Brisbane, the capital city of the state of Queensland, had for years been drained of its lifeblood by the right-wing, dictatorial government in the form of the gerrymandered National Party Bjelke-Petersen regime, protected by and large by the loathsome and frighteningly corrupt police force, a 32-year reign of terror that was only ended following a Royal Commission, still many years hence, which saw the sacking of the government and the imprisonment of the Police Commissioner Terry Lewis. To say that the mood among the Queensland youth of the mid 1970s was ripe for the birth of Australian punk is, at least in hindsight, severely understated.
So it was that in 1976 four young men with attitude calling themselves The Saints wandered into Bruce Window Studios in Brisbane to book some studio time to record their first 7” single. The recording engineer on duty that day and for the recording was another young man named Mark Moffatt, and the record they produced was (I’m) Stranded, now a classic of the Australian music scene which launched the punk rock genre in this country and which still thrives today. They couldn’t find a label to take on their single, so set up their own, printing just 500 copies, with copies now almost impossible to find and fetching unprecedented sums on the collectors’ market. With its heavy, grinding ‘amps turned up to 11’ guitar riffs and flat, disinterested vocals, it immediately caught the attention of anti-establishment music fans everywhere. Sending most of the copies they had pressed to music industry magazines, especially in the U.K., they almost instantly found a strong following, the record being proclaimed ‘single of this and every week’ by the British Sounds Magazine. As a result they were quickly signed by a major record company and within a short timeframe became a global success.
Meanwhile, Matt Moffatt went on to became an equally successful musician and producer, and many years later began to wonder whatever happened to that recording console used to record the now iconic (I’m) Stranded. Recording consoles are big and expensive items, and don’t generally just ‘disappear’, because during their lifetime they will be used by a great many artists to record a great many songs and thus earn their place in recorded music history.
Matt made some initial enquiries and found that the console eventually left Brisbane, but drew a blank as to its final destination, and so put out a general call in the music industry to try and track it down, which all came to nought. But then came the Pink Floyd connection, which is where Steve and I come into it.
Some years after the recording of (I’m) Stranded, Mark Moffatt and The Saints had moved on to bigger and better things, as had Bruce Window and his studio. Bruce sold the old recording console that he had built himself to another recording engineer by the name of Nick Armstrong, who owned the only major recording studio in Hobart, where Steve and I lived, and where later we also worked together.
Nick used the console for a time at his studio in North Hobart, but eventually it outlived its usefulness, and in 1988 he upgraded to a bigger, more modern console in keeping with the times. Steve and I were young, keen audio guys, wanting to make our mark in the industry, but having little of our own equipment to work with. When we received word via our various connections that the old Armstrong console was up for grabs, we jumped at the chance. The deal was simple: we could have it, gratis, but it needed to be taken away by lunchtime that day. Gulp! Understand, this was in the day when simple four-track recorders and even tiny mixing consoles cost a fortune, and here, astonishingly, was a 24-track professional quality desk being given away, for nix. This just never happens, and so whatever the personal cost, we had to take up the offer.
Not believing our luck, we skived off work and high-tailed it to the Armstrong studios in Steve’s station wagon and had the desk procured and loaded into the car before anyone could change their minds. As we drove away with our prize threatening to break the rear axle of Steve’s vehicle, I looked at him and asked, ‘your place?’ He shook his head, and I couldn’t help but notice he was driving in the direction of my house with an air of quiet determination. ‘You’ve got the garage, mate’ was all he said and the decision was therefore made. How I’d explain the behemoth rendering the garage useless for its intended purpose I would somehow have to work out before seeing Mrs MLCMM later that evening.
Now at this point we had no idea of the console’s provenance and were blissfully ignorant of its role in the birth of the punk movement. So when we unloaded the beast and began to examine what we’d in fact laid our hands on, and it became very clear that it was, in fact, well beyond its years of useful service, the decision became one of weighing up whether or not we wanted a serviceable garage or instead, a space taken over by what was now dawning on us as being basically a pile of junk which was once a lovely mixing console, but which had been thrashed well beyond its expected lifespan and now largely and sadly useless to us.
The upshot was that the desk’s power supply was dead; the guts of the desk were corroded beyond repair, and to bring the beast back to life would take much time and energy, as well as cash and skill levels we simply didn’t possess. Thinking therefore that the desk had no great value, we reluctantly gutted it for the few serviceable parts we could and disposed of the chassis and many of the components at the local rubbish dump. Steve salvaged a few pieces and turned them into various bits and bobs, but the desk basically sat dismantled into several large containers in my garage where it remained for another year or so before we moved to Adelaide which necessitated the disposal of what remained of the desk, and thus it met its final demise at the McRobie’s Gully Waste Disposal site in South Hobart.
And that was the end of that, until just a few days ago. And then, and only then, was the full horror of what we had done revealed to us.
When we confessed to our crime, Mark Moffatt was gracious, telling us he had not in all honesty expected to find the console in one piece, and grateful at least for ‘closure’ to the story. But as we re-visited the saga of the band, and that astonishing, history-making song, with its significance and impact on so many other bands and musicians, we were left only with a massive weight of regret at an opportunity missed and now lost forever. The console would not have fetched the millions likely to be spent on Pink Floyd’s EMI desk, but an icon it was even so, and its rightful place in Australian music, and indeed the world’s punk movement history, is now lost because we simply didn’t know what we had our hands on.
The real question is this: would we have been better off remaining ignorant of the console’s place in music history, or is there something positive to be gained from knowing what we briefly had in our possession, despite the horrific ending?
If ever I work it out, I’ll let you know, but the console's demise, under 20 metres of landfill was perhaps a fitting, anarchic end for an icon of punk history.
(04-03-2017, 03:55 PM)Antonio247 Wrote: Congratulations, MLCMM! You seem to be quite motivated and in good shape. That's great. It's good for us too since it infects us with that motivation which is so necessary. By the way, my right calf is already well and I'm also motivated with training although my runs are shorter, just six or seven kilometres but looking forward to doing another half in which I'll follow your strategy going form less to more if I feel well.
Saludos desde Almería
Thanks Antonio, I'm glad to hear your calf is fine again, and that your motivation levels are high. They could hardly fail to be after the rip-roaring success of Almeria, could they?! It's going to be an exciting year, I feel. Cheers!
I've probably hit my current endurance limits for the moment, with my Maffetone-method long run finishing at a touch short of 18km. I'm slightly disappointed that I couldn't go on with it, however, it rounds out a 60km week, much of that distance completed at an honest work rate, so nothing to be disappointed about, really.
I'm now at the point of having to consider intra-running nutrition a little more seriously. The long run was again done on zero fuel, that is, before breakfast, with nothing but water throughout. Whilst I am pretty sure I'm now burning a high percentage of fat on these runs, I should perhaps be adding some small amount of carbs, most likely in the form of glucose, to my drinking water. This small percentage of carbs is apparently required to trigger and maintain the fat-burning process. More experimentation is required.
But hey, 60km is 60km! Now to make it a ripper month.
Summer here has officially been dubbed the "angry summer" by the climate scientists with some 205 weather records being broken in the last 90 days, mostly in the form of intense heat around the country. Here in Sydney, whilst it has also been officially the hottest summer on record, we're currently instead being subjected to one of the longest wet spells I can ever remember. It's depressing, and when the rain does stop the humidity levels rise dramatically making everything, damp, sticky and mouldy. So we're being subjected to a summer form of winter blues, and it's getting us down.
My battle plan to tackle this is of course quite simply to continue running, and I have. I'm running every second day, with my short runs being around 12-13km and the longer ones, well, a few kilometres further, and this has been enormously beneficial. Even yesterday, which followed a night of far too little sleep, and a long day at work, I knocked over another 12km when in all honesty I thought I'd only be good for an "at least turn up and show my face" effort of 15 minutes or so. But as often happens, once under way, it wasn't so bad and I completed the full, scheduled session.
It was a doubly useful run, really. Apart from filling out the running diary nicely and helping to cope with the appalling weather, yesterday was also another dramatic day at work, with the MD announcing staff cuts of 5% across the board, all of which are to be undertaken by the end of June. My area especially is under threat, with a major shake up and possibly serious levels of redundancies in the offing. So we nervously await news from our department head as to what it all means for us, but as usual the nihilistic, psychopathic bastard is taking great delight in telling us nothing, being his usual, smarmy, smiling self, obsessed only with his own inflated sense of self-importance, and not caring a jot for the actual workers who produce the very thing that keeps him in his senior executive lifestyle of business-class travel and 'hire and fire' ego-inflating mentality.
These things used to get me down, and if my style of writing suggests that it still does, then fear not, gentle reader, for the noble pursuit of athleticism really is a pure form of mental and physical tonic and I actually feel fine. Of course there are concerns as to the uncertain future, but these are met with clear-minded rationalism, and my aggressive form of writing merely indicates that I will, once the revolution comes as surely it must, with a clear, sharp and unemotional mind, line these cretins up against the wall and shoot them. An angry summer it has certainly turned out to be, but in a considered, "clean kill" manner.
(05-03-2017, 01:49 PM)Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man Wrote: My small part in punk music history.
The real question is this: would we have been better off remaining ignorant of the console’s place in music history, or is there something positive to be gained from knowing what we briefly had in our possession, despite the horrific ending?
If ever I work it out, I’ll let you know, but the console's demise, under 20 metres of landfill was perhaps a fitting, anarchic end for an icon of punk history.
Wow - reading this had me hooked! What a tale :-) I think definitely better to know - knowing you are a part of something bigger than oneself is a good thing for human beings and I don't think you need judge your past self against what you know now. Not that I think that will stop you ;-)
In the meantime, keep running. I am THRILLED to hear that you're getting so much from the running at the moment and, in your latest post that it is helping you cope with a difficult time at work. I am not running at the moment - instead I am doing ankle exercises, of which more in my own training diary - and I really miss the running. I can't tell you how much it helps to read about what everyone else is doing, it keeps me feeling connected to the doing and the feeling of getting out there.
... Take the National Express when your life's in a mess / It'll make you smile ...
(05-03-2017, 01:49 PM)Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man Wrote: My small part in punk music history.
The real question is this: would we have been better off remaining ignorant of the console’s place in music history, or is there something positive to be gained from knowing what we briefly had in our possession, despite the horrific ending?
If ever I work it out, I’ll let you know, but the console's demise, under 20 metres of landfill was perhaps a fitting, anarchic end for an icon of punk history.
Wow - reading this had me hooked! What a tale :-) I think definitely better to know - knowing you are a part of something bigger than oneself is a good thing for human beings and I don't think you need judge your past self against what you know now. Not that I think that will stop you ;-)
In the meantime, keep running. I am THRILLED to hear that you're getting so much from the running at the moment and, in your latest post that it is helping you cope with a difficult time at work. I am not running at the moment - instead I am doing ankle exercises, of which more in my own training diary - and I really miss the running. I can't tell you how much it helps to read about what everyone else is doing, it keeps me feeling connected to the doing and the feeling of getting out there.
Cheers TK, much appreciated! After all that however, the inevitable happened and I had my first missed run for a while, being simply too exhausted on getting home to contemplate anything other than crashing and burning sleeping. Oh well, it happens from time to time - I have been rather overdoing it of late. Tomorrow will be better.
The week ended with a disappointing two additional rest days brought on by physical and mental exhaustion; the former caused by a combination of shift work and poor sleep; and the latter by a new era of job cuts at work with much uncertainty, other than the passing parade of friends and colleagues departing after long and distinguished careers, all apparently now of little worth to the corporation. It's all very sad and so unnecessary. For the moment my job survives, but for how long I have no idea, but no-one is safe from the long, sharp scythe of corporate death.
The good news is that last night, thanks to an accumulated sleep debt that finally had to resolve itself, I slept well. And so this morning I rescued the week's training schedule with a much needed, and long overdue Maffetone-style long, slow run. All up it was 3h20m of comfortable plodding, covering a decent 25.75 kilometres, all of them unremarkable other than the comparative ease at which they were completed.
The brilliance of a run like this is not just the growing fitness, endurance and confidence I have with my running, but the strengthening counterbalance it provides when work life becomes monstrous, unrewarding and downright difficult to stomach. Even at the best of times, we need a happy and productive life away from work, because a life dominated by your employment isn't that fulfilling, ultimately. Very few people on their deathbeds actually wish they'd spent more time at the office, let's be frank. But when work starts to creep into the foul paddock of despair and despondency, then time away from it becomes of paramount importance. Cruelly, it's often the time we least feel like overcoming our inertia, and finding the motivation to run at all is difficult, but find it, and it really makes everything so much easier to cope with, and even overcome.
A 25.75km run is not going to change the situation at work, but it clears my head of negativity, and gives me hope, for it focuses the mind on what is really important. Good health, including a bright, positively charged mind can overcome even the darkest of times.
Run on; run as long and as far as you can. It's worth every step.
My running went to a whole new level today, and it's really rather exciting. After a six-day working week, which culminates in what is always a difficult transition from early shift to then doing two graveyard shifts, I'm normally capable of little more than a token run, if that. Today I thought would be no exception, and I donned the running shoes with no plan other than to see how things went, and if all was well, to try and put in about an hour's effort, although that seemed beyond credibility, such was my state of mental imbroglio and physical lassitude.
Instead, I surprised myself by completing a 1h40m work-out at a slightly faster than normal pace, but the real shock that had me shaking my head with wonder was the absolute ease with which I ran it. It seemed like the proverbial walk in the park and I kept pinching myself to be sure I wasn't dreaming it all. I was left with the very clear sensation of having ramped my fitness level up a notch; of having made that quantum leap to a higher plateau, and at a time when I least expected it. It will take further sessions to verify whether that really is the case, or if perhaps today was just a freak, but I've experienced this before in previous campaigns and it really does feel like that rare sensation you get when you've put in the work and are rewarded with an open door to the next inner sanctum of fitness nirvana. It really does make all the effort worthwhile and engages a new fifth gear of enthusiasm that has me scouring maps for new running routes and scanning the race calendar for new events I can train for.
Thus far, 13 days into March I have completed 94.5 kilometres, meaning I am well on the way to hitting my target of 200km for the month, which is my vague, general target for what I consider to be a 'good' calendar month of training. Given my physio's demand that I do not run on consecutive days, this is about as realistically high a target as I can set without taking considerable time off work and from other commitments. I only rarely hit it, but when I do, it makes such a difference to my fitness levels and general well-being that I am constantly surprised I don't make the effort every month. As we know, however, motivation is a fickle beast, and the descent from the highly motivated state to one of inertia is, for me, cruelly rapid.
To get me through the dark, lean times I watch inspiring videos of endurance events: ironman triathlons, ultramarathons and mountaineering campaigns chief among them. Not everyone is the same, however, and different people use different forms of motivation, of course. I was watching one such video recently, a simple video diary compiled by a runner as he completed the 205-mile Bigfoot Ultramarathon through Washington State in the USA. For motivation, or I suspect more likely to simply keep his mind off what he was actually doing, he had his pacer read aloud Kim Jong-il's treatise on socialism as they ran. Not probably my choice of inspiration for an endurance run (and me, a leftie from way back), but hey, whatever works for you, I guess.
Yet, these oddities and differences between us also inspire me. I have to say however that it is highly unlikely I could ever be convinced that running for three days to complete a 200-mile trail run was anything but an absurd idea, at least for myself. It is inspiring in the extreme, however, to see others complete them, and to translate that down by several orders of magnitude to what I hope to achieve on my far more modest level. Hey, I don't mean by that, that I would never run an ultra; in fact, there are several that are greatly appealing to me, but they are far shorter than 200 miles!
No, we'll get there one step at a time ... pretty much literally, when you think about it. For the moment, though, the enthusiasm is high and I don't mind looking a little further into the future than usual. Not too far away is winter, which is always a challenge for me, and if I'm honest, my single greatest goal this year is to quite simply get through winter without reducing my training levels, for it has been too many years (four, to be exact) since I had even a moderately successful winter campaign. The key for me, in order to run a few good races in the second half of the year, is to simply get through winter in good shape and with a suitably large number of kilometres in the training log. If I can do that, then I believe I can afford to dream a little.
A good training plan, well-written and carefully constructed can be a fantastic substitute for the difficult business of actual running, and all too many times I have been guilty of that offence. This year, this winter, to be precise, it must be all about the action.
Kim Jong-il, not that what he thought about things really matters a jot, would probably approve. I know those ultra runners certainly would.
There's not been a lot of music discussion here lately (apart from The Saints episode that is)... but I'd like to share this wonderful track with you. Currently on high rotation on the MLCMM running playlist, from 1972 this is Railroad Gin, from Queensland, and a rarely heard song these days. Even rarer is this superb live performance, sadly featuring the recently deceased Carol Lloyd and her astonishing voice.
This video surfaced on Facebook as a result of the news story about my destruction of The Saints' recording console. It turns out Railroad Gin may well have used the same desk to record some of their material. Life's funny, eh? It's all such fine threads; fine threads that connect everything together.
I love this song, and it's excellent running material. Grab a look-see.
A nice, base-building, easy 15km this morning takes my tally for the month up well over 100km already, which is greatly encouraging. It also brings the total kilometres run for my current road shoes to over 1,000km, so it's probably time to start alternating them with a new pair to see how they're truly holding up. The old shoes look totally fine, and whilst I suppose it's the internal gizzards that are important, I don't think I've ever had a pair of shoes look as good as these do after notching up a thousand clicks.
When my podiatrist recommended switching to this model (Asics 1000s) I did a double take, as when I had previously used Asics I found they were pretty soft and wore out quite swiftly. However he assured me the new versions of Asics were far better made and would last a great deal longer, and so it seems to be. Even so, most of the recommendations I've ever seen about running shoes suggest replacing them after about 800km or so. I'll try my new pair and see if there's any noticeable difference. If not, I might just let the old pair do a bit more work first.
Thus far, base training is going very, very well. With nine weeks still to go before my next scheduled race which is the Sydney Half Marathon in May, I'm in a great position to simply enjoy the training without the more usual panic of making up for lost time and having to cram in too many miles too quickly prior to race day. That isn't to say something untoward may not still happen between now and May, but having this many miles under my belt this far out from race day is a luxury I intend to make the most of and enjoy whilst the going is good. I'm still not sure what my goal will be for this race, as it's really just one of those events I've run several times before and therefore like to keep my foot in, so to speak. My half mara PB was set nearly five years ago now, and I'm not sure I even want to contemplate trying to break it, as I have my mind firmly set on other, bigger goals. I would like to get closer to two hours than I have in my last two half marathons, which at least would be a general indicator of improving race fitness, but I'm not too fussed about going under two hours again for the moment. After all, I've been there, done that, and got the medals to prove it. To go under two hours again would require a lot of speed work that would invite overuse injury and risk my other goals, so I'll just take it carefully for now and build the mileage and the pace very, very gradually. So far it's working a treat and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
A few more weeks like this and I'll be ready to seriously contemplate some other, longer races. For now, with fair weather and a fine breeze, it's steady as she goes.
So said the young woman sitting in front of me on the train, explaining to her companions the disastrous result of her running experience. If her companions seemed surprised at her apparent reincarnation, they didn't show it.
I can also clearly remember my first 10km run, and whilst I certainly did feel as if the sting of death was approaching me in the last couple of kilometres, I am very pleased to say that my memories of that run are mostly a sense of pride and a clear sense of achievement rather than anything to do with mortality. My running log says that I ran that first 10km on the 24th January 2004 and that it was the 36th run I'd undertaken since taking up the sport 102 days prior. It had taken me 82 days to get from couch to 5km, but then only a further 20 days to double the distance I could run without stopping. That first 10km took me just 59 minutes and 14 seconds, which in hindsight is a very clear indication to me that I began running at way too high a pace, and which I'm sure was in large part responsible for the large number of injuries I sustained in the first few years.
Of course, these days I'm far more circumspect, with my primary aim when running being to remain as free of injury as possible. Sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, that means 'listening to my body' and actually being a little sensible and acting accordingly, even if that means cutting back for a while. And so it was today, or more to the point, yesterday. Late yesterday afternoon I quite suddenly developed a sore throat and aching joints and muscles. This was a nuisance, as I had my long run planned for this morning: 20 - 25km out to and through the Kuringai National Park, a run consisting of many hills, some long and reasonably demanding, some short and very steep and extremely demanding. That the weather forecast was for strong wind and heavy rain had put me off not at all. We've had three weeks of rain now, with barely any stop to it, and it was simply time to give in to the conditions and run out there in them anyway.
Well, that was all fine until I arrived home last night feeling like the death of which the girl on the train had spoken. The planned long run was also in jeopardy as I was unexpectedly asked to work an extra shift today, putting a major dent in my plans. Even so, a wave of optimism engulfed me and I decided to dose myself up with echinacea, get a good night's sleep and I felt sure I'd be fine in the morning and able to squeeze some sort of run into my day. And that's what happened. The echinacea and the sleep worked wonders and I did feel pretty good. The shortened run I shoe-horned into my schedule was somewhat tougher than normal, but I still completed a useful 13km and was left feeling very pleased with myself.
Now then, by way of an update, let me tell you a little more about how all this Maffetone method business is going. One of the catalysts that had me start down this road was my inability last year to shed any weight. I had stacked it on again, but despite being 'careful' with my diet and running quite a bit, my weight was going nowhere. So, in October I began following the Maffetone method of low heart-rate running alongside a low-carbohydrate diet. It started with two weeks of very low carbohydrate eating, as in less than 10 grammes of carbohydrate per day. You can see what happened on my weight chart, below. The line of squiggles at the top is my weight essentially plateaued well above where I wanted it to be. The number '1' is where I began using Maffetone's techniques, and as you can see, my weight immediately and sharply fell away. After two weeks, I gradually increased my carbohydrate load, and it's now in the order of 100 - 150 grammes per day, which is plenty, and where I want it to stay. That's probably in the order of one-third to one-quarter what it used to be, and as you can see, the weight is still falling.
Oddly, the only period since then when I've not been able to keep the carb intake low was during our holiday in Sri Lanka. Despite eating carb-rich foods there and not running at all for nearly two weeks, my weight still fell. The number 2 represents where we returned from holiday and got back on schedule again.
I still only very rarely eat bread, and I never eat pasta. Other than that, I'm fairly relaxed about this diet. I focus on eating vegetables and eggs, a fair amount of protein without going overboard, and quite a lot of fat. Because the other aspect of Maffetone training requires running at a slow pace down in the fat-burning aerobic heart-rate zone, this fat fuels my running to a much higher degree than when I ran faster. Good for endurance, because you store way more energy as fat than you do as carbohydrate, but not so good for speed, although Maffetone assures us that in the long term, running on fat will yield even greater pace than when you ran on carbs. That much remains to be seen in my case, although I am already running quite a bit faster at the same low heart rate as when I started.
The key figures are these: since starting this five months ago back in October, my weight has dropped 11.1% (and I wasn't exactly obese to begin with), and even more amazingly, my body fat percentage has dropped a whopping 51%. Some people find quitting bread and pasta impossible, but for me, the results have made it easy, and this far down the road I'm not even thinking about changing back to my old ways.
As to how well it's helping my running, well that will take more time yet to fully assess. It is true to say however that I'm running for much longer periods of time, and if I'm not covering any more ground than previously, I am definitely running with fewer aches and pains. Recovery from long runs is faster, and the runs themselves are far less troubling.
Well, the more we get to see and hear about the Trump U.S. presidency, the more I'm grateful for being able to sidle away into the world of running, where I can forget about politics; forget about work, and forget about a squillion other things that otherwise torment my mind with a debilitating weariness that assaults us these days. In days now regrettably long gone, political leaders had something akin to a high jump bar of substance that they had to successfully get over to be serious contenders for leadership. Now they just seem to limbo dance under it, making false accusations and wisecracks as they go in order to draw our attention away from the fact that actually, they have no leadership qualities at all, but instead have achieved their station in life through some weird form of reality TV show, as if political status is a prize for just happening to know the middle name of Kylie Minogue's second child, and having accumulated enough bonus points to gain the power pin that eliminates their only serious competitor. It certainly appears to have very little to do with political ideology so far as I can tell.
Look, just don't get me started on this...
No, seriously, let's get back to running. It's far safer territory.
My run today was an interesting one. By rights, I should have attended to the long, slow run of 25 or so kilometres that was postponed previously. However, I have a 30km coastal, challenging and undulating hike with several workmates tomorrow, and it seemed wise not to attempt a long run today and thereby risk soreness and fatigue tomorrow. Still, I pushed the pace a little by way of compensation and covered 13.5km in hefty fashion, well into the anaerobic zone, I feel, but which felt good to complete.
This now puts me well on track for my best month of running ever, in terms of kilometres run and time spent in training, if I can maintain this moderately disciplined approach ... I say this, touching every piece of wood I can find. It's never wise to make predictions in this game, but I am feeling confident, and it will be a cracker of a running month, no matter what happens in the remaining 12 days of March.
So successful has it been thus far that I'm beginning to hone my goals for the rest of the year and will report these back soon. For now, I'm staying focused on solid base-building and not trying to get too far ahead of myself. On that score, I think I'm also doing quite well, maintaining the enthusiasm and excitement without rushing off and paying entry fees to too many ambitious races. At least, not just yet.
No, let's be honest. I really am doing well, and I need to acknowledge the fact. I'm not here often enough and need to give myself some credit for getting this far.
So, trundle on, comrades, and should you happen across Trump, or any of those other leaders treating politics as a game rather than a serious, progressive form of leadership, then give them a swift kick in the shins for me and move on. The world will thank you, I'm sure.
Wow, this is amazing stuff. 200km is a peak marathon training month for me. For you it's just a "good" one! And you have shed 11% of your body mass. Presumably without having any bones, limbs etc removed. And all this while having your soul destroyed at work. (Maybe there is a link...)
March Too Much
![[Image: Dr%20Karl%20Running%20Diaries_sm.jpg]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/80315908/Dr%20Karl%20Running%20Diaries_sm.jpg)
