|
RE: Dry July? No! Why?
Yesterday.
It's 5:30a.m. and I'm sitting in my kitchen, eating my eggs & b and pointedly not running. It's not because of injury however. Rather, I'm going through a bad bout of poor sleeping (more on that later) and have to yield to commonsense. Rather than get up at 3:45 to get in a quick 10km before work, I'm taking the extra hour's sleep and have to content myself with just two runs per week instead of three or even four.
I can hear that outside the recycling truck is emptying our bin. The empty bottles from our our Bastille Day dinner party crash into the truck and I almost shed a tear. One of those bottles - a 1979 Ch. Reynella Claret had been in our posession since we bought it in 1984. We'd kept it only as a curio - somehow it had remained unopened and as the years went by we assumed it would be vinegar and left it as a momento of days now long gone, before the French wine industry chucked a wobbly and stopped us using the term "claret". Then I read a wine blog somewhere in which one of these very wines had been opened and pronounced "magnificent". So we opened it on Bastille Day, alongside a couple of decent Burgundies and a magnificent Vouvray, and indeed it was surprisingly superb. For a very cheap wine, now 30 years beyond its supposed drinking wndow, it held its own fantastically well against its fancier French cousins. Perhaps not techncially the better wine, the novelty and nostalgia still easily made it the wine of the night.
The recycling truck moves on, oblivious to the significant piece of MLCM history it has just so unceremoniously dumped into its internals and I'm overcome with a wave of nostalgia. Actually, it's all Seafront Plodder's fault (as it often is) but that story, involving Coopers Sparkling Ale and a globe-trotting Waitrose catalogue is a tale for another day. It's time now to catch the train and head to w*rk.
It's a funny thing when the world changes abruptly while you're not watching. I caught the train in clear, albeit cool weather. Of course at this time of morning at this time of year in the southern hemisphere the stars are still shining brightly and dawn is a ways off yet, but the weather seemed kind enough. I engrossed myself in my book, got off the train at the underground Wynyard station, headed up the ancient, creaking wooden escalator and emerged into ... another, apparently vanished world. A thick fog had set in, and as I began the 2.5km walk through Darling Harbour to w*rk, the world seemed very surreal indeed. All the skyscrapers had vanished and the other side of the Harbour had likewise disappeared, making it seem I was walking beside the ocean. And it was oddly quiet, with no aircraft (the airport having been closed and all air traffic diverted to other cities) and no bird life. For some reason, the usually ubiquitous seagulls who can be found fouling Darling Harbour 24/7 (it's true - seagulls don't seem to sleep in Sydney) were elsewhere. There were however dozens of joggers - far more than usual, most likely because of the City 2 Surf in two weekends time, which also happens to be my next race. Actually I felt mixed emotions at seeing them. On the one hand I was jealous - it was a beautiful, serene morning because of the fog and an idyllic location for a run - but on the other hand I felt smug in knowing I'd already done all I needed to do for the race and was more than ready for it.
Leaving the harbour and heading into Ultimo where I work, the fog was still thick and the tall buildings eerily invisible, including my own place of employ, the only part visible from this distance being the scrolling Times Square-style news ticker feed facing the rail corridor. Through an underpass of the same rail corridor there were fresh posters advertising visits by Mumford & Sons, Snow Patrol and Slipknot, a reminder again of how Sydney was big enough that major acts visit here all too frequently and barely raise a blip on our muscial consciousness. In my home town of Hobart, a visit by any those bands would be front page news and have the town abuzz. Here it seems to mean hardly anything and I'm struck by the dichotomy of it.
And so to w*rk. My employment, it must be said, has been unusually wretched in recent months, thanks to a micro-managing demonic agent of change brought in as our department's new manager just over six months ago. Not that we are opposed to change, but change for the sake of change, with no explanation, logic, rhyme or reason will always stir up resistance, and that has been the case of late, to such an extent that it has involved two unions and at least one lawyer to date. Currently we are in a kind of stalemate as management seek easier fish to fry, but the day of showdown is looming.
Normally I am very good at disassociating work from real life, and it is still true that I don't dwell on work matters. I have, for example, no trouble at all getting to sleep at night. However the really annoying thing is that work now impinges on my dreams to such an extent that I find myself waking up maybe a dozen times a night because I have been dreaming about work, which invariably forces me awake. Combined with my cholesterol-lowering medication which has the delightful side-effect of causing night sweats, I am currently somewhat more than usually sleep-deprived.
Now I am not the kind of person to dwell on negatives. There's always a silver lining to any cloud and so I find myself thinking thus: if work is going to cause me such anguish I can at least use it as a form of training in that if I can struggle through the mental torment of industrial disputes, it must surely help prepare me for those moments of anguish in endurance running. It certainly gives one a steely resolve to see the matter through and if not win, at least give the buggers a fight they'll remember.
Added to this is the fact that I work very long hours (12 hours 40 minutes is the standard shift), and on those days in my current state of fuggishness I do not run. While I only work three or four days per week, I have the further constraint of being under orders from my miracle-working physio to not run on consecutive days - a constraint that has definitely helped my recovery from hard runs and kept me free of significant injury thus far this year. The upshot now though is that I can run only twice per week, and therefore really have to make both runs count. Which of course means lots of miles and much hill climbing.
Anyway, back to my day. I do love my job, which is in the main radio control centre for the government broadcaster. It's a crazy nerve centre of a place, sometimes dull, often ticking over nicely, but more than just occasionally erupting into almighty chaos as some disaster or other engulfs us. I actually thrive in a crisis and so it's those times I enjoy most - and as broadcasting gets ever more complex, we have more and more such times, which is fine by me. There's nothing I like more than being confronted with a desperate situation and have to get things back in working order again asap. As I say, all good mental training for endurance running, too. Anyway this particular day had only modest disasters so it was not too taxing - I even managed to get out at lunch time for a brain-cleansing 4km walk through and around Darling Harbour again, which is always worth doing.
One of the things we do as a sideline is to look after VIPs (politicians, authors, actors, academics etc.) who come in for interviews with radio stations interstate and overseas. Sometimes these get messy and complicated with circuits not booked or missing, schedules and time zones confused, interviews that run over their allocated time, and circuits simply not working as they should. And today I got a hug from a gorgeous blonde Hollywood film actress after calmly negotiating her through a series of interviews that didn't all go according to plan but which were ultimately successfully completed. That always puts a positive spin on a bad day, although later I did have to quickly explain to Mrs MLCM why I smelled of expensive perfume and had a soppy grin on my face.
And so the day at work went pretty well, rather like a good long run - tough work but it feels great to get to the end intact and having had some positive moments along the way. After work it was straight down to Darling Harbour again to meet Mrs MLCM and a close friend who was leaving Sydney after several months work here. Several bottles of decent red later I finally hit the hay for a decent night's kip... or so I hoped.
Today.
So it's 2 a.m. and I've woken with a raging thirst and a throbbing head ... a wretched hangover that didn't even have the courtesy to let me wake at a reasonable hour. Suffice to say the rest of the night was spent fighting a losing battle to get some rest. It was not a good night and I felt and looked lousy, as if we'd been drinking cheap Bulgarian rocket fuel all night rather than the dignified, classy reds we paid through the nose for.
However. If there's one thing I've learnt too many times before, running with a hangover is not such a bad thing. Somewhat counter-intuitively, hung-over runs often turn out to be rip-snorters. My theory about this is that if you persist for the first 20 - 30 minutes you invariable sweat out whatever toxins are making you feel crook, and the rest is merely a matter of re-hydration. You then emerge on the other side of the hangover feeling utterly fantastic.
Such was today's run. Although it was 10:30 in the morning before I found the courage to hit the treadmill, I did feel determined enough to attempt my scheduled 90-minute hill climb, accompanied today in a moment of strangeness by Ace of Base's Greatest Hits. And I have to say, after 30 minutes of careful plodding and hydrating, I felt fabulous and completed a 15km uphill run in negative splits and in top form. Talk about a transformation!
And so now, even though I may be restricted to two runs per week, I am confident it's sufficient to run both a marathon and a good time in the P2P this year. I am hopeful of entering the Sydney Marathon in mid-September, and will get another couple of very long runs tucked away over the coming weeks in case it works out that way. If however work intervenes and I can't compete on the day, I'll run the distance anyhow as a training run sometime in September or October.
So despite the torment of work, missed training days and self-induced alcohol poisoning, this is a very positive time in the running life of MLC Man. I look forward to bringing you more tales of employment angst, rocket fuel and mountain running in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned, race fans!
Track du Jour: Ace of Base's Greatest Hits album turned out to perhaps be somewhat better for a spin class than a long slowie, but appropriately perhaps, this song about being hypnotised seemed just right for the treadmill...
15.11 km, 99 minutes at 2% incline.
YTD: 845.8km
|
Dry July? No! Why?
