Week zero?
Well, yes. The 'official' 16-week training program doesn't start until next Monday (Christmas Eve, and that's a rest day of course!) but I want to start on a good footing and so haven't been lazing around too much, and this week I do start to get a little serious about not missing runs and getting my weekly mileage up to the 50km mark or thereabouts.
And so I was up at 5 a.m for an early run with No. 1 son Chris. He only had time for a 10km or so before work, but I thought I'd tag along and then add another 6km or so at the end. To be honest the first few kilometres were very ragged, but after 4 or 5km I started to warm to my task and it was a good run in the end. Plenty of hills to keep me honest and a beautiful morning for running, so whilst it was hard yakka at the time, the
apres-run glow of ruddy good health makes it all worthwhile. And it's another decent run in the log book.
Apart from the great weather the only real thing of note from the run was the amount of wildlife now evident in the suburbs. Rabbits are now in near-plague numbers, impossible to count, and
brush turkeys - a particularly stupid and large native turkey are in rapidly increasing numbers as well and are so panic-stricken but inept at getting out of your way that there's a constant threat of being tripped up by the damn things.
More interesting last night was my first ever sighting of a
marsupial mouse hiding in a moraya tree in our backyard. These apparently used to be quite common in Sydney's suburbs many years ago but were wiped out by suburban sprawl and particularly an abundance of cats. Well there are now very few cats in our area - in fact I can't recall seeing a single one in the last three years - and so hopefully that means the native fauna is staging something of a comeback.
There's an obvious segue there to running, but I'll let it pass.
17.18km, 1h46:21
YTD: 1,390.4km
P.S. On the treadmill front, the previously hopeful news of a resurrection has to be tempered somewhat. The patient had a secondary heart failure whilst on the operating table and it now looks far more uncertain that
Infiniti can be revived. I await further news with bated breath.
Deadish December 2012
