Long March Rocket

[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.