Run? Must in August.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

A beautiful day here in Sydney today - spring is not far away and you northern hemisphere RCers must be shivering in anticipation of another long, cold hard winter ahead. And serve you right for beating us at cricket.

No but seriously it was such a stunning still and sunny winter's day that I had no choice but to don the running shorts and hit the trail for a serious run. Bored with the usual targets and set routes though I decided to be a little different and wired myself up to the mp3-thingy witrh the aim of running through an entire album. So, without watch, GPS or heart rate monitor I took off in the company of Slippery When Wet and had a whale of a time.

I thought this would be a sort of fartlek, adjusting my pace to suit the music but it ended up being a tempo run, gradually building up to the point where I was actually belting along at what must have been better than 5km PB pace to the appropriately named final track Wild In The Streets. Clearly my mediocre short runs (and there have been precious few of those in recent weeks) have kept me in better form than I thought.

I might have hit upon something here. An album (classic 60s-80s music at least) is just the right length for a decent 5 - 6km (maybe 7km?) hit out. Any other suggestions for running albums?

Album du Jour: Slippery When Wet - Bon Jovi, 1986
Track du Jour: Wild In The Streets





P.S. Today also happened to be the 40th running of the annual City to Surf 14km fun run here in Sydney. Labelled the "world's biggest fun run" it attracted over 80,000 entrants... I don't know about you, but as much as I would like to run it some day, that kind of crowd is just a tad daunting.