Gut bust August.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

It's another cold winter's morning. It's not exactly freezing, but in the colder pockets around the area there is ice on the windscreens of cars, so it is definitely cooler than it has been of late. I am up an hour earlier than I need to be thanks to my old pal, insomnia. It is in fact 4:30 a.m. and I'm half-way through my scheduled 5km plod and therefore nicely warmed up. My speed is slow however as the cold air has made me wheeze, causing me to curse my lack of forethought in not using my asthma inhaler before heading off.  My resultant shallow, wheezy breathing has caused almost continuous side stitches which aren't yielding to the usual remedies. The run is not too taxing however so I just take my time and try to enjoy the serenity of the quiet suburban streets.

It's almost a relief to be running in the middle of the night again. In recent years these early hours have become easily my favourite ones in which to run. I simply love the solitude of the otherwise normally busy streets of my local suburbs, and the endorphins and general feel-good smugness of completing an early run certainly sets me up for the day ahead. In recent weeks it has been all about the night shfit which curtailed these early jogs completely. I've finished with the graveyard stints for a month or so though, and so the early run is well and truly back on the training agenda.

With this year's Point To Pinnacle now definitely off the calendar I am free to run for the simple health-giving goodness of it without the pressure of a training regime to complete, so these early runs are a positive joy just now, even at these ridiculously early hours. Hopefully with the return of decent, overall fitness my insomnia wil also clear up somewhat and I can return to a relatively sane, properly rested lifestyle again. Time alone will tell in that regard.

So just a modest, slow, wheezy and stitch-addled 5.3km completed this morning, but what a joy to be back on the sterets again. The inconvenience of the early cold starts are as nothing compared to the uplifting mood it gives me. Even now, tired and yawning at the other end of the day, I feel bloody glad to have made the effort once again.

Of course, the Rio Olympics currently add another layer of motivation. They may be a whole cosmos away from me in terms of talent and ability, but there's still some incentive to be gained by watching athletes achieve what most of us can hardly dream of. Now if I could just triple my speed and octuple my distance, I could be right up there, mixing it with the Kenyans in the marathon...

Meh, who needs it. My morning plods are enough for now.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

A Sydney disbeliever writes:

I can't believe I'm doing this...

That was my first waking thought as I sat up in bed, smashed off the alarm and swung my feet out onto the bedroom floor. The air was cold; damn cold. It was not even 5 a.m. and far more sensible people than I were still warm and toasty in bed asleep. They were not, as I was now doing, changing into running gear and hitting the streets after a long, hard week on a cold, bitter morning. Yet there I was, stumbling out the door and wondering if I had my running top on back to front or not and unsure as to whether it even mattered.

As I headed out into the dark, the 'I can't believe I'm doing this' thought stayed with me, etched into the hard, stone-like substance substituting for a brain as I pounded down the lanes and avenues around my home in the pre-dawn icy gloom.

I was a good 2km into my run before I began to feel even slightly human again. As I slowly came alive the sense of disbelief only grew, but also with it came a determination to finish the run, alongside a resignation that, yes, I may as well push on now that I was apparently out there. I slowed down, took my time and completed the requisite number of kilometers, along with half-completing this blog in my head. Not a bad effort for such a morning, or so I thought.

It was a court appearance, or rather, the aftermath of a court appearance that got me out there again this morning on a day when my exhausted brain just needed a break from such exertion. I don't make a habit of appearing in court - such things are mentally draining and stressful, no matter how well prepared you are. Yesterday was a simple matter, and I expected it to be over in thirty minutes ... which just goes to show how naive I am about such things as it actually took nearly five times as long. It was a strange affair, with the presiding judge appearing by video link from Melbourne, nearly 900 kilometres away while the rest of us, complainants and defendants all sat side by side in the pine-paneled light and airy court room on the eleventh floor of a government building with fine views to the south of Sydney. It was, it must be said, a little surreal.

By contrast my first ever appearance in a court room was a thoroughly different affair. It was 33 years ago, in an ancient, dark and sombre windowless magistrate's court that looked like something straight out of Gormenghast. Well actually, it wasn't quite my first time there. I had been there once before that, sitting on the media bench as a hack (and very temporary) journalist gathering inconsequential stories about drink driving offences and the like. Most of my time on that occasion had been spent trying to decipher the initials and names of previously bored-to-death reporters who had carved them into the woodwork between cases... Ken Gourlay, Steve Earling and Nicholas Webster were all there years before me, their penknife attacks on the timber plain to see and who were now star reporters for their various local media outlets. Rather than those long forgotten court cases, it made a far greater impression on me to learn that that many senior journalists had long before sat there on the same hardwood bench as I learning their craft. Or not, as the depth of carving seemed to suggest. It's even stranger now to think it was even possible to take a pen-knife into a court room in those days. How the world has changed.

My appearance there as a defendant early in 1983 was a vastly more dramatic affair, and resulted in me being led from the court in handcuffs, cheered and photographed by a crowd of supporters who had assembled out the front, there being no room left in the public gallery. On that occasion, it was a simple matter of political protest, and perhaps a tale for another book sometime, but brought to mind by its contrast to yesterday's bright and almost cheerful looking yet hi-tech courtroom which sadly had no cheering crowd of supporters outside or indeed anywhere.

The details of yesterday's court appearance are dull by comparison, but afterwards our lawyer quietly warned that even though we had won our case, it may yet come back to bite us. The case concerned flexible working arrangements for people with medical ailments. Our employer had been providing accommodating requests for a privileged few but refusing to allow the majority access to those arrangements or even explain the criteria used when applying them. The court order changed that, but the lawyer did say that a flood of such requests could cause our management to change tack and throw out all such arrangements, which they are entitled to do. The warning from the lawyer was that if we made a request on medical grounds, they would then have ammunition to throw us out of our jobs on the grounds that we were medically unfit, and so it becomes a double-edged sword.

Tedious as these details are, it is the sole reason I managed to drag myself onto the streets again this morning, when all my body wanted was extra rest. If I am to continue in my present job for another ten years or so, the physical and mental demands on my body as a result of rotating shifts in a demanding environment mean I have to be as fit as possible to ward off the disease and illnesses that inevitably results from such work. Every medico I have spoken with has warned me about this, and I have little reason to doubt it as all of us in my work group have ailments that I consider premature considering our ages.

And so I ran. After those first couple of wretched early kilometres it did seem to me that I was running a little better than my earlier efforts this week, but I'm still as slow. I'm probably running slower now than I ever have, and the fitness is taking much, much longer to return. Maybe it's age, maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's a lack of a proper holiday for over twelve months now, or a combination of things. Whatever the cause, I don't like it, but it's comforting to know I can still do something about it so long as I don't get hung up too much on details such as pace and distance.

Winning a court case is like taking 20 steps forward and 19 back. One questions whether it's worth the effort, except experience shows that to do nothing yields an even greater number of backward steps with no compensating forward movement, and so yes, you have to fight on regardless. And running is perhaps not so very different. It's worth it, even when it doesn't seem so.

But man, it's hard getting out of bed.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Running with His Excellency.

There was an interesting little story tucked away in one of the weekend papers recently. Australia's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, His Excellency The Honourable Alexander Downer was dining at Roka, a Japanese establishment in Aldwych, just off The Strand in London and an easy stroll across the road from his office at the Australian High Commission. As their Spanish waiter turned and left them, his dining companion nonchalantly asked who he thought would be left to wait on diners after Brexit. His Excellency looked grave and replied that he was afraid London's pubs and restaurants would soon become 'self-serve' only. He had, it must be said, consumed a sizeable portion of sauvignon blanc by this stage and he was of course being facetious, but possibly as a portent it contains an element of truth (I should perhaps add that Mr Downer was a notable advocate for the 'Remain'  campaign).
 
I actually met the Honourable Mr Downer a handful of times back in the late '90s when he was the Minister for Foreign Affairs here in Australia. He resided then, as I did, in Adelaide, albeit he in a renowned family mansion and myself in a far more modest abode. Despite his privileged upbringing, he was (and I presume remains) a pretty down to earth character. More than once, having completed an end-of-day radio interview from the guest interview booth at the broadcast centre where I worked he would emerge shaking his head and muttering dark oaths about 'those bastard journalists' before asking if he could chill in my control room for a while to 'unwind'. He would then help himself to a mug of our government-issue instant coffee and sit down, contentedly humming to himself or making small talk for 15 minutes before rushing off to his government car and doubtless more affairs of state.

Although I had already formulated my theory of 'inverse humanity' about politicians by then, which is that the more you despise a politician for their politics, the more likely they are to be a very decent, approachable human being, the charming and disarming Alex Downer cemented it for me. A thoroughly likeable chap, he was none-the-less not of the political persuasion I could ever vote for and made, I thought, a terrible foreign minister. Not that the rest of the country seemed to agree with me, as he held the post for well over a decade.

It was his habit of making off-the-cuff quips such as the one in Roka that sometimes got him into trouble, and which quite possibly prevented him from becoming Prime Minister, not that a decade as Foreign Affairs Minister and now his role as High Commissioner to the U.K. isn't a bad consolation prize of course.

In stark contrast there are no consolation prizes of any sort for me just at the moment. My early morning runs continue, but the benefits remain far from view. The bathroom scales reveal the ugly truth that my vital statistics; weight, body fat percentages etc., are still headed in the wrong direction. I've reached the conclusion there's little for it but to get a bit more serious about my drinking and diet. A week off the booze would probably be a good start, so let's see if I can't recalibrate some internal calorie burning with a touch of abstinence.

I would say that my effort on the streets today did feel just a little easier, although my pace remains as slow as ever. I will just have to persist and doubtless the benefits will soon enough flow. But I do have to stick at it, and probably start throwing in some longer runs as well.

This of course has very little to do with ambassadors or Brexit or anything much at all, really. But it is the fine threads that connect us and everything together, and the story of Downer making off-hand remarks about waiters in the wake of Brexit piqued my interest. That a simple cup of instant coffee should connect His Excellency, a Spanish waiter in a London Japanese restaurant and my unearthly early morning plods in suburban Sydney fascinates me. And it neatly skirts around the fact that my running just now contains very little that is of interest.

Never mind, it's what I think about when I run, so it's all part and parcel of the sport.

Sushi, anyone?

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Positive vibes, man.

We have had some seriously beautiful weather here in recent days. It is still cool at night, but the days are nothing short of glorious. Warm, but not hot, and sunny. The early signs of spring are in the air, but with none of the humidity or insect life that so often conspire to ruin the otherwise wonderful summer that's soon to come. Given that we still have two official weeks of winter left, this early spring teaser is both pleasant and very surprising. Perhaps there's an underlying stern confirmation of global warming inherent in it, but for now I'm taking it at face value and just trying to enjoy it.

I say I'm trying to, because of course, on these rare and precious days when one should just say 'to hell with everything!', and get out there and enjoy all that climate change has to give, I am instead consigned to the dark satanic mill that is my workplace and so still yet I have to run in the dark anonymous pre-dawn murk.

Oh, woe is me.

Well, in fact, no. The reason I don't acknowledge that the cosmos will continue on regardless even if I decided to skip work for a day and should therefore do so, is this: the height of my insanity is becoming ever more stratospheric as I actually look forward to and enjoy these super-early outings. As I am often wide awake by 4 a.m. in any case, it is really little trouble to get up and go running, rather than tossing and turning, thinking only of the day ahead and wondering how long I have until the alarm goes off. That the run and the endorphin buzz it produces sets me up for another day when not even the nihilistic, psychopathic overlords of my work can upset me makes missing out on the weather much easier to bear.

There is also good news and further motivation in that I have turned that first, important comeback corner. Weight and flab have both suddenly turned in the right direction, and my pace and distance run have also taken a positive leap. I covered a comfortable 8km yesterday morning at a slightly quicker pace, and this despite stopping twice for 'technical shoe adjustments', i.e. my sock was scrunched uncomfortably in the toe end of my left plod box. It has taken much longer than usual to recover some of my loosely called 'form' but now I seem to be, if not crunching it, at least sneaking up on it and stealing the ball occasionally.

Over the years my numerous returns to the running fold following a lapse are rarely well constructed, and this one is no exception, but at least progress can be seen, and I intend to build upon it. Perhaps there won't be any great race goal as such for a while, but there are constant reminders now as I approach 55 years of age that this is important. Just two days ago at work a colleague succumbed to a stroke at the age of just 66 whilst on the job. He loves his work, and though he survived the stroke his chances of returning to the career he loves seems now to be greatly diminished. He is not an unfit man, and it just serves to remind that life is fickle. Maybe running in the pre-dawn hours won't change the inevitable, but I'm pretty sure it has to help. And as the weather improves, so it becomes easier. I'd be a fool to ignore the opportunity.

Erm...