Schleptember

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

schlep
verb: go or move reluctantly or with effort.
noun: a tedious or difficult journey.

And so another Olympics have come and gone, with this one, Rio, being the 13th instalment of the Summer Games that I can honestly say I remember. Being from a warmer climate I haven’t paid nearly so much attention to the Winter Games (although that has changed in recent years), but I have always looked forward to each edition of the main event. I may have been vaguely aware as a three year old of Tokyo Games of 1964, but it was Mexico in ’68 where the Olympics first made a meaningful impact on me, and really it was not until the Munich Games of ’72 that I remember significant detail in any great measure.

Of course ’72 is infamous for the massacre of eleven members of the Israeli team by Black September terrorists, but notable too for the astonishing Olga Korbut and of course Mark Spitz, who rather overshadowed another remarkable swimmer, the 15 year old Shane Gould from Australia, who won five medals in the pool, three of them gold. This I remember very well of course. 1972 was also the last time an American won the marathon, in this instance it being Frank Shorter. Interestingly, his winning time of 2h12m12s would only have been good enough for 10th place in this year’s event.

 

Not so many years later the Olympics would take on new meaning for me as I took up my career in broadcasting, the Olympic Games being of course one of the most significant and demanding events for any broadcaster to cover. Every four years therefore saw a massive effort undertaken to cover the Games in a fitting manner as had come to be expected. This usually entailed sending an ever larger team of commentators and technicians, with the broadcast teams growing in size through the years as the complexities and technical capabilities grew along with the event itself. Meanwhile, back at base the enormous task of disbanding regular programmes for the large and ever-changing Olympic schedule was a forbidding challenge. When done well it left the audience oblivious to the frantic machinery churning away underneath  which was required to keep the Games on air. Because of the work involved and the significance of it, a good Olympic Games coverage was always a rewarding and memorable experience. The only time since the 1984 Los Angeles games that I wasn’t in some way involved in its broadcasting was in 2000, when I took time off to take the family to the Sydney games.

The continuous growth of the challenge of broadcasting the Olympics however took a very dramatic turn this time around, as technology stepped in and quite literally removed the need for large teams of commentators and technicians to travel to the host city at all. Instead, here in Australia a corner of an anonymous facility in an inner Sydney suburb was transformed into a rather secret remote viewing centre. The recent global expansion of high speed bandwidth, plus a drastic lowering of cost and higher reliability meant that for the first time ever commentators could sit back at home and call the events off multiple high-definition screens, with enough camera angles available to them to give the impression they were sitting at the actual event, instead of in a temporary facility 13,500 kilometres away. This concept was inevitable I suppose, but it’s bizarre to think that in a few short decades we’ve moved from vision having to be flown home on film by plane through the expensive and limited analogue satellite era to the point now where digital broadband circuits are so cheap we can bring back dozens of high definition vision channels for such little cost that we now barely consider the cost of it at all. Airfares, and accommodation on the other hand… It’s definitely a watershed time in the life of technology, with remote control of everything becoming the new norm. Of course, as with most things, the military got there first, and have already moved on from remote control, with fully autonomous drones about to change the face of warfare, but that’s another story.

Futurists and technology pundits have long been saying that the communications revolution we are now undergoing will be far more significant and have a far greater rate of change than the industrial revolution did, and I think it’s now pretty obvious that we can take that as a given. 

Just as the industrial revolution brought about machinery that automated many labour-intensive, repetitive tasks, so the communications revolution is automating many of the intellectual tasks we do today. Before I began working in broadcasting, I worked for a year and a half in a bank. Back then (1979) teller machines were only just being mooted, and computers were still tucked away in secure rooms and run by boffins with high level security clearance. Everything else was done by hand. In one of the smaller branches in which I worked we even still hand posted the ledger. If you can imagine that, it seems ridiculous today. You’d come into our bank, and deposit say a cheque. I, as the teller, would receive your cheque and a deposit slip, bang a rubber stamp on it and give you back a stub acknowledging the deposit to your account. The cheque and the deposit slip would then go out to the back room where a large leather-bound volume would have hand-written into it the deposit details and the new balance. If you left town and wanted to make a withdrawal from your account, you would need to go into another of our branches (and they were only open from 10 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon back then) and they would have to phone us to check the balance of your account. If you wanted to do any multiple transactions or serious business with your account whilst out of town, you would need the branch manager to pre-arrange access to your account at another branch. Hard to believe, isn’t it? And that was only 37 years ago. Now we transact our accounts from anywhere in the world on our phones without even thinking about it, unless you’re in Italy of course, where nothing to do with banks or money seems to work particularly well.  

All those people that enabled us back then to very slowly make financial transactions (including myself as a then-spotty faced teenage bank teller) have been replaced by computerised systems that make the process instant, generally error-free and without the need to engage in small talk with fumbling teenage bank clerks.

Automation is fine for repetitive functions such as stamping out screwdriver blades or processing financial transactions. However when you try to force automation on a process that is inherently malleable and requires flexibility and dynamism, much of the actual functionality of that process is lost, along with the jobs of potentially a great many people. We are entering an era where seemingly too many managers are being tasked with the job of bringing long established but apparently now dated areas of productivity and expertise into the 21st century, and that means shoving everything down a fibre optic pipe and having it managed by a piece of autonomous software, or better yet an app on an iPhone. And the rate of change is now so rapid that few take the time to consider what really needs to be done, and how best to do it well.

The area where I work is a prime example. I freely admit it is a bit of a Heath Robinson affair, with multifarious systems cobbled together over many years as needs and wants and methods have changed, without any real thought as to how to integrate everything efficiently. However, it amazingly really does work and actually produces everything we need it to. But undoubtedly, if you redesigned it from scratch it could be made far more efficient.

Instead, and in great secrecy, a team of supposed experts have drafted a tender document for a single piece of software to tie all the unwieldy bits and pieces of actual equipment together all across the country. And with this, they hope to eliminate the need for human involvement almost entirely. It’s as if they’ve been given a box of Technics Lego, and instead of creating the intricate, beautifully engineered apparatus with motors and gears and lights that flash, they’ve thrown out all the interesting stuff and built a single cube of one colour. Efficient yes, but hardly effective. And yet they believe this one cube will be everything that everyone wants it to be.

Actually, I use the Lego analogy for a reason. Not so many years ago, when our corporate leaders were trying to be especially new age and attempting to reach out to the employees for ideas, they had a totally left-field brain fart. With great fanfare and pride they announced that they had set aside a corner of the staff cafeteria and installed a table with huge pile of plain white Lego bricks there and invited all staff to build with them anything at all that they felt inspired to as they considered the future and the direction that we, as a national broadcaster, should take. After a week the idea was quietly shelved as the pile lay completely untouched other than the not insignificant percentage stolen and taken home for the kids.

 

It’s this lack of basic understanding of the concept of human endeavour that makes me fearful not just for my job, but for the future in general, and I don’t just mean the field of broadcasting. Doubtless it will sort itself out in the end (that might take a generation or two), but the current crop of tyro-leaders seem to have about as much of a grip on what needs to be done as I do about Madagascan beetle sexing. They do seem to think everything to do with broadcasting, i.e. all the intricate processes and systems can be reduced to a single app. They don’t seem to understand that a complex system is exactly that, and cannot be reduced to an app or even a series of apps on a phone, no matter how sexy they think it might look on their CV.

The single most useful thing I learnt in my time studying computers and such stuff at university (yeah, believe it or not I did) was that the vital element of any process or system was that the person using or initiating it must feel in control,  or as the text books put it, ‘the locus of control must remain with the end user’. Whether it be an aircraft carrier or a simple app on your mobile phone, if you don’t feel you in complete control of it, it simply cannot function effectively. This golden rule seems lost on those designing our future.

And so to schlep.

As I’ve written before, the difficulty of the shift-working life is that I don’t feel in control of my physical well-being. The rigours of rotating shift work and the demands on one’s body make any sort of routine impossible, and without a supreme effort of will the discipline required for serious running is very hard to find. And so I schlep about from one race to the next, losing motivation, finding it again and so on. In both senses of the word, noun and verb, I find myself neatly defined by this one rather exceptional word.

My next race goal was to be Almeria, a delightful town I’ve visited just once, and then regrettably without running there at all. A trip away with the chance to run the half marathon with the gang from RC would have been an extraordinary joy. The agents of change at my place of employment however, with their tunnel vision and Lego brick mentality, have made prudence necessary. Whilst they have little to no chance of achieving their aims within their stated timeframe, they are the kind of managers who will, as soon as the ink is dry on the contract they sign with the software providers, likely reclassify our positions and begin a Hunger Games approach to staff reduction; i.e. sack everyone and invite them to reapply for the fewer and lower-paid positions they create in their place. They make no secret, at least verbally, of the fact that they believe our environment requires young, 21st century tech-savvy types and that there is no longer any place for us ‘old guard’. Old guard? I’m only 54 for Christ’ sake! Although it is true I don’t really ‘get’ Apple logic, I hardly think that’s the point.

A difficult and tedious journey indeed it is, but sadly not one to include Almeria just yet. All significant travel has been postponed for the moment until we see what transpires with my employment.

May we at least run a few miles yet and watch a few Olympics events along the way.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Digesting in the waiting room.

Sitting in my doctor’s waiting room the other week I despaired at the pile of magazines sitting on the table in the middle. It was the usual mind-numbing stuff of very little interest, and the dog-eared corners were in any case probably laden with the germs of dozens of the infirmed. The whole concept seemed geared toward generating more business for the doctors by re-infecting the patients with the illnesses of all the other patients whilst lowering their morale and therefore immune systems by simultaneously creating despondency and despair through earth-shattering magazine articles about stars I’ve never heard of on weight-loss programmes I also hadn’t heard of that looked about as convincing as Donald Trump winning a ‘good citizen of the world’ award.

I mean, there wasn’t even a single copy of Reader’s Digest. Don’t people read that anymore? I still see it for sale in supermarkets, so people must be buying it, but it certainly isn’t as ubiquitous as it was in my youth, when everyone read the latest editions at home, then re-visited them some months later in waiting rooms all across the country. One of the best sections of the good old Reader’s Digest was of course ‘Laughter, The Best Medicine’ which is presumably the reason why it found its way into doctor’s waiting rooms in the first place. This was a section of short, funny jokes designed to make you at least chuckle if not actually laugh out loud and one of the first sections I turned to. These days it all seems a bit lame, but back then it was good, clean fun.

Another popular section was ‘Life’s Like That’ with more short stories designed to illustrate the absurdity or just general strangeness of life at times. Some things really are just difficult to explain, among them my recent about-face on Almeria. I mean, life really is genuinely mysterious and wonderful at times, and just when you think the horse has bolted from the stable, you find that all along he was just having a kip in his stall and is now feisty, fine and raring to go. In the same manner has been the story of Almeria and my participation in its Medio Maraton along with a large RC contingent next February. One day I’ve all but written off any chance of being there and the next I’m just about ready to book flights and start a serious training program.

Can I explain what happened? No, not really. Quite suddenly two seemingly insurmountable difficulties just evaporated overnight and I’m still somewhat flabbergasted at what happened and how it happened. But then, sometimes it’s the mysteries of life that make it so enjoyable, and so I’ll just leave it at that.

But there is the small matter of training. With a little over 21 weeks to go, there is tons of time. I’m not off to a great start however, with an extended batch of night shifts making week 1 of this campaign difficult. But it will happen. If I’m to travel 17,589 kilometres to Almeria (isn’t Google wonderful for looking up this sort of thing?), it’s not going to be to just totter around the course smiling and waving at the crowds. It will of course be a memorable occasion anyway, but let’s make it more so by at least putting in a fair effort.

I haven’t been this excited by a race in a long time. It’s going to be fantastic!

  

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

The Great Almeria Trek Begins.

My usual practice when beginning a new campaign is to rule a line under my training log to signify a fresh start. I then draw up a training schedule and devise a few rules; resolutions, if you like. These typically include declarations such as not skipping runs just because I'm working a night shift; eating better; working seriously on core strength; and drinking more water and less alcohol, although admittedly I all too often get that last one the wrong way round.

This time it's a little different. I've drawn an especially thick line under the training log and left the schedule blank. Huh? Why leave it blank? Well, simple really. Almeria is of course a fine event, but a half marathon does not need the training to be brutal, merely consistent. Flogging myself mercilessly under the crushing weight of 60 to 70 kilometres per week, with hill reps, tempo runs, speed sessions and 30km long runs is just not necessary as it would be for the full marathon distance or a Point to Pinnacle. Sure, if I want to set a PB those things would help, but the risk of injury would be far higher. So whilst I'll certainly aim for a steady 30 - 35km per week with enough long runs thrown in to keep myself honest, I'll not seriously fill out the schedule with a strict training regime until we're getting to the danger zone of the last few weeks.

I've decided that above all else, this is going to be fun; that's the priority. The simple enjoyment of running without the pressure of a tough schedule, yet knowing it will be enough to complete the race in a tolerably reasonable time and showing pretty good form is all I really need. The presence of so many other running friends will make this event a seriously special occasion already without the need to hurt myself running impossibly fast Yasso 800s or too many insidious hill climbs.

So with around five months of preparation time, how best to start this thing? Well of course the best idea is to simply crack on with it. With that in mind, this afternoon saw me head off on my first Almeria training run, and it was a genuinely happy experience. It was nothing more than a simple 5km training log filler of no great note except that it felt bloody brilliant to know I was finally on the road to Almeria. This has been a very long time coming. After twelve years of reading so many Almeria race reports, and then visiting there for the first time whilst on holiday last year, now I have at long last begun an actual Almeria Medio Maraton campaign.

I may only be in first gear yet with the clutch still not even fully released, but I'm under way. After years and years of wanting this to happen, it's finally here.

Good times!

I'm on it.

[Charliecat5]

You are starting to worry me with all this talk about training.  I hadn’t even considered a training plan, or programme, or weekly targets or indeed doing anything materially different to what is my normal pattern.  I.e. running up and down hills trying to avoid a coronary thrombosis. 

Additionally, from what I am increasingly realising, the training required has little to do with running and much more to do with the ability to sink copious amounts of Rioja.  With this in mind I have created and embarked on a serious programme of training.  Cheers.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Additionally, from what I am increasingly realising, the training required has little to do with running and much more to do with the ability to sink copious amounts of Rioja. 

A friend asked what I'd spend on a decent bottle of Rioja. I said, 'I guess about half an hour.'

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Premier League Down Under

I am a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to television. I don't have cable or pay TV as I naively and incorrectly believe that the 25 or so free to air channels ought to be enough. Our main TV set is now so old we honestly couldn't give it away. The big problem with this equation comes with the viewing of sport. Most televised sport here is now relegated to pay TV, and so the situation becomes for me untenable. Because of my very eclectic tastes it also means I would have to subscribe to virtually every subscription service out there to have the full range of options that I would want in the course of a sporting year. This causes me not inconsiderable angst at times, most particularly during cricket season, but it applies to just about every sport, very very few of which can be watched in their entirety on free to air channels.

Take as an example English Premier League football. Noticing that Man U and Man City are set to play each other this coming weekend I thought that it would be a match worth watching. Also aware however that the free to air network that until this season had the broadcast rights here had now lost them, I had go to searching for my options. They were, it must be said, less than satisfactory.

The EPL rights in Australia have been bought by the telecommunications outfit Optus. Even though I use Optus for my mobile phone service, this does not allow me to watch the games. Instead I have to fork out an extra $15 per month on top of my already horrendous mobile phone plan just for the right to watch any of the EPL matches. But it doesn't end there. Obviously I don't want to watch them on my tiny mobile phone. I would of course much rather watch them on my nice big (albeit very old) television. However, as I said, it is so old that it doesn't have anything as whizz bang as Wi-Fi or any form of network interface or digital anything at all. in other words, I can't connect it to the Optus service even if I did pay for it.

I could watch it online, but only if I pay the additional $15 per month, and being the tight wad that I am I refuse to do so on what I think is the reasonable basis that I already pay Optus a huge sum of money to avail myself of their services, and I resent having to fork out any more. Old fashioned, I know, but that's me.

I resigned myself, or so I thought, to catching up with the match reports on BBC and Premier League websites, but of course their vision is geo-blocked so I can't watch any of the video highlights, post-match interviews and so on here on the other side of the planet. Not being able to watch the vision makes the rest of the web page a little pointless as it assumes you can watch the vision and the articles are written with that understanding. Duh.

Yes, yes, I know I could watch it through a VPN, but they cost a tidy sum for a decent service as well, and by this stage of proceedings I was fed up with the whole process and thought instead I would merely vent my spleen here, among a group of friendly, if not long-suffering readers of my not infrequent rants on such matters.

It did at least remind me rather more happily of my youth, when life was simpler and I was a far more avid fan of English football despite the lack of TV coverage. This fandom was thanks mainly to my father who was a keen follower of his home town side Portsmouth, and my older brother who also actually played the game at (amateur) club level and occasionally would take me to local matches. Way back then of course there were no live football telecasts on TV here at all except for the FA Cup final which required us to get up at 3 or 4 in the morning to huddle around the TV feeling very adventurous. Here in Australia TV was even black and white only until 1974. This was a particular nuisance when two teams with strips of vertical stripes played each other, such as say, Stoke versus Newcastle.

Despite the lack of live telecasts or even full match replays and the restrictions of monochromatic television, we were happy enough with BBC's 'Match Of The Day' each week with the inimitable Jimmy Hill, and the occasional live game (usually involving Pompey) tuned into via shortwave radio (yes, really!). This meagre coverage was supplemented by my own semi-regular purchase of Shoot! magazine, where I avidly followed the fortunes of my team of choice Crystal Palace. I followed Palace only because I liked the name and there was a very loose connection with radio, having been given a crystal set for Christmas one year when still young and impressionable.

Over time the more readily available access to the local code, viz Australian Rules Football, together with cricket and the relatively poor local standard of soccer saw my interest wane. In recent years it revived a little with EPL matches regularly shown live or delayed but at least complete on one of the free to air networks. However with the disappearance of EPL to the difficulties of a mere Telco provider who seems to think they should be in the business of sports broadcasting, I am left in a state of limbo. I might have to eat humble pie and ... no, no, that's not going to happen. I won't pay out yet more money just to watch one code of sport!

I might just have to fire up the short wave radio again ... or perhaps just follow the local football. Sad, but radical!

OK, rant over ... I'll get back to the subject of running tomorrow. Promise!

This is Radio MLCMM, out.

[Charliecat5]

Football, football.  There's football and then what I call proper football.  What am I talking about... well Lewes Football Club obv..  Owned by its fans, it is the home of the real game... not a game tainted by money (it really isn't) nor the egos of overpaid idiot players...  this is were the real action resides.  And you get to drink the local brew on the terraces.  

However, I can extend this ramble further.  If you really want to experience good quality football, then the Lewes Ladies team is exceptional.  Currently 2nd in the table having seen off West Ham and Cardiff and drawn with Cambridge.  Helped along by sponsorship from yours truly and the Big Man.

Not only that, you can tune in each week via the delights of Twitter to the live commentary of @Rookmeister (aka @Sweder) for the action as it happens.  And... you can read his match report afterwards.  All this and it won't cost you a single penny.  

Unless you want to be an owner of the club.  That will cost you £30...

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Is that your sales pitch (no pun intended)? You had me at 'drink the local brew on the terraces'...

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Two cockatoos and magpie.

Surrealism. It's a fascinating subject, but not something you encounter everyday whilst churning out your regular 5km round the local streets. But today I had one of those illuminating moments where the fabric of reality cracked open just a little and allowed me to see the underlying weirdness of the universe. Or maybe I was just overtired from too many night shifts, I'm not sure.

On that matter, let me say that today's run, the second of my Almeria campaign, was very pleasing as I ground it out despite the torment of four consecutive all-nighters. Normally I don't run at all, or at least very rarely when working the graveyard shifts as it's just too difficult, both mentally and physically. However the Yoda discipline is strong with me just at the moment, and I was very pleased to get this little outing completed. And what a day it was too, with the first genuine signs of summer in the air. A pleasant, warm day in the low 20s, with that maddeningly indefinable promise of summer which was lingering, almost tangible all about the place.

Running in the afternoon is not my preferred time of day, especially when working the dreaded nights. It isn't like an early morning, when I can fall out of bed, change into the running togs and head out the door to hit the streets before fully waking until I'm well under way. No, instead waking in the afternoons takes time. The body fails to function properly for a good two hours after waking, and the brain is even less accommodating. So normally by the time I am alert enough to seriously consider running the day is nearly over, and the more pressing necessities of life demand to be done before once again I head off for work and my solitary duties through the night.

Fresh enthusiasm generated by the re-emergence of my participation at Almeria has however enabled me to finish two short, but important runs despite the chloroform-like unconsciousness of my nocturnal vocation. These runs are also helping to verify a report I read in the Australian Medical Journal that exercise prior to a night shift is especially beneficial to rotating shift workers such as myself. It's a little too early to say for sure, but these runs certainly lift my spirits, of that I am certain. Anyway, it was a glorious day for it, although following a wet winter and now a wet start to spring, the local birdlife is already up and at it, which means we have numerous baby birds popping up everywhere, and that in turn means that the magpie 'swooping' season is under way. At this time of the season the apparently Millwall FC-loving male magpies 'protect' their young by swooping anyone that ventures too close to the nest. Actually, being swooped by magpies isn't a problem I suffer from, although Mrs MLCMM does have to take extra care when running or walking the streets when the swooping is 'on'. Magpies are apparently petulant bastards and take a dislike only to certain people. According to research done in this country recently, they can recognise up to a hundred different human faces, and seem to associate certain people with danger for some as yet unknown reason. Those unfortunate people then get swooped, sometimes quite viciously, and children are particularly prone to serious cuts and gouging to the head if they don't take care. In busy areas where the birds are likely to encounter far more than a hundred different people they can instead categorise the people they see, attacking only certain types, and so it turns out that magpies have been using this technique of profiling the people they encounter to determine threat levels since long before Border Security even existed!

As I say, magpies tend to leave me alone, and although I have been swooped by another vicious member of the Australia avian community, the angry and raucous (not to mention nocturnal) spur-winged plover, around my local neighbourhood I am fairly safe from airborne attack. It's true that the local fruit bat community have taken a particular dislike to me, but they tend to just hurl abuse and guano which is easily avoided. I did however see the angry side of a magpie this afternoon on my outing. Its hooliganism wasn't directed at myself but at two far larger and quite different birds, which brings me back to the topic of this missive: surrealism.

John Lennon once said that surrealism had made an impact on him because it gave him the realisation that the imagery in his mind was not insanity as he had previously feared, but simple, valid creativity. Both he and Salvador Dali, that icon of the surrealist movement, felt the imagery of their minds was a completely normal reality and presumably therefore, that the outside world was the absurdity.

In hindsight, the scene I encountered this afternoon seems perhaps just a little humdrum, but at the time it struck me as significant, and as there's nothing else particularly noteworthy about my outing (other than the fact, as already mentioned, that I actually did the sodding thing), I shall tell the story. It was a busy street scene, with late afternoon traffic banked up and people scurrying about with end-of-day purpose and pace. I then stumbled on a scene that was just so strange and bizarre that it struck me as significant, though I fear now, as perhaps John Lennon did at first, that such thinking is just ... mad. Except for one thing; as I shall explain. The scene was a simple one, but somewhat paradoxical. Hopping around on the ground were two cute little baby bunny rabbits, utterly oblivious to the traffic just two metres away from where they played. On the ground just a further two metres to the right of the bunny rabbits was a bizarre fight scene. A feisty magpie was fending off the attack of two much bigger sulphur-crested cockatoos. They were after what the magpie had, which was a dead mouse firmly held within its beak as it tried to ward off the persistent but slightly clumsy cockatoos. It was simultaneously trying to swallow the mouse and take flight, but was having difficulty with either of those things due to the clamouring attention of the cockys.

The really bizarre thing (as if this wasn't strange enough) was the woman standing between them. Standing there transfixed was a statuesque blonde woman of about 30 years of age, wearing a lemon dress. She stood stock still just gazing at the rabbits with utterly no expression. So stony faced was she that I was immediately made to think of the emotionless aliens from the 1960s TV show Invaders. And so the juxtaposition was intense: on one side of the woman/alien in the lemon dress we had the adorable baby bunnies hopping about, and on the other a battle scene between a mouse-in-beak magpie and two querulous cockatoos. All the while the late afternoon rush of a town wanting to get home for Friday pre-dinner drinks swooshed past, myself included. As much as I wanted to stop and try to make sense of the strange scene, I felt like an intruder, and so ran on, puzzled but also delighted to have experienced something at least a little out of the ordinary.

OK so perhaps it was not exactly Salvador Dali or like the weirder parts of Magical Mystery Tour but it's all I have for you today. Oh, there is a possible foot injury to report, but I'll save news of that for tomorrow.

Asparagus butt-clenching furtwangler. Machine-wrapped with butter.

Ciao.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Aunts, trams and televisions.

Long weeks of too many night shifts have depleted me of life's essence. I awake disoriented, knowing only that I was dreaming of a non-existent tram ride from Queenstown on the west coast of Tasmania ... most odd. Not so odd but equally disconcerting was the dry tongue and parched throat recoiling at the drizzle of sawdust that was apparently raining down on it from who knows where. The disorientation I blame on work, but the hangover I blame on my aunt. At 91, she is one of life's sweetest souls. The depth of her sweetness, however, is matched by a fierce independence, so much so that she still lives alone in a huge old house, as it happens just around the corner from us. She's a fine, fine lady, and so last night, when she failed to answer any of the numerous phone calls she usually receives of an evening, we received a concerned call from her sister (my mother-in-law) asking if we could please walk around and check on her. Well, of course. Abandoning our dinner preparations we high-tailed it around to her house to find a most unusual scene. The lights were on and the television unusually turned up full blast so you could easily hear it from the street. There was no answer at the door, and we could hear her phone still ringing constantly. A somewhat concerning scenario, you might say.

Long story short: we 'break' into the house using her hidden key and discover our aunt blissfully asleep in  her armchair in front of the TV, the phone still ringing by her side. It was a simple conundrum; her hearing aid was on the blink and so she had the TV turned up excruciatingly loud so she could hear it, but it was then so loud she didn't hear the phone ringing. She fell asleep, and so the worrying of friends and relatives began as the number of unanswered calls mounted.

We woke her as gently as we could, which is no small matter when she's 91, quite deaf, prone to be a little disoriented, and not expecting to see anyone else in her house. Anyway, no harm was done except to our fish drying out in the oven back home, but she was so embarrassed by it all that she insisted we stay for a drink ... which of course turned into several. I said she was a sweet lady, didn't I?

Then, on returning home to rescue our dinner, we found the fish was so dry that it needed considerable lubrication ... and you get my drift, I'm sure.

That doesn't explain the tram dream, but I'll just have to let that one go through to the 'keeper I think.

Anyway, not one to let an unscheduled hangover get in the way of a scheduled training session, I sweated out my aunt-induced hangover with a nice little tempo run, a little later than I expected, but at least it was done. It was just 6km, but getting right up there into proper training and maybe even moderate race pace for a while. It felt very, very good. Well, at least after the first two kilometres of sweat and pain anyhow.

As a base-building bonus week, it has been a reasonable one. Just 16km were covered, but given I'm working long (50-hour) weeks mainly through the night at the moment, I'm more than happy to be doing any running at all. With another bonus week to come before the slightly more serious 20-week programme to get to Almeria in good form begins, I have every reason to be happy and confident, and I am. This is despite the best efforts of difficult work conditions and hearing-deficient and-generous-with-the-booze aunts, (bless her!)

Oh yes, the possible injury I alluded to in my previous post turned out to be nothing, really. I think it was just some arthritis flaring up in my right foot. At first, it seemed like my old friend plantar fasciitis, but I'm pretty certain by the speed at which it settled down again that it wasn't that.

Right, on with it, then.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Barking mad of Sydney writes...

Gadzooks; only half of what I had planned to run was actually completed this morning. The transition from night shift to early mornings never goes well, and this morning was no exception. With only a little over two hours sleep my arrival on the streets of suburbia at 5 a.m. today in running togs was never going to be memorable.

Sure enough, I barely completed half of my scheduled run before succumbing to the reality of the situation, which was that it was simply madness to be attempting a run when in this condition. I turned tail and fled homeward, feeling pleased to have at least made the attempt and covered about half the intended distance.

There were always going to be days like these. It's no great problem. Good on me for at least giving it a go.

Breakfast schnapps never tasted so good.

[glaconman]

Such a big diference between being 'ready to run' and 'wishing I was still in bed'. With rest half the equation I'm suprised this was even attempted. But like you say, being willing is another essential part to keeping things on track. I guess once you DNS on a run it becomes easier the next time. And so it goes on ...

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

G'man! Nice to see you. Any chance we might see you in Almeria??

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

I had to miss a day out of the schedule due to aching joints, sore throat and too little sleep. I did get back into it this morning with a 5.6km flogging of the local streets though which didn't go too badly, but I am going to be a little short of the intended mileage this week I fear unless I can pull something out of the bag on Sunday.

No matter, 'tis but early on in the piece.

[Charliecat5]

Short against mileage - against what are you measuring? I have taken a much simpler approach (for me anyway) by trying to maintain an average daily target (2 miles/day). When I'm feeling on top of the world I bank the miles (currently have an average of 2.5); then when the body and soul (and work) are against me I have the buffer to maintain the target. So far it's working. I have a spreadsheet to prove it and everything.

I am also shuffling the running deck - heading out to local places that I have not run before. This creates interesting opportunities for rest stops, or rather head scratching, as I work out which way to go. Last night Mrs CC5 dropped me off in the next village and I ran back home over Caburn... in the pouring rain. I really didn't fancy running but given that I had allowed myself to be dropped off miles away from home with no phone and darkening skies, the motivation was there to get those feet moving. Still not feeling the best (tough day at work) I decided to break the run up into fast legs and slow recovery legs... with the odd standing under a tree when the rain was at its worse. Overall, with the *ahem' lost bits and rain stops, I still got home in a pleasing time.

Keep at it mucker... there's plenty of time before Almeria.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Short against mileage - against what are you measuring?   I have taken a much simpler approach (for me anyway) by trying to maintain an average daily target (2 miles/day).  When I'm feeling on top of the world I bank the miles (currently have an average of 2.5); then when the body and soul (and work) are against me I have the buffer to maintain the target.  So far it's working.  I have a spreadsheet to prove it and everything.  

I am also shuffling the running deck - heading out to local places that I have not run before.  This creates interesting opportunities for rest stops, or rather head scratching, as I work out which way to go.  Last night Mrs CC5 dropped me off in the next village and I ran back home over Caburn... in the pouring rain.  I really didn't fancy running but given that I had allowed myself to be dropped off miles away from home with no phone and darkening skies, the motivation was there to get those feet moving.   Still not feeling the best (tough day at work) I decided to break the run up into fast legs and slow recovery legs... with the odd standing under a tree when the rain was at its worse.    Overall, with the *ahem' lost bits and rain stops, I still got home in a pleasing time.

Keep at it mucker... there's plenty of time before Almeria.

There's no doubt it's working CC, you've put in some great runs in recent times, and running over Caburn in any weather is a fair effort. I remember looking at Caburn from atop Lewes Castle. It looked bleak and forbidding and not a little challenging as a run. In bleak weather, all the more so.

Yep, as you say there's plenty of time before Almeria, but as someone reminded me recently, we seem to have reached our later years far, far sooner than we thought we would when we were young. Time doth fly, my son.

Better get on with it, then I suppose...

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

On your marks...

A half marathon doesn't generally warrant a 20-week training plan, but as I've no other race on the calendar and am desperately keen to find some form and fitness again over our summer, it seems appropriate. The Almeria Medio Maraton is, therefore, twenty weeks hence, which makes today day one of week one. Most training programs will have Monday as a rest day, even in the first week (well, you need a day to stock up on baked goodies I suppose), but my schedule is rather more dictated to by the variances of shift work, and so today is a scheduled run day. And run I did, and it went pretty well, really.

I had just completed a six-day work week yesterday, complete with long hours, insomnia and two days of lurgi which interrupted the pre-training schedule program somewhat, such as it was. I was keen therefore to kick off this week with a decent run just to reset the internal running body clock, as it were.

So after a decent night's sleep (yay!), a long lie-in and a lengthy morning sit in the sun catching up on the weekend newspapers, I changed into the running kit and hit the treadmill for a slow, easy 8km. In fact, I turned it into a rather modest tempo run, building to something approaching a decent training pace, but without any undue exertion. After all, this was just a run designed to get things back into gear again following a shitty week with just two not-so-successful early morning outings.

The run went very well, and I was even able to fool myself into thinking I was something of a runner again, although the pace and distance were, of course, modest. Never mind, it felt great and that's the thing.

I have too many friends and colleagues of a similar age to myself struggling at the moment to find even average health and fitness, and it reminds me all too frequently how I constantly struggle now to stay upright and balanced on the greasy pole that is the healthy lifestyle. Just a short break from running now requires an ever-longer and increasingly painful and difficult return to what I consider an acceptable level of fitness, and so I try to persist. It's never easy, but as I keep telling myself, it's always worthwhile.

Go.

[glaconman]

G'man! Nice to see you. Any chance we might see you in Almeria??

Well, I love the idea of Almeria. When we go away at that time of the year it tends to be India. As we are doing this year.

Maybe I can sell it as a mid-Winter cycling break one year. My wife loves the Vuelta a Espana and it's right next to the Sierra Nevada so she can indulge in her passion as a grimpeur.

We had a great Easter holiday in northern Mallorca this year staying in Port de Soller.

How long will you be in Spain MLCMM?

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

G'man! Nice to see you. Any chance we might see you in Almeria??

My wife loves the Vuelta a Espana and it's right next to the Sierra Nevada so she can indulge in her passion as a grimpeur...

How long will you be in Spain MLCMM?

How long we spend in España depends on many things, most of which are yet to be determined and some of which are beyond our control. We do however have a cousin with an astonishingly beautiful small farm/vineyard in the Sierra Nevada that we would desperately love to visit again... and may yet this time around. But we don't know and won't know fully of our plans for a few weeks yet. It depends on employers, friends and relatives etc. etc. But almost certainly it includes the Medio Maraton Cuidad de Almeria, and doubtless many other RCers would be thrilled to see you and Mrs G'man there as well if at all possible.

Let's at least make a pact to attempt to see each other, preferably in Almeria, but possibly also on the climbs of the Vuelta an Espana ... actually, I thought of you both last year when our GPS managed to take us on a lengthy detour of the greenhouses outside of Almeria. An incredible, daunting Gotham City of crops under glass (or at least plastic), with an army of African migrants on bicycles tending to the crops; it was an eye-opening vista of what Europe has become, and immediately (no exaggeration) brought to mind your short movie of Vitya, albeit displaced to a different continent, as these workers were. Right or wrong, I was immediately made to think of India and its poverty, which you so beautifully portrayed in Vitya.

Anyway, into the hands of Gods we bequeath ourselves, and with their blessings, come what may ...

See you soon!

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Good runs and rarish grape varieties.

So, a good run today, albeit a little odd. It began lethargically enough, and I thought as I got under way that this would be a very slow, 'just grind the sodding thing out' sort of run.  Of course, in keeping with the nature of this running beast, after a short while things started feeling good and I finished it not a million miles from within race pace, albeit race pace for a far greater distance of course.

But never mind the stats, this was a great, fast run by my humble standards and left me feeling fantastic for the rest of the day. In fact, it was one of those runs that had me feeling around dinner time as if I should go for another run. Of course, my physio would have strong words to say about that, so I didn't, but all in all, it's a very positive outcome.

If only every run could feel like this...

Still, in nearly fourteen years of running, I've never quite figured this game out. I don't suppose I ever will, and maybe that's a good thing. Running is a bit of a metaphor for life, I think, in that if we really knew what it was all about, we might not bother.

But, whoa there! That's way too much existentialism this early on in the training schedule.

I blame the sparkling durif* we had with dinner.

Yeah.

That's it.


*2005 vintage. Superb.