Shocktober

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Dear Entrant,

We regret that we have to advise you that your application to run in the 2013 Virgin London Marathon has not been successful due to massive over-subscription.

However, if you still wish to run there are tour operators in your country who may be able to help you enter the 2013 Virgin London Marathon.

Yours Sincerely

Hugh Brasher
Race Director

Oh well.

[marathondan]

However, if you still wish to run there are tour operators in your country who may be able to help you enter the 2013 Virgin London Marathon.

It would be quite hard to run after the loss of an arm and a leg, however.

[Antonio247]

I also got a similar letter a few years ago when I had to send international post stamps.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Righto. Here we go then.

Fifteen days after tearing my calf (slightly) it is finally at the point where I can say it is just about at 100% again. It was 90% better after 24 hours, then 95% after about three days, but the last 5% has been a bitch to finally get better, and each attempt at a run was aborted within seconds of trying. At long last however I can no longer feel the tear unless I push my fingers really deep into my calf, so tomorrow morning the training starts. Again.

With only five and a bit weeks to race day, it's going to be a bit touch and go to be honest. But I'm feeling really, really good, so hopefully I can ramp things up fairly quickly and get some decent hill work done before the race.

If not, it's going to be a real bastard.

But softly, softly for starters. Just 15 - 30 minutes easy jog tomorrow and I'll see how I pull up before deciding how to best get back up to full training mode.

Stay tuned, race fans.

[marathondan]

Good luck with the jog!

[Antonio247]

Best of luck tomorrow, MLCMM!

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Thanks gents. A gentle 30 minute jog went without a hitch this morning, so I'm well pleased and it feels fabulous to be running again. Will now give it another day's rest before testing it a little more on Friday.

4.32km 30 minutes
YTD: 1,147.3km

[Sweder]

Good news. Check out Dan's most recent post in general running re: top flight runners loafing. There's a good reason your body screams 'whoah!' sometimes

[Antonio247]

Wonderful news, MLCMM. Little by little you'll be fit enough to finish the Point to Pinnacle race next month.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

There’s nothing like a funeral to focus your thoughts. When the deceased also happens to have been an elite sportsman (he declined a chance to represent Australia at rugby union although his nephew later became a much-capped and famous national representative), one’s thoughts tend to focus likewise on sport. When one also happens to be seated next to a champion athlete and probable future Olympian (OK so she is my niece and I may be biased, but she is a junior national rep with a focus on Rio 2016), then there’s little choice once the funeral and wake are over to swap suit for shorts and head to the hills for some serious mountain climbing. Well, actually I headed to the treadmill, which is probably worse, but a mountain climb it was.

Now my efforts were of course pretty insignificant compared to some of the elite company I was in today (even if some of them were deceased), but I tell you this: there are few better feelings than a tough run well completed and done above expectations. And on the comeback trail from injury (and isn’t it annoying – at least for those of you old enough to understand – how much longer it takes to recover from injury when there’s a “5” in front of your age?) a good run is twice as welcome.

I must say however I was a little horrified to check my spreadsheet afterwards and discovered it has been eight weeks since my last serious hill session, so this was long overdue.

The long and the short of it was that I covered 9.67 kilometres in the allocated hour on a mountain climb program with the steepest section at 9% and an average across the hour of 5.2%. And it was tough. I mean really keeping me honest tough. Not quite lung-busting, jelly-legs and vomit tough, but one of the tougher runs I’ve completed this year. And while there isn’t much time left before the P2P, I am feeling somewhat more confident now that I’m properly back into training and having at least one tough hill climb completed.

And just to help focus on the fact that I can complete the tough events, I dug around in my wife’s computer and found this photo she took of me enjoying my first post-marathon beer a little while back.

Onwards and er, upwards.

Misc

9.67km 60mins 5.2% average gradient

YTD: 1,161.7km

[El Gordo]

Happy birthday. old chap. Or older chap...

[glaconman]

Yes, Happy Birthday MLCMM. And best of luck with the P2P.

[Sweder]

Greetings and felicitations old bean. Raised a pint of black gold in your name last night. Er, several times, as it happened. Will do so again this arvo, once we've settled the small matter of the Autumn Tour trophy here in the lush pastures of County Cork. After two rounds of three (on two of the most stunning golf courses I've ever seen) I lead by a single shot. No last-round leader has ever won this esteemed goblet. I shall do my best to break that hoodoo in an hour or so, just as soon as I've waded through this magnificent, carb-light breakfast ...

   

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

...After two rounds of three (on two of the most stunning golf courses I've ever seen) I lead by a single shot....

Bloody hell Sweder! Is there no end to your talent???

Ta, by the way everyone, for the birthday wishes.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Awoke mid-afternoon following a dreaded night shift with a strange determination to go for a run. Normally I can't stomach the thought of running after night shifts, but necessity (a.k.a. looming race day) has spawned a "no excuses" mentality of late so I hit the treadmill still dazed and befuddled but intent on pounding out at least a half hour of modest hill climb.

In the end, I completed 45 minutes. It was nothing to really get excited about, except that it was 45 minutes I wouldn't have ordinarily done, and that is just what the doctor, or more accurately the coach, ordered.

Speaking of motivation, check out this guy:



6.84km @ 3% incline, 45:00

YTD: 1,172.9km

[El Gordo]

Awoke mid-afternoon following a dreaded night shift with a strange determination to go for a run. Normally I can't stomach the thought of running after night shifts, but necessity (a.k.a. looming race day) has spawned a "no excuses" mentality of late so I hit the treadmill still dazed and befuddled but intent on pounding out at least a half hour of modest hill climb.

In the end, I completed 45 minutes. It was nothing to really get excited about, except that it was 45 minutes I wouldn't have ordinarily done, and that is just what the doctor, or more accurately the coach, ordered.

Speaking of motivation, check out this guy:



6.84km @ 3% incline, 45:00

YTD: 1,172.9km

I'm sure I posted this myself a couple of months ago. I exchanged a few emails with him. Roger. Nice fellow. Writing a book.

[El Gordo]

Here's another I came across recently. There's a musical theme developing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9FSZJu448&feature=youtube_gdata_player


Sent from my iPad

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Here's another I came across recently. There's a musical theme developing...

Wow! Great stuff! Check out the extended cut too - very inspiring.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Wow, what day that was. Despite being a lazy “lie in” kind of day, and following the second consecutive night of bad, restless sleep, I was up at 6 a.m. for a long(ish) run for which I had no motivation other than “whoa, wait a minute … you need to DO this thing… I can’t quite remember WHY, but it’s IMPORTANT man, so get your lazy arse OUT of bed and hit the road…. um, Jack.”

And so I found myself on the street, bereft of reason, sense or logic, just … running. I didn’t even know why, other than some strange sense of needing to DO this thing. I think that is why motivation is so hard… when you’re tired, I mean DOG-tired, it’s really, really hard to understand the reasons WHY you’re killing yourself like this. All you can do is hope that the reasons seep deep into your psyche and actually do enough to kick you out of bed in the morning and despite everything, actually get you onto the street before you have a reason to protest… or at least argue with yourself too much.

Anyway. Here I was. A quarter past six a.m. on a regular working day Tuesday, running down a particularly nasty stretch of busy road on an early-hours long run. It made no sense as far as my befuddled brain could tell. Even at that early hour the traffic was immense and the noise and fumes overwhelming on what is a very busy road prone to traffic jams of such magnitude that it is quite literally faster to jog along this road than to drive it… even at 6 a.m. Such is big city life. Go figure.

OK. Actually I kinda sorta DO know why I’m here, and it has nothing to do with training programmes. It has everything to do with my neighbour, Next Door Andy (to differentiate him from RC’s Swiss Andy a.k.a. El Gordo and P2P Hero Andy). Next Door Andy had run this course (at my suggestion) the previous weekend, but being sans-GPS had no idea of the distance. In my innocence I said I’d run the thing on Tuesday (this morning) with my trusty Garmin and let him know. Gad. Sad!

To be honest, the first 9 km were the worst. After that I went into a kind of naïve sensory deprivation mode, whereby I found a sort of solitary-confinement introspection and kidded myself that all was counter-intuitively OK. The truth was of course otherwise. It was also one of those days when the only other runners I encountered were young, fit, incredibly lean, ridiculously tall and totally not inclined to return my greetings or salutes. In fact the only one who did was being marshalled by a particularly demonic personal trainer who immediately admonished her for losing focus to return my shouted “good morning”. Woeful! It was as if I’d encountered some secret East German training camp from the cold war era. Oh well. I never could get the hang of Tuesdays.

Anyway, let’s cut the crap. Today I ran a hilly, nay very hilly 18.3 km in a respectable time (for me) despite the overwhelming desire to sleep in and the apparent unintentional wandering into some bizarre Stasi athletic camp. No, today was simply another “no excuses” day, which thankfully has become somewhat ingrained of late into the MLCMM being by the remarkable determination of other members here of the RC community and one or two others as well within my sphere of social intercourse. It’s fair to say that in recent times my motivation has come not from goal setting, but from watching others set their goals and then achieving them. Inspiring stuff! I love it. When you don’t have a real personal reason “why” (well, I do, but I seem to keep forgetting what it is, especially first thing in the morning), it seems you can always rely on others if only you take the time to look around.

Why is this so? Perhaps because when you can’t find personal motivation it’s in the efforts of others that you can often sense real purpose. You may not understand it exactly, but you “get” the underlying cause … the urge that drives them on. It’s innate and fundamental to our being. Primal, even. And that’s what got me out of bed this morning … not the love of running … not a slavish addiction to the training programme … but a keen sense of the primal urge to satisfy something deep within, and yet somehow undefinably basic to human survival.

Shit. I’m sounding… ridiculous. Sorry, but unlike others around these parts I’m definitely NOT on the wagon, and therefore prone to … gushing. Ness.

I think I’ll go and have a quiet cry in a corner somewhere. With an Islay malt. Or maybe a Rutherglen muscat. Mmmmmm… now we’re talking.

Struth. If not for running, I’d be dead (or at least my liver would). Probably that’s more true than I care to admit. Damn.

Genuinely Mid Life Crisis (Marathon) Man.
18.3km, 1:53:43, tough and hilly.
YTD 1,191.2km

[marathondan]

That's a stonker of a run to grind out at 6am, on a work day, when you're not feeling like it. These are the runs that make or break your training. Fantastic effort. Great essay, too.

We salute you, even if your fellow runners didn't.