Sydney -2

Strathfield and back

Well, this was a nice run except maybe for the hills coming up Canterbury Road. But absolutely a first class a-grade spring morning, perfect weather. I'm starting to taper now, so this was run at a fairly gentle pace; plus, I think I'll go easy on the exercises for the next couple of weeks. I've almost made up my mind to start at the pace I want to finish. I watched the IAAF marathon this AM when I got home - just amazing really, 3 minutes/kilometer, 42 times. Sadly, I don't think I can run the second half of mine faster than the first half, no matter how tactically sound that might be. Slowing down gently is the right tactic for me.

Here's something trivial. 1% of 100 meters is 1 meter; of a marathon it's 422 meters. That takes near enough to .1 second for the sprinters, and about 76 seconds for the marathoners. The margin in Daegu today was more than 2 minutes, so that's about 2 meters in sprinting terms. A real thumping. When you see 2 marathoners come in only a few seconds apart, as, say, in the Commonwealth Games women's in Melbourne, that's a sprinter's .01 of a second.

If it's Spring it must be flowers and it was. The casuarinas are out, and there are masses of them along the Cooks; casuarina flowers are as subtle-coloured as their leaves and make a fine muted backdrop for the wattles. I saw at least three (species of) wattles, hardenbergia, and lots of short-plumed grasses, bright green leaves and soft white florets; my guess is wallaby or plume grass. Plenty of exotics, too, including orange trumpet vine - one massive display at the back of the racecourse - and a couple of azaleas.

Lots of birds; ducks and ibis mainly.The ibis are a menace out of the water but they look quite picturesque sitting in it.

Not much else to tell really.

Sydney - 3

Endomondo Running Workout: was out running 30.74 km

That'll be my last "long" run before the Sydney marathon on the 18th September. I'm feeling pretty good about it now, because unlike the last 30km run I did, there have been very few lingering after-effects. I'm not stiff, I only needed to collapse in a chair for about 30 minutes to recover & I've managed a fairly active Sunday - cutting down trees & grocery shopping. I can't say I felt quite so good on the run itself, which wasn't particularly fast & wasn't particularly comfortable, even as early as 20 km, surprising a little in that a 20 km run is the usual Sunday routine & pretty much a minimum distance. It's all a mystery. Liz thinks I need to change my training routine & perhaps she's right. More sprints. More hills. More time in the gym. It's probably necessary to strike a balance. In a sense, I'm not so fussed about the result of the marathon, but I'd like it to be moderately predictable. Right now I can't decide whether to attack it and hope to hold on for 3hr:30min, or whether to set out at a 3hr:50min pace and accelerate at the halfway point, which would probably get me about a 3hr:40min assuming no unforeseen incidents.

I think I'm temperamentally inclined to the former; but the general marathon "wisdom" seems to be that the latter is more likely to result in good times.

We'll see.

BTW, if you are curious, you can sign up to Endomondo and connect to me as a "friend", then you'll be able to monitor my progress. If you don't have any paint drying to watch, it might be interesting.

It was a fantastic morning for a run, but apart from the fact that the wattles are out in full flower, there's not a lot to say. The Botany Bay route is one of my favourites, but I didn't really see anything that stood out today. Well, I did notice the angle that planes take off from the airport, even heading out to sea, is extraordinarily steep. Running north along the bay cycle path watching the planes take off, apparently silently, is pretty amazing. It reminds me that physics is a bit of a mystery still, because the standard explanation for why planes can fly (curved upper surface on wing) doesn't actually explain why planes can fly upside down. Not that any were trying this morning.

Spring is definitely well on the way, because the numbers are out - sadly, predominantly cyclists, who are a menace at corners - in force. Cyclists are to pedestrians as cars are to cyclists: a parallelism that hasn't imposed itself on many cyclists' minds.

Jabulani

Endomondo Running Workout: "26.99 km in 2h:38m:00s"

A typically generous assessment of the performance from Endomondo; in point of fact, 2h:50m. Very slow; this was a *hard* run.

Running Activity 23.23 km | RunKeeper

Runkeeper's elevation profile is a much better view of the race; look particularly at the drop down to river level and the climb back up. I was hammering along nicely until that ascent; by the end of it I could hardly manage to move forward. Well, maybe it wasn't quite that bad - the really slow bits are checkpoints - but those last two hills coming up to the finish line were soul crushers. (There's a pun there somewhere) A lot of people passed me there.

In retrospect I guess I started out too fast, although I was running around 5:40 per km (I do 5:00 for road races this distance) so it didn't feel too fast. Initially I was quite pleased to be holding my own on the climbs & descents, because I'm not much of a descender, and I settled in with a pair at "chat speed", which is not that quick, in absolute terms. It transpired that one of this pair was the women's winner of the 2010 event, so perhaps that was a warning; sadly, one unread.



Trail running really is a different can of worms. I've only really done one before, which was the NOSH. That was certainly a much tougher 15 km than my usual training runs around Canterbury-Marrickville, and in fact, NOSH finishes higher than it starts by virtue of not being an out-and-back course, but NOSH didn't compare with this. Of course the extra 9 km makes a difference. The big difference though is the steepness of the hills, which does two things. Firstly, you have to lift your legs much higher, so it's like running up a staircase compared to running up a road. That gets into the quadriceps, which by-and-large isn't a runner's muscle. After a while, it starts to hurt.


 Secondly, the hills push the heart rate up really, really high. I wasn't wearing a monitor for this run (it's broken) but on the big hill at NOSH - which was long, but not as steep as the climb up from the river here - where I was wearing the monitor, I got up to 181 bpm. Compare that with Canberra, where I averaged under 160 and peaked at about 170. I don't particularly like to push too hard in this regard; mind you, I can't claim that I felt I had much choice in the matter. My legs didn't want to push either.


I usually start too fast (amateur/beginner error) but I don;t think I've been punished for it quite like this before. I also have a feeling I might have mismanaged my food intake, because I got a very unexpected kick from a couple of jellybeans I picked up at a late stage feeding table. Again, that's a useful lesson, because my Sunday runs are focused around teaching the body to burn fat, so I only take water, not sugar. But maybe in a race a bit of sugar wouldn't go astray. *update: I've seen the times for the race now, and I feel a bit better about it. There were a lot of people at 2:40, including the two here.

Halfway - Bobbin Head Park

It reads like a bit of whingeing, but it's meant to be reportage. I mean, I enjoyed it - more after it stopped, and the last 3 km maybe not so much - but it was certainly good to run in the bush. I swear you can feel that the air is oxygen rich and low in monoxide (note the chiasmus). I'll need to learn some bird calls - there were plenty around; some calls I didn't know at all and I don't think there are any (except perhaps a kookaburra) that I can actually name (that's a bit poor, really). *update: I can in fact recognize the call of the Eastern Whipbird, as I imagine, can any child over the age of 4.

There weren't a lot of flowers out - one bush with hardenbergia-purple flowers that wasn't a hardenbergia - which I think I saw in a couple of places (or maybe twice, once out, once back).*update: almost certainly a Hovea.

 One other challenge is to work out a way to stop the glasses fogging up: this is a serious problem because it's actually more dangerous running with fogged up glasses than with none: but I'd guess my eyesight is about 2/4 (from 20/20) so none is not exactly entirely satisfactory either.

At one stage I stepped on what I though was a flat-topped rock - it was actually a 45-degree down-sloping rock and I totally lost my footing. Luckily it was a slide/slip rather than a fall, so I was back up quickly (you can see it on the pace profile above; it's the little spike on the left hand side of the canyon). All the pictures you see here are of the smoothest surfaces that the race covers; there's a fair bit, perhaps about 20%, that is nothing much more than wallaby tracks.

I say bush, but quite a lot of the run is along the back edge of the residential intersection with the bush, which is a bit worrying. How much longer is the bush going to survive, because there's plenty of signs of continuing development? Another curious feature is the number of aged care facilities that are situated next to incoming bushfires; immediately adjacent. First line of defence? Or a headache for emergency services? Still, for the time being I'm a little jealous of the running opportunities. It leaves the Bardwell Valley TVT somewhat for dead, and I'm not finding running 28 laps of Henson Park particularly inspirational at the moment.


The run is organised by ex-pat South Africans; they're nearly more Australian than Australians, it's the first time I've seen beer supplied free as replenishment fluid at the end of a run. It's a pretty hit-and-miss exercise as far as directions/signposting, but I think this was only the 6th time they've run it, so they're are still ironing out the kinks. Their directions suffer from having been written by someone who knows the track too well (a typical race director), and not checked by an idiot who doesn't know it at all (the average competitor).

Anyway, next year I'll get in some serious practice on hills and go back.

Last Sunday in July

Endomondo Running Workout: "was out running 26.55 km "

The first thing to mention is that, despite a number of technological issues being solved - see last week's blog - there are still problems with the technology. I don't think there's any way that we ran 26km. And in fact, when I run the same set of data through RunKeeper (one of Endomondo's competitors) it comes up with a much more plausible 22.5 km, which is what I would have guessed. So, it's a software problem. I guess I'll just have to wait and see. No point complaining too loudly; all the software is free.

Anyway, another boringly perfect running morning, cool but clear. Almost warm in the sun, in fact. Still quite muddy, but at least there was no free-flowing water on the TVT (Two Valley Track) this week, so we ran one whole valley before taking a bit of a shortcut across Homer St, thus cutting out the second valley. All the hill running must be having some positive effects, because I almost didn't grumble about the shortcut. It takes about 3 km out of the run back to Steel Park, but the trade off is a very steep ascent & descent. And now that I think about it, I was actually in sufficient breath to admire the view to the north west coming down the steps. It's quite startling how much green there is in the fore-to-middle ground before the suburbs take hold. Right now, of course, after the rain, the green is really green, almost an English green. (True, I haven't seen an English green since I was 8, but definitely a lush green. No noticeable greys, browns or blues.)

The pelicans are back from their winter break. There was an incredible amount of rubbish in the river; I would have expected that immediately after the heavy rains, but a week on it seems even worse. A pity, although I think it's possible to see past/through the rubbish (I've been cultivating this since living in Clifton Hill). The water was clear, especially for high tide, and the air was clean. You can't really ask for more from an urban landscape.

Next week Jabulani, in Kuring-Gai National Park. 23 km of trails, should be interesting. I've just finished a book called "Born to Run"; it's rather messianic, but intriguing. More on the virtues of trail running, like my main Sunday colleague. He's trying to get me to run "ultras" - that's not happening! (well not yet, anyway)

Second last July run

Endomondo Running Workout: 28.05 km in 2h:35m:09s

Well, extraordinarily the rain vanished this morning so it was pretty easy to get out. I needed to do a long run this week because the last couple of weeks have been a bit short (quick & hard, but short), which means I was going rain, hail or shine, but there's no doubt that shine is much the easiest.

On a technical side note, I upgraded my mobile phone OS to Froyo (it's a silly name, but it reflects the adolescent humour of the guys who write OSes) which has in fact been out for a while, so ought to have had the bugs ironed out, but in fact on a test run yesterday was playing up badly in the GPS department. It took 2 kilometers to find the satellites yesterday (about 10 minutes) where previously it was about 30-odd seconds, i.e. the time it takes to get down the front path. Today was worse - It took nearly 4 km to get a fix on the satellites & then 24 km later just stopped. Meantime whatever it was doing caused Endomondo to add 3 fictitious kilometers (Endomondo tries to work out when you've stopped for traffic lights so it's a bit sensitive to interruptions in signal). That sort of balances out; I think it might have been more like a 30 km run, but 28 will do.

Nothing really new today but we tried a three stage approach because we had two new members, so we did 5 km around the golf course, then 9 km around the back of Arnecliffe, then I did an extra 14 around the airport. It was all pretty wet. It's amazing to me that 10 meters from the river, and about 5 meters higher than the low tide level, Marrickville's engineers & builders have managed to build paths that don't drain. In places the paths are 10-12 cm under water; but they're only puddles, 10 meters away from a perfectly dry path. Seems wrong to me. Anyway, it's not really a big problem, I can run with wet feet.

The Arncliffe spur - which is pretty much 100% bush on the Wolli Creek side - was a small waterfall, even though it hadn't rained for 24 hours. Well, 12 hours. Still, it's amazing for how long water is retained on top of a hill. All this hill running practice must be worth something; I nearly managed to spring up the rocks like an aging gazelle.

Did I mention that the first wattles are out? Spring is coming!

Lane Cove National Park

Endomondo Running Workout: 18.41 km in 1h:46m:28s

Just two of us in the end, and we drove through a light drizzle up to Hunter's Hill to get to the edge of the Lane Cove National Park. This is a resource which is slowly being eaten away by developers; I don't know how long it has to go. It's huge, so I guess a while. Plus the locals are both well heeled and articulate so there may be limits to how far claims that new corporate premises will be integrated "lightly" into bushland. And despite everything, this run (which you can see is squeezed into a pretty thin strip of bushland on the river bank) is not appreciably different to running through, say, the "real" bush; and it's only 20 minutes from Marrickville with Sunday AM traffic.

You can see we had to take a detour through a bit of suburb; the track & bridge were being refurbished due to the summer fires; there are boardwalks laid down at strategic points across the mangrove swamps, and presumably these were damaged by fire.

Liz has been paddling up the Lane Cove River recently on Saturdays. It's a much more significant entity than the Cooks River, for sure, where I think a canoe would get grounded at low tide. Even though you are very close to suburbia you still feel the quiet of nature. OK, quiet plus birds. But birds aren't all bad if you're not trying to sleep.

It's startling the variety of ground; primarily three kinds, the swamp, the sandstone and the soil, but these have their own internal variations and there are also sections of domesticated land, cleared and grassed with little beaches on the river banks. Surprising to see no sign of any boats though; in the bits of Middle Harbour (further north) that I've seen, where the landscape is vaguely similar, anything resembling water access has boats, even if they're old rowing boats chained to a tree. Perhaps the council here is less sympathetic.

All the variety of ground makes the running even harder. Nothing's flat, so you're either going up or downhill, both of which are hard work. There's rocks, logs, rocks and mud to avoid on the path, and trees to get under - not too many - plus branches to dodge. It takes a degree of concentration, which is fine on the first 10k or so, but not so easy as you get near to home on the way back. When I'm tired I mainly like to concentrate on breathing (it makes a surprising difference - given that you could do it without thinking - to pay attention to the mechanics) but with trail running concentration has to be on the path. Even more given that I was running without glasses, due to the previously mentioned fog issue. Anyway, no falls this time, unlike the NOSH where I went head-over-heels in the last kilometer.

I was pleased to stop though. Only 18 km this week, but I swear it was harder than the 21 last weekend. Still, I had a look at the Sydney Marathon course yesterday, and it has a lot of hills. I se more of these trail runs in my future.

Dolls Point Half

Endomondo: "21.81 km in 1h:41m:25s"

Time for a race: I've run down to Doll's Point from my place when I wanted a long run (it's about 30-ish km there and back) and it's a very pretty spot, with the bay in one direction and the George's River in the other. Of course, it's perilously close to "The Shire" for a big person but at 8:00 AM on a winter's morning it didn't figure to be all that dangerous. This was a Sri Chinmoy event, cheap and cheerful & with excellent pancakes and after a couple of long-ish training runs a brisk 21 km hit out seemed just the go. The run itself, like all SC events, is based around loops (it makes providing fluids much, much easier) and Dolls Point-Ramsgate-Taren Point bridge is a very scenic 10 km.

I wanted to do this in 100 minutes, which would basically be extending my 16k PB pace for another 5 km.  It seemed like a reasonable challenge, and in fact, the 101 minutes will do me as a success, given that I seem to have run a bit over the 21.1 km anyway. So that was good & the run actually includes a PB for the 10k (43 mins) and 16k (73 mins) as well. On a competitive note, I didn't make the top 3 in my age group (by 7 minutes) and the #7 women's competitor passed me in the final km and comfortably held me off to the finish line. (That's actually about par for me)

Another fantastically sunny day, pretty much identical to the last couple of Sundays, with one big difference: the wind. The one thing my phone doesn't do is measure wind speed (I'm sure that's only because I haven't looked hard enough) but I think I can give you an idea. The first lap wasn't so bad; there was a noticeable breeze, but the most noticeable thing about it was that it seemed to be coming from two directions. The first run east from the bottom of the bridge past the sailing club to Dolls Point was into a mild headwind which irritatingly persisted after we turned north at the point to head up to Ramsgate. "Irritating" turned out to be a mild problem because by some mystery of weather by the time we got back to the point to turn west back towards the bridge for the second crossing, the wind had turned and there was now a howling gale in our faces, the kind of howling gale that makes you think that you're not moving at all despite the effort, and has you wondering if there isn't some way to run sideways so as to present a smaller target (there isn't, BTW). The one good thing about this was that the leaders were by now going past us on their final couple of km, and they looked pretty happy and relaxed with the gale at their back.

Because I run so many laps (unlike most distance runners, who hate laps) I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about winds. You might think that it all evens out, but in fact out of the 360 degrees that the wind might come from, only about 60 - at most - are beneficial. All of the other 300 are problematic, either because they slow you down, or interfere with your balance, or both. I was wondering what the winds would be like on top of the Taren Point Bridge, which I wasn't particularly looking forward to anyway because as bridges go, it does a very good impersonation of two non-trivial hills, and despite all Andrew H.'s exhortations, I still don't really like hills. But when I got onto the bridge, I forgot about the hill problem. It was time to worry about the standing up problem. The pedestrian pathway is protected by concrete barriers from traffic (hard to imagine they would actually be any use in an accident, but it IS nice to see them there) and the first problem was to avoid being blown into & over them. Every time one foot left the ground the wind would try to push you into the barrier, and please note that the definition of running is that there are periods where both feet aren't on the ground. Plus I had to hold onto my race number with one hand because I wasn't sure the safety pins were up to the task. The path is a shared pedestrian/cycle way, and cyclists were holding onto the railings to stop themselves being blown in front of the runners.

That sounds bad, but curiously downhill was even worse. Normally downhill I open out the stride and try to concentrate on not falling over while I run as fast as I can; not today. If you left your foot off the ground for the length of a full stride the wind would catch it and blow it across in front of the other one (yes, only for one side, for the other foot the wind tries to make you take a frog step) leading to disaster. I had to invent a new gait, which involved leaning into the wind and running slightly crabwise. Normally you hope to get back on the downhills the time you lost on the uphills. Today time was not the issue. Uprightness was. I didn't meet anyone who actually fell, but everyone I spoke to felt the same way about it.

Of course it was the same, reversed, going back the other way Really, quite an extraordinary feeling. I meant to take in a bit more of the scenery the second time round, but I was so busy concentrating I completely forgot.

Once off the bridge it was almost an easy run home. The wind did stay consistent, so it was at our backs for most of the last 4 km - if you look at the times I think I managed a 4:15 km around about the 18/19 km point. That is certainly tailwind, much as I might like to claim otherwise. I couldn't find any sprint in the legs over the last couple of km, which I suppose means no unused energy, but is a bit annoying when you get passed. It also suggests to me that the finishing burst of my youthful running was based around a lazy first 90% of the race. Strangely, that is what my PE teacher(s) used to say as well.

Hard work, but a lot of fun. Running with that wind makes for a totally different experience.