Sunday 2.1

Endomondo Running Workout: "19.01 km in 2h:08m:16s"

Four of us turned up! It's a new record! Anyway, it was a very social run. The best weather in about a month; the river is still very muddy dealing with stormwater runoff. If you follow the run on the map the big left turn (south) at about 6.7 km is past what I call the "Earlwood waterfall" - it is a waterfall, albeit down a concreted drainage channel. Turns out it does have a proper name, Cup and Saucer Creek. Presumably it wasn't concreted when it got that name. It's amazing how many watercourses there are around when you start looking; of course, it's less amazing in the historical/geographical context, bearing in mind that the whole Cooks River area was swamp. Perhaps what is more amazing is how easily oblivious one can be to one's surroundings. Especially from a car.

Sunday 2.0

Endomondo Running Workout: "19.60 km in 1h:48m:11s "

"2.0" is an internet joke - it means something more than incrementally new. Since this was a Sunday run for fun, rather than as specific training for a specific event, I thought the name might be appropriate. It's true, I have decided to run in the Sydney marathon in September, but that's a long way off. Specific training for that probably won't begin until July. Meantime, I do have some training goals, but they're more oriented around short work & speed. Sunday is a leisurely stretch.

For all that it was a leisurely run, I didn't see a lot of new things to report. At the Tempe marina the water was very low and the oyster beds particularly visible with the gulls busy feeding - presumably not on the oysters. Down in Arnecliffe the wetlands were wetter the usual, which I guess reflects recent rains, but the wildlife quota was unchanged. No planes overhead. Apart from the cyclists, who were out in force, there was not a lot of traffic. At home munching on Easter eggs, perhaps. Or cashing in on the extended Easter weekend and out of town.

The bike path at Tempe station is being rebuilt, which will bring the updated path to the Marrickville/Rockdale border (Princes Highway). An Ikea warehouse is being built in a derelict factory; it will take more than that to overcome the pall of being too close to the airport for Tempe. Cheap industrial real estate as local industry declines is a challenge for the town planners.

Canberra Marathon

Endomondo Running Workout: "was out running 43.68 km in 3h:43m:12s"

1st km: already some of these people look serious...

I had concealed hopes of breaking 4 hours, just based on the fact that my times in training this last 3 weeks have taken a sudden leap downwards towards the 5 min/km mark, but I really had no idea how hard that last 10 km was going to be. As it turned out, it was difficult, but it didn't really affect the speed that much. That's consistent with my experiences with the 30 km runs, where a point arrives when the legs disconnect from the mind. One of the curious things about running is the mind/body relationship - ultimately the body wins because it's not physically possible to exceed certain limits, but within some parameters, concentration and willpower have an (measurable) effect. But at 32 km, give-or-take, the parameters get a bit hard to identify. Still, whatever the feeling or lack thereof, the legs did a good job of keeping turning over at (approx.) 11 km/hr.

At about 30 km my feet started to hurt a lot more than they have before; I wonder if that's partly an effect of running on wet roads? The rain was a big help in many ways, particularly temperature control, but the wet paint & metal insets in the road were very slippery and I'm a bit paranoid about falling. Also wet socks chafe a lot more than dry ones; for whatever reason, I spent 3 km running along thinking "My feet aren't important so long as they don't fall off" and they eventually stopped hurting. By the end of the race, the glutes seemed to be carrying the load and complaining bitterly, but an hour or so after the race the main ache seemed to be the hamstrings.

In Canada I was talking to the senior paddler on the Texan crew that holds the canoe record for the Yukon River Quest (42 hours for 740 km) and he said that his main job was, when people started looking tired, to get them to sprint for a couple of kilometers. Apparently the additional effort has a morale boosting effect (plus you make up some time). My plan was to try this at about 35km and it actually worked pretty well. From 35 km I got to 37 km without noticing any elapsed time and at 37 km I knew that I could run 5 km in pretty much any condition whatsoever. Which is pretty much how it went, although the last kilometer was my slowest. Having realised that I was going to finish, I spent the last 3-4 km trying not to burst into tears. No-one warned me about that! It's not particularly that I mind crying in public (and in the rain, even less) but I wasn't sure that I would be able to run and cry at the same time. It seemed much too complex. Constant deep breathing kept me (just) from finding out if it was possible. Even after the race, an hour or so later I was still fighting off great teary gusts of random emotion.

One of the side effects of the rain was that I ended up carrying my glasses for the bulk of the race; it's better to see things out of focus than through wet spectacles, which render me blind. Speaking of which, there was at least one blind guy running the course. He finished significantly in front of me. Anyway, Thurber wrote a story once - Thurber has dated pretty badly, but this maybe not so much - about the surreal world of myopia-without-glasses; at one stage Sunday I was following a guy who was hopping! You have no idea how how seasick that made me feel - I was forced to sprint close enough to him to work out how the illusion happens (at a certain distance wet tights & wet road are indistinguishable to an un-glassed eye, leaving the rise and fall of the contrasting coloured t-shirt the only visual input). There are people who hop the City-to-Surf (14 km), but I think it probably stops there. Other than that, not wearing glasses was OK. Comfortable enough to make me think of it as a regular option, because when I get sweaty on long runs they are inclined to slip off, and I don't like elasticating them on.

1st km; probably 200-odd people have already passed this point

The course wasn't quite as flat as I was expecting, although to be fair it wasn't that bad. What gradients there were were quite gradual. In a perverse kind of way I find hills easier to attack than any other part of a course. I don't know why, but it's much easier to find energy to focus on maintaining speed up a hill than on increasing speed on the flat. The other good thing about these Canberra gradients was that the downhill sides were shallow enough to stride out with a degree of confidence - well, for the first 20 km, anyway, when striding out was still an option.

The nutrition plan (fruitcake) seemingly worked. One of the things that everyone "knows" about the marathon is the phenomenon of "hitting the wall", when the muscles run out of glycogen & you have to stop. The main way to avoid this is to teach the body to burn fat - that's what the long Sunday runs are for - and apparently (there's a lot of nutrition folklore around) a moderate and replenishable supply of carbohydrate is required to underpin that process. "Replenishable" is the key (although, according to my spell-checker, non-existent) word here; it's not possible to take on/store enough carbohydrate to fuel the muscles directly but the amount required to fuel the conversion process is much smaller. There are oodles of purpose-constructed chemistry-contrived supplements for runners (we're an industry) but  rumour has it they can cause quite bad stomach cramps if you are not used to them. I read somewhere that fruitcake is a good option, and I've trained with it on the longer runs without problems. Of course, it's hard to know if it really makes a difference. I don't feel like scientifically trying a run without it, just in case it turns out to be the critical success factor. This goes for my entire routine really - it's quite difficult to contemplate changing any part of it, because it seems to be working. Now, in fact, I guess I'll find that I'm even more emotionally committed to it. Mind you, I am going to look for some different shoes. Perhaps it's not essential to have half my toenails either falling off or growing back.

The time was fantastic, much better than I ever dreamed of. I went out hard - which, oddly, I didn't notice at the time, perhaps because of the crowd effect - and the first 16 km time is in fact a PB for that distance. From 32 km onwards the time jumped up to around 5:40 per kilometer, but that was always my planned pace, so I was a long way ahead of schedule by then. There's video of me at 42 km on this website : http://www.marathon-photos.com/scripts/event.py?event=Sports/2011/Australian%20Running%20Festival&match=A458

39-ish km; not enough energy to smile for the camera

and you can see I'm pretty much down to a shuffle. It's still a faster than 6 mins-per-kilometer shuffle though - just think what I can achieve if I learn to run! My official time was 3:49; curiously my GPS recorder has the time at 3:43 (for 43+ km) but I think the bridges have an effect on the satellite tracking & the compensation algorithms must be a bit shonky.



I thought there'd be more to say. Oh well, I wonder what I can do next?

Sunday Run (12) (Saturday)

Endomondo Running Workout:

Last real hit out before the race, neatly but unintentionally in Canberra where I was supporting Liz in the dragonboat club championships. It's a long day hanging around a regatta even if you are paddling and since I wasn't I went for a run. I was only planning a 14 km training run, but I thought I'd keep going and ended up with just under 21 km. There's not a lot to say about this run; Lake Burley Griffin is not un-picturesque but large parts of its banks are just plain ugly and by starting off easterly I found the least elegant parts. Even when they finish the apartments that are currently building sites along Wentworth Avenue it isn't going to be much chop, judging by the blocks already built. It's not clear to me that the ACT planning office or the the relevant architects were operating with any particular aesthetic guidelines. Concrete functionalism - that's a bit out of date isn't it? About Fyshwick, of course, nothing too bad can be said. Australia's pornographic capital (Territories have no regulations covering pornography, plus for obscure reasons the diplomatic & parliamentary community seems to require extensive sex industry resources) has an ambiance to match. The wetlands are, or will be, a bonus, but they are still in the visible afterthought stage. Still, trying hard to be fair, all urban wetlands are afterthoughts, and for all that, running through Jerrabomberra - the afterthought - is much more pleasant than running through Fishwyk or Kingston - the forethought(s).

Lake Burley Griffin does support some wildlife not seen on the Cooks River, to wit, black swans; and the duck colonies around the area seem to be much larger than my local ones. That's nice; we saw the classic V-formations of flying ducks in the pre-sunrise dawn mist and it made a strangely evocative picture - I say "strange" because really, what is it evoking from my life experience? Images from paintings? Literary references? Nostalgia for a rural world that I have never been part of? It's very odd.

The last part of the run, the easterly loop from the so-called Reconciliation Place (where the racing had its finish line) is much more pleasant, being through tree-ed parkland as you head through the Parliamentary Zone around to Yarralumla. I did notice though that all the trees are "exotics", or weeds to the stern-minded. They don't handle the climate all that well; they have a ragged, unkempt appearance. The planting design seems very haphazard. Canberra is a place where the occasional piece is finely detailed, but all the places in between are unfinished.

Reconciliation Place: where the view stretches from the War Memorial to the Parliament, surrounded by invasive vegetation, an architectural and planning vision solely of Europe. Ho, Ho, Ho.

On a more cheerful note, this was a good run from the training point of view. Definitely my fastest half marathon with even the slowest kilometer being well under 6 minutes, and a couple of sub 5 minute kilometers chucked in for luck. And no question I could have kept going at that pace for while. The last 10 kilometers on race day still looms large, but I don't really think I could have done much more in training.

Fingers crossed.

Sunday Run (11)

Endomondo Running Workout: Shepherd St to Doll's Point and back

Truly a difficult run, not least because of the weather. Irritatingly, the GPS software decided to stop after 7 seconds and since I was running with it in my pocket I didn't notice. But if you look at the Brighton lap from a couple of weeks ago (March 6th) and add this bit onto it, you'll get the idea. It's roughly 32 km, in 3 hours and 7 minutes. I have to say that the last 5 kilometers seemed to pass very very slowly but I've learned that "seemed" is not entirely reliable. As the legs stiffen up they still work.

Thanks to the weather bureau which provides 10 minute visual updates of radar tracking of storms I was able to avoid the heaviest rain. It's been bucketing down up here. Avoiding the heaviest rain didn't mean all the rain though, by any means, and on Botany Bay the rain was coming in horizontally from the ocean, along with a decent headwind. OK, it was a side wind, but according to my calculations only about 70 degrees out of a possible 360 of wind is actually helpful. Sideways or head on, wind just doesn't help.

Not that running in rain is all bad. At these distances you're going to be wet whether it's raining or not, and at least when it's raining you're cool, and cool is a good thing. It's a curious feeling, mind you, because the outside of your skin is cold, and the inside is hot. On average you might be cool, but no one place really feels that way.

The river was really high, as high as I've seen it, probably a combination of tide and rain, so the underpass at Tempe was half a meter deep in water, which meant using the station stairs as an alternative route. Luckily that was on the way out - not sure I was up for stair climbing on the way back. I saw a cormorant - I think - doing an impression of a bird choking; when it saw me it jumped into the water and swam away, underwater. Very curious, do cormorants always swim like this? Only about half the neck above the water, the whole body submerged? I thought it had a yellow beak, but Liz said she'd never heard of a cormorant with a yellow beak before. Who knows, but it was certainly the first time I've seen whatever it was around here. Actually, on Saturday's run (I missed Friday) I saw a pelican looking quite pleased with itself on the river near Canterbury. It'll be sad if the Libs sabotage the river for the sake of a new freeway, which they will be under pressure to do. I can put on a brave face about running beside freeways, but a river is better.

Practically no-one was out, unsurprisingly. A Korean Baptist picnic was gamely battling the wind armed with umbrellas and guitar, but I suspect they were grateful to have the place to themselves. A warm and sunny Sunday morning by the seaside is a pretty secular experience typically. At least, face to face with Nature, one has some sense of the magnitude of the world.

Brighton-le-Sands is quite visible from the beach, but as you run south a park intervenes between the road and the sand, and the park widens nearly all the way down to Doll's Point - a place I've never been before. Most of the trees in the park are pines, so the ground is a needle carpet. This emphasises the differences with the ocean beaches, where trees are typically figs & eucalyptus. The bike path & the jetties are more run down the further south you go; not many tourists down here, I'm thinking. It's almost - not quite, but almost - remote.

Then I ran back, uphill all the way.

Sunday Run (10)

Endomondo Running Workout:

These are starting to mount up now; I might have to find some new routes. A perfect morning for running, cool and clear. I can't remember if I confessed to getting lost on my previous run to Coogee, but I managed  to avoid that this time, arriving as planned, somewhat surprised by the number of people up and about in Randwick as I passed through. On the last run I arrived at the north end of the beach  and exited in the middle; this time I arrived in the middle and deaprted via the south end, which, I can now inform you, has an extraordinarliy steep hill. The leading light of the CRRC was actually running in the "Six Foot Track" (q.g.= "quid google") 45 km race Sunday AM and this hill forcibly reminded me that I'm not quite ready for the Blue Mountains yet. Just after I turned right at the top of the hill another runner shot past me (young, so knees able to move quickly downhill)  wearing a 6ft Track race singlet. That's a subtle - in the sense that only a runner would recognise it - boast because 6ft Track is a really hard race, but the way this guy was handling the hills he had probably earned it.

Apart from the fact that Coogee is about 1000 times groovier than Brighton-le-Sands (my other beach), it also has the slap-hiss of breaking ocean waves on the sand versus Botany Bay's gentle swell. Real estate dreams.

The run back through Kingsford and Kensington was all street/pavement, not so exciting. The Inglis stables are on Barker St, south of the Prince of Wales hospital, but they were deserted. Seems like an extraordinarily valuable chunk of land; I still can't really believe the horse racing industry exists at all, let alone that it finances this kind of operation. When we were living in Harris Park (near Rosehill track) there were a couple of two-horse racing stables operating out of suburban backyards: that's more my idea of racing, such as it is.

Anyway, an OK run from a training point of view. Maybe a little bit short.

Sunday Run (9)

Endomondo Running Workout

Looking for an easy run this week after last week's gut-buster (although more accurately, thigh-buster) and picked on the Brighton-le-Sands loop which in my mind is about 20 km (I remember the first time I ran it was on the day of the Sydney marathon last year, and I had to finish off with a couple of laps around a football oval to build up the extra 1.0975 kilometers. However, the best thing about it is that (when I run it by myself) is that it is substantially flat, as you can imagine following a river down to the sea and running alongside the shore would pretty inevitably be. Normally when the club does the run we come back through Arnecliff, for the hills. But this was a scheduled quiet day, and the other Andrew, who is the CRRC guide, was off resting up for the 6ft track 45 km race next week, so I had no guide and that meant no Arnecliff. I was a bit surprised when I got home and found I'd run 23 km - someone must have stretched the Grand Parade, Brighton's imaginatively named beachside road. Probably a real estate agent; it sounds so much better than General Holmes Drive, of which it is a direct continuation.

Perhaps I was a little late setting off because I missed the spectacular dawns of the last couple of weeks - mind you, that could also be a side effect of atmospheric conditions. Perhaps the air wasn't refracting. I just re-read a book on the surveying of India by George Everest; refraction played a big role in his success. Indirectly, amongst other things, it meant he was better off surveying in winter than summer (there's more refraction in winter and it means you can take sightings further) and this hugely reduced the toll of sickness in the surveying parties - which were enormous, I had no idea. Another thing I realised, in passing, while reading this book, was that all the maths I learned at school would have been more than enough to do the maths required for surveying. I wonder if that made school education feel more relevant to students? Probably not. (Thinks Stalky & Co)

I'm not sure how I failed to notice before that this run takes you right under the approach path for the EW runway - maybe the wind was in a different direction this AM -  but a point on the path halfway between the freeway and the hockey club (Kyeemagh RSL) is exactly in line. No more will I say that planes fly low over Shepherd St. I can't say I saw the pilot wave back, because the sun reflecting off the glass made him a bit invisible, but I'd be damned sure he saw me waving. Also, just past the hockey club, you get to run almost parallel to the runway for a couple of hundred metres, separated only by the engineered course of the Cooks river, which is pretty narrow at that point. Surprisingly the noise isn't particularly overwhelming from the side.

The beach was very empty and just raked, if raking is what tractors do. Manicured, in preparation for the day's beach volleyball. It was pretty cold this AM, so I doubt a big crowd was heading down (but our local market was packed - later - despite the grey skies). It's such an unimpressive beach - for Sydney - it's hard to imagine anyone using it, although of course if you live locally you do.

Having reached Brighton I turned around and came back. Nothing exciting happened, except perhaps that my fastest kilometer was the 19th; that's not usual. Normally it's the 3rd (it's downhill into the park where we meet)