Sense of satisfaction

Google really should make a mobile version of their blogger website - it takes forever for this to load here in my shack over GPRS. It's eating into my sleep time!

I'm back now in Sea Palling after the weekend's Great North Run exploits. I'd only been away four nights, but the spiders and woodlice had taken over. I'm starting to feel very comfortable here now, since there shouldn't be anyone coming in at the weekends for a while, so I'm making it a bit more my own. I also have a really good gas heater now, courtesy of Rick, the kindly husband of one of my new colleagues, Louise. I'm starting to feel confident that I could make it through the winter months.

Anyway, the run was a lot harder than I had thought it was going to be. As you may have noted, I'd only done one run of more than two hours in training, and I think that may have been a bit of a miscalculation. I wasn't very far away from being fit enough to do the run at my 'race pace' (just under seven minutes per kilometre) but I really needed more stamina. I ended up crumbling a bit in the final hour of my two hour forty minute effort. I even walked a couple of times, but only when I was taking on water/Lucozade.

The people of Shields gave an excellent account of themselves, having taken the time to prepare orange segments, handfuls of sweets and my favourite, ice pops. I wouldn't have pulled myself through it without their goodwill, and also without the occassional sight of someone doing marginally worse than me.

There were some people, running for Childline, whose t-shirts stated that they were 'going the extra mile'. Sod that.

I don't think that the half marathon is really my distance. It goes beyond running and into endurance territory. It's all well and good for the eight stone superfit athletes, but for me, still 14 stone, it's just a bit too much.

I have a 10k run coming up in Great Yarmouth this month, and I am actually looking forward to that as being something well within my comfort zone. I don't intend to let my ability to run around non-stop for an hour or so to slip - I intend to take up some kind of sport, preferably non-contact, and not squash.

I have been experimented upon

I should have told you - if only sportstracker hadn't broken down, last Sunday I managed a 2 hour 15 minute run, on very hilly terrain. I think you can piece together the run from the following sportstracker outputs:



This was a monster run, roughly 9 or 10 miles. It was slow because of the very hilly nature of the terrain. After this, I have to be prepared for the distance of the Great North Run, which is now only a week away.

I have managed only one run in the intervening week - an inadvisable 40 minute run at dusk in Sea Palling.

Just to nail my colours to the mast, I am aiming for 2 hours 20 in the Great North Run. I am prepared to accept 2 25, but 2 30 would be a bit disappointing. Please donate now to make me push myself beyond the limit! Although not past the limit that where good people die.

I've just come back from another long drive, this time to Newcastle to have my mass, volume, composition, breathing, efficiency, and anaerobic threshold measured, all in the name of science.

I have lost just under a stone, with all of this being fat. My body fat is still horrendous, but lower now, at 37.9% from 41.2%. I now know that by rights my body consumes 1600kcal/day, so I have a target and a reason to count the calories.

The point at which I stop burning fat and begin to primarily burn carbs (anaerobic threshold, in terms that I understand it) has increased from a heart rate of 86 to a heart rate of 139. This means that I now almost only burn fat when I exercise, and this was by no means the case at the beginning.

I have almost tripled the amount of O2 I can consume before this point is reached, and yet my heart is still actually beating at the same rate, meaning that it has simply increased in size. The whole heart/lung complex is bigger than it was, with my lung capacity having gone from 89 to 103 (no idea what these units are though). Just sitting down for two hours, I burnt 20% more calories than I did 20 weeks ago. I am a machine!

I have never been fitter than this. I still need to lose two and a half stone though before I can begin to think about being vain.

You do realise I'm living in a shack don't you?

Every night before I retire, I sweep my bed for woodlice. There are always more in there by the time I wake up. When I get myself out of bed, I check my slippers for poisonous spiders. This is not a response to a threat that is based in reality however. I do this because I was scarred as adolescent by a TV reconstruction of someone being bitten to death by an arachnid that hid in their slipper.

Spiders and insects are everywhere in my wooden construction, chalet-style, midweek arrangement in Sea Palling, in the North East of Norfolk. You can't really get too worked up about it. Every morning I get spider's web in my face as I walk through the front door. A ladybird stayed in the same place, on the side of the sink, staring menacingly at my flannel, for two days.

While it is great to hear the sea, and see the stars, you have to be outside to do that. The rest of the time, it's just a bit lonely and small. This week coming I intend to do more reading, and less listening to the radio. I think I must have heard every bit of Radio 4's output over the past week, twice in many instances.

It has been exciting to have somewhere new to run though. Viz the route of my long (one hour) midweek run from this week below. This was a really difficult run at times, as the terrain was threatening to the ankles, and the blackberries by the side of the road were tempting me to stop and gorge.


I've also had a go at running along the beach in the morning before work. Running on the beach is very difficult. At one point I went from running on sand to running up a very steep ramp, and the ramp was actually something of a relief. The Chariots of Fire factor is very high though, and it makes for a good looking route. 


According to my training diary, I should be doing a 100-120 minute run today. This fills me with some trepidation.

Work has been interesting. I've been to a different building every day, so it's been hard to get a true idea of what it's going to be like. Next week there is a caseload allocation meeting, and it seems as though I'm going to be getting a bunch of cases assigned to me there. I hope that I don't end up doing community clinics like the rest of them. I have been employed as someone to do something different, to work in Sure Start centres in a preventative capacity, to do something about early interaction, to work with families before the need for a referral arises. I don't want to lose sight of that.

I have some beautiful bits of Norfolk to investigate, and I'm trying to take advantage of this while I still have some sunlight after work. This week I had a look at:

Horsey Mill

Happisburgh Church.

Uproot

I've entered a rather bizarre phase in my life, one I've seen coming for a while. My nearly two month summer break has drawn to an end - it was like being a school child again - and I'm starting back at work tomorrow. It's just that work is 150 country miles away from my home, where I've left Ian holding the fort, and the cat, for the working week.

So I am in a peaceful holiday home in Sea Palling, which is Norfolk's closest beach resort, and feeling a little apprehensive about my first day's actual work as a fully fledged speech therapist tomorow in Great Yarmouth.

I can see the stars here, even though it's a full moon. In a couple of weeks time it's going to be stunning out there. No light pollution, no sound pollution. No telly or wifi, just radio 4 and the faint buzzing of a fridge. I might turn the fridge off when I take my beer out of it. What a racket!

I am uptodate with my training schedule. I remember right at the beginning of all this, when I could barely manage 10 minutes running, my friend Ricky pointed to the 14th of September's '100 minute, easy run` as a particularly unachievable target. Well, Ricky, I did do it - sort of, 60 minutes on the cross trainer, and then 40 minutes on the treadmill directly afterwards. All this and then four hours driving. Surely one or two donations are in order?

Thank you to Liz for doing just that! She states that she'll be doing the Great Eastern Run the week after the Greaet North Run. I hope she's not planning on doing both - that would be ridiculous.

Great Yorkshire Run Report

This blog is becoming somewhat straight ahead for my liking, and post-titles like the one above are not helping. Do you agree that this blog is entirely lacking in political backbone?

Should I denounce America / Britian / Israel for training Georgians to murder Ossetian civilians in their beds a month ago, and go on to denounce our media for reporting the whole thing backwards, with Georgian tanks being called Russian tanks (see TurgotReis' comment responding to a still somewhat unbalanced Guardian article here), Russia being called the warmongerer, and so on?

Now I'm no Russophile. They're all gangsters, and they are all scum. The team of criminals who are supposedly in it for our interests look a lot more evil and stupid at this point in time though. You only have to look at Saakashvili himself: eating his tie, and cowering in the streets to see this.

Since I am unsure whether such an alternative commentary on contemporary events is going to help my ailing sponsorship fund, I will refrain from a full public denunciation. Thank goodness the American citizen (Martin) has already donated!

Back to the sport! I am much inspired by our Olympians! If Rebecca Adlington can do it, and have her parents be interviewed on the local news on a nightly basis for a full week, then so can I! I had a good week of training - two runs and two trips to the gym before my big run in Sheffield on Sunday. Here's what Sportstracker recorded me as doing during the Great Yorkshire Run.


I did the 10k in 1 hour 7 minutes. See my official "splits" here (search for race number 5214). This is by no means fast, but it wasn't dreadful, and it was marginally faster than the pace I took the 5k run at, which is a good thing for sure. Here are some of the people I overtook - a guy from Channel 5's Biggest Roundest Man competition, a man in a women's swimming costume, and an extremely pear-shaped woman...


Ian and I also went to the Vivienne Westwood exhibition up there in Sheffield - loads of clothes, that's for sure. I think I preferred the older stuff that looked like a series of sacks stacked upon one another, although the spangly stuff also caught my eye. I liked this particular one, a man's coat, with the very heroic touch of blood, depicted in red jewels, dripping from the chest and arm.

Although blogging appears to have become a weekly thing...

I promise you that running isn't. This week, after my long run on Sunday, I have either run or been the the gym every day, except yesterday.

• Monday, I couldn't face a 'recovery run', so I went to the gym instead.
• Tuesday I was in the gym as well - 35 minutes hard work on the cross trainer, and then the incredible flying machine for 20 minutes, and three sets of ten on three weights machines.
• Wednesday, a 45-minute hard run. This was a real killer, as I went at 9.4 km/hour (according to my previously published scatter-chart, I would normally take a 45 minute run at 8.5 km/hour). I knew that chart would come in handy.
  
• Thursday, I couldn't face the weights machines, but I did 40 minutes hard work on the cross trainer.
• Friday, a 35-minute gentler run, at 8.7 km/hour.
• Saturday, takeaway food, looked around some cool second hand shops on the Mansfield Road, and went to the local borough fair, which featured wonderfully traditional produce-judging what-have-you (I'll get some pictures of the massive leeks digitised soon, I promise).
  
• Today, I wanted to protect my knee, which is now starting to hurt a bit, so instead of 90 minutes on the pavement, I did 90 minutes on the cross trainer at the gym. Since sports tracker would just give me a big blot on a single point of a map, I didn't turn it on, and accordingly I can't prove that I did this today. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Please consider donating to my charity, WaterAid. Just click on the button below to start the ball rolling. I'm doing a 10k run next weekend in Sheffield, and I need encouragement to go over 9.5 sports tracker km/hour! Verbal encouragement is also a great help. Thanks to Becca and all those who have commented here.

In other news, Ian and I have bought a Wii, which is proving to be a fantastic waste of time. My life of leisure is set to end pretty soon though. I'm off to Great Yarmouth tomorrow to prove to my future employers that I don't need the MMR jab, and then I will meet some of the team in Lowestoft. Two weeks 'till I start!

Back on track

I'm sitting with a beer in our backgarden, typing into a laptop, which is glaring back at me a reflection of myself: still a bit plump despite all these miles I've covered, and requiring a haircut. The next door neighbour is strimming her garden. I did mine yesterday. That is how bloody settled and grown up I am. I mean, I just bought bulbs for a hanging basket for goodness sake!

Our cat is being de-territorized by the neighbour cat, who I have to admit is nicer to stroke and is a bit more friendly (I hope Colin doesn't read this). It's reached the point now where Colin needs to be persuaded to step outside the back door to join us. He is a bundle of squauks and miaows, and very very needy. This may have something to do with me utterly pandering to his every whim. I currently let him wake me up at 5am, whereupon I feed him, falling asleep downstairs until he wakes me up, when I let him outside to perform his ablutions. I will then allow myself to be woken again less than 2 hours later to let him back in again. He sleeps soundly during the day, except on those days where I practise a similar style of sleep torture on him in a futile attempt to teach him a lesson. When I actually start my job, and I'm not around during the week, Ian informs me that Colin will lose all of these privileges.

And to think that when I start work in Children's Centres in Great Yarmouth I'll be part of a team that among other things is trying to improve people's parenting skills, such as learning how to say 'no' to your children.

This week I ran with Ian for the first time, and, notably this was my fastest ever run. I blamed Ian for starting out too quick, but I sustained this pace, and it was obviously a really unfriendly thing to do. He managed to keep with me though, and he even tried to pass me at the end. How dare he!

Then Ian and I joined the council gym scheme, for a one month taster thing, £25 each. This week I've been in twice, once for a swim, and then running on the treadmill for 40-odd minutes at a pretty good pace. I also did some weights, and spent 20 minutes on what my friend Caroline once unforgettably described as my 'incredible flying machine'.

Today's run really does mean that I'm back on track. 81 minutes, slightly faster than last week's long run, over the 10k barrier for the first time (actually over 11k). I feel like I will be more than able to do the Sheffield run in a few weeks time, but not at any kind of pace.

I will also admit here to having nipples, and that they are starting to chafe a bit. I would have bought Vaseline in Poundland today, but I couldn't cope with taking it to the till. Ian suggested that I use his Vaseline lip chapstick, which provided a humourous image.

And as James notes running is pretty dreadful. I stayed up to watch the marathon last night, and those guys were in advanced states of bodily distress. How is that a good thing? I cannot really say a good word for it. Like some kind of junkie, the endorphine high is harder to come by now. I guess in that way I can see how people start to work out harder and harder, although I can't help but think that heroin would be easier.