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.