A little post-race hibernation

It might be a little belated, but I ran the Cadbury Half Marathon on Sunday! Hooray!



And I won!

Nah, not really. Are you kidding? If people like me started winning races, I’d be worried.

Major thoughts? I’ve got to find some way to sunscreen the top of my head. I know I’ve thought about this before. I certainly wasn’t thinking about it the day of the race. The first time it even popped into my head was the morning after the race when I simultaneously stepped under the shower, and into a world of pain. I’m not sure if it’s just a line where the part in my hair was exposed to the treacherous Tasmanian sun (hey, it was raining to begin with. Why do you mock me, sun?) or whether my entire head was burned.. But I’m still feeling it now. As someone who liberally douses themselves in 30+ before even leaving the house, I can’t stand missing a spot. I don’t know how I’m supposed to sunscreen myself on the top of the head. Maybe I should wear a hat that isn’t just a visor. Maybe I should only participate in races that take place in the dark.




The swag from this race was pretty goddamn awesome. They gave me a medal (as seen above, backwards). They gave me chocolate (of the standard Dairy Milk variety) and more chocolate (also Dairy Milk. I’m sensing a theme here). They gave me a shirt. And they gave me a magazine subscription. I tried to queue for a sausage sandwich but failed. I didn’t really mind as I was previously queuing for a free leg massage, and I succeeded in that. And I’d take massages over sausages any day of the week. Except maybe Thursday.

I guess I should say something about the race as well, shouldn’t I? Well, I maybe enjoyed about two thirds of the race. The rest was painful and unpleasant. One minute I’d be thinking about how miserable I was, how I hated everything, how the world was a sucky place. Two minutes later, I’d love everything, I’d love the world and the pain wouldn’t even be there. Endorphins like to mess with my brain chemistry.

In the end I came in at 2 hours, 5 minutes, 44 seconds. About ten and a half minutes (give or take) faster than my half marathon personal best. I only count official results as personal bests, mind you. I know I’ve run faster than my last PB in training. But that doesn’t count. I actually ran this one faster (about 20 seconds, maybe), but they didn’t have a mat at the start, just the end. The result was from gun time. But I don’t mind. The field was small, and it didn’t add much to my time.

I still haven’t registered for the Canberra Mara in April. I know I should, but I’m a little scared. As soon as I register, it’s real. I have to start training. I should have already started training. Yes, I know, I’m up to 20-something kilometres in my long run, but I know I’m going to have to do better than one training run a week to get through this one.

Lazy days, and a new resolution

You would think that a nice long week off work would result in a lot of running and maybe some swimming or cycling or other fun fun outdoor active activities.

Scratch that. I knew what this week would involve. Food, computer games, lots of movies and not a lot of moving at all. And maybe some baking. So I guess this has been a successful holiday, because that’s what I’ve been doing.

I have been intending to get out there and do some running for the last couple of mornings. Sunday was Christmas, so I gave myself the day off. Monday was Boxing Day, a day of dubious purpose to be sure, but I didn’t think it involved running. Tuesday, I think I may have had a late night. Wednesday, pretty much the same. I set my alarm for 5am, but I couldn’t manage to drag myself out of bed until half past, and then I had a stomachache. Thursday morning I only got home at just before 1am, so waking up four hours later didn’t appeal to me.

Today, I got up at 6am. Finally managed to get out there on the road. It was a gorgeous morning, not a cloud in the sky. I didn’t even negotiate with myself the way I usually do, like “Maybe you can just run TO the lake, and if you don’t feel like running around it, you can turn up College Street. At least that’s six kilometres. If you just do one lap around Gininderra, hey, that’s fourteen kilometres. Even better! Maybe if you feel okay after that, you can press on for the half.” I just went for it, and even though it wasn’t an easy one later on (I was really hurting by the 18k mark) I managed to get home in 2 hours, 11 minutes.

This is a massive win, because my half marathon personal best is 2 hours 16 minutes or thereabouts. Five minutes off my PB, and I wasn’t going particularly fast.

Happyface.

I fell asleep as soon as I came home, though. It was pretty warm out there, and I sorta crashed as soon as I came in the door. The tendons at the back of my ankles are really tight right now. I think I should start stretching.

Should I make that one of my new year’s resolutions? I need to stretch more.

You spin me right round baby, right round

Helluva crazy weekend. I really wanted to manage 21 kilometres on Saturday, and I did. So I win. Hooray! These long runs are really starting to screw me around, though. I get low blood sugar, I eat more sugar to literally keep myself awake, I get a headache, I crash, I fall asleep in the middle of the day... After yesterday’s run, I wasn’t much good for the rest of the day. Irritable. Unable to focus. I’m thinking there might be a diet issue, but I have no idea what it is.

So when I was running, I was trying to get Siri to play me some music. Exchange follows:
Me: Play my marathon endurance playlist.
Siri: (long pause) I’m sorry Cupcake, I didn’t catch that.
Me: Play my marathon endurance playlist.
Siri: (even longer pause) You don’t have a playlist named ‘Maritime Insurance’, Cupcake.

See, I made Siri call me Cupcake. It sounds so condescending when she says it in her little robot-y voice. I tried to get her to call me ‘asshat’, but she just paused for a moment and said “Could you please repeat that, Cupcake?”

I got cranky today for a variety of reasons, and rather than sit in my room and wallow in my shitty mood I put some clothes on, strapped on my running shoes and went out for a six kilometre jog. It kind of helped. Apart from the fact that I ate a whole bunch of fruit before I went running, and that didn’t do my stomach any favours.

One more week of work and then we’re shutting down over the Christmas holidays. Looking forward to a bit of a break.

I know she's my PA but I get the feeling that Siri hates me.

Just going to be a quick post this morning because I got up late, took a run for almost two hours and now I’ve got to go to a dance class. Yeah, after a 16.5km run. THAT’S AN AWESOME IDEA. You would have thought I’d learned my lesson after the swimming debacle last month. I’m expecting some agony. But if I didn’t take any risks, I’d never get anywhere.

It was a nice run this morning. The weather seemed a little cool to begin with but I figured it wouldn’t be a problem... Until I saw that I was running toward a wall of ominous black clouds. Within a few minutes, it was raining pretty heavily. I got paranoid that taking my iPhone out of my bumbag would result in a dead iPhone 4s and a really unhappy me, as water damage isn’t covered under the warranty. I laboured under my hastily chosen music playlist for about five or six kilometres, before I remembered Siri. Now, I’ve had a bad history with Siri because she never seems to understand a word I say. I still keep trying because apparently she’s supposed to learn and improve over time. We’ve come to blows in the past because she flatly refuses to play Eye of the Tiger. Every time I ask, she plays the Black Eyed Peas. I don’t question why, although I do question why there’s a Black Eyed Peas song on my iPhone. I just figure that she hates me and this is her attempt at defiance.

Today Siri was behaving, at least to begin with. I’d ask her for some Bush, or Queen, or Talking Heads, and she’d play it. I’d say “Play my newest junk.”, and she’d play my newest junk. After a while, I think the microphone may have gotten a little wet, because I was trying to get her to play some Foo Fighters and she just wouldn’t do it. She said “I’m sorry, I don’t understand semicolon hash A four...” etc. I’m not sure exactly what it was she said, as I cut her off mid-sentence, but it certainly didn’t have anything to do with the Foo Fighters. There was nobody around at the time to see me running along at full steam, screaming PLAY! FOO! FIGHTERS! seemingly to myself. That’s a good thing. Ah, technology.

So the Cadbury Half is only four weeks away, give or take. I really wanted to do 21km this morning, but I slept through my alarm and I can’t miss the dress rehearsal today for the ball performance. I haven’t been training all that well (as evidenced by my lack of bloggage) but I think I’m in good shape for the half marathon all the same. I’m really looking forward to it. New scenery, as I’ve never been to Tasmania. I ran to work one and a half times over the last three weeks (second time I had to give up halfway as I messed up my knee. No lasting damage, though). So yeah, all in all, things are going to be fine. Positivity!

Man, I wish I was somewhere else right now. Somewhere warmer. With an ocean, and sand.

Superfast Jellyfish

I had a day off on Friday, and it was a serious luxury that I didn’t want to waste. I got up early, fell back asleep, dragged myself out of bed at about 6:15 and faffed around until I finally managed to get out on the road at 7:00. Then I took a nice leisurely run down to Lake Burley Griffin and around the central basin, only stopping occasionally to take some photos.



I find it strange that things always look so much further away when you take a photo of them.

I also tried to take a shot of some fluffy baby ducks but as soon as I got my phone out to get all happy-snappy the mother duck started freaking out and went straight for me. Duck needs to take a chill pill. Probably thought I was going to eat its children. And I may have. Fluffy baby ducks looked pretty damn tasty.

The run itself was uneventful. I’m getting back into the swing of the long runs, not really feeling any discomfort due to the increased distance. Now the boredom starts to sink in, unless I entertain myself some other way. Does this mean I’m not pushing myself hard enough? I’m just trying to avoid heat exhaustion, dehydration and all the other wonderful things that come along with running at this time of year. I only drink water on these runs and I get pretty sweaty, so there might already be some electrolyte loss. Especially considering what happened later in the day.

After my run I had a big breakfast of eggs, bacon, crumpets and a pop tart. Long long runs = mucho food = bliss.

Now, complications. I went for a swim pretty much as soon as I’d eaten my breakfast because it was a really hot morning. I went down to CISAC, which is pretty good. They’ve got a nice 50m pool there, and it’s not too far from home. Six hundred metres in, I had an encounter with my old friend Leg Cramp. Now, this could be because of the electrolyte loss from earlier, or simply from muscle fatigue due to the run and my bad swimming. If I thought I ran badly, my swimming is like 1000 times worse. Children watch me in horror and turn to their mothers, shrieking “Mummy, that girl is drowning!” Or, “Mummy, is there something wrong with her legs?” and this is on a GOOD day. This was not a good day. I was halfway through my 13th lap and both legs completely seized up, bending double underneath me. I had to swim to the other side of the pool with no legs, avoiding splashy freestyle guy in my lane who kept trying to overtake me despite there being two sparsely populated lanes for medium-speed swimming and only one slow lane. Which I was in. Life in the slow lane, that’s me.

Out of this, I took the comforting assurance that if I really were to drown, the lifeguards would probably just stare at me in a bored fashion as they had when I was all cramped up and struggling to stay above the water.

Later on in the day, I went to get a deep tissue massage. This had seemed like a great idea earlier in the week, but this woman was BRUTAL. She had elbows of iron, and by the sounds of it she was either really exerting herself while working me over, or she was enjoying herself a bit too much. She tortured my back for what seemed like a lifetime, and even though I knew it would hurt when she got to my calves, I had no idea just how much.

Yeah. I like deep tissue massage. Nothing like a bit of whimpering agony to liven up my day.

Now after dancing today, my legs feel odd. Rubbery. Jelly-like. I know I have to run tomorrow, but I’m hoping they’ve fixed themselves up by then.

Doubts, dramas and philosophical inadequacies

I don’t know all that much about philosophy, but I know a whole bunch about traffic lights. I want to share something, a lesson that was taught to me by the little green man on the pedestrian crossing. He’s a friend. He’s very close to me.

The little green man says to walk, but it’s more than that. The little green man says to keep moving forward. When you’re waiting to cross the road, the little green man teases the shit out of you. He never shows up when you want him to, he waits and waits until you’re halfway tempted to start crossing despite him. But then he tells you to walk, and you cross the road.

Sometimes when you get to the other side of the road, you realise that you really want to be back there where you were before. But you can’t just turn around and walk back, because now the cars are going past and you’ve missed your chance. The little green dude is nowhere to be found. He disappeared when you were still walking, when the little red man started flashing at you in warning. The little green man fucked off to do whatever it is the little green man does when he’s not shepherding your ass across the road. You no longer have the freedom to cross the road unimpeded. You’ve lost that magic moment. If you want to cross back again, you’ll just have to wait. You don’t know when the lights will change again. Is it healthy to stand there, looking back across the road, wishing you were back where you were before this whole crossing-the-road mess started? Staring at the red man, wishing him gone. It’s not frigging healthy. It’s not good for you. You’re wasting your life, waiting for the green man to come back. If you ever got back there, it wouldn’t be the same.

The little green man is trying to tell you that you just have to keep moving forward. You think you’re on the wrong side of the road? How do you know? Have you really looked? Maybe life is great here on the other side. Even if it’s not, there will be other roads and you’ll cross them in your time. If there’s someone you left behind back there, maybe in their time they’ll come over to this side of the road to join you. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.

But basically, setting aside the confusing metaphor, reflection is okay every now and then but living in the past is counterproductive because you’re not living at all. When there are setbacks, you just have to pick yourself the fuck up and KEEP MOVING FORWARD. Because life doesn’t stop for anyone, and nor does the little green man on the traffic lights.

Maybe I know a little about philosophy.

I landed stupidly on my ankle during dance class today. Sometimes my spatial perception sucks ass. I went floundering on the floor, knowing I’d have to pick myself up and somehow get to the other end of the room so the other dancers could keep on dancing, knowing that there was no dignified way of doing this because I couldn’t put any weight on my left foot. I had to hop the length of the room. I knew I looked like a dick. I knew I was epitomising the fucking ridiculous but what the hell else is new? Since I got home I’ve accessorised with a hole in my hand from accidentally grating it with a box grater, and several hot oil burns on my fingers.

But you know what? That’s me. I’m clumsy. I’m a dork. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.

I haven’t been in a dark place, but over the last week I’ve been standing right next to a dark place, peering in. I don’t want to go in there. I want to go back to the way I was before. There is no going back, and I’m going to give the dark place a wide berth. I’ve just got to accept the way I am and keep moving forward. Hope for a road somewhere ahead.

I wish I could follow this more consistently, stand by my convictions and be a strong person. But I’m too fucking weak. It comes and it goes.

In short, I didn’t run this weekend, even though I don’t have a long training window left. Falling back into the lazy trap. Am I going to let it bother me? No. I’m going to just keep on going.

I used to be so awesome. Now I’m not sure anymore.

Tempted...

Ooh. Entries have opened for the 2012 Canberra Marathon. Already. I’m sorely tempted to shell out for my entry fee now so I’ve got the race locked in for next April.

Also, I’ll probably get a nice low bib number as well. Does that actually matter? Nah.

Interesting to me is that the race was $99 this year, and next year it’s going to be $109. Is there going to be more included? More amenities? Better quality medals? More of those deliciously awesome gels they provided this year? Is this prompted solely by inflation? I DON’T KNOW.

I haven’t really run this week at all. But I did do my long run on the weekend, and I swear I’m going to start getting my act together during the week. Soon-ish.

This is my Race Face

Okay, not so much my Race Face as my early morning Saturday face, where I haven’t showered or prettied myself up. Pre-run. Scary, huh? This is as candid as I get. I took a post run photo but it seems to have vanished. Which is a good thing.

As may become evident, I just got an iPhone 4s and I’m so overwhelmed by the novelty of a shiny awesome phone with a camera that I tend to take a lot of pictures. So, I apologise in advance.

I ran on Saturday, despite being for the most part unwilling to drag myself from my comfortable bed at 6am to spend half an hour dousing myself in sunscreen before hitting the road. I’m very sun-smart, most of the time. Even though sunscreen makes my face sting and my eyes swell up and inexplicably causes me to come home covered in tiny dead flying bugs. The bitches just love me. Maybe it’s because sunscreen makes me sweat like crazy. Sometimes I feel like the essence of Summer is purely the smell of sunscreen. Or Golden Gaytimes. Gotta love a Golden Gaytime.

I didn’t know if I was going to be able to cope with the distance, given that I’ve been so slack of late with the whole running malarkey, but I managed to run 14k in a pretty respectable time (at least respectable in my middling standards) of about one and a half hours. No personal best, but it’s just a training run. As the weather hasn’t really heated up as of yet, I’m starting to dread the longer runs to come through November and December in the lead-up to my race in January. I’ll get to experience the joy of a 4am alarm on a Saturday morning once more.

I can hardly wait.

I’ve given up on the MarathonGuru training plan. It’s just not realistic. Add to which, they sent me an email this week (or at least I think it was them, I can’t find the email now) to tell me that my free trial was coming up and I’d need to pay in order to keep my membership of the site. Naturally, I thought “Get stuffed” and stopped logging in. I know I can train for this event by myself anyway. I don’t need those losers.

Flailing ineffectually!

So I’m following this MarathonGuru training plan in the lead-up to the Cadbury Half in January. Thoughts so far? It’s pretty hardcore. Not the distances or the expected speeds, because they’re fairly average so far. It’s just the training load in general. It’s asking me to run five times this week. A combo of short runs, speed sessions, long slow runs, and I’m sure there’ll be hill repeats coming up, maybe even some fartlek. It kinda makes sense given the time goal I’m aiming for, but I’m really not used to running so often. I’m too lazy for this sort of discipline. Especially at this time of year.

We were actually discussing this at my dance class this morning. As it gets closer to the end of the year, people just feel more tired. It’s not the heat, so much. Heat is good for the muscles. You just feel a bit more blah. It’s interesting to get the perspective of others on this. At least I’m not the only one.

So anyways, I went for a 10k stagger yesterday. The weather was gorgeous. Overcast, occasionally spitting a bit of cold rain. It wasn’t full-on bucketing down, which I felt was a little bit of a shame, but it wasn’t windy. I enjoyed it. I approached the water fountain and this old lady in a bright pink see-through plastic raincoat starts laughing. “Ahahaha!” She says. “You’re thirsty!”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say in response to that.

Variation on a theme: You make me feel like dancin'!

When I signed up for the Cadbury Half Marathon, one of the interesting bonuses on the website was a link to a free interactive training program at MarathonGuru, which helps you to train for a particular time, and adjusts your predicted time based upon the progress you’re making in the training runs. I don’t know how good the results are going to be, but I’m giving it a shot.

Today, it’s 11 weeks away from the race. The training plan also started today, and being the good starter that I am (let’s not mention the ‘mediocre finisher’ aspect at this point. I’m working on it) I went out there and dutifully ran the 6km that was expected of me. Perhaps a little faster than the program told me to run. At this point, my predicted finish time for the half is 2 hours and about 4 minutes. Which would be pretty awesome. Those numbers will probably get a little skewed as time goes on.

I’ve also booked my flights and accommodation for the trip. So it’s definitely happening now. I’m about a grand poorer than I was this morning. Hoping it’s going to be worth it.

I haven’t really been running (apart from faffing around on the treadmill at the gym. I don’t really consider that running) for the last week or two, but I’m happy to get back into it. I’ve been a little preoccupied with other things, fitness-wise. Mostly Zumba. I know I’ve mentioned before that I got my instructor certification for Zumba Fitness back in January, and on Friday night, I finally had the opportunity to teach my first class. I realised that you sweat so much more when you’re teaching, because you have to give so much more energy to get the class to follow you. I tried to steer clear of the cardio-heavy songs, but I was still completely exhausted afterward. I’m teaching next Friday night’s class as well. Then, I’m done for the time being. I have a race coming up, and as fun as it was to teach, it was also unnatural and terrifying to me.