So let me back up a bit after this pre-credit sequence. At the end of July, I came back from my month in Europe, three days before the semester began. The trip was excellent, thanks for asking, although not particularly restful: two weddings (Oxford & Ingolstadt), a conference (Southampton), writing a paper for said conference (Dublin), and trying to sort out the tedious last finalising of marks for Sydney from the other side of the planet. Most enjoyable was seeing family (London, Dublin) and friends (all of the above + Cambridge). There wasn't much time to launch into preparation for the new semester, but at least the pressure of work pretty much staved off jet-lag: amazing what one can forego if one doesn't have time for it. Anyway, casting about for a way to fill the spare three hours I had a week, I decided to enter some kind of road race. Not perhaps everyone's first choice, but spring was around the corner, and given the heat during summer, it seemed best to max out on exercise at this rather than any later/earlier stage in the year. My first thought was to enter the City to Surf, a popular 14km event which takes one from the heart of the city to Bondi, but by the time I got my act together, the only spaces left were in a group which would have included mums with strollers, people dressed as furry mascots, and the like, so that seemed pointless. In compensation, I decided to go for the more demanding Blackmores half-marathon, which would take place seven weeks hence.
Now, I've always run (anti)socially since the summer of 2001, when I was writing up my Master's dissertation and realised that 12 hours a day at the desk needed some kind of counterbalance. The amount and intensity has fluctuated over the years (there was one bad time when I had to take several months off with a knee problem), but at least twice a week, and more typically three to four times, I'd get a morning run in before undoing all the calorie-burn with an extravagant breakfast. My only regular running partner was my brother, and since we've more often than not been living in different cities over the past decade, it's become a pretty solitary pastime. Not that this bothered me: if I found I was running slowly enough to be able to converse, then this seemed to defeat the point of the exercise. There's a reason why the film title is not 'the gregariousness of the long-distance runner.'
Until last April, I was a stranger to competition, assuming one doesn't count a 10km 'race' against the clock with two friends one morning on the university track in Cambridge. Then I did a local five-mile (8km) race at two weeks' notice - didn't break 30mins as I was hoping, but squeaked in under 31. So I was pretty much a novice when starting out on this project. For instance, my idea of training for running was simply to go out and run as hard and long as I could. Despite the intuitive simplicity of this, there's a lot more needed. Now I'm at least aware of such things as splits, negative splits (despite the semantic implications, these are actually Good Things To Do), fartlek, pyramids, intervals, the necessity of doing sprints, hill-sessions, mixing distances, and a whole repertoire of stretching and muscle-strengthening exercises. A possible next step into this murky subculture might involve working on my running technique - I was told the other day when doing some speed work that I was a bit low to the ground. While this might seem to be something past praying about, apparently it has more to do with one's carriage than adding cubits to one's stature (which, as the good book points out somewhere, isn't really practicable).
Initially, I tried to clue myself up via the web: downloaded a seven-week schedule, and more or less stuck to it for about a fortnight. Then the race organisers offered the chance of weekly group training sessions, which sounded like a good thing. I signed up with alacrity, only to discover that they began at 6am. My morning runs were NEVER before 7am, and frequently closer to 7.30, so this was a big ask. Nonetheless, I did two of them, and then was invited to join another, somewhat more hardcore group which met at 5.45am on an additional morning. Well, in for a penny, I thought. If you're going to take the medicine, don't balk at licking the spoon. In the last two weeks, I've moved to another part of the city (that's a tale for another blog post), and getting to the starting line for 5.45 has meant rising at 5am and a 30-minute cycle. Still, with the race at 6.20am, it's less gratuitously masochistic than it sounds.
So I'm now running about 5-6 days a week, with a particularly long run on Sundays (between 65 and 110 minutes). One plus from all this insane activity, aside from calves to die for (which are some compensation for toes like a chiropodist's nightmare) has been that I've seen lots of new parts of the city. For instance, one circuit took me from my former dwelling-place on the North-shore on a loop through many different harbour-side areas via about 6 bridges (see picture 1).
Relocating to my present location has of course opened up a new set of panoramas - last Sunday I hit some of the famous Eastern beaches (Maroubra, Coogee, Bronte, Clovelly - see picture 2), and Bondi is on my radar for this Sunday, my final hour-long run before the race.
So, this has been a mostly positive experience, and hopefully I can nail a sub-90 minute time Sunday week (19 Sept). I've enjoyed my two days a week spent running in the company of others (not that it's a time when I'm at my conversational best, what with the early start, shortness of breath, etc.) Probably the most difficult part of the training has been the food sacrifices: I cut down hugely on my intake of puddings and biscuits once I signed up, with a total ban on them for the past two weeks. Am looking forward to making a beast of myself with some sticky toffee pudding once this race is done. And maybe getting a life back again (though after all this time, I'm not sure I'd know what to do with it. And anyway, lecturing duties continue, as sure as those perennial standbys, death and taxes). But I rather suspect that I will 'keep it going', as the coach enjoined - maybe at lower intensity for a bit, but enough to stay sharpish. After all, once you've done a half-marathon, you can't help thinking that, back in 490BC, this would only have got news of the victory to somewhere midway between the battlefield and Athens. Although, had Pheidippides bethought himself, and realised that 'no news is good news', he might just have saved himself (and the rest of us) a whole heap of bother...
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