The bust.

To get in my 3 run commitment this week meant running on consecutive days. I'd already run on Monday (previous post) but as Wednesday and Thursday were away days, this meant Tuesday and Friday would make up the numbers. Given my attempt at doing a 5K failed in the small print last week, I ended up sponsoring the wife of a colleague to do a similar event elsewhere in the country and setting up my own 5K course to have a go on Tuesday, and see what sort of pace I could maintain.

This turned out be a fun thing to do - I didn't manage to make myself feel too sick as I did the last time I tried running at a sun 8:30 pace, and it was good to have this sort of target to hit. I managed a 3.2 mile circuit (I had brain fade at the end and added 0.1 miles by failing to look at Mr Garmin in time) in 26:36, an 8:19 pace.

The other thing I wanted to do this week was to extend my running time to 50 minutes, regardless of the pace. I added in a couple of roads here and there to my normal route and came in within 30 seconds of my target end point of the run, a red post-box down the end of my road. This run came in a smidge under 5.5 miles, as is becoming usual, the first two miles felt clunky, mile three was OK although it's on concrete slabs for a good half mile, so uncomfortable, then mile four onwards felt just great. Plus it was in light rain which also helped with my temperature gauge.

The plan for this week is to extend out to 55 minutes, perhaps just tipping over 6.2 miles. This will be a milestone as it means I can run 10K, giving me 3 more weeks training for The Stourbridge Stumble to improve fitness. I know that 10K will be harder than on the roads as it is on track and grass, and not flat!

Training for the latter part of the week:
Tue: 3.2 miles, 26:36 minutes 8:19 pace. 10C HRAve:155 HRMax:167
Fri: 5.49 miles, 50:31 minutes 9:13 pace. 12C HRAve:163 HRMax:166

It does seem strange that my recorded average heart rate on the longer run was higher than shorter, faster run. I suspect that this has more to do with my cheapo HRM than what my heart was actually doing. Whilst on the train earlier this week, I calculated what my 70% and 85% heart rates should be: 144bpm and 163bpm respectively. These are using the "subtract your age from 220 ..." method, rather than having actually finding my maximum through genuine effort. I think this is pretty reasonable to work with for the moment.

Meanwhile back in real life, all sorts of things have been going on. My son now has a school to go to, it's all confirmed and the costs are covered. My daughter is off in Brighton with her theatre group, and they have a few performances of a show which the kids themselves developed and wrote. We get to see it when they get back, later this week.

Meanwhile, the house next door to my brother - the adjoining semi - was raided by the police on Friday. He lives a couple of streets away and I run past his place on most of my circuits. It turns out that this neighbouring house was a sizable hydroponics lab! It was one of several houses raided last week around our quiet suburban district which seem to have been purchased with the sole intent of growing cannabis. It's one way of paying the mortgage I suppose.

Thanks Phil for your comment on movies. Here's another bunch of favourites which nearly made the list:

I love "Delicatessen", especially the saw-playing scene, and when they are trying to find the squeaky spring in the bed! Then there's Twelve Monkey, Fargo, Brazil, Blues Brothers ...

I'll add on your suggestions to my Amazon rental account, always good to see new stuff. Mind you, Wizard of Oz always scared me as a kid - it was a regular X-mas movie on the BBC and the flying monkeys made me hide behind the sofa.

I'm a regular at the cinema, but this year has been slim pickings for good movies. Hopefully, things will pick up again second half of the year.

And finally for this post, I managed to leave my iPod Shuffle in my shorts, and so it's been for a swim in the washing machine. The initial prognosis is that I now have a 1GB memory stick. All of the bits which use the internal battery don't work. My daughter's Samsung mobile phone went for a similar swim two months ago, and after a lot of drying out, lived. However, it was fully discharged and switched off when it went through, something I can't say of my Shuffle. Bah.

All the best

Mr Stumble.

Prawn Crackers.

It has been a long week, and a while since I posted. In my defence, my time has been taken up doing a truck load of tech support, partly for my nephew's notebook PC which has been very ill, and more bizarrely for the local convent. Once you've done a favour for a nun, you're more or less in their grasp forever, even though they reimburse you with offers of cash or alcohol. Or both. They do appear to be extremely tax efficient in the dealings though!

The particular incident this week involved a nun of uncertain age (I wouldn't even hazard a guess) having been sold a laptop by a spotty teenager in a local PC World store. Of course, to the teenager, a new notebook running Vista is easy peasy, and installing Office 2007 a trivial matter. To Sister M.M. here, getting past the warranty card for some OCR software with the bundled scanner / printer was already too much. Too much information demanded which she simply didn't know how to answer. We started by ripping that card up.

I don't know about you, but I'm seeing more and more people getting left behind in the rush to "technologize" our lives, mainly because society (and a certain OS manufacturer in particular) has an expectation that everyone knows how to operate a PC.

Of course, in reality, most people don't really have anywhere near the level of knowledge to know how to protect themselves and their IT investment in the way they are expected to, and the elderly have an even tougher time because it is so far removed from the majority of the lives they have led. This isn't their fault. They want stuff which just works. You don't have to patch your dishwasher every week in case someone modifies the water in some nasty way which will turn all your plates pink and melt the cutlery. Really, if we need to use it, why should IT be different.

So, in the knowledge that in 30 years time, I'll be asking my daughter to do the same for me, I try to help out where I can.

Amidst all this, I did manage some running. I was actually aiming for a 5K racing being run this weekend (well, yesterday) as our previous plans for this weekend got altered, leaving an open slot. However, when I rechecked the small print, the "Race for Life - Telford" turned out to be a women only race, and there was nothing else doing within a reasonable distance. Aside from dressing up, I wasn't going to get past the start line. Sunday, also happened to be my birthday, so a busy day in other ways, topped off by a delicious and not-good-for-me Chinese meal. Plenty to run off this morning then.

Recent training has been:
(last week)
Mon: 3.37 miles, 31:14 minutes 9.16 pace. 10C HRAve:X HRMax:X
Wed: 4 miles, 37:00 minutes 9:14 pace. 9C HRAve:151 HRMax:X
Fri: 4.2 miles, 38:14 minutes 9:06 pace. 12C HRAve:X HRMax:X
(this week)
Mon: 4.85 miles, 47:49 minutes 9.52 pace. 8C HRAve:145 HRMax:157

Those prawn crackers really did slow me down this morning, but then again, my target this morning was just to run for 45 minutes and then jog back home. As I'm travelling on Wednesday, I plan a short run tomorrow morning and then to pick it up again on Thursday with a 50 minute run at just under 10 minute pace.

I'm aiming to get up to around 6.5 miles in the next couple of weeks and then work on improving pace to get a 10K practice time under 60 minutes. The race I'm aiming for is this year's Stourbridge Stumble on June 16th. This is a multi-terrain race and not flat, so I expect my pace will be more like 10:30 on the day. We'll see eh!

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble.

Bunny hops.

It's been an odd week. I needed to finish last week with a reasonable mileage as I had missed my mid week run. Thus I ran on Sunday and got in 2.5 miles and then ran again on Monday - my first run on sequential days - and got in 5 miles.

I'm not too sure that I like running without a rest day, but it's probably something I'll have to get used to - and hopefully enjoy in the coming months.

On the Monday run, as I approached my 3 mile marker along a suburban road I noticed a fairly sizable white domestic rabbit sat in someone's front garden munching on their perennials. It noticed me at about the same time and after assessing my sweaty frame for a moment made a mad dash back across the road and through a gap in a wrought iron gate which I suspect was home. This looked like a bunny who had done this sort of thing before (we have one just like it, only smaller and gray), and it's owners probably didn't realise that their gate wasn't up to the job. So I'll keep a lookout for it, and if we get a repeat, I might go knock on some doors to let them know.

On Tuesday, D developed a nasty cold and sore throat, and retired to bed Tuesday evening, not to emerge until today Thursday morning. This essentially blitzed Wednesday for running, and I got a bit of an earful this morning for sneaking out early for 4 miles, but not early enough to be back in time for my youngest daughter getting up. This is the cue for everyone to get up, regardless of the day and D would certainly have preferred to stay in bed again. More bridges to rebuild!

So the summary for the latest batch of runs:

===========
Sun: 2.56 miles, 22:37 minutes 8:51 pace. 13C HRAve:156 HRMax:X
Mon: 5 miles, 45.28 minutes 9:06 pace. 10C HRAve:149 HRMax:156
Thu: 4 miles, 37:59 minutes 9:30 pace. 9C HRAve:140 HRMax:156

Monday felt like I was running a 10 minute pace - just horrible - but turned out I was kind of where I planned to be. Today felt like I was running an 11 minute pace through treacle with all sorts of twinges in my legs. As you can see it was a lot slower than Monday, probably down to a late night Wednesday as my brother came round, and then an early morning.

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble.

Anger management

I'm not a person who gets angry easily, in fact it's pretty damn rare. But this week, I've managed to spend a couple of days incandescent with rage, kicked off by some mad policies at my workplace, related to my intention to move on to a new role, and then my next door neighbour's builder attaching a building to a wall on my property without permission. On Tuesday night I had more than had enough and was off planning to emigrate to New Zealand and set up on a mountainside with a small herd of goats.

Thankfully, I didn't do anything rash and lifestyle impacting in the heat of the moment and the latter part of the week has given me time to take stock and calm down.

Midweek was also very busy with travelling, so I managed to run Monday and Friday only - so far - early mornings and just being knackered in the evening put paid to anything on Tuesday through Thursday. I might get a couple of miles in over the weekend to try to make up the difference. That said, today's run was something special.

I exited the house and decided that I needed to edge up again from 4 miles. However, I didn't want to set a target distance, I wanted to set a target time of 40 minutes, and run that at an easy pace. So, after a moment of re-mapping my route, I set off in the opposite direction from normal, planning a 9:30 mile pace for 40 minutes. This would bring me in at about four-and-a bit miles. Although I started off with a little stiffness in the legs, mile 2 had an I-could-run-this-pace-all-day feel to it, and with a long flat segment between miles 3 and 4 started what might have been an in-the-zone-ness I've heard talked about before I had to wake up again to avoid getting knocked down on a main road.

As I approached the end of mile 4, I was feeling just great. I didn't want to stop so headed on past the top-end of our road and added on another mile, finishing in 47:23. What's more, I still felt strong. This might be a combination of the benefit of 4 rest days, if such a benefit exists, and the selected lower pace.

So this weeks training so far:

===========
Mon: 4.01 miles, 35:52 minutes 8:57 pace. 7C HRAve:149 HRMax:162
Fri: 5.03 miles, 47:23 minutes 9:25 pace. 7C HRAve:153 HRMax:191

I think my HRM was having it's own bad day this morning as I don't think the Max figure is any way right, and this probably brought my average up from about 148 (at a guess).

So as the week is ending, I'm now back to my normal calmer demeanor. I've re-evaluated my expectations - I'm probably going to be disappointed over something - and know what my options are. And I might squeeze in those few miles in over the weekend.

One last thing for this post. Whilst on a rare visit to the office this week, one of my colleagues, Ranjit, approached me sheepishly with a sponsor form. Of course, I had no problems sponsoring him for a 10K in Manchester in 2 weeks and we had a great chat about shoes, injuries and training. There were a fair few parallels and I knew he must also be listening to Fdip as he's an avid podcast listener too. It was just weird to find someone I've worked with for a good 5 years has essentially gone through the same stuff that I have, with the same influences and at the same time, but completely independently.

All the best.

Mr Stumble.