Andy Stumbles

Stumble status. March 2009.

2009-03-29T09:48:00.002+01:00

Sitemeter tells me that there are still some of you out there keeping an eye on my RSS feed. So here an update on whats happening in my life:

Running. I've had my longest ever injury free period of running. So that's sure to jinx that! Strangely, this has coincided with starting to use the Nike+ Sportband I bought back in September 08, so maybe there are some other secret protective whizzy functions in there (now that would be worth paying money for). Alternatively, it might just mean that I'm taking things relatively easy and not overly worrying about it all.

My pace has improved over that time, from averaging 9:44 pace in October in averaging 9:08 pace now, all without doing very much new. However, my last run did include something new - I've started adding in some short 100 to 200 meter bursts of speed - something like a 7:30 pace - to see how that helps and to add in a little more interest to my regular circuits.

In terms of distance, I've really just kept it at 3 to 3.5 miles over winter, aiming for a weekly total of 10. And I've managed that in the main - a few weeks I've only done 2 runs rather than 3, but they have been the exception. However, I've now got a couple of goals in mind, the Stourbridge Stumble 10K in June of course - how could I miss that - and a half Marathon as part of the Wolverhampton Marathon in early September. With both these in mind, I'm increasing my circuit distances very gradually, starting Friday last week with a 4 miler.

As work has me in London for a couple of days each week, the weather is now a bit better and mornings lighter, I've started sampling the delights of running in some of Londons large parks. Last week was in Hyde Park and next week I've a run scheduled on Tuesday in Regents Park, which is pretty close to my hotel. All assuming that all-hell doesn't break loose early in the week with the impending G20 and its counterpart demonstrations.

Work. Just really, really busy. And it looks like remaining so for the next 9 months. On the plus side, this should see me through the worst of the recession. On the negative, it would be nice to get some respite from it all, having worked at a sustained higher pace - 22 months now - than ever before.

GTD and other fads. I'm still interested in GTD as a means to just trying to keep my head above water. I'm partly implementing it, but I know my rate of input of tasks exceeds my ability to complete those tasks. At least I have a better idea about which of the balls-in-the-air I'm letting fall. Blogging, sadly, has been one. I have replaced it to a degree with Twittering though. Got Steven Covey's "Seven Habits ..." as an Audible freebie about a month ago, and although I found the man's voice initially annoying, there's probably a fair amount I can take from those habits. I aslo found, strangely, that he was no longer annoying once I knew what he looked like. What's that about?

Current Podcasts listened to / watched (generally as an accompaniment to some other chore; driving, early trains, washing up ...):

Dawn and Drew
Phedipidations
You look Nice Today
Macbreak Weekly
CryptoGram
Robert Llewellyn's Carpool
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's Film Reviews (my favourite)
Friday Night Comedy from the BBC
Rocketboom
Running from the Reaper
4 Feet Running
43 Folders
GeekbriefTV

Tech. Still hanging on to my old Palm 750V phone. It was a nice freebie from Microsoft and still does what I need it too, especially as I now am playing around with Evernote mobile and some Twitter clients. Still, a little under powered now. Lovin' my MacBook, which is now nearly a whole year old. Bought a second hand Canon 350D SLR off eBay a couple of months ago and am enjoying taking higher-def crappy photos with that. Some day, I will improve.

My iPod shuffle 2G remains a constant companion, but has started to act wierd with podcasts. It started putting them at the end of my playlist, rather than the start which is a real pain in the *rse - and no end of resetting and synching in different priority orders has worked. So, I'm listening to more music as a result and I think a replacement for my old 20GB iPod 4G brick may be in order, with a new Nano over the coming months.

Other. Need a new car, but am also saving for that rainy day - just in case. We'll just have to see whether the-right-deal emerges alongside the-right-finances. Am taking up sailing again this year and am looking for a 2nd hand Lark dinghy. Should be dusting off the wetsuit again fairly soon though.

===
So, that about wraps this update up. I'll try to keep more up-to-date with your own goings on over the next few months.

Mr Stumble.

Leg Calibration.

2008-09-26T08:00:00.003+01:00

First run with my Nike+ Sportband thing this morning. I have to say my experience with the thing has been a little mixed. When it arrived, there was of course that jolt of excitement about a new toy to play with. However the instructions that come with the thing are somewhat basic and it's one of my delights with new gear to eke out (perhaps geek-out) those hidden features from the manual - non of that joy here.

Essentially, the instructions are "install software", "stick unit in computer", "charge for a bit", "go take a run", "stick unit in computer". There's a bit on how to press buttons too, but it does look designed to be as idiot-proof as you can make something with 2 buttons. My Garmin is not idiot proof, as I've proved on more than one occasion.

I think my main complaint so far would be that it has no screen backlight, and the display - gold on black - is difficult enough to read under overcast skys 52°33´North, and impossible in the dark before sunrise. However, on the plus side, this does encourage you to just start it up and then ignore it, just to enjoy the running.

I also found that it's not a perfect fit into the USB slot on my Macbook - there is a small locating pin on the bottom of the recording unit that is used to lock it into the strap on your wrist, and this means it puts a bit of strain on the USB port unless you put a book underneath the computer. Minor niggle.

I always knew the thing would need calibrating, and I found that it was quite optimistic about distance. If I were 6'2" it would probably be right, but with my 29' inside-leg pins it was about 10% out for the run. The software allows some calibration, so I've told it that what it thought was 3.45 miles was actually 3.11. We'll see how it does with my next run. I suppose the alternative is to re-calibrate my legs somehow. Stilts?

The real bonus though is the completely automatic upload of the run data, which is what I wanted it for. That worked a treat, and the Nike+ site allows you to link a graphic for the run, and here it is:

So, on balance, now that I've used it properly and have some data captured, I'm very pleased with it. I'll probably post some more about it once I have a dozen runs with it under my belt.

Mr Stumble.

Erratic schedules

2008-09-24T21:38:00.002+01:00

My job continues to take me up and down the country, so that running is getting a bit like a guilty pleasure. However, I am trying and now have a regular set of hotels in London, the various Radisson hotels dotted through London, and they all seem to have a gym with a treadmill.

I've been trying to run from home on Monday's and Fridays, and on the 'mill Wednesdays - and this worked for a few weeks, but my schedule has got more and more erratic since July, so I take what I can.

Keeping motivated has certainly been a problem. The main two things that are keeping me going are:

1) weight control - I managed to shed a few pounds in Nigel Runner's 10-in-10 challenge a couple of months back and I'm trying to keep them off.
2) I know that when I stop for more than a couple of weeks, the likelihood of crushing migraine attacks increases 10-fold.

So as I write this, I'm again in my hotel, and aiming to get 3 miles in tomorrow morning. And I've also just bought myself (via Amazon) a new gadget to try out - one of these Nike+ Sportband things. I always find gadgets are good for at least a few weeks motivation (simple mind, easily pleased) and I'm hoping that this one will also give me low-effort access to the Nike+ community, which itself acts as a sort-of running club/community thing.

And two more feet on Nik and Dan's Million Feet Running challenge can do nothing but help.

Mr Stumble

Update
=====
When I got to the hotel gym at 6:30 the following morning, I found it closed - they had the decorators in and it was full of paint buckets and dust cloths! Bah.

After March - 2008 Stourbridge Sumble.

2008-08-28T21:41:00.003+01:00

Thanks for the prompt Phil. Almost every week since my last post I've thought "I really must update the blog" but the whole weight of time since my last post just got heavier and heavier. I'm sure only a couple of people will actually see this now, most having subscribed to stuff far more interesting and regular.

However, regardless of it's size, I have a duty to my audience to respond.

When I last posted, there had been no running, only training on the elliptical. I was beginning to get concerned about my ability to run my "signature race", the Stourbridge Stumble, a race I really have no real claim over, having only done it once and finished about half way down the pack. Still, it gave the blog a name and, to my embarrassment, if you search for Stourbridge Stumble in Google, I appear on the first page.

This must annoy someone.

Back in January or February, I had visited my GP and got a referral to a physio requested on the NHS. I was too shamed to use my medical insurance again for a self inflicted injury, so I just got on the list. March and April passed with no sign of an appointment and work more or less consumed me - although I did manage 3 times a week on the elliptical. The Stumble itself was scheduled for 14th June, so as May dawned, I hit the road to see if I could get some sort of form together in the 6 or so weeks to the race.

The first big change in my training is that I was to take set walk breaks whilst training to relieve the impact on my various ankle tendons. Initialy, I set out and run for 5 minutes and walked 1, quickly went up to 8 minutes and then settled at 1 mile run / 1 minute walk. In 2 weeks I was back to 4 miles and starting 2 miles run / 1 minute walk reaching 5 miles per run by the beginning of June.

Whilst training, I roped a collegue of mine, also called Andy, into doing the race. He has been running for around 8 months having been started on a get-healthy-kick by someone else we had both been working with. A group of us had been running on and off from a hotel we all used when we gathered for weekly project meetings. Andy happens to live on the edge of Stourbridge and fancied a go at entering and completig a 10K.

Meanwhile the longest I had managed to run before 14th June was 5.5 miles, so I can't say I was that well prepared, but I couldn't not run the race.

I met up with Andy and his family about 15 minutes or so before the race started and gave him as good an intro as to what to expect as I could remember. It wasn't long before we were trying to find the right position to start from - not too forward as to get our heals trodden on, nor too far back to get delayed by the few people who would be slower than us.

Then we were off, me trying to keep an easy pace at the start and ensure we didn't both burn it all up too early. Fat chance.

We covered the first mile, including a rolling hilly grass section in 8:46, about a minute faster than I had wanted, considering I knew I was going to pick up an injury. We were soon out into countryside and at a pace that allowed us to chat about stuff without too much difficulty finishing mile 2 in 9:47. The course rises up over miles 2 and 3 and the tracks are of rock and dirt, ocasionally through fields and across a golf course. Soon enough, we passed the half way marker having completed mile 3 in 9:57 and through mile 4 - the whole race meeting some people walking their dogs along a narrow country track - they weren't best pleased.

Then, having passed along a narrow downhill path with nettles on all sides we entered a bridlepath and suddenly our section of the race ground to a complete halt. A horse had been ridden out onto the bridlepath (despite the fact that about 80 runners had already just run past) and had promptly got panicked by a cohort of approaching neon clad mad people.

The lady riding had to then control the rearing horse and settle it enough to return to it's field, not particularily helped by shouts of frustration by some of the runners. Some harsh words and bad language was exchanged.

The delay here probably cost us about 2 minutes but I think my Garmin noted that we'd stopped and automatically stopped the clock, and we tried to make some of that time up, finishing mile 4 in 9:33. However, this is where things started to get unhinged for me as my right calf started cramping as we were waiting for the horse to turn around, and the increased speed only made it worse. A commented to Andy about this and then we just pushed on and I did my best to ignore the warning signals. This next section was a long uphill section, first along a muddy track in trees (last year there was a huge pool of water we had to clamber around - not this year) and then up the neverending sandy trail to the top of the course.

I kept us running and Andy just followed looking, there was no chatting now as this was the most difficult part of the course, and he later commented that if I hadn't kept running, he would have stopped and walked. I think I would have stopped and walked if Andy hadn't been there!

Finally we completed mile 5 in 10:20 and began the downhill return across the golfcourse and back into town. My calf really started burning as we went downhill and I hobbled on, somehow managing 8:44 for mile 6. As we got back to Mary Stevens Park Andy and I were shoulder to shoulder and I called to him to go for the line. I couldn't sprint this time (probably a good job) and came in 2 seconds behind Andy.

Out of 259 finshers, we placed 191 and 192 (joint with 3 others) in 59:08 and 59:10 respectively. My 59:10 beat my PB of last year, 59:36. So I'm pretty pleased with that.

As it happens, my physio appointment came through just before the race scheduled for the following week. So I took my new injured calf and sore tendons in for assessment and got some good advice, ultrasound therapy and stretches to do. My last appointment is schedued for Monday. Next year, I'll probably go get request a physio appointment again in March and I'll probably get it through in time to fix me up after the 2009 Stumble.

Having taken several more weeks off to repair my legs, I've now just about restarted running regularily in the mornings. this week, 3 x 1 miles on the local roads on Monday, on a hotel treadmill on Wednesday and planning a further 3 x 1 tomorrow from home.

======
Well, having got all that off my chest, I'll try to post more regularily again. I've some Holiday photos from the English Lakes to post; it was overcast most of the time, but there are a couple of nice shots. And let you know how my autumn training goes. It'll still be with walk breaks but that's the best way I have to reduce the risk of injury, and keep me running more consistently.

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble.

March

2008-03-31T21:36:00.002+01:00

Bah. Leave a blog for a month and all these weeds start growing. Not a lot to report since my last entry. There has been no running, unless you count the half mile dash through Southwark to get to London Bridge tube station, only to find all trains out of London from Euston were cancelled. Very late home that day.

I've kind-of kept up with training on the elliptical. The past 2 weeks though have been not so good as I've been away on business (I did get one session in a hotel gym) and then the Easter holiday and the kids home. I restarted this morning and certainly felt that two weeks off plus chocolate eggs had taken their toll.

My Achilles remains not too good. I have been icing and stretching, especially over the past week, and got a doctors appointment last week to get yet another physio referral. The tendon still has some thickening, which I know has been reduced by ultrasound before, and still aches in the morning until it gets warmed up. We'll see how long an appointment takes.

On the home front, my five year old daughter has had an ear infection resulting in a perforated eardrum. A couple of weeks ago, I sat with her and told her I wanted to do a little test of her hearing, I'd whisper a number in each ear and she had to tell me what it was. I started with the good ear, the right one and whispered "eight". "Eight", she says straight away. I try again - "two". "Two", she says. Then I switch to the left ear. "Four". "I can't hear that", she says. I try again, "Nine". "I can't hear you", she says.

I start to panic. I go through a couple more, to each she says she can't hear what I'm saying. So I say to her, "You must tell me if you hear anything, because if you can't we'll have to take you straight to the doctors". She waits a moment then cracks a huge smile and says "I was only tricking you dad!" Total poker face all the way through. She can be so cheeky sometimes.

---
We've been on a few local walks over the past couple of weeks - having joined the UK National Trust, we're working our way through as many places as we can get to. Certainly had our money's worth already! I'll grab some of the photos and post them up over the next week or so.

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Elliptic Curve.

2008-02-16T15:10:00.006Z

February already? Where does it go? Time for a quick status report.

Achilles injury: there is still a dull ache in the tendon in the morning before it warms up a bit from walking around. I can feel that there has been some thickening of the tendon, so it must have torn and now needs a bit of care.

This has meant I am still not running, but did buy myself a nice elliptical trainer off eBay a few weeks ago. This is now installed in my downstairs office and I’m now using it three times a week. The model I got is a pretty solid, robust monster, which thankfully folds up so it doesn’t block up doorways when not in use. It has generated some interest within the immediate family, and my son has had a brief go on it – he likes the display which tells him how fast he’s going – and D has even mentioned (in a non-committal don’t-even-think-about-pressuring-me kind of way) that she might give it a go once she is through her current spate of colds.

We have all had a series of colds over the past month brought in mainly by D from a local school where she does some volunteer work at the moment. Schools are just factories or pestilence, especially this time of year. The teachers tell her that after a few years you build up a resistance to it, but in the meantime we get everything that passes through that school.

So, the Elliptical is working out fine, and when I’m working away, I’ve found a hotel with a similar unit to maintain the schedule. Currently, I’m simply aiming to maintain a 30 minute session getting my HR to around 145-150. Two months off running plus Christmas had left me in a sorry state. And so far I'm keeping to schedule.

The first couple of sessions were not too easy. I managed to go for 10 minutes, then staggered off for some fluids and a short sit down before getting back on for another 5 minutes. but pretty quickly, within a week, I was handling 30 minutes of consistent exercise and was fiddling with the various settings. I tried a programme that sadistically increased the tension for the equivalent of 5 hills over the exercise period, and decided that it was too soon for that sort of thing.

Now having completed week 3 on the elliptical I've started racking up the tension a bit so I get an easy start and finish, and build towards a 5 minute section at a level 3 or 4, admittedly out of 8. However, it's fine for me, and as my very cheap HRM chest strap transmitter is magically compatible with the elliptical, I can adjust the tension as I improve to keep me in the right HR zone.

What else is going on? Just bought a big family tent and am planning a couple of camping excursions with the kids this summer. Looking forward to that! Ben doing a bit of walking. Got a couple of photos to share with you here.

A Spanish Chestnut tree near Croft Castle. This is one of a line of trees reputedly grown from nuts that came from the wrecks of the Spanish Armada in 1592.

Kingswood Park, near Kinver, Staffordshire.

Also, trying to get my life a bit more organised with this Getting Things Done thing. It does actually seem to be working for me (must add "do blog" to my todo lists though!) and am enjoying listening to Merlin Mann over at 43folders, who has an interesting take on all this.

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble.

Review of 2007

2008-01-01T22:18:00.001Z

2008 hasn't started as I'd hoped, what I'd hoped being with a nice refreshing run through empty streets. My ankle is still not up to the pounding, and I wouldn't be surprised now if this remained the case for another 4 to 6 weeks. Looking back at my last lay off, 8 to 10 weeks was the recommended time my physio advised me as needed to heal this kind of injury.

This said, I am now considering buying a elliptical trainer to sit in the corner of my home office. I might even use it. This would give me at least some means of running-like training, and prevent further decline. I shall be consulting my Financial Director (the wife) on this shortly.

Looking back over the past 12 months, it's been a mixed bag. My efforts don't really stand any comparison with many others I read about in the blogosphere. I entered a single race and broke myself. I recovered and got back on the road, then broke myself. And then went through the whole thing again in November.

However, I did really enjoy participating in the Stourbridge Stumble 10K, and so at least that is something for me to aim at again for 2008. A couple of 5Ks wouldn't be a bad thing either.

As far as what the stats say, this is what I pulled off RunningAhead.com earlier about 2007

Entries: 99
Distance: 306.0 miles
Duration: 48:22:17

So that's two solid days of running from the whole year, covering a distance equivalent to travelling from Trafalgar Square in London to the centre of Carlisle in the far North West of England. Almost corner-to-corner of England, using the shortest corners possible.

It would be nice to get into Scotland by this arbitrary means of measurement for the running year, 2008.

Thanks for sticking with me.

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

December Status.

2007-12-24T20:17:00.000Z

It's Christmas Eve. 8:15pm. Youngest is in bed and might actually be asleep. She's had a busy day, culminating in being Mary at the children's Christmas mass this evening. Joseph didn't make it through the whole service as he was a bit under the weather. Poor lad.

The teens have now hijacked the telly. I finally feel I have a half hour to write my blog, which kind-of says something about the past 2 months.

It probably comes as no surprise that, in November, I managed to damage my ankle again, or more accurately, my achilles tendon. I know exactly why it happened. I've been sticking with a 3 mile course as it's been getting darker and darker in the morning, but familiarity breeds recklessness, and instead of taking it nice and easy, increasing distance gradually, I've been gradually increasing pace. Now this isn't to any blistering speed. It's increasing from around around a 9:40 pace to 9:0X or slightly sub 9, and not really on purpose. It felt comfortable.

However, however comfortable for heart and lungs, my brittle tendons can't handle it. The damage occurred on November 19th and I left it for 2 weeks. On 3rd December I tried again and it felt just as bad - and I was undoing any healing that had taken place. So I find myself on the wagon again, waiting for things to mend.

The consequences are, of course, rapidly declining fitness and I can't wait to be able to pick things up again. Other forms of training just don't fit in my life at the moment.

But I've not stopped. The spirit is definitely willing, and with RICE, the flesh will heal. I just wonder how many times I'm going to have to learn this lesson over pace! New Years day looks like a reasonable target to pick things up again, so I hope to be back with some reports about that shortly afterwards.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to you all.

Mr Stumble.

Tada.

2007-10-14T22:26:00.000+01:00

Hi. My name is Stumble and it has been 40 days since my last post. 40 days, it both flies and crawls by. Once again, all I can do is apologise for another long gap and hope to do better.

In the gap, I have managed to reach my 30 minute running target again. This was actually accidental, as my vague "don't push too hard" plan had me run walking for another week or two. However, on Friday 12th my head was in too much of a fog, falling out of bed at 6:00 to run through our now dark streets (as yours must be too!), and I just hit the start button on my Garmin without programming in my normal intervals - which should have been 3 x 12 minutes with a minute between.

Nope, on Friday I just started running, and when the little "haven't you run a bit far for 12 minutes" alarm went off in my head, and the stopwatch said 13 minutes, I just kept going, thinking Blondie had drowned out the alarm - I do crank up Hangin' On The Telephone - and would take a rest at 24 minutes. I was just having a giggle thinking how un-rock-and-roll I must have been looking whilst Steppenwolf was playing, when I noticed I'd passed 25 minutes and realised what I'd done.

So I just kept going again and watched for 3.1 miles to come up. Done. Milestone reached. Thinks: Should blog this.

As far as physical injury and pain goes - nothin' doing at the moment and I'm feeling great again. I think I'm now addicted to running just because I know how bad I feel when I don't run. Things pretty much fell apart after 3 weeks resting my hip, despite regular visits to my local swimming pool.

I don't have any events planned at the moment and this is something I might take a look at now. 5Ks seem to be a nice distance to have a go at, and I've another 8 months till the next "Stourbridge Stumble 10K", although they do have another event called the "Stourbridge Stagger", which might be fun. I'll find out about that and let you know.

In the meantime, I'm traveling a lot at the moment and really not enjoying treadmills in hotels at all, but they are a necessary evil right now.

Very much hoping to get back to reading and commenting on your blogs again.

All the best,

Mr Stumble
===============

Training:
Date    Distance    Time   Pace   Run:Walk
12-Oct-07    3.11 Mi    30:38   9:51   ----
11-Oct-07    2.99 Mi    29:15   9:47   12:1
05-Oct-07    2.84 Mi    25:11   8:53   8:1
02-Oct-07    3.1 Mi     31:00   10:00   8:1 treadmill
28-Sep-07    2.81 Mi    25:49   9:12   8:1
26-Sep-07    2.61 Mi    25:12   9:40   8:1
21-Sep-07    2.78 Mi    26:24   9:30   5:1
19-Sep-07    2.78 Mi    26:23   9:29   5:1
18-Sep-07    2.4 Mi     24:00   10:00   3:1 treadmill
14-Sep-07    2.56 Mi    24:00   9:23   3:1
12-Sep-07    2.14 Mi    20:00   9:21   2:1
10-Sep-07    2.1 Mi     20:00   9:32   2:1
07-Sep-07    1.76 Mi    16:39   9:28   1.5:1
06-Sep-07    1.75 Mi    16:51   9:38   1.5:1

Stumble, rebooted.

2007-09-04T21:26:00.000+01:00

To those of you who have kindly chivvied me along and gently prodded me for more news from the House of Stumble over the past 6 weeks or so, thank you. And apologies for being so lax in my blogging. Very poor form.

As Phil pointed out, this should be more than just a running blog. I think I've established I'm more of a run-to-live person than a live-to-run person. I have certainly enjoyed the benefits of being fitter, and boy have I been paying in the past few weeks for loss of form.

So, since last episode, I've been on holiday again. This time, a week in the county of Devon in the South West of England, specifically in Dartmoor. We rented a lovely little cottage in the middle of no-where ...

... and had a week of excursions and walking on the moorlands and coast of the area. Such as Bellever, in Dartmoor

... and the beaches around Exeter and Dartmouth ...

This area is close to where my dad's family come from, so there was the chance to visit places I'd last been to 30 years ago with my Grandparents, now long gone.

So a good time was had by all and it was with some grumpiness that I returned to work on Monday morning.

However, before doing so, I got in my first run of my new season of running. And it was a very gentle run. As many of you know, I have a habit of breaking something by going out too hard and fast - and also then going entirely the other way and making painfully slow progress for fear of repetition.

I know that I'm more or less starting from scratch now after 6 weeks off, so I'm going to follow a C25K plan, starting off slow and then maybe taking a week or so off the whole plan as I start to get my legs back - we'll just see how it goes.

Monday morning, it was very simple 1 minute run, 1 minute walk for 20 minutes, just to get the measure of things. And they measured up OK. This completely back to basics approach might seem a bit extreme, but as I see things now, I've got plenty of time and no particular target other than simply to reach a point where I get a consistent 10 to 12 miles a week in for fitness. I might run an occasional 5 or 10k for fun, but only for fun - pushing myself only gets me into trouble!

So there we go, I'm back on the road again. Hurrah!

Mon: 1.1 whole miles, 10 minutes in 1 minute chunks with 1 minute walking.

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Cumbria.

2007-08-22T20:34:00.000+01:00

That perennial problem. What to write in a running blog when you aren't running. And of course, the longer you put it off, the bigger the mountain. Well here goes ...

For the past month I have been mostly:
- working
- driving long distances
- swimming
- going on holiday (aka vacation)

Work. My recent switch of jobs has taken a bit of acclimatisation. Despite the hokey phrase, no-one really hits the ground running when taking on something new and challenging. I prefer to think of it as hitting-the-ground-digging. So there's lots going on and this has resulted in the frequent long distances en voiture.

Clearly, with running banned I've needed to do some other sort of activity to try to maintain at least some level of fitness. So, I've been off down the local swimming pool a couple of times a week to get in 40 laps before breakfast. This has been OK although my work schedule has been preventing me from making 3 weekly visits up until this week, when Friday shall be #3.

Before I get onto holiday/vacation, I have now had my latest osteo assessment for may hip. The outcome is fairly positive, in that it seems most likely to be a ligament/muscular problem rather than bursitis and that the 4 weeks of rest put me in a good position to restart running in 2 or 3 weeks, these things usually taking 6 weeks to settle down and heal. I will be back to a very gentle re-introduction - it'll be another lengthy walk/run programme (won't that be fun to read about) but I am so looking forward to it. I've really missed having running as part of my life.

So, finally, the holiday photos. Last week we had the distinct pleasure of spending a week in Cumbria, the English Lake District. This is my absolute favourite part of the country but despite visiting many times in the past, I've never actually climbed a Lakeland Fell until last week. The photos here are of Cat Bells, off Derwent Water. It's a classic family climb with lots of people on the fell. We arrived in Keswick and took a motor launch across Derwent Water to Hawes End, at the foot of Cat Bells.

As we took the launch, this was our view of Cat Bells.

The route is to climb from the woods on the right hand side of the photo, up the first peak, across the ridge and then up the second peak

This photo is from about halfway up the first peak and shows my boots and a view across Derwent Water to Keswick on the far shore.

This is heading from the first peak to the second, across the ridge.

And finally, one of many views from the top. This looking North towards Bassenthwaite Lake.

I took this one late in the afternoon, after returning to Keswick.

If you've enjoyed these, I'll post a couple more from around Ullswater from later in the holiday.

Hope all is well with you!

Mr Stumble.

Stumble's end.

2007-07-22T23:11:00.000+01:00

After struggling last week, I began this one hopeful that I'd put my injury troubles behind me and I'd take it gently while my bones healed up. Oh how wrong I was.

Monday was a great feeling 3 miler at a moderate pace, but Monday night, I couldn't sleep properly with the pain in my hip and sitting in the car for long distances has not been helping. I again left it till Thursday before trying again. The same 3 miles and again, everything eases up after the first mile so I'm almost not limping, but then I'm living off Ibuprofen.

On Thursday evening, we went to watch a local amateur production of an amateur production of Macbeth (that was the plot - I forget the real title!) which was essentially a farce and nicely done. At the interval, I was in such discomfort, I knew something had to be done, so I called the doctors magical-automated-appointment-system and got an appointment - the earliest available - for a week Friday! However, it was a start.

Yesterday, I called the doctor's surgery to moan about the wait. It turns out that they have a "bookable appointments" system for extremely un-urgent stuff, and then their normal daily appointments system for everything else. Being more urgent than extremely un-urgent, I got myself a same-day appointment, that very afternoon.

So, I go in and see the doc. He doesn't need to tell me to take a break from running - that's a given before I go in. The hip problem is not straightforward to diagnose, we agree on "dicky hip" (dicky being a very British term for "dodgy" or "not working properly) so I'm referred on to a hip specialist, for which I expect an appointment to materialise within 2 weeks. If not, then I'll be calling on my Medical Insurance once again.

Being on the Internet and thus having all manner of medical resources at my disposal, my own otherwise untrained diagnosis is bursitis. What started out as joint pain is now ligamentish and possibly muscular which might be bad. But hopefully, this will get sorted out with mainly rest and no high-impact activities. At worst, I'll have to get the bursa drained. Yummy.

So that's me done running for some time. I broke myself on the race I named myself after. I'm planning to do some swimming over the coming weeks to try and retain some fitness, but will need to balance this against the need to rest. In the meantime, I'll be reading the posts of all you fine running folk out there and feeling envious. And I plan to join you again in good time.

Mon: 3.16 miles, 30:32 minutes 9:39 pace. 11C HRAve:151 HRMax:162
Thu: 3.1 miles, 30:41 minutes 9:53 pace. 13C HRAve:148 HRMax:158

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Getting hip.

2007-07-13T22:49:00.000+01:00

Apologies to all for my dearth of entries for the past 2 weeks. I changed job on 1st July (in the same company) and promptly found myself travelling up and down this fair isle of ours, getting to know the inside of my car and the view along the West Coast train line more than I cared for. However, the interference with my running has only been minor from the job perspective, other things have happened ...

It was such a surprise how much my legs degenerated over just two weeks off. I knew that I'd need to take things easy, so on Monday (last week!) I set myself an easy 2 miles shakedown to see how things were.

Things seemed not bad' although my left hip still hurts after the 10k 2 weeks previously. So for Wednesday, I planned on a 30 minute easy run. However, on Wednesday morning, I found myself on a 3 hour car trip to Basingstoke with an early start, all day meetings then a dash back to chair the committee for the local scout group.

I finally got time to run just after 9pm and didn't want to loose the opportunity so headed out for my planned 30 minutes. My hip continued to ache for a mile or so and then settled down, but then at just over 2 miles, my right calf started cramping up. It was runnable, so I jogged home, but with little improvement by Friday, I ditched that run and iced and rested up.

I went to see my physio that Friday and she said to me "do you think you're not actually built for running ...?" but I dismissed this on the basis that nearly everyone I know as runners (that's you) run with pain at one time or other, and I've managed pain free before. The rest I took to help my ankle has simply shifted my aches and pains around. Its not going to stop me!

Monday came, so with the calf feeling twitchy but alrightish, I headed out for another easy 2 - a period of acclimatisation seeming necessary. With both hip and calf now giving me some pain, but not as bad as the previous Wednesday, I've started taking glucosamine as a supplement to try and help the hip and been doing more regular stretching to try and ease the calf.

I had planned to meet up with a local club run on Wednesday evening as an intro, but as I had another 6 hours in the car down and up the country, I wasn't back in time. I do think joining a club would be good for me, so it's on my list of things to do. Having left early and arrived home late, my Wednesday run got ditched. Thursday saw me back in London, but I got away at a reasonable time and managed a run after the kids were all in bed. This one was planned as another easy 2 miles to see how my calf was shaping up - hip pain being a given for the moment. With 2 miles under my belt and everything loosening up nicely, I added another easy mile on with no calf pain. I was very pleased with that and I think for the moment, 3 miles may stay my target distance whilst I try to get my hip sorted out.

If it's not one thing, it's another!

My ankle now feels a lot better and so my course of physiotherapy has stopped - I just need to take the time to get regular daily stretching in. Of course, if I end up back at my doctor with my hip and get a referral, it will be months again before I get an appointment.

Training for last 2 weeks.

Mon:2.1 miles, 20:05 minutes 9:35 pace. 13C HRAve:xxx HRMax:xxx
Wed: 3.22 miles, 30:01 minutes 9:19 pace. 13C HRAve:158 HRMax:168
Mon: 2.21 miles, 21 minutes 9:31 pace. 11C HRAve:135 HRMax:156
Thu: 3.03 miles, 29:06 minutes 9:37 pace. 16C HRAve:158 HRMax:177

Hope all is well with you!

Mr Stumble.

Waking from stasis

2007-07-01T19:14:00.000+01:00

You couldn't say that its been a particularly dull week in the UK. New man in No.10, biblical floods and bombings at each end of the country. It's all go. I happened to be in London on Friday, and despite all the media's best efforts to tell me what was going on, I didn't know that anything had happened only a mile away from my meetings in the early hours of that morning, until I was reading the front page of the London Evening Standard belonging to the guy sat opposite on the train back home. Where I'd been, off the far West end of the Oxford Road, everything was business as usual.

Back at home, physio seems to be going OK at the moment and my ankle is feeling pretty good. The exercises I have now are a little odd - I have to stand on one foot (the bad one) and then dribble a soccer ball in a circle around that foot. I actually dribble an imaginary soccer ball as I'm so bad a football I'd only end up having to stop and fetch the ball every 10 seconds. Also, the only half-descent ball we have is in a shed defended by our new moat, courtesy of recent heavy rain.

I'm finding that the exercise really demonstrates how much my foot needs to re-learn about balance - it's been protecting the ligaments by shifting some of that work around, but the balancing on one foot exercise needs that ligament to do it's stuff. Hopefully it's starting to build strength again now.

My weight is currently down by 2 or 3 pounds on when I last ran. I guess this is down to to muscle atrophy effect Phil was talking about recently. I know I've lost a lot of what little form I had, and I'm needing more sleep at night now. Hopefully I can keep the weight off and get some fitness back over the next 2 weeks...

... because the good news is that my running starts again tomorrow morning. I plan a nice easy 2 miles shakedown and then probably a couple of 3 milers by the end of the week. However, nothing is set in stone as I don't know how bad things have got.

I shall once again be accompanied by Music as D and I bought each other iPods for our wedding anniversary this week. Tradition would have this as our "ivory" anniversary, but we feel that iPods are a much more environmentally acceptable and useful gift to give these days. Perhaps this will start a trend. "Save an elephant. Buy an iPod." You heard it here first.

The clippy arrangement works really well, so I'm very hopeful it won't fall of my shorts tomorrow.

Hope all is good with you.

Mr Stumble.

Stourbridge Stumble - Official results

2007-06-22T09:06:00.000+01:00

It seems that official times were kept for the Stourbridge Stumble, I just hadn't noticed the timekeepers! Stourbridge running club published them a day or so ago, so I now have an official time:

59 minutes 36 seconds, placing 154 out of 203 finishers and 29th out of 39 in my category. This gives me a nice baseline PB to improve on in the coming months and years!

I had already planned to take a 2 week break following the race under instruction from my physiotherapist. This has turned out quite good for two reasons:

1) my left hip is not very well, I suspect because I overdid the finish in the race. It needs a bit of time to heal. My left calf also gave me trouble for a couple of days but has settled now.

2) we've had extremely wet weather over this week, especially in the mornings I would have been running. I don't mind light rain at all, but this has been the sort of rain which turns streets to rivers. It looks like this will run through to next week too.

So, in the meantime, I'm doing my stretches and ankle exercises and plan to hit the roads again on 2nd July, possibly with the start of a half-marathon training plan. After a lay-off, I know I'll need to keep things easy - but I have plenty of time ahead of me.

All the best,

Mr Stumble.

Mr Stumble Stumbles!

2007-06-16T22:10:00.000+01:00

This week, I've mainly been taking things reasonably easy so I didn't get a blow-out to prevent me running The Stourbridge Stumble. On Monday, I ran an easy five and Wednesday an easy three and a half. Everything seemed to be ticking over nicely. What's more, I borrowed my wife's iPod shuffle which I have found really helpful. It's like when I run without music, all I can hear is that voice in my head moaning about the time of day, wouldn't it be better if I hadn't started out in the first place and why not make it a shorter run today. That voice gets drowned out with even the fairly low volume on the Shuffle.

Mon: 5 miles, 47:49 minutes 9:33 pace. 16C HRAve:141 HRMax:155
Wed: 3.67 miles, 33:51 minutes 9:14 pace. 14C HRAve:148 HRMax:166

I took the rest of the week off so as not to overdo things before Saturday.

Race day finally arrived! This particular race is run at 6pm, which means a lot of finding things to occupy yourself with through the day. Family life generally means that Saturdays are busy anyway, and this particular one also coincided with my eldest daughter taking a keyboard exam and then heading off for a sleep-over. The logistics of this meant I had no-one to come along to cheer me on or take photos, so apologies for the lack of any footage in this report!

This race is a pretty low tech affair. My number had already arrived in the post last week, so All I had to do was show up at the start line. No chips, nothing to sign in. Nada. The starting point was a big "START" banner strung between a couple of trees in a public park and I spent 15 minutes shooting the breeze with a bloke, talking about a possible 10K in September, at Enville, slightly closer to home. Then, the massed hoards - well about 300 runners - followed the starter up to the trees. There was a fair old mix of club runners from at least 4 local clubs, plus various unaffiliated folk like myself. I knew my target for this was somewhere just under 60 minutes so I lined up at the back.

The course was loosely described to me before we started. A hilly grassy start through the park, then local roads and then into countryside. It's muddy in parts and there are some sections on sand, which would probably be better this year than last due to the enormous amount of rain we've had here since Thursday. I really mean enormous - we've had areas flooded, railway sidings turned into canals, abandoned cars and everything. My own back garden resembled a swimming pool for most of Friday - we've never seen so much standing water out there.

Thankfully, although it had rained on and off through the day, it stopped an hour or so before the race, but surfaces were very wet.

Then we were off. The first section was fast, even though I was telling myself to keep the pace under control, but once you're with a bunch of people surging forward, you can't help keeping that pace. By the time we exited the park, I'd got some better control and was hitting around 9:30 pace. We had already settled into groups and once through some streets and onto an open field, I could see all the leaders streaming away into the distance. However, I was with some club runners, so I couldn't be doing too bad!

As we neared the end of mile 1, I passed some people struggling up a grassy hill before entering a very narrow section, very overgrown with barely any elbow room between the vegetation, and a lot of nettles! This was now trail running and there were gates to negotiate and then a road. Unfortunately, we had to stop for about 30 seconds as the marshals let through several cars who has waited for the leading pack to go past, but then we were off again and into more open countryside. Much of this was uphill work and we followed the trail past a water station and then along the edge of a wheat field. By this time, I'd passed a few more people as they slowed back and kept on the tail of a guy in black top and tights who pulled me up through the field. Once through there I was passed by a couple running and then followed them past the man-in-black. They then slowed their pace within a half mile and I spent the next mile as we headed into muddy trails switching positions with them.

However, the trail became a fair incline and was very slippery with inches deep churned up mud and no dry path. A lot of people in front started walking which allowed me to catch up and pass a few. I was refusing to walk any of this and just plowed on through mile 3 until I hit the pond at 3.8 miles. Here the trail went through a 20ft long puddle the whole width of the trail. All you could do was edge round the side or plow through the unknown depths. I edged, but lost some time doing so. Then another climb and onto a sandy path that steadily rose back up to the central high point of the course. That was just knackering, but again I passed 3 or 4 runners, keeping my stride short and moderating the effort.

Then we were at 5 miles and it was all downhill, returning along the sections we had already run. As we ran through the nettle-alley I joked with the guy in front about it and then the pace started to pick up again as we were back into the open field. There were three of us in this little group now, a guy in a blue top and a tiny lady in a pink top. Pink top had passed me as we exitted nettle alley and had pushed on 20 yards in front. I kept on Blue top's right shoulder and refused to let him get away. We stayed like that for a half mile weaving through some roads. At this point, I'd fully recovered from the hills a mile back and was feeling the best I had through the race.

As Blue and I increased the pace, we closed the distance on pink and then we were back in the park. 300 yards to go and I realised I had a load of gas still in the tank. I put the peddle down and passed blue and pink turning into the last stretch and sprinted for the line like I'd sat on a wasp. I don't think they tried to keep up!

At the line, I tried to read the "official" time which looked like 59:06. My watch made it 59:25, and I started my watch when I crossed the start line, a good 10 seconds after the leaders. Anyway, as my head was a bit fogged up, I'll use my clock time as I don't think I'll get an official time posted from the race.

Once through the shoot, I stopped to speak to the guy in Blue - Mick and shake his hand as really he'd paced me through the last mile. And then it was over.

Splits were (bearing in mind a lot of tree cover and some lost GPS)

Mile 1 9:13
Mile 2 9:57 (including a stop for traffic)
Mile 3 9:29
Mile 4 10:03 (including swimming alligator swamp)
Mile 5 10:29 (sandy hill climb)
Mile 6 8:48 (thanks Mick!)
final 0.2 1:23 (7:29 pace)

All finishers got a commemorative horse brass, and this one is mine.

All in all, I really enjoyed the event and am looking forward to more over the coming months.

Mr Stumble.

Preparation.

2007-06-10T16:27:00.000+01:00

Bit of a mixed week for me, this week. I had planned to try out running shorter distances more frequently, with a longer run on Friday in order to start building my base mileage up. Last week was a mileage peak for me as I had two 10K training runs in there, but this Monday, I was feeling the results of running too far and walking too many hills - things were a bit more of an effort.

When Wednesday arrived, I rapidly found a little tightness in my right calf had turned into a nasty knot. This didn't worsen any further, but meant I shortened the run for safety's sake and subsequently cancelled all further running to allow my calf to settle down. I'm more and more grateful for the endless supply of ice from the fridge/freezer we bought last year.

In the meantime, the physio appointment which I got referred to back in January/February finally came through. Actually the letter permitted me to call for an appointment, which is almost an appointment! Being a "mobile worker" and essentially flexible in the way I apply time to my job, it wasn't a problem to take a mid-morning appointment, and I was offered Friday 8th (just gone).

This appointment was for a ligament in my ankle from damage done way back last year, but that didn't stop me from talking about all the aches and pains I'd had since Christmas. With all the history taken, yet again, we settled on the likelihood that I had some residual scarring in the ligament, and so I'm back on a programme of more stretching, frequent ultrasound therapy and a likely short layoff (2 weeks) starting right after the Stourbridge Stumble 10K.

Speaking of which ... I sent off my race entry at the beginning of the week and on Thursday got my bib number and race instructions. This is all getting pretty exiting now! The course map is a bit hand written so I've not really been able to figure out the route on map-my-run. There are certain sections which I can see and one or two roads and features named (like "golf course") but the rest could be on marked roads or unmarked paths. The description does say "There is a short section of pavement/road but most of the course follows well marked country trails." I guess I'll find out next Saturday.

I'll be running for the benefit of my son's cub-scout group, for which I am a committee member this year.

Training for the week:

Mon:3.52 miles, 32:12 minutes 9:09 pace. 13C HRAve:153 HRMax:158
Wed: 4 miles, 38:00 minutes 9:30 pace. 5C HRAve:138 HRMax:150
Fri: rest up calf.

It looks like Wednesday wasn't much of a workout anyway, with my HR ave at 138. I suppose it is a sign of progress though.

For the coming week, I'm planning a 5 miler tomorrow, then 3.5 on Wednesday, two rest days and then the race on Saturday. I really don't want to break anything between now and then.

All the best,

Mr Stumble.

Harvington.

2007-06-03T10:48:00.000+01:00

This is our cat, Spats.

As with most cats, Spats is inquisitive. This week, Spats decided that it would be fun to squeeze through a pretty slim drainage hole in the deck only to find she couldn't get out again. Cue deck disassembly. Of course as soon as she was out it was as if nothing had happened. "What, me! Get trapped? Nah. I could have got out any time I liked." Bah.

It's been half-term this week, so kids home from school and I took a couple of days off to herd them around. Not that this meant any holiday lie-ins of course as my youngest tends to get up between 7 and 7:30 so I try to get out running well before that to allow D more Zzzzz time.

On Monday, things were feeling pretty good so I set myself the 10K target I spoke of last week and set off. These longer runs are now starting to involve at least partial double-loops of my regular circuits and I now have a couple of these add-ins which put either a half or full mile on the end of a run, depending upon how well I've managed to estimate to mileage on the rest of my course.

Funny thing is that when I start the second loop, I feel so much better than when I go first time round. It's like, regardless of mileage, the second half always feels better than the first.

Anyway, I managed the 10K in 57 and a bit minutes and was quite pleased with myself, although my hips were feeling a bit sore. On Tuesday, we took the kids off into Wales to go climb a mountain. Well, walk up one anyway. This was Moel Famau, a 554 meter bump in the middle of a country park West of Wrexham, in the North East of Wales. From the top there were fantastic views over the coast and across to Mount Snowdon some 50 or so miles to the East. Snowdon is the highest peak in England and Wales, only Scotland having anything higher.

It was pretty blowy at the top with a couple of rain showers on the way up. However, we all had to alternate between T-shirts and 3 layers with waterproofs as we climbed, the weather being so changeable.

My eldest daughter was off at the Brighton Fringe Festival with her theatre group, so we had to get back for her being dropped off, and then got in a quick celebratory Chinese take-out; her successful show and our making it off the mountain alive. I should have learnt from last time though as my run on Wednesday morning was just rotten, and I struggled home after just 3.5 miles. It's time to cut out the junk!

On Friday, things were better and I got a second 10K in around the same route, although this too was more of a struggle than Monday. I'm considering now trying to run shorter distances more frequently, and having a longer run at the end of the week. Some juggling of schedules needed to achieve this though.

Yesterday, we all headed out into the countryside again, this time closer to home. I've found a website called Walking in Britain and dug out a walk near Harvington Hall, just outside Kidderminster, about half an hour's drive away. It said it was only 5.8 miles, but I think it was more like 8 and the kids (and wife) were all flagging after taking more than 5 hours to hack across some pretty overgrown countryside. Here's a few snaps from various parts of the trek.

Training for the week

Mon:6.21 miles, 58:20 minutes 9:24 pace. 10C HRAve:149 HRMax:155
Wed: 3.55 miles, 33:13 minutes 9:22 pace. 5C HRAve:150 HRMax:156
Fri: 6.21 miles, 59.06 minutes 9:32 pace. 10C HRAve:154 HRMax:158

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

The bust.

2007-05-27T11:03:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-05-20T17:05:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-05-10T21:06:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-04T11:45:00.000+01:00

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.

Blossom falls

2007-04-28T20:12:00.000+01:00

It's almost like Spring is over here, and April hasn't finished yet. One section of my run takes me past a long line of cherry trees, and they've been in blossom for the past couple of weeks. It's been a lovely sight, especially when I catch them in the morning sun. This week though, especially Wednesday and Friday, the trees have been ditching the blossom and, as it's been a wetter week here, the petals have been drifting together to make little pools to drench the unwary runner's shoes.

I was only unwary once though.

On Monday, having had two full weeks of running at 30 minutes, I added on an extra 5 minutes, taking the route of "run for longer" rather than "run faster" which certainly seems the best advice at the moment. I'm getting pretty good now at guessing the target distance and then finding a new combination of side roads on map-my-run, so when Mr Garmin's alarm goes off when I reach target, I'm no more than 200 yards from my front door.

The run came in at 3.9 miles, so Wednesday and Friday, I just set Mr Garmin to alarm at 4 miles, to make it a nice round number. All the runs went fine, even the one with the wet foot, but my legs have been telling me to definitely take the weekend off.

I started wearing my heart rate monitor again on Monday, just so that I could start to record my heart rates again for future reference. It's not the cleverest of devices, but it gives me my peak rate and average for the run, which is OK for now.

Training for the week:

Mon: 3.90 miles, 35 minutes 8:59 pace. 11C (rain) HRAve:153 HRMax:170
Wed: 4.01miles, 35:41 minutes 8:54 pace. 11C HRAve:150 HRMax:168
Fri: 4.00 miles, 36:46 minutes 9:12 pace. 11C HRAve:147 HRMax:169

At the moment, I'm planning on just repeating 3 x 4 miles next week, but I probably need to start thinking about mixing it up with longer, slow runs. I have some reading material on this, and might start pushing up my Wednesday mileage, whilst using Monday and Friday to work on other things.

On the home front, I'm just about to change jobs, albeit within the same company, and disengage from a rut I've stayed in far too long. This shouldn't affect my running, although I do expect more travel to London. I'll just have to pick my hotels so I can run through Hyde Park or up The Mall for a nice change of scenery.

It also looks like we've finally got a school sorted out for my son next year. This has been a big source of anguish for us over the past year as getting the right placement for a very bright autistic boy in the face of budget cuts at the city council has been very difficult. My youngest daughter has been off nursery school with a bit of a fever for the latter half of the week, hopefully we'll see a bit of improvement tomorrow. My eldest daughter got a new Yamaha keyboard this week as an early birthday present and between gymnastics, trampolining and homework has been practicing away on it. I did give her some headphones so she doesn't keep us awake though ;).

Finally, today, 28th April, is my blogiversary. And my Runiversary, a whole year since I started out pounding the pavements. Here's to the next one then!

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Looking ahead.

2007-04-22T21:18:00.000+01:00

It's been a weekend of review and goal-thinking-about. The first review item is that last week, mainly due to my mad Wednesday dash, I topped 10 miles for the week for the first time. This is something I intend to build upon, mainly by adding run time and extending my loop somewhere - I don't quite know where yet though.

Secondly, I checked my resting heart rate on Friday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised at a nice low 58 beats per minute. I don't think it's ever been that low before, having sat between 68 and 72 for some years now.

As far as goals go, I'm trying to find a suitable 5K to run in the next month. This will mean some family logistical problems as weekends are packed with all manner of swimming, dance and theatre classes for the kids which I don't really want to interfere with. I can see, though, a 10K possibility on 16th June. This is the 2007 Stourbridge Stumble ("Stour" rhyming with "ow" - as in I hurt my head) the race for which I selected my moniker nearly a year ago.

From where I sit now, it's 8 weeks away and there are plenty of 4 and 8 week preparation plans out there to adapt. I've been looking at a couple of plans on Runnersworld.co.uk to give me some idea of what I need to do. This has meant that I actually need to understand what "strides" are and what Fartlek really means so I can decide whether or not they are going to be suitable.

Don't worry, I'm not about to go try some mad speedwork before I've worked more on my endurance and made sure that my ankles are up to it. However, it doesn't hurt to find out. I'll also be finding out a bit more about how understanding heart-rate can help me train. Again runnersworld tells me to find my maximum heart rate as follows:
"Do this by warming up, then running as fast as you can evenly for three minutes (ideally on a treadmill), then resting with two or three minutes gentle running, then repeating your three minute maximal run. During your second run you should get a higher maximum heart rate than with any other method - though use your heart rate monitor to take readings throughout it, as your heart rate may peak before the end."
I may try this in the next 2 weeks, which should then help me know what easy, medium and hard training heart rates should be.

As for Friday just gone, I had a reasonably good run and found my average pace was just under 9:00, a bit faster than I was aiming for. It was significantly easier the Wednesday though.

Fri: 3.40 miles, 30:14 minutes 8:54 pace. 5C

=================
On a non-running topic, my CISSP exam results from April 1st (it wasn't an April Fools trick!) came through, and I passed. I don't get any more detail than that - they just tell you pass of fail, but it's such a relief that I don't have to study and do the whole lot again.

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Head boiled again

2007-04-18T08:51:00.000+01:00

It was Monday-Legs again at the start of the week and I battled on through to get in just over 5K in 30 minutes. This despite the fact that the temperature was up to 10C and quite pleasant I just felt - yuk.

Today though, was somewhat different. I've found generally that I can't tell how a run is going to go until I'm about half a mile down the road. Today, I was half a mile down the road and thinking about a 5K race I may enter in about a month's time. And then I was wondering what sort of PR I might set - it being my first race and not having a PR yet. And then I was thinking that I would need to know what my race pace should be before the race. And then I looked at Mr Garmin who told me I was running at around an 8 minute mile pace.

So, I was feeling pretty good and decided I would try to maintain a faster pace for as long as I could and see what happens. The way I began measuring the effort was the feeling of resistance I was getting in my quads, something akin to wading through water, except very "thin" water. I used this and a steady breathing rate to try to maintain a steady pace and just kept giving it a bit more gas.

At the 3 mile mark, I knew I was well ahead of my normal pace and was wondering where I would end up running to, as I would have to walk back. I was also feeling a little nauseous having completed the main 400 yard incline section in my otherwise flattish circuit. The main problem I was having here - and sorry if this is a bit gross - is that I was building up a load of phlegm at the back of my throat and, well, I'm not a spitter. So this had only one place to go and my stomach just wasn't liking it.

I could also feel my heart rate was probably close to my HRMax, though I had no good means to record it. This lasted for a couple of hundred yards and I was back to a more comfortable throat and heart as I passed 5K and my usual finishing point.

I completed the run having covered 3.6 miles in 30 minutes at an average pace of 8:22. Nothing mechanical broke. My head looked like it had been boiled, which is probably a good indication of effort - I haven't had a boiled head for months now. This might show that my normal speed, which I've been keeping down to spare the ankles is not really fast enough for a good workout, but 8:22 is too fast at the moment. It's nice to know it can be done though.

So, having done this, I arrive home to find in my mailbox 2 pieces of advice which advise me to do something entirely different. Firstly Phil (thank you!) suggesting I run 30 minutes more frequently in the week and add some lower effort workouts to make a total of 5 sessions.

Secondly, from Runner's World who drop me an email every week or so with links to some wise words for beginners. One of their 35 training principles for beginners is:

"#3 Go farther, not harder Once you reach the magic 20-minute mark, build up to 30 minutes (then 40, 50 and 60). Don’t make the mistake of trying to get faster – don’t try to run your 20-minute course in 19 minutes. Increasing endurance is your first priority. "

So I think the message is clear. This morning's push for speed might have been fun to try, but it's not going to be any good for me to continue right now. I might look to increase my pace slightly as I know I can sustain it, but not currently to anything faster the 9:00, probably more like 9:10. Instead, I need to increase my workout frequency, thus increasing my weekly mileage and perhaps then increase the time I spend out there on each run. But, keep the 10% per week rule in mind.

Training so far this week:

Mon: 3.11 miles, 30 minutes 9:39 pace. 10C
Wed: 3.60 miles, 30 minutes 8:22 pace. 5C

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

A non-stop week

2007-04-14T22:05:00.000+01:00

The weather in the UK this week has been extremely good, which is unusual in two ways. Firstly it's April and usually it rains. Secondly, it's a school holiday and usually it rains. I've worked only two days this week, burning some of my admittedly pretty good vacation package which has left plenty of time for more escapades to keep the kids out of trouble.

On Wednesday, we were back at the Wrekin, introducing some friends to the hill which they hadn't managed to get to despite living in the area for 7 or 8 years. So another ice-cream fuelled climb after which my knees started complaining, mainly because of the descent. Here are a couple of shots from the top, firstly the toposcope:

And my eldest daughter resting at the trig point ...

On Thursday, we went up into Cheshire to visit Beeston Castle which the kids always love, especially as there is a farm nearby which makes it's own ice-cream in loads of flavours, which is a nice treat. Mine was apple pie and custard. Mmm.

This was a shoddy photo I took of the castle from the ice-cream farm.

It was a bit hazy.

After this we drove to the Delamere forest, which I'd never been to before, to see what it's like. It turned out to be a very pleasant place for a nice gentle walk in the woods.

Meanwhile, on the running front, things have been steady and good. Wednesday and Friday were both repeats of Mondays 30 minutes non-stop, and with no real problems - my ankle grumbled a bit, but only for an hour or two, so I'm hopeful that this is going to be a good base from which to move on from.

What to do next, I'm yet to decide and could still do with a nudge towards either longer distances or improving pace. Or whatever. Advice would be gratefully received!

Wed: 3.22 miles, 30 minutes 9:20 pace. 4C
Fri: 3.20 miles, 30 minutes 9:23 pace. 7C (back in shorts again!!)

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

* 30:0 *

2007-04-09T15:59:00.000+01:00

It's what we call a Bank Holiday today, essentially a day off for everyone, unless you work in a DIY / home improvement store or any place selling garden plants and ornaments.

Thankfully, I don't work in either, so have planned today to continue our spring odyssey around the local hills with a visit to the Clent Hills, South of Birmingham. But before any of that, there was the small matter of 3 miles to get in first.

So with the nation taking a lie-in I stood outside the house at 7:15 busily programming Mr Garmin in a totally new way. No more of these run walk intervals, I want automatic 1 mile lap pacing and a 30 minute "your done" alarm. Caution? Wind? Pah!

It may have been a beautifully bright morning, but the fog remaining in my head made this task a bit longer than expected. However, I hit the road after this minor delay and just kept going, keeping the pace as controlled as I could as I followed the flatter course I've been using for the past few weeks.

There was a little discomfort towards the end in the old plantar fascia, but I don't think any damage has been done. I'll use a bit of ice over the next 2 days as I need it.

However, the deed is done. Only 346 days to complete my C25K. At this rate, I'll be ready for a Marathon in about 8 more years. Actually, that suddenly looks optimistic when I look at it.

Of course, what this means is that the goal is met. I will shortly need a new one, although I plan for the moment to establish this 30 minutes as a base for a week or two, before adding anything further or trying to improve my pace. My guess is a little more distance is the better approach, but I wouldn't mind some advice on this.

Mon: 3.09 miles, 30 minutes 9:45 pace. 4C

At this point, I think I need to thank Thomas for giving me a kick up the arse. You were right, and I needed it

Following this momentus occasion, the family headed off to the Clent Hills where we had a pleasant walk around the paths, which were quite busy as they were running an Easter egg hunt. From the viewing point (the big blue starry thing in the middle of the map linked above) I took this photo looking North West towards The Wrekin, where we were a couple of days ago. You can just make it out on the horizon in the photo,

It's there, hazily merging into the clouds just right of centre, on the horizon. We could also see the Long Mynd further West, The Clee Hills (a future expedition) South West and the Malverns to the South.

If you do plan on coming to the UK and seeing the countryside (or perhaps you are already here!), there is a mapping service which allows you to view and print small sections of detailed maps so you can plan routes ahead. The service is at Ordnance Survey and is called Get-a-map. Very useful. This is the one I used today, starting in the car park by "Nimmings Plantation"

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Shropshire hills

2007-04-07T09:17:00.000+01:00

School holidays are upon us here and the kids are already a week into their Easter habit of driving D mad. I've taken a little time off to ease the burdon a little, so yesterday we all piled into the car and headed for a little adventure, in the Shropshire hills. Target on Thursday was the Stiperstones (sty - per - stones) which I haven't been to for for a very long time.

Stiperstones is part of the Shropshire Way walking route but we were only planning a small incursion to determine the lay of the land and consume a picnic.

It was a beautiful sunny day, hazy in the distance but glorious all the same.

Here we have part of the ascent, my son taking the lead....

Manstone rock .....

... and my son atop said rock ...

Stiperstones has an incredibly rough and stony trail, so after lunch, we abandoned and went across to the Long Mynd, to the East. This is a long ridge, stretched out North-South-ish and home to the Midlands gliding club, with both fixed wing gliders ...

.. and parascenders ....

... and some cracking countryside ...

... that being the lovely town of Much Wenlock in the background.

As you may have noticed, I took the opportunity to update my own blogger photo too.

This morning, I got in a further 3.1 miles, moving forward to run 25, walk 1, run 5. So I'm very nearly there. I'll see how I feel on Monday as to whether I dispense with the walk this end of the week. Having got this run in, I then took the kids off to the Wrekin in the afternoon. The Wrekin is a local hill from which our local telly signals are broadcast. It's a 977 foot climb from the car park and my four year old daughter walked from bottom to top assisted only by a Smarties ice-cream half way up. Amazing. She's such a tough kid for someone so small.

Training
========
Fri: 3.10 miles, 30 minutes, 25,5:1 run:walk 9:42 pace. 5C

All the best.

Mr Stumble

Getting closer.

2007-04-04T22:25:00.000+01:00

I'd forgotten just how horrible exams are you know. While Thomas spent 5 hours 40 minutes running an ultra, I spent a roughly equivalent amount of time hacking through 250 multiple guess questions in a CISSP exam in Oxfordshire. Despite a pleasant night's sleep in a local hostelry and a hearty full English breakfast to fuel me up, an hour in, I was suffering brain fade already trying to recall minutia of ISO17799, TCSEC standards, elliptic curve cryptography and what types of fire extinguishers to use on a petroleum fire. That'd be Class B then. Foam, gas, CO2, powder.

However, there were no moments when I wished I was trying to run that Ultra instead. No no no no no no. At least a can still walk after an exam!

Results are probably 4 weeks away, so I may mention them in May some time.

Studying has taken a lot of my time in the evenings over the past month and I know with my head buzzing with factoids, sleep has been a bit of an issue and might have been the cause of my Monday legs. This Monday was much improved on the previous two and the 15,15:1 run:walk was no real problem. This might also have been assisted by my new improved stretching regime. This consists of stretching for about 4 minutes rather than the one or so I've been doing previously - I have been lax.

Monday went so well that I've kept with my rash increases in running time and ran 20,10:1 this morning with no apparent ill effects. My ankle feel exactly the same as at 11 and 15 minutes, which is a little stiff and with the slightest of warning aches, but no more.

So, at this point, I have 24 days to complete my full C25K target within one year of starting out. This might actually be some sort of record, I don't know. But given 8 planned runs between now and then this should not be difficult and I might actually do it in one of the next 4 runs.

What I have certainly achieved now is running continuously for the longest I ever had. Once I get to the 5KAIO (5K all in one), I'm certainly planning to establish that as a base and start to increase as best I can.

Mon: 3.17 miles, 30 minutes, 15,15:1 run:walk 9:28 pace. 4C
Wed: 3.21 miles, 30 minutes, 20,10:1 run:walk 9:22 pace. 4C (garmin a bit suspicious today)

All the best,

Mr Stumble.

Half and Half

2007-03-30T09:18:00.000+01:00

Very quick update - gotta study! As planned, did a 15,15:1 run today through another grim and overcast early morning. I had my Monday legs on for some reason and the early part of the 2nd 15 minute section was difficult, and both legs were complaining. However, the last 5 minutes or so were by far the best part of the run. Don't know how that works.

Hopefully, I'll repeat this effort on Monday and move on as planned later in the week.

Fri: 3.1 miles, 30 minutes, 15,15:1 run:walk 9:41 pace. 5C

Monthly stats for this year:

March, 2007: 40.2 Mi 6:27:22
February: 27.5 Mi 4:31:00
January: 25.0 Mi 4:06:12

All the best.

Mr Stumble

I don't like Mondays.

2007-03-28T14:56:00.000+01:00

Busy week again this week and I have a professional exam coming up this weekend, so I'm going to be short on time getting things written up here till next Monday.

However, after some mulling and welcome comments and feedback, I'm accelerating my slow pace of increases to hopefully get the magic 30 minutes without stopping in the next few weeks.

Mondays though seem to be bothering me. Monday morning just gone was just a horrible slog to get through the run even at 11:11:8 minute run segments. It's the same as last week - and it's not like I've been partying or staying up late. It was a grim cold grey day and suited my mood. On the plus side though, Monday took my current shoe mileage over 100 miles, so a milestone of sorts reached.

This morning was an entirely different matter. Running 13:13:4 actually felt easy(ish), and I felt I could easily have wrapped the last 4 minutes onto the 13. Why didn't I? Well, I'm a slave to Mr Garmin and didn't want to mess my records up. Plus, I've been impetuous before and have paid the price, so I'm keeping to the plan.

This has spurred me on though, and on Friday, I plan a straight 15:15. It then looks like this:

Monday 15:15 (As I don't like Mondays and see this as maintaining the gains only)
Wednesday 20:10
Friday 25:5
Monday 30 (or maybe Wednesday, as I've established my Monday problem)

Being ever pragmatic, if whilst I'm going for the summit of my goal I can feel the impending blizzard of injury, I'll retreat to the base camp of crushing failure to re-plan my assault on this little ambition, no doubt with a block of ice round my ankle.

The ankle BTW is still not properly fixed. It's not painful, just feeling a bit stressed out. A couple of weeks ago, I chased after my physio appointment. In their wisdom, the local NHS Trust has decided to centralise all of the physio services in the city, to make them more efficient. Thus instead of having to wait a week or two for an assessment and treatment plan at our local doctors office, I now have to wait until June (I think it is June this year) to get an initial assessment some place about 4 miles away.

All being well, I'll be able to run there and back by that time ;).

Training this week.
Mon 3.14 miles, 30:22 minutes, 11,11,8:1 run:walk 9:41 pace. 5C
Wed 3.11 miles, 30 minutes, 13,13,4:1 run:walk 9:41 pace. 4C
[Garmin problems both days, probably related to high relative humidity and thick cloud.]

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Moo.

2007-03-25T11:10:00.000+01:00

Last weekend I planned out a new course to something a bit less hilly. Not that I'm running up Everest or anything like that, but I'm not doing myself any favours by stressing my ankles, and this in turn might be holding me back from my main goal of just running for the whole 30 minutes.

The new course also has the benefit of not including a fairly fast and busy dual-carriageway road, so my risk of coming off worse in a runner vs. car bout has been reduced.

Last Monday morning was one of those days where you really feel like not running. It had snowed overnight and the pavements and roads were slushy - half melted snow holding together pools of ice cold water.

On top of that, I just felt like crap and my right calf was mooing achingly, even before I set out. However, once I'd dragged myself downstairs and out into the bright and sunny morning (0C, 32F), I was determined to battle on through.

I ended up over-compensating for feeling rough and completed the course much faster than I had intended and average 9:27 pace with the first mile under 9:00. With the slushy surface, any slight mis-step (and there were plenty) would send a jet of water from the sole of one foot straight onto the front topside of the other one. The foot-freezer-effect would then set in for a few hundred yards, but I was surprised how rapidly my feet warmed and dried out after each splash landing.

My calf continued to moo all day, but was much improved by Wednesday, another cold and sunny morning, -2C (28.5F). Although below freezing, the ground was dry with no ice, and I felt great on return, having managed to control my pace better. So on Friday, it was time to move up to 11,11,8 minute run segments and see how that felt. It felt pretty good.

So my plan now is to run 11,11,8 tomorrow then 13,13,4 for the remainder of the week hitting 15,15 a week Monday. I do think this flatter course is going to make a big difference. I should have done this months ago!

Training for last week:

Mon 3.18 miles, 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:27 pace. 0C
Wed 3.11 miles, 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:39 pace. -2C
Fri 3.14 miles, 30 minutes, 11,11,8:1 run:walk 9:34 pace. 5C

All, the best.

Mr Stumble.

A little entertainment

2007-03-24T17:49:00.000Z

After seeing Mike's video, linked to by Phil, I thought you might like a little entertainment from over here too! Not a cute vid, but I find this quite funny to watch.

This is my eldest daughter, sat next to me on a freefall-drop-ride at Drayton Manor park in Staffordshire UK. The scream you can here is from the young lady to my left (not visible in the video). And yes, I was a bit deaf afterwards. The grunty gargling noise during the descent is me. :)

Enjoy.

My Stumble.

Charing Cross

2007-03-18T10:38:00.000Z

Have you ever been in a public place and suddenly and unexpectedly had the spotlight swung on you? You know, you arrange the chairs for a school concert - just mucking in and suddenly someone thinks you need to be presented a bottle of bubbly in front of 500 people. That sort of thing.

Last Tuesday I was on the Tube heading South to Embankment listening to FDip before a customer visit and what do you know, the spotlight was suddenly on me. And that exact same feeling of "OMG I want to run and hide" came over me. Not easy to achieve on a Tube train.

Of course, I should have expected it. I had sent Steve a short note, intended as a minor contribution to the C25K episode, kind of a "I'm doin' it and this really helped me" note, but it probably arrived too late and missed the deadline for inclusion. And then this little boomerang hit me 2 weeks later as we were pulling into Charing Cross. The woman sat opposite noticed and even briefly put her book down to frown at my obvious squirming. Isn't it strange how even though you know no-one else can hear what you're hearing through those ear-buds, your (well, my) brain acts like it's on the tannoy and the SuperTrouper has swung over and lit me up.

Anyway, goofy as it was, it was heartfelt and I did mean it all. This blog, as a tool to meet other runners and the subsequent chivying along and advice received, as well as reading what others are up to, really has kept me going.

So, really, thank you. And thanks Steve for the mention.

Back to this week, whilst not in the City I've had 3 good runs this week.

Mon 3.1 miles, 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:41 pace. 2C
(Garmin tells me it was 3.41 miles, but I think it got confused somewhere)
Wed 3.1 miles, 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:41 pace. 2C
Fri 3.15 miles, 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:31 pace. 0C

As noted, Mr Garmin has started getting a bit confused again, I suspect through some reflected signal somewhere it placed me almost a third of a mile from where I actually was on the course. I was very surprised to see my pace over the first mile reported as 7:44. I don't think so. I'm looking at other course possibilities now as I've just added more height to the top end of the run and could do with a flatter course. I'll see what jockeying MapMyRun will turn up.

Hope all is well with you!

Mr Stumble.

Breaking 5K

2007-03-09T14:45:00.000Z

This week has seen some really lovely sunny mornings to run in, followed by rain later in the day. This is of course perfect for me, and getting out of bed when it's light is so much easier.

Things continue to progress slowly but surely and the graph from RunningAhead shows my mileage drifting upwards to the point where I am actually running 5K now, with 2 walking breaks.

I've managed to stay at 10:1 run:walk all through this week without anything breaking. I have certainly found there to be an increase in complaint from my ankle tendon, but as things stand on Friday afternoon, it seems to have started getting used to the extra effort and there is less grumbling down there than at the beginning of the week.

I now plan to keep this going through next week and then add an extra minute so I'm running 11:11:8, then continue to keep my total running time at 30 minutes whilst I continue increasing towards 15 minutes. Hopefully, this very gradual approach will prevent further injury.

I think I can now say I've partially met one of my goals here. I am running for 30 minutes, I just have to work on the "stopping" part now.

This weekend sees me at a family event in Somerset which I'm looking forward to. Unfortunately, it clashed with a real 5K event I had hoped to run, the "Hearts First Jog - Wyre Forest 5k" on Sunday. This looked like a really good one to start as it's in a place I love to go walking anyway, it's only a half hour ride to get there and it's in aid of the British Heart Foundation. However, family first, so I'll continue looking for another opportunity as I carry on training. It would be great to post my first PR in something before I get a year into this blog!

Wed 3.11 miles, 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:39 pace. 2C
Fri 3.11 miles, 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:39 pace. 3C

Mr Stumble.

Sunrise

2007-03-05T09:43:00.000Z

My luck on the weather front seems to be holding out. Over last week, even though we had significant rain, enough to turn our back garden into a mini swamp, I managed to run in barely a drizzel on one day, overcast another and clear skys the third. The Friday temperature dipped to zero C, nothing a pair of gloves couldn't sort out.

This was my second week of running 9 minute sections and it's been going pretty well. My right ankle continues to feel a little sore the day after, but nothing that causes me to hobble. I keep thinking I must do some preventative icing, but then forget at the point where I collapse on the sofa at around 9pm. Especially as I'm catching up on Battlestar Galactica, rented from Amazon. Hadn't seen any of the new series until a couple of weeks ago and am pretty hooked now.

Mon 2.70 miles, 27 minutes, 9:1 run:walk 10:00 pace. 5C
Wed 2.75 miles, 27 minutes, 9:1 run:walk 9:50 pace. 4C
Fri 2.85 miles, 27 minutes, 9:1 run:walk 9:29 pace. 0C

I seem to be falling into a pattern where my pace improves over the week, then drops back to 10:00 mile the next Monday. Must be to do with what I eat over the weekend, this weekend being especially bad as we had a bit of a family get together on Saturday night, involving copious amounts of Chinese food, pies and beer. Not good for The Plan.

Earlier in the week, I listened to Fdip and Steve's C25K discussion. I wish it was all that easy for me! I'm stuck at around week 6 mark - my mileage is ahead, but I just can't make those larger additions to running-distance-per-interval without risking it all. This said, it did help me make the decision to at least increment a little bit this morning, and so I ran 3 x 10 minutes, finally making it back over 3 miles for the first time since around July last year. This did mean a modification of my route, and I did have some trouble crossing a main road, essentially pushing my way across through a gap in a line of cars heading into town, nose-to-tail at about 20Mph.

This morning also marked another glorious moment. I was running after Sunrise again! I couldn't see Sunrise itself, as there is a ridge to the East of my house. The sun came up at 6:47, I started running at 6:56 and caught it's first rays whilst running through the Woodlands walk at 7:10. It really was lovely out this morning and certainly the best part of todays weather thus far.

Mon 3.05 miles (nearly 5K), 30 minutes, 10:1 run:walk 9:51 pace. 2C

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble.

More pancakes

2007-03-05T09:26:00.000Z

As you asked Phil, here's my current recipe!

Breakfast Pancakes

140 grams (5 oz) plain flour
7 grams (1.5 teasp ) baking powder
3.5 grams (0.5 teasp) salt
28 grams (2 tablesp / 1 oz) white sugar
1 large egg
240ml (8.5 fl Oz) milk
2 tablesp unsalted butter

Whisk together flour, baking powder salt and sugar. In another bowl, whisk together egg, milk and melted butter. Add egg mixture to flour mix and stir until smooth.

Heat pancake maker. Gently cook first side for 1 to 2 minutes, then flip and cook the other side.

I serve with maple syrup, sliced banana and vanilla ice-cream. Mmmmm. I don't think I can run far enough yet to burn off a stack of these!

Always looking to improve, so alternatives welcome!

Mr Stumble.

Pancake day

2007-02-24T16:01:00.000Z

I like pancake day, because I like pancakes. And I can pinpoint exactly where and when I really started to like pancakes. The where was the "Olde Niagara House" bed and breakfast at Niagara Falls, and the when was 24th September 1992. About 8:30am. A stack of pancakes, gammon and egg for breakfast. Mmmmmmm.

This was the place, scanned in from my copious photos of the trip. One of my favourite bits of the 3 week trip, coast to coast and back again.

About 5 years ago, I decided I would start to finally make my own to recreate the Niagara House experience on Sunday mornings and it wasn't long before the Internet gave up a recipe which was damn good. I've been making them the same way ever since and demand always outstrips supply.

To work off the calories involved, from Monday (in anticipation!) I added another minute to each of my 3 sections to see what would happen. Thankfully, nothing has broken, but I can feel the additional strain in the ankle. I don't think it's going to tear again, I just think this is the residual tendon-scar tissue having a rough time in there. I don't have any problems with walking, stairs and all the old problems, it's just like one of the annoying rattles in the door of your car.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my GP for a referral for physiotherapy again, this time on the NHS. I had a call about it last week asking how long ago the injury was sustained. As I have a record (here) that wasn't too difficult. However, no appointment yet. Hopefully, I'll get an idea about that this coming week.

I've was pretty lucky with the weather over the last week and always found the parts of the day where the rain had just stopped, or would start half an hour after I got back in. And for February, it's still really warm at 6C in the mornings. As I write it's 10C. I know it's going to be one of those record-breakingly warm winters, when the statisticians get to talk about it in a couple of months.

Results for the week.

Mon 2.69 miles, 27 minutes, 9:1 run:walk 10:03 pace. 6C
Wed 2.75 miles, 27 minutes, 9:1 run:walk 9:50 pace. 6C
Fri 2.77 miles, 27 minutes, 9:1 run:walk 9:45 pace. 6C

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble.

Swinsty reservoir.

2007-02-18T10:59:00.000Z

Another busy start to the week meant I had to abandon my planned run on Monday. I suppose I could have got up at 5am, but as I'm not training for anything in particular, I let it go for an extra hour in bed.

From Wednesday, things were calmer, especially as I'd taken the day off. We were off to Skipton in Yorkshire mid morning to collect my daughter who had spent a few days up there with her cousin in a rented cottage. So plenty of time for a run.

Still keeping with my trying-not-to-break-anything plan, it was yet another 8 minutes x 3, this time with the iPod, something I've not done for a while. I also allowed the pace to increase a little to an average 9:46 (gosh!). This all felt fine and although my ankle complained gently during the run, it felt fine afterwards.

After showering, and being Valentines day, there was breakfast in bed, flowers and such to sort out for D before the family climbed into the car for the two and a half hour drive via Manchester to Skipton. Stopped at a nice country pub on the way for lunch and arrived ready for an afternoon walk in the Peak district before heading home.

We drove out to Swinsty Reservoir and had a lovely walk round in some very pretty countryside. Ah - I miss being in hilly landscapes. It's fairly flat where I live, but having spent 5 years in South Wales, you miss the valleys. Here's a selection of photos taken on my Treo, so not best quality!

Fewston reservoir, taken from the dam between Fewston and Swinsty.

As we walked we were passed by a couple of runners. This would be a fantastic place to train, a fairly flat path around the lake, just over 3 miles round. Oh, I envied them.

On Friday, I got my second run in, yet another 8 x 3, this time in the rain. It took a while for my hands to warm up - it was 6C with a light wind, so there was a bit of a chill - and looking at my pace, it seemed to have encouraged me to try getting home sooner ave. 9:24. Again no problems aside from not being able to see much when my eye-glasses misted up. And this time without the iPod, as I didn't want it to get a soaking.

Planning to move back up to 9 minutes next week to try it out again.

All the best.

Mr Stumble.

Elliptic Curve

2007-02-12T19:49:00.001Z

After a long week away studying night and day, I was very glad to be leaving Wembley for the 3 hour trek home. As aluded to previously, I have not run outside all week, and this was becaise I found the place a nasty mix of building site and, well, "rough neighbourhood" only starts to scratch the surface.

When I pulled into the car park at the hotel on Sunday night, I stepped out onto crunchy glass, glass that, earlier that evening, had been part of the passenger window of the car in the next space. I moved to an underground car park straight away.

Thus I was thankful that I had selected a hotel with a gym so as to avoid the urban dangers outside. I also avoided some freezing temperaures and snow, which was a bonus.

Although small, the gym had the two things I was looking for. An elliptical trainer and a treadmill. The plan was to use the elliptical for 10 minutes and then do 2 lots of 8 minutes on the 'mill, adding up to slightly more cardio work, but with less impact. Thus I would be able to train each day without blowing up my ankle. This worked out OK except for Thursday when I woke up feeling just rotten and abandoned hope of achieving very much of anything all day.

The results:

Monday 1.6 miles at 10 min pace ( 2 x 8) plus 10 mins on elliptical.
Tuesday 1.6 miles at 10 min pace ( 2 x 8) plus 10 mins on elliptical.
Wednesday 1.6 miles at 10 min pace ( 2 x 8) plus 10 mins on elliptical.
Friday 1.6 miles at 10 min pace ( 2 x 8) plus 10 mins on elliptical.

All this followed by that full English breakfast I spoke of last time.

I found the elliptical quite difficult. This was because I felt off balance all the time and it's like you're constantly supporting you weight on your quads - the isn't the same "rest" that you get in the return part of your stride. This may well be why it's good at what it does, but it does little for calves, as Phil says.

All the best.

Mr Stumble

The Lost Post

2007-02-07T08:01:00.000Z

Very short post. I wrote a more lengthy entry last night, but got my old pal, Blue Screen Of Death, just as I was about to post. I'd hoped Blogger did some sort of auto-save-draft like gmail, but it doesn't yet, you have to press the button .. like that .. and then hit the edit button to carry on. Bah.

In short:

- Friday was an 8 mins x 3 @ 10 minute pace. Nothing unusual
- Weekend, ended up working so didn't post
- This week, in Wembley on a course.

The hotel has a gym, and I'm visiting daily, doing 10 minutes on the elliptical followed by 8 mins x 2 on the treadmill. I'm not running outside, and will explain this one in a later post.

Anyway, having just burned off 350 calories, I'm off for a full English breakfast to prepare for all the upcoming mental exertion. Doing encryption today, if one can be said to be able to "do" encryption in a single 8 hour stretch!

All the best.

Mr Stumble

Notes from a Stumble.

2007-02-01T23:16:00.000Z

Apologies for falling into the "blog hole" for more than a week. Since I ran on Wednesday last week, I've been worried about this ankle again. The sore tendon is back, and I think it's the extra minute that did it.

So I took a whole week off and it got marginally better. Yesterday, Wednesday, I went out again, and held it back to 8 minutes and a very easy pace. It loosened up around half way round, and since has sat there - not so much aching, but in a pre-ache. Hard to explain.

I've finally been to the GP for another physio referral, but that won't be for a while now. Next week, I'm spending the whole week at a training establishment, next to Wembley stadium. No it's not soccer training! The hotel has a gym, so I'll be probably trying out an elliptical trainer if they have one, and if it's any good may get one myself.

Being none impact, it should be better for me, but I do hope to get a run round the stadium if I can at least one morning.

Meanwhile, planning another run tomorrow, and hopefully a more rapid post.

All the best.

Wednesday 2.35 miles 24 minutes @ 8:1 10:13 pace

Mr Stumble.

Traction control

2007-01-25T07:41:00.000Z

Wednesday morning was a little less cold than anticipated, but still below freezing and the coldest air temperature I've run in. Having run at 4C in a long sleeved under shirt, T-shirt and some old trackie trousers (I can't bring myself to buy running tights) I was pretty sure I'd need something extra to ward off the 4.5C difference.

I added a windbreak zip-up fleece, bobble hat and upgraded my gloves from some sailing gloves, with the first finger and thumb half open, for thermal gloves. The sailing gloves are intended to allow for the tying of knots and fiddling with little metal pins holding the sheets in place. They are also really good for accurately pressing buttons on a Garmin.

Having loaded up on the layers, I was already overheating as I made my way out the front door, so I had a few moments to cool down slightly - taking in the gloriously clear sky, just starting to lighten, before kicking off.

This run moved me forward again now 3 x 9 minutes with one minute walking between. Again I kept the pace down and followed my MapMyRun planned route. It was pretty slippery out there and in some spots I was only really keeping myself upright and letting momentum carry me forward. Mind you I had plenty of padding if I did go over.

The gloves only lasted the first mile before they came off, and the hat lasted another mile before I just couldn't stand the heat. I was pretty much roasted at the end, so will be replanning my run-wear for next time.

9 minutes felt pretty good, but now 24 hours later I can feel that right ankle tendon complaining again. I've been wondering if Carmen has something similar which has put her out of action for a while.

Not wanting to loose this progress, I'm considering rolling back to 8 minute sections for a while longer, then trying again at 9. Physio help would also be great and I keep promising to get an appointment but can't see where in my diary it will fit until mid February.

Hope all is well with you.

Monday: 2.7 miles, 10:02 pace 27 minutes. 9 run : 1 walk.

Mr Stumble

For the benefit of Mr Stumble

2007-01-23T21:12:00.001Z

I've been considering over the last few days what benefits my sorry attempts at running have brought me thus far. I was somewhat surprised when I realised that since I started way back in April last year, I haven't had a single "bad head" day related to lack of sleep.

I had recognised a pattern. If I had less than 7 hours kip for more than 2 nights in a row, I'd wake with a bad head which would progress to debilitating migraine by lunchtime, and then ease off in the evening.

The response to this was clear. Go to bed earlier. However, over the past couple of weeks, I've broken this golden rule of sleep at least twice with no ill effects. The conclusion: my lack of any conditioning and fitness were having a much more corrosive effect on my life than I had ever guessed at.

The maths of the benefit are pretty positive. I spend about an hour and a half running each week and gain between 5 and 7 hours each week awake in return. That's a bargain.

Over the last week and a bit, I've maintained my running schedule much better. Monday was my last run at 7 minutes x 3 and went OK. Wednesday I moved up to 8 minutes x 3 which strangely felt a more comfortable distance and time.

Friday nearly didn't happen. I got stranded in London due to the storm-force winds closing the rail network. I had a suit, my PC and a credit card. The credit card got me a room for the night, so I ditched the PC, jacket and tie, and headed out into the West End with a collegue for a good Chinese meal and spur of the moment tickets to Spamalot. Cool.

Having made the best of a bad lot, I still didn't know how I was going to get my Friday run in. Thankfully, despite chaos at Euston station, I managed to get a train home and arrived by lunchtime. So first job was pounding pavements which was great relief from the previous 24 hours.

Monday 22nd was much colder. I'm starting to increase the clothing layers now and I expect it to be well sub-zero centigrade tomorrow morning, probably -2C or lower. I'll be watching my step!

Last 4 runs :

Monday 2.1 miles, 21 minutes @7:1 run:walk 9:59 pace 11C
Wednesday 2.42 miles, 24 minutes @8:1 run:walk 9:55 pace 13C
Friday 2.46 miles, 24 minutes @8:1 run:walk 9:46 pace 11C
Monday 2.4 miles, 24 minutes @8:1 run:walk 10:01 pace 4C (trouble crossing a road!)

Phil, congratulations on your marathon finish. Just brilliant!.

Mr Stumble.

Good intentions.

2007-01-14T11:18:00.000Z

It's been one of those weeks of good intentions but poor results. Following my run on Friday 5th, the tendons in my right ankle felt sore through the weekend. I knew I was off to London very early on Monday, so wanted to run on Sunday evening, but when it came to it, I was worried about not giving it enough rest time.

So Monday turned into a long day - 5 hours of travel, 7 hours of work and wasted on my return. Tuesday, however, was an altogether different kettle of fish and I was working from home. I didn't manage to get up early enough to run first thing, so decided to brave the oncoming forecast rain at lunchtime. Happily, this rain turned up the moment I stepped back in through the door, having completed another 7run:1walk x3. This was done purposefully at a lower pace, just under 10 minute/mile pace, as although I don't find the running difficult on the cardio/energy/breathing side, the slower pace is far better at damage limitation to my tendons.

This meant that my next scheduled run would be Thursday, giving myself a day recovery. However, Thursday was another day in London, this time starting even earlier. So no time to run in the morning and, as we do most Thursday evenings, we had a baby sitter booked for an evening out (seeing Pan's Labyrinth at the local Arts cinema - very good!) so no time then either. Bah.

The weeks second run occurred 2 days late, on Friday morning, bright and early-ish. Again, this was a slower paced run, the same as Tuesday and all fine.

This then left me with a problem. To fit in a 3rd run would mean going out on consecutive days, Friday and Saturday, or Sunday and Monday. My next week diary is again shot through with 2 trips to London on Tuesday and Thursday, leaving me Mon, Weds and Fri as convenient days to run. I don't want to jeopardise Monday by running Sunday and then needing a rest day for my ankle, but then I do want to get my 3 runs in for this week.

So, I might write this week off as "underachieved" (there's nothing like emotive language to spur you on to improve) and stick to a regular schedule next week. I'm also going to try to keep my future London meetings to Tuesdays and Thursdays only - if I have any choice in the matter!

Mr Stumble

The uphill struggle.

2007-01-08T23:00:00.000Z

A late post for a run last Friday. This was a middle of the day run, it had dried up nicely and as I was working at home on nothing in particular, the luxury of an hour's break for a run, shower and lunch was welcome.

Since the previous run on Wednesday, I'd had some moderate tendon soreness again in my right foot, but this had all but gone by Friday morning, so I went ahead with another 7run:1walk x 3.

The route I'm now using gives me a short light downhill, followed by a steady slight uphill incline for a half mile, then a substantial flat-run along a busy main road before turning downhill. It finishes with a bit of uphill. RunningAhead tells me that the biggest elevation changes are 50ft up and 80ft down, which doesn't seem much over half mile distances and are purposefully much less than in my original 3 mile course.

However, the extra slight ankle stretch going uphill is still causing me problems. Since Friday, my right ankle has continued to be sore through the weekend, and a long trip down to London today gave me an additional excuse not to run today to give it a little more time to settle down. The plan is to run tomorrow (Tuesday) early - I've seen the weather predictions and don't want to be out after 11am - and see how it goes. I might even drop back to 6:1 for a while, to see if I can maintain something while my ankles try to build some strength and I can push on up again.

Of course, Christmas feeding hasn't helped as, once again, I find I am that little bit heavier. This in turn loads my ankle up and isn't helping. I get the feeling I have the ankles of someone 2 stones lighter. So, I'm going to see what I can do to reduce my weight through being more careful about what I eat. I don't want to use the D word. I'm just going to eat less and better, that's all.

Friday: 2.21Miles, 21 minutes running @ 7:1 run:walk. 9:31 pace

Mr Stumble.

How I did in '06.

2007-01-03T22:46:00.000Z

After spotting Phil's snazzy diagrams and run-metrics, I thought I'd take a look at RunningAhead myself and see what it could do for me. As it turns out, quite a lot. My Garmin does not have the data upload facility - it's the cheapo one - but manual data-upload really only takes about 60 seconds of clicking and typing, so it's not really a problem, especially if you do it regularly.

Of course, having found it, I then hacked in all of my Garmin recorded runs from last year too. This told me that I'd run a grand total of 32 times last year (probably more like 40 with pre-teched-up runs taken into account) and racked up just over 69 miles. If nothing else, this is 69 miles more than I ran in 2005. However, I also note it's under a weeks mileage for Thomas at the moment, so I have a clear perspective on this one.

It's return-to-school day here in Blighty, at least for two of the three kids, so schedules were as ever mucked about, especially as we've all become so used to staying up late and sleeping in late. My plans to run this morning went out the window, so I've run this evening instead. I can't really leave it later than 8:30 to run, as I know the weight of prevarication increases exponentially thereafter and I'd end up eating my way out of a tub of pistachio nuts for the remainder of the evening.

However, 2 hours is still a bit short for digestion, so I ate reasonably lightly, knowing a Christmas Pudding, which had survived this long because of us all being ill, would be a delicious high-carb reward on my return.

Today, I moved up to 7 minutes x 3. RunningAhead helped me plan a slightly longer route and I headed out into a relatively warm (9C) blustery, drizzly, dark evening. Aside from a calf twinge at the start of the second 7 minutes, all went fine. I even managed to tidy away some stray bin-lids which were blowing down the road - good deed for the day. Still some slight tendon strain in the right ankle after the run, but I expect that will subside before Friday.

2.18 miles, 21 minutes running at 7:1, ave 9:39 pace.

Back to work tomorrow. Bah!

Mr Stumble.

Spritely, for the New Year.

2007-01-02T00:11:00.000Z

Staggered out of the house this morning at about 9:30. It's not that I had a bad head from revelry, I'd just been daft enough to stay up after the Big Ben bongs to watch Amnesty's Secret Policeman's Ball and not managed to unstick myself from the sofa. All those nuts, dates and Black forest gateaux probably didn't help either.

The particular 20 minutes I selected turned out to be the best, sunniest part of the day. I spent half the run squinting into the Sun which all the incline parts of the loop point at and the other half at the neat purple blotch in the middle of my vision.

Mustn't grumble though as it felt fresh and new, and nothing like the miserable Thomas Hardy poem about New Year I studied decades ago, but still comes back to me on New Year's day.

I found this morning I was a bit more spritely than anticipated, and had my first 6 minutes at a 9:10 pace. This meant I would run out of road if I didn't alter the route - well actually I'd have to run past my house for a few hundred yards and walk back - so I added the Woodlands Walk back in - it tacks a few hundred yards on in going across, running parallel to the road and then coming back again. And it's far more pleasant than the main road.

I followed on with the next two 6 minutes at 9:23 and 9:20 giving me a total run of:

1.94 miles, 18 minutes running at 6:1, 9:18 pace.

All remains well with foot and ankle, so on Wednesday I'll move to 7:1 x 3, and alter the course again.

At the moment, this new approach seems to be working, so I might start thinking about a 5K target for March soon.

All the best to you.

Mr Stumble.

The stolen week.

2006-12-30T23:52:00.000Z

Got up extremely late this morning. Woken up by the bloke delivering the weeks groceries some time way past 9:30am, which is embarrassingly late. However, the whole family has an excuse for being stay-a-beds. We're all just getting over a whole week of some dread lurgy, pitched somewhere between a nasty cold and all out flu. I actually had a flu jab just after my last run on 21st Dec, so I suspect I picked something up and had that and a de-activated flu virus to handle.

I was third of the five of us to get something, hitting me on Boxing Day, but having two kids with fevers and stuff gushing from just about everywhere for the previous two days had meant running had been suspended anyway. Then D got it a couple of days ago and I was Mr Mom while she got the fever and achy bones. My son spent nearly every waking hour since Christmas wrapped up in a blanket and watching a constant loop of Doctor Who in the living room. I don't think he remembers he was ill now - sci-fi-self-hypnosis.

However, not wanting to fish for sympathy (sickness is what holidays are for isn't it?), I've not posted on the subject till now, as I've not had a run to talk about.

Which I do now.

After the groceries had been packed away, I headed out to try and do some catching up and general lung-clearance. I know I'll have a continuing cough for a week or so, and I think one benefit of the exercise is to get fresh air into bronchioles which otherwise just hold the gunky stuff. Lets say I cleared some of that out and leave it there.

Although still short, all seemed to go well and I don't have much feeling of tendinitis at the moment. Still keeping to my previous plan, the run was:

1.88 miles, 18 minutes running @ 6:1 averaging 9:34 pace (best pace 9:18 on first 6 minutes)

It's unseasonably warm here. 10C this morning and I managed to find a time between rainstorms, so although the streets were wet, I stayed dry.

Had a nice post card from my Physiotherapist this morning, with a "Hope all is well" message. I'll have to write back.

Just checked on my target 10K date: Stourbridge Stumble 2007: Saturday 16th June 2007 at 6pm. It's in the diary!

Best wishes for a Happy New Year to you. All being well, I run NYD morning.

Mr Stumble

Shortest day, longer run

2006-12-23T19:31:00.001Z

Thursday was my first day of the Christmas break, so I allowed myself an extra half hour in bed before heading out. This meant that thigs were just getting light, although the fog made things a light grey. It was also pretty cold, -1.5C. Not having running tights, I'd dug some old paint splashed track suit trousers from the back of a wardrobe - what the hell, no-one was going to see me.

This run, as promised, was three lots of 6 minutes, starting to move the time up. I've changed the route so the whole thing is under streetlighting. Pace kept fairly easy, averaging just under 10 minute pace.

[update: 1.82 miles, 18 minutes runnig @6:1, ave 9:54 pace.]

I finished the run fine with no real problems, but have had all the signs of tendonitis again in my right ankle. The tendon may have healed, but I can feel a lump of calcified tissue in there, and that is causing some inflamation when I run.

It being the wrong part of the year to make a doctors appointment, I'll have to wait till after boxing day. I need further ultasound to break down the deposits. In the meantime, I'm going to carry on as planned, but with a load of icing, massage and stretching. I really feel that if I can chase this last problem away, keep the program easy I should be able to finally make the progress I need to. I'd love to be able to make a 5K in the spring, and the Stourbridge Stumble next April.

So another 18 minutes on Christmas Eve.

Mr Stumble

Running in the dark.

2006-12-19T17:17:00.000Z

Well, after that bit of planning, it all went to the wall as the weekend turned into a long haul of many different things - mainly concerned with finding a school for my son who has special needs. We had some bad news on Friday concerning his secondary school placement - our local education authority appears to have rejected the school everyone says he should go to and we are waiting for a formal letter, telling us we have to choose a mainstream school.

Never one to wait for the bad news, a lot of letter writing ensued and our campaign to appeal the decision has already started.

Yesterday (Monday) I realised that even if there were a plan, there would always be something to prevent me running in daylight and that I had to take the plunge and run in early morning darkness. And this meant overcoming the daemon of complacency, whispering about the cold, the safety aspect (cars and psychopaths), how mad this would appear to sane people who are still tucked up in bed at 6:30.

D commented that I would never get up, and that really solved the problem for me as I'm stubborn and won't stand for this prejudgement. She knows this of course, so it was a double bluff.

As it turned out, it was dryish and a bit misty - the fog descending an hour later as I was driving North for work. Temperature was around 4.5C. The side roads were empty except for a couple of people heading for the bus and aside from an excursion through the "Woodlands Walk" - part of my normal daytime route, all was lit by street lamps. The Woodlands Walk was pretty dark - a 3 minute section with no lights except that coming from the main roads at either end and the perfect place for Rutger Hauer to be hanging out, so I might re-plan the route for next time.

The only problem - as I couldn't see Mr Garmin, I managed to fudge up the display by pressing the wrong button when trying to get it to light up, so there was a fair amount of guessing for the segments. Also, the Garmin speaker grill was muffled by my fleece jacket and I couldn't hear it. So, I'll be repositioning that next time.

No bio-mech problems so I expect to be out Thursday with an increased time and distance.

Tuesday - 1.4 miles @ 5:1 - 10:10ish pace

Mr Stumble.

Focus.

2006-12-14T14:10:00.000Z

Thanks Phil for your comment. In today's 15 minute run-let, I realised the problem was - just as you were telling me - not having a plan. Therefore no focus on a goal and before long it will all come off the rails. So, given these few moment, here's the plan outline.

1) whatever happens, if a run causes pain for more than 24 hours, back off.
2) keep things in 3 "intervals" of running separated by a minute walking.
3) increase each week by around 1 minute per interval (so 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30 minutes total) unless I have good reason to think I can increase by more (say the 24 to 30)
4) run 3 times a week. At least.
5) plan the next goal when I have 3 lots of 10 minutes under my belt.

So next run will be my last at the "15" level, and that should be this weekend.

Mr Stumble.

Winter blues.

2006-12-13T10:14:00.000Z

A poor week for running. I am doing a lot of travelling at the moment and the idea of getting up extra, extra early to run in the dark, when it's only 3C outside - and it's raining and blowing - I 'm not in that place at the moment.

Being usually home based, I had been planning to run at lunchtimes - Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays but since early last week, have not been home at the requisite time to do so. Except on Thursday last week. I did actually manage to get out of the door on Thursday, but managed to get about 400 yards down the road before the double glazing van I had been waiting in for shot past me in the other direction. At least I now know that I can run short distances at a higher pace!

Once I'd had the faulty pane measured up for replacement it was too late to go out again - people to speak to, tasks to complete. The weekend then turned into a dead loss, and I'm sat here blogging on my second train trip to London this week.

I guess this is the perennial runners problem of winter motivation. Too dark. Too cold. My motivation has been exceeded by sheer volume of excuses. The answer, of course is to increase my motivation somehow. Perhaps listening to Steve's Boston 110 again will help. Or just be bloody minded about it and force myself out onto dark and rainy streets. I might actually fond that I like it once I try it!

Anyway, I'm working from home tomorrow, so am planning to get out sometime between 12 and 2, come rain or shine.

Mr Stumble.

Head full of goop

2006-12-05T23:14:00.001Z

I managed to pick up a cold in the middle of last week - I think my immune system has caged up a few nasties over the last 6 weeks and has started to release them. This happens to me when my job has me running on adrenaline on a sales opportunity and I can't get sick. I get the backlash when things calm down again. Anybody else get something similar?

Last week I had some physio booked for Thursday and having had the green light, wanted to get a couple of runs in beforehand. On Monday I ran the basic 15 minutes at a 10.02 average pace and repeated this again on Wednesday with a 9.45. Both went fine, a little tightness in the right calf and ankle - only slight discomfort the following day.

The physio session was for a sports massage on my right calf, which has become increasingly knotty over the past few weeks. Rather than my regular physio, Nicky I was with Joe, who specialises in sports massage for runners.

This was the most painful half hour I've had in a long time! A lot of time was spent trying to separate my calf muscle from the bone. Where it had become very tight and was putting up a fight. This being my last scheduled session, I got some tips on how to continue teasing the muscle out to loosen it, and even more variations on stretches.

On Friday, I lost my voice (there was some cheering from my work colleagues - thank God for instant messaging) and then spent the weekend with a head full of gunk and garden fences to repair after some strong winds on Friday night. Yesterday, I was breathing a little easier, so got in another 15 minutes at lunchtime. I can feel an improvement in how I feel after the run already, but there is some way to go before I get back to where I was in July.

With a busy week ahead, I'll probably run next on Thursday and then at the weekend. Perhaps then I'll start to increase the running time to 18 minutes.

Hope all is well with you.

Mr Stumble

Keeping things nice and easy

2006-11-28T22:40:00.000Z

Today's post comes courtesy of my new toy, a Treo smartphone. Nothing that helps running, but might get me back on track posting a bit more regularly, as I can compose away from my PC.

As for running, there is finally some good news. Whilst off in Hemel Hempstead last week (I get to go to the most glamorous places) I booked into a hotel with a pretty good gym and managed to get 15 minutes at a 10 minute pace, as agreed with my physio. I don't find treadmills that entertaining, so I was glad I didn't have to run any further. That went very well, and was followed with a nice meal in the restaurant - not bad for an evening away.

I've had a fair amount of calf-grumbling on the right side over the past couple of weeks, possibly as a result of stretching or new pairs of shoes, so I really hope that doesn't turn into something bad as I start up again.

In the meantime, I've reached the end of my main course of physio, with one sports massage remaining to try to sort the calf out and on Tuesday lunchtime just gone, I headed out for my first outdoor run of my new Autumn program. The plan is to keep to 15 minutes running until it is comfortable, with no recurring heel or calf pain before increasing the time and distance. Nice and easy while my tendons and bones get used to the pounding again.

As with the treadmill, this run was in 5:1 run:walk intervals. Mr Garmin had forgotten where he was after being switched off for so long, so no pace or distance recorded, but probably a nice easy 10 minute mile pace over a total 1.7 miles.

It's a start.

All being well, I'll run again tomorrow, although it's my daughter's 4th birthday party in the early afternoon, which might throw the whole day's plans out. We'll see.

Mr Stumble.

Permission to run.

2006-11-19T10:41:00.000Z

As instructed, I arrived at this weeks physio session 15 minutes early so I could get 15 minutes warming up on an exercise bike before hitting the treadmill. The exercise bike is more of a recumbent device, than a sit-up-and-cycle, and I had a good 20 minutes of peddling and stretching before we were ready to go.

The treadmill is a monstrous thing, and I think it gets used by some of our local soccer team who, from the "wall of fame" in the gym, frequent this place to get back into playing form. Can't be a bad place then. Once established at 6mph I asked if the machine went up to "11" - recalling Spinal Tap's amplifiers. It does in fact go up to 15 and there have been people on the machine for whom even that has not been fast enough.

6 is fine for me though.

The running session was simply to gauge any running pain in my foot, and thankfully there is non there. However, my right calf felt very tense from the start, in the same sort of way that my left calf used to do when it was warning me. After 6 or 7 minutes of mixed walk/running, we headed off to take a look at the calf and continue the ankle tendon treatment.

There is a load of bunched up muscle tension in my right calf, so she had a good dig in there to try to loosen things up, and a couple of days on, I do think it has helped.

But the best bit is that I'm OK to begin running again, with certain boundaries - a very slow start - a good warm up and no more than 15 minutes for the moment.

With a busy travelling week ahead of me, I'm hoping the hotel I'm booked into for the next couple of nights has a gym and treadmill, otherwise running might be difficult.

We'll see.

Mr Stumble.

A light, I see a light!

2006-11-14T20:27:00.000Z

It's been a very long 2 weeks working, which has made it difficult to keep up with normal family life, let alone this little journal. However, there has been a change of pace from about 9am Monday morning (yesterday) and I'm back to normal ... well … normal running isn't quite the proper phrase, but you know what I mean.

I missed one physio session last week as I was suddenly at the wrong end of the country, but have otherwise tried my best to keep up with stretching, icing and keeping kind-of active.

Yesterday, I had another appointment with my original physio, now back off her holiday, and her assessment is that it's about time we had a look at how the mechanics are all coming together, with a treadmill session on Friday - there being a mini gym within the centre I'm going to.

So I'm looking forward to a 15 minute warm up on a cycling machine followed by ... some running on a machine!

This isn't to say I haven't run at all for the best part of 10 weeks. In fact, this morning our local railway station had a bit of a problem with its automated ticket issuing machine - locally referred to as Daleks (see Wikipedia for that one, if you're outside UK!) – which delayed my obtaining a ticket and gave me 90 seconds to get down the length of a platform, onto a bridge, over 4 platforms and down again - before the train left. I made it and even that little jog felt good!

Hopefully, the result will be I'll start up again, perhaps this coming weekend at a suitable rate to-be-determined. I'm thinking 5:1 run:walk as a starting point and perhaps even time limiting to 20 minutes for the first week. I don't want to go out too fast again and I so hope I can put all the silly injury behind me.

Hope all going well for you out there.

Mr Stumble

Electro-shock therapy. For feet.

2006-10-30T21:21:00.000Z

This was a new one on me too! My regular physio is off this week on her holiday, so I'm booked in with an alternative. There are always difficulties in catching up with the history when you see someone new, but thankfully having typed a load of what has happened in here, I remembered a fair bit (unusual for me!).

I think we are all now moving away from Plantar to Posterior Tibial Tendinitis and the treatment again began with my confessions of poor ankle stretching during a busy week, followed by ultrasound on the tendon and then something new. I wondered why she was strapping electrodes at each end of my foot, and being the trusting sort, I didn't question. Until the "let me know if this hurts" comment.

It is weird seeing your toes twitch involuntarily as waves of power wash through your foot - I was suddenly reminded of Young Frankenstein, as Gene Wilder wakens the monster for the first time. Classic. Ever one for new experiences and assured that electricity is a good thing for me, I sat through a good 5 electrifying minutes before the machine went beep and it was all over.

If nothing else, I will definitely be doing my stretching and icing EVERY DAY now. I'm pretty sure that machine has a lot more punch in it - if I go back on Friday and admit to slackness, I might get my voltage upped! It looked pretty old too, so maybe I'll look for it's last electrical safety test ...

I'm being hassled / advised over my footwear. Having the good fortune to work from home 60% of the time, I've been wearing my old running shoes as "trainers" as they have a better shape than my normal, comfortable, old shoes. I'm not running in them though. Ever again. For the other 40% of the time, I'm in offices wearing those comfortable old shoes and they are just no good for me. So, the hunt is on for a good cushioning regular shoe, into which I might stick an off the shelf orthotic if I ever get to Boots in town. And these were recommended as a good basic orthotic before taking a plunge into custom orthotic territory. Somewhere I don't want to go.

Mr Stumble.

If I was blogging about films, there would be so much more to say.

2006-10-28T22:23:00.000+01:00

I'm sure I'm not the first to get blogger's block, and I'm sure I won't be the last. However, having finally dragged my fingers back to this particular keyboard, I have little to report on the running front. That is, I am still waiting for my foot to fix itself.

What has been happening is another physio session earlier this week and a further one booked for Monday coming. I noted the first session in my last post and was waiting for the post-massage pain to hit the following morning. Nothing. Not even a twinge. A strangely happy disappointment.

My last visit centred on a particular tendon - I think the posterior tibial tendon - which runs down the rear of the inside-knobbly-ankle-bone and supports the arch of the foot. This particular tendon got demonstrated by plucking it like a guitar string. I never knew it was there. There's some tendinitis in there so it's having some ultrasound therapy. I know ultrasound therapy is good, as it sorted out an Achilles tendon problem for me last year.

My 3 year old daughter continues to remind me every night to do my stretching, and I have a lot to do now, not just the calf and hams, but ankle ones too. Hopefully, only a couple of weeks until I'm able to start again - I'll be dressing for colder weather though!

Mr Stumble.

The trouble with Stumble.

2006-10-12T21:07:00.000+01:00

Apologies for yet another delay in posting. Partly busy, partly not having anything interestingly run related to post.

Following my ankle injury, I've laid off any running and taken things easy, aside from a 40 minute session at Laserquest - man that was fun - although I twisted the ankle on the outside this time, but with no permanent injury, just a bit sore for a day. What was worse was having fallen over (thinking the worst had happened and I would never walk again) someone leaned over a balcony and shot me. Unsporting, I thought.

I'm not a Laserquest regular, but this is turning into an annual event. We get an invite to a birthday outing at Laserquest every year from one of my son's school friends and, well, you just have to go along to "help". I did notice that this year, I was far less out of breath by the end than previous years, so running has done something for me, I'm sure.

Last Sunday, I thought I'd give my ankle a little more strenuous activity, so I went for a brisk 30 minute walk to see how my foot-mechanics were getting on. As it turns out, not very well. My ankle and underfoot ached after the walk and for the next couple of days. So given that it had been about a month since the initial injury, I went to see my GP on Tuesday. After a short discussion, and a prod of my foot, he recommended I go back to the podiatrist.

On calling the Podiatrist, I had a discussion with them on the phone and they recommended that I actually see their physiotherapist for assessment and treatment initially. They could fit me in Thursday (today).

So, after some more prodding and standing, we reach a diagnosis. Plantar Fasciitis, the root cause being over pronation and probably the frame in my old shoes bashing into my plantar fascia. Bah.

The treatment - firstly a foot massage along the band of affected muscle (this was not bad, mmmmmm!), and then a deep tissue massage on my right calf muscle because of the connectedness of the calf and foot muscles. This was pretty painful, and damn good! My physio warned me that it might feel great for the rest of the day, but tomorrow morning it might feel like it's been run over.

Next, I had my foot taped up to support the arch, and that's going to stay on for several days. Unless I get sick of it. I'm not looking forward to removing the tape - very sticky stuff.

Next, an analysis of my regular shoes which were embarrassingly covered in grass clippings from chasing down our pet rabbit in the back garden, across freshly mowed lawn the evening before. Simply put, I need to consider shoes with more cushioning and better support. I'll consider whether to consider this, as with my feet and the high street choice, it'll be difficult to comply.

Finally, some more stretches and advice on compression and ice. I'm going to have a word with my medical insurance company to see if they'll stand some more physio sessions, probably weekly until I start running again, which looks like it will be another 4 weeks.

But I *will* run again ...

One last thing, whilst looking up Plantar Fasciitis I came across these interesting articles on therapeutic massage you might enjoy:

Plantar ...
and then
Tension Headaches
Low back pain
Shin splints
Neck pain
Tennis Elbow
Back and hip
Jaw clenching a personal favourite
Quads
Pecs
Upper back Pain
Lower Back pain

Use with caution!

Mr Stumble

Still here, Still static

2006-10-08T23:07:00.000+01:00

Hi folks. Sorry for not posting for a while. I'm in the midst of so much stuff! Anyway, very quickly: no running yet; ankle not fully mended; stretching still going well; still determined.

Mr Stumble.

Ice and a slice.

2006-09-26T10:00:00.000+01:00

After 9 days of ice, compression and rest, I managed to get back out running again this morning. My ankle finally started feeling reasonably stable again yesterday, although when the alarm woke me up Monday morning, I waggled my foot around to see how it felt, was unsure and so went back to sleep for half an hour.

This morning, a different story. I had pizza and sticky toffee pudding (mmmmm) from my son's birthday meal-out last night to run off, so guilt got me up.

Sunrise here is now around 6:58, so this is my first pre-dawn run. Thankfully, it's a good clear day today with the temperature around 12C/54F - later this week it's going to get very wet, we're told. However, as the weeks go on, I know I'm going to be getting up and running in the dark and the cold, not a good combination for getting me out of bed in the morning. I think the part which I'm most worried about is getting the warm up walk in before I start running, I expect that to be the most challenging part.

Back to today though. I know I started out too fast (I think it's the new shoes!) and Mr Garmin was telling me at one point I was running an 8:40 pace, so I slowed right back to get that segment averaging 9:19. I had decided on 7:1 run:walk splits for this morning, so I was at least moving forward from the last run without overdoing it.

Overall I managed an average 9:35 pace covering 2.82 miles, 27 minutes total running time. My HR monitor shows an average 149 and peak at 165. I took a peak at the HR every so often on the flatter sections and it showed my normal running rate increasing from the mid 140s to mid 150s from around 5 minutes in to 25 minutes in.

Once back in, I could feel a little tension in my ankle, so I immediately strapped on some ice and will keep a compression bandage on for a few hours this morning.

So hopefully, my ankle will be fine and I'll be out again on Thursday.

Mr Stumble

Lame with a Sprain !

2006-09-19T20:56:00.001+01:00

I've got another possible name for these ramblings: "Bad News Blog". Just when you think you've turned that corner, and it's all plain sailing, something else breaks.

I suspect my previous pair of shoes, in a last ditch effort to nobble me, are to blame. The "bruised" feeling I reported a week ago was probably the initial weakening of my ankle ligaments, and my Sunday run finished them off. I have a sprained ankle.

Unusually (according to bits I've read - and the Internet is never wrong for long :) ) this is on the inside of my ankle rather than the outside, so feels different to sprains I've had in the past. Probably only 2 or 3 I can remember - I'm not prone to them.

So, once again, the worst-startup-runner-in-the-world is waiting for another injury to heal. I hope this one is going to be quicker than my calf. It's being frequently iced and compressed at the moment and is definitely improving, but I'm not about to hit the streets whilst it feels damaged, especially as I have a fair amount of walking to do in London on Thursday.

Thomas asked if I have had my gait and feet assessed at a running shop. The answer is "yes" it was the first thing I did after deciding to run - right at the start of this blog. However, I think it is clear that there is Running Shop gait analysis and Podiatry's gait analysis. Running shops are going to be good for the 80% of runners, but I am clearly outside that group. I'm going to use those results as guidance and see what happens in my new stability Asics. If that all goes wrong (and there is no reason to be optimistic!) I may well follow Thomas' route onto a neutral cushioning shoe and perhaps (worst case) go back to my podiatrist for orthotics.

But that's all speculation. I'm still determined to keep at it - I'm too dumb and stubborn to know when to stop. And I *so* want to try a race.

Mr Stumble.

Blogger problems

2006-09-19T09:06:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago, I accepted Blogger's invitation to move across from regular Blogger to BetaBlogger, as I already have a gmail account. "Great," I thought, "integrated identity - fewer passwords."

What could be better?

It turns out that there is a fundamental incompatibility between "old" Blogger and Beta Blogger, which means that I can't automagically be logged in when commenting on "old" Blogger blogs, and if you have an "old" blog account, may not be able log in and comment on mine.

Then again, you just might not be interested enough.

At best, this makes commenting a pesky faff and at worst, just impossible.

Anyway, the problem is discussed here and here. Blogger seems to have torn it's blogging community in two with this bug. What's worse is once you've made the jump to Beta, there's no way back! However, as Google has bought Blogger, Beta is the future and I'm sure they will fix it somehow.

Meanwhile, I'll see if I can open up the comments a bit to allow unauthenticated comments (with word verification). Then perhaps I'll hear from Ann again - who still has that broke Atom feed.

Stumble Admin.

Planning ahead

2006-09-17T10:27:00.000+01:00

Took the Asics out for their first run this morning and they feel pretty good. The ache in my right-foot arch is still there, but not enough to stop me running. Tried the HRM for the first time as well and had a couple of glances at it at various stages of my circuit.

Top of the hill - 158
Downhill parts and flat - around 145
After 1 minute walking interval - 122

I have to remember to reset the thing before I start running otherwise it gets a bit confused during the "strapping on" stage and shows a max HR of over 180. It's another fun stat to measure anyway.

No problems at all to report on my calf, which is great! The rest and stretching regime do appear to have worked well, although these are early days!

Mr Garmin tells me that the average pace this morning was 9:17/mile with a total distance of 2.81 miles. I'm trying to figure out how I add a bit more distance to my route as, with a warm up walk and then slightly higher pace, I'm arriving back at my driveway 2 minutes early. The streets where I run (incidentally, in Wolverhampton) are higgledy piggledy, so if you look hard enough, there is always some way to add a little detour to include an extra few hundred yards.

This morning I took a look at the RunnerWorld web site for local races in October and found something I might use as a target - a 5K in Cannock Chase Forest on 14th October - which is a fundraiser for planting 20000 trees in "some of the world's bleakest urban areas". Well, that's a reasonable enough reason to run and if nothing else, something to focus on.

Mr Stumble.

My right foot.

2006-09-16T13:37:00.000+01:00

Following Tuesdays outing, the small amount of foot pain grew significantly, and for the remainder of the week, I've been hobbling around. I just can't seem to get this right can I?

After a few experiments with my shoe on Thursday evening, I've worked out what it is. My shoes have this frame around the outside of the sole, designed to stop the shoe flexing too much. However, for some reason, the position of my foot in the shoe has changed so that a slightly knobbly part of the frame has been sticking into the back of my almost-arch and I've been left with a pretty deep bruise with all of the pounding.

As to why this might have happened, perhaps having been wearing the shoes for a little more than running over the past few weeks have stretched or altered their shape in some way. So, it's time to ditch the daft shoes that no-one has heard of before, and go for something a bit more mainstream.

I've been eyeing up a pair of New Balance 680s for a while, and ducked out from work at lunchtime yesterday to go get me a pair. However, on trying them on, they just didn't fit comfortably. So, next up was a pair of Asics GT2110 shoes. These have been very well reviewed and do fit comfortably - especially on my silly uber-narrow feet. They have no daft frames or cut-outs, so hopefully less to go wrong with them. Sold!

This is the second purchase this week. On Wednesday, our local pharmacy had their basic heart-rate monitor on sale for £5. It's a simple chest band and watch receiver unit showing current and average heart rates for a given exercise period. Nothing fancy and just right to get an idea if an HRM can provide me with any value before I spend silly money, and before I actually hit any form of running target.

I'm planning to run tomorrow now - my foot is nearly right and I don't want to leave it any longer. So lets see if I can get to 30 minutes in the next 4 or 5 weeks.

Mr Stumble.

Hitting the streets

2006-09-12T23:28:00.001+01:00

Apologies for the delay in posting. There are reasons but really, no excuses.

Last week saw two bike excursions around our local streets, the third being cancelled due to a late night and never properly rescheduled. Temperatures on the second early excursion were down to 8C / 47F and I quickly wished I'd worn more than a T shirt and shorts. However, with a clear blue sky and a low mist across the parkland I rode by, I managed to keep my mind off my cold arms whilst wishing I'd brought a camera to catch the light.

This morning, however, I bit the bullet and headed out for a run. And it felt soooo good. Temperature was about the same at 8C, but cloudy and pretty humid for the temperature, but given my pace is a lot slower running than cycling, there was no issue with getting cold.

I'd decided to easy back in, starting with 6:1 run:walk intervals and see how things go. First stretching using one of the physio techniques described previously and then with a warm up fast-ish walk to the end of the road before starting the first interval. I think that this proved a reasonable starting point, I don't think I broke anything during the run although my right foot is complaining a little around my fallen arches - but this is nothing new.

The route was my original and more hilly route - not what I'd intended to take when I started out, but I had one of those moments where I had 10 yards of indecision about "do I go straight on or left?" between the two courses, and choose left - my original route. I think this was due to several factors - not least that last time I pulled my calf when trying the new route - but also that my original route is just "comfortable" and has fewer concrete pavements.

It was good to catch up with the squirrels and cats again, running giving more time to observe early morning feline and, well, rodent behaviour than is afforded by the bike.

At the top of the circuit, I came across 3 people, seeming like parents and their daughter consoling each other quietly at the end of their driveway. It was a strange moment, as I approached the parents hugged and began to return to their house, whilst the young woman sat on the stone wall for a moment and looked up at me. I couldn't hold her gaze and had to glance away, suddenly feeling I was intruding, just running by. I've no idea what had happened, but there was a lot of sadness there.

This gave me plenty to mull over for the remaining section and I finished the run with an average 9:58/mile pace (I lost some time waiting for a gap in traffic to cross a main road, twice) covering 2.55 miles.

I'm seeing if I can pause Mr Garmin whilst using the interval trainer function and it still keeping the interval times, which will allow me to cross busy roads and not "lose" the running time.

My plan from here is to do another run at 6:1 on Thursday and then move back up to 8:1 this weekend, from there to 10:1 by the end of next week and hopefully onwards to the goal!

Mr Stumble

What's in a name?

2006-09-04T22:01:00.000+01:00

My dire performance over the past few months have caused me more than once to ponder renaming my blog to ... something else. Stumbleguy will stay - there's always the Stourbridge Stumble next year - but "Run like the Wind, Bullseye!" just isn't right.

I might have explained it's origin before, and if not, you may know it already; however if you don't, it's a quote from Toy Story 2 which came to me during the 15 seconds or so I gave myself to think as I filled in the box when creating this blog.

Casting around for ideas, I keep coming back to Thomas' "Diary of a Rubbish Marathon Runner" and thinking "blimey, well how rubbish am I then". Really rubbish.

On the plus side, however, good name or bad, I know it was you lot that got me out of bed this morning, kicked me out of the house and dragged me onto my bike again. I wouldn't have been back doing my prescribed stretches and 6 more tyre miles this morning if you hadn't done that, so thanks.

And it was frickin' hard! My few rides in the Somme over the last 2 weeks have been relatively flat, so my uppey-downey course back home was hard work - but I've got some added weight now and loads of Brie and croissant to burn.

So, suggestions of a name of theme are welcome. I was thinking of something pretty self explanatory like "It'd be nice to be able to run for 30 minutes" or "how not to start running".

Looking at my Google running diary, I note that it's (only) nearly 4 weeks since my last run. I'm meant to give 5 to 6 weeks healing time, so I'm probably going to continue to hold off running again for a week or two more. I might be asking for advice on what to wear in wet and/or cold conditions soon!

Mr Stumble

Stuffed and returned.

2006-09-03T12:35:00.000+01:00

It's always good to get away and recharge your batteries. We got back from France on Friday and I've had a bit of time to take stock of the health impact of this year's trip. 3 Lbs added in eating too much croisant, Brie, fatty sausage, frites, pate, steak and chinese food (yup, we found a great Chinese restaurant near the station in Aberville), all washed down with beer, wine and Orangina.

My efforts to offset holiday eating were early morning bike rides through the lovely Somme scenery, with occasional additional rides out with the kids, my 3 year old in a little seat attached behind my saddle.

I managed to work out a 6 mile loop and got in 2 rides (Monday and Wednesday), before waking up with debilitating back pain on Thursday. There was no identifiable cause - although I suspect a poor sleeping position on an old matress. This stopped me cycling until the following Tuesday, where I took an easy 5 miles and then Thursday, back to 6.

I did manage to take some photos along the circuit, so here's a selection of French countryside, around St. Vallery in the Somme.

This is a lovely tree-lined country road, near Nueville, close to Pinchefalise and Drancourt. My favourite bit of the route.

This is looking Northwards over farmland towards Pinchefalise. From here I head (left) into woodland where I came across a wild deer near the road. However, it was much to quick to have photographed it!

I'm planning to be back on the bike and continue my stretching tasks over the next week, and then, hopefully, back running again.

Mr Stumble

Au revoir!

2006-08-19T17:27:00.001+01:00

A short post to say I'm off on my holidays! We're travelling down to Picardy tomorrow and will be there for the best part of 2 weeks.

By necessity (and design) I'll be unplugged from the net for the duration, but hope to provide at least a little entertainment on my return with a few photos and confessions about lazing around.

I am, however, taking the bike and Mr Garmin and fully expect to be cycling to the local boulangerie each morning. I hope I can find one a handy 3-4 miles away to keep me burning off all that croisant and foie gras.

This week's cycling was just Monday and Wednesday, Thursday night we had some friends round and it ended up a pretty late evening, so I guiltily ditched Friday morning.

Monday - Bike 6 miles / 30 minutes
Wednesday - Bike 6 miles / 30 minutes

All the best.

Mr Stumble

(In) Flexible

2006-08-15T22:15:00.000+01:00

As per last post, I took the "blue pill" and went to see a Podiatrist today. After taking some history and a brief look at my diary of disaster, dumped out from Google Calender, she got down to the business of bio-mechanical assessment.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how flat my feet are, and "C" wanted to investigate if there were any related problems in my legs which would exacerbate my over-pronation and thus lead to injury.

The good news is that my legs are the same length and I can walk.

The bad news is that I have substantially less flexibility in my calf and hams than would be normally expected. The main test for this was lying on my back and having one leg raised up, whilst kept straight at the knee, until it starts to strain. I managed about 50 to 60 degrees lift, when a normal person would expect to be much closer to 90 degrees. In addition, I have limited flexibility when stretching the calf muscle by raising my toes towards my shin.

This flexibility in the ankles is pretty important when running (hey! I'm an expert now!), as a lack of flexibility will increase the amount of pronation as the foot rolls forward.

And one leg was just as bad as the other.

So, how do I deal with this? The main two things I need to do are:

- stay off running whilst the calf heals up properly. Bah.
- undertake twice daily stretching of the calf and hams in order to gradually increase the flexibility and range of movement and thus reduce the chance of injury.

Shoe inserts to help with over-pronation are a possibility in the future, but I need to sort out the stretching and flexibility before we decide if inserts are necessary.

She also took a look at the shoes I'm using. The brand - Pearl Izumi - wasn't familiar, but I think she was happy with my general process of selection - which involved taking advice at a proper running store, trying the shoes and not being bothered with brand names.

However, there are some shoe features which she was at least a little concerned about - the shoes have some edge cut-outs which remove about 5mm of support from the sole in 3 small sections (back and both sides) around the outside of the shoe. These might adversely affect foot strike and roll, but I do find them comfortable to wear.

You can see the cut-outs in the picture here:

I'm considering trying different shoes, perhaps a little Pepsi challenge once I'm back on the roads again.

My stretching exercises are:

Twice a day
- 10 leg lifts per leg, holding 20 seconds when the muscle becomes taught under strain (this is best assisted by someone to do the lifting, but can be managed using a towel around the foot and hauled into the air)
- 10 calf stretches, using a stair, standing with the ball of my foot on the step and dropping my heel over the edge to stretch the calf muscle, hold for 20 seconds.

I'll also be back with my local physio soon to see if there is anything she can do to assist or measure progress.

Meanwhile, back on the bike, which was what I was doing Monday morning and plan to be out for a further 6 miles again tomorrow.

Mr Stumble.

A bitter pill.

2006-08-09T21:56:00.000+01:00

Ran again this morning, the usual 8:1 reps for 30 minutes. 2.65 miles. 9:56 pace. Compression again, 5 minute walking warm up. My normal unimpressive efforts.

Calf sore after the run as usual, but nothing worse. At 11am, I'm in with the physio. She treated me for an achilles tendon problem towards the end of last year and that cleared up with several sessions of ultrasound.

This time she's looking at muscle elasticity, the area of pain, pronation, posture, stretching and warm up regime, even unevenness in leg length and probably a load more she didn't mention, or I've forgotten.

We discuss the various opinions out there on whether stretching before running is good or bad, and the value of the warm up. Also, how valuable stretching is as part of recovery from muscle damage, to promote a smoother healed muscle with less or no cell "bunching" or other such bodily disorderliness.

Given the history and my foot-flatness, she recommends a podiatrist for a specialist assessment of my lower leg bio-mechanics and how my shoes are really working out for me.

A phone call later, we have the number of a recommended local Podiatrist who does private work. The NHS waiting list for this stuff is very long and full of people with much worse problems than I have. No insurance cover on this though, bah! PPP don't recognise podiatry as an insurable branch of health care provision. Podiatric surgery, yes, gait analysis, no.

So, I need an assessment from someone more specialised, but there are general rules my physio gives me: if I must run, don't go beyond where I am now without advice. If I can, switch to something non impact for a couple of months. And get qualified podiatric advice ASAP.

To get the lay of the land, when I get home I give the Active Body Centre place recommended a call. I end up, not with a receptionist, but with the head physio who, apparently with some time on her hands, takes some of the history and gives me some general advice.

With calf injuries, the normal healing time is 6 to 8 weeks. Recurring strain or damage to the calf just extends the time it takes to heal. I should stop running, as:

- I've reached a limitation which prevents me from improving and is not helping me build general cardiovascular fitness.
- I have post run pain after every run, albeit in varying degrees.

In all likelihood, if I continue, I won't improve and will just maintain a damaged calf which will never heal properly and will not achieve the potential general fitness benefits available through other activities.

However, this general guidance needs to be tempered by the fact that this isn't a full assessment, just a verbal review of the history. My recommended choices are:

- (red pill) wait 6-8 weeks (it would be 6 wouldn't it, not 8!) and then start out running again. In the meantime, move to an alternative fitness regime: cycling; swimming; elliptical trainers at a gym, to build general fitness whilst things are left to sort themselves out without impact, assisted by regular stretching and ice. If it blows again, get professional help.
- (blue pill) get the podiatrist's assessment now, and probably end up doing the same regime, but with more knowledge about my bio-mechanics to help avoid things going wrong again.

Not one to want to wait in the dark when there is a light available, I'm going for the blue pill (I know, Neo took the red one). And I'm sure it will be bitter. I'm likely to get assessed next Tuesday - a whole hour of tests and analysis for £60.

So this might have been my last run for a while. I can tell that tales of the bike are even less interesting than my sorry tales of running, but I'll keep posting anyway and reading your blogs with envy.

Mr Stumble (soon to be Mr Wobbly).

Catan.

2006-08-07T21:40:00.000+01:00

Well, I didn't get the bike out on Sunday evening. Instead, D and I decided we needed to entice my daughter out of her room for a few hours and socialise with the family, rather than with her MSN friends.

We enjoy board games from time to time and a current favourite is "Settlers of Catan" for which most other things can stop, so we gave the game an airing, with the Seafarers expansion for a change. D thrashed us.

Family matters sorted for a while, I set the alarm time for an early morning outing - but forgot to click the switchy thing to make it actually go off at 6:30. At 7am, I'm blearily staring at the numbers trying to figure out what day it is and what I should be doing. Ah. Get up ... run ... shower ... eat ... drive to work ... perform design miracles on computer networks ... drive home. A plan. I might achieve some of it.

I know that my leg is going to complain about it, but as discussed previously, I'm starting to dislike cycling, so I'll take my chances again. A walk to the end of the road and then 8:1s again as this seems like a reasonable balance point at the moment.

For a change, I decide to run with a compression/support bandage on my calf and I think this might have helped by keeping my calf muscle from flapping around, whilst also apparantly slowing me down further, the whole run averaging a 10:09/mile pace, far slower than normal.

The first half mile went with the usual calf tightness and a slight mistep off a cambered pavement onto the road brought a sudden stab of pain, but thankfully only momentarily. It was an "oh my God" moment though - I must be more careful on that corner. At the 15 minute mark, both calf muscles felt warmed up and pretty relaxed about the whole thing - even when climbing uphill - and the remainder of the run went nice and easy.

So, yes, my leg is now sore. Yes, I'll be icing it (in about 5 minutes) and yes, I aim to go again Wednesday morning before my Physio appointment.

Update you then!

Mr Stumble.

"In irons".

2006-08-06T10:54:00.000+01:00

Following my GP visit last week, an appointment duly arrived in the post on Wednesday to see the in-house physio for an assessment. That'll be next Wednesday, so I've a short while to wait until I find out if anything can be done locally, or I move on to some sort of specialist ... somewhere.

In the meantime, I rested through the weekend and took the bike out again on Tuesday for another 6 miles dicing with death in traffic. There are two or three parts of the route where I cross busy main roads whilst trying to keep the wheels rolling.

I used to cycle to school, half a life ago, and balancing on a static bike in the middle of a busy road waiting for a gap was second nature back then. However, I feel a lot more mortal now, so gaps need to be way longer. I also don't try that trick of following a bus so closely, the particular motion of the air behind the bus draws you up hills. You just have to be really quick on the brakes if the bus suddenly slows.

I adjusted the bike route slightly to allow me to join traffic for a couple of hundred yards before crossing into my target side road, which seemed to work OK this time, but might be troublesome in very heavy traffic. We'll see how that goes. The total distance this time was 6.1 miles taking 30 minutes exactly - if we ignore the 1 second it takes to hit the stop button on Mr Garmin. An average pace of 4:55/mile varying between around 2:55 on the swooping downhills and 9:something on some of the inclines.

Definitely sweat inducing though.

On Friday, I had a day off work and managed to fit into a packed schedule of gardening a 30 minute run. I had planned to take the bike out, but:

a) didn't feel like it
b) didn't feel any problems in my calf
c) wanted to be sure there was at least something to talk with the Physio about on Wednesday

So, back to the normal circuit, keeping it at 8:1 run:walk. What I find amazing is that the rest of me really feels it can do a lot more than this and I find that when Mr Garmin chirps up to say "walk" I really don't want to - I want to just keep going. However, I know that if I do, I'm going to do a load more damage.

I set out again with a warm up walk to the end of the road and then kicked off. Within a hundred yards, I could feel the tightness in the calf muscle, but nothing nasty. Last time, I know I began to favour my left leg and in doing so put extra strain on my right, so I was keen not to do that this time and just try to keep an even kilter and a steady easy pace.

Things stayed much the same all around. I was a little fast on my first downhill 8 minutes, 9:13 pace, but more consistent on the middle two at 9:47 and 9:48 through the uphill sections. The final 3 minute section (i.e. 8+1+8+1+8+1+3) averaged a 9:34 pace.

Following the run, I've been icing and compressing a couple of times a day. I might get the bike out this evening as my calf is still pretty tight now, 48 hours on. Hopefully I can maintain some running with cycling over the coming weeks and not be instructed to stop by the physio!

So, not much forward, but not back either, thus "in irons".

Mr Stumble.

Locum Hocum

2006-07-31T21:49:00.000+01:00

I had to visit my local GP (i.e. doctor, not sure if this is an international term) today to deal with another disfunctional part of me. So, I took the opportunity, prompted by Phil's sage like advice, to have a word about my calf muscle.

Since running Friday, it's just not been right - just a bit of a strain whilst walking that I thought would have gone away by Saturday, but is still there now. So I provided some history - I found I had a diary with all the problem dates right here (!) and talked about what I was trying to do.

Now, here's the thing. My doctors surgery has 5 or 6 live-in doctors and a few visiting locums. Each time you go, you get assigned to whoever happens to be taking appointments - not any fixed person unless you're really fussy. I don't like to be fussy normally, but this might change.....

Today, I got a live-in doctor. When I went in in early May, discussed in Run 4 The Aftermath I was talking to a Locum - a perfectly reasonable bloke who told me to rest. Today I got someone who I think actually knows about running, he brought up the term "RICE" while we discussed how to promote healing and he seemed interested in getting me back out onto the roads again pretty soon.

So, I'm waiting on a referal to physiotherapy right now, hopefully to find out tomorrow on what's available in surgery before we look into the big world of private practice. And insurance claims :).

So, Phil, you were right again.

I'm going to keep up with the cycling and I'm looking at rowing machines on ebay - I know I've gained a fair amount of fitness benefits since I started and I don't want to loose any of it whilst I get my legs sorted out.

Mr Stumble.

The bike

2006-07-31T11:30:00.000+01:00

Quick snap of my cheap bike and my running shoes. The shoes were way more expensive!

Mr Stumble.

Back in the saddle again.

2006-07-28T20:50:00.000+01:00

Ahhh, busy week. Kids off school. Work going bananas.

Today, I ran again for the first time for two weeks. And after 3 minutes, I could feel my calf tightening again. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As alluded to in previous posts, last Sunday I cleared that space in my study and got the bike out of the shed and put it in the cleared spot. This lets it glower at me to remind me to use it, and makes it less noisy and quicker to leave the house at 6:45.

I had planned to go out on Monday morning, but a late night on Sunday put paid to that - I needed the extra 45 minutes in bed. On Tuesday morning though, I hit the streets on my 8 year old generic mountain bike, bought in a French HyperMarket as it was cheaper than hiring a bike for 2 weeks. So it's not state of the art by any means, nor is it the most efficient of devices. But that doesn't matter. I'm using it for exercise, not racing.

I set myself a mildly hilly 6 mile circuit to cover in 30 minutes, straped Mr Garmin to the handle bars and headed through the first mile and a half of downhill warm up. The last time I'd rode this sort of distance was chasing my kids around CenterParcs in Cumberland, and that was over a longer amount of time.

With the downhill section out of the way, it's a mile and a half of uphill to the mid point, and this wasn't easy. Already the saddle was feeling a lot sharper than it had any right to be and all sorts of different leg muscles were wondering what the hell was going on.

Still having turned through the half way there was a flat mile before another mile of uphill around the ridge overlooking my part of town. I'd lost a fair amount of sensation in most of my lower body by this point and the next 3/4 mile were mercifully downhill, but took me over a main road which had burst into life and took some time to get across. Finally, the last quarter mile back up the road to my house were fine and I arrived with 5.79 miles under my belt in 29:21, a 5:04 pace. I was left reflecting that there are people who run longer distances faster than I can cycle them!

Thursday was a repeat performance, with a minor modification to increase the distance to over 6 miles. This was 6.05 miles in 29:56 with a 4:57 minute mile overall pace.

So, distances achieved OK. No injuries. But I did find cycling much less involving than running - perhaps its the temptation to freewheel the easy bits.

So, this morning, having had two weeks to recover, it was time to strap on the running shoes and hit the pavements again. This time, no stretching. I walked to the end of the road - just under 5 minutes - and then started on my regular circuit. Not the one I was trying out when things went wrong last time. And yes, after 3 minutes I felt the calf straining and was close to giving up rather than risk another 2 weeks.

But, I decided to just keep it slow, keep to 8 minute:1 minute run walk intervals and see how far I get. And this worked. I got round with a 10:03 pace, running for over 25 minutes of the 28 I was out there.

Although not ripped, I've felt the strain in the calf all day, So I expect I will not run again until Monday or Tuesday next week, and possibly get the bike out once in the meantime.

Hopefully, I'll manage to keep the balance between improvement and injury by doing this.

All the best.

Mr Stumble

That false sense of security.

2006-07-22T21:52:00.000+01:00

Blimey, is it 8 days since we spoke? How the time whips past.

This week has been a rest week following last week's disappointments. And in a funny way, that's worked out OK - if there were any week to have to wait out an injury, this is the one. Not that I wanted to of course.

My daughter is in a dance school, has been for 9 years, and this week is the dance school's bi-annual show, with all of the dance grades involved in a series of 30 three minute segments of song and/or dance, from ages 3 to 15, as solos, groups or whole classes. The show, as always, was just great with so much effort put in by the kids and teachers.

However, this week happens to have been another UK mini heatwave, with temperatures close to those Phil and others in Arizona are used to, albeit at 5am!

We Brits wilt in these temperatures. And when couped up in a small theatre with no air conditioning, it's not going to get any easier. So the audience sat and sweated it out whilst the kids battled on through, backstage being tropical temperatures too.

So what with these shows and all the rehearsals, plus the normal last-week-of-school-term there's been plenty to keep me busy.

As far as the leg is concerned, it was letting me know something was not right up until Thursday. At the moment, it feels normal, but I know that's the old false sense of security. I've just about made that space for my bike in my study, so I expect to be getting in some low impact miles early next week. Can't wait to get back on the pavements, especially having read Phil's race report.

Have a better one.

Mr Stumble.

Damage Limitation.

2006-07-16T17:08:00.000+01:00

As you might have guessed, I didn't run the Sport Relief Mile. I would only have made things worse and taken longer to recover. I hobbled around a bit on Saturday morning, but by lunchtime I was walking fine with only minor discomfort.

Today (Sunday) I can't feel any discomfort when walking, but during a mild jog with my 3 year old in a local store car park, I can feel the calf muscle complaining.

I think stopping as soon as I felt it go on Friday rather than trying to "run through the pain" will have limited the damage, and so I expect to have to wait 10 - 14 days before running again.

In the meantime, I might get back to the pool, or get the bike out so I'll be doing some sort of aerobic exercise in the meantime. Plus RICE!

It's a setback, but I'm determined to continue.

Mr Stumble.

New circuit, old problems.

2006-07-14T23:53:00.000+01:00

This evening, I decided to repeat the 10:1 run:walk of Wednesday rather than push things further - not quite yet. However, as I've been thinking about how I make the run flatter, I spent a bit of time on MapMyRun (thanks Ann) to build a different 3 mile circuit.

It wasn't too difficult, and I think I reduced the difference between the lowest point to the highest point to about 20 meters. However, the first half of the run is on the footpaths of main roads, so the ground is not so even and occasionally on flagstones.

The plan is to run this Sport Relief mile race tomorrow, so I tried to take things nice and easy, just running at a comfortable pace. First segment was 9:23 pace. No problem but faster than I had wanted. Second section I slowed back, a 10:27 pace taking me onto quiet residential roads, a little twisty with some ups and downs, but nothing too horrible.

Then, 1 minute 30 into the final section - my last bit of uphill and at a 10:07 pace, my left calf blows again. Suddenly - bang - I know exactly what's happened. A muscle tear - sudden and no warning. Given everything back in April and May, I knew trying to run on would only make recovery that much longer, so I took 5 minutes gently stretching at a park bench and walked back home.

As soon as I'm in, I ice the calf for 15 minutes and I'm back in the compression bandage. I suspect I'll be unable to attempt the run tomorrow, I might even be hobbling around.

This is so disappointing. Even though I'd reduced the pace and flattened the circuit to make this less likely, the calf muscle blows again.

This might mean another 2 weeks of rest before I can start up again! I hope not. I'll let you know which way things go tomorrow.

Mr Stumble.

The One Mile Milestone

2006-07-12T13:13:00.000+01:00

This morning, I moved up to 10 minute run segments. Three lots of 10 whole minutes - something that would have felt impossible to attempt only 2 short weeks ago. And, knowing my trudging pace, this meant I should run a mile on at least one of these segments.

So, I set Mr Garmin up for 3 reps of 10 minutes with a 1 minute walk interval, a couple of minutes over the normal excursion time, but it's a big day for me - so why not.

I left the house at 6:51am. Temperature a nice 12.6C, 54.7F. Beautiful clear blue sky. Birds singing, well, squawking. We have a "gulp" of magpies (honest - it's a collective noun) who have taken up residence next to the local murder of crows and they have been having rowdy conversations with each other at 5am for the past few mornings. Buggers.

After 400 yards, I encounter roadkill. This is unusual, as most wildlife keeps off the tarmac round here, except the squirrels who are simply bonkers. Today, a small bird and a hedgehog had met their ends not 10 yards apart. I considered moving them for at least a millisecond, but the impetus of the need to keep going, mixed with the yuck factor kept me sailing on by.

The rest of the run was pretty uneventful. I did feel the 1 minute breaks were necessary again, but there were only two of them (I don't count the one at the end) . I extended the circuit slightly, going the long way around one of the roads and still managed to get back home with 3 minutes still to go. So I ran on past for a minute and a half, turned round and ran back, ending just outside my driveway.

Then I checked Mr Garmin.

All 3 segments were under a 10 minute pace, so I'd run 3 whole (individual) miles.

So I feel much better about that large Indian Balti Curry I ate last night.

On other matters.

Something which made me smile. Mob Football, especially the description of Shrovetide football, if you follow the link.

Something which made me pretty mad: YelloWiki under attack from Yell.com. Big companies being nasty to little people. Grrrrrrr.

Mr Stumble.

Ramble and Browse

2006-07-11T20:14:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the delay in posting. This post comes courtesy of my Palm and it's portable keyboard, during the 2 hour Virgin train ride from London to the Midlands.

I've managed to keep up my 3 running sessions this week, although I had planned for 4 - events overtook me. So I ran on Monday and Thursday morning, then again Sunday morning. As promised, I increased my run time on Thursday to 8 minutes and Sunday morning again to 9 minutes, both with 1 minute walk intervals.

Sunday morning especially, I was finding that Mr Garmin chirping up to tell me to have a short break is actually starting to break the flow of running. I find that I am settling into a comfortable pattern of breathing after around 3 minutes and have to re-establish it when I start running again.

The answer is, of course, "don't stop" but, having blown out my leg all those weeks ago, I'm still cautious. I plan now to increase by a further 1 or 2 minutes with each run to get me past 15, and then 3 or 4 minutes each run to get up to 30.

Add to this the fact that I have finally caught up with every Fdip episode, I'm no longer running with my iPod. Unplugged! I think I might use it off and on over the coming weeks and see how things go, but running is a different experience when you're not wired for sound. Perhaps more
therapeutic even, as your mind is able to ramble and browse on it's own.

Mr Stumble.

"You look like you just boiled your head." ......

2006-07-03T22:19:00.000+01:00

...... A fine example of the support and encouragement I receive from my wife on returning from my 21st 30 minute running excursion. Never one to mince her words! :)

Today was the second of my runs at a 6.5:1 ratio. This takes me to the edge of the escalator which will take me past 10 minutes very soon.

The first of these runs was on Saturday evening and it was pretty damn warm for those of us used to a comfortable 16 to 18 centagrade evening (thats about 60 -64 F in old money). Saturday was around 24C and today 25C with around 65% humidity in the evening, with daytime temperatures "rocketing" to close to 32C (just under 90F) in early afternoon.

The media are making hay on the back of our local heatwave and we have all sorts of warnings given in weather bullitins about fluids and shade as, last time this happened, we had around 2000 deaths in the UK attributed to our inability to cope with the heat, mainly amongst the elderly.

And, as we are having similar weather to Germany, you can guess one of the contributing factors being trotted out for our World Cup exit. If you can see past all the knives in the back of the England ex-manager.

The Saturday run was just at what I felt to be a comfortable rate, not really taking any notice of pace. This pace turned out to be 20 seconds faster than normal and my legs have been complaining a little since, to the point I was considering not running this evening. However, I thought I'd give it a go as my circuit has several points which allow me to shorten the distance if something goes wrong - I'd just slow the pace back and see. This evenings average pace was around 5 seconds per mile slower than normal and aside from stitch (again) achieved without pain.

I'm still trying to figure out how to program up the next run into Mr Garmin, as the numbers are probably going to get very uneven, which Mr G doesn't like. It will probably be an 8:1 split next, giving me 3 x recorded 8 minute segments plus 1 x 3 minutes, unless I just program in 4 x 8 + 1 and stop the clock when I get home. That might do it.

Mr Stumble

Burning Japanese (food)

2006-06-26T23:22:00.000+01:00

This evening, I was stumbling up the last of the upwards hilly bit in the middle of my circuit with a stitch developing, feeling bloated and The Vapours classic “Turning Japanese” tune in my head, threatening to drown out Phedippidations, and Steve's praise of Burning 20, the title of this entry just came to me. Which is good as for various reasons, I've had a bit of bloggers block since my last entry.

Sunday just gone was our wedding anniversary. So I'd spent a few hours with the kids back in the Wyre Forrest, having a picnic and an hour's biking through the trees, giving D a few hours peace and quiet, before returning for the England vs Ecuador match at 4pm local time. (Sorry, no countryside photos this time!). A lot of things were riding on this match, but most important was whether D would be happy or miserable in the restaurant later on.

Thankfully, the result was a happy one. So we headed off joyously to a virtually empty Japanese restaurant, Wagamama, in Birmingham. We ate lots. It's hard not too as the food is just delicious and the service lightning fast. But all day today, I've just felt bloated. And even though I didn't feel like it, I dragged myself out the door into the evening drizzle to burn off miso ramen, yaki soba and plenty of gyoza, while sane people watched Switzerland Vs Ukraine.

Now, between my last post and this have been 3 runs. Thursday and Friday, both at 4:1 run:walk and this evening up to 5:1. Friday was strange, as I had a sudden urge to run, even though I normally keep (at least) one rest day between runs. So I just went with it and there were no problems. I was a bit concerned this evening that the biking yesterday might have strained something, but again – aside from a bit of stitch, no problems.

So it's all still going well. I've even started looking at the Phedippidations half marathon training programme, but that's too optimistic. Surely?

Mr Stumble

Stats, Shirts, Rabbits and Batteries.

2006-06-22T18:04:00.000+01:00

I thought it might be interesting to get an idea of just how few people are reading, seeing as blogger doesn't have any good in-built stats and I'm just a bit curious. So, after a short Google and some not-too-difficult work, I got Site Meter attached to the end of my blog pages (you'll see it right at the bottom of the page) and left it to sniff out who's reading and how often.

So, I'm sorry if you feel this is an intrusion, I hope you understand!

Turns out that there are 4 people, not including me, looking at my paltry efforts at the moment. And given a single mention on FDip and a couple of links from at least 2 other blogs, I think that's not bad. But I am easy to please!

You can see the stats for yourself by clicking on the sitemeter logo down there..... and if you'd prefer I turn it off, I'll take a straw poll from any comments and do what pleases the audience!

As for running, well, I did my second 3:1 minute run:walk on Tuesday morning, nice and early (but not if I compare to Phil and his 5:30am starts) which was fine. The main change was my new Brooks running shirt which I picked up from a local running store at a vastly discounted rate through a RunnersWorld advert. Funny thing was, it was a "trade in your old cotton Tshirt and buy a Brooks shirt for £10 (normally £15). However, Brooks had totally failed to put all of the Tshirt recycling services in place, and the shop owner didn't want to just take a Tshirt and stick it in the bin. So, I got the discount and kept the Tshirt. It's these minor little bonuses in life which make shopping bearable.

I'm all set for a 4:1 run this evening, which I'll post an update for assuming my haggard old DSL router doesn't pack up again. It's had some power supply problems, brought on by the family rabbit stripping the power cable (12 volt - after the transformer) of insulation during a particularily destructive unattended tour round the back of my PC.

On the plus side, those batteries for Mr Garmin arrived and are busily charging at this very moment.

Mr Stumble

Failure to Stumble

2006-06-18T23:38:00.000+01:00

This weekend was the date set for my original target, the Stourbridge Stumble. (BTW, the "Stour" part rhymes with "flower"). Needless to say, I wasn't in any shape ready - I might have made it to the fun run if I'd started off with a good plan, but there you go.

Always pragmatic, and not to be disheartened through aiming too high, my first goal now is to simple run for 30 minutes - without stopping - and to do so comfortably. Pretty reasonable.

The early part of the week saw me increasing to 2 whole minutes of running and 1 minute walking repeated 11 times, and this went pretty well. That elongated "week" is shown below. Mr Garmin is becoming a bit more accurate and consistent in the pace he's recording as the running sections become longer, and keeping him charged up has also helped. Mind you, it shouldn't be long before my new 900mAh rechargeables hit the doormat.

Todays walk in the woods was at Cannock Chase, about a 40 minute car ride from where I live. My daughter has been at a Guide camp this weekend up there, so we went up a couple of hours early with the other two kids and had a walk around Castle Ring and some of the local pathways. Always thinking of you, I took a couple of shots of the green stuff, careful not to include the big coal fired power station totally failing to blend into the local surroundings.

Then, this evening came the time to increase to 3 minutes running and 1 minute walking, 8 repetitions on the normal route. And it went fine. It felt much more like real exercise as this is starting to push at (my pretty low) stamina rather than train muscles to work properly. Total run distance is now about 2.4 miles.

You might note that from my "YATP" post, that I'm not following very much of anything at the moment, other than what feels right. I think that I have the balance OK at the moment between pushing on and avoiding injury. Where I am now, I see one more at 3:1 before I go up to 4:1. We'll see how things go.

In the meantime, I watching out for local 5K races to try out in a month or two, so I have a goal to follow this one.

Mr Stumble

Stalling for time

2006-06-13T23:50:00.000+01:00

The real reason I've been dazzling you with photos instead of recording running time is - well - because I managed to sunburn my feet on Sunday. They weren't the only parts sunburnt, but the critical part when it comes to hitting the pavements.

Just wearing socks was uncomfortable and the thought of strapping on those Pearl Izumis was a bit too much. So I delayed till today and after yet another day in The Smoke, but before Lost came on at 10pm (we're somewhat behind the US, still at the Anna Lucia shoots Shannon bit - no spoilers please!!!) I headed out for another 11 reps of 2 running and 1 walking.

Seeing as Brazil and Croatia were kicking a ball round in Germany, the roads were pretty quiet and thankfully, much cooler - we've had a bit of a mini heatwave here, hence the sunburn, which has ended in the traditional manner of a pretty big thunder storm followed by rain, rain rain.

Temperatures over the weekend exceeded 30 Centigrade. This evening a much more pleasant 15 Centigrade. Of course Mr Garmin packed up again after a minute running. It does squawk as it dies to let you know, which is good, otherwise I might not have noticed at the time and run the whole thing (yeah, right). However, I don't think it Mr Garmins fault. It's probably my fault for putting nasty old cheap 600mAh Ni-MH in it and not charging them every other day. I'm about to buy some higher rated premium batteries to sort this out.

With Mr G out of action, fall-back is my Runners-World freebie-with-3-month-subscription-multi-function-rubber-watch. So there's no split times and I ran roughly the same pace overall as on Saturday, just using good old digital stopwatch technology. I was listening to Steve Runner get mad at Muriel Gray for disrespecting Podcasts which I found very funny. I think Steve's dead right, and Gray has spent so much time in old format media that she just doesn't get it.

Go Steve!

Still running through Lactic Acid ache and a lot of tension in my calves – but no ripping thankfully, so the plan is coming together. Unfortunately, I've not managed any cross training on my non-running days, need to do better here. At the moment it looks like one more run at the current splits and then move up another minute of running between walking.

I'm at that stage now I was last Wednesday. Run for 3 minutes – madness! But as I've broken through that psychological barrier once, I know I can just keep doing it by staying focussed and sticking with the plan.

Thanks again for all your support. Of course you know what I'm doing when I distract you with pretty pictures now. Maybe one more for the moment. This one is titled “Hagrid waits for Dinner”

Mr Stumble

Another for arid lands

2006-06-12T22:45:00.000+01:00

As Phil liked the last set of pictures, I thought I'd post this one, taken in April 2001 at a beach called Sandy Mouth, near Bude in Cornwall. It was the middle of the Foot and Mouth crisis, and no-one was going anywhere in the UK. Except us, enjoying lovely scenery and brooding weather with no-one else around.

If you visit a UK beach in April, you need a wetsuit to enjoy it, even if it's sunny! Brrrrrrr...

Mr Stumble.

for friends in arid climes

2006-06-11T22:55:00.000+01:00

As a supplementary non-running entry, and seeing as “green-ness” of the landscape has been commented on in previous posts, I thought you might like these few photos. Today the family visited a lovely little beach in Wales, belonging to the village of Tresaith.

It was a bit of a trek – 3 hours in the car each way, but well worth it.
Glorious sunshine, sandcastles, sandy sandwiches, frisby, ice-creams and very few people there. Most day visitors to Wales hit the more accessible and commercial areas around New Quay to the North East.

Anyway, Enjoy.

Mr Stumble

Stepping up a gear

2006-06-10T23:41:00.000+01:00

This week, in addition to the Monday run, I ran again on Wednesday and Saturday, as Friday became difficult for various reasons. Wednesday was another 11 repetitions of 1 minute running and 90 seconds walking, and I modified the route so that I ran it “backwards”. This was because I thought maybe facing the uphill bit first , then having a downhill middle section followed by a moderate uphill end might be better, as the uphill bits would be in 2 segments.

This turned out not to work too well, and I found the revised route much more difficult. However, I made it round OK with just lactic-acid ache and no strains. Mr Garmin had problems again getting signal lock, so when I post the times, they'll look odd.

When I got to the end, I couldn't imagine being able to step up to running two whole minutes with a minutes rest then repeated for 30 minutes. Madness.

Today's run however, was that step up in running time. I returned to the original basic route, tried to keep the pace down and repeated 11 times: two minutes running, one minute walking. And what I thought was madness on Wednesday turned out to be pretty much achievable. I'm doing 11 repeats because Mr Garmin doesn't count walking as part of the thing it times. You start with a running section and finish with a running section, so it's kind of 10 x (2 +1) +2 = 32 minutes training.

Quadratic equations next week :)

As I've posted before, I actually find the walking sections difficult because it seems to stress the already complaining muscles in a different way, but I'm not going to push the running time up quickly as I know my leg will go again if I do so.

So stepping up a gear has worked OK. I'll stick with 2 more sessions like this one before I increase the running segments to 3 minutes.

Mr Stumble.

Week 1 - extended a bit.

2006-06-05T23:56:00.000+01:00

Since my last run on Wednesday, that-old-injury (you must be so tired of me going on about it) has been letting me know it's still there, without actually baring it's teeth. I've been doing a fair bit of walking anyway to try and mildly exercise it which has consisted of tromping round London to get to places where the tube doesn't get very near to, and a pleasant leisurely stroll around a UK beauty spot on Sunday. Dovedale.

Dovedale is about 90 minutes by car from where I live and is somewhere my parents took me and my sibs when we were young-uns, so there's no good reason why I can't inflict it on my 3 kids now.

It's especially nice when there's no too many people there and it being the end of a mid-term break for the UK kids, it was fairly crowded, but once you get past the point where most day trippers stop to splash about and fall off the stepping stones, it becomes a little less like a shopping mall and more like a country walk.

Dovedale is a scenic limestone valley about 3 miles end-to end through which the River Dove flows on it's way to joining the River Manifold. Terrain is mixed, but mainly good paths with a few more difficult rocky sections to carry the youngsters over. You can see some pictures at http://www.cressbrook.co.uk/features/dovepic.htm - I took some of the kids but couldn't find a decent scenic view to snap for you this time.

We walked at mainly 3 year old pace for close to 2 miles along, before turning back, retracing out steps, with the promise of ice-creams keeping the returning pace fairly brisk. Carrying my 3 year old also helped the speed, and she had done really well walking that far anyway. The whole thing with a pleasant picnic in the middle was about 3 hours of early Summer sun.

Not a Grand Canyon hike though, eh Phil! :)

This morning (Monday) I was off tromping round London again and on the rail trip back, I decided that things were probably OK for another run this evening. Just after 9pm, I headed out and really held back on the pace to between 9 and 11 minute mile rates. Unfortunately, Mr Garmin kept loosing signal lock, for no good reason - good view of sky - no clouds, only haze - no trees - so the split time are all over the place, but as I modified the route to make it shorter, I know I was running slower.

And as a result - no pain! And not very out of breath even. My circuit does contain a long slow incline which I find really difficult to walk in running shoes - I feel knotts forming in my legs and running is actually a relief - so I might modify the circuit to something flatter while I work up to 30 minutes.

I think one more of these before I move up to 2 minute running, 1 minute walking.

Mr Stumble.

Week 1 - the never-ending week

2006-06-01T09:11:00.001+01:00

Following the jaunt's earlier this week, I've ended up with a mild strain to that calf muscle again. The term "dogged by injury" springs to mind, although cosmically speaking, it's pretty insignificant.

I'm just running too fast. Still. And with it, I've long burnt my chances of hitting my race target. Chances are, I won't even be able to make it round the 4k fun run, my secondary target. The rest of me is itching to move on up to week 2 but I just can't leave my left leg behind!

I couldn't run on Friday as I knew to do so would make things worse and this is very frustrating. I feel that I can't move on through my training plan until I can make it to the end of week 1 without pain. Week 1 will just have to continue until I manage 2 or 3 consecutive runs at a 1 minute run 90 second walk without the wheels coming off, and I manage to keep my pace down to around a 10 minute mile.

In the meantime, it's back to mixing it up with swimming, walking, cycling (if I ever blow those tyres up) and that whole RICE thing Steve Runner talked about in his early shows: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.

Mr Stumble

Week 1 - beginning the plan, proper.

2006-06-01T09:11:00.000+01:00

Don't you just hate it when you spend 30 minutes typing in a new blog entry, and then you hit a button to insert a graphic resulting in Blogger vapourising your prose. Gone. And as Tom Hanks put it in You've Got Mail, "I was eloquent, dammit".

New plan for blogging. Write it somewhere else safer. Somewhere that auto-saves the text. Somewhere like OpenOffice. Somewhere not like an IE7beta2 window. I should have known better, especially as it's sort of my job.

I had been banging on about Bank Holidays in the UK. Last weekend was a national holiday, for which the term “Bank Holiday” has become very much part of the language wallpaper. But why the hell are banks anything to do with national holidays in the UK? Wikipedia thinks that it knows, with Bank Holidays being enshrined into UK legislation over 100 years ago, but in the Banking and Financial Dealings act 1871. This kind of thing is just bloody typical in the UK, and to my mind, plain wrong. It's not like I'm unhappy about having a few days off each year, no! It's that we can't be honest about things, and have a separate act for “Banking” and “National Holidays”.

On the other hand, it's this sort of mad quirkiness which makes the UK such an endearing and eccentric place to say you live in. Apparently.

Just don't get me started on the un-written constitution.

Ah, but how does some bizarre decision in 1871 relate to running? Well, Bank Holidays weekends usually mean a day off on Monday. And a lie-in on a Bank Holiday Monday morning is itself a national institution, observed by anyone who doesn't have young kids and who has remained in the country rather than fly out to Malaga or Tenerife. As an exception to the “young kids” rule, my wife usually observes the tradition whilst I feed and entertain my 3 year old daughter until the appointed hour.

This results in no early running. However, lengthening days do allow for running after 9pm without returning in the dark, so this is what I've been doing this week, Monday because of the reasons above, and Wednesday because I had an early train to catch for the Smoke.

Monday went well. I'm still getting used to Mr Garmin abandoning me suddenly when the intervals come to an end – it always seems to start and finish with a “run” interval, when I expected it to finish with a Walk. I've also adjusted the intervals to be 1 minute running, 90 seconds walking as I was finding the 2 minutes between each run a bit boring. This is the run I'm counting as the "start" of the plan, as it's a Monday and matches the training calendar I'm using.

Wednesday was going well until Mr G packed up. As you'll see from the intervals below, it looked like it was having some problems getting a position lock in the 2 intervals before it ran out of juice. I have been toying with lengthening my stride which has resulted in two things.

1) my estimated pace increases to something way too fast and
2) I might have slightly over cooked my calf muscle again. Which went straight back on ice.

We'll see what Friday brings – I might push that run back a day if I've still got some calf pain. And I'll keep an eye on Pace to make sure I don't over do it. I think an 8:40 mile is a comfortable target at the moment, but will probably slow this back as the running intervals become longer.

Mr Stumble.

Run #6 - plan in action

2006-05-26T23:59:00.000+01:00

This morning it rained. A lot. It's one of those funny weather weeks here in the UK. Everyone's been waiting for Spring to arrive - Winter has been pretty long this year, not really very cold, just, well long. Now Nature is packing all of April's rain into a couple of weeks in the back-end of May so Summer can get started.

I was ready to hit the pavements this morning if the weatherman had got it all wrong, but also knew that things were slated to improve through the morning and, as I'm working from home today, I could head out at lunchtime.

So this is what I did. At 12:30pm I strapped on Mr. Garmin, hung Mr Brand-New-Delivered-This-Morning-iPod-shuffle round my neck and headed out, kicking off Garmin's Interval Training Assistant. 1 minute running, 2 minutes walking.

It all went pretty well. I heard most of the beeps telling me to start and stop. I was out for just over 30 minutes, I had to tack a bit on the end of the run to get me home. I covered 2.86 miles in total and arrived back feeling pretty good. No pain whilst running, although I did find the walking part strangely difficult as both calf muscles ached - which went away when I ran.

This does seem a bit back-to-front but I suppose it's just my legs complaining that they haven't done this much work in a long time.

Between then and now (12 hours), there've been a couple of twinges, but nothing to make me hobble at all. It's early days but this plan might just work!

Mr Stumble.

Birthday bonanza!

2006-05-25T11:32:00.000+01:00

It's been a busy week. Two family birthdays, and one of them - mine! Last year, my birthday was all about sailing, as I'd set a target of learning to sail before year end. So, that birthday was full of wetsuits and sailing books.

By the end of July last year I had completed my 2 sailing courses and passed the RYA (Royal Yachting Association) courses for dinghy sailing 1 & 2 and spent a pleasant Summer crewing and helming Larks and GP14s at our local sailing club.

Sailing year 2 starts to get expensive as you really need to buy a boat. I'm putting this off until next year, due to "exceptional circumstances" and this was one of the contribution factors in looking for, or perhaps being available for alternatives. Like running.

This year, you can guess the gift theme. And I know that non of these things really make that much of a difference, but I just love my gadgets.

First up, the Garmin Forerunner 101. We had a really good deal on this from an Amazon seller and I think this is going to really help me understand how long and far I'll be running, as I'd rather not be measuring miles in my car as time goes on. Mind you, "Map My Run" is pretty good for outline planning.

It's also got some really good interval training function which is just what I need for the old walk/run plan.

Following on from my previous post, I've got an iPod Shuffle on the way too, which will please my daughter as I won't be stealing here MuVo any more.

As to actual training, well I'm really close to restarting the running. I am being pretty cautious - it's now 10 days since I last ran and still had some calf pain then, but in the intervening time I've stayed with the swimming, aiming to keep a steady pace over 30 minutes and build a bit of stamina without the road-impact.

It is 3 weeks ago today that I did the main injury. I suspect, all being well, I'll be back on the pavements tomorrow.

With only 3 weeks to go to my initial target, a 10K is going to be beyond me. However, there is a 4k fun run too ......

Mr Stumble.

Cause and effect.

2006-05-18T23:58:00.000+01:00

I was considering the other day the string of events that led to me getting off my backside and trying to get fitter. What can I trace this all back to? Was there a singular event that knocked me onto this new pathway?

As it turns out, it's all the fault of my job. It's probably not a big surprise that I work in the IT sector. It's what makes me blubbersome and slothful. Following what we managed to define as a successful "end" to a particular project (which I'm still working on), a bunch of us were nominated for a little local recognition in a "reward your staff with small consumer gifts rather than manage them properly" sort of initiative. Of course, non of us refused our points based bounty, and I duly headed off for the company reward-partner website and converted points to cold, hard, difficult to spend vouchers; the other stuff on offer was generally pointless or lame.

These vouchers then sat in a desk drawer for weeks until I suddenly had an urge to replace the MP3 capability of my Palm Zire handheld, with a proper music player. One that could store everything I had so I could choose my musical poison on lengthy train rides across the country.

So, an iPod was purchased with said vouchers. A 4th gen 20GB model, easily enough for my very modest collection of music. And just beautiful.

That was all fine until Apple released the iTunes update which included Podcast subscriptions. This really interested me, as up to that point, I'd been pulling BBC content down by FTP every week, stuff like Mark Kermode's film reviews and various other nonsense; occasionally I might have recorded stuff with Audio Recorder Pro from the BBC "listen again" features which meant I actually got to listen to "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" last 2 series and "I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue" at a time that was good for me rather than the broadcast time.

Lots of BBC content was just there for the taking in iTunes. And lots of other stuff too....

So you can probably guess the way this went. Adam Curry's podcast led to Dawn & Drew. Dawn & Drew and Curry led to Phedippidations through Steve's promos and then I heard Steve do Boston 110. From there, I just couldn't help myself. Running is something I've thought about doing for years, including a (not so) secret (now) goal of running a marathon. As the years have gone by, this little life ambition has got a little buried. I've never spoken about it with anyone, except perhaps to D. in an unguarded moment.

So that's how I got here and I hope this story has a happy ending. I'm sure your story is better and I'd like to know how you started, if it's not prying!

Problem I have now is that I need a new MP3 player coz I don't want to mash the iPod disk on a pavement out there. Anyone want to nominate me for an award .........? :)

Mr Stumble.

YATP: Yet another training plan

2006-05-16T16:33:00.000+01:00

This is the more intensive hybrid training plan I've come up with as an 8 week "start running" process. I've replaced walking with swimming and cycling as I'm not that much of a walk-around-the-suburbs kind of person. It would be easier if I was in the countryside, but I'm about 15 minutes walk from green-belt here so I'd just see it at the point I needed to turn around!

No doubt, the schedule I eventually follow won't be quite this intensive, but I thought I'd post it up anyway. Someone might use it!

Mr Stumble.

Run #5 - Impetuous, impetuous, impetuous

2006-05-15T23:50:00.000+01:00

After all that planning, I couldn't stand it any more and needed to try running again. After some stretching, I could feel nothing wrong with my calf muscle on Sunday evening, so I brought forward the plan to start Monday morning. But a different plan of course.

The walk/run programme was always going to be the way back in but having spent a couple of hours jockeying around runnersworld.co.uk and the coolrunners.com web sites, I decided that their plans were probably pretty good, as they are for beginner runners. Like me. And they were agreeing about how to start, which is based on a 1 minute run and 2 minute walk, repeated 10 times over a 30 minute period. This means 10 minutes of running, rather than the 3 I had actually planned over my first half an hour.

So, back to the drawing board I went and planned out an 8 week training plan based on the runnersworld plan, but using a mix of swimming and cycling as cross training. I'll post it up as I still think its a good plan for someone who hasn't already done some damage.

Anyway, on the 2nd 1 minute run, back comes the twinge and I can feel it pulling again, so I stop and just walk. Walking eases the ache, so I start up again after 2 minutes and it's not so bad. I make a total of 7 walk run cycles, totalling 21 minutes for the whole thing.

Once back inside, I pack my leg with ice and Ibuleve for 15 minutes and see what happens. Well, I've been hobbling again, although no-where near as bad as 10 days ago, so I don't think the damage is too extensive. I think I've proved that I started back too early and should have left it for another couple of days at least. In all, I've probably pushed back the recovery by a week.

It's so hard knowing when an injury is actually fixed, something I think will probably come with experience. But, hopefully you'll understand the need I felt to start pounding the pavement again; I so want this to succeed.

So, it's back to the pool for a few weeks, then I'll try again.

Mr Stumble.

Revised training plan.

2006-05-13T23:12:00.000+01:00

This is the revised training plan. It still shows the start day and target days, and where I plan to pick up running, all being well on Thursday 18th May. "@2r8w" means run for 2 minutes and walk for 8 minutes.

This may well mean I'm not in the correct shape for the Stumble by June 17th, but we'll see how things go. I've based this on Phil's advice in his comments to Run #4 - it all seemed pretty damn sensible. I am allowing myself to break some of the rules, like not doing all of the "swim" entries if I think I need a rest day, and if the calf injury threatens again, I'll be backing off a little longer!

Go see Phil in his "Running in the Sun" blog, linked on the right ->

Weight increasing; Sleep decreasing

2006-05-13T22:50:00.000+01:00

I thought, as I'm doing this to get in better shape, it might be a good idea to keep tabs on my weight through the programme. Daily weight-taking is not really going to help as micro-increments are not at all inspiring and shortly after my first weigh in, my daughter flooded the bathroom and shorted out the scales.

Having taken the scales apart and fixed them with a blunt instrument, my next weigh in a few days ago gave me a bit of a shock. 3 lb weight gain. Now there were some mitigating factors. I wasn't weighing myself at the normal time, normal being first thing in the morning before I eat anything. It was in the evening after a particularly delicious steak pie - really-calorific-highly-saturated-fatty food and exactly what I should be avoiding. But I was hungry having been swimming the previous day.

And the scales could be lying, having been in pieces not 10 minutes earlier.

However, given that 2 days later, re-weighing showed me 2lbs lighter than this all time high, I think the scales are probably right.

My wife, D, tried to console me by saying that muscle is denser than fat, and that it might be down to a miraculous conversion of blubber to sinew. Pie to blubber is closer to fact.

I had thought that I might just try to keep everything else normal, like diet, whilst I get the basic fitness and stamina bits sorted out, but I don't think that it can work this way. The more effort I put in, the more hungry I'm going to get and the more I need to watch the type of food I ingest.

It's not like I'm a big biscuit (aka cookie across the pond) and chocolate eater. I've still got half of that Toblerone left from Easter. OK, it was a yard long Toblerone, but still that's well less than one chunk every two days. The chunk-rate has been accelerating a bit recently though.

So, on the eats side, we are planning less meat, more fruit, less sweet stuff.

On the sleep side, things have got a bit strange. Fitful is probably the best way of describing it, certainly not proper restive sleep for around half the nights over the past ten days. I'm not sure if this is a result of exercise, work or a touch of a head cold. So, I'll keep an eye on this and see if I can relate it to anything in particular. It might be all the chorine ingested in the local swimming pool keeping me awake.

As for the calf muscle, things have definitely improved. And thanks for all the kind words and wishes attached to previous posts. Just great.

It's not 100% yet and I can still feel the point of injury when I stretch, but just keeping at it with stretching a few times a day and the anti-inflamitory gel have done wonders. All being well I can re-start running later this coming week, with a revised plan.

May get the bike out of the shed in the meantime....

Mr Stumble.

Andy Stumbles

Stumble status. March 2009.

Leg Calibration.

Erratic schedules

After March - 2008 Stourbridge Sumble.

March

Elliptic Curve.

Review of 2007

December Status.

Tada.

Stumble, rebooted.

Cumbria.

Stumble's end.

Getting hip.

Waking from stasis

Stourbridge Stumble - Official results

Mr Stumble Stumbles!

Preparation.

Harvington.

The bust.

Prawn Crackers.

Bunny hops.

Anger management

Blossom falls

Looking ahead.

Head boiled again

A non-stop week

*** 30:0 ***

Shropshire hills

Getting closer.

Half and Half

I don't like Mondays.

Moo.

A little entertainment

Charing Cross

Breaking 5K

Sunrise

More pancakes

Pancake day

Swinsty reservoir.

Elliptic Curve

The Lost Post

Notes from a Stumble.

Traction control

For the benefit of Mr Stumble

Good intentions.

The uphill struggle.

How I did in '06.

Spritely, for the New Year.

The stolen week.

Shortest day, longer run

Running in the dark.

Focus.

Winter blues.

Head full of goop

Keeping things nice and easy

Permission to run.

A light, I see a light!

Electro-shock therapy. For feet.

If I was blogging about films, there would be so much more to say.

The trouble with Stumble.

Still here, Still static

Ice and a slice.

Lame with a Sprain !

Blogger problems

Planning ahead

My right foot.

Hitting the streets

What's in a name?

Stuffed and returned.

Au revoir!

(In) Flexible

A bitter pill.

Catan.

"In irons".

Locum Hocum

The bike

Back in the saddle again.

That false sense of security.

Damage Limitation.

* 30:0 *