Hypocrisy of the Most Breathtaking Kind

For those gentle readers who do not like my occasional forays into Australian politics, please look away now. But this one is relatively brief.

In perusing the blogs and the news today, I just couldn't help but notice that in one breath PM Howard is ramming the NT Aboriginal legislation changes through Parliament with barely enough time for consideration, let alone debate or, heaven forbid, consultation with the communities concerned, while in the next breath he is attacking Queensland's proposed forced local government mergers for having a lack of community consultation.

The sheer bald-faced audacity. Consider these two reported quotes from Honest John:

1. From the ABC a couple of days ago

"[Labor] is entitled to see the legislation and to express whatever view it wants, but I want to make it clear, we will not be changing our approach in the Northern Territory," he said.

"We will be going ahead with all of the elements of the intervention plan that [Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal] Brough and I announced, including in relation to the permit system and the prohibitions on alcohol."

In other words, not Labor, which has indicated a willingness to take a bipartisan approach on this issue, not the academics who created the original reports on which Howard and Brough are acting, not aboriginal leaders in general, and not the communities concerned are to be given any voice or influence over the specifics of the legislation. They can all just go to Hell because We Know Best (or will not have Our Agenda meddled with).

2. From today's SMH

"I challenge the Premier of Queensland, let the people speak on your amalgamation proposal.

"Let this be a reminder that if you remove the check and balance in our system and if you have Labor governments at every level, this sort of behaviour will become the norm."

Checks and balances. Yeah, right, you are something of an expert about the abuses that can occur when checks and balances are removed aren't you, Mr Prime Minister. Makes me retch.

Feelin' alright

It finally feels like my body has caught up to the new workload. All leg and health issues are in good shape apart from the left Achilles, which continues to yip away. I now see the great benefit of slowing down a little and evening out to some extent the daily load. I ran 14 km this morning at an average pace of 4:41/km and it was just a steady rolling pace, well within myself. The milder 26 degree temperature helped.

Now, to deal with a couple of things raised in comments to my last post.

To Ewen: Yes, my lower aerobic runs tend to be relatively easy judging by heart rate, though not necessarily by how my legs feel. Though that is now finally turning around, as per the above note. Thanks for the prod, I added the link to my on-line log over on the right there. That takes you to the summary page and then you can click on Calendar or Workout views to see links to individual runs.

Clairie: "Do you throw in a 'drop down' week after several high mileage weeks?"

My reply: I probably should but haven't specifically programmed it in. I think I will do that if I feel myself starting to get worn down. But the specific strategy behind my current program is to run at distance/pace combinations that stress the system only slightly and from which I can recover from and adapt to and start to feel strong, as is happening right now. So with three 90-100 km weeks behind me, and this will be a fourth, I will try to ratchet up by 10-15 km adapt to that, then when it becomes comfortable, ratchet up again. I will also need to start introducing some hills and small amounts of speed work, moreso after the next four-week block of steady distance.

Clairie again: "I'm curious to hear what an 'easy' pace is for you as most of your runs seem to be tempo or decent pace for someone doing that much mileage."

My reply: I am using two kinds of reference systems for pace. One is the Lydiard "steady state" pace (the fastest pace you can run 10 km every day and recover from for the next day). I judge that to be about 4:30/km for me at the moment. Training paces are based on percentages of that. The fastest training pace is that pace and the slowest is supposed to be about that pace plus 10% (about 5:00/km). The other system is Hadd percent of maximum heart rate zones, which roughly line up with the Lydiard pace guidelines. I wouldn't say that any of my runs (except a 5k time trial two weeks ago) have been tempo pace (defining tempo as lactate threshold). So I guess the bottom line is that anything slower than about 4:55/km falls into "easy" (depending on the overall distance), and that is what I will use for warm-up, recovery and long runs. Just about all other training paces at the moment will be between 4:50/km and 4:20/km and if you did a frequency histogram of recent runs, the distribution would be skewed towards the slower end of that range. (But this will change as time progresses.) Because of the current heat, I am also not at all concerned about going slower than steady state + 10% if heart rate or common sense dictate.

milesandmiles: “Always amusing for us training in Singapore to hear people complaining about a 29 degree day :)”

My reply: yes, yes, I know Arnaud, you Singaporeans have the worst of everything. Almost as bad as Texans, you are :-). At least you have the whole year to get used to those temperatures. We have to go from 4 degrees in winter to perfect conditions in autumn and spring, to boiler house conditions for 6 weeks in summer. And yes, I agree that cross training is helpful. I did use it to some extent during the early part of this build-up.

-17 weeks: 90 km getting easier

That was the third week in a row over 90 km and it was much easier to handle. A combination of improved health and improved fitness I should think.
Mon: Rest
Tue AM: 13.5 km @ 4:51/km, HRav 129 (lower aerobic)
Wed PM: 17.2 km with 15.8 km @ 4:54/km, HRav 133 (lower aerobic)
Thur PM: 11.5 km @ 5:01/km, HRav 133 (lower aerobic)
Fri AM: 14 km with 6.3 easy. Then 7.7 @4:37/km, HRav 149 (upper aerobic)
Sat AM: 12 km @ 4:29/km, HRav 142 (upper aerobic, average lowered by including early part of run)
Sun AM: 26 km @ 5:25/km, HRav 134 (long run) in 29 degrees!
Total: 94 km

Health wise, my body is feeling better than it has for a while. I went to a urologist on Thursday who diagnosed epididymitis for the problem downstairs that I alluded to last week. I'm now on antibiotics and off the drink. It had been feeling better but I decided to go get it checked out to be on the safe side. I'm glad I did because I think it explained a lot of the other malaise I'd been feeling on top of the fatigue from increased mileage. Now all I have to worry about is the normal heat stress. This morning's long run was a bit of a killer, but I survived it OK. Longest for a while and at a better pace than last week (not that that is saying much).

93 km for the week

With work and life crowding in, I seem to be reduced to weekly updates. Probably not such a bad thing.

Started last week feeling tired and lacking in energy, empty legs, and sore back. Slight tummy discomfort. High temperatures and humidity added to the challenge. I scaled back distances and intensity on Monday (easy 8.4k) and Tuesday (12k). Still not feeling great on Wednesday evening, but jumped into the monthly 5k time trial with a view to run it at HR no higher than 165, which is the same thing I did last month. The 20:06 turned out was somewhat slower than the previous month, but the heat and feeling poorly surely contributed. Ran home from work on Thursday night (12.7k) and found energy levels slightly better. Friday (12.6k) I ran back from home to work and finally starting to move more freely. Saturday morning I was up and out the door reasonably early to try and beat the heat (ha!) and actually had a decent 12 k, fastest of the week, not counting the 5k of the time trial. In the shower later I noticed that I am tender in my right nether region, so might have an infection down there, which would go some way to explain my doldrums. Might have to get it checked out. Sunday (yesterday) morning I got going quite early and headed out to try and run 2 hours, I didn't mind how slowly. Ended up making it to 22 km on the nose in 2 hours and 5 minutes.

I recovered pretty quickly from yesterday's slow run, but with the stomach and abdomen discomfort this morning I have decided to take a day off. There was a cool change overnight and it would have been lovely running weather this morning. Plus yesterday was my 20th day straight. That was something I really would have liked to have continued and it took quite a bit of will-power and mental struggle to resist the urge this morning from about 5:00 as I woke and dozed fitfully, got up, went back to bed, changed my mind about four times ... finally accepted I had to try and do what is best for my body... damn, it will be a low mileage week now ;-)

End of a solid week

Well, running and work have both been conspiring to make it difficult to find time to blog. But this past week I set about trying to apply the principles of the Lydiard running approach while mainly using Hadd's heart rate prescriptions to control my efforts. The principle of the Lydiard approach, as I understand it, is to run as much as you can while keeping the distance and exertion up near, but below, the limit of what you can recover from each day. And the aim is, then, to run every day. Every day. Like all runners, the biggest threat I pose to myself is to go over the edge and head into a slow death spiral of increasing fatigue. Work pressures this week almost caused that to happen through a few nights where I didn't get as much sleep as I needed. But somehow I have got through and logged 97 km as 12, 12, 18, 13, 7, 12, 24. At this stage of the game, 18 weeks from tomorrow until the marathon, this is a pretty good place to be, but I still think that I might have over-reached slightly and will simply be trying to consolidate this next week rather than add on any more distance. At least I kept the intensity down on most of these runs, easy or lower aerobic, and haven't felt any major physical difficulties backing up each day. The only exception was Friday, when ideally I should have been doing 10 to 12, but the efforts on Wednesday and Thursday had left me feeling tired, so I backed off for an easy lap of the Palace with Ms Uchida from my office (she continues to progress and ran a PB for the course!). Today's long run, at 24 km, was a few more km than I should have done, but then it was also a bit slower than it should have been too. The temperatures are staying mild so far (low to mid 20s), but every day is overcast and humid. Bring on WM-18! (=marathon week minus 18 weeks).

Lining up Hadd and Lydiard-cum-Mystery Coach

Before I get to the title of the post, I'll just fill in the last few day of running. A typhoon brought a very rainy old weekend. On Saturday morning I visited a sports club and got in an upper aerobic 10 km on a treadmill. I discovered the incline function (all the controls are in Japanese you see, so I'd never known what that button was for) and found that it can really help you get a decent workout without constantly feeling like you are about to get thrown off the bloody thing. I still don't like them.

On Sunday the typhoon had set in properly and rain was falling constantly, but there was no wind and it was warm, so I headed off into the rain. I had discussed my intentions with Gareth and tehre was a chance I might meet him in Yoyogi Park. (Colin and others were all off at a race in Nagano.) At the designated meeting time of 9:00 in the park, the rain was growing steadily heavier and not a soul was about bar a few soggy crows. I gave Gareth the customary 5-minute allowance, still no signs of life so I headed off. With a couple of minutes I bumped into Mika T coming the opposite way and so we shared a very wet but warm 10 km together and I turned for home. A soggy but satisfying 20 k. That brought up a satisfying 77 km for the week.

Yesterday (Monday) was a public holiday (Ocean Day). I met up with a friend who has a predilection for speaking Spanish and all things Mexican and ran a couple of laps of the Imperial Guest House (Gosho) with her, generally easy but surging up the hills. An invigorating 12 km all up, though the warm conditions started taking their toll by the third lap.

This finally brings me to today and the title of this post. I've been reading up on all the Lydiard related theory posted by the enigmatic "Mystery Coach" (and commenters) on Mike's blog. As Ewen and others have noted, the methods of Bideau and Hadd, et al. all have a basis in Lydiard. Lydiard's prescriptions tend to be pace related determined from what he calls your "steady state" pace, the fastest pace you can run for 10 km or so every day and be recovered enough to run the next day without getting worn down. The most important word here is not "fastest" but "be recovered". Workouts are then based on a percentage of this pace, ranging from about 8% slower to the same pace.

Hadd, of course uses heart rate based prescriptions rather than pace-based. I have been basing my training on Hadd, but have been seduced by the incredible knowledge of Mystery Coach and really attracted to his ideas on the fiber recruitment model.

So to see just how the Hadd method compares with the classic Lydiard approach, I had a play around with some of Mystery Coach's numbers that he provides for developing a stamina build up. From an educated guess I assumed that my steady state pace is about 4:20/km, from which I calculated that the easier paced days that Mystery Coach prescribes for the early part of the program would have me running at about 4:40 pace. I thought that sounded interesting and based on recent experience was probably not too far off the mark for the Haddish lower aerobic heart rate runs.

So today when running around the Palace on an unseasonably cool day, I put this to the test. The first lap (5k) at 4:40 resulted in a HR considerably lower than the upper range of Hadd's lower aerobic, but that would not be unexpected even if I was following a heart rate guide for the run, since it does take a while for the system to get loaded up. It is the latter part of the run that the prescriptions really come into effect. And sure enough, during the second lap, although I did at times dip down into the 4:20s, the average pace was only a bit faster than 4:40 and the heart rate was right around the 139 to 143 area, exactly spot on for a lower aerobic run. You can see the data here. So this is good stuff. I feel that I much better understand the relation between these two fundamentally similar systems and feel the ability to mix and match somewhat without compromising the integrity of the program. In particular, I am pretty keen to adopt Mystery Coach's suggestion of running faster (100% of steady state) on Saturday (the day before a long run) to activate/fatigue the harder to get at muscle fibers and then bring them into use, i.e., condition them, during the next day's long run. Of course, all this depends on me staying injury free :-(

And if you have read this far, I'll reward you with a little anecdote from today's run, slightly grimace inducing though it is. On my first lap, I was running along concentrating on pace and heart rate and so on, and a nice fine drizzle had started. It was near the Otemachi stretch where the path is a little narrow and the paving is surfaced with that fine pebble-crete stuff. A guy and girl were jogging along side by side ahead of me and I started to pull out to go around them which would have blocked off the path, but I looked ahead to see a guy on a bicycle hurtling towards the gap I was about to close. I saw him in plenty of time to pull up and leave the gap open, but he, the poor bugger, saw my move and reflexively went for the anchors, unfortunately locking up the bike causing his front wheel to slide out from under him. Thereafter he involuntarily used his right knee and elbow as landing gear on the way to becoming fully sprawled over the pavement. He was still a good 10 m in front of us when he went down, indicating the prematurity of his actions, and also the speed he must have been going at. We scraped him and his bike up off the pavement. He was grimacing in pain but being very stoic. Luckily with the greasiness of the path he didn't lose any skin. He was a bike courier and was pretty good about the whole thing. I think he knew that whichever way you diced it, he'd screwed up: too fast for the conditions, notorious place for joggers at that time of day, misjudged and hit the anchors way too early...still, I couldn't help but feel bad for my part in it.

Getting back to normal

The back is still a bit stiff, but much better than it was. I went for a bout of cross-training last night. I spent 12 minutes on a stationary bike, then 5k on the treadmill (does that count as cross training?) and 1 k of freestyle. Plus I did a few strength exercises, but I need to approach those in a more structured way.

This morning the alarm woke me from a deep sleep and I fumbled my way out the door and ran a lower aerobic 15.5 km in 1:14:35, average pace of 4:48, average heart rate of 141. The humidity made this a tough little run. I only aimed for it to be lower aerobic, but despite the conversation over at Ewen's place, I did find that my heart rate crept up past the upper figure (143) for lower aerobic. I slowed as necessary to stop it going too far out of range, but still the average HR after 30 min is above what it should be, and the gradual heart rate drift can be seen in the pace vs heart rate of the splits.

I was still definitely a lot happier with it as a run than last Friday's, which although doesn't look too bad on paper, practically did my back in.

Germaine Greer on Aborigines

oldsprinter posted a link to a very good article by Germaine Greer on the aboriginal issue. At first it seemed like she was just going to rehash the same analysis that many other commentators have provided on why Howard's Crusade (as oldsprinter put it) is deeply flawed and cannot be interpreted as anything other than a deeply cynical political and ideologically driven exercise. But the article goes much further and draws heavily from her own experiences visiting aboriginal communities and friendships she has made within them. She provides some important insights and gets closer to the source of finding enduring practical solutions to the issue of improving the aboriginal condition than most other commentators.

There was one passage though that I did find a little hard to reconcile with my own understanding of the history of early white settlement. She said:

The Aboriginal peoples reacted to contact in different ways. Some were used to foreigners visiting their land. Most assumed that the newcomers would adapt to their way of life, and offered to help them find food and show them how to survive by studying and venerating country. Even when diseases brought by the Europeans reduced thriving communities to a handful of traumatised survivors, there was no concerted attempt to drive the interlopers away. By the time the Aboriginal peoples realised that the newcomers had laid claim to the whole country and everything in it, it was too late.

To suggest that there was "no concerted attempt to drive the interlopers away" is a complete misreading of the real history. When aboriginal tribes understood the enormity and permanence of the white "invasion", they did resist. And they resisted stoutly. In NSW there was something of a guerrilla war that lasted fifty years or more after the first fleet (I guess these days it would be called an insurgency). But ultimately, guns, germs and sheer weight of numbers won out. Perhaps this is what she means by realizing too late. Still, it smacks a little too much of the noble savage rendering of history, and there are one or two other examples of that in the article. Which is not to diminish its overall thrust. It just brings to mind the reality of the sordid early history of white settlement. A legacy that I think hangs around our neck to this day.

I have been reading a book, actually two books in one volume, about the Northern Territory. They were written in the early 1960s. One is by Douglas Lockwood called Up the Track, and one by Bill Harney called To Ayers Rock and Beyond. Well worthwhile getting your hands on, especially the Bill Harney book as he recounts his time as the first ranger at Ayers Rock (as it was then known) after it was declared a national park in the late fifties. He shares a lot of what he learned from the aboriginal elders from the region during his time there.

But it is the Lockwood book that is germane to why I think Germaine glosses over the reality of the nature of the early contact. Lockwood recounts several incidents of history that are at once brutal and ugly and difficult for us descendants of those times to come to terms with. I will reproduce here an expurgated (for brevity) version of one passage. As the passage starts, Lockwood is being given a tour of an old telegraph repeater station in Barrow Creek by a chap called Tom. He goes on to describe an incident that occurred in 1874:

Perhaps it is not surprising...that the repeater stations in these remote spots, weeks and probably months from help, were built as fortresses with stone walls two feet thick and narrow loopholes commanding large fields of fire from within. The linesmen who had to go out on horseback to repair wires cut by the malicious natives generally travelled in pairs. Even so, there were those who failed to return.
...
Tom was saying something about the stone in the walls . . . but I had wandered off again to that hot as hell night in 1874 when the Kaiditj came down from their cubby-holes in the table-top mountains, their black bodies unseen in the dark, and crept to within a few feet of five men sitting on the front veranda of the station. The white men were unarmed and separated from the safety of their fortress. [Lockwood then introduces a couple of the men in the party, James Stapleton and John Franks.]
Suddenly, an incredible shower of spears fell among them, hurled by shadows now dimly seen but unmistakably heard as the quiet evening was pierced by their yells. The white men tried to regain the safety of their fortress through a gate leading to a courtyard at the rear. . . "Yes, that's it," Tom was saying. "They tried to come in through here . . ." but they were driven back by a second volley of spears from primitive tacticians who must have expected them to do just that.
John Franks was speared through the heart and died within a few minutes. At the gateway, Stapleton fell with no fewer than four spears in his body.
Finally the men were able to get through into the fortress. They armed themselves at once and poured a volley of shots through the loopholes ... and cleared the ground.
[section of waffle omitted]
The natives reappeared on the following day, but were fired on from five hundred yards and retired after leaving a dead man on one of the world's loneliest and least publicized battlefields. There was a grim sequel. A punitive expedition was soon organized and rode out to extract revenge. At least seventy aborigines, men, women and children, are known to have been shot. A near-by watercourse was named Skull Creek, for the obvious reason. And there is said to be a mountain named Blackfellows Bones, though I don't know it.
The graves of Stapleton and Franks are still there beside the road in Barrow Creek, a lonely monument to courageous pioneers who rode into unknown hostile country so that Australia might communicate with England.

From "Up the Track" by Douglas Lockwood, 1964 (1995 reprint by Seal Books)

There is a certain poignancy to that last phrase. Scenes like this were played out all over Australia from 1883 until as late as the 1920s. The aborigine has always just been "a problem" to be dealt with using the most expedient measures available and acceptable to the times. Ignore him, shoot him, civilize him, assimilate him, but don't try to understand him and meet him on his terms. He isn't really human enough to deserve it. It seems some things never change.

Easy easy

The back is sorta kinda improving each day. After the easy 10k yesterday morning I went for a pretty serious bit of massage last night at a clinic (K's in Ebisu) that treats some very good athletes, including Mara Yamauchi, who came second in the Sapporo half marathon behind Mizuki Noguchi on the weekend (and ahead of 6th placed Catherine Ndereba). I digress. The masseur also deigned that I was in need of getting a few needles jabbed in me, so I came to have my first encounter with acupuncture. It wasn't bad, but I cannot proclaim it to be a miracle cure either. Not for whatever I've got, anyway. I was in great fear of the massage, not for any pain I might feel, though there was some of that, but for the fact that I might find myself thinking that this is something I need a lot more of. I had good reason to hold that fear. Damn it was good. But at $50 a pop, I just can't do it very often. I dunno, maybe I should aim to go once a month or something. Do a night a month at a host club in Kabukicho to raise the readies.

Tonight, track night, I skipped track and had a good run in Yoyogi Park with Colin. One hour and fifteen minutes of nice easy/steady pace in pretty high humidity and a few squalls. Under the circumstances I think it is a good outcome. And rest assured, the back is getting plenty of stretching.

Caught short

I have often wondered if my continual niggles in the left leg have any structural or gait basis, but never got around to doing anything about it.

With the fact that I am going for a sports massage tonight in mind, I did something simple this morning that I have meant to do for ages, check whether my legs are the same length. After the shower, clad only in my best pair of Bonds briefs (an image I could have spared you all, but ha!), I sat with my butt against the wall, legs stretched out straight, and got my wife to come and give the old pegs the once over.

"Your left leg is about a centimeter shorter than your right leg," she immediately blurted out with a kind of sadistic smirk. Sure enough, I could even see it myself. My left ankle bone touched against my right leg quite conspicuously above the right ankle bone. Damn! Fourty-four years it has taken for me to notice this.

Now the million dollar question is whether this is a) the cause, b) a result of, or c) not even related to my back and other left side problems. And finally, what kind of practitioner do you see about getting a definitive analysis and remedial measures? I have heard that short-legged bastards can get a heel lift shoe insert. I wonder if one centimeter is enough to justify such an intervention?

A tentative come back

Thanks for the assorted "Get well soon" comments.

I took Saturday and Sunday off running. It was hard to swallow given that I was on track for such a good week, but there wasn't much option. I got onto the Ibuprofen and generally just took it easy.

By yesterday morning it was feeling somewhat improved, but far from 100%. SO I decided to use the ticket to a sports club I have and went for a swim before work. That was fin and I did 2 km in 40 minutes. By theend of the day the back was feeling heaps better and the little hip injury thing had pretty much faded into the background. Great stuff that Ibuprofen.

So I braved a run this morning. I ended up having a reasonably crappy sleep and the back was a little tender when I woke up. This time I decided to a) not force the pace, and b) Just aim for 50 minutes. So in the end it was a very easy 10k in just over 50 minutes at an average heart rate of 126. I felt only mild discomfort and never that I was making things any worse. So if I can continue to nurse it back to health this week while keeping up a few runs like this, I shouldn't go too far backwards.

Hobbling & humbling

My lower back has flared up. I worked at home on Tuesday and I think the chair I used is the main culprit. It was a bit stiff on Wednesday, but didn't really hinder my running. Yesterday it was somewhat worse, and due to the discomfort combined with a deadline at work, I didn't run.

So I woke up this morning, got moving and knew immediately it still wasn't the best, but I have run through lower back pain before so thought I'd give it a try. Ended up being a pretty difficult run. Quite painful and slow for the first 4 km or so. Then I stretched my legs and back when I hit Komazawa Park, and it improved a little. I finally got my pace better than 5:00/km, but not much. Still felt like I was hobbling. I did a couple of laps only and then after a toilet break headed home. When I was fully warmed up I was moving OK, but it was a bit of an effort. My heart rate was higher than it should have been for the pace. By the time I finished, my right hip was hurting, probably because of an altered gait. I should have known better. Here's the breakdown.

From a training perspective it wasn't complete write off, but I hope I have not set myself back further by pushing through. I have a tendency to do that, especially when, as now, I am trying to lift the workload. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

A good compromise

Last night it was Wednesday night at the track, i.e., VO2max intervals of some sort. When in aerobic training in the past I have skipped these and gone into Yoyogi Park and tootled around at below LT pace. Got an email from Gareth in the afternoon asking what my plans were for the evening and I said I wasn't sure. Track is more fun and interesting, but I have started aerobic base building so want to avoid running above lactate accumulation pace.

After a 5 km warmup in the park we headed to the track (at which point the drizzly rain decided to get a bit more serious). With none of the regular leaders in attendance, Gareth took over the podium and stop watch and announced we would do 5 x 1200 on a 7-minute cycle. I decided to run them at a lower intensity than I would if it was a full-on interval session, thus they became what McMillan calls cruise intervals (4:26 to 4:32/1200 for me).

Rather than think about pace too much I just said I'd try to not let my heart rate get much above 160. As it turned out, that gave me a set of times just a bit on the slow side of McMillan's suggested range. They were pretty comfortable to run and I was even talking a little bit during a couple of them. So I did one more for good luck. Final result: 4:40, 4:38, 4:33, 4:31, 4:34, 4:31. Full log entry here.

Back into the routine

I meant to post yesterday morning's run much sooner but just got too busy. Basically my stock standard Tuesday morning route to Komazawa Park with a few loops for 14 km in 1:03.

Average HR of 140. So a bit harder than Monday and heart rate drift was noticeable. It was meant to be lower aerobic, and the average heart rate definitely is, but late in the run I was straying into upper aerobic territory. I am determined to try and stop doing that so that a lower aerobic run stays in lower aerobic territory the whole way. Most important.

A new start

I bought some new Asics Gelfeathers, a pair of discounted New Balance trail shoes, a top, shorts and socks yesterday at Art Sports. So decked out in an all new ensemble this morning I had a nice easy to lower aerobic run of 10. 5 km at an average and pretty even 4:39/km. It wasn't hot, but the humidity was incredible, as it has been the last week or so, and as it especially is tonight. Sultry, muggy, steamy, oppressive. So while there was no stress at all on my legs, I was still a lather of sweat by the end.

It was a good way to kick off the first week of my new marathon buildup. Yep, 21 weeks until Ohtawara, and the training starts now. Feeling pretty good too because I am certainly in better shape than I was at the same time last year, and I don't think I really even thought about the marathon until August last year. So let's hope I get the buildup right this time.

I don't normally run on Mondays, but had to do my long run Saturday to free up yesterday for judging in the WanCup home brewing competition out in Chiba. That was very convenient for my anal retentive side because it meant I could get the log up over 300 km for June, whereas had I run Sunday, those km would have gone into July's ledger. Only just scraped in over the 300 too.

For the Saturday run I was up at 6:00 and out the door by 7:00. It was already quite warm and, yep, humid as hell. "Thank goodness I am not delaying this until later." I thought. I found it fairly tough going toward the end of the 21.5 km. Turned out that was about the warmest the temperatures got all day! It seemed to be noticeably cooler by 10, perhaps back up to the early morning temperatures around 1:00, but by 3:00 it really cooled off where it stayed until the next day. Very strange weather.

Anxiously wondering how some fellow bloggers went yesterday at Gold Coast ... just when ya ready fellas ;-)

Evaluation run 5k and a new on-line log

So I have been running a bit, though this blog would not stand testimony to it. Sort of 60 to 70 km a week. Until a couple of weeks ago I was trying to put emphasis on speed "renshu" (training), but there are no races or anything coming up, so my motivation has flagged and I am now looking towards the aerobic endurance build up over the next 20 weeks for an autumn marathon. I am thinking that if I can keep injury free and can juggle family and work enough to put in the miles, it would be so nice to try and make a tilt at a 2:50 marathon. After last year's disappointments that seems a bit ambitious...but there is no point namby pambying around. Let's aim for perfection and perhaps we will end up with very good (or however it goes).

So tonight was the monthly 5 km time trial. I decided to run at around my lactic threshold, which is the heart rate that Hadd says you can run a marathon at IF you are fully trained. For me, that's about 165. Intersting results that showed I have a way to go before I could run a marathon at that pace.

I have discovered this really excellent on-line log called RunningAHEAD. I mean really excellent. Has a pedometer tool and other neat ways of displaying your data. About 100 times better than the one I mentioned six weeks ago. See if this link shows you the results of my run, then take it from there if you are interested.

And now for something completely different

Running!

Last Saturday I joined a large (16) group for a trail run. The idea was to run from Hakone-Yumato to Gotemba. I really didn't have time for the full version, so together with a couple of other pikers ran (and I use that word very loosely) out for a couple of hours to the top of some peak or other then turned around and came back to where we started and had a bath in a hot spring and bento (lunchbox) beside the river. The trail was bloody rugged in places and even though we we out for almost three hours, we only logged about 15 km. Prior to turning around we probably lost 30 minutes waiting for the back-markers, which, considering I was only out for an abridged version, I found a bit frustrating. Still, it was bloody nice to get out of the city and into the bush for a few hours. Thanks to Shoji-san for organizing the run.

(photos from Shoji-san's blog)

WWKD?

A comment from Gordon (oldsprinter) on my last post has prompted me to follow up a bit. You know that hackneyed evangelical refrain, What Would Jesus Do? Well, Gordon opined that Whitlam and Keating never said sorry either. While no Australian government can exactly shower itself in glory over issues of aboriginal reconciliation, neither Whitlam nor Keating, nor Hawke nor Fraser, nor any who came before them, had a Stolen Generation report to respond to. Howard did, and his response was to duck and weave and consider it an embarrassing part of Keating's "black armband view of history".

So let's just stop and ask ourselves for a minute, what would Keating have done? The thing is, Keating, I believe, came closest to a sincere and honest response to aboriginal justice. In 1992 I was driving home from work and his Redfern Speech, delivered earlier in the day, was being replayed on the ABC current affairs radio program, PM. I have always strongly felt a sense of injustice and shame about the long sad treatment of aborigines. I had long wondered when would our politicians stop the obfuscation and shirking of responsibility. And here was Keating's voice, the new Prime Minister, delivering these powerful, moving, honest words. Here was the representative of the Crown admitting that there were wrongs and inhumane injustices in our past that needed to be confronted before we could move on to build something better. This was a real and true brand new dawn for reconciliation. I suddenly realized that it could happen. The emotion was enormous and overwhelming and I found myself weeping openly in the car. Tears were streaming down my face and snot was running out my nose. I still remember where I was, right there in Mowbray Road near the primary school headed towards home in Artarmon. I remember it like it was yesterday. When I got home I sat in the car and listened to the end of the speech and then had to sit some more before I could go inside.

Of course Keating's short few years in power didn't exactly create domestic bliss in every aboriginal home throughout the land. But it was the Keating government that introduced the Native Title legislation in response to the High Court's Mabo decision. This created howls of protests from the States as they saw Crown and leasehold land slipping "into the clutches" of the aborigines. It required enormous political will to make this happen. And I believe the impact of this legislation on furthering aboriginal pride and dignity and giving them some basis for self determination is vastly under-estimated. Don't forget Keating also tried to set us on a path towards becoming a republic and tried to get us fully engaged with Asia. Compare all that with the Howard government's approach.

I don't mind admitting that the other time that Keating made me cry was when he was voted out in 1995. I couldn't, still can't, understand how the Australian people could not see what great things he was doing for us as a country. I really think that was the single worst thing to happen to Australia in my lifetime. And I was alive during the Dismissal (though a bit young to remember it. I still think it rates behind 2 March 1996).

Anyway, here is an excerpt from the Redfern Speech. Listen to it, think about the legacy of the Native Title legislation, and ponder what else might have been...

Jackboot Jack

John Howard sits on his hands with regards to aboriginal issues for ten years. No, that's not quite true. He does actually engage with the issue rather robustly, and on each occasion it is to find a way to smack aboriginal Australians in the face. He refuses to implement all the recommendations of the Stolen Generation report. He attacks land rights gains won in the High Court, he publicly insults and belittles aboriginal leaders, he even goes so far as to abolish ATSIC.

So when I read on the SMH web site yesterday that he will be tackling the social problems of aboriginal communities by marching in with his jackboots, I was outraged but not surprised. This is just so exemplifies how myopic, small-minded and bigoted he and his coalition henchmen are. It is entirely consistent with his patronising and paternalistic pre-1968 world view that aborigines are incapable of self-determination and beneath being treated with equal respect.

This is a highly complex and nuanced problem that requires concerted sophisticated solutions. Is it a crisis? Of course. Has it just suddenly reared up out of nowhere? Of course not. The politicians have for decades done nothing to seriously address the underlying causes of the social dysfunction, of which drug abuse, violence and sexual abuse are but symptoms, not some kind of primary cause. And now, when they finally decide to act decisively in the face of a horrifying report on the state of affairs, it is through high-handed, draconian, knee jerk measures that only serve to reinforce the alienation of aborigines -- they are different to "us" so can be treated differently to "us". This is a sickening response calculated to appeal to the deep-seated racial bigotry of every simple-minded ugly Australian -- the ones who have recently deserted the government in droves. The ones who need a Tampa to bring them back. This is John Howard in Pauline Hanson's clothing. This is vintage Howard seizing a political opportunity, playing the charade of care and compassion for the underprivileged while having nothing but political expedience in mind.

I was surprised then that the initial responses and commentary were pretty positive. Oh, yes, isn't it terrible, all the sexual abuse of the poor children. Cluck, cluck, coo coo. Kudos to Mr Howard for having the guts to do something decisive.

Bullshit!

This has to be seen for what it is. A mean-spirited grab for the minds of bigots and a push to exert greater Commonwealth control over aboriginal lands. I was relieved then to start to see s ome comments surface that accord with my reaction, and I hope that this trickle becomes a stream, and the stream a torrent, and the torrent a deluge, and then wash this evil bastard and all his witless cronies into electoral oblivion.

And then perhaps we will find a more humane and respectful way of addressing this tragic problem. How about massive public education campaigns? How about handing greater power and responsibility to the elders of these communities? How about a big increase in health and social workers to help those who are vulnerable to these problems make better choices? These may not offer immediate and comprehensive solutions, but it would be a far more measured and humane response than basically labeling every aborigine a drug-addled, alcoholic pervert until proven otherwise.
____________
Update: I dashed off the above before checking any of the political blogs to make sure that I was relying pretty much on my own analysis. I don't always trust my ability to analyze an issue, but I am pleased to see, now that I have had a bit of a look around, that I am not alone and that there are other much more considered and intelligent analysts coming to much the same conclusions. See also: Andrew Bartlett, Larvatus Prodeo, Club Troppo. A common theme that also disturbed me, but I didn't mention above, was Kevin Rudd's inability to spot the leading edge of the wedge. Labor should have thought through their response a bit more carefully, though I don't believe they have put themselves completely into a corner and still have an opportunity to turn this back on Howard. I only hope they do.

To everything there is a season

Another week, another Wednesday at the track trying to pop a foo-foo valve.

Funny how we go through these phases. When I first joined Namban Rengo it was my introduction to interval workouts. Hell, I didn't even know you called running "workouts". That sounded kind of weird. I thought you did workouts on a weight machine in a gym or in front of a TV screen with Jayne Fonda yelling at you. But I got into these lung-busting sessions and quickly enough got used to calling them workouts. The first few I went to certainly worked me out. Or over, or something. And I enjoyed it in an S&M kind of way. It reminded me of those nasty "one lap of the oval" things we would do at footy training when I was a kid. I think I progressed quite a lot due to the dual approach of intervals on Wednesdays and long runs on Sundays with Team Touch of Grey.

But then two years ago I discovered heart rate training. I became a slave to the HRM. Building mitochondrial density. Racking up the miles at sub lactate-threshold pace. And it got results too. I largely eschewed intervals and anaerobic speed training, though I would still join the occasional track session or do a couple of 1600 m repeats by myself.

So this spring, after an ever so slightly disappointing string of fall and winter marathons, I resolved to spend the spring and early summer putting a bit more focus back on speed work with a view to going into the next aerobic base building phase with increased leg speed.

A few good sessions at the track through May led to the 17:47 around the Imperial Palace in late May. And ever since the 5 x 1200s the Wednesday preceding that race, I have felt the interval sessions starting to have more quality about them. So it is all starting to feel like things are going to plan.

After last week's 6 x 1000s session, Ewen suggested that some shorter reps wouldn't hurt. So in amongst a 10 k run last Saturday I did 5 reps of 80 m stride outs, building up to top speed for the middle 50 m. I'll do some more of that and would like to do a session of 200 m to 400 m repeats one day soon. I've never really done any significant number of repeats that short.

Last night club leader Bob set us the menu of 800 m, 4 x 1200 m, and a final mad dash 400 m. The 800 was supposed to be more or less a warm up. My times were 3:11, 4:09, 4:16, 4:14, 4:19, 1:12.

I'm a little bit disappointed with the spread of times on the 1200s, but I was slightly distracted supervising a couple of other runners I am helping at the moment, so that's OK. And they were faster overall than the five x 1200 last month. The 400 was flat out and I recorded a higher heart rate than I've ever seen before, 186. I guess that's my new HRmax.

In contrast to all that, I went out at lunch time today for two laps of the Imperial Palace (5k per lap). During the first lap I worked my heart rate up to high 140s, approaching 80% of HRmax. That all felt quite comfortable despite a reasonably brisk average pace of 4:17/km. On the second lap I decided to maintain my heart rate at around 150 as much as possible. If it got up higher, I would slow down. This is what I will be telling the people I coach to do, so I have to do it myself. It felt so slow, but with a 24 C humid day, the heart rate and breathing were always threatening to race away into "hard" territory. In the end the lap pace wasn't that slow at 4:29/km, but it was definitely a big slow down from the first lap and an average HR of 150 versus 145 for the first lap.

So I think the story overall here is that I am getting a clear indication of how difficult it is to train or maintain two energy systems at once. Right now I'm getting faster, as far as interval and 5k type race distances are concerned, but I'm losing aerobic endurance. To everything there is a season...speed work now, aerobic endurance later.

I can also report that my left leg injuries are relatively good right now. They can feel a bit niggly after a run or workout, but are much better than they were right through the winter. Fingers crossed.

Running towards motherhood……

No, not me you silly sausages, my Melbourne-based friend Nicola. Nic wrote the article below for a sports web site of some sort, something to do with adidas I think she said. Anyway, she gave me permission to post it here. Reading of Clairie's exploits the other day, I decided I should put it up. Here's to all the expecting mums...

Running towards motherhood……
As a seasoned and serious runner, driven by PB’s and how many km’s I can run in a week, my reaction to my pregnancy news was somewhat mixed. The excitement of becoming a mother for the first time was somewhat tempered with the trepidation that my running days as I knew them would be over. Every pregnancy book I read, written before 2005, extolled the virtues of exercise in the form of gentle swimming and an occasional brisk walk. Difficult for a 90k a week, 3:15 marathoner to hear! Luckily, enlightened health care and sports professionals put my mind at ease and outlined the benefits to both mum and baby of maintaining an existing exercise regime, including running.

Naturally, as the weeks have progressed, I am no longer a slave to my running watch. And I have realised that a longest run of 10k is an achievement, even if it takes me 70mins. So, at 29 weeks, as me and my tummy are running slowly along the beach, and the thought crosses my mind, “will I ever be able to run like I used to, will I ever get a new PB?” I think about how lucky I am, how I can still do what I love, and that I’m going to give birth to a future Olympian!

Nicola Thomson and Bump, 17^th May 2007

Going hard

I am definitely falling a bit behind on the old blogging front at the moment. I have a fair bit going on with work, keeping up the running, and I brewed a beer last Sunday afternoon/evening (a story in itself).

Last week I treated as a kind of recovery and mental break after the Ekiden. I only ran 42 km from three runs: Wed, Fri, and Sunday. I also swam 2 km on Thursday night. Sunday was a pretty sedate kind of 20 km in Yoyogi Park.

Yesterday morning I forced myself out of bed early and ran around a loop I used to run a long time ago. Nothing really special, just a good steady 10.8 km in 47:56 (4:27/km), average HR 139, max HR 165 (up the hill at the end of the run).

Tonight was the more interesting run. After a 5.5 km warmup with Gareth and, later, Stuart, I joined the interval workout with the rest of the club. First Wednesday of the month, so therefore 6 x 1000 m.

The first one I did in 3:35 and it felt solid but almost a little bit too relaxed. The next one I seemed to start off a bit faster and held it and finished in 3:32. This time I was closer to someone, lets call him J-meister, who finished somewhat ahead in the first rep causing me to remark to myself, "gee, J-meister is in pretty good shape at the moment." I didn't set out to chase him, but in rep 3 I finished in 3:27, right there with the J-meister. Rep 4 saw a 3:26 posted. I think this might have been the rep in which speedy Gordon came whizzing past me at about the 600 m mark, but I then found myself pulling him in over the last 100 m and finished about a second behind him.

Reps 5 and 6 were both bang on 3:27. Rep 5 I led J-meister the whole way, rep 6 he got a jump on me at the start and would have finished several seconds ahead. But that was OK because I knew I had put in a lot and finished really spent, but with a nice even set of numbers. Maximum heart rates for the six reps were: 170, 171, 178, 179, 179, 180. Last time I looked, my HRmax was about 184, so this was really getting up there.

Actually, on that last rep, I remember now that I really ran the last 400 hard. A lady in our club called Masako, very fast runner with a 2:40ish marathon PB, came past me at about 400 m. She stayed just ahead until 800, then I lifted and sprinted past her on the home straight and yelled at her to finish it hard. "Come on Masako, finish it!!" It really gave the sense of a hard workout. The 180 maximum HR would seem to agree.

So, what do you think Ewen? Is that a good solid interval workout or not?

20k in the hot, hot sun

Well, a lot of it was under cover, and the humidity was mercifully low, but we had a lovely 20k today on a different route to our normal Sunday loops around Yoyogi Park. In temperatures that ranged from 24 at the start to 28 at the finish, about eight of us set out from Hatagaya Station at 8:35 am, ran along the Kandagawa (a "tamed" river) and then to Inokashira Park at Kichijoi, then back towards our starting point along the Tamagawa Josui, a heritage canal built to irrigate the rice paddies of the Tokyo granary some 250 years or more ago. Some of us cut off a few boring km along a major road by jumping on a train, but about half the group completed the full 24 km. After a lightning shower in a sports centre we repaired to a 1000 yen ($10) all you could eat buffet of quite good Indian/Thai dishes. Hmm...

In response to comments on the last post: firstly, thank you all for the kind words. I'll play diplomat between Robert Song and Ewen by saying that it was both. Yes, the residual base from marathon training was very important for endurance while red-lining. But there is no doubt that for that extra bit of fizz on my 5k time I desperately needed the VO2max topping up and mechanical strengthening, form, and leg-turnover provided by the quality interval and tempo sessions included over the last four weeks. Reading Mikes blog and his Mystery Coach's comments over the last several months I have become more wedded to this notion of periodicity in training, especially in the form that the Lydiard system espouses. Weeks of running base mileage, weeks of hills, weeks of sharpening up -- all designed to have you at the best you can be on race day. I also think a few weeks here and there of putting emphasis on speed workouts can also be helpful in making faster aerobic paces more manageable during base building. I haven't really invested the time I should into taking on a full-on Lydiard system, but I am getting a lot from Mike's blog and other sources and will continue to learn and apply what I can. Eric, whose comment I really appreciated, also just ran a sensational debut marathon in Fargo. I strongly recommend you pop into his place and read his riveting report (that alliteration just popped out there, sorry).

One last thing: Ewen, htf are you getting hold of Fat Tire in Canberra? Did you have a friend bring it in from Colorado? Or is it really travelling that far. I've never tried it myself. One day. But then, you've never tried Baird's Spring Bock. So nyeh nyeh! :-) I'd also be happy if you'd go out and drink lots of my friend Mr. C. Zierholz's marvelous libations. Here's to beer!

F@#K me! A PB!!

Well , there I was thinking that maybe all my PBs were behind me. After a nice couple of weeks of solid but not over the top training, I was starting to feel like maybe I was coming into some reasonable condition. The set of 1200s the other night was certainly encouraging. I also decided to not back off too much this week. I ran 10k home from work on Thursday night and 8k easy back to work on Friday morning.

So today was the company ekiden around the palace, regarded as 4.96 km by purists, but called 5 km by most people. I was hoping to go sub 18:10, and in my wildest dreams, maybe sneak under 18:00.

I ran the first leg and wasn't sure whether other teams would also put their faster guys first, which is in fact the conventional tactic in ekidens. We got off to a fast start and after a couple hundred meters I soon settled into third place. Stayed like this for the first couple of km until the uphill from Takebashi when the 2nd place guy immediately ran out of steam. First place was a good 10 or 15 seconds further ahead (yes, Mr bloody Nakagawa!).

But somebody else was on my tail all the way up the hill. I could hear his number card flapping in the wind. He stayed there across the flat in front of the British Embassy. I worked pretty hard through this section and this guy probably benefited from some drafting. But if I'd backed off to dice with him, it would have meant giving up all hope of chasing down first place, so I pressed on. Around Hanzomon the third place guy made his move and went ahead and opened a 4 or 5 second gap. Try as I might, I could not pull him back in. Maybe I was mentally weak here and hoped he would fade rather than attack to my absolute physical limit.

Mr Nakagawa was unthreatened up front. And that's how we finished. I was spent at the end and didn't really feel that there was much more I could have done. My time was a quite unbelievable 17:47. Considering it was a 20 second course PB over last year's race I am actually extremely happy with the result. Have to be. But running such a narrow third in a competitive race took some of the edge off my euphoria, but overall made it a far more enjoyable experience.

It was hot too, about 24 degrees and a stiff little wind in our face at the top of the course. Actually, on any objective analysis, there is no getting away from the fact that this was my best 5k run ever.

Our finishing order also ended up being the placings in the individual times contest, so I brought home 7000 yen worth of shopping coupons for the wife and kids. Not something to sneeze at. Or so you'd think, but in fact my right nostril has been irritated and dripping and making me sneeze ever since the race.

Celebrated over a couple of beers at a German festival in Hibiya park. They tasted GOOD!

5 x 1200

Well, the Wednesday track workout went pretty well last night. After a 6.5 km warmup, the prescribed dosage of pain was administered in the form of five lots of 1200 m on a cycle of 7 minutes between each repeat and with a 200 m jog recovery. My times were 4:24, 4:18, 4:18, 4:23, 4:13. I definitely gave it a bit of a kick in the guts on the last one and imagined myself running hard the last part of the 5k (ekiden leg) on this coming Saturday. Now to see how it goes. I think I've got a bit of a response from the last couple of weeks of harder efforts, so it should be a solid run, but no matter how hard I go, I don't think it will be spectacular.

Plu: no I haven't been following Andrew Bartlett's blog (or any Aussie political blogs to be honest), but I checked it out yesterday. Thanks for the tip. Good stuff. Got him on Bloglines now.

Just an Average Joe

I just read something that has inspired me to make a rare political post. Apparently Joe Hockey, Australia's federal Minister for Workplace Relations, believes he is doing poorly in polls compared to his opposite number Julia Gillard because he is "not as pretty as her".

Holy smokes, when will these troglodytes get it? He is trying to diminish her for being a woman. Pure and simple. Nice one Joe. Crikey, if there was even a grain of truth in his logic, why weren't Kerry Chikarovski or Natasha Stott-Despoja as politically successful as they might have been? They were clearly prettier than their adversaries. I wonder if Joe also thinks that Helen Clark only made it into the PM's chair in NZ because she looks like she might be a good root (don't answer that ...), or is he suggesting that ALL half-attractive women are succesful beyond merit because of their looks? I mean, really, what message does he want to send to the women of Australia with a statement like this? Poor old Joe. To think he used to be my local member.

And the most delicious irony is that he said it after "addressing a conference on advancing the position of women in the workplace". Ha ha ha ha !! I wonder what he told them ... ten top tricks with foundation and lippy? How to make it to the top with just two simple implants?

OK, back to running next time, but this just tickled me so much I had to write about it.

An upper aerobic run & some blogger fun

I had yesterday off as two hard efforts in two days had left me feeling a little tired and leg weary. Better to recover I thought and run quality the next day rather than two junk runs. So got up early this morning and out for 12 km with 4k warm up then the next 8k at heart rate in the high 140s peaking at times in teh low 150s. Overall average HR for the run was 141 and the time 54 minutes.

And since someone is always trying something new with their blogs, here is a slideshow generated from Picasa Web Albums. The photos have nothing to do with running ... in fact they were taken by my brother and his wife when they visited Japan a couple of years ago ... hope he doesn't mind them getting a global audience here:


Hmmm... that seemed to work OK, though it is probably necessary to follow the link to the album to see the photos in all their full pixelated glory.

Quick Hupdate

Well, the company ekiden is just a week and a half away now. This involves a 5-k lap around the palace and the prospect of a top three finish for individual times for me. First prize is 10,000 yen (about A$100) in shopping vouchers, 2nd place is 5,000 yen worth. Three years ago I got first, but the last two years Mr Nakagawa has beaten me into 2nd place. I have been a bit late getting my ass into gear, but finally the last couple of weeks I have been gradually getting more motivated towards improving my condition for this race. I racked up 85 km two weeks ago and 75 km last week. A few lactate threshold and VO2 max workouts thrown in for good measure, but perhaps not enough upper aerobic miles. It is probably too little, too late I suspect. Last year Nakagawa-san ran more than 10 seconds faster than 18 minutes. So I have to get down into the low 18s to be even in with a remote chance (I have no idea of his relative change since last year).

I had an easy 10 km run yesterday morning, and then in the evening got out for a training run on the actual ekiden course with my team. We ran our own paces so I decided to give it a blat and see what I could come up with. What I came up with was 18:54. I don't know whether that's good or bad. It isn't a bad time for a training run, but then again, I pretty much kicked it in the guts. I'm not sure I can find another 50 seconds or a minute in there!

Anyway, with fatigued legs I did a 6k warmup in good company this evening before joining the Namban ladder intervals workout: 600 m, 800 m, 1000 m, 1200 m, 1000 m, 800 m, 600 m. My times were as follows: 2:07, 2:49, 3:35, 4:18, 3:35, 2:50, 2:00 ... not too bad at all really, especially hitting so close to the same times on the way back down as on the way up. That seven second improvement on the 2nd 600 was also encouraging. I did push very hard on the last one and was happy with the result. My left knee, groin and achilles are all complaining about it now though :-(

Hello!

Nothing too exciting going on, but at least I have an iota more motivation and energy this week ... just enough in fact to pop up this mid-week post.

That hamstring strain I mentioned that I picked up during the TELL 10k race was real enough, but not too serious. Rather than run on Tuesday morning I swam about 1500 m, the first as general laps and the next 500 as five repeats of 100 m at hard effort with a couple minutes rest. I got out for a run in the afternon with a work colleague, Ms. Uchida. Our company's annual ekiden taikai is coming up in a couple of weekends time. For training we do a lap of the Imperial Palace (5k) and I try to encourage her to run at a challenging, but not debilitating pace. The week before last she did it in 27:11, last night she brought it home in 26:51. Without a lot of other training in between, that represents decent improvement. For me it was just a nice relaxing leg turnover effort and showed that the hamstring was not too bad, but I'd still need to be careful with it this week.

Last night was the regular interval workout at the track. With the lovely, balmy late spring weather there was a big turnout. Club leader Bob decided we would do Yasso 800s -- a set of 10 x 800 m run in the same number of minutes & seconds as target marathon time in hours & minutes with a 400 m jog between repeats. I was not too keen on this workout, but the niggle meant that whatever we did I was going to have to back off the intensity anyway, so I joined a 3:15 group, and because of time constraints we only did eight. All repeats were pretty close to the mark. Here are our times, dropping off the "3:" minutes: 17.0, 14.8, 17.5, 14.8, 13.3, 14.6, 13.6, 15.0. Did you notice that last one? It took us eight tries, but we finally did one in 3:15.0!

I plan to run home tonight and back to work again tomorrow morning. If I have a decent run on Saturday and Sunday as well, that will get me close to another 70 or 80 km week. I guess that's a reasonable enough base mode to be in.

Inagi, TELL

Creeeeeaaak. That's the sound of the blog being opened. I'm still not all that upbeat and excited about my running at present, but I guess I have a little to report with two race efforts and logging 85-km for the past week. The races were Inagi Ekiden, a low-key affair (3 km per person), last Monday and the TELL charity race (I did the 10 km) yesterday (Saturday 5/5).

Last year my team won the Inagi ekiden mens masters category. This year we didn't have quite the same talent in the team. My 11:26 was a few seconds slower than last year. Everyone busted their balls, but we just weren't in the hunt for the prizes unfortunately. One thing that caught my eye was that Mr Keren Tryhard recorded a time only a few seconds slower than me. He has been gradually gnawing away at the difference between us over the past year, especially on the back of his herculean ironman training -- and that difference was once quite substantial. He is strong on hills and Inagi had a vicious little hill near the end. Still, the world was in it's natural order because, marginal though it was, my time was faster.

Well, that natural order came crashing down at the TELL (Tokyo English Lifeline) race yesterday. This photo tells the story Keren (black Namban singlet with yellow writing) ahead, me 20 m or so back in the shadow (both figuratively and literally in this instance).

I started the race 10 or 15 m adrift of Nambanners Keren, Stuart and Christian (the young Swiss guy I met at the start at the Shinjuku Half Marathon -- he has now become a regular Namban member). We all started too fast and the conditions were very warm ... perhaps 25 degrees. I can't remember if it was the first or second lap, but Stuart eventually faded more than I did and I passed him. I had Keren in sight the whole way, but sometimes the gap was pretty large. I worked really hard on the last couple of km, despite the pace getting more and more ugly. On the final hill I pulled back 10 or 15 m or so and may have been reeling him in until he heard someone call my name and that spurred him on to stay 20 or 30 m ahead to the finish. I suppose every dog has to have his day (the bastard!). No, just joking. We are mates and he thoroughly deserved his victory. I'm not sure exactly how many seconds ahead he was, but I ran a 39:24, which given my current condition I was pretty happy with. I think I strained my left hamstring though. Christian powered away to record a low 38 minute time. He has a lot of improvement left in him too, that boy.

After the race I went to an awesome homebrew party out in Chiba, but somehow managed to not get too under the weather. But I was afflicted enough that it was still a slow start to the day and I did not make it to Yoyogi Park. But once the fog lifted a bit I managed to get out for a steady 21 km to round out a reasonably solid 85k week.

New On-line Running Log

I started using an on-line log called Breaking the Tape. It has the advantage of being able to generate scripts to show various kinds of summaries of your accumulated data. An example of which is shown over there in the side bar. Does multi-sport workouts too, so might interest the triathletes.

My one point of discontent is that I emailed the owners to find out if there was a way of importing all my old data from Excel, after appropriate layout formatting of course, and so far haven't heard anything.

Edit: I wasn't sure if it would work, but I dropped some of the script (a script for generating a summary of the last three workouts) directly into the body of a post. It didn't work in preview mode, but did work after publishing ... as you can see below. Nice.

Edit: But having trouble customising the script ... caveat emptor

A 5k time trial

Considering how little I have been running since Arakawa Marathon (March 18) I think I did alright to record a 18:43 for the 5k time trial on Wednesday evening. But then again, it is the first time trial I have done in a long time, so I can't really gauge how good or bad it was compared to recent performances. I guess the most telling thing is that it is a fair way off my low 18:00 best form. But I can't even regard myself as in training for anything at the moment, so it was really just a state of the nation assessment. The weather is about to start warming up, so soon all heart rate and pace assessments are going to be shot to pieces anyway.

Also ran about 10 km on Tuesday morning and 11.5 km yesterday afternoon, mostly slow, but 5k at upper aerobic pace. I'm resting today. We have a long weekend coming up with Inagi Ekiden, only 3-km legs, on Monday. More of a social day out with the Namban gang than anything else. Though I was in the winning masters team last year, for which we received a nice bright-red Saucony long-sleeve top. We do not have quite the same class of team this year, but we will give it a shot.

Bass Instincts

After running yesterday, I did what my friend Gareth describes as a "Good Thing".

My son Kohta joined the (electric) guitar club at school some two or three months ago. He had to fight us a bit for the permission because he is already in the brass band club, and there is only so much a kid can fit into one life. One problem was he didn't have a guitar, nor any experience playing one, nor a parent that knows the first thing about it. The other kids in the club (all three of them) declared that what they really needed was a bass player. So Kohta was volunteered for that role. And he was keen. But unfortunately he didn't have a bass. Nor did he have especially sympathetic parents. We were a bit worried about several things: a) Would it just be a passing fancy? b) Would he be able to practice without disturbing the neighbours? c) Who would teach him? (the guitar club had no teacher) d) Wouldn't this cost us a fortune?

He located a second hand bass in a nearby trash and treasure. It was only 5000 yen (A$60?). Hmm, pretty cheap. But we were still not convinced due to reservations about quality of a 2nd hand machine and that he would still need an amp, strap, case, etc, none of which we knew much about. So we let it go, days went by, then weeks, and weeks turned into a couple of months. Still he kept raising the topic. I have been feeling symathetic to his cause for a few weeks, having been convinced of the strength of his motivation, and so we managed to convince the financial controller that we should invest a modest amount to give him the chance to try it. But still there were questions....

Then two things happened. Firstly, he told me a couple of days ago that the new headmaster has his own band and is going to teach the guitar club...AND, he can play/teach bass. That was one big obstacle out of the way...at least he would have every opportunity to learn, and it would be entirely up to him. The one remaining obstacle was the complete state of ignorance on the part of his parents when it comes to all things musical. And that was where Gareth came to the rescue. He has been learning electric guitar for the past couple of years, his 50th birthday present to himself. To cut the story short, he emailed me after the run yesterday to point me towards Rock Inn, a guitar shop in Shinjuku that sold starter bass sets for 20,000 yen (a bit over A$200). He then very kindly met us there later in the afternoon. And to cut this rapidly lengthening story even shorter, we ended up getting a slightly more up-market starter set for 25,000 yen: an Ibanez GSR320. It is a pretty nice machine (picture shows actual colour), and since that price includes a 10 watt amp, bag, strap, leads, tuner and assorted other bits and pieces, it felt like a bargain. It was one of those shopping experiences that really made you feel good. It certainly made Kohta happy and it was fun watching him pop the study DVD he bought into the player and get stuck into the practice as soon as we got home.

Could this be the beginning of the career of the first musical Lacey in existence?

A low-key week

I had a very funny old week of running last week. Or more to the point, very little running. Only Wednesday night and Sunday (today). But I managed close on 25k today.The lack of running on other days was de to a combination of low motivation, yuck weather, and feeling a little bit off-colour, esecially on Friday. I also squeezed in a swim on Tuesday night. So I suppose it wasnt all sloth.

One bit of good news is that I was able to patch back together most of my missing running data from a couple of different sources. I've lost some of the details, like 1-km splits from Arakawa and Tokyo, but I have the total distances and times of all runs, so at least my monthly and annual tallies are still in-tact. No luck with the device though, so that's a few passwords down the drain.

I hope to run a bit more often this week, so we shall see.

Grumble bum

Starting with the most important thing first: Good luck to everybody running marathons this week!! Scott and Yoshida-san in Nagano; Don, Satohi, Leng Leng, and Aya and Keith in Boston; Tesso, P Allen and a swag of other Aussies in Canberra, and I think there may be a wee preggers Scottish lass running a 10k in Canberra as well. And what is that bloody Clairie doing? The other preggers runner? Is she running something in Canberra? Cheer-squading? I dunno what, but I'm sure she'll be putting a smile on somebody's face, just like she did the other day.

Things have been pretty busy for me of late. Had a fair bit of work on and been taking on too many extra-curricular activities, not necessarily running related. Hence the low activity on Bloggus variegatus, as a certain half-pint harrier decided to remind me last night.

Running itself has been bumping along. I have not been forcing my training at all. I had a 17 km week followed by a 60 km week followed by a 49 km week...no runs longer than 10 to 12 km until last Sunday, when I ran 22 km with Satohi and Rie as Satohi's last major run before Boston. Wednesday week ago I ran a 6 x 1000 m interval workout with the Horde. Coughed and spluttered to a 3:49 on the first rep, then settled into a more business-like set ranging from 3:39 for no. 2 down to 3:31 for no. 6, but the rest around 3:35 to 3:36. I was pretty happy with that actually. Then last night we did the Namban mile (5:52 min for me) followed by a couple of 800s (2:52 and 2:49). After a little break we then (and this was my idea) ran four laps by jogging the curves and sprinting the straights. It was a good workout and quite a few people enjoyed the variation.

The grumble-bum title refers to two things mainly. 1) I have been hoping that the lower key approach to running would see the niggles in my left leg clear up. They haven't. I guess they are not as bad as they were, but it appears that nothing short of complete rest for God knows how long would fix them up. And since they don't really bother me that much, other than to act as a throttle on how hard I can train, I really don't want to stop cold turkey. So then it becomes a mental battle between just carrying on at a low-key level (and hoping they continue to improve) and actually ramping up a bit with a view to a couple of upcoming shorter races. Maybe I just have to push aside silly human pride and maintain the low-volume, low-intensity training and take poorer results in the races. But I certainly wasn't thinking that when I went out and ran 12 km at around 4:15-4:20/km pace tonight. Which brings me to grumble bum reason number 2) ...new paragraph needed...

Yesterday afternoon just before I went to the track I finished editing a 20-page scientific paper. I'd been working on it on my Creative MuVo TX FM, using it as a thumb drive. Not backing it up of course, I'm f$%%ing hopeless like that. When will I learn? Oh, I am foreshadowing what happened next. Yes, when I went to do a final read-through and send it to the client this morning, bloody device would not connect. The computer was saying "Device not formatted, shall we format it now?" NO!! Bastard, don't do that! Tried another computer, same. Checked the mfr forum on the Internet ... oh crap, there is no way around it except to re-format the device and reload firmware, which wipes all the data. So I spent the day completely re-editing the paper (and a shit of a paper it was, too). I finally made a slightly extended deadline. Now, you can shrug your shoulders and accept that, but then I remembered that I had been operating my running log off this device for the last couple of months. So I am going to lose a lot of data from that. I have a backup of it from a couple of months ago, but this is still going to muck up all my monthly and yearly tallies and so on. You'd think I'd learn because I lost quite a big chunk of the log when a hard disk crashed 18 months or so ago. Grrr...there were a couple of other things I lost, including a few important Internet banking passwords in my Password manager application. Dumbkopf, dumbkopf! So, that's why I am a grumble bum tonight and had to go for a hard run to try and work out a bit of aggro. Not sure if it worked. The several glasses of amber lager have helped a little though...oh well, life goes on I suppose. But if anybody has any clues as to things I might try to get at the data in my device, please let me know. I have not re-formatted it yet.

The chronicler of the seasons

I have linked to Shoji-san's blog before when he had a set of neat photos up. Well, it's cherry blossom time here, so I guess he must have taken some good pics. Oh yes, so he has! A number of them in our Yoyogi Park.

Struggling

Wow, this is one lazy, unmotivated runner's blog you are looking at right now. I ran a whopping 17 km the week after Arakawa. Somehow I racked up 60 km last week. But none of it had much quality or enthusiasm about it. Just a couple of commutes to and from work, bit of this, bit of that. No long run. And quite a bit of beer drinking in between. Generally I am happy as long as my weight is under 74 kg. This morning I jumped on the scales and it was ...76!! So I am definitely having a bit of a down period. I probably need it. Or that's what I keep telling myself anyway.

Today is Tuesday. I was quite prepared to do my regular early Tuesday run this morning, but a damn deadline got in the way, keeping up until 1:30 in the morning and then had to get up at 7:30 and get straight back on the job to get it done by 10:00. Grrr...

So tonight I went to the gym. My company bought some tickets and I use one every now and then. Having both swim-wear and gym-wear on board I decided as I was walking over there that I would do a "triathlon". So I swam a kilometer in 19 minutes (first time I've swum proper laps in several years, so I was reasonably pleased with that) and then had a slow transition to the "bike" upstairs in the studio. I did 15 km on the spinnie thingie in about 25 minutes. Does that sound right? I think there might have been a bit of extra time and distance cooling down a bit. Then I jumped on a treadmill and did 6 km. Man, those treadmills are weird things. Five minutes per km (12 km/h) feels like some kind of crazy, dangerous speed freak thing ... gunna get thrown off any minute ... but then you realize that the breathing is very comfortable, so, oh yeah, I guess it isn't so fast after all. I ended up getting the thing up to 14 km/h for five or ten minutes and finally 14.5 km/h for the last half a k and then a bit of a cool down. I definitely need to learn how to use the dang things properly.

So, that's my first, and maybe last, triathlon.

I have also been getting a bit behind with blog reading. Generally I am reading, but not finding much time to comment. So apologies me hearties. Bloody Pharyngula keeps backing up ... I can't believe he can churn out 6 to 10 blog posts a day as well as be a high-powered uni professor fighting the good fight. The Chimpanzee Refuge gets the better of me at times too. Bloody Kevin Beck .. should stop haranguing fundies and get out running more ;-) ... plus I've added to me burden by subscribing to half a dozen beer blogs (as well as starting my own, which is stuttering like this one just now). But certainly life is not what I would call empty...

Me & Eric

I have taken things very easily since Arakawa. I recovered very quickly actually and could have run Wednesday, but didn't do anything until an easy 5k on Thursday night. The next run I had was yesterday morning (Saturday). And what a run it was!

My friend Gareth gets massages at Route Vigor, which also boasts as one of its regular customers the Kenyan three-time Olympian (bronze at Atlanta, silver at Sydney & 7th at Athens), Eric Wainaina*. Yesterday they organised a low-key run for a few customers with Eric around the Imperial Palace. Gareth was helping me to pick up a replacement beer fridge yesterday morning, so although I was a non-customer, aka a ring-in or hanger-on, I also went along to join the run with Eric. (* The linked article is a bit old and out of date -- he now works at a training gym and trains mostly at the Imperial Palace).

The crowd was maybe 15-strong with runners of levels ranging from kids to semi-serious social joggers, and then three of us from Namban Rengo. We chatted with Eric a little before the run and found him to be very friendly and personable. When we got underway we found ourselves running along with Eric and chatted continuously as we moved at a very easy pace. A lot of it was small talk and about life and work and living in Japan and so on (he has been here since he was 18 and is now 34). But I also asked him a couple of questions that I am sure will interest some of my readers:
Me: Do you train with a heart rate monitor?
EW: Yes.
Me: Do you ever race with a heart rate monitor?
EW: Yes.
Me: (Surprised) Oh, really, what percent of maximum do you run the first half of a marathon?
EW: 61%
Me: (jaw dragging along the road) 61%?!
EW: Yes.
Gareth: And then you race?
EW: Yes.

Well, I found that staggering, and I am still not 100% certain that he didn't misunderstand my question, but I think it would be hard to mistake it for, "What heart rate do you do your recovery runs at?" Anyway, if true, it made me realise just how supremely conditioned these elite marathoners are, and how much slower I would need to run to be able to run the marathon at a comparative level of effort. (By the way, Eric runs twice a day for a total of about 30 km/day).

After the first lap and waiting for all the Route Vigor runners to come in and be congratulated, Gareth and I had to run back to the top of the course to where the car was parked. Eric was keen for another lap, so joined by another Nambanner, Philippe, who had stumbled upon us, we ran the long way around to accompany Eric to our hop off point. Eric was effortlessly gradually dragging us along at a progressively faster pace. Gareth dropped off the back and I was working pretty hard with my heart rate was up well over 80% of maximum and soon at 161 (87%). Philippe was hanging in there as well, but also doing it hard. I guess we were getting up towards 4:00/km and I was able to gasp out, "So Eric, does this pace still feel like jogging for you?"
"Oh yes." He nonchalently replied. When I train it is more like this, and he shot off like a startled rabbit, yet his form didn't change at all. Just beautiful to watch.

When we stopped to bid farewell, I took consolation from the fact that he had a small bead of perspiration on his temple. I guess the heavy tracksuit he was wearing and mild weather might have contributed to that.

Eric is currently aiming for selection in Kenya's marathon team for the World Championships in Osaka later this year. He had a great performance at Honolulu in December, but has had to miss the upcoming Nagano Marathon due to a niggling knee injury. That would have been his target qualifying race, so now his fate rests with the Kenyan Athletic Federation. And with the depth of running talent coming through, and his age perhaps being against him, selection is far from a certainty. Of course, all of us who met Eric yesterday were so impressed by his generosity and friendliness that we wish him all the very best of luck with selection. I cant wait to see him competing at Osaka and shouting, "Go Eric!!" while turning to whoever is beside me and saying, "That's Eric Wainaina. We train together at the Imperial Palace."

Arakawa Marathon

Arakawa Marathon is a little run of 21.1 km south along the banks of the Ara kawa (river), turn around and run 21.1 km back. It is a very wide open flood plain and if there is ever any wind about, you can be sure you will find it at Arakawa. So it was with some trepidation that I monitored the weather forecast for today starting about six days ago. It first said, fine, cool (1-9 degrees C), and wind of 26 km/h. Yikes, that's strong! About three days ago the wind prediction was for 6 km/h. Yippeee!! But by yesterday it sprang back up to around 20 km/h. Bugger! The whistling around the windows of our apartment last night confirmed that we could look forward to a challenging race.

Well, the one thing the forecast got right was that that it was fine and sunny and cool (if not cold). But for large sections of the course the wind was more like 30 km/h. It was behind us for the first 21.1 km and in our face for the second. After I turned around I thought about that Eric Bogle song as I felt like it was trying to blow me right back to Australia.

In the end I was happy with my race. I ran pretty much to plan and didn't let myself go too fast when the wind was at my back. Although I was going to run 4:20+ in the first half, the tailwind made it very easy to just cruise along at 4:15-4:20/km. So that's what I did, and resisted all temptations to "try and pick up a few minutes". I consciously decided to try and hold something in reserve to deal with the wind. And that seemed to pay off to some extent. After the turn, on tiring legs, I slowed of course, and my legs fatigued just as much as in faster marathons, but I managed to hold a pace of under 4:40, and many splits of under 4:30, until 33 km. Then it was more like 4:4o to 4:50 for most of the next 9 km. I felt quite calm and accepting of this and was actually feeling reasonably strong. I thought that without the wind I could have easily been holding sub 4:20/km pace.

In the last 5 km I realized that the only realistic goal was to come in with a net time under 3:10. I should add the wind had dropped off a bit by this time, but of course it had done a job on the legs by then. I was still happy enough with the way I was moving, though, and was passing heaps of people and rarely getting passed.

At the one km to go marker my watch said 3:05:34...I'd have to run a 4:26 or better final km to get under 3:10. Since I'd been moving along at about 4:50/km at that stage, I almost gave it up as lost, but quickly decided, well, it is not really out of the question. It is just like running one hard interval on the track, dig in and see what you can do. So dig in I did and gradually fought through my leg pain to get some form back and pull out a 4:28 for the last km and 4:05 per km for the last 200 m to squeeze out a 3:09:54 (net time, net time!). Cheer squad Jaynie at the end said I looked like I was really strong in that last couple hundred meters. Little did she know I was a shot duck! I really paid later for that hard finish too, with lots and lots of cramping in my calves and feet.

Despite it being my slowest marathon in seven outings, net or gross, I am actually quite happy with the result under the conditions.

Satohi went extremely well. She has set very high goals for herself and finds it dificult to feel satisfied when she doesn't meet them. This marathon she would have really liked to have gone under 3:20 and has ultimate designs on a 3:15:xx (or better), though her standing PB was about 3:28. Despite the nasty wind, she ran 3:25:xx to lower her PB by 2 minutes. She would have surely run under 3:20 if it hadn't been for the wind. So that's a real shame, but even the fact she PB'd was quite extraordinary under the circumstances (which includes that she has struggled for the last couple of weeks with a sore ankle). Like all of us she suffered into the wind, but fought hard and had far more even splits than the rest of us in the race. Otsukaresama Satohi-san!