Me!

Me!
After the Brighton Marathon 2010

Friday 31 July 2009

I didn't run last night

The weather was nasty and I'm in full wimp mode.

Saturday 25 July 2009

10k. Done.

Not yesterday. I couldn't be bothered. And the reason I couldn't be bothered contributed to the pain of today's experience.

Not that anyone in the World but me would need to be told this, but curry and half a bottle of vodka may be fun at the time, but are not the ideal menu selection the night before attempting the longest run you've done in over a year. In my defence, I had a bit of a stressful day, both work-wise and in seeing the village next door to my parents' home in Spain burning uncontrollably on the News. Their home phone line was not working and I couldn't get hold of them mobilely. They did turn up, safe and sound. Thank bloody god.

Anyway, glorious sunshine and, once I'd made it down to the Hove seafront, a nice cooling breeze.

57:41 was the time, which is not bad at all considering my preparation technique!

A day in front of the telly having fun with Merlin and Excel beckons. F1 qualifying (how sexy is Heikki Kovalainen!?!) and London Athletics. Nice.

Friday 24 July 2009

Pause for thought

I got up at 6.30 fully intending to go out and attempt a 10k. I haven't been that far for a long, long time. But then the weather went all British Summery, so I've postponed that. This evening, if I can be bothered by then.

Anyway, this gave me some flopping on the sofa with coffee and a book time. I'm reading Jeremy Clarkson. I know I should object to his very existence, but I'm sorry, I think he's intelligent and very funny and you can't spend your life taking things personally, right? I also believe he's identified some particular traits that others, including Catherine Tate, have gone on to make a lot of money by caricaturing.

Anyway, I'm reproducing below his column from The Times, Sunday 15 April 2007. And by attributing it, I'm taking no credit for the bits I agree with and no responsibility for the bits I don't. If you know me, I hope you'll know which is (are?) which.

Jeremy's title for the article was 'What the hell are we saying here?'. I'd like to subtitle it with 'And does it need saying?'. Over to Jeremy.

A few weeks ago I became a businessman, which means I've started going to meetings. Or, as they should be known, 'places where nothing happens and nothing gets done'.

Here's how they go. Each of the people round the table expresses their opinion on a particular subject, and each of these opinions is completely different. Then, after you've drunk a cup of what might be coffee, but could be oxtail soup, a biggish woman - and it's always a woman - says: 'Well, we're outside the box here with a new kind of hybrid venture and we can't know what the result will be until we've run the flag up the flagpole and seen which way the wind's blowing.'

Plainly, you want to argue with this, but as you draw breath to speak you realise that what she just said didn't make any sense. And anyway, she hasn't finished.

'It's mission critical that we use blue-sky thinking and that we're proactive, not reactive, if we're to come up with a ballpark figure that we can bring to the table.'

Again, you raise a finger to make a point. But you don't know what that point might be, so you pour yourself another cup of winter-warming coffee broth, help yourself to another triangular tuna and cucumber sandwich and wait for the pastry-faced woman in culottes to finish.

'We must maintain a client focus so that we can incentivise the team and monetise the deliverables, and only then can we take it to the next level.'

You look round the table at all the old hands, the sort of people who whip out their laptops every time they're at an airportand know what a Wi-Fi looks like, and they're all nodding sagely, so you stop yourself from actually saying: 'I'm sorry but what the hell are you on about?'

Later on in the day, you ring the person who called the meeting and in less than a minute decide on a course of action. And then, when you get home, you wonder why it was necessary to have the meeting at all. So you can listen to a farmyard animal in a power suit turning nouns into verbs and talking rubbish for half an hour to mask the fact she hasn't got a single cohesive thought in her head.

To get round this problem, a friend and I developed a new scheme to make meetings more interesting. We would give each other a band as we walked through the door and then we'd compete to see how many of their song titles we could lob into the conversation without anyone noticing.

That's why, last week, I actually said: 'Every breath you take is like an invisible sun. We are spirits in a material world, or, as they say in France, Outlandos d'Amour.' And do you know what? Nobody batted an eyelid.

And nor did anyone cotton on when my friend replied by saying: 'We're on top of the world looking down on creation, and we are calling occupants of interplanetary craft.'

Eventually, though, even this became wearisome so I went on holiday, but even in the Caribbean there was no escape. A fax arrived from my new business colleagues advising me that there was to be a conference call at 2 p.m. Barbados time between people in Los Angeles, Aspen, London and Cairo.

I've never felt so important in my life. Me? On a conference call? Spanning the globe? Wow. I was so excited that I completely forgot about it until 1.55 p.m., by which time I was very drunk, and on a sailing boat.

No matter, I dialled the number, entered the security pin I'd been given and was asked to state my name so I could be introduced. 'Beep' went the phone, and then on came an electronic voice to say: 'Captain Jack Sparrow has joined the conversation.'

Conference calls are great. They're exactly like a normal meeting in that nothing happens and nothing gets done and everyone talks rubbish, but you don't have to sit there remembering not to fall asleep or what Culture Club did after 'Karma Chameleon'.

You can just pour yourself another rum punch and look out of the porthole. At one point, when the boat went about, or whatever it is sailing boats do when they turn round, I fell off my chair, dropped the phone and couldn't find it for five minutes, and when I finally rejoined the conversation nobody even noticed I'd been away.

Unfortunately, one of the decisions made in a follow-up phone call to the man who'd hosted the conference chat was that we'd have to go to Los Angeles.

Hollywood, America. And have meetings there, face to face with the people we hadn't been talking about because they were in the box and we were outside it, at the top of a flagpole seeing which way the wind was blowing.

Gulp. American business meetings. That'd be scary. A whole new raft of power women and even more white-collar nonsense. I'd better get sober.

Strangely, however, the Americans have got meetngs down to a fine art, which is probably why they have NASA and Microsoft and we have Betty's tea shoppe. You walk in and the receptionist asks if you'd like some 'wadder or something'. You are then ushered into a conference room where you say your piece, and when you've finished, their top man stands up, thanks you for coming and leaves.

They've realised that the meeting is useless for getting anything done, so they listen'n'go. And move straight to the follow-up phone call where the decisions are made.

I therefore have a new rule. If I go to a meeting, only I am allowed to speak. And then something happens.

Thursday 23 July 2009

Wednesday 22 July 2009

Could I have got the name for this blog more wrong?

I haven't cycled, or run, for a while. Flu scare at the end of last week, nasty windy wetness so far this week and, although the sun was shining this morning, I've been up most of the night with food poisoning, effectively meaning I got 0 calories in me yesterday.

I have, though, created a detailed training plan for the marathon, which has shown that I can get through the full programme twice if I start in mid-September. That makes anything I do now definitively optional, so I'm not feeling bad about a little break.

Maybe tomorrow morning?

Saturday 18 July 2009

Viruses and paranoia

Had horrible problems yesterday which resulted in an early exit from the office and a nasty afternoon spent sweating, aching and sneezing at home.

This morning, the runny nose is still with me, but the fever appears to have gone, replaced by stomach trouble. I'm fairly confident now I don't have the dreaded you now what, but am equally sure I won't get any exercise done - at least not today.

Thursday 16 July 2009

Feeling deeply virtuous

Had a BIG meeting in our London office today, which scuppered the scheduled morning run - I've been doing them on a Friday because I've been working from home, but the silver dream machine (I love my MacBook) is not quite configured right to make that possible just now. So it's into the office for me on Fridays for the foreseeable. Heigh ho.

Anyway, escaped and travelled back down to Brighton a bit early. I have noticed a strange correlation between the amount of work I manage to get done and the number of people in the office - an inverse relationship, obviously. So I went for a run when I got home.

It went very well indeed. 6.7k in 38 minutes. 500m more than last time, 5 minutes quicker. This clearly indicates that vodka is good for you and early morning activity is just plain wrong.

And now I'm beavering away, clearing my inbox faster than ever before because everyone else from work is logged off and there's nobody to contradict me. I guess I have that to look forward to in the morning. Mood matching the weather. It's been a good day.

Tuesday 14 July 2009

Another drizzly run

Up at 6, a quick coffee and off I went.

Definitively avoiding hills wherever possible for now. I encounter a couple of minor ones and I think it's my technique that screws me, but I seem to lean forward and compress my diaphragm, which basically means I don't breathe at all when I'm running uphill. I have a feeling this is not ideal.

Frightened the occasional dogwalker this morning - I still maintain that nobody looks good in lycra, and even wearing another layer on top I'm a particularly disturbing vision at 6.15 in the morning. Small dogs I can outrun and large ones tend to head for the hills (figuratively, although I obviously wouldn't be going in that direction, so it wouldn't be a bad move it it was literal, either!), so it's not too bad.

6.2 k in 34 minutes. Pacing not bad at all. I need to sit down with the 16 week programme - which I plan to do twice - and work out when I need to start.

Monday 13 July 2009

Did absolutely nanty yesterday

The sun was out, yes. But what on Earth was that wind about?

It really can't seem to make up its mind this morning at all, can it? Patches of blue sky, but loads of black cloud. Quite chilly and fresh, but very humid.

Cycling again today. I'm sticking in lowish gears, cos it's all about weight loss and CV stamina for the next few months. It seems to be accepted that we'll be wearing shorts in the office at the moment, too, so I'm not wearing the traditional padded gusset, instead cycling in what I'm going to wear all day but changing my top when I arrive. There are limits, after all.

There are so many appropriate songs about my feelings towards Mondays lately, but I'll let you pick your own favourite. The one that's best fit for me this morning is top right.

Saturday 11 July 2009

How I love the rain

Did the usual run to Tescos this morning. I think there must have been a Saga tour or something. Full of old people stopping dead with no warning, turning their trolleys sideways and blocking entire aisles and generally being hopeless and tiresome.

I don't know if it's because I'm reading a Jeremy Clarkson book, but I completely lost the ability to be polite to...anyone...old people, slags with uncontrollable multiple brats, you know the types. I resorted to running over the children (no great loss to society, in fact I may have saved us all a few bob) and bashing into everyone else's ankles shouting, 'Excuse me, non-pointless-young-person-with-a-continuing-contribution-to-make coming through!' And I let down the tyres on the old gits' coach. Well, I didn't, but I bloody well would have had there been one.

Blood was still a bit boily when I got home, so I decided to release some tension with a run. I've been doing, just in case you've managed to miss previous instalments, the same course for a while now, trying to shave time off. I decided this time to increase the distance and see how that went.

The rain is actually really great to train in, as long as it's not too windy, and today's conditions suited me quite nicely. Did 7.5 k in 42 minutes, which is nothing to write home about but also nothing to panic about, given that I've got 9 months until the marathon.

And a body update, for anyone interested. There's definite gluteal tautness and upliftage developing, but persistent abdominal and mammary porridgeyness.

Also, I still think my nose is too big, my top lip's too thin and I have a weak chin.

Friday 10 July 2009

Another lovely a.m. in Brighton

The sun's back! Although, apparently, not for long.

Cycling today. A lovely little troll along the plage, soleil sparkling on the briny.

Thursday 9 July 2009

Still moving about a lot

I'm still in EITHER run OR cycle mode and this morning running won.

I'm still sticking to the same course for a while. It's an easy way to judge earlier on whether or not I'm getting better.

And I am! Another 7 seconds knocked of the previous time. Fairly piffling, but an improvement nevertheless. And the cycling seems to be helping stretch out my muscles, as my thighs are no longer giving me gyp, whether I spend 30 minutes stretching or not.

Still definitely no visible change in weight. Mind you, I've only really been going for 2 weeks. So impatient, you see. If people will invite me to weddings, they should expect me to worry more about my weight than theirs. I mean, they have met me, right?

Onwards and upwards.

Wednesday 8 July 2009

Don't give up on Summer just yet!

Yesterday. Ooooh, no thankyou very much. My garden seemed to enjoy it, but I didn't and nor did my cat.

Today's much more like it. Got up early enough to go for a run, but decided instead to cycle to work. I've tried before doing both on the same day and it simply doesn't work. Or rather, it didn't when I was smoking like a chimney. May be worth a try at some point, I suppose. Especially if I'm ever going to do a triathlon, which I really quite fancy.

I don't own a pair of scales (I feel the same about them as I do about mirrors, they're bastards), but I do have a Wii Fit. I may dare a quick weigh-in and yogafest and try to build that back into my routine to monitor whether all this tedious moving about is having any effect.

Quite flatteringly, a lot of colleagues who've signed up for Brighton next year as their first marathon are coming to me for advice. They've all seen the picture of me on the London course with a beer and a cigarette in 2005 and they still come to me. Talk about laugh.

Anyway, on with the work thing now.

Sunday 5 July 2009

Someone else's turn

No running or cycling for me today, although I've walked rather a long way.

My sister, however, with a couple of friends, completed the 5km Race for Life course for Cancer Research this afternoon. Couldn't be prouder. It was damned hot, too, so extra special congratulations due. I enjoyed watching for once! :-)

Photos on Facebook and Video on YouTube shortly.

Saturday 4 July 2009

How very British of me

Talking about the weather again. Anyway, it clearly rained overnight, but that doesn't seem to have done much to reduce the humidity or cool things down. It's absolutely mingin', innit.

Went running anyway. No direct sun, as it's so cloudy, but really hot anyway. Managed to be organised enough to take a drink with me. Drinking on the run is a lot harder than I remember and definitely something I'm going to have to start practicing again. Is that an embarrassing confession I've just made, or a helpful hint for novices if any stumble across this site? Whatever.

I did exactly the same course as yesterday, 3.25 miles, but finished it 27 seconds more quickly than yesterday. All after the usual Friday night curry and 'a drink'. Can't be bad. And it's actually the first run since I restarted where I felt like a runner - the technique, breathing, coordination and all that felt right. Fingers crossed I can keep it up.

Time for work now. Waiting for the Wimbledon ladies' final, but not with as much anticipation as I'd hoped - Williams v Williams AGAIN. I have nothing against them, but when I watch them it always feels like the really amazing shots are more by luck than judgement and it winds me up that their opponents seem to psych themselves out. Hey ho.

Friday 3 July 2009

And now, the weather

Can't remember exactly what the forecast said yesterday evening. But I'm fairly sure it didn't, there are many reasons why it couldn't and I'm kinda glad it wouldn't and never will say 'Mostly moist'.

Meteorologically and sudoriferously accurate, nevertheless.

Running. Done it. Innit.

Wednesday 1 July 2009

Cycled again

It's really hot and that's making running quite unattractive. The cycling to work and back is deeply lovely, though. It's before it gets too hot in the morning and in the evening it's just starting to cool down.

I may take my camera with me one day, if I remember. Which isn't all that likely, I confess.

Am going to try to cycle 3 times a week and run 3 times a week until I launch into the marathon preparations. Perhaps I'll end up with a waist again at sme point? At the very least some of my current wardrobe (unchanged in many, many years) might start to fit again.

It's rehydrating time. Ciao e buona serata!