Evil stuff – Page 2 – Not a Jogger

Birthday present?

On Thursday I was 36. Hard to believe, what with my youthful good looks and poorly dyed hair, but it is true. I can’t say I’m a fan of the inexorable march of time, but I still love birthdays.

When I was young, my parents used to plant presents at the foot of our beds to surprise us in the morning. Now that I’m older, and a little bit taller, this might result in smashing, so Mr N waited until I had drunk a cup of tea before breaking out the swag. It was a good haul – this is what comes of circulating a list in advance.

Terminally sensible, I took the day off and worked out a day of lovely things to take my mind off the ticking clock. It included a run, of course. Sadly I wasn’t in charge of the training programme and its birthday present to me was “tempo hills”.

Tempo hills are like regular hills designed by Satan. In a regular hill session, at the top you jog gasping back down like a deflated balloon slowly filling with air. In a tempo hill session you get to the top, turn right back around and run down fast, not pausing to recover your breath.

I demand a refund.

Morning Gloom

Autumn is upon us. I ran 5 miles to Muswell Hill and back in the dark this morning.

Darkness pervaded the run in more ways than one: I forgot my watch; and I was listening to the BBC’s dramatisation of Life and Fate – the episode about the Holocaust. Returning to the flat, I felt a wave of relief. The clock was ticking on the wall, the sun was rising and the Today programme was reporting on Afghanistan, not Stalingrad.

I wouldn’t recommend running alone through dark streets listening to the sound of Eichmann eating lunch with a colleague in their freshly constructed gas chamber. I suppose there is no appropriate time to listen to this story, and that the important thing is that I listened at all, but I felt bad that it was the soundtrack to my leisure pursuit.

Short Circuits

This week is billed on my training plan as ‘recovery week’. Apparently recovery begins with a killer session of 8 x 400m at mile pace (1600m pace, for fans of consistency).

Hmm.

I found this session much harder than the longer, slower intervals of previous weeks. I managed 30 seconds of each set before praying for it to be over. I don’t think I was going too fast, I just don’t think I can run fast over short distances. My 10k time is nowhere near as quick, relatively speaking, as my half-marathon one and never has been.

Sitting here on my sofa writing this at 10pm, three hours after finishing my run, my face is still hot and I feel a bit sick. I hope this is doing me some good in the long term, because the short term effects are not fun.

On the positive side, I discovered that the Emirates stadium is a perfect place to run circuits, and the lights of the Hornsey Road were a welcome sight on the way back home.

On repeatedly running up hills at 6.30am

It’s insane, basically.

Several commuters travelling down Muswell Hill this morning may have reported a woman acting suspiciously between 6.45am and 7.03am on the pavement leading from the Victoria Stakes pub to the junction of Cascade Avenue.

The woman, who was wearing a white t-shirt and grey flappy shorts, appeared to be racing up the hill repeatedly, despite showing obvious and distressing signs of pain.

“I was worried for my kids”, Olivia Colney-Hatch (39) might have told police, “We were stuck at the lights for 10 minutes and they were forced to watch this crazy woman hurting herself for no reason. I locked the doors. It was frightening.” Mark Fortismere (23) was also concerned, “Ladies should look pretty, but she was all red-faced and sweaty. It was rank.”

Death by Intervals

I keep my promises.

I’ve signed up for another Regent’s Park 10k and yesterday I started a new training schedule.

It was hard to find a free 10k training plan on the web that wasn’t aimed at beginners. I know enough about running to know what works for me, but not enough to know how to combine sessions to make me faster. I want to run about 30 miles a week and include intervals, tempo, hills and long runs. After a dismissal-worthy amount of googling at work, I found a plan. It wasn’t in a good format so I made a spreadsheet:

10k training plan – 8 weeks

It looks hard, but not mountainously so. I have no idea whether it will work. My scientific conclusion is that it’s worth a try.

The first session, last night, was an interval session of 4×1600 at 10k pace. I measured out a loop of 2 x 2 miles with 1/2 mile recovery gaps in between and went round it twice. It was not fun. I re-discovered that the pace at which I think I could run 10k, is not actually the pace at which I can run 10k. I did the miles (or 1600 metres if we are being consistent) in 7minutes 15 seconds each, other than the final one which took some time longer*. I have run a half-marathon at that pace, but yesterday I could barely manage four individual miles. I have some way to go with this plan.

*I have no idea how much longer. How much longer do you have?

Crackpots

“it’s not much of a hill”, my mum said, directing us over the Swale and straight up a gully to Crackpot. To walk, maybe not. To run, it was a killer: 100 metres up in 500 metres. I walked twice, at the steepest point and again at the top. Mr N did not. The man has calves of steel.

The hill was only 10 minutes in to the run and we spent the remaining 30 recovering. In the warm glow of hindsight, I enjoyed it. At the time, not so much. Running up these hills makes me feel like a novice. My heart is pounding, the lactic acid in my muscles is writing cheques my lungs can’t cash. If I don’t stop, I am sure I’ll be sick. Mr N feels none of these things. For him it’s purely a mental struggle.

Last run tomorrow and we might brave the Vale of Dead Rabbits again. I’m not crackers enough for another shot at the Crackpot.

There was a young lady who swallowed a fly…

…or more precisely, two flies. I don’t know why she swallowed two flies, perhaps it’s because once was not enough and the coughing fit induced by the first one was so much fun that she ran for the next 8 miles with her jaw hanging open just hoping for another throat buzz.

Yeuch. In addition to ingesting winged beasts, I have been running twice since returning from Paris: a gentle 5 miler on Friday afternoon and a stiff 10 yesterday morning.

I think a few days off running was a good thing, though I did walk down every Rue in Paris so they weren’t really rest days. I didn’t miss it at all, it was hot and there weren’t many runners on the streets. It seems that Parisiennes get their exercise by smoking and walking their tiny dogs, with an occasional trip on a scooter.

I’m not sure where I would have gone to run – there was a man in the Luxembourg gardens who looked like he was on lap 3 of 45. Give me Regent’s Park any day. Everything’s bigger there: the dogs, the trees, the love handles. There isn’t an actual palace though, I’ll give you that Paris.

Cretins

It’s Wimbledon time, and therefore the season to get disproportionately annoyed at other people. My Dad likes to shout “Cretins! Morons!”, and “Peabrains!”, at the television whenever the audience yell “Come on Tim!” just before the player is about to serve . According to Pa Notajogger, audience participation in sport should be limited to polite applause. Apart from when Leeds Utd are losing, of course, at which point it is mandatory to hurl insults in a broad Yorkshire accent you haven’t used for 40 years.

Yesterday evening I experienced some unwanted audience participation of my own and I rather wished my Dad had been there to voice his opinion.

It was time for the 5k Challenge III so, although I was very tired, hot and really didn’t want to, I planned out a 5k outdoor route and attempted to run it as fast as I could. The route wasn’t ideal: there were roads to cross, people to get stuck behind and hills to run up and down. It was also a warm evening and I was mildly dehydrated. Enough of the excuses. Two kilometres in it was going badly but I was holding on. At the next upward stretch I ran past the open door of a betting shop, which pumped out a blast of cold stale air, along with a thickset man who started running close beside me up the slope, shouting words into my face.

I don’t know what he was saying – I had headphones in and was staring straight ahead – but it was something like, “Come on, run faster, even I can beat you!”. He was laughing like a drain. People have done this to me before, but usually the cretin pretends to run for two seconds but then gives up, but this moron kept on running, and he was faster than me. Automatically, my legs speeded up, ‘I can beat this peabrain!’, my body said. Then my mind kicked in and countered, ‘I will not alter my running plan for this loser’. I slowed down and the guy threw his arms into the air in a victory gesture, cheering.

Rounding the corner away from him, I slowed to a jog to catch my breath. At 4km I slowed to a walk for 10 seconds. I left the watch going and finished the 5k in 21 minutes, 25 seconds. Not too far from my treadmill time if you take into account the slowing and walking, but you can’t do that. The time I finished it in is the time it took. If I hadn’t slowed down to walk I would have slowed down in general.

The gym isn’t real life and the treadmill isn’t real running. Real running comes with other people.

5k Challenge II

I meant to run my 5k challenge outside last night, but ended up in the gym again out of laziness. I know it will be harder to run the 5k in the real outdoor world and I’m scared I won’t be able to push myself hard enough. I have to try, though, so next week I absolutely definitely will do it. Probably.

On a positive note, after 20 minutes on the cross-trainer, I managed to knock a whole 5 seconds off last week’s 5k time, and finished it in 20 minutes, 5 seconds. I felt like a jockey flogging a racehorse going flat out for the last three minutes, but I didn’t slow down. In fact, this time I started at 13.5 km/h and worked up to 16km/h, which was fairly murderous. I would much rather have run the whole thing at 15km/h, but that would not have been possible. On a treadmill the monotony would have killed me.

I must try this outside, I need to be able to gauge my speed. Running on a treadmill is not going to help me run faster in a 10k race. I will absolutely definitely run outside next week. Definitely!

5k Challenge

I came out of the office to an Edward Hopper summer’s evening. Waiting for the bus, several runners passed, throwing sharp blue shadows onto the gold pavement. I snapped one’s departing calves, enviously, knowing I was headed underground to my gym.

It’s been a few weeks since I did any training other than running. From experience I know that’s the swift way to injury so I’m going to try to go twice a week from now on. I also want to test out my 5k theory – that running a hard 5k every week will speed up my 10k time.

I know it was only on the treadmill, but I ran the 5k in 20 minutes, 10 seconds. I don’t know if I could run that on the road, but that time must indicate I could break 43 minutes over 10k.