Category: Photos

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Flat calm greyday

It was back down to my parents house in Woodingdean this morning for another long road run, though there wasn’t as much bounce in my step as last week.

Maybe this had something to do with the weather, which was flat grey and though not quite as cold as last Sunday, still very chilly indeed.  As I ran down the Falmer Road, I was transported back to a very hot and sunny day in the early seventies.

Do you remember those small, dense rubber balls that were popular at the time… the ones that were super-bouncy?  I was walking back to school after going home for lunch and I was about to cross the road by the petrol station when I dropped the ball I was carrying.

I chased it as it rolled down the gutter, but I was not nimble enough.  Every time I got ahead and reached out, it snuck away, eluding my grasp and carried on rolling.  It got all the way down around the corner, virtually a quarter of a mile away, before I finally closed my hand around it.  I might have got it sooner but I was acutely aware of the traffic on the road.

It was the day of the annual School summer gala and all the children had assembled in the playground surrounded by parents, each class ready to perform some musical oddity or other.  Having run down the road and hurriedly staggered back up again I was hot, late and out of breath.  I seem to recall that Mr Matthews substituted the recorder that I had been due to play with by a triangle, much to my chagrin.

Today I stretched out my pace lazily down the hill and on down to Rottingdean, turning right for Brighton.  Although the sky was flat grey, the view out onto the sea was gorgeous, with the sun occasionally breaking through the mat of cloud to bring some welcome contrast.

I ran on and it occurred to me that the myriad runners I passed (mostly going the other way) were a most insular, surly, antisocial bunch.  I make a real point of acknowledging each runner I pass with a smile or a grin, a wave of the hand, or a breathy hey or good morning.  What I got back, in the main, was a blank stare, as if I had just violated some sacred rule forbidding brevity or camaraderie.

Fortunately, enough people reacted positively to my greeting, mostly runners but with the odd carefully-chosen cyclist, walker or older couple, for me to know it was not just because I look like some madman… although I realise that I do!

After many such interactions I reached the Palace pier at 52 minutes and the Peace Memorial, just the other side of what is left of the West Pier, at the one hour mark.  This works out to 7.25 miles.

Here I turned around and started to run back again and it was immediately apparent that those runners who I now passed for the second time were far more inclined to open up and return my smile or wave.

We’re all out there in the fresh air with our distinctive Lycra running gear, pitting ourselves against the landscape, the weather and our goals.  For whatever crazy, personal reason we have, we share the same passion, at least to some measure.  Why can’t we celebrate the pain and the gain by hailing the other runners that we pass… call me old-fashioned, but surely we are far the richer for these tiny nods of socialisation, indicative of a more respectful, cohesive society.

I ran along Madeira Drive and up on to the top again past the Marina, all the while thinking that it was far easier last week when I had Nikki for company.  The view was still great though.

The outside of my right thigh had been painful, to some extent, for most of the run although up until Rottingdean I had been fairly successful in zoning it out.  But the hill that is the Falmer Road brought it right back front of mind.  I ran with the pain however, rather than stopping, knowing that I would only be taking longer to get back.  I was not in the mood to run to the top of the village though, instead running only as far as the Downs Hotel.

Alas, I now realise that this meant that I did not quite reach my goal for the day, instead managing 14.55 miles in 2 hour 11 minutes.  Still not bad though and at an average of 6.7mph, faster than the similar run last Sunday.  Keep this pace up for another 11.65 miles and I can bring the Brighton Marathon in within spitting distance of my goal.

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21 seconds

I didn’t really want to run this morning (there’s clearly a theme here!) but I knew that I had to, so I jumped on the machine and set off to be a bit quicker than my Friday run last week.  This involved warming up for a nanosecond before dialling in a speed of 7.7mph and hanging on!

I counted down the 20 circuits in order to pass the time, even though they seemed in no particular hurry today… the only usual benefit of running faster is that the run is over sooner, but today I could have been running at the speed of light and the circuits would still have taken their time.

So, 5 miles in 39 minutes, 16 seconds… a whole 21 second gain on last week for a WHOLE lot more effort!

Still, the speaker at the lunch event I attended was Tim Hutchings, who is the man behind the Brighton Marathon, so at least I was able to bask privately in the knowledge that I’m keeping up my training schedule!

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Failure to average seven-point-something mph

This morning I ran the intervals that I didn’t run yesterday, legs still a touch stiff from Sunday, but in a nice way.

I started at 7mph and increased this by 0.5mph for each 400m lap until I got to 10.5mph.  By this time my legs and particularly my ankles were causing me discomfort.  Also, I wasn’t sure whether it was a good or bad sign that my heart rate peaked at 175 and went no higher.

I dropped back to 7mph for a breather and built up again to 9.5mph.  Finally I alternated between 7 and 9.5/9/8.5 until I reached the end.

What is really frustrating is that I had hoped to come in close to last week’s personal best of 38.43… but now I’ve gone and beaten that by over a minute, passing 5km at 24.04 and reaching the 5 mile mark at 37.35… an average of a tad over 8mph.

I hate jumping over ever-higher bars… you know that there will come a point when you just won’t make it!

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Running total

Kim has been encouraging me (with a pointy stick) to increase my mileage as part of my pre-marathon training as the it’s only 11 weeks away now.

I just brought my mileage record up to date (since August last year) and am happy to confirm that I had my biggest month since starting to write my blog in August 2007, beating the previous top month of November 2007.

I managed to fit in 12 runs, 14 hours of running time and to cover 88.1 miles, compared to Nov 07’s 8 runs, 11 hours and 68.3 miles

Mind you, Daren covered 49 miles in the week (one week!) to the 18th January and both Cliff and Pete must have each topped a hundred miles this month, so I daresay it’s not such a hot total after all!

But tomorrow is another month.

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Auspicious company

Part way through my run today I heard the inexorable approach of feet from behind and turned to find Kurt from Run in Hove just about the slide past me with his friend Ken.  They were out for a 15 miler and though they were into the last stages, were clearly still running a tad faster than me.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I needed to start piling on the Sunday miles, so I took the opportunity of a beautiful day to run from my folks house in Woodingdean, down to Rottingdean, along to Brighton and all the way back again.  Aside from anything else, I thought it would be a good test of my staying power to run up a long, long hill at the end of a long run.

Of course, most of the first two miles were downhill, so the run started real easy for a change!  Between Rottindean and Brighton I took a couple of photos which might help explain why else I had chosen this route.

I reached the pier around 55 minutes which gave me an average speed of 6.9mph, it being about 10km into my run… with the help of the long downhill section, of course!

As I ran back along towards the Marina, so Kurt and Ken picked me up and pulled me along at their pace for a few hundred metres before I made my excuses and paused to say Hi to the guys at Martlet Kayak Club.  It seems strange to think that I was a member here in the formative years of my teens and early twenties… although the club is amazing now by comparison!  Andy was cleaning drains, but Nikki just happened to have her running kit on and agreed to join me for a while.

I had planned to run along the Undercliff Walk, but it was closed due to falling rocks and we ran up on to the cliff top instead… both feeling knackered at the top of the ramp!  It’s a lot easier running with someone else though and we then made light work of the three miles to Rottingdean.

And so it was, around the ten-mile mark, with Nikki heading back towards the kayak club, that I started back up the hill.  And actually it was okay, as the long, steepish hill is broken up by flat sections that give you a welcome breather from time to time.

The only thing that you don’t get from any of the sunny photos above, is the temperature.  I was under no illusion as to how cold it was as there was solid ice across the pavement in a couple of places on the way down, but it was most apparent on the hill coming back… with the front of my jacket pressing against the two sweaty layers below, my chest was so cold that it was actually painful!

I had decided to stop at the Downs Hotel, but when I got there I felt a curious need to continue up the hill to the ‘bakery’.  The bakery has long-since gone but as the top of the village, it holds a symbolic value for me.

Apart from the symbolism and another photo opportunity, the other benefit of having run up to this point was the ability to run easily back downhill to the end!

13.5 miles completed in 2 hours and 5 minutes… 6.48mph.  Not bad Foster, even if I’m forced to say so myself!

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Slow down Sally

I had quite a thoughtful run on the machine this morning (Friday), the subject of which I will come back to some other time… right now my ears are ringing from going to a brilliant Soul Katz gig!

But while I remember, I was focussing today on keeping my heart-rate down slow, by trying to run and breathe as efficiently as possible.  It was mostly sub 160 until after the two mile mark, then sub 165 until three miles and apart from a couple of blips, I managed to keep it sub 170 until the end.  Not bad considering I ramped the speed up from 7mph to 7.6mph in the first 400m and kept it right there for the rest of the five miles.

So five miles in 39 minutes, 37 seconds.

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Just a second

I was just in the process of making a quick round of cheese on toast to eat at my desk when I realised that I was supposed to be running today.  I only had a 40 minutes window of opportunity if I wanted to have time to shower before I needed to be out the door, so the completed cheese on toast went in the fridge and I went on the running machine.

I didn’t even have time to put Kiss FM on to accompany me so I had to put up with the sound of my feet as I did some fast intervals… hardly intervals though, as I was only going from 7mph to 8mph to 9mph to 8mph and then back round again.

As I reached the 5-mile mark I was surprised to see the time… 38 minutes, 43 seconds.  One second faster than Friday last week.  I really do hate racing myself, as I DO like to win… which means that the task can only get harder from here on in!

BTW, the cold cheese on toast was hard to swallow while I was running around the house trying to shower & out earlier, but I’ve just eaten the other half of it now and it was quite tasty.

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The Sunday six and a half (people)

Cliff arrived late this morning with some lame excuse about having had a nose bleed… it looked more like one of the dogs had shoved a toy up his nose to me!  I have a picture if anyone is interested…

So the gang this morning consisted of stalwarts Andy, Nikki, Cliff and myself, plus Jane and a strange man with a headband who who had already run to Falmer from Brighton rather than drive!

For time reasons, we decided to run around one of the shorter circuits, but for a change we went around the other way… I’d say we went backwards, but that gag has already been well overdone.

We ran across the bridge and up towards the Downs.  With the addition of Pete, there was plenty of testosterone flowing and the pace was hot, so it was just as well that Jane is pregnant and needed to stop for a pee, otherwise I would have been knackered!

We turned right onto the South Downs Way before we reached the ridge and dropped down the hill to the Newmarket, taking the sharp uphill section in the middle in our stride and pretty much racing down the final steep hill to the by-pass.  Unfortunately this meant that we had to turn around and run back up the hill until we met Jane (after a second stop) & Nikki and then come down a second time.

Pausing half way up the other side (ostensibly for Jane’s third pee-stop, but probably more because we’re all starting to get old!), we were somehow persuaded by Cliff to do the plank.  More testosterone was apparent as some people showed off by holding only two contact points!

Then it was up to Newmarket Copse, out to the Falmer Road and back down the hill to the cars.

From last summer https://www.fosterruns.com/2009/08/five-go-to-falmer/ it appears that the run was only 7.25 miles and although some of us had an additional couple of hundred meters of hill-climbing in the middle, the average speed from our one hour 24 minute run was a heady 5.2mph.  At least it was an improvement on last week!

And then Pete ran home again.  Mad fool!

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Bravado

Bravado got the better of me yesterday and I foolishly volunteered to try to run 5km in sub-20.30.

As I started running on the machine at lunchtime, I finally worked out the speed I would need to do to achieve this: 9.4mph for 3.125 miles.  Eeeek!

I thought I had better warm up thoroughly, so completed one mile before increasing the speed.  After one more mile I can’t say that I felt particularly like doing 2.125 more at that speed, so I backed off.

So, Andy, the answer is no.   Unfortunately I forgot to check what the time was when I did complete the 5km, so I’ll have to try again next week.

However, as I reached 5 miles, I noticed that the time was 38.44, which is actually faster than earlier in the week.  This 7.74mph average speed would give me a 5km split time of just over 24 minutes.  This is faster than I thought, bearing in mind it included my first warm-up mile.

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VAT fuelled intervals

It took me longer this morning than usual to calculate my quarterly VAT return, in part because my accounting software doesn’t easily cater for the differential rates of the Flat Rate scheme, but mostly because the department that sold me on the idea of Flat Rate told me to do it incorrectly (using the net rather than the gross sales figure)… which meant that I had to go back today and calculate additional payments from past quarters.  And then work out how to record these in my accounting software!  Oh how I truly miss Maurice ‘Tigger’ Dawes!

To add injury to insult, the culpable department still think that they are correct, which meant that I was forced to call the ‘automated queuing’ helpline and endure 15 minutes of a message repeatedly saying that it may be helpful to look on our website while your waiting.  I persevered and finally got a real person who confirmed that both my accountant and my colleague in RiVO were correct.  Strangely, she didn’t seem to care that one of her colleagues was advocating an incorrect treatment of the figures.  I suppose that that a little misinformation in the system could make life more interesting life for some people?

Anyway, fresh from this frustrating and monumental waste of time, I climbed aboard the magic carpet and ran my little legs off.

The downside of having run five miles in each of my sessions last week is that to do three and a half seems half-hearted.  So I was forced to do another five and I did it as intervals: slightly faster, elongated ones.

I warmed up at 6mph then alternated largely between 7.5 mph and 9mph , with short segments of 6mph or 7mph.  A couple of the the 9mph segments were 800m long which helped to increase the average speed from last week.  So five miles in 39 minutes 7 seconds, an average of 7.67mph.  And one very sweaty me!