Category: Short run

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Six fix

A weekday run with Daren is always a great way to fix the cognitive fog which afflicts us all from time to time, although you can clearly see from the photo above that any fog could only have been on the inside!

We run so infrequently that we’ve not yet tired of our simple six mile route: starting from Jack & Jill, dropping down to Pyecombe, running up Wolstonbury, dropping steeply to Clayton, running along the the bottom of the Downs and up the ‘tank-tracks’ that rise directly up the scarp slope and finally dropping back down to Jack & Jill.

It’s not lost on me that this is the third windmill (technically the forth) that I’ve passed in three runs!

We were particularly appreciative of the rough steps that have been installed on a short and often slippery uphill section below Wolstonbury (Daren thought this might have been big bearded Charlie at work) and otherwise just generally laughed our way round, appreciating the weather, the view, our open schedules, life in general and so on!

We even had an unseen audience… Maria (from the top of the Men’s Sussex Fitness League) arrived back in the car-park ten minutes after us and said that she had seen us running up the tank tracks.  She had heard us first, of course… probably on account of our chatting loudly to be heard over our own panting up the hill!

Six miles in a leisurely 1:25, 4.2mph average or so, TOP value!

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A loud out

After more than a month sitting pining by the door following the brilliant Eye to Eye event, my mud-caked runners were finally allowed out to play yesterday.

It was a stunningly beautiful day, made more so by the ensemble which consisted of BIG man Daren, and Dai with Henna the dog.  We met upstairs at Jack & Jill and traced the well-worn path through Pyecombe and Wolstonbury Hill, to Clayton and the Tank Tracks.

The discussion was heavy-going to start with as we unpacked our general frustrations, but this lightened as the 6 miles rolled by.  1.25 of collegial conversation, with the 4.2mph average reflecting the steepness of the hills and the heat of the day!

 

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Tempo hour

My life is fast becoming a series of fascinating cognitive experiments.

In the week leading up to last weekend I spent 53 hours researching an alien (to me) commercial sector, first trying to gain a working understanding of it and later attempting to elicit valuable insights and present them in a coherent narrative.  

My approach to the fascinating project was based on one of my creativity hypotheses and whilst some time needs to elapse for the client to be able to measure the real value of the exercise, one thing was abundantly clear: it left me mentally exhausted!  Such that I wasn’t even able to contemplate a run last Sunday.

A contributory factor might have been a generously hearty dinner at Cliff & Nessie’s… where the combined testosterone from that many serious ultra-runners in one room was probably exhausting in itself!

This week has been fascinating for different reasons.  Tuesday I was a participant in a Phd neuroscience experiment into pain at Kings College.  This involved surprisingly little pain allied to the interesting experience of being scanned in an MRI machine, twice.

As I have aged so the subject of pain has become more interesting.  When I was young I remember my father periodically yelping in agony at various twinges brought on by the gardening which he used as a means to relax.  Now I understand those twinges first hand and the only evolutionary modification is that I try hard not to yelp!

Later in the week I had the privilege of helping Brighton Business School to review their new MBA syllabus.  It seems to be an increasingly common theme for me to help people look at challenges from a different perspective, even when, as in this case, the people concerned are consummate specialists and way more learned than I.

So after another thought-provoking week and with a fresh back-ache to ignore (brought on by gardening yesterday) I decided that I really must get a run in.

My aim today was simply to run for an hour, so I set the speed to 6mph, covered the distance indicator with a towel (and later the clock too) and just got on with it.  6mph is a great speed for thinking, hence the myriad thoughts above, whilst it is also not too draining on such a gloriously warm summers day.

6.07 miles in one hour, 6mph average.

And now on to my next experiment.  My sense is that I either need to strengthen my back by doing more gardening, or avoid aggravating it by doing less… no guesses which one I’ve chosen!

PS congratulations to my niece Kate and her beau Alex, who got married yesterday!

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Thinking

It was a muggy morning after a night FULL of rain (the front lawn was a swimming pool when I went to bed), but it was too lovely to be inside so I opted for a seat in the tea house.  I was particularly glad that I had ignored Mark’s offer of an 8.30am pick-up to go run the Chichester marathon!

I had been sitting and reading for some time, enjoying the smell of the honeysuckle and chuckling at the sound of a bird who seemed intent on waking the neighbourhood, when I had a minor epiphany.  Joseph Jaworski might even class it as a ‘predictable miracle’.

Epiphanies are not actually an uncommon occurrence hereabouts and this one involved a connection between the fields of neurogenesis and change management: it turns out that one of the reasons that scientists have thought until recently that the human brain is unable to produce new neurons is because the primates used in experiments were stressed…. I’ve lost you, I can tell!

Suffice to say that this is a very useful connection to have made and it gave me plenty to think about… so I decided to go for a gentle run.  Gentle is important here, since it gets more difficult to think the more quickly you run.

My aim was 5 miles at an average of 7mph, but after a first half mile warming up at 6mph, I realised that I would need to ramp up the speed to make my intended average.

7.5mph is just too fast to think clearly, but it was necessary so I paused my brain until I reached the half way mark to ensure I was ahead of the game.  Then I dropped back to 7mph for the rest of the way completing the distance in 42.5 minutes.  Average 7.06mph.

I guess that I should also have drawn a connection between muggy morning and running at more than 7mph… I was still dripping with sweat half an hour later, even after a cold shower!

I wonder if Mark managed to stay dry in Chichester?

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Putting my back into it

Those people who have dropped in on us unannounced will testify that we live in a relatively ordered, clutter-free way… down to the showers that get wiped down after each use and our somewhat Zen-like garden.  And yet, with six important visitors expected last Sunday, we still managed to spend most of the Saturday tidying the garden and the Sunday tidying the house.  All of which is a slightly elongated excuse for not running last week.

You will note that my excuse has nothing to do with the Eye-to-Eye odyssey.  I actually had surprisingly few side-effects for my 47-odd miles, although it’s fair to say that mid-way through the following week I suddenly developed a severe case of narcolepsy.

However, mid way through last week (eleven days after the odyssey) I suddenly developed severe back-ache.  This was most likely due to gardening, although by coincidence it occurred around the same time after the Eye-to-Eye as it (or something similar) occured after doing the Tour du Mont Blanc last year, so it might well be a case of over-heavy back-pack syndrome.

Which is my excuse for not joining Mark on the Downs at 8.30am (on a Sunday!!) this morning.

Although I had wimped out of a long run I was still mindful that a short run might indeed loosen my back, so I climbed on the machine this morning safe in the knowledge that I could get off at any point.

I started at 6mph and felt pretty-much-every-other–step jar my back for the whole of the first mile.  Increasing to 6.5mph for the second mile helped a little, as did increasing to 7mph for the third mile.  Some of this was probably due to my back loosening off, but it’s also much easier to skim along at a faster speed… if only I could hold it for extended periods of time!

7.5mph for the fourth mile was as fast as I wanted to go today so for the fifth and final mile I reduced back to 7mph, desperately trying (and failing) to do mental arithmetic to figure out the average minutes-per-mile covered.  As I’ve mentioned before, as the level of exercise increases, so the bandwidth available for processing data in your head decreases.

I completed 5 miles in 44.17, an average of 6.77mph.

I then spent some considerable time stretching-out while my muscles were warm (read HOT!)… in fact the front of my body looked as if it had been glazed, although you only get a sense of how lobster-like it was from the photo below.

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Hot banana

It was HOT today!  Even with a breeze blowing through the house the temperature was still in excess of 80 degrees.  Outside it was way hotter still, so it was going to be a hot run whatever.

I opted to run inside and decided that there should be no mind-tricks today: I would be happy with five miles.  Sticking with the intervals of late I started with 6, 6, 7, 8, 6 to warm up (huh?) before repeating 7, 8, 9, 6 four times.  This was definitely exertion, but not by comparison with some of the recent sessions in view of the heat.

A hastily eaten banana ahead of the start of the session thankfully caused me no discomfort and having completed 5.25 miles in 44 minutes  (7.16mph average) I went for a very long, cold shower!

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Hedging my bets

With all the rain, last weekend was the first opportunity this year to cut the hedges… a six-foot one at the front and a ten-foot one at the back.  Not doing this as a day-job means that I ached so much after the first one that I had the leave the other to the next day!

So when it came to deciding how far to run in between, I hedged my bets and chose a short distance of intervals on the machine.

I set the base level at 6mph, then increased the other quarter-mile each time from 7mph to 10mph by which time I had covered 2 miles.  I repeated this and then did 6-7-8-7 in the final mile.

5 miles in just under 43 minutes, averaging about 7mph.

I did have lots of thoughts at the time, but I somehow managed to forget to post and any thoughts have been deleted from my (very) short-term memory!

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Ministry of Silly Walks

After yesterday’s sudden jolt back into running, I thought I would give my legs a ‘hair of the dog’ run this morning.  It turned out to be a painful idea and although I completed a mile in a shade over 11 minutes, I’ve been walking around the rest of the day as if I’m on a pair of stilts!

Which is worrying since the worst impact for me is usually on the second day after a run!  Maybe I should order a crane to get me out of bed tomorrow morning?

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Six of the best

I was a bit miserable this morning, having missed a 40th birthday party that I was really looking forward to last night.  Kim thought it was later in the month and I didn’t realise until too late.

My neighbour’s wonderful cats cheered me up a little (I occasionally act as their food-on-feet service when my neighbours are away), a quadespresso and a little guitar playing brightened me further still and finally a great friend called from the other side of the world for a catch up, which was top banana and improved my morning no end!

It was raining persistently outside which, though GREAT for the garden and water-table, since we’ve been on drought alert, was not so appealing to run in.  So, risking the mirth of Cliff & Co, I opted for a run on the machine.

I’d still not had breakfast at this point so I downed a banana (the largest I’ve seen in an age) by way of sustenance before  jumping straight on and winding the speed up… somewhat against Kim’s advice.  As normal I moved the speed up, up, up or down at each quarter-mile and by the time I reached 9mph had decided that I would complete 6 miles… which is about the time that I got the stitch, that big banana fighting back against being digested!

My plans for greater speed disrupted, I was adamant that I wasn’t going to acquiesce to my subconscious by stopping at 4 miles and calling it a day.  Instead I just lowered the speed until I managed to catch my breath and then started increasing it again, this time every eighth of a mile.

I crossed the 6-mile line in 48 minutes, an average of 7.5mph on the nose, before cooling down for a quarter mile at a sedentary 3mph.

Cooling down is a misnomer… I was so wet with sweat when I finally stepped off that I looked like I had just stepped out of the shower.  Realising that I wasn’t going to cool down for quite some time, I capitalised on the rain outside by going to wash Kim’s car… using less water than normal in the process and saving me the effort of rinsing or drying it!

I’m now finally back down to normal working temperature and am also actually really glad that I didn’t go to the party last night.  I’m pretty certain that it would have been a tediously boring evening…

…without all those people, including the host, who will be attending it next weekend!  Needless to say that I’ve not yet told Kim… I reckon I’m going to get six of the well-deserved best when she reads this!

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Five months between blinks

BIG man Daren is ever-present in our thoughts and our conversations so, although I’ve not run with him since September (can that be so?), it seemed like we’d only seen each other yesterday.

We met at Jack & Jill windmills (we call it ‘Upstairs’, for obvious reasons… huh?) which this morning was as windswept as a windswept thing, with a powerful South-South-Westerly blowing straight down the car park!  So much so that I actually changed into my muddy runners IN my car, which is pretty-much unheard of!

We followed our normal 10km circuit, which took in Pycombe, Wolstonbury Hill, the ‘Downstairs’ car park at Clayton Rec, and the Tank Tracks, which we goaded ourselves to the top of without stopping.    At the top we had our cobwebs blasted away by the wind, before running back down to Jack & Jill.

I note that our 1.14 time for the 6.2 miles was slightly slower than September, but averaging 5mph with a couple of serious hills to contend with (not to mention 5-months of conversation to catch up on) is not at all bad going.

As ever, a thoroughly enjoyable run!