purplecat

Two things of note this week. Firstly, I got a new iPhone. Actually I bought this last week but didn't really start playing with it until this week. My main motivation for buying a new iPhone was that the battery on my old phone was becoming increasingly erratic leaving me with the option of either replacing the battery or buying a new phone - I certainly don't want to risk my phone running out of juice half way around a marathon since I enjoy listening to podcasts as I run. When my Mum expressed an interest in acquiring an old iPhone in order to experiment with Siri, it made up my mind that I'd by a new phone.

Most of this month's "toys" budget later, I have a second-hand iPhone 7. I like the increased memory allowance, I'm distinctly less convinced by the necessity for bluetooth headphones. The set I purchased swing about like mad things when running (unless I clip them to the back of my collar, which I have taken to doing) and then rapidly fall out. I've just got an adapter for more standard headphones and intend to research running headphones in the near future.

The other event of note is pain in, I think, my posterior tibial tendon - on the inside of my ankle anyway. It started last week, but after a couple of days' rest it had gone away and did not reappear either following my Park Run on Saturday, nor my long run on Sunday. However on Monday I had an interval run - a sequence in which I ran pretty fast (4:35minutes per km) for 3 minutes and then slowly for 2 minutes seven times (I did pretty well for the first five, but was struggling during six and seven) - and the whatever it is was definitely hurting afterwards. A "steady" run on Wednesday was also characterised by pain in the ankle towards the end making it harder work than it should have been. It is totally fine now after another two days of rest so I'm not sure quite what to do about it. My current plan is to change shoes (there is a whole saga of running shoes I could relate here, but suffice it to say I'm currently running in cheap shoes, however the pain (on the top of my foot) caused by the expensive shoes seems to have resolved itself so I may as well change back into them and see what happens), and see how next week goes since according to "the plan" it is a light running week. If I'm still having trouble after that, I may need to take a week off.

KM run this week: 43.9
KM run in 2018: 142.8

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already, but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

I'm still on my regular training plan which involved a 15km run on Sunday, followed by a gentle 30 minute run with the Teenager. She took up Couch to 5k as part of her Duke of Edinburgh's award with a vague plan to participate in a Park Run. This is actually a very vague plan since I think I am keener on the idea than she is. She's certainly in horror at the idea of being among the last few runners to complete a Park Run. I think this is in part because I've told her how encouraging everyone is and she would frankly rather fade into the background than be cheered across the line. At the moment she's running at a pace of about 8min per km and I think we need to get that down to about 7:30min per km for her to be inconspicuous since there are a whole bunch of people who complete Park Run in about 40 minutes.

Went to the gym on Monday without ill effect, which after last week was a relief.

I then ran 10km on Tuesday which went well (managed just over 2km at 4:35 - the target was 4km but that wasn't going to happen) and on Thursday which was a disaster. My target pace was 5:05 for the whole run and I'd thought setting out I might manage it based on last week's run, but I didn't even manage 200m before having to slow down - so I gave myself a kilometre at an easy pace, then managed 5:05 for the next two and then dropped down well below even "easy" (albeit marginally faster than the Teenager can manage). I gradually forced myself to speed up and managed the final kilometre at 5:05 again, but all in all I was pretty disappointed. I have three hypotheses for what was going on:

1. Sometimes it happens.
2. Anaemia. I am prone to anaemia and I had been lethargic getting up. I have put myself back on the iron supplements on the grounds it can't hurt.
3. Lack of calories. I'd lost track of my calories the previous day and had possibly over-compensated. I had had a perfectly normal breakfast before the run, but when I went shopping afterwards I was feeling much like I do when I get home from a long day at work and need food badly. I stocked up on snacks and made sure I ate enough.
   

Still a disappointing run to go into the first week of "proper" training.

I also booked a hotel. I had been going to leave this until after the longest training run in late March on the grounds I didn't want to waste money on a hotel I wouldn't use if I got injured. However fififolle had been trying to organise a get together in London that weekend and warned me that hotels were already hard to come by. The London Marathon has arrangements with all the Holiday Inn hotels for miles around which include a bus to the start of the marathon, but these were all non-refundable so after an awful lot of messing around on lastminute, I booked a hotel at a reasonable cost with free cancellation up to 3 days before the marathon. It's 15 minutes walk from the nearest tube station and, of course, the tube and then Docklands Light Railway are going to be heaving with marathoners, so I anticipate a certain amount of stress getting to the start, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it. At least if I get injured I won't have wasted £200.


KM run this week: 38.8km (all last weekend)
KM run in 2018: 58.8km

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. People have been incredibly generous already, plus bonus £10 note found in the street* (much appreciated), but you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

*I read your blog post, but then got distracted so didn't comment.

In 15 weeks and a couple of days' time (assuming I am counting correctly), I will run the London Marathon.

This was not part of the plan.

Broadly speaking this is all Charlie Brooker's fault. At some point, probably around 2011, I came across an article of his in which he discussed the Couch 2 5k app that could get you running and thought it sound interesting and potentially useful if I wanted to get a bit fitter. When I finally acquired a Smartphone, I installed the app and off I went.

By the time I finished the 9 week course in the app, I could run just under 5k in half an hour and I continued to potter about doing this a couple of times a week while listening to the Zombies! Run! app/game/story/whatever it is. Then I discovered ParkRun which had, if not prizes, at least points and I began to actively try to improve my running speed. Then someone at ParkRun suggested the Great Manchester 10k, so I amused myself working towards that and ran it for the next three years.

In the meantime I had made some friends among the Park Runners and when the 10k spun off a half marathon last year, I was persuaded by A. that I should run this, if only as moral support for her attempt.

Did you know, once you run a half marathon, everyone starts asking you when you are going to run a marathon?

Now B., who has occasionally in his career hung out with Sports Scientists had convinced me many years ago that marathons were a terrible, terrible thing (anatomically speaking at least). However, he mysteriously morphed into the kind of person who muttered about bucket lists and "you have to run at least one." My solution to this situation was the London Marathon ballot - with a success rate of, depending who you ask, between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10, I felt I was pretty safe entering the ballot for a few years while I considered whether I really wanted to do this.

You can guess what happened next.

So, lack of injury permitting, I will be running the London Marathon on the 22nd April.

I wish I could say training had started well with the new year. However my scheduled run on Monday was abandoned when I totted up the list of things I needed to do before going to Florida on Tuesday, factored in not getting back from Stoke, where we had spent new year and concluded the run would have to be skipped. My scheduled run on Friday was abandoned because I couldn't actually get out of Florida because of the Bomb Cyclone in New York. Since I am writing this in Fort Lauderdale airport, I doubt my scheduled run on Saturday will happen either.

KM run this week: 20km (all last weekend)
KM run in 2018: 0

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While raising money for charity is not my motivation for participation, it is a big part of the London Marathon. Shelter have bribed me with a T-shirt and the promise of a post-race massage. It would be nice to at least cover the cost of the T-shirt and you can donate here should you feel so inclined.

kargicq announced on Facebook that he had signed up for the Great North 10K and asked if anyone else felt like joining him so I said yes, because why not?

The Great North 10K is organised by the same people who do the Great Manchester Run. Their flagship run is a half marathon, The Great North Run, and the Great North 10K used part of that route through Gateshead and along the side of the Tyne. The first half of the final kilometre of the route had been crowdsourced with the name "The Slog on the Tyne". As the run approached this began to loom quite large in my mind (Manchester is pretty flat) with chatter in various social media places remarking on how terrible it was and kargicq advising against attempting to get a personal best on the day, though he also said the slog wasn't as bad as people were making out (while also mentioning that he had walked up it in 2015).



Before the race selfie


My plan for the race, therefore, was not to get too carried away. There was a fair amount of down at the start so I figured around 5:05m/km on the down, 5:20m/km on the flat and I'd take the slog at the end at whatever pace I could manage having, hopefully, still some reserves of energy at that point. While a smaller race than the Great Manchester Run, the route was also a lot narrower than I was used to and so it often felt more crowded - particularly on any upward inclines where people tended to slow down while I was generally trying to keep to the 5:20m/km pace I was using on the flat. There was a tight turn at the halfway mark, with an announcer encouraging everyone to "do an aeroplane" as they went around the turn. I aeroplaned around the corner and then got to wave at kargicq who was a couple of hundred metres behind me.

The slog really wasn't that bad. Below is the Strava log for the run. There was a big banner over the route at the start of the slog, so you can see from the log below where I slow down in alarm when I see the banner, decide actually that the slope isn't too bad, gradually accelerate up it, slow down for a moment at the top and then accelerate again as I sprint for the finish. The run finished in Gateshead stadium with the theme from Chariots of Fire playing as you enter the stadium. My final time was a respectable 52m 34s - faster than I ran the Great Manchester Run in 2015, though slower than my time this year.







After the race selfie


kargicq's daughter is a keen amateur photographer (mostly of birds) and I gather she is somewhat contemptuous of the quality of the official run photos and also amazed at the price they charge. As bunn has noted, its not necessarily that easy to get good shots of the runners and there are a lot expenses involved that may not be obvious to a 12-year-old. There were a lot of me, so I feel I got pretty good value.

( Some of the official photos under the cut )

That's 2 minutes faster than last year so I'm pretty pleased.

I actually started out going pretty fast, around the speed I normally run when practising for 5km, but since I was feeling pretty good and I know I run faster than practice in actual races, I decided to go with it and maintain that general pace as long as I could (which, it transpired, was around 7km). Despite the doom-laden predications of at least one of my weather apps it was hot and sunny. I was glad I hadn't worn a long sleeve top. I did wonder if it was a good idea to skip the water station at 4km but I don't habitually drink when running and now didn't seem to be the time to start. I did go through the run-through shower at 5km, though regretted it a little as my new (vari-focal) glasses spent the next 500 metres slipping down my nose.

It was around 5km I started noticing people, most notably children in, I would guess, the 6-10 age bracket standing in the crowds with their little hands held out hopefully for high fives as people went past. So I amused myself for the next 2-3km by obliging. I was actually a little surprised that more people weren't interacting with the crowd, though I don't think it is something I would have thought of had I not read nanila's account of the Worcester 10k. But hey! I wasn't going to win any medals and spreading the fun seemed like a worthwhile thing to do.

Around 7km the faster than normal pace started to hit home and I slowed down to about 5minutes 15 seconds per kilometre, which was the pace I'd been practising at, but everything definitely began to feel rather like hard work. I was cheered up by spotting one of the regular Park Run directors cheering in the crowd around 7km, and the Team Humphrey bus at about 8km ("Team Humphrey" is the name coined by the Manchester Children's hospital for whom I was running - I've no idea why) - in both cases it was a boost that someone in the crowd recognised me (or my T-shirt). About this point I also spotted one of the regular park runners just ahead of me and keeping her in sight, helped me keep the pace up. I was mildly perplexed that I couldn't catch her up, because these days I'm faster than her at park run, though when I first started out I often used to follow just behind her - I guess she's my informal pacing mascot. Looking at the results I was over a minute faster than her overall so she must have actually started ahead of me. I managed to speed up a little in the final few hundred metres, but I wouldn't claim to have sprinted for the finish.

This year I experimented with listening to podcasts as I went around the course, the idea being that they wouldn't drown out the various musical acts one passes en route but would be more interesting than silence. As a result, I had the slightly surreal experience of listening to JonnElledge (with his CityMetic hat on) discussing public transportation in LA for a large part of the run (shortly after leaving the bold reporter from Welcome to Night Vale cowering under his desk because Management had left their office). It was certainly easier to switch attention into and out of spoken material, but it happened to the extent that I don't recall a great deal about public transportation in LA - nor the nature of identity in the suburbs of large cities. By the time I remembered to switch podcasts off I was, apparently, into an episode of "From our Own Correspondant" but I hadn't heard any of it because of the noise around the finish.

Each year, I've been fascinated by the loot that is put into the finishers bags. Presumably it is all provided by sponsors and mostly it consists of obvious things like energy snacks, but there's often something a little left-of-field. This year that was a 500g bag of basmati rice. I'm assuming carbo-loading was behind the reasoning there.

According to the website I was 5,082th overall, 53rd woman between 45 and 49, 470th person between 45 and 49 and 630th woman overall. My nemesis (i.e., the woman between 45-49 who regularly as clockwork beats me at park run) was exactly 2 minutes faster than I was and came in 3,695th overall. Since she volunteered at park run yesterday (as did I), I have now identified her. As well as running faster than I do, she has a very cute umbrella. Another park run regular spotted me as I wandering around central Manchester afterwards. He'd managed a time in the 46-47 mark, my neighbour of the Manchester Museum and Art Gallery Mafia managed 45 minutes, 47 seconds. But they're both men and so sadly, but frankly, in a different league.

I've caught up with Zombies! Run! so could use suggestions for something else to listen to while running.

It was an interesting morning to have agreed to volunteer for Parkrun. For those, not in the know, Parkrun is a not-for-profit organisation that holds free 5K runs in parks worldwide on Saturday mornings. Stoke Gifford parish council (who must be wondering what has hit them) have required Parkrun to pay a fee to use the park. Cue much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, not to mention a great deal of newspaper print and tweeting. Little Stoke run, as a result, was cancelled and presumably will remain so for the forseeable future.

As a result of all the publicity, of course, there were a huge number of new runners at Parkrun this morning. I lost count of the number of times, while waiting for the run to start that I said, "Do you have a barcode? That's all you need. Just go along to the start and we'll scan it at the end" or, alternatively, "Do you have a barcode? That's a shame, you can still run but we won't be able to give you a time at the end." It was my first time actually scanning barcodes so there was also a fair amount of mutual confusion as I tried to work the scanner and new people tried to figure out what was going on. We had beautiful sunshine, but it was pretty cold and I rather quickly lost sensation in my scanner button pressing fingers.

Anyway, before the rush started I managed to take a picture of the first two across the line.





"Which of the front two won?" one of the marshals asked us at the end. The other barcode scanner and I exchanged slightly blank glances since we had not memorised names and then she said "The front one." After we'd stopped laughing she elaborated. "He was wearing orange."

For the record, charging people to run in a Parkrun is out of the question, but, as a not for profit, the organisation does have sponsors and staff so it wouldn't have been out of the question for the park fee to have been met from central funds. I don't know how much Stoke Gifford were requesting, but given they initially proposed charging £1 per runner one assumes it was in the region of £5,000-£10,000 per annum. Multiply that across all the parkruns and I can see why the central organisation baulked at opening the door to suddenly needing to raise several hundred thousand a year more just to cover park fees. However, it is a desperate problem that councils simply can not afford parks under the current austerity regime (at least if this Guardian article has its facts right) and there will be no Parkrun if there are no more parks...

I volunteered at the park run this morning. I like to volunteer occasionally and give something back, and I've been tired this week, even having taken Monday and Tuesday pretty easy. Giving blood on Wednesday and going to a project meeting in Bristol and Thursday are probably contributory factors but B did neither of those things and fell asleep on the sofa at 8.30pm last night, so I think we're both still recovering from Cheltenham.

I was quite glad I wasn't running since I don't enjoy running in the rain. I had the job of "barcode checker" which meant I made a record of any barcodes that the scanners couldn't handle. We had a lot of very soggy barcodes, the worst of which we couldn't even unfold and I had to read the barcode in mirror writing through the back of the folded paper.




The above was one of the soggier specimens. It was one of the first to show up (in the first five people to cross the line) and the barcode scanner was absolutely determined to get the technology to work on it. She succeeded eventually and I recorded her triumph for posterity above. Later soggy specimens I just wrote down, more work for the Results Processor but it helped keep the queues for scanning down.

Right towards the end one of the unscannable barcodes came with a friend I vaguely recognised. At first I just assumed I'd seen her at park runs before, but then we realised we'd met in the blood donation centre on Wednesday. She's been promoting Foster Care Fortnight and got the nurses to photograph her giving blood in her Manchester Foster Parents T-Shirt. I mentioned that it was also National Blood Week so she could promote two causes in one tweet! She was wearing the same T-Shirt at the park run, though she hastened to reassure me that it had been cleaned.

I should get a running icon of some sort.

...or in my case 4K.

In the name, more or less, of not getting any younger, I have taken up running.

I got the idea from, of all places, a Charlie Brooker article. He mentioned an iPhone app which would take you through a running program starting with short runs broken up by periods of walking and working up to a long half hour run. So when I finally broke and purchased a second hand iPhone the "Get Running" app was one of the first I purchased and installed. This probably entirely demonstrates the power of suggesting to someone that they get to "level up". It turns out "Get Running" was just an instantiation of the (possibly NHS) Couch to 5K program which you can also download for free from the NHS website though not, I think, in a form that allows you to play your own music while the nice lady tells you to run, or walk, and so forth.

Today I reached the final half hour run. One of our local parks has a handily laid out 2K circuit which is how I know I've only hit the 4K, not the 5K mark distance wise. I've not really decided whether I think the distance or the time is the important part here. I have downloaded an NHS podcast for "Couch to 5K graduates" which claims to improve running speed but it would mean listening to their choice of music - not that random slow ballads and odd bits of plain song or whatever iTunes shuffle decides to serve up today are necessarily the best things to run to!

( Wibbling about Running )