Stability Through Motion

Before my 10k road race, what better way to prepare than with a long hilly run on trails?

So Sunday’s run was the small matter of a drive out to the Brecon Beacons, Upper Neuadd Reservoir to be exact, and a circular run round the tops of Corn Du and Pen y Fan.

The route starts with a gentle climb along boggy forest edge until you reach the reservoir damn. Then there’s a sharp left turn, you can’t miss the hill, and a stiff climb up to the ridge of Graig Fan Ddu and a long beautiful, if windy, passage along the ridge to where it meets the main path from Storey’s Arms. Despite the cold and drizzle, there were quite a few well-covered walkers around.

There’s a short climb to the top of Corn Du, followed by a little up and down to Pen y Fan, the highest point in Southern Britain at 886 metres.

There’s just time to stop and eat a condensed milk/ginger nut bar before freezing too much in the mist, then a steep steep descent to the Beacons Way path skirting the bottom of Cribyn. This is the now the same route I followed back in the spring, but instead of taking the gentle roman road back to the reservoir, we headed up past Fan y Big along Craig Cwumoergwm and over a beautiful lonely path winding between peaty clumps to Craig y Fan Ddu and down to Blaen-y-glyn waterfalls car park. That was a really horrible bit of running, down wet slippy steps, and my quads are complaining even today about it. Then there’s a gentle trot along road and cycle trail back to the starting car park. A truly fabulous day out.

Continuing my reading of tales of terror and Gothic fiction generally, I just stumbled through Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. Here are a few favourite entries:

OVERWORK, n. A dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.

PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting

VALOR, n. A soldierly compound of vanity, duty and the gambler’s hope.
“Why have you halted?” roared the commander of a division and Chickamauga, who had ordered a charge; “move forward, sir, at once.”
“General,” said the commander of the delinquent brigade, “I am persuaded that any further display of valor by my troops will bring them into collision with the enemy.”

but best of all is:

EXILE … An English sea-captain being asked if he had read “The Exile of Erin,” replied: “No, sir, but I should like to anchor on it.” Years afterwards, when he had been hanged as a pirate after a career of unparalleled atrocities, the following memorandum was found in the ship’s log that he had kept at the time of his reply:

Aug. 3d, 1842.  Made a joke on the ex-Isle of Erin.  Coldly
received.  War with the whole world!

It’s available online at several places including here or do as I do [TOP TIP!] download the free ePub version from Project Gutenberg and add it to your free Adobe Digital Reader software. Run that on your laptop/netbook, fridge, and you can read full screen books in a much nicer format than usual, and save money not buying a specialised eReader from Sony or Amazon.

I’ve lined up a few ghost stories and tales of the supernatural to read on the laptop:

• Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, which I’ve already read once;
• a bit of Lord Dunsany which I tried once before and could not get to grips with and
• William Hope Hodgson’s Nightlands, which also has a peculiar and dense writing style

I’m going to seek out some more Vernon Lee too.

It must be time for a bit of a running update, as my 2009 target race approaches. It seems wierd targetting a 10k, such a small distance! But the challenge is to run it at approximately 6:05 minutes per mile and knock a good minute off my PB from May.

I’ve been following an adapted FIRST schedule, for those of you who’ve lost their notes. This schedule incites hatred from all other runners because it recommends RUNNING LESS!

• Monday: rest day – phew. Maybe some weights if I’ve got the energy.
• Tuesday: repetitions on the track. A wide variety of stuff, from 10 x 400M @ 1:19 per lap to 1600M horrible horrible sessions.
• Wednesday: 1 hour biking, usually in the gym because my bike squeeks and it’s dark and cold out there. Squats, lunges, calf raises. Possibly upper body work if I’ve got time.
• Thursday: tempo session, usually incorporating 3-4 miles at 6:19 per mile
• Friday: 1 hour biking in the gym
• Saturday: 4-5 miles easy running (8:30mm). Upper and lower body weights.
• Sunday: 16 -18 mile easy run in the woods (8:30mm)

The Saturday extra run is my concession to logging miles. In the FIRST schedules Saturday should be a cross-training session, and the long run would actually be much shorter but much much faster, more like 7 minute miling.

The plan is to increase the number of days I run after the Brighton 10k race, and up the weekly mileage again. I’ve really enjoyed the FIRST schedules, and kept injury at bay, barring a constantly tight hamstring. But I’ll be targetting marathons again next year, so I think I’ll use the method I tried briefly at the start of the year – a guy called Hadd‘s approach. This is almost the opposite of the FIRST approach – lots of easy miles at a low heart rate to build a strong aerobic base.

The plan is to aim at 3:0x at Stratford next April, then if all goes well, finally go sub 3:00 in the autumn of 2010.

There are tree sounds on the BBC home page today. The artist, Alex Metcalfe, has exhibited his tree headphones at various venues already since 2007, so it’s not really news, but you can view it now at Harlow Carr Gardens near Harrogate until September 27th. The exhibit is a little more scientific than my pine cone soundscapes, but I love the idea of tree-hanging headphones, so simple and appealing.

Just back from holidays. Our trip through Bavaria and Austria coincided with the Ars Electronica festival in Linz for one night. We took pot luck and visited the OK Offenes Kulturhaus OÖ cinema to catch the free Animation Festival, after a few beers in the exceedingly cool bar of course. Of the five animations in the Late Night session we saw, Nadia Micault‘s Naïade particularly caught the eye. Beautiful, sweet with Brothers Quay style dolls and a Miyazaki back-to-nature storyline.

Also notable was Laurie Hill’s funny Photograph of Jesus. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Linz was an exciting town, a feeling perhaps enhanced by having spent the previous two quiet nights in a tent in the heart of the Bayerischer Wald!

The Ars Electronica centre building itself hosted a late night show of 3D cinema. This was pretty much my first experience of immersive cinema of this sort, and it was definitely impressive, after two beers and no food. Food was extremely hard to find in Linz – I’m not sure if all the hungry electro-art afficionados had just eaten it all, or the ongoing wine festival in town had just changed everyone’s priorities.

Other quick art highlights from the trip:

• the incredibly empty Alte Pinakotek in Munich
• James Turrell’s Sky Space in Salzburg – CLOSED except for 15 minutes per day??? What is the point of that?
• Tony Cragg show at the same Salzburg Museum der Moderne Kunst
• Fabulous exhibition of inter-war art from Austria at the Schloß Bruck, Lienz

Turrell’s Sky Space in Salzburg

“Quiet!” warned Adam. “The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and the forester has three young archers who serve the king and guard the deer day and night and have a lodge high upon a hill.”

from King Edward and the Shepherd, medieval manuscript, c.1300

That field hath eyen, and the wood hath ears.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Knightes Tale. Line 1524.

Becomes John Heywood’s, Proverbes Part II, c.V of 1565

Fieldes have eies and woods have eares

From Herman Hesse’s Wanderings

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have long thoughts, long breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Wandering : Notes and Sketches / translated by James Wright. – New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972

The European artists inhabitation of Harcourt Arboretum begins next week, so things are hotting up. Or getting wet, or something. I’ve been sketching and thinking for ages, but really awaiting the arrival of all artists on the scene so we can begin conversations. I think the aim is to allow our meetings to affect the work produced, at least that’s my way of thinking. Read more about the project at the web site www.artinthearboretum.org, and visit the Arboretum between July 1st and 18th to see artists at work.

Sketchbook image of audio listening posts, which look more like parking meters … watch this space!

Cor blimey, I wonder if this gets easier.

[picture right: garish Brooks T Racer 5 shoe for racing - as yet unused!]

4pm at the track yesterday for only my second ever track session was mighty hot and shadeless. I managed the required 5 x 800m but nowhere near scheduled FIRST pace.

I knew anyway I wouldn’t reach the optimistic 2’30 required per 800m (5 minute miling!), but these are the splits:

1. 2:40 (5’20 per mile) – good
2. 2:50 (5’40) – tired
3. 2:56 (5’54) – make it stop
4. 3:06 (6’14) – poured cold water down my back for some relief
5. 3:06 (6’14) – actually feeling better

Each with 400m jogs in between.

Rubbish, but god it was hard. The first 400 I think I actually did at the right pace, but quickly slackened off. I suffered really bad stomach cramps when I finished too, but a bar of peanut brittle and some crisps sorted me out

Jack Daniels and most other schedules have my sort of ability runner doing 800m intervals in 3:00 (6 minute miling), and I probably could have kept that consistent five times. I thought the FIRST schedules were hard last week, and have just confirmed it again.

Just out of interest the world record is a staggering 1:41.

Having run 800m reps for the first time in my life, I have renewed respect for the speed these runners must go at. I’d love to watch a professional athletics meet some time.

Not surprisingly there weren’t many other people around at 4pm – just a girl practising stepping over hurdles, which I also don’t think I could do, my legs are so stiff!

Back to racing news now. I ran the Oxford Town and Gown 10k race last Sunday, and don’t believe I’ve even reported back on the 5k I ran back in April. Shameful.

Okay – the 5k, my first ever, was a great event. I caught an early Saturday train to Basingstoke, which didn’t quite seem like your dream start. However, Basingstoke is where the nearest Park Run event is held every Saturday. Basically you just turn up in the Park for 9am, and run round the park three times with about 100 others, for free! Your time is recorded, and there’s a trip to the coffee shop afterwards if you’ve time to chat. It’s such a fantastic idea, and everyone is a volunteer. The race itself was strange for me – so much shorter than anything I’ve done before, but nice and low-profile, so no pressure. There are a lot of people there who’ve really just started running, so it’s not an ultra competitive environment. Having said that, the record time is 16 minutes, which is quite bl**dy fast enough. I was confident of a sub 19 minute time, based on last year’s racing, but it had been a long while since my last competitive race (October’s Snowdon marathon really). Still, I managed 18:51, which seems a good starting point. I met up with a few people I’d met or heard of through Fetch, the running web site, and the whole occasion was really welcoming for newcomers. Highly recommended.

Last Sunday I ran in the Oxford 10k in a mixture of absolutely stonking rain and windy sunshine (not sure if sunshine can be windy . . . that’s a physics problem). I was hoping to crack last year’s PB (personal best) time of 39:18 (chip time, 39:36 gun time) and 104th position. This equates to about 6:21 per mile, or 3:56 per km, and I’d had a couple of training runs up to 4 miles at this pace or below which felt hard but tolerable.

The result: 39:16 (gun time) or 39:08 (chip time) and 70th position. Chip time is more accurately measured from the starting line to the finish, as it can take some seconds to cross the start line after the gun goes. However, I’m recording the gun time because I’m being mean to myself! In a big, congested race, unless you’re elite and start at the front, you’d always record your chip time. There are some photos of the day, which at least show how wet it was on the Oxford Mail web site.

So – onwards and upwards. As humanity pointlessly drives onward and upward, so do I. The new plan for 2009, which will disappoint fans of ultra long distance, or marathoners, is to concentrate on the 10k. My 24 week plan targets the November Brighton 10k for a record performance, somewhere in the region of 38 minutes, hopefully 37 minutes something. The longer term plan is to take that new speed into marathon training for 2010 and get that sub 3 hour time that we all, quite obviously, dreamt about as small children (except for Haile Gebre Selassie who dreamt about sub 2 hours).

The London Marathon looms, and everyone gets their running gear out to sit on the sofa and cheer on the millions. I was going to go along and add my own cheers, but the bluebell hunt continues and Sunday looks like it’ll be sunny after all, so the woods have won.

Okay, since the last reappearance of the NIGGLE, I’ve adjusted my training in two ways.

1. I’m only running on alternate days, no back to back running. This has led me to look at the FIRST running schedules from the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training. These are based around three intense running sessions a week plus two or three cross-training sessions. So far so good, although I’m only doing one running session at the suggested (much faster than usual for me) paces, as I’m still checking out my NIGGLE.
   Tuesday was a tempo session with 3 miles at my possible 10k pace. In fact this is last year’s 10k pace as I have no recent races to rely on. Suffice it to say, it feels fast to me – 6:24 per mile or 3:57 per kilometre, therefore 39:30 10k pace. I’ll be extremely happy if I can keep that up for 10k on May 17th in the Oxford 10k race.
2. I’ve been trying to run with a faster cadence. This is probably at the root of all the techniques that abound for trying to change your running style, become more efficient, and reduce injuries. It seems sensible advice, but it’s surprisingly hard to increase your cadence if you’re not running fast. Try counting the number of times one foot hits the ground in a minute. Mine usually hovered around 80 times, but I’m increasing that to the suggested 90. It certainly feels wierd, but I think the principle is that your feet spend less time on the ground. It beats trying to think too hard about running style, which has thrown me in the past in any attempts to alter my style. I have to say I’d always been quite happy with my style, it feels ‘natural’, fairly light, and I haven’t been THAT injury prone. But I’ll try anything to get rid of this year’s little NIGGLE.

As a precursor to the 10k, I’m finally going to race in a 5k event, tomorrow morning in glorious Basingstoke.

This is part of a weekly set of races around the country called Park Runs. They’re always 5ks, they’re free and apparently friendly. We shall see! I can’t predict anything about time because I’ve never raced a 5k. I’m quite scared to tell the truth, because it will probably mean trying harder to run than I’ve ever run before, and probably feeling like throwing up.

Oh, I guess I should fill in here all the other training I do in a week, since it’s currently quite a lot more mixed up than it used to be. Oh for the simple pleasures of January where it was run at one pace six days a week for 8 – 12 miles.

• Monday: rest
• Tuesday: tempo at 10k pace
• Wednesday: cross training, usually 60 mins on the bike at 100rpm with some short speedy bits and sometimes some rowing
• Thursday: for now just a general, off-road hilly 7 miles around Wytham. Eventually this should be an interval session
• Friday: cross-training, same as Weds. There are alternatives, but I’m sticking with biking for now
• Saturday: 10 mile run, easy. Eventually becoming a 10-13 mile run at a faster pace.
• Sunday: more cross-training as I wish