THE GOOD BUCK

Ha! Pain is just failure rubbing salt into the wounds. In other words, I’ve still not cracked the 3 miles in 18 minutes. The training schedule started this week, if I’m to fit it in to the races I’ve booked. ie, the big goal for the end of one week is a 10 mile race at a 6 m/m pace, another is a half marathon, etc. This week should have culminated with me doing a nice easy 3 miles at 6m/m. I took two stabs at it this week. Both in the gym so as to give me a constant speed. Both times I managed a mile and a half then had to give up, half dead. The plus side to the gym is the constant speed of the run and not having to cross roads, the negative is the heat. By the time you’ve done the warm up mile you are sweating, then trying to sprint flat out… It kills me. I then go on the exercise bike for a quick spin to break up the lactic acid in my legs. Even just a 15 minute spin at a reasonable level of resistance has the sweat pouring off me. I have to throw a towel over the bike to mop it all up. I’m already dripping from the run, any effort after that is sweat city. The heat! That guy I met who was saying he ran the marathon part of the Lanzarote Ironman in 45 degrees! Seriously, screw that. Anyway, tomorrow morning while it’s still cold, I’m going to take another shot at it. On the road. Anybody getting in my way is going to get trampled. I’ve got to do it. You know you’re giving it your best shot when you eye up an approaching transit van at a roundabout and think “you’re going to have to run me over ‘cos I’m not stopping.” I’m looking at the training programme, the big goal at the end of next week is to run 12 miles in 90 minutes or less. Cool. I can piss that. I did a new PB on the 10 mile run of 1.09 that means I have 21 minutes to stroll the last two miles. Yes, just checked it again. 12 miles, sub 90 minutes. Cool. That gives me another week to to get up to proper pace.  The week after is 5 miles in 30 minutes! Back to the 6m/m pace. Oh dear.   Work is more of the same. I’m getting better all the time. I will crack that 90 degree reverse between two barriers in one attempt. They have cleared out a space at the front now, so you can get it more or less in position then pull forward to straighten it out, then reverse straight back. That takes the challenge out of it, though. Also, sometimes the shunters leave a trailer sticking out in front of the cleared space, so you can’t count on it. Once I’ve cracked this […]

It’s been a while. It’s not like I’ve been that busy except in the field of prevarication, where I’ve been rushed off my feet. I had a week off last week. Wendy was told she had to use her holidays so took a week off, thought I might as well join her. My sister, Lisa, and I went to Wales on the Sunday at the start of my hols to see the parents. It turns out they had not buggered off back to Bulgaria as I thought, merely gone to their rural retreat. It was my first time there, looked like a lovely place to go in Summer. Very quiet and scenic. Loads of lovely, fitness improving hills. Mmmm, hills. Then on the Monday, I texted my timesheet in to work, with the accompanying message saying “don’t forget I’m off this week.” I started to say to Wendy, “Give it a few minutes to check I’m in the clear.” I hadn’t even finished the sentence and my ‘phone was going. They were saying they had someone to cover the rest of the week but could I go in today. In other words the lazy bastards had got my email saying I wasn’t working, done Jack about it and expected me to drag them out of the shit. The thing is, it would have looked bad on me, not the agency, if I hadn’t gone in. Or possibly both. But I have to think about paying my bills. Anywho, I went in. On my hols, on short notice. Not a happy bunny. I picked up my truck and trailer and drove to Crewe (50 minutes away). When I got there they said they had nothing for me, so I should go home. Are you having a laugh? So that was that day ruined for bugger all. Thanks for that. The only bright side is I get paid a minimum of 8 hours if I start a shift.   I went for my first real swim since the Outlaw last year while I was off.  I went for some sea swims when we were in Cornwall, but they weren’t very long or many. I had been putting it off as, well, I hate it, to be frank. I just don’t like swimming. I’m bad at it, it’s hard work and if you get it wrong you can die. The longer you leave it the stronger the aversion gets. In the end it was only because I’ve joined Warrington Tri for swimming lessons and wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to make an arse out of myself by drowning that I went. Turns out it was a big fuss over nothing. I knocked out an hour’s swim without much of a problem. It was slow work but at that pace I could have kept it up all day. Or that’s how it felt at the time. Since I last went swimming in Warrington they’ve opened up a new leisure centre and handed […]

Technology is just a demonstration of how stupid I am. Last week I bought the shiny new computer and thought all was well with world. Then I tried to activate my email accounts and was reduced to *headdesk* and getting others to fix it for me. Then there was the blue-ray debacle. This week I bought a router to try to fix that drop-out problem I’m having with my connection. It arrived (when I was in the shower, obviously) on Friday. I had a quick play with it before work but couldn’t get it set up. I set to in earnest today (Saturday) and got it recognizing the PC and working, but saying the ethernet cable wasn’t connected. I trotted up and down stairs many times, sticking cables in different slots and generally being puzzled. I looked at my old modem/ router jobby and followed what I knew to be the wiring of that. It’s only 3 wires, 2 if you take the power lead out of the equation. One from the ADSL/ ‘phone line, one from the router to the computer (via the mains, in my case.) After quite a while, and some vigorous and heartfelt cussing I had a moment of epiphany. An ADSL connection is not an ethernet one. The ‘phone line goes into a ‘phone line (ADSL) slot, an ethernet goes into an ethernet slot (something fancy and computery, I don’t know!) The router doesn’t have an ADSL slot. It is a router. Not, as it transpires, an ADSL/ router. They are not the same thing. Super. A router, it appears is just a transmitter for making Wi-Fi. You need to have a modem/ ADSL jobby as well. Double super. I bought it to replace the modem jobby, to try and get a stable connection to the internet. But that’s the kit it needs to work. *sets fire to internet*   BTW, (By The Way) I don’t know how much of Twitter/ internet grammar has leaked into RL (Real Life) but the asterisk thing is a way of expressing an action or emphasising a written word. Someone described it as a meta-commentary. Some people will say anything, though. It looks pretty self-explanatory to me, but everything does when you are used to it. Anywho, I have now bought a DVD white elephant and router one. Got to love learning by your mistakes, it’s like buying my education in small, irritating chunks. Talking of which, not content with the above frustrations, I took Anonymous’ (the hack-tivist collective) advice (on Twitter) and bought a VPN (Virtual Privacy Network) which is just running your internet stuff through some proxy server (as I understand it). So I want X but don’t want The Man knowing about it, I get it but it goes through my proxy’s computers first where, presumably, it is anonymized. Anyway, easier said than done. I’ve been fighting with it most of the week. Lots of partial successes. I got a 12 month contract which was only […]

Well, apart from my running, which I may have mentioned is a total bitch, other stuff has indeed been happening. My fancy-pants new computer has arrived, and after five days of sorting out niggling issues, is now all peachy. I was having a bit of a nightmare getting in to my email accounts, but with help from Luke and Plusnet (who now take over your pc and sort it out for you remotely, as you watch. Ace!) they are all working and integrated into one place. My next issues was with blue-ray’s. I had a blue-ray film and wanted to burn it off. The pc said it was the wrong kind of disc. Fair enough, apparently DVD’s and blue-ray’s are different discs. I bought some blue ray discs. Wrong burner. A DVD burner doesn’t burn blue ray’s. Now you’re just taking the piss. This means I’ve had to order a blue ray burner for the pc. The brand new, build to your own spec, pc. Or to put it another way, I’ve just bought a brand new DVD burner in my pc that is never going to be used because it is obsolete tech. Balls. It never even occurred to me that blue rays and DVD’s were different. Grrr. Hopefully when it gets here it will be easy to install. The other thing I’ve ordered is a new router. For some reason whenever you turn the landline on or off (and often when you’ve done nothing) you lose the connection to the internet and have to reboot the router. Hopefully it’s the ancient router that is at fault. If not it’s only £40 and a new router is worth having anyway. With the new pc I included a new keyboard and mouse. Nice easy set up, no messy wires (the old wireless ones had plug-in  receivers on wires, this one just has a dongle thing that plugs into a USB port. Tidy.) and the keyboard is quiet. The old one sounded like a manual typewriter. I can get away with typing now without Wendy killing me.   Work continues to be inconvenient hours but it’s steady, 5 days a week work. To the same place, doing the same job. That I like. Saying that, on Friday I got to Crewe to pick up my trailer for Cowley and they couldn’t find it (not unusual, Crewe is a farce of a depot) after an hour and a half they declared they couldn’t find it because they didn’t have one for me. They sent me to Barnoldswick instead. I’d been there once before and hated it, tiny roads and that stupid, four barrier-ed, impossibly tight crossroads. This time, expecting the worst, I found I took it all in my stride. I may be improving. Yay! And I’m definitely getting better at that hideous reverse at Cowley. I was saying to Wendy, I think I’ll stick at it until February before looking for another job. This is the time of the year when […]

I’ve referenced it before but I’ll jog your memory. It’s a war drama film, a German sergeant who has an Iron Cross and his younger, vainglorious officer who desperately wants one. The officer lies to try and get one and tries to get the sergeant killed to cover his lie. In the end, as the allies are closing in and all hell is breaking loose, the sergeant prepares to run out into the fight he says to the officer “Come with me, I’ll show you where the Iron Crosses grow.”   That is where my rather pretentious and somewhat tenuous blog post title came from. I’m using it to refer to my latest ambition, the sub 3 hour marathon. It’s that special. I thought, now I’ve broken the 7 minute/mile barrier I’d just trot in at that pace. This training plan I’m trying to follow says: “week 1, run 3 miles in 18 minutes.” You have to remember it’s only a week or so ago I was thrilled to set a new PB of 6.45 m/m. That wasn’t an accident. That was going at it full-on. Then I tried to the 3 mile sprint (19.43). Not good. I mean, new PB for the mile and 3 miles, but not up to scratch. In the week one of the training days was 10 minutes (easy) run to warm up, then 4 X 1 mile sprint. It was blowing a gale so the runs into the wind were slower, but none of them were brilliant. (6.45, 6.23, 7.08, 6.22) Again, that was two new PB miles, but PB doesn’t count for shit. It just means my best isn’t good enough. Today I jogged an easy mile to get warmed up then sprinted the 3 miles again. It is pure hell. I’d prefer to run a full, steady, marathon than sprint 3 miles. This time was even slower (20.15) but that was because I burned out. I seriously can’t get enough air in my lungs to support that much effort. I set another PB for the mile (6.05, so close!) but then dropped to 6.45 and 7.23! 7.23! Let’s focus on the positive here, I’ve managed to knock over a minute off my best mile from 3 weeks ago. I think I’ll have to adjust the training plan. I have plenty of time, it’s a 14 week plan and I have just under a year until the Chester marathon. I’ve booked into some races roughly where they should be on the plan though. A 10 mile, a half marathon and a ‘fun’ hilly-as-buggery marathon. That should keep the momentum up. I need to train to reach the base standard. I’ve proved to myself that a 6 minute mile is possible. If I run a mile sprint one day, a long, easy paced run the next, a day of rest and repeat it might be a better plan. Get used to doing a single mile in 6 minutes, then 1½,  2 miles, etc. I […]