tired legs

theres a saying in sport that pain is temporary and glory is forever. most of the time i think that is the wrong way round though. the satisfaction i feel at a good race or achieving one of my targets is often short lived before i start thinking about the next of my targets, whilst (like today for example) if i have had a hard race my legs can feel utterly drained for days afterwards. on sunday i finished 69th, and my legs were hurting from sart to finish. the course was on a field and whilst it wasn't classic mud and trenches cross country course, you were always either going up or down a hill. one end of the field was at sea level whilst the other end was 131 feet above, which just about says everything. it was one short lap and 3 long laps. i was boxed in at the start but as the field started to thin out that was when i started to make my move, 100th at the end of the 1st lap gradually picking as many people as possible off before finishing 69th and collapsed at the end. gb international ben tickner won the mens race, whilst fresh from 10 pinst of cider the night before, complete with a hangover, claire willer won the womens race.

i went for a run when i got home in the evening just to try and get rid of some of the lactic acid and 30 mins was ok. i did another run this time for 55 mins last night plus a game of badminton and i really think its a long time since my legs have been so heavy. i am not expecting anything special from tonights session as i don't think i will have recovered properly.

i had my 1st deep sports massage on friday and i was surprised to be told that whilst i have exceptionally strong calf muscles, i had virtually no muscle on either my hamstring or my quads or my adductors. if i can run such good times on legs that are allegedly so weak, then it will make the results of my vo2 max test in 3 weeks time very interesting. i vehemently deny that they are that weak though and any way i know that i more than make up for it with huge amounts of grit and mental strength. thats one of my training partners words not mine!

its been a long time since we spoke

due to the fact that the 6 o'clock starts are now here which means that i am rarely able to get to portishead library before it closes, so as you can guess a lot has gone on in my athletic life since then. we have trained twice at coombe dingle since then once at bristol zoo and i have had a 5 mile road race at weson super mare where i ran 29:42. i have also been asked out by a woman, who changed her mind as soon as i said yes, giving me a lesson in why women can be the biggest head fucks in the universe.

last night at the zoo we did a session of long lap, medium lap short lap x2 and my times were 3:45, 2:55, 2:15, 3:50, 2:47, 2:17. i still fel a bit 'leggy' from tuesdays sess at coombe dingle so it was quite pleasing that i was able to equal the sorts of times that i would have ran last year only if i was feeling particularly good. it was annoying though that some upstart students decided to turn up and take my place as leader of the chasing group (self appointed by the way) behind the county and international standard runners/duathletes/triathletes.

for those of you who never thought that in their life time they would ever bear witness to a miracle, well now you have. my cross country career, which i had once given up the ghost on is now restarting on sunday with a run in the new south west league. the standard isn't expected to be as good as the gwent league but the distances covered wont be anything like as far (8.2k for the blokes) which is far more suuitable for me than the 10 or 12k races that they have at the gwent. they say that the course has some hills in it which will suit me even further. rather than trying to win the race outright i have a few people in my mind that i want to beat and i'll just settle for doing that afterall it would be madness to try anything special after so long away from the brown stuff!

disappointment at swindon

one of the first rules of running a pb in any race is that you must finish the race. that unfortunately rules me out completely, having dropped out of todays swindon half marathon. having started quite well, i managed to stay with the lead group for the first couple of miles before the problems set in. firstly my legs were tightening up and every time i slowed to accomodate for this problem they just seemed to tighten up some more. maybe it was an effect of over training, maybe it was some other problem. having got a lift back to the start i queued to get a massage done, i think i got closer to the route of the problem.

"no wonder you dropped out with legs like this" said the massager.

"why?" i asked

"theres massive knots all over the place, no wonder they felt so bad. its a cumulative effect of not warming up and down properly and not stretching properly over the years". so i think i'm getting close to the root of the problem. getting more massages done would help as well as that helps to iron out any potential problems. the one problem with that though is that it is almost impossible to massage yourself. meaning that the cost is rather extortonate."

the fact that things have gone wrong both times i have competed in half marathons tells me quite clearly that i am just not ready for them yet. while my 10k times are coming down every time i do one, that half marathon time of mine remains a real blot on my copy book. lesson learnt i feel.

on the positive note though there is a prom run on thursday night down at weston super mare a 5 mile road race on a course that i like and is always fast whenever i run it. a pb would go down well but i have a perfect record of having pb'd every time i've run the course at weston. finally i can't go without mentioning the rugby last night...after being writen off by every man and his dog at the start of the tournament, england are in the final of the rugby world cup and look as though they are coming in to a bit of form at the right time. even if we win on saturday, i still don't think that this england team is as good as the team that won 4 years ago, but it isn't performances that count, it's results and i would take a 3-0 if it was offered to me now, whether it is south africa or the argies and i don't care which as i think we have an equal chance against either team.

i'm supposed to be training tomorrow night with mikes group, but don't think i will be as i feel tired and jaded as a result of not having slept properly. and if i am to race on thursday i will need to rest. on the other hand it might be the perfect confidence booster for me and i suppose it would help me todecide whether or not the problems i had today are a long term thing or just a result of having got out of bed the wrong side, metaphorically speaking. we shall see what we shall see.....

easing down

for the first time in a long while, i gave a session a miss yesterday/last night, whilst at coombe dingle on tuesday, whilst i was running further ahead of people i would usually leave behind, i was still running rather quite easily. the session was 6 minutes, followed by 2x3 minutes, followed by 3 x 2mins short recovery 1 min 30, long recovery and just for good measure at the end a 8 minute effort was tagged on. mike said to me not to bother doing the thursday session if my legs weren't feeling fully recovered, and not to worry too much about it if i didn't as i wont lose any thing by not doing it and i wont gain any thing by doing it.decision made. the effort now is entirely on being fresh for the big day on sunday. i asked mike whether or not he thought i was fit enough to beat 80 mins and the answer was a straight no and he said that 85 minutes was a more realistic target. i do wonder sometimes how much of what he says is actually what he genuinely thinks and how much is him trying to get people fired up for the races with a bit of what can quite easily be perceived as criticism. its certainly stung me in to action a few trimes before. i have been warned about this though go off to quick and it will hurt like hell and could take a few weeks to recover properly. i'll bear that in mind but i still feel like going for 1:20, i've got my heart and mind set on it far too much now. does that sound like a recipe for disaster? i hope not, but 13.1 miles is a long long way and the early pace will feel easy. but i'm a gritty little fucker and the more i get in to this running lark the tougher i'm becoming and the better i am at holding on when things start to go tits up, but hopefully not on sunday!

a kaick in the teeth from mr brown

after we had been striking to save the postal service from annihalation by messrs crozier and leighton it looks after what gordon brown said last night we could lose this dispute. congrats gordon, in 3 secs you lost 190,000 votes.well done

we will never be broken mr crozier

not by royal mail at least, but the intensity of my training over the past week or so has more than made up for the pathetic lies, mistruths etc etc over the past couple of weeks. the walkout was close to 100% today and yesterday. one thing i have learnt during this whole sorry affair is this. in an industrial dispute, you certainly know who you're friends are and quite often the ones who cross the picket line, the scabs are often the worst hypocrites as they will moan more than any of the strikers will, yet they act like goody two shoes in front of the managers to try and court favours. i certainly wont be making any time for the few who did cross the picket line yesterday. they justify it by saying they can't afford to lose a days pay. what they have to get in to their heads though is that even if they are only trying to earn a days wage, in the eyes of the evil one and his cronies if they cross the picket line they are supporting the evil ones position. most of the scabs don't have enough moral integrity to understand that though and as i said to one of the scabs once in a heated discussion, don't ask me to explain what that is as i haven't got all day to sit here explaining it.

i have used the spare time for 2 things. doing some cash in hand work to keep the old income up and some more training. i used google maps to find out how far the tempo run i did on saturday evening was and it said 10.2 miles. and i managed it in 62:37, which i was well happy with. an hour steady run on the sunday followed by a gym sess and i could certainlyfeel the lactic acid in my legs and the same on monday. tuesday we were at coombe dingle doing some timed efforst on the grass and the session was as follows. 1x6 mins, 2x3 mins, 6x1 mins, 1x 6ins. i managed the 6mins ok, but from then on in it was a strugle with the effects of saturday night still in my legs. i even had to drop out of two of the reps as my legs just weren't responding to any thing i was trying to tell them. by the time i got to the final 6 minute rep it was just a case of getting round in one piece. the fact that i got out and did some thing was in itself a positive.

on to thursday night and we were doing an old favourite of mine, the sneyd park hills. these are roughly 1k per rep and it is a circuitwhere you start on a moderate slop, turn a corner go up a very steep slope, turn another corner and you are on the flat for the final sprint, before you jog back down for a recovery and you start all over again. i did 3:22, 3:24, 3:25 3:31, 3:31 and 3:31 there were again still effects fron saturday but nothing like so bad this time. as usual on the hills i was leaving the people i usually run with for dead and on the first rep i ws actually not that far behind the lead group. usually only 3 or 4 max in that group, but they were given a shorter recovery. i was looking for a race this weekend but the only thing i could find was the avon 10 mile championship which is too long for this close to the swindon half next sunday