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Day 69–A Little Frustration But Pleased With The Run

I set out for the run a little later than planned, watching the bobsleigh on TV and reading about the controversy over in America with Nike/USADA disqualifying a Brooks athlete in the ladies 3000m in frankly ridiculous circumstances. If I moaned a couple of days ago about short track speed skating not having an appeal process and some baffling decisions, then athletics took it to a new level with Alberto Salazar appealing the appeal of an appeal and eventually getting his way when some Nike people had a closed door meeting with USADA officials.

I thought briefly about burning my seven or so pairs of Nike trainers in protest, but thought the better of it for when push comes to shove, for my feet anyway, they make the best trainers on the market. I just wish they didn’t, allegedly, have such a questionable influence on the outcome of elite sport.

With that injustice out of the way I drove out to Somerby to follow a route known as the Old Somerby 19  based on a Strava upload from a club mate which I downloaded and eventually managed to get it uploaded to my watch (a process that took way longer than it should have). As the title of the run suggests it was 19 miles and I wanted to run something closer to 22 miles, so I began the run with a loop of Somerby, stopping to return to the car and discarding the gloves which, despite the strong wind, were not necessary as the temperature was a balmy 12C.

The first mile was 7:09, which is quick for me for an opening mile. The second was 6:42, then 6:43, and the fourth in 6:28. Regardless of whether the wind was helping me this was swift stuff so early in a run. It was reminiscent of an 18 mile run I did back in October when, similarly to today, I hit 6:38 after the second mile and was pretty much able to hold that fairly comfortably for the rest of the run. The next four miles confirmed I was in that kind of form: 6:37; 6:23; 6:39; and 6:37.

Then things briefly went awry. My Garmin 910XT has a known issue where, when following a course, it is horribly prone to repeatedly telling me I am off course and then back on course (When I never left the course in the first place), delays in refreshing the course line and, worse still, random power offs. Ever since that happened mid run last November I now make a point of checking the watch frequently to the point of paranoia. That was justified today as somewhere around 8.2 miles the unit powered off randomly. It turned back on, took a while to find satellites and I continued running, but something wasn’t right – the distance didn’t appear to be increasing and the route I was taking on the course map bared little relation to what I was actually running.

I made the decision to stop and stop the following of the course. This had the effect of resetting the mileage and elapsed time to zero, something it doesn’t usually do. I powered the watch off and on again, was relieved to see at least my run was stored in the history rather than disappearing into the ether, and recommenced the run. It was ultimately no more than an annoyance, but for flagship watch it is unacceptable and Garmin will be receiving a phone call in the morning. At the end of the day my old 305 could handle courses near perfectly and this more expensive watch handles them badly to the point of it being nearly broken.

The rest of the run went fairly quickly as my mind mulled over exactly what I would be saying to Garmin in the morning. There were a few tough miles when I turned to face the head wind, which almost at times had me stopping in my tracks. By and large though the pace was relatively consistent and the legs remained good, albeit with a little tiring in the closing legs, which is only to be expected. At 7.6 miles on the new run the watch powered itself off again. I kept cool, gave it a few seconds and turned the watch back on. This time I was able to recommence without having to create a third leg to this long run.

As I returned to Somerby the watch was showing around 12.5 miles on the second leg of the run. The maths wasn’t too great at this point of the run, but I reckoned I should do another lap of Somerby to ensure the run was over twenty miles and hopefully nearer 22. It ended at 13.3 (Half marathon completed in 1:28) which mean a total of 21.7 miles, both segments averaging 6:41. The pace was unarguably consistent

This also meant a new record mileage week of 86.5 miles, which came as something of a unplanned surprise. There were very few quick miles as I spent most of the week recovering from Stamford, but today’s run left me in no doubt that things are coming together very nicely – as long as I stay fit and healthy!

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Day 68–Missing Out

By rights I should have been lining up for the National Cross Country Championships at Nottingham today. I was entered, paid up, ready to run. Then a couple of weeks ago it not only transpired to me that I was covering the Bahrain F1 test that day, the time difference had changed making it nigh on impossible to be able to make it to the race. I vainly hoped for a sandstorm to postpone the testing; that didn’t happen and I was resigned to missing out on one of those special races which don’t happen within an hour’s drive of where you live very often.

As it was I got out to run at 4pm, an hour after the Men’s Senior race began and hopefully sometime after I would have completed the 12km course. I’d mapped out a local run which took in some roads I hadn’t been down before. Unfortunately I had issues trying to upload the course to my Garmin (I think they are mucking around with things ahead of a big revamp of the Connect site) so had to run the course from memory.

I made a pretty good fist of it, only taking one wrong turn. Legs were still quite stiff, I need to pay attention to the right calf which is sending occasional creeping aches down to the foot. I don’t fancy another dose of plantar fasciitis thank you very much… The main objective was to tackle a new hill on me, one that has a Strava segment in need of a new KOM. Job done, but only just, it was a bit of a toughie.

I screwed up a bit with the Garmin, forgetting to restart the watch and losing a third of a mile. When you are going for record mileage, every metre counts. Twenty or so is planned for tomorrow, the weather doesn’t sound too promising mind you, so who knows what may happen.

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Day 67–Easy Running

Day three of the Bahrain F1 test I am covering – I cannot decide whether the most exciting action of the day was breaking the news to the world (via a third party) that Jenson Button had proposed to his now fiancée Jessica Michibata, or revealing to the world that Lotus tested an exhaust that is off centre at the rear. It was that exciting.

Hardly surprising then that I was keen to get out for a few miles running, more so after watching the apparent injustice in the short track ice skating with our disqualified British skater (cannot understand how a sport can have a judge seemingly penalising athletes at will without the need to explain themselves nor have any grounds for appeal. It seems ripe for corruption – not that anything like that would ever happen in the Olympics…)

The burning embers of injustice barely stoked the boiler in the opening mile or two, the legs feeling decidedly stiff. Somewhere along the run though I forgot about the achiness and helped somewhat by the wind blowing behind me for the closing stages, was able feel much better in the final miles – a successful recovery run.

I’ve got my eyes now on a record mileage week. I shouldn’t let myself chase these meaningless targets, but it is tempting…

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Day 66–Long and Slow

Another early start and a full 12 hours sat mostly at the desk. I was finished though in time to do my regular long, slow, Thursday club run. I was though really tired after only around 4 hours sleep. Strangely though when I was running I didn’t feel too bad; it was when I stopped I felt insanely tired.

First off it was 3.5 pre miles before heading off to the club, rather tragically choosing a hill to run up purely to create a segment for Strava later in the evening. There was a good turnout at the club, many of whom had run at Stamford on Sunday. This meant that there were still plenty of tired legs and quick running was not on the agenda.

I was happy with that. Totalling 16 1/2 miles, nearly all ran at a really easy pace, save for one stretch where I just let the legs tick over for a bit. There was few problems, the right groin a bit sore late in the run, otherwise fine. Once I stopped though the legs certainly stiffened up. Hopefully there’ll be a good night’s sleep before another early start. Looking forward to Sunday and a lie-in!

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Day 65–Happy Mapping

It was an early start behind the desk this morning as I was covering F1 Testing in Bahrain, although it should be noted that my start time was the kind of hour some club mates are heading out for their morning run, which rules out any possibility of me moaning about how tired I felt.

After the delay in the test actually commencing (not enough marshals, apparently) and the initial commotion over Lotus revealing their tusked new charge, there was some time to spare to think about where I was going to run once the day’s work was over. I felt that the legs were up for doing ten miles or so, fancied charting some new territory, so took to mapping out a route to upload to my Garmin.

Uploading a map to follow on your watch would have been the stuff of fantasy just ten years or so ago, so this is still very much cutting edge in the grand old story of running and training runs. Ever since I bought my trusty Forerunner 305 I’ve been a bit fan of mapping out runs to follow using the trusty black triangle and black line, occasionally chasing a white triangle if I’d set the run pace correctly. This feature of the watch came to the fore when I was part of the F1 Grand Prix circus: it allowed me to explore areas I’d not consider venturing to before and making circular courses, previously impossible without local maps or local knowledge, eminently possible.

The procedure was something of a trial seven or eight years ago, but in recent times the process has matured to the extent where it can take literally a couple of minutes to map out a new route, upload to the watch and be out of the door running it. The process is not without its hazards however: there’s been occasion when the quiet looking country lane has turned out to be something more like a motorway and the infamous occasion in the Eiffel Mountains when a perfectly good looking road on Google Maps turned out to be the figment of a cartographer’s imagination – leaving me puzzled in a field in the middle of nowhere at 5:30 in the morning…

These unexpected surprises are now more or less avoidable with the addition of Google’s Street View, which allows you, from the comfort of your computer, to recce a road or lane and decide whether it is fit for running or cycling on. It isn’t fool proof, but if, sometimes, things go awry you just need to remember that at the turn of the century most of us were still measuring the distance of runs with a map and string, knowing your pace and distance ran was the stuff of fantasy, following a map on a run was the preserve of an orienteer.

Street View has though, for me anyway, created the new phenomenon of the non-Street Viewed Road. These are typically quiet lanes and bridle paths where, for whatever reason, Google has not been able to send their camera car, leaving the nature of the lane or path a mystery until they are actually seen for yourself. In most cases the explanation for the road not being captured is straightforward – it is either too narrow to fit a car or in too poor condition to risk driving a car packed full of technology on.

For some reason I tend to forget this straightforward explanation and think there is something more sinister behind the absence of Street View. Is there an angry farmer wielding a gun at whomever dares to cross their land? Is the terrain totally impassable, horribly dangerous, likely to injure or even kill? Is there a vortex from which you will be sucked into, never to reappear? The bounds of my imagination are seemingly endless when it comes to determining why certain roads are not captured on Street View.

And so this lunchtime I was mapping a route, using Street View as a guide to see if the roads were suitable for running on. This was initially made harder by Google completely revamping the layout of maps again, seemingly minutes after they last revamped it, at least on the computer I was working on (It’s currently totally different on each of the three computers I work with). They are certainly packing in a lot of extra information with these revamps but seemingly making it just a little bit harder each time to work out exactly how to do anything. Most of the run was straightforward, but there was a loop of around a mile where Street View was not available. I went to the end of each end where the Google car went as far as it deemed possible – there seemed no reason why they couldn’t have gone further save for a sign saying something along the lines of if the rain is really heavy and you cannot see the stepping stones, don’t bother coming this way.

I decided the route was one worth attempting especially as the escape route, if the road was indeed impassable, only added a mile or so to my planned 10 miles. So it was at around 4pm I headed out, just in time to be able to complete the run before it was dark. Out of Manthorpe and past Belton on the main A607 turning left at Hough Road just past Barkston. Along the road and past the level crossing (Not sure what train line this is – it seems a quiet one) and down the hill towards the crossroads where I was to turn left onto the lane where Google cars fear to tread.

I was partially reassured when I passed two girls on ponies – suggesting this lane would not lead me to anything too sinister. The bridle path, as it turned out to be, and called Drift Lane, was in very poor condition. It was now obvious why the Google car called it quits. I diligently followed the black line on my watch which thankfully tallied exactly with the path I was taking. I jarred my left ankle a couple of times and it was touch and go with the huge puddles in places, but there was just enough room to pass without my feet getting wet. I saw no stepping stones and after a mile or so the path connected back to a civilised paved road (West Street) – complete with houses and a pedestrian to reassure me I was on safe, charted by Google, ground again.

The run back was plain sailing; the legs a little stiff still but no pains to concern unduly. Ten and a third more miles in the bag run again at around 7 minutes per mile on average. There should be more of the same tomorrow but probably a little further and a little later in the day.