Waffle

Despite having grown 13 years older since last year’s 4 Mijl van Groningen, according to my classification (fill in the number 6104), I have shaved a minute and a half off my previous record by net time, finishing in 28:52.4 this year. Or have I? This time around, the explanation of what gross vs. net finishing times mean is incomprehensible and self-contradictory, but considering that I passed the starting line something like half a minute after the signal, I think I should use the net. If not, I still ran 29:37.7, which is almost a minute off last year’s result. And I beat my boss this year, even though he improved his personal record too.

As usual at the 4 Mijl van Groningen, I had all sorts of agues and pains at the start, needed to go to the bathroom when the signal was given, didn’t feel my right shoe was tight enough after the first 500 meters, had to duck and weave past other runners, bumping into at least one (sorry!) and got another runner’s hand in my face at about 5 km. But I still felt great once I was done with it. The weather was once again great and seeing all those other people run was very motivational. There’s nothing like passing runners with a much lower start number than you, who started several minutes before you.

I did catch a glimpse of winner Eliud Kipchoge (start number 1), who was apparently born in 1900 according to the event’s database, shoeing up with two other very skinny African guys. Kipchoge, who also won last year, is impressive to watch, making me look obese in comparison. He finished in 17:30, not improving his personal record - I don’t think I’ll ever bridge that gap though.

I ran 56:44 net (56:49 gross) in the 11 km at this year’s Thesinge Run on Saturday, finishing 18th out of 49. I’m very satisfied with this result. Prior to the event, I didn’t feel ready for it - I’d come out of trainings feeling like I couldn’t keep up with my training-mates and on the day itself, I had some mild asthma problems. I was also worried that I’d knock myself out in the first few kilometers, because I’d never run an 11K or even a 10K before.

In the end, the asthma concern actually helped me, because I had another motivation to slow down at the start. My breathing was irregular during the first half but stabilized during the second. I was able to talk throughout the event. At the 1K point, the guy running next to me clocked us at 4:50, at which I slowed down a bit more. I passed the 4 Mile mark (official length of the 4 Mijl van Groningen) at a little over 33 minutes, and could speed up a bit during the last 2 kilometers, catching up again with the guy with the stopwatch before finishing.

Wilma de Vries, winner of the women’s 11K, told me she’d seen me finish and that I was looking pretty good at the finish line. In short, I ran the race by the book and finished with energy to spare. Good. Next year, if I’m still in the Netherlands, I’ll knock a few minutes off that time.

I love the Thesinge Run. It’s only in its second year, but it’s well-organized, with many of the teething problems from last year dealt with. The start was earlier in the day so no one had to run in the dark, and there were real dressing/showering facilities and a pasta meal after the run this year (I didn’t go to the pasta meal, preferring to drop by at my parents, who live nearby and hit them up for food instead). Because the community center had been renovated, partly with the takings from last year’s run, there was a bar as well, so when I fancied a beer after the race, I could have one. That drew some comments from people in the audience as I was drinking beer while still in my running clothes. Also, this year’s weather was fantastic.

What hadn’t changed was the inclusive atmosphere, with the entire village turning out to help out, encourage runners, take photographs and have a good time with the event and make everyone feel a winner. The different categories were also set up to allow everyone to take part, with special kids’ runs for the very youngest (though young children who felt up to it could also take part in the adult events and the women’s 4K was in fact won by a nine-year-old girl) and generous time limits allowing people to walk the 4K and 4M. It’s the camaraderie that makes the Thesinge Run so much fun - that and running on gravel and shell paths running through farmland. I didn’t notice quite as many cowpats as last year, which I’m grateful for.

Me at about 2 km || Me at a hundred meters or so from the starting line, though I can’t tell if it’s the first or second time I passed that spot

I ran the 4 Mijl van Groningen in 30minutes 32.9 seconds today, which was a whole 4 minutes off last year’s result. It was also quite a bit faster than I expected to run on the basis of Wednesday’s training or my result in the four-mile event at the Thaisner Dörpsrun two weeks ago, when I ran 34:05. On the other hand, that last run was done on a trajectory riddled with potholes and covered in cowpats, in windy, rainy, chilly conditions. And it was a couple hundred meters longer than 4 miles. On the third hand, today’s summery heat wasn’t exactly ideal for running either.

To be honest, the village event in Thesinge was more fun than the 4 Mijl van Groningen. Fewer people, and the village atmosphere was just too good to be true. The start/finish line ran between the school and the church, and pretty much the entire population turned up to cheer. The people guarding the route came out looking like absolute troopers, staying at their posts to guide everyone in the right direction in the cold rain. Oh, and there was even a guess-the-weight-of-the-pumpkin competition run by the schoolkids.

The 4 Mijl van Groningen is more of a real sporting event, with some top athletes on the roster running it in 18 minutes or thereabouts. Still, for the non-competitive part, it’s also a celebration of running and of people’s individual health and fitness goals.

One thing I did this year that I’m never going to do again is go to the starting area in my day clothes, change on location and hand over my stuff to the clothes trucks that the organisation provides. While all this is handled reasonably professionally, it’s still a pain in the arse to have to deal with. My goal was to have a little more flexibility in picking out what outfit to wear, but as I arrived very late, I had to change in a hurry, then rush to the truck to hand my stuff over. So next year, I’m going back to paying attention to the satellite weather forecast, traveling to the start in my running clothes carrying my keys and maybe a few euros for emergencies, like I did last year. It’s a lot less stressful.

30:33 is just a little slower than the last result accomplished by my boss at work, so I guess I’ll never hear the end of it when I show up there tomorrow morning.

By the way, my start number was 17721, in case you want to check on my claim/look at embarrassing photographs when they’re published.

See also: Jeroen’s experiences. Seems he has the same problem that used to bugged me as late as last year (but which has since cleared up for me through careful training).

- The two best-match vacancies I wanted to apply for evaporated on closer inspection. One had expired in June, one was run through an intermediary who was under strict instruction not to pass on resumes from people who didn’t have a University diploma in English/Dutch Translation. I might still send an open application to the first firm though.

- Lifestyle-wise, I’m still moving towards more of a normal worker’s schedule. I’m working on my habitual procrastination. I found out that not having music on over breakfast gives me more of a desire to get out of the house - today, I managed to cut half an hour’s worth of dawdling that way. Dawdling in the morning is my biggest time sink - all the other distractions during the day are minor compared to that.

- I’m also looking more closely at my own assumptions on how I go through the day. I’ve always thought of myself as "not a morning person" but this only really holds true for my writing and drawing. Anything else, from dentist appointments to swimming to photoshop work on my art can and should be scheduled early in the day. I think. Maybe. Possibly.

- I did a bit of teaching work today. Fun. Well-payed too, and the contact who got me this gig may be able to get me more.

- I still haven’t read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I really should get started on it as the spoiler policies in the various Livejournal communities are more laxly enforced by the day. Even the HMS_STFU community on Journalfen, which is run with an iron fist and sarcasm, had a partial spoiler above the cut in one post.

- After today’s training, I think I may be able to run a half-marathon in not-embarrassing time and without arriving at the finish limping and puking. I’ll see how my bad knee feels tomorrow and then, if it’s not killing me, start looking for a suitable event in September or October to train towards.

Man, if anyone had told me fifteen years ago that even a mild runner’s high was better than being drunk, I’d have come out of University a superhuman athlete, asthma or not. Recently I’ve been using short solo runs (I mean really short - 15 minutes will do the trick) as an anti-depressant and it’s really making a difference to how I feel through the rest of the day after running and the day after.

Right now, I do have some performance problems. A month ago, I went on a cycling trip that did some damage to the calf muscles in both legs. It wasn’t even a long cycling trip, but the conditions were pretty bad, with strong wind and some demanding uphill stretches putting too much strain on those muscles. The next time I went running, after skipping one group training, my legs didn’t cooperate at all, and they’re unreliable even now. Tonight’s training wasn’t too bad - my legs were sore but at least they worked, and I’m almost back to the level I was at before last year’s foot problem.

Yes, you could say I break easily.

I am making more of an effort to pace myself, though. One thing that’s turned out to be useful is that list I made a while ago of things that I do and don’t like about running. When I posted it, I didn’t mention two things that I added in the "dislike" column a week or so later: warming up and stretching. Hate them. Necessary evil, but evil nonetheless.

What I do with that list is use it to make sure I don’t avoid those things or skimp on them. I need to warm up even though I just want to get some mileage behind me; I need to stretch afterwards. I need to do dynamic exercise and strength training, and I need to get used to running in hot weather.

Last weak, trainer Marzena mentioned that it’s quite possible to be sweating from the outside temperature and not have warmed-up muscles, so I’m also paying more attention to that. I’m going to train in long trousers until it really becomes unbearable, just to make sure the legs are properly warm. I’ll sweat more, but once I’m adjusted to it, it’ll make more of a difference on those really hot summer days when I do switch to shorts.

I got a starting number for the 4 Mijl van Groningen. It’s one of the very highest, meaning I won’t be allowed to start until just before sunset, probably. My aim this year will be to keep myself from seriously hurting myself throughout the summer and run the distance in less than 30 minutes. I may take part in some other events in the run-up, but the 4 Mijl will be the year-to-year comparison event for me.

First Wednesday training in months. The Wednesday trainings at my club are more strenuous than the Monday ones, so being able to do one again and finish it without pain is a big step in the right direction.

I’m paying more attention to figuring out what I do and don’t like. I think I mostly like running:
On asphalt;
In cold weather; and
Steadily over a middle-to-long distance.

I dislike running with poor visibility. I don’t mind dynamic exercises in moderation, such as a quick dash up a slope, but I don’t like spending the entire training doing that. And I think I don’t like running in hot weather, such as what I had to endure today.

But apart from the heat, I got what I wanted. Mostly paved, flat track, and we did a middle-distance exercise, running along the Reitdiep from bridge to bridge, in a group, with either a single runner or a pair of runners taking turns to lead the group. I think dynamic exercises would have been a pretty bad idea in the heat anyway, so I pretty much expected that distance running would be on the menu.

Running along a canal is pretty nice right now. There’s a lot to see if you have the energy to look around you. Lots of people enjoying the evening air, migratory birds coming back from their winter residences, and towards the end I took an opportunity to stop for a bit to take a look at the frogs that were making a big racket in the ditches. There were a lot of them, and they were quite big, and randy enough not to care that people could see them.

Unfortunately, the club is closed next Monday because of Queen’s Day, April 30. I might go for a run on my own, and I’ll definitely be back next Wednesday for hopefully more of this.

In the weeks before I got my last bout of ‘flu, I didn’t do much running. I told people that it was because I disliked running in dark, wet conditions, which was partly true; one evening, I got rather badly spooked running up a slope into pitch darkness. But a bigger part of the reason was that the joy had gone out of running for me.
Well, the joy is back. But conditions did have something to do with the lack of joy: it turns out that I enjoy running in Zernike Science Park a lot more than running in the Noorderplantsoen. This may seem strange, because the Noorderplantsoen is quite a nice park whereas the ZSP is a collection of parking lots encircled by streets that lead through a rather ghastly post-industrial business waste land. But for me as a runner, those mostly-flat, paved streets allow me to get a decent tempo going, and the trainer isn’t tempted to make me do Fartlek-style interval training*) (up a slope, down another, 10 meters of running at top speed over gravel, and up another slope). While running uphill can be fun, I don’t think Fartlek is on the whole my thing. Let me get some mileage under my feet and I’m happy as a pig in shit. So the next few trainings, I’m going to pick my group based on where they’re going.
Of course, this only applies to running in the evening, with my club. It’s different when I’m running alone, in the day - then, a quick dash into the Noorderplantsoen is convenient and fun.

*) What we do on those occasions isn’t technically Fartlek, which as I read in the Wikipedia article actually does contain quite a bit of steady running. Maybe I should refer to those in-park interval exercises as Mini-Fartleks?

Yesterday, I went running again after a month’s sick leave due to ‘flu and bronchitis. Before that, I’d been training only sporadically, due to a series of injuries, including one case where I spilled boiling water on my foot. Burns on the foot, I can now tell you, are proportionally more painful than similar burns elsewhere, and heal very slowly.

There are currently three subgroups in my running class. I was going to join the light subgroup again, as I had during the period when I was only training sporadically, and queued up with the trainer who handles that group. There were some new faces, but that didn’t mean much. People switch groups all the time. Little did I know that it was the trainer who had switched groups and was now training the medium group… but once I realised, I decided to see how well I did.

And I made it through the training all right. I could really give it some welly and keep up with the rest of the group. For a guy with such a bad attendence record, and someone who was still recovering from bronchitis, I was in pretty good shape.

Or so I thought when I came back from the training. A day later, not so much. It turns out that not only can’t I hold my liquour anymore, I can’t hold my lactic acid either. Ow. Also aargh, moan, groan and woe is me.

Despite arriving at the start with a whole range of body parts feeling sore or intractably painful, I finished the 4 Mijl van Groningen, my first, in what will probably turn out to be about 35 minutes. I’ll know the exact time by this time tomorrow. I started a little too fast and it took me a little while to find the appropriate tempo for me - I’ll need to work on that.

The most problematic of my injuries is probably my left knee, which started really playing up after 4 or so kilometers. However, I have learned that by concentrating strongly on technique, making sure I lift that leg probably and keeping a bit of tension in my foot, I can make the knee behave, and I don’t think I was even significantly slowed down by it. Good.

I’ll skip the next training or two to give all the sore bits time to recover. But once I get back, I’ll want to do more events.

Update: 34:39.7. Not bad for a first time, I think.

After this, with Ullrich and Basso out of the running, a dramatically reduced number of contestants on prologue day, and confidence in cycling’s integrity presumably at an all-time low, is there any point in even having the Tour de France at all this year?