Waffle

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?

Running this evening has really messed me up. Almost two hours past the end of the training, I'm still not experiencing any of the euphoria I felt after the trainings of the past few weeks. In fact, I'm not even particularly hungry, which is unusual. Normally I spend the rest of the evening wolfing down food.

I overdid it. I was still somewhat sore from Monday's rather extensive uphill/downhill exercises (carried out on the footpath at Zernike Science Park), and I'd eaten a little more than I should have beforehand. It didn't help that we got another uphill/downhill training again on the same footpath, albeit one that prioritised endurance a little more than Monday's exercise. I got continuing pain in the calves, intestinal cramps, and quite a bit of nausea towards the end of the training, although that's alright now.

A couple days' rest should do me good. Actually, now that I'm writing this, I'm becoming a bit more coherent and focused, signs that I'm less knackered. But the fact that I'm still not very hungry is not good at all.

One of the best things about running is going out in the fields and having the core part of your training somewhere where horses graze. Horses, while not exactly bright, are very interested in what goes on around them, so they'll have a look and then when they see running going on, they'll also start running. It's a fantastic thing to look at, very different from watching them run while they have riders. They always look like they're having a great time with it, and their movements are graceful and effortless, unlike those of most human runners.
Lambs will also get in on the fun and games. Fully-grown sheep always look like they haaaaate being sheep, but the ones that are only a few days old know how to have a good time. So you'll get horses running gracefully in one field, lambs dashing to and fro in little groups in another, mature sheep looking at the lambs worrying if they'll catch scrapie, maybe a few frogs croaking in the ditches - perfect. Absolutely perfect.

For future reference: today, April 25, was the first day in the season I swam in De Papiermolen, the outdoor pool right next to my workplace. 2006 is also the first year since moving into the studio that I have a season ticket.
I limited myself to twenty laps in the competition-length pool, not because I'm out of practice (I'm not) but because I was still feeling the effect of Sunday's cycling. Sidsel and I went to Dokkumer Nieuwe Zijlen - no, I hadn't heard of it either. It's on the northwest side of the Lauwersmeer. Our original destination was Lauwersoog, which is only 42 kilometers from Groningen, but we ended up taking a bit of a detour because we rode too far west and didn't go north quickly enough. This meant we got to see quite a few towns we hadn't been through before, as well as long stretches of empty space. The Netherlands has a reputation for being a wee bit crowded, but there are still places where no people live although avoiding tourists is a bit difficult even there. Near Dokkumer Nieuwe Zijlen, though, there's a nature preserve, two thirds of which is off-limits to people. The other third is largely marshland, with only the bike paths being accessible. It's very nice to suddenly find yourself riding through swamp covered in tall dry grass and reeds as far as the eye can see.

It's really nice to go cycling right now, anyway. You get to see tiny newborn lambs, birds nesting and everything coming to life. The birds in particular are everywhere, twittering and chattering. We stopped to look at a large group of excitable yellow-bellied finches and took pictures of, among other things, a swan in its nest. We spotted it turning over its eggs, but by the time we got our cameras out it had sat down on them again. Interesting though to see it nest out in the open. I suppose swans are badass enough to defend their nests against anything, so they don't need to hide them. (pictures to come later)
The one downside to cycling this early in the season is that it's impossible to dress for. We left in cold, clammy conditions; by the time we took our tea break at Houwerzijl it was sunny and warm; and by our coffee break in Lauwersoog at 5 PM it was cooling down noticeably again. The last hour of our journey we had light rain. In all, we spent about 7 1/2 hours, of a 9-hour journey, in the saddle, covering between 100 and 120 kilometers, most of it upwind. We rode on just about every surface known to man: asphalt, brick, concrete, gravel, sea-shell, dirt and sand. The only surface we missed out on was one made of shit, and trust me, we have ridden on dung-covered roads before in the past two years. The dominant organism along the northern coast is the sheep, remember.
I didn't write about this earlier because I was knackered at the end, and still didn't feel my best on Monday. I even skipped running on Monday evening. By 9 PM, though, my energy was returning and I started tinkering with the website. I expect to have manic levels of energy later today.

Long term readers of the blog will know that I like to run but have a problem with my knee preventing me from running for any lenght of time. Between my last post on the subject and yesterday evening, I went running less than half a dozen times and never for longer than 15 minutes in one go. I knew that if I built it up I would be able to expand that, but running for such short periods turned out to be frustrating - the muscles and lungs have only just warmed up and I have to quit again to prevent buggering up the knee.
On New Years'Eve, though, I noticed that I could dance (not well, but energetically) for hours on end without it affecting the knee. So obviously the energy and muscle are still there and with the right kind of movement I should be able to train without damage and build this up to much longer training sessions reasonably quickly.
It just so happened that the newsletter from my old running club arrived a few days later with a yellow note attached inviting me to a runninc clinic they were organising. So I signed up, bought some clothes for winter running on Thursday, tested them with another short run that same night, and yesterday evening, I took the first class.
And lo and behold! With a coach telling me how to structure a training session, when to hold back and when to go fast, it turns out I can complete an hour-long training without the knee objecting, and it also turns out that I'm actually pretty fit still. I can run pretty fast, and I'm not even all that sore the next day (not to give the impression that I'm completely free from the after-effects, but I had expected much worse). Actually, the only real complaints (apart from a slight soreness in that knee to remind me that I'm not completely out of the woods yet) come from the muscles in my stomach and sides, which clearly need building up and whipping into shape. As if I didn't know that from looking at my skeleton-with-a-potbelly shape in the mirror.
So now I'm feeling very motivated to bite the bullet and just do those 10-minute runs every other day during the week, in the hope that in two or three weeks I can last longer even when I'm running on my own.

Thirty minutes into any strenuous exercise, time that had been passing slowly before starts passing quickly, the breathing becomes steady and tackling that next half hour becomes easy. It's the time when the body starts running on fat instead of calling for more sugar to be brought in to fuel all this busywork. What also happens is that the mind suddenly becomes clear and focused – not on keeping those feet moving or whatever it is you're doing, but on the things it wants to think about and now has energy available to do so. It's a great feeling, and it's enabled me to write both Telethon material and Gang of Four easily.

(By the way, the work I did on Monday to write and draw a longer story for the Telethon isn't completely wasted. There is now a finished test page in which I was able to try some new techniques, plus twelve pages of thumbnailed comics which will make a good second draft for the final version, plus some White House in Orbit material that I might want to do something with, plus character designs and better insight into my time budget than I had before I had a try at it. In the long run, these will all come in handy.)

My preferred sport is now swimming again. I use the pool below my workplace every other day. De Papiermolen is a city-owned outdoor pool that had very few visitors for much of the summer, because after an early heatwave it was mostly wet and chilly outside. But since the last week of August, the weather has improved a lot, and the authorities have decided to keep it open until September 31, instead of pumping it out on the fourth as originally planned. The last week of August was also when I decided to start using this facility instead of just spending hot afternoons at the lake as I'd been doing before.

I don't count laps – instead I just swim for an hour or so, putting some effort into it. Then I spend some time in the sun with my sketchbook until I get too hot and leave. It's working well: I get a bit tired in the hours after the swim but after that I become more focused again. More physically taut as well - it's too early to expect any visible changes in my muscle tone but I can feel more balanced, as if my stomach muscles are pushing me upright.

Only downside: I get tanlines from wearing a swimsuit regularly for the first time in a decade. The pool water reflects the sunlight causing people to tan twice as fast. One day I observed a gull flying over the pool, and the bird's belly looked sky blue from the light reflecting from the pool! So those tanlines appear quickly, faster than sunbathing unclothed at the lake can remove them again. But the lake environment doesn't encourage hour-long, high-energy swims, and I'm now at the point where the endorphin rush from that becomes addictive. I'm hitting my stride – now let's try very hard to keep up that momentum during the winter.