I’ve run the New York City Marathon, and more than that I did it in a time I can be proud of and I managed to enjoy myself for about 90% of the time. So let’s get the time out of the way, final official time was 04:30:22. We ran a very even race up to around 30km or where admittedly we “crashed and burned”. I’m just glad for all the moments I had along the way, the sights, the shouts, the words of encouragement and countless high fives.
My bib number for the New York City Marathon reminds me of the old phone numbers where I grew up. It’s one of those numbers that seems to mean everything to you at a moment in time and then sinks into obscurity afterward. Like my student number from college, my leaving certificate student exam number and yeah, my old 5 digit telephone number at home in Ireland- which they destroyed with a double 8 prefix this year. Another number to be important for a while, then not.
I’m not just running. I write here about running, but for a change I’ll not talk about the run we had last night in the dark and windy Sloterplas and instead thread together a few pieces of my other interests. Here goes:
Yes, done it, last long run. So after running 8 half marathons in the last 10 weeks I can say this about long runs. They are hard, they get easy, then they get hard again. I hope I’m due another bout of easy and that will time nicely with the marathon. The numbers start to get scary now. Been training for 24 weeks, 8 runs in excess of 21 kilometers and 4 of 30k or above. No wonder then that yesterday while on a good pace and in great weather, we felt tired, a year of running wearing us out.
Yes, I’ve dusted off the keyboard and got myself into blogging gear again. What a week. This was EBM week, the brand meeting for ASICS in Europe and while it’s lots of fun it’s also lots of work. We presented alots of great new product for next autumn, EBM always makes me want to time travel right through to the year ahead because all the shoes and new clothes look so nice, new and fresh. But before this busy week even started we had done yet another long run. That turned out to be an adventure in itself.
Could write a book on that, runner’s guilt. I’m suffering from it today. Ran ten should have been 15, the line they used to throw at us in school rings in my ears “you know you’re only fooling yourself”. Every run is different, even on this route, one which we I can run in my head at this desk right now. Each turn, bend, broken paving stone and low tree branch are familiar. While it was wet last night, the wind is from the south and has brought the temperatures up to 16 and 17 degrees. We were very warm, over dressed, the air and darkness pressed in on us. I was thinking of the Gorillaz song…demon days….
Since I last posted, we’ve done a speed training and a long run. With the evenings drawing in we now have to get straight out the door after work and get the run in before the light is gone. We do the speed laps around the park in front of our building and only half the loop has public lighting we’re left running quite quickly in the dark, which is just asking for a sprained ankle. Laziness, I suspect, is the mother of most injuries. We’re just too lazy to find a safer place to run fast.
It’s that time of year, last weekend we were getting sunburned in Almere and now you’d nearly need a row boat to get through the bike paths, it’s been raining cats and dogs here lately. On Tuesday night the schedule called for 10km and I while I was feeling lazy on the train on the way home I was heartened by all the under-10’s who were out doing their soccer practice under floodlights, the waves of rain drifting over their little heads. They didn’t look cold or sad, so I decided I’d be happy about going out and doing some sport too.
Yesterday we ran 30km in Almere, “Holland’s fastest growing city” which is out in Flevoland, a polder (land reclaimed from the sea) dating from the 1950’s. I was pretty impressed with Almere, it has a poor reputation (boring, no character, boring) in Holland but where we ran yesterday was green and rather pleasant. It was strange to think it’s all new, that it’s a planned place that it’s been give to nature to and non-fashionable people tp colonise. Most importantly, it’s a nice place to run.
It’s what I officially become in December but in running terms that’s what I am already. The Man wore the HR monitor the other night for our 15km training run and he didn’t his heart rate didn’t budge above 149. Jeepers. My heart has to do a lot more work to keep up. I live in sport zones 4 and 5 he clipped along in zone 3. On top of that we went to see Perry at Fysiomed to get our knees looked at, and he mentioned that the Man is probably experiencing some pain because he is shortening his stride to stay at my pace. 
. Little sad-faced circle you say it all.
