Since I got the Nike + iPod kit last Saturday, I have officially logged 25.97km over five runs. Folks, that’s more than sixteen miles. I am in utter awe right now. My speed’s not great but that’s some serious distance for me. It’s amazing (and sad) how much more motivation I have now that someone is “keeping score.” Today was a rather short run with the Snook over through Sydney Uni. We ran down to the #2 Oval (ie the cricket pitch) and ran two laps inside the fence. On our second lap, I happened to look down and see a flash of orange. “HEY, IT’S TWENTY BUCKS!” I got way excited. That was my most rewarding run ever.

Thanks, Paula!
I went out for my third(!) run tonight with the Nike + iPod kit. I ran all the way down Harris Street through Pyrmont, then around under the ANZAC Bridge by the Sydney Fish Markets, and back up Wattle Street to home. It’s almost exactly 5K, which worked out pretty nicely. I’m still trying to build my fitness level up again so I wasn’t pushing too hard. I’ve set myself a goal of running twelve times in four weeks, so I’m going for frequency more than anything. Anyway, as I got back to the house tonight I hit the button to end the workout, and I was surprised to hear a strange British woman’s voice announce: “Hi, this is Paula Radcliffe. Congratulations on your new Personal Best time for the mile!” Sweeeeet. Granted, eleven minutes is pretty darn pokey by most of y’all’s standards, but it’s within sight of my ten minute goal!

I just found Hal Higdon‘s excellent running site. He’s got dozens of training plans on there, including this Novice Half-Marathon that looks pretty promising. The Sydney Half-Marathon is next May, which means we’ve got about seven months to train. He suggests that you can stretch the plan out by doing each week twice, which should work out pretty well. In the more immediate future, there’s an 8K Fun Run on Australia Day. (Didn’t I say we were done for the summer? Sheesh.)

Well, today was the day of the Ryde Aquatic Festival and the 10K Fun Run event in Gladesville. (We’d actually mistakenly thought the run was Saturday morning, so Friday night we’d carb-loaded and everything before we thought to check the entry form. Oops. Oh well; it was too hot to run Saturday anyway.) I’d like to start off by saying that AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, I will NEVER run a race in a hilly residential area again. This was the hilliest run I’ve ever been on and it KILLED. Add in the fact that the crowd thinned pretty quickly – most of them were doing the 5K – and soon it was just me and the Snook and one old guy clambering up endless hill after hill of McMansions. I’d forgotten my pedometer and there was no signage announcing the distance, so we had no cue whatsoever about how far we had to go. I think I started to go a little mad. At one point the route crossed a park, and another section was along a trail through a little bit of woods, but mostly it was just endless suburbia. (At one point, I could swear that the damn course was a tesseract.) My goal had been to run the whole thing without walking, but the hills sapped my will to live pretty quickly. At roughly the halfway point – I have no way of knowing, really – I told the Snook to go on ahead. He was itching to pass the old guy but I didn’t have it in me. So I plodded on alone. About three years later (in my subjective mental time) the tesseract finally folded in on itself and the finish line came into view. I crossed at 71:34. Not the greatest time, but understandable considering the hills, I think. (The Snook finished in 67:09.) I finished eighth out of my age group though! (There were only ten of us.) And I think that’s probably it for the Sydney running season until the heat of summer is behind us. Maybe I’ll take up swimming…

While the Irish were getting spanked by the hated Wolverines back home, the Snook and I were engaged in our own grudge match with the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We were aiming for a time of 60 minutes for the 9K (based on our previous 8K time of 53 minutes). The race started in Milson’s Point at the little grassy park at the base of the bridge. You were supposed to “self-seed” so the Snook and I dutifully joined the crowd around the “60 minute” sign. The gun went off and everyone started inching towards the starting line. Unfortunately all the idiots who’d been in line at the Port-a-Potties just joined in wherever they could, which meant that once again we had to pick our way around walkers and strollers. (It’s getting to the point where a main source of my inspiration to get faster is my desire to get away from the goddamn walkers.) We headed up the street and turned onto the bridge exit ramp. And then suddenly there we were, heading up the middle of the bridge. I fulfilled a dream and deliberately ran in the “death” lane. (There are six lanes with no divider, just indicators that light up to tell you which ones are open in each direction. They change it depending on traffic. The middle one is the death lane.) More idiots were stopping in the middle of everything to take pictures of each other. WHATEVER. We were there to run, people! Then down around the Cahill Expressway above Circular Quay and then right onto Macquarie Street. Then it was all the way up the hill to the park, where we hung a left into the Domain. This part of the course was basically the same as the Mother’s Day Classic, so we knew what we were doing. We were checking our pace fairly frequently and we hit the 5K mark at 33:00. Not bad! That’s the point where I felt a stitch starting to threaten. The whole second half of the race ended up being an epic battle Kristy vs. Her Stitch. Back up to Macquarie Street and then a straight shot down to the Opera House. As we hit the 8K mark, I told the Snook to go ahead. I knew I could grimly hang onto the pace I was at, but I wasn’t really in any shape to be sprinting. Wincing and gasping for breath, I crossed the line at 58:20. The Snook probably finished around the 58:00 mark. BOOYAKASHA, BRIDGE! Then we headed up to the “Recovery Village” to turn in our timing chips. I have to say, the “post finish” services at this race SUCKED. Maybe it’s just because we finished in the middle; I don’t know. But it took us ages to inch our way through to the de-chipping area, and then ages more to locate the medal collection tent. People get really greedy and grabby post-race, and every tent where things were being handed out just turned into a complete melee. We got our medals; we got our free newspaper. We headed home. In Haymarket we stopped at Harry’s Cafe de Wheels for a much needed beef pie. Mmm, protein. Now we’re just in recovery mode. Man, I’m thirsty.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the most amazing part. WE RAN THE WHOLE THING. Well, I had to stagger up the last fifty feet of the last hill, but other than that, we actually ran more than FIVE MILES without stopping. I’m very proud of us!

This Sunday the Snook and I will be competing in our THIRD race together, the 9K Bridge Run. Can you believe it? And we’ve already started thinking about what our next event will be. This running thing has gotten a bit addictive. We’re not even that good at it! I found a great calendar at CoolRunning Australia and we’re having a look. I think this Sydney Summer Series sounds interesting. It’s a program of after-work events where you have to navigate various courses around the city. We can pretend we’re on The Amazing Race!

Anyway, Sunday. Yeah. Our original goal was to finish in an hour, and I’m hoping that’s still achievable. Unfortunately we’ve had a week and a half off due to my stomach, and we both put on a few kilos. (I’m hoping it’s just water weight.) We had a good run last night and I’m just looking forward to running down the middle of the Bridge on Sunday!

When last we met, I was preparing for the City 2 Surf and lamenting the weight I’d put back on. A lot has changed since then: I’ve been seeing an acupuncturist; I’ve given up Diet Coke completely (cold turkey!); and I’m back to running regularly. The Snook and I are even training for another race in a few weeks. My stomach problems have mostly cleared up, but while my acupuncturist is happy to take the credit my doctor is still puzzled as to the cause. Hence, I’m having the damn gastroscopy next Tuesday. (Not looking forward to it.) In terms of concrete numbers, I’m happy to report that I’m back down in the land of the sevens. HURRAH! I’m still 1.5kg above my goal weight, but I know I can get there. Overall it wasn’t the greatest winter, but Spring is just around the corner (three more sleeps!) and I’m sooooo looking forward to it.

I just found two great running-related links: “Eat and Run” (about carb-loading before a race) and Secrets of Endurance: Eating to Go” (about eating during a race to avoid the dreaded “bonk”). As the Snook and I start to increase our milage, this will become more of an issue. We didn’t do too badly with the City 2 Surf in terms of hydration, but we didn’t bother to eat anything during the run. Next year I think a hit of energy goo on Heartbreak Hill is in order.

Today was the first day in ages I actually felt like running. The Snook and I did a nice long jog down Harris Street to Pyrmont, then around the Fish Markets and into Glebe via Pyrmont Bridge Road. We’ve also signed up for our next event: the Sunday Telegraph 9K Bridge Run in one month. We were tossing up the idea of the Half Marathon, but they have cutoff points and the idea that we’d have to meet some sort of speed minimum scared us off. Next year…

City 2 Surf Recap
Did you know that Sydney’s City 2 Surf is the largest timed fun run in the world? AND WE KICKED ITS ASS. Okay, so we didn’t even come close to Dickson’s or Anna’s times, but we did manage to jog most of the distance and finish relatively strongly. We started the day off by walking over to the start (about 20 minutes from our place), figuring it would be a good warm-up. Once we got there, we were just astounded by the number of people. They’d actually closed registration a day or two before as more than 63,000 people had signed up. We fought our way through to collect our red baseball caps and then nervously joined the other 19,000 runners in the HSBC start. (That’s the “middle” group, behind the serious contenders but ahead of the walkers in monkey suits.) We heard the pistol as the elite group took off, and a few minutes later it was our turn. I’d thought to bring a stop watch so I started it once we actually got up to the starting line. (It took a while; 19,000 people don’t get moving very quickly!) And then we were off…

The initial bit heading down William Street was so fun. Everybody was cheering and I felt like I could run forever. I kept turning my head to look at the sea of red surging down the street behind me. I’ve never seen that many people running in my life. Of course, the immediate problem was picking your way through the crowd. Just as you’d start get get up some steam, you’d run smack into ten soccer moms walking abreast in the middle of the road. (I honestly bet we probably ran an extra kilometer from all the sideways dodging we had to do.) It was also tricky to stay together since the red caps made it hard to spot one another. At any rate, we seemed to be making really good time and we decided to skip the first drinks station. (We’d done a good job of hydrating beforehand; all the more remarkable considering that this guy and this guy got Snookums drunk the night before.) I remember coming into Double Bay and just starting to realize how hard this was going to be and how much I was going to hurt… when I heard pumping rock music in the distance. We turned the corner to see a full-on 80’s hair band wailing through “Paradise City” on the roof of the Golden Sheaf Hotel. It was AWESOME, like a scene out of a movie. Have you ever seen 10,000 people try to jog and head bang at the same time? I have.

The rest of the course is a blur, really. I remember passing a few jazz bands of old guys tootling away on their horns and clapping with delight. I remember enterprising little kids who’d set up lemonade stands along the route, as well as the more philanthropic kid with a bowl of ice cubes he was handing out. I remember people spraying their garden hoses over the appreciative crowds. (Did I mention how GORGEOUS it was today? Sometimes I can’t believe I live somewhere so pretty.) I remember turning a corner and seeing the crowd surging up up up… So this was Heartbreak Hill. Two kilometers pretty much straight up. We walked the steep bits and tried to run on the flat bits, along with pretty much everybody else. The church at the top had erected a big sign congratulating us on making it the top, and I could’ve wept. An onlooker yelled out “AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE” and I screamed “OI OI OI!” “I’m surprised anyone has the breath!” said the woman struggling next to me. “I’m a new Australian, and that was my first official OI chant!” I grinned. We could tell we were making good time, even with my walk breaks (which became more frequent in the second half). Our stopwatch was running about twelve minutes behind official race time. As we passed the 8K mark at the top of the hill, I said to Rodd, “There! Now this is the farthest you’ve ever run.” And when we passed the 10K, it was his turn to say it to me. I could see the ocean and feel the cool breeze as we neared Bondi. My stomach had been cramping the whole time and I started to get a stitch, but Snookums kept me moving. We were nearly there. The only accident came as we were heading down in to Bondi. I turned to tell Snookums I needed to take a breather, and a girl who’d been running right behind me swerved and tripped over my foot. She went down to the pavement and I apologized profusely as I hauled her up. It could’ve been worse; the St. Johns Ambulance people looked to be busy with folks who’d overexerted themselves.

We’d asked a lot of people before the race about their previous times, trying to gauge how long it would take us. The serious runners were all under 90 minutes, while the walkers were over two hours. Our previous 8K took us about 50 minutes so theoretically 14K should be doable in under 100, but with our lack of training (thanks to my stomach) and Heartbreak Hill, we decided to aim for two hours. Two hours, we figured, would be miraculous. Well, guess what? As we struggled around the final turn, I raised my head to the official clock. It read 1:56:00. “Look at the time!” I yelled. Screw the stitch; screw my stomach; screw my aching feet and jelly legs. I just started pounding one foot in front of the other. We crossed the line at 117 minutes, and I was trying so hard to keep moving and breathing (and not break down in tears) that I forgot to check the stopwatch. Whatever. Our time will get adjusted down anyway due to the delayed start, and we knew we were about 12 minutes off the official clock. So we’re calling it 105 minutes. Which is AMAZING. I still can’t believe it. The next hour was a haze of wandering through crowds and waiting in line to get a bus back to the city, from whence we walked back home to Chippendale. My face was gritty from the salt of dried sweat. After a shower, we headed out to the cafe for massive cheeseburgers. Then it was home for a long nap, followed by an hourlong massage (for me) and many hours of World of Warcraft (for the Snook). It’s gonna take us a few days to recover.

So man, 14K is HARD. That’s nearly nine miles. It’s the longest we’ve ever run (or walked, for that matter) in our lives. And you know the craziest part? As soon as we finished, the Snook started talking about an upcoming HALF-MARATHON. I think we’ve created a monster here…