Jul 11, 2023 | Legs!, Sugar, Ah Honey Honey, Writing
I ran my first 10,000 meters since 2009 at the weekend, picking out a route that took me from home and around the back of Murrayfield to Roseburn and back via a roundabout route. One hour 11 minutes. It took a bit more out of me than I expected, but I know I can do it now, which helps for the next one.
I ran it alone. There are advantages in having ‘running buddies’ and there’s a kind of fun in running with a large group, but Murakami was right to say that for many of us the pleasure is in the solitude and the ‘Zen’ aspects. Having said that, I’ve signed up to do a ‘proper’ 10k in Edinburgh on October 22nd, a couple of weeks after I turn 64. I may as well mark the return to 10k form with a t-shirt and a medal. I’ve also signed up for the Edinburgh Kilomathon on Sunday 7 April 2024: 13.1 k from Ocean Terminal. Both events finish inside Murrayfield Stadium.
By the time I run both of them, they should be well within my ability given the training schedule I’m putting together, assuming no injuries or mishaps along the way – always a risk with Edinburgh’s roads and pavements.
I bought some new running shoes – last year’s model, heavily discounted when this year’s model hit the shelves – and some odds and ends of ‘technical’ clothing found very cheap in either my local Cancer Research shop or as clearance items in TK-Max. For readers in the UK, Trespass, with its never-ending sale, is quite good for heavily-discounted wicking t-shirts, as is Mountain Warehouse.
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My most recent Substack post waded into a topic that I hadn’t thought much about until a stray thought occurred while I was out running. When I started on the low-carb route I unthinkingly bought into the notion of both beer (in the sense of real ale) and bread (in the sense of traditionally baked bread) as high-carb products. What occurred to me was that looking at the carb content of the ingredients missed out on the effects of fermentation. I haven’t completely made up my mind on this, and I have to be wary of settling on the answer that I want, but I reckon there is something more going on than received wisdom suggests.
You’ll find it here: Bread and Circuses
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I’ve been writing, though not as quickly or assiduously as I’d like. I have a number of projects bubbling under and decided to prioritise putting together a sequel collection to the stories in Coyote in the Corner. The first of these, coming in at a lengthy 57,000 words, is now complete in first draft. I like it, although at present the ending is rushed and only blocked in. I’ll let it ferment for a while as I’m writing other tales in the sequence then come back and sort it out. That’s more than half the book done, though, so I’m pleased with that.
One of the things I like about Coyote is the way I managed (I think) to imply a bigger picture from how the stories fitted together. That’s my aim for this one when it is done as well.
Jul 1, 2023 | Goggle-eyes, Legs!, Music
After taking that tumble last week, I gave it five days before I went out for a run and spent most of the time listening to what my body was telling me and alert for reaction. It went fine, and I gave myself a couple more days until going out again, which I did this morning. The aim today wasn’t about distance and it wasn’t about speed: my aim today was to run for a continuous 45 minutes, which I achieved. I did a little more than that, but by then I was on our hill and gritting my teeth.
Assuming no more accidents or illness, I’m back on my leisurely track towards 10k fitness. Sometime in the next couple of days, I’m going to follow a reasonably flat route and aim for 7k, then focus on short runs through next week. This would put me on a path to 10k fitness sometime in early to mid August. If I get there, I’ll look for a couple of 10k runs to enter and reward myself with a T-shirt and a medal 🙂
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TV has livened up again with the appearance of season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. After bailing on season 3 of Star Trek Discovery and putting Picard on pause, I was sceptical about any new shows in the franchise, but I’m enjoying Strange New Worlds a lot. I don’t think it’s groundbreaking, but it has a good cast and tells its stories well, even if the stories are familiar.
The Witcher is back for season 3 and has started strongly. I’m also enjoying Star Wars Visions on Disney+ – anime shorts from the Star Wars universe (well, except for the Ardman mashup of the pod race from The Phantom Menace and Chicken Run.)
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For reasons not unrelated to the acoustic bass guitar that I’m currently grappling with, I’ve been listening to a lot of The Beatles. I haven’t listened to a lot of their stuff for a while and it’s fascinating to come back to them with fresh ears. The journey from a hot band playing rock’n’roll standards in Hamburg and Liverpool to the emergence of their own writing talent is one I’m going to have to think about more, but something happened in 1963. It might have been meeting George Martin, but there was something else going on: the emergent repertoire of Lennon/McCartney originals is qualitatively different to the Hamburg/Cavern material.
At the same time, McCartney begins to emerge as a creative and influential bass player, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. He has said that a big influence was James Jamerson of Motown, but there is more to it than that. The bass line of All My Loving is rooted in neither rock’n’roll nor Jamerson. By the time of Michelle (1965) he’s a long way from roots and triads or walking basslines.
There was more to the Beatles than just Macca, of course, but I can’t help but think his restless creativity was the catalyst for what the band became.
More on this to come.
Jun 23, 2023 | Legs!, Writing
For those interested, I posted on Substack earlier. The piece is here:
Correlations and Causations.
After posting that, I went out for a jog. I’ve already run 2 x 5ks this week and my plan was to have a shorter run just to keep the legs in trim before a longer run at the weekend. All was going well until I hit some loose gravel and couldn’t stop myself tumbling. I count myself lucky that I got away with scrapes and grazes, although I damaged my glasses and they will cost money to fix, even with insurance covering half of it. (Normally I don’t wear my ‘good’ glasses when I’m running but I got lazy today.) Anyway, I’ll rest for a day or so in case there are any hidden problems waiting to emerge (such as bruising) but I’ll also take the 2k that I ran towards my weekly total 🙂
The annoying thing is, I really was just out jogging without pushing it, but my pace (for me) was quite good…
Jun 4, 2023 | Legs!
Old Faithful
I wrote in my last post that I was cranking up my couch to 5K routine again. Slightly to my surprise, I’ve completed two 5k runs in the last three days – this morning’s was a 6k.
I’ll be resting my legs for a few days now for family reasons, but this morning’s 6k tells me a few things, one of which is that 6k is probably about my present limit and therefore a benchmark. The other things it tells me are,
- the muscle memory is there from last year and my swimming has kept up cardio and general fitness levels over winter and spring.
- so long as I’m sensible, patient and don’t do anything stupid, 10k fitness is achievable by autumn (sooner, probably, but it depends on whether the summer gets really hot again.)
- even though I felt towards the end that I was slogging, in fact my watch says that I jogged every kilometre in exactly 7 minutes (except the first where I had to wait for traffic to cross a road).
- I used my old running soundtrack on an original iPod shuffle (pictured), and at the 3km mark – a bridge next to Murrayfield Stadium – I was slower than young me by a whole Immigrant Song. It used to begin when I reached that bridge, this morning it was just finishing as I got there. I’m OK with that – my legs are older. However I do recall that 15 years ago I was doing intensity sessions in the gym at work, so I think part of my routine now will include sessions of running a measured distance, say 500m or 1km, harder than I would normally jog, then rest and repeat.
- if I can get to 10k fitness later this year, then it becomes feasible to start the work needed to build that out to a half-marathon in 2024.
Wait – what? Yes, another attempt at a half marathon is in my mind for next year. The last one, in 2009, was an odd occasion – I completed the run in 2 hrs 08 min then fainted and ended up being checked out in hospital. That was when my blood pressure issues were uncovered. To run one again means my training has to recognise that I’m 14 years older, but I’m also 13 kilos (28.6lbs) lighter than I was then, believe it or not. My pace in 2009 was around 6 minutes per kilometre, so my 7 minute pace this morning isn’t too bad for an auld yin.
Don’t go getting excited. There’s a long way between now and then and the reality is that injuries can happen however sensible you are, and they take longer to heal now than they did in the past. Nonetheless, it’s a plan.
May 17, 2023 | Books, Dead Water, Legs!, Writing
For those interested in these things, I put a post up in my writing pages.
4 Random Musings
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I had a strange day. I had a dentist appointment this afternoon at which I expected to have some work done underneath a deep, old filling – a shadow showed up on an x-ray at my last check up. I’m normally OK at the dentist, but I’d got myself apprehensive about this one, expecting it to be tough going. In fact, after the dentist had very thoroughly numbed me up, she decided that the x-ray was misleading and the work didn’t have to be done at all. Relief all round. I’m drinking through a straw, though, until the anaesthetic wears off.
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At the beginning of April, I put up a post on my Diabetes and Me pages about an eight-week experiment I’m conducting on myself. The post is here:
1. Brave New World
I’m still in week six of the experiment, but so far I’ve lost more than 3.4 kilograms (about 7.5lbs) and my average blood pressure is markedly down. It’s been an interesting experience, especially tracking blood pressure. Even though the average is clearly down, there are still days (or even couples of days) where my BP is elevated for no obvious reason. This has got me thinking, and those thoughts will probably turn up in a Substack post at some point. A teaser is to say that I see now why UK doctors look at average BP not at absolute numbers.
I would say that the benefits have come about 75-80% from diet and 20-25% from exercise. A 30 to 45 minute swim (which I do twice a week) has an obvious impact, and, despite what I said at the beginning of the experiment, I’m starting up a couch-to-5k programme again. I dare say the muscle memory will kick back in, but so far my short jog sessions have been more pachyderm than gazelle. I may yet find a happy distance of around 3.5k around our hill, but I’m not back to that stage yet – 2.8km yesterday was hard, slow going and included about 3.5 minutes of walking (in 30-second bursts).
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In November 2020, I mentioned here that I was reading and enjoying Peter Ross’s A Tomb With A View, his tour of graveyards. His latest is Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church. It is beautifully written with his trademark eye for the telling metaphor or simile, insight, and sentences that catch you off guard. Highly recommended.
Oct 26, 2022 | Goggle-eyes, Legs!, Tai Chi, Writing
A wee bit of a catch up in this post: October has been quiet on the blogging front.
I wanted to put something up to mark one year since Coyote in the Corner was published. I can’t say that I sold a lot of copies in the great scheme of things, but it does still sell, and it’s nice to think of the results of all those nights in the shed at the keyboard gracing some stranger’s bookshelf or Kindle. I look at writing and publishing differently since I put Coyote out, but that was part of the point of publishing – to learn. I plan to write something longer about this once I manage to coral my thoughts into coherent form. Meantime, I’m researching what will be novels and keeping my hand in with new short stories. More on those later.
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I’ve been running quite a bit of late, and all of the runs have been around the 5km mark. I’m starting to tail off a bit as it gets wetter and colder – I may return to the exercise bike in the garage over winter, depending how the weather turns. I’ve been swimming but it, too, is tailing off, mainly because my days have been taken up with research and writing as well as other family stuff.
Whatever happens with running and swimming, I’ve tried to make the Chi Kung/Tai Chi a permanent fixture in my week. Mostly it has been Chi Kung and the ‘Eight Pieces of Brocade.’ Until last week we had been taught the first two pieces; last week we learnt two further pieces and it felt like something was coming together. I aim to practice the routine at least once a day, and usually I manage that. Even if I don’t do the routine, I do try to focus on the five fundamentals – correct posture, correct breathing, relaxation, awareness and focus. I can’t say that I’m on them 24/7, but I do try to stick at them.
And I achieved another of my long-term targets this week – I’m wearing 30″ waist jeans for the first time since the early 1980s..
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When I can, I try to catch the odd TV show – almost always online rather than on the crystal bucket in the corner. Updates:
Rings of Power: underwhelming. The final episode recovered some ground, but overall I didn’t enjoy it. The acting was good, as were the production values, but the writing was all over the place.
Pennyworth: is back for season 3. I’ve only caught the first episode so far, but it was as great as ever.
From Marvel have come She-Hulk and Werewolf by Night, and I enjoyed them both. The latter has Laura Donnelly in it and I’ll watch anything she’s in. She-Hulk caught me by surprise – I didn’t expect to binge watch it. In some respects it was a bit ‘too Marvel’ for me towards the end, but what I like about the Marvel TV series is that they are all different in their own ways and some try hard to push the boundaries. Even if they don’t always work, they are all worth watching. My favourites remain Moon Knight and the wonderful Ms Marvel (and, from an earlier era, Jessica Jones.).
Andor is one of the best things ever done in the Star Wars universe. I’ve seen all the films, most of the animated series and read a smattering of the novels. They fall into two camps: the major one sticks to the whole Jedi/force thing; the smaller camp is much grittier and Andor is in that one. ‘Must-see TV’ is a cliché, but I look forward to Wednesday mornings. Also new in the Star Wars universe is a short animated series – Tales of the Jedi, which largely focuses on Ahsoka Tano and Count Dooku. It has only 6×15 minute episodes and is from the same Dave Filoni stable as Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels and The Bad Batch. It was slight, but I enjoyed it; my guess is that it is part of the set up of the forthcoming Ahsoka TV series starring Rosario Dawson.
Finally, Gangs of London is back for series 2. I’m 2 episodes in and it follows in the spirit of series 1, and that can only be a good thing.
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