It's What I Do.

Thursday. I was really tired when I woke up but I still got up and went to the gym! Hooray! The thing that gets me out of bed at the moment is, well, A - I'm not running as hard at the gym as I used to, but B - I think to myself "Ugh morning. Time to go run." and a little voice thinks "oh god no not exercise", but then I think "Yeah, this is just what I do all the time - so there's no point in debating whether to go or not because this is just what I do". Amen.

No time to say anything else right now and another very busy day today but perhaps I'll get in a lunchtime edit.

Go and have yourselves a great day now y'all!

Does Every Post Need a Title?

It feels like I did this run days ago - it was only this morning. I'm stupid busy so I'll cut to the chase.

This run was good. After yesterday's confusion over what to do next I took what I'm hoping was a pretty sensible option. So last week I was running 2 walking 4 and I was meant to be running 3 walking 3 this week. After yesterday's hellish run I decided to go back to running two but to cut my walking to 3 - so it's kind of half way between last week and this week. What persuaded me to do this in particular is that looking back on my runs I had noticed that my heart rate was going right down into zone 2 in the last minute of walking and my thought was to get rid of this last minute so as to stick in zone 3 more. Good idea?

Whether it was the right thing to do or not I'm not sure but either way it felt better than yesterday so I'm happy!

I get top marks just for going to the gym today. Mr JRB is back from a business trip to China and it's always so much harder when he's around. How am I meant to spring out of bed at 6am to go running while he snoozes away for another 2 hours?! AND he's twice as fit as me. There is no justice in this world.

I had a golf lesson tonight. It was good but I have no time to talk about it so here's a picture!! Groan... who's ever going to read my blog if I never write about stuff? I still have the giant cannoli to tell y'all about! That one's coming up at the weekend... or maybe next week as I have a busy weekend.

In my Dreams I'm a Good Runner

Ow. I moved on to week two of my running programme today and it hurt. I ran 3 at 7kmh and walked 3 at 5kmh for 30 minutes. I didn't have to look at this chart of my heart rate to know that I was working too hard. I was reading my Garmin's manual yesterday and it turns out that I should be aiming for zone three, I previously thought it was zone four. As you'll see from my stats I spent 17 minutes of my 30 minute work out in zones four and five!!

But the question is, what do I do? Should I go back to week one of my programme for the rest of this week? I could slow down my running sections to 6.5kmh but 7 is already so slow... I think I could walk at 6.5! I could slow down my walking sections? Last time around I walked at 4.5kmh rather than 5 as I am now. I really don't know what to do except that it's not what I did today!

In other news, I dreamt about running last night. It was a really good dream and I woke up feeling more determined than ever to become good at running. I was back in the village where I grew up with this girl from work who is a good runner. It was a crisp autumn/winter day and we were running in the fields around the village that I used to play in as a kid. It felt so good to be able to run fast and to be sucking in all this cool fresh air. I want to be able to do that! Incidentally we were on some crazy life or death mission - the theme of most of my dreams!

That's it. Happy Monday everyone! It's the last public holiday before Christmas over here in England!! God what a depressing thought. I'm off to plan a holiday!

Week 1 Review

I would usually call a week Monday to Sunday but my Garmin software prefers Sunday to Saturday so here's my week in review not including today but including last Sunday!

Sunday

At 8am this morning I got in this final "run" for the week. I played around with the speed a little on this one and just couldn't really get comfortable.

Italian Road Trip Part Two - Agrigento and Mt. Etna, Sicily

This was our second day in Sicily. We decided to drive to the other side of the island to visit the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento - basically this place with lots of Greek temples! I confess I am magnificently ignorant about history of all kinds including Greek so this is not going to be a greatly intellectual post.


The inland parts of Sicily are quite barren but spectacular none the less. I particularly liked what they'd done with the road here - nice bend. There was also a great hilltop village that you could see from the road - I think it was Eze. There were a lot of vineyards and olive groves etc. It was damn hot in the car but it was NOTHING compared to what we were coming up to, though we didn't realise that yet of course.

Here's our little car in the little car park. The toilets here had a sign outside saying "free toilets" in various languages but then inside was some guy with a plate for your euros. I'm pretty sure he was just figured it was a good place to sit and earn some cash.

Ok so we started to walk around. Problem number 1 - It was REALLY hot. There was very little shade as you can see and it just felt like being in a great big oven... albeit on a low setting. People pretty much moved from one bit of shade to another. Brilliantly we were also visiting in the very hottest part of the day - pretty soon I began to understand why they run guided tours in the evening!
Here's me demonstrating problem number 2 - none of the signs were in English! Not knowing what the hell stuff is about is a perennial problem when travelling to non-English speaking countries where you don't know the language.

Given me and Mr JRB's mutual ignorance of this Greek stuff we resorted to trying to figure out what this was all about by reading the guide book. Sadly I had only brought my "Italy" guidebook and as you'll be able to gather by the size of the thing it doesn't go into a great amount of detail on any particular place! Note to self - do not in the future buy small guidebooks on big places.
Some parts were more ruinous than others - this being one of them. Still amazing though. It's a shame that a bunch of Christians went on a bit of a wrecking mission here - I think that's what the guidebook said happened anyway. Apparently they mistakenly thought that these were Pagan temples and they went nuts! I'm surprised they could be bothered to do all of this in this heat - I'm guessing it must have been a particularly cold winter. They probably spread the job over a number of years.
Here's one big mutha of a stone lady. I know how she feels... well the big part anyway not the stone part.
Problem number 3 - I wholly underestimated how hard it would be to walk around this place in this damn heat! The entire thing was only something like 3 miles but it felt like 5 times that distance. This photo looks pretty innocent but my God was I hurting at this point. There was this great long walk with no shade and it was the middle of the day and was probably pushing 40 degrees C.
Amazing temples. Apparently this very well preserved one survived the angry Christians' wrath because they decided it would make a nice church.


Here's me at the furthest distance we got from the car. I didn't even bother to find any shade to sit in. I was feeling glad that we'd made it but so wiped out and just soooo hot.

The long road back to the car - and you can only see as far as a bend in the road in this photo! The Italians weren't suffering like I was... in fact, no one was suffering like I was. Why?

I like this photo. This is the same well preserved temple as before but from a different angle, taken on the walk back.

We got back to the car and headed into the small shop to buy some water. Just as I was feeling relieved that I'd survived, I nearly passed out for the second time in two days. I felt awful but we managed to make it across to the car where I sat with my head between my legs sipping water. The car must have been about 50 degrees C! It took some time but I gradually felt better. As before I'm not sure what this was but I'm guessing some kind of heat stroke.

Here's the final route. I can't say I enjoyed it at the time but I'm glad I did it and at least there was nice stuff to look at while I felt like crap!


On the drive back to the hotel we took the guidebook's "scenic" drive past Mount Etna. This part of it was very scenic but the rest of it was really grotty and a bit scary. Mount Etna was beautiful though. We had planned to get a bit closer but we were too tired by this point.

I love this! They let their cows just walk all over the road round here! There were signs to warn you of cows on the road but I didn't think there'd actually be any. They didn't give two moos about the car, they just kept strolling along to wherever they were going. Please moove out of the way... groan.

Finally we wound up the day with a meal in this nice trattoria in Taormina. Taormina is lovely at night - there's great little restaurants with tables outside like this filling the narrow roads. We picked up a couple of cannolis on the way home from this great little shop called Roberto's. Droool... mmmm cannoli.

Sensible Saturday

I was really tired yesterday so I, I think sensibly, skipped the gym and instead got some extra sleep both in the morning and the evening... and the great news is that it seems to have done me some good because I appear to have IMPROVED!

Today's "run" definitely felt easier. I felt like I could have run faster and longer and I spent the last couple of minutes of my walking sections itching to run again. I'm not sure how much of this was the fact that it was 0815am and not 0630am!! All of this even shows up in the stats:

5 minutes less in heart rate zone 5 than on Tuesday.
6 minutes more in heart rate zone 3 than on Tuesday.

Weeeeeeeeeeeee! I actually feel ready to add a minute's running and lose a minute's walking next week.

This is the point where the first time around I started to run faster. I'm not going to do that this time because I know for sure that I was running too fast. It was completely unsustainable so as the minutes running in my programme went up and the minutes walking went down I just couldn't keep up the speed that I was running at and it got really unpleasant! I like running hard at the time I'm doing it but the memory of it kind of puts me off going back to the gym.

I'll be so happy to get to the point, in 9 weeks time, where I can run at the speed I'm running at now for 30 minutes without walking. Once I get there, then I'll work on getting faster.

Where has all of this sensibleness come from all of a sudden?

Morning of the Living Dead

I'm a completely different person at the moment. Not only is the "running" making me feel so much happier and optimistic than usual but I am actually running! Here I am again posting another 0630am "run"! I've gone with the cadence view again because it shows what I did better. A pretty uneventful run. I woke up and really only half considered not going. I had a bad night's sleep so being able to get up so easily was surprising.

I ran in my new treadmill position again which was fun because it faces a window and in the window's reflection I can spy on the main bank of treadmills. It's amazing how many people only walk on a treadmill - even when it's plainly obvious that they could do a bit better than walk. There was also a lady holding the top of the treadmill while she walked - it occurred to me that, when viewed from the side, people who do this look like zombies. They should really run some kind of electric current along the top of treadmills to stop people from doing it.

No really, I'm REEEALLLLY UNFIT!

It's still Tuesday night but this bit of information deserved a post of its own - if you search on Google for "really unfit" my blog is the fourth result! Surely gyms and weightwatchers etc. would pay good money for that kind of placement - I should get sponsored! I could have adverts on my blog saying "If you don't want to end up like this miserably unfit cake monster then drink slimfast twice a day!". On the other hand... how depressing. Grim LOL

Oh how brilliant! - someone also found their way here through searching on google for "cake eating rehab". Whoever you are - that place isn't here, but if you find it please tell me where it is!!

And also one from "breathless when speaking" - I get this too, please go to a doctor and then come back here and tell me what this is... I'm too scared!

I am also most flattered to find that if you search for the great departed Running Rabbit's Blog on google I am the second result you find... how disappointed those people must be! Aaah Running Rabbit, how I miss your cheeky blog.

So much fun. Somehow I think I like being a total running loser more than I'd like being fit.

The One With No Funny Title Due to Blogger's Fatigue

I'm rather sleepy so please excuse the boringness/incoherence of this post. Somehow I've managed two work-day work-outs in a row - see results above. I forgot to turn my Forerunner off at the end which explains the sudden drop in everything (interestingly I appear to find driving home from the gym rather stressful...). Running in a different part of the gym has fixed the problem with the heart rate monitor (for some reason HR monitors malfunction in the part of the gym I like to run in - even the ones built into the treadmills - I was given an explanation on this but I'm too tired to explain more right now! More at some later point no doubt.) and weirdly if I select cadence rather than speed, as I have for the above graph, then the footpod doesn't seem so erratic. I'm sure there's some perfectly logical explanation about this out there on the internet somewhere but I never seem to have time to look it up! blah blah blah Bed. zzzzzzzzzzzz... dribble dribble drroool.

p.s. Coming soon on Jenny's Running Blog - photos of Italian cakes featuring a giant cannoli! Stick around... or even come around sometime.

1 down, 6239 to go!

I managed to do it this morning but now I'm late so post to follow. HR monitor and footpod still being totally erratic. Ran 2, walked 4 for 30 mins.

btw - 6239 is the number of workouts on a work-day I have before I retire, assuming I do that in 30 years. ouch!

Italian Road Trip Part One - Taormina, Sicily

42 hours after leaving our house in England (at 2am) we arrived in Taormina, Sicily! That was 1630 miles, 30 hours of driving, 2 ferries, 4 countries, 21 toll booths, 11 petrol stops!! Phew.

Air con broke on the car which was a nightmare as temps were up to 39 degrees - not so bad when you're in a moving car with the windows open but not great in a traffic jam. Italian drivers are insane. Made good time on day two but didn't on day one as we got held up in switzerland. Ended up travelling for 21 hours but made it to florence where we stayed overnight.


This is me on the ferry at about 5am with no make-up on... eek!

Aaah the white cliffs of Dover - goodbye England!




Some driving shots - that's Lake Como in the middle (I think!). Lots of tunnels in Switzerland - the bottom photo is of the Gotthard tunnel which was pretty scary - it's the third longest road tunnel in the world - 15.3 miles long - and all I could think of was the tunnel disasters that happen every so often...

The view from our hotel window on the first morning. Taormina was lovely. On day one we just set out and explored.


Mount Etna - she's huge!

This is me by a cannon in the botanical gardens. Wherever I go away I always like to look round botanical gardens - they're lovely and they're usually free!


More of the gardens. Here's me by a curious work of art. People, a lesson to you all, this is what will happen to you if you eat lots of cakes - you will get chubby, you will be unable to run to catch buses and you will look twice the size of any life-sized statues you sit down next to.

Taormina centre.
After going into the centre we headed down to the beach via the hotel. This is our hotel car park! You can just see our smart car behind the leaves of the palm tree.

We took a walk down to the beach - it's quite a long traversing walk - most people take the furnicular instead (we only saw one other person on the steps down). These people are lazy! It was a nice walk with great views as you can see.

Part of the path down.

The beach! I think that's Isola Bella in the background which you can walk through the sea to. The beach was completely jammed. Sadly lots of beaches in Italy are private.

Mr JRB enters the sea. I stayed well clear of the sea for fear of being harpooned or rounded up by Greenpeace and driven into deeper waters.

When we left this part of the beach there was quite a long flight of stairs which we had to climb. I almost fainted and had to sit down for quite a long time. We had to go back to the hotel because I was really unwell. This meant we took the furnicular back :-( I was looking forward to the hellish walk back up!! This happened a few times on the trip - heat stroke? My hands swelled up terribly too.

Me in the hotel gardens looking pale but recovered. Good hotel - Grand Hotel San Pietro. The evening was spent eating pizza and... best of all... CANNOLI!! More of that to come.


Here's what my Forerunner made of our walk down to the beach (don't worry there's far longer and more interesting walks to come!).

Death of a Heart Rate Monitor

After yesterday's "run" I felt so great all day that when I woke up this morning and for a few moments wasn't sure whether I'd go to the gym I just remembered how great it made me feel yesterday and I just went! If only every morning was that easy.

I remembered all my stuff today so the "run" itself was quite a lot less boring than yesterday. I'm trying not to push myself too hard which frees up my brain to think about other stuff instead of just thinking "oh god when is this going to end"! I have a strong tendancy to push myself too hard and I think that that has probably been a pretty huge factor in my past failures - I'm trying to take Phil's advice to go long, slow and easy. There's so many jokes I could make here about how I am always slow and how I never go long!

What I was thinking about today was about how I need to make the whole exercise thing sustainable for the rest of my life. It's a pretty challenging thought when you're just starting out - it's such a total change and at the moment I can't imagine how I can make this as much a part of my everyday life as eating breakfast. It seems like such a huge chunk out of my time everyday. So far I've only run at the weekend - the real challenge will be tomorrow when I have to fit it in around work.

As you'll see from my charts both my footpot and my heart rate monitor malfunctioned today. It's like my heart rate monitor slowly died towards the end of my "run"! I'd like to think that this was a sudden and drastic transformation in my fitness... if only. It's good to see that I'm kind of hanging around in zone three and four - I think four is where I'm ideally meant to be.