Counting down

As they say, shit's starting to get real now.

With 2 weeks to go it's time to do some last minute preparations.  Plan was for a nice long 3 hour run yesterday, with 2 more to go.  A 2 hour run Tuesday evening and a 5 hour on Thursday.

Had some disappointment after my long rambling post about shoes.  The green ones i wanted just weren't going to come in time to get broken in so i've had to suck it up and get a black pair instead. :o(
Saved £16 in doing so but i'm ashamed to say i'm shallow enough to regret it.

So, yesterdays run.  Was aiming for just a solid 4mph average for 3 hours to see how the shoes went and to try out some fuelling.  Apparently fuelling is going to be vital and i'm a little late in getting strategies in place.  No, scratch that, i'm very bloody late.

Weather was pretty poor, alternating between heavy rain and clear with reasonably warm temperatures.  My coat was been done up and being undone just about every five minutes.  Took a photo of a pretty grim bit on a northwestern facing ridge to illustrate but it looks like a lovely day, HDR on the phone does that though.

Run was good, 13.3 miles in just over 3 hours including a chatting stop and getting lost a couple of times.  In good news, the shoes and 1000 mile socks were great, no issues at all and a bit of wear might make the black shoes look a little less crappy.

Real artists ship

http://www.ghostinthepixel.com/?p=24

Fascinating insight into what makes some people successful.

Meniscal Tear

So the Doc says that the cause of my knee problems is a minor :o) meniscal tear on the inside of my left knee.  She went on to say that running on it a bit is fine but that 30 miles would be pretty silly.  Reckons they'll do some keyhole just to shave the loose bits off, nothing else needed.

The good news is there's nothing loose in there and it's certainly not a bad injury.  I reckon that i'll carry on as I am for the next couple of weeks and decide at the last minute.  Gut instinct says i'll do it but as carefully as I can.

Good news. :o)  (I think)

Doctors

Showing my stupidity in a much less rambling way than my last post.

Doctors tonight for MRI results on my knee.
9 miles last night, 1150 ft of climbing.
4 runs left before the 30 miler.

Not sure, those three sentences make sense together. :-S

Shoes

Trail Shoes

Coming from a long background in biking there's no denying I have a tendency to be a bit of a gear geek. Both mountain and road biking are steeped in a culture where equipment is of pretty major importance so the initial culture shock of not really having much to buy has been a bit strange to say the least. As such, trying to decide which running shoes to buy has been a bit of a minefield. Allied to general lack of gear geekery in the running world is an aversion I seem to have to spending big money on a pair of trainers, I'm very aware of the hypocrisy of having bikes that cost thousands of pounds and spending large amounts on technical bike clothing but being unwilling to drop a hundred pounds on a pair of running shoes, which, after all are pretty essential to the running process.

Running being a simple thing you'd at least think that once i'd accepted the necessity of a purchase, making my choice wouldn't be that difficult. Wrong! To me at least, there's a bewildering amount of choice and contradictory advice to be had from all directions. Surely, the massive international shoe companies must know what they're doing and there must surely be a tangible benefit to all the research they carry out. Not so simple it seems, Firstly good objective reviews are not easy to find (and perhaps not easy to do) and secondly there's loads of stuff flying round the internet and the running world warning of the dangers of overdeveloped footwear and the injuries it can unwittingly cause. Arghhh!!

Because I am a bit of a sad hippy the whole barefoot running thing does really appeal to me but i'm sensible enough to see that switching to barefoot just prior to a 30 miler would be a stupid idea. I do still like the idea though and will come back to it at some point in the next couple of months. So that left me with a few options.

* Stick with what's working ok now and keep using my cheapo New Balance trail hybrid shoes.
* Cough up for a significantly better pair of New Balance's on the basis that I know i like the ones i already have.
* Make the switch to another mainstream brand. Seeing what i could find that looks like a bargain.
* Buy specific use trail shoes from a company I know nothing about, using decision criteria I don't properly understand.

Of these options, 2 were quickly discounted. My current shoes are on their last legs and trying to last them beyond the 30 miler is just not sensible. They've probably not done more than 200 miles at the moment but the soles have started to feel noticeably soft lately when running over rocks.

Buying a bargain from a mainstream brand was also quickly discarded. If i'm spending a reasonable amount of money I want at least some sort of purchase excitement and the idea just wasn't doing it for me.

2 options to go then. So I dragged Archie, Lis' and her kids to try some on at a local large outdoors store which to be fair they took in good grace. Archie was more help than i'd have liked, he was obviously a little anxious so devided that the place he'd most like to be was on my lap. Well, apart from when he gave himself a seizure trying to jump up on the artifical grass that wasn't stuck down. Anyway, that's off track, sorry.

A better New Balance seemed pretty sensible. They felt pretty good, were reduced by £15 and seemed to do what i need. I couldn't deny to myself though that they justweren't getting me excited. Also, i convinced myself (and probably correctly) that there's no guarantee that New Balance use the same foot cast throughout their range and just because my current shoes work for me doesn't mean another set will.

So, on to the more exciting options, the Inov8's looked good. Again though, the choice was too wide and i didn't know which ones suited me best. The pair i could instantly discount were the lightweight ones that Sean has, there's no fun in buying something after somebody else already has it, sad but true. The rest seemed a little heavy and again, weren't really doing it for me.

It then dawned on me that I'd probably already decided what to buy. I'd seen a development blog post for Salomon Speedcross and realised my heart was already set on them. I tried on two sets, a 10 and a 10.5 but was obviously too much of an idiot to tell the difference in size. There seemed to be a small amount of heel lift on my bigger foot but logic was out of the window now and i wanted a pair. But they didn't have the right colour! I'd be damned if i was spending £90 on shoes that were the wrong colour. Logic said that the colour made no difference and that having the chance to wear them in adequately was much more important but by now i was full on in stupid mode. So after two and a half hours out of the house I left empty handed. :o(

Now you'd probably have thought my stupidity would end there? Nah, fraid not. Turns out that i could get last years Speed Cross for 75% of the price of this years. Bargain...Not. Nope, they needed to be this years because the blog I'd read gave some vague reasons why this years were better and besides they had to be like the menatl image i now had. I.AM.SO.GULLIBLE.

So the moral of all this rambling is, if you're a shoe company your development blog could be more important than all of the actual worthwhile development and marketing effort you involove yourself in. Well it would be if the world was full of more idiots like me anyway.

Hopefully, I'll tell you how awesome they are over the next few weeks and then won't feel quite such a doofus.

^^ The offending blog. ^^

Steve Jobs

Not running or biking related so feel free to skip or tell me I'm a saddo. But I wrote most of this the other week when Steve Jobs announced his resignation so thought I may as well post it.

Steve Jobs resigned, nothing to do with this blog really then but couldn't let it pass without saying something. It says a lot about Jobs' vision and about Apples virtually unique appeal that his resignation is such big news worldwide. How many of the other 50 biggest companies in the world have a similar figure? I reckon you could count on one hand those with any sort of such claim and probably none of those have a genuinely arguable case. Whether this is good or bad depends an awful lot on your point of view.

Apple haters would argue that the fanboys have no sense of proportion and that the Jobs cult of personality is overblown. I'm not going to argue that popularity alone is a sign of quality but as someone who hooked into Apple products just before their explosion in popularity I do like to think that this phenomenon is quality based. In my opinion Apple have based their success on making consistently good products 'that just work', it's not their fault that this makes them stand out from other companies so much.

What this desire for quality always meant was that unavoidably the prices for Apple stuff was a little steep, consumers got to choose whether price or the quality of the experience was their priority. The problem now for Apple's competitors is that this dynamic is changing. Huge economies of scale have put the IPad in the position where it's on a level playing field with it's competitors. Use the devices and the decision is a no brainer, the iPad having 90% of the market speaks for itself. All the guff about flash and openness shows itself for what it is, the excuse to go Android for cost reasons. There's nothing wrong with that but people hate admitting it.

Anyway, back to Jobs. I'd like to thank him for showing that being popular does not require being cheap, and that people will buy quality if you make the case compelling. Strange as it is to admit, I think my life is just nicer thanks to the things this guy has had a part in introducing and that makes him cool in my book. I hope that this transition has been planned for some time and does not mean he's had a big downturn in his condition and that he gets to enjoy easing back a little. Have a good one man.

Beacons :o)

That's a Motley crew (Me, Nige, Khalid, Sean)

Wow! That best sums up today. Well, maybe ouch needs to be in there too.  18k in the Beacons in a gale, 1000m of climbing (ish) and a pretty large sprawling fall.  


Sean floated the idea earlier in the week of a longer run in the Beacons for this weekend.  The Brecon Beacons are what passes for a mountain range in South Wales, and whilst they top out at 890m so they're only small in the scale of things they're still pretty beautiful.


So it was that Sean, Khalid, Nige and I found ourselves there this morning in some rather horrible weather. I figured that I needed to get a reality check on myself if I'm to have any chance of doing the 30 miler in 3 weeks time.  I'm running off road a lot at the minute but not in conditions that are particularly harsh. 


And a reality check was got I got pretty much straight off, a 350m climb in 2 miles right from the get go.  Ouch! Sean, Khalid and Nige set off at a run but I know from experience now that I need to walk for a little just to ease into things if I want my knee to survive. Turns out that wasn't such a bad plan today,  Nige saw the error of his ways soon enough and in reality walking wasn't all that slower than running.


At the top the weather really closed in and visibility was down to about 20 metre.  What didn't close in was Sean and Khalid as they absolutely roasted us along traversing ridge line. Admittedly it wasn't helped by me going arse over tit as we like to say around here. Ouch again, and a nice bleeding knee and banged up hand for the rest of the run, bugger. The rest of the ridge line was absolutely fantastic and must be spectacular on a good day, not today though.  Precarious and scary was the order of the day.

It certainly was next, straight down an escarpment, losing 200 odd metres in about quarter of a mile.  Again, Nige and I struggled and may (just may) have been a little out of our depth.


The gap pass was next, a famous old road (as in a thousand years old) linking the towns of Merthyr and Brecon.  This is a famous Mountain Bike climb which I must have done over a dozen times, it was pure relief to be honest after the technical challenges of the last three miles and it was also nice not to have my butt beaten by the saddle like normally happens on the rough track.


At this point, Khalid pulled his disappearing trick on us.  Khalid is super fit but I'd had it in my head up until now that his endurance is not always fantastic and I may yet get a chance at a small measure of revenge.  No such luck now though as he made off skirting the lower flanks of the hills, in his defence this was probably because he hadn't budgeted time for me and Nige's pace.


So over the three big peaks it was.  The wind was absolutely howling, to the point where I got a headache from the noise and perhaps a little bit of dehydration.  On a few occasions the wind caused proper stumbles which was a little hairy with a few hundred meter drop on our right.  Nige was suffering by now and is face was a picture when he foud out at the top of Cribyn that the big climb was still to come.  Worse though was mother nature playing tricks with us coming off Cribyn when it blew all the clouds and mist away for ten seconds and allowed the path straight up Pen y Fan to show itself.  I wasn't happy and I thought Nige was going to cry.


I was going to cry coming down the other side though, my knee was grumbling quite a bit and I was slooooow.  Nothing I could do seemed to make much difference and it was really frustrating.  Certainly gave me a lot to think about with the thirty miler so close.  Finally though we were out of the clouds for the last time, to our North the flatlands towards Hereford opened up and it was just a really enjoyable couple of miles of peaty bog back to the Storey Arms.

All in all it was a fantastic way to spend a morning and as I often think, i'm really lucky to have such landscapes so close to home.  More thoughts on the the thirty miler tomorrow I think.