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I look at Froogle UK and I look at Kelkoo UK and I get completely different results.
For some reason Yahoo’s Kelkoo seems unable to distinguish what the product I’m looking for (Salomon XA Pro 3D XCR shoes) is. They give me results for computer game controller pads, weights systems and tank tops. Google’s Froogle gives me only the results I want. It’s amazing. How is it that one search company can be so rubbish while another is so good? My natural starting position was the REI store for the shoes, because I want to see what else is out there. Unfortunately, most of the shoes that REI sell by Salomon aren’t available in the UK so I’ll be saddled with the VAT and customs charges if I purchase from the US. I’ve had a variant of these Salomon sheos for a while now having purchased them in Seattle two years ago and they’ve been complete work-horses. They’re amazing and they wear like a dream without wearing out. They’re breathable, great for getting that little bit muddy, have a nifty single-tie system and are really stable with great grip. I’m going to be spending £70 on them from REI if I don’t get them from Britain or $120 without p&p, customs or VAT. I don’t know what to do, but the British options just seem a bit rubbish, especially since they don’t offer half sizes and I need these shoes. They’re perfect and I don’t want to go without them!

Popularity: 4% [?]

We had a vacation mid-winter. Funny really because in France, where we went skiing, January is thought of as an early month in the ski calendar. The ‘little’ resort of Val Cenis was great skiing, after leaving the UK on Boxing Day, the whole family ‘pod’ had to adjust to skiing on some serious ice. The piste was hard and dry and compacted, but it was a great way to regain the skills that had been forgotten from the year before. Easy snow makes you a lazy skier.

Anyway, we went en famille for a skiing holiday and it was fantastic to be together as a group again; it seems to happen so infrequently nowadays and I suppose will occur only less frequently as the years carry forth. After a couple days of ice, we had heavy snows of over a foot overnight and then following that bump-ups of about an inch per day. Snow makes the conditions so different it’s insane, the mountains just transform their style and improve all their opportunities. Oddly enough, despite the heavy snowfalls, the management of the mountain didn’t open all the routes and none of the black runs were available which was a major disappointment, but one that was tempered by the continually changing conditions.

My favorite thing about the whole thing though, the fact that in early April I’ll be on another mountain, just around the corner from where we were this week, skiing for another ten days. Life is good!

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You’d have thought they were, but they’re not.

Army press-ups involve putting your hands right under your shoulders and only using arms to lift the body off the ground. There’s no involvement of pectoral muscles at all. This comes, when doing them for the first time, as a bit of a shock.

My arms, they hurt!

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I ran really well yesterday. For the past couple of days I’ve been doing my 6 miles in 41 minutes. This is my standard ‘good’ time. If I’m really killing myself slowly I can get a 40 minute, but only if I’ve prepared according to my standard kind of routine. Yesterday I got 43 minutes. They say that athletes are superstitious when it’s noted that someone has a particular preparation routine or style of getting ready, but I don’t think they are. I think that people get ready in a particular way because your body needs to get ready in a predictable way and once you start exercising you adapt to work with the way your body is prepared. If I go running and I haven’t stretched properly, then I have problems with my feet and that would just lead to problems with my knees which is not good.

Normally when I’m getting ready I listen to some music on iTunes to get into the speed of breathing. It sounds strange but I have to get used to breathing fast enough to keep up with the speed my legs are moving. Some people breathe in time with a song, or have a particular song running around their head that they run ‘to’, as in, ‘I was running to Jamelia today’. Others like Paula Radcliffe count while running to give you something to concentrate on instead of just breathing in and out. I found out yesterday that just breathing is tough enough for me: I’d never tried counting while running before, and it’s hard to count and run! How dumb must I be that I kept losing count? I’d say 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 43, 44, 45….. 58, 59, 60. I seemed to be able to count in twenty for so numbers at a time, but then I just lose it somewhere and kind of forget where I was and start at 83.
Not being able to multitask like this doesn’t slow me down, it’s just odd that I can’t do both at one time.

The other new thing that I tried yesterday was breathing as though I was in a swimming pool. You know how, when you’re swimming crawl, you have to suck in air when your head is out of the water and then physically push it out under pressure when blowing out? You can’t just let the air drift you of your lungs because by that point all the competition would be miles in front of you because they’d have taken in two more lungs of air by the time you broke the water again. So you push the air out so that your lungs can take in a new fix of oxygen. This is what I tried while running. It makes me feel a bit weird, blowing out when I run, but I can’t really say it didn’t work. Thing is, I didn’t prepare right. I ate a yoghurt about an hour before running and for me, that’s a cardinal sin. I can’t eat anything for 3-4 hours before I run if I’m going to do at all well. I normally get a stomach cramp if I’ve had food, so I just go without and I can gorge myself when I get home and have caught my breath.
I don’t think the idea of superstition is all made up. I think part of is mental and emotionally getting the body ready, but some of it is also physiological; the body needs preparation and some sort of routine for the demands of extreme exercise. Whether ten miles in an hour is extreme or not I’d debate, but without preparation I’d think it rather dangerous.

Superstition keeps athletes safe, so long live OCD.

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I didn’t mention to you all later, but my run today was amazing. I normally run every day on a rather standard 6 mile route that takes me along the Birmingham canal network in from where I live, toward the centre of the town and then I stop, quietly die for about 20 seconds, and then turn around and go again! What joy.
And I know people could say that my little break half way through is cheating, but I don’t care; I like it and it’s just training and image-boosting running anyway. It’s not like I’m training for anything in particular!

So. Today was a good run, partly because it was hot. Normally a run that’s hot and dry is torture because you dry out and you can’t drink anything because that’d give a stitch. Hot air carries less oxygen so you have to breath in more air when it’s hot just to get the same effect as a breath of cold air. This is partly why running at high altitudes helps runners because when the body has adjusted to the lower level of oxygen they come back to sea level and awe the world with their speed.

So it was hot today because it was (strangely for a British summer) actually hot anyway, and I ran earlier than I normally do. I normally run from around 8 o’clock so that the day has cooled a bit and yet it’s still not pitch dark outside. It was good that the weather was hot because it made me think about what I could do to not stop running. There are so many times on my daily run that I could just go ‘arrrgh fuuuuuck’ and stop to actually breathe instead of panting my way along looking like I’m trying to stretch my torso out and mostly the reason I want to stop is because I’m so darn hot and so breathless. It’s not normally my legs being exhausted, but just that I’m unable to keep going. Today, I remembered how on the really long runs they tend to have overhead showers and so forth that spray you down. Then I rememebered that the professional runners never go in them; they make your feet wet – why would you ever want that on a marathon?

It makes you look like a goon, but I carry a bottle of water with me ever time I run. I get stitches so easily that I hardly ever drink from the bottle and if I do it’s normally just to barely wet my mouth; I’d cramp up and have to stop which is really not the point. Today I thought I’d just pour some of my water on my head instead, and it was amazing. I’m so dumb to have never done that before. I’ve been running for about 4 years properly, doing cross-country, doing 1500m athletics and doing long distance training and yet I’ve never done this. I’ve never tried.
It’s amazing. I’ve been trying to get myself back in shape after not really doing a whole load of running over the past year; not really having a great route or whatever crummy excuse, I just haven’t got around to it more than about twice a week. I go to the gym more but that’s not the same. So when I’m in form-ish I get about 45 minutes for my 6 mile/10 kilometer run. Today, I took FOUR minutes off that. I don’t know how that happened, but I ran 41 minutes today, which kind of blew me away as I realised I’d get a time near that as I was about 10 minutes from the end.

I don’t carry a watch with me because I find that if I’m not doing well it’s just distracting and demoralizing. If I’m running well consistently then it’s a great thing and you can work out tiny little improvements in your run continually, especially if you know a route really well and know how long you should take between particular points. I tend to know I should take a particular time up to each artificially created waymarker that I measure. I tend to make them up at good time points like 4 minutes thirty seconds, 12 minutes, 22 minutes and so forth rather than make a big obstacle the marker and then have to rememeber an arbitrary time. Instead I have to look up at the massive University clock tower that is near where I run along, meaning I can get a vague marker of how well I’ve been doing. Today, when I normally have 10 minutes left out of my 45 minutes, I only had 5 minutes left. w00t!

If I keep running at that speed, I’ll get 1:36 in the half-marathon which is just just just over my ideal time that I’m running for. I want to get 1:35 or less, so I’ll have to do rather well from now on. On a marathon, I’d get 3:26!
Marathon and split times calculator

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