Short

This short entry might be typical of the next few posts.

Wednesday: 30-minute run by the lake. Weather suddenly turned cold overnight but it was alright when I was running. The lesson bell rang at 11:00 and I was out the gates by 11:10. I'll have to remember to do that - leave the work for later, get dressed, run, then come back and settle everything.

Saturday: 20 minutes running locally. Also 200 pressups, about 100 reps of bicep curls, 1 set of calf raises, 2 sets of abs - goes against my one set a day idea but who cares?

Work wise - Tuesday and Friday are really really long days. I wonder what effect they'll have on my running, seeing as they are just before the days I go running.

Everything's starting to get into a routine now. I'm doing less running this time of year than I did last year, but I can live with that.

Happy running (or tapering) everyone!

Trail (as in "lagging behind") run

I ran for time rather than distance or pace today. I think that might be the way to go for the next few runs, to make them more enjoyable. I certainly enjoyed today's 40-minute trail run along the Parkland Walk. Never mind that it felt like 6 out of 10 for effort; never mind that it might have been slower than eight minutes per mile, or not anything spectacular, distance-wise. It was fun and relaxing and that should be the way most times. And I kept going. Today must have been an anamoly in terms of temperature because it was really humid; we're forecast to have heavy rain the next couple of days, but let's hope it clears before my next run on Wednesday or the weathermen are wrong.

Running twice a week - that's what I'm doing. Enough? Not as much as I would like, but for now it'll have to be that way. I have twelve-hour days on four or five days of the week, and six hours on Saturday - on some of those days it's seven hours straight without a break. I'll do more runs during the week if I feel I have the energy, but on paper and judging from this week, two runs a week, and walking about 2 miles a day, is going to be enough to wear me out.

I'm hoping to keep to doing one set per bodypart each day. Some days it might mean doing dips using chairs in between lesson changeovers, or I might be back to the days of curling snare drums and squatting bass drums at work - but that's fun. Just don't tell the students what I get up to.

Just spewing it

The quick post while I've got a break at work.

The work part: Timetabling is an utter nuisance and I'm still getting calls about changes. I've done 9 amendments since Tuesday morning. Teacher, please don't tell me so-and-so has to come at this time on Thursday, then call me back three days later, when I've righted things, to tell me you said Tuesday and insinuate it was my fault!

The run part: I've not run for a long time so I was determined to get one in today. Had some time free at lunch today so despite the prediction of heavy rain, I ran 3.5 miles, including 5K in 22:21. The weather fellas are rubbish - for all the technical jargon they throw at you, they can't even get the next day's predicted weather half-right!

Weights at home this evening. Next run Saturday, when there's no school this week. Pig out!

PS - Blogger is trying to tell me I'm a Wurst (sausage).

This is what I get after I click "Publish Post" -

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Is it just me?

The numbers game

Try to fit 12 hours of teaching at 3 different schools into 2 days (13 hours max) for 11 weeks out of a 13-week term. Take into account travel, school break times, different school start/end times and other logistics. Then ring schools to ask about availability of rooms for those particular days and times. Wind up with something like 10-minute lunch breaks. (Oh well.)

Done?

After timetables are despatched to all schools, wait for School A to ring back to say "take these students off, add these students."

Then try to fit what amounts to 16 hours in a weekly maximum of 13. Um.... Play around with spare weeks, but try to schedule things so students don't have lessons too close or too far apart. Reshuffle Thursday schools onto Tuesdays, Tuesday morning school to Tuesday afternoon and make other changes because of room and student availability. Ring schools to check if it's alright and feel like an idiot for messing people around. Resend new timetables.

Wait for School B to ring back and say, "Oh, by the way, there are two more who have applied..."

Repeat up to four times. Make sure to turn timetable topsy-turvy each time.

Finally plan a varying weekly timetable to precision for an entire 13 weeks. I think I've cracked it. (My brain, that is.) But wait till I have to explain to payroll about how it all works out.

On more positive numbers:

Friday run: 20-25 minutes, with a few sprints -

1st 400: 85 seconds
1st 800 (including earlier 400): 3 minutes

2nd 400: 90 seconds
2nd 800: 3:20

Time-out called after that. Too slow.

Saturday: 3.5 miles tempo run, including 5K in 22:12. That's okay for me.

Miles run since: 0
Guilt: 0
Reps done: about one or two sets a day

At my main school (4 days a week) where the timetable is planned for me, I've managed to tweak it - to the irritation of the department heads - such that I can do a long run on Wednesday lunch times, possibly a short one on Monday, and not have to leave for school at the ungodly hour of 6:40am on a Saturday.

I'm exhausted just getting the work life in motion.

Not a good start to term

Luciano Pavarotti died of pancreatic cancer in the early hours of this morning. Listen to him sing Nessun Dorma on YouTube. I have two left feet and can't coordinate the pulse of my beating heart with the pulse of music I listen to, but if ever I became an ipod runner, I'd put that song on the ipod. It's very uplifting - we should give the credit to Puccini for a wonderful tune, but Pavarotti's voice adds to its intensity.

The students came back to school this morning. I don't know how many weeks into term it'll be before the two-hour commute each way, four times a week, gets to me, but it's a good school, the work I'm doing is proper teaching - not policing students, watching the clock and hoping nothing goes wrong on my watch - which is why I stick with it. It's tiring though to leave the house before 7, get a full day's work in, then get home at 7 in the evening. After all that, I'm not always in the mood or feel energetic enough to get out to run. And this is in the summer - wait till we get to the winter when there's less light. I'll need to do something about that.

A Design-and-Technology teacher at school died over the summer. I didn't know him personally, but it was a little upsetting nonetheless. More upsetting was the news that another teacher, with whom I'd had brief contact over the course of the year, had killed himself with no apparent motive. He'd visited his native South Africa with his wife, met his family there, and seemed happy and - to those he spoke with on his return - was really looking forward to the start of term. Then his wife waited for him to pick her up at work, he never came, and when she got back she found him hanging in the garage.

I remember reading a couple of years ago (I think) on a blog about someone's brother who had committed suicide. It's an awful thing. Personally, I feel suicide is a transference of responsibility: the person who does it thinks he is ridding himself of all his responsibilities, but he is not - he is merely passing it on to his family, friends, and others who knew him. Still, it is sad when people you knew in one way or another leave the world. A reminder that life is like a bouquet of flowers: flowers all start from unimpressive seeds, and are cold and withered at the end of their life; we should live our lives as well we can, so people remember it, like flowers, for the bright colours while they lasted.

New Goals for the time-efficient lazy person

My running of late can be summarised by one of the two descriptions below:

a) one mile warmup, two to four sets of 400s, one mile cool down
b) 20-30 minutes jog

I will be focussing more on speed at the shorter distances for many reasons. One is because this year I expect to do a bit more commuting to and from work and time will be a premium. Another reason for this is that I feel if I wish to run faster for longer distances (who doesn't?), then I should work on speed for, say 400m, then work at maintaining that speed for 800, then a mile, then 5K etc. No brainer, right? A third reason is that I'm simply lazy and don't like to run for too long. Running is one of the things I do outside of work, but not "The Thing". I'd like to keep it that way. Fourthly, I'm more proud about running a 70-second 400m and a 2:45 800 than a 36-minute 5-miler.

In the past two years I have set myself the lazy person's goal of achieving 50 runs between September and Christmas, but this year I will not be doing that. While it's been good to have this 50-run goal, I feel at times I've done running more for the sake of ticking off the runs on the 50-to-do list, then actually making sure that they contribute towards something helpful in the long-term. These next three months I'm going to focus more on weights, stretching, and working up to maybe 8 sets of 400s in 80 seconds.

How does walking affect cardiovascular health? I wonder if there have been any studies about the effect of regular walking (not brisk walking) on one's running ability. Many years ago I walked daily to college, forty-minutes each way, 5 days a week for about six months. The first time I decided to run after that, I ran a half-marathon in 2:35. I now walk about 2.5 miles six times a week and wonder if I can use that in some way - maybe it compensates for one less session of running? Hmm.

So You Want to Live in the Countryside