For a few weeks I had been somewhat looking forward to last week. The schedule looked on paper to be relatively forgiving baring the weekend LSR. There were no sessions scheduled for the Thursday and in fact every run had the word ‘Easy’ by it. Jackpot!

However, on Wednesday I was about to realise perhaps things were indeed easier but they were still runs none the less. The relatively short 5k I chuckled about as I took to the treadmill, simples I thought! However, 20mins later, sweating like anything it was actually bloody tough and I couldn’t have pressed the stop button any quicker.

Thursday was similar – an easy 6 miles scheduled so I jogged back from Stratford. As I was on the tube on the way to the start I was telling myself ‘yesterday was a blip -today really will seem easy’. From the first 100m I realised once again that wouldn’t be the case and it was going to be a more challenging than expected run home. To give me a little bit of credit I did have my camelback on which adds about half a stone to my weight which doesn’t help matters!

I entered the house feeling dejected. In what felt like a few short seconds my three easy days were over – and none of them felt easy. What was that about?! After a few texts with a woman in the know I was informed this was to be expected following heavy training. That said she also informed me I could be coming down with a cold. I tried to have an early night and similarly on Friday my allocated rest day.

Once again due to plans and arrangements my LSR was shifted to Saturday and I was scheduled to run 2hr15. I sorted my kit out on Friday night, gels etc. I’m trying to get back into the SIS Tropical gels having been suggested it possibly isnt the best idea to only take the caffeine ones as I did in Dublin. Laura had to do something for her school in Bromley so I decided to go with her and run towards my nan in Kennington from the other side of the river.

I was also fortunate to have Olly company for a portion of my run. I ran a few times with Olly last year, meeting him in Greenwich and once again we met in Blackheath and following a quick handover of wallet etc we were on our way to London Bridge. I am normally pretty meticulous with gMap Pedometer and plan my route out however today I knew that I was likely to come out short so would have to do laps at the end.

The south side of the river is much less enjoyable to run along than the north. On the other side there is a footpath that runs all the way from docklands with only a few deviations for new properties this is not the case on the south! Mental note to self there!

The run itself went ok. The 16 miles turned out to be 17 but mainly because I forgot to restart my watch at Blackheath. My heart rate was up on last weeks LSR and I failed to take on a third gel which may have helped during my final few miles and where I really did slow down!

As I finished and whilst consuming a recovery shake I started to ponder more about the week that had passed. Why had things seemingly been so bad? I think the problem stemmed from my brain giving the wrong message to my body. It was a recovery week NOT a rest week. For some this may amount to the same thing, for me I now know the difference!

Recovery week done, back to sessions this week and the likelihood of having to do some shuffling about due to another busy week of commitments.

Till next time.

N

Big news fell into my inbox and around the web yesterday – Nike are releasing a GPS watch powered by TomTom. The Nike+ SportWatch enters the market to compete alongside the Garmin, Polar and Timex range currently in production.

Nike already have a MASSIVE community of runners who used its devices on Apple products. They have had the benefit of creating very slick interfaces which work in perfect harmony with the Apple ethos.

The Nike+ SportWatch GPS is designed to be simple and intuitive with only three buttons and a Tap Screen for navigation. During the run, the new Nike+ SportWatch GPS captures location information while showing runners their time, distance, pace, and calories burned on an easy-to-read screen featuring a customizable layout. Throughout the run, the GPS receiver works in tandem with the shoe-based Nike+ Sensor to deliver highly accurate pace and distance data. This sounds much like the Garmin Footpod/GPS model but typically the other systems increase the price to have the extra footpod setup. The benefit of the footpod is that sometimes you have to run in a gym or out of satellite range – this way wherever you go you get readings!

The features seem vary similar to all other devices, heart rate monitor, backlight, history. What I’m hopeful is that some time has been spent on the user experience which is something that I often think that my garmin struggles with. The touch screen feature will be interesting to see when my hands become sweaty or are in gloves!

If I’m totally honest I wasn’t expecting Nike to release a fully fledged GPS watch, I have had a few conversations in the past how I had expected them to create a simple watch that hooks into Smart Phones (iphones/androids etc) hence using the phones GPS receiver and processing power but giving the runner the extended information in an easy to read fashion. I would have thought this would be relatively cheap to create vs what they have outputted.

It will be interesting to see how well this does in the market. Nike/Tom Tom are entering a very competitive arena and from the press info I have I’m not sure its going to be suitable for tri-athletes, no mention of waterproof,  so really is a tool for the runners of which how many will give up there £1.99 Nike+ GPS app for something that is likely to be over £100 (realistically nearer £200 I’d have expected).

Regardless of the negatives I’m very interested to see what Nike/TomTom bring to the field!

Pretty high up on the list of guidelines for times when not to run is when you have a cold. I ignored this, my cold clearly hadn’t reached the worst type of man flu levels and a quick squint at my heart rate earlier that day showed nothing abnormal. Couple that with a hard run on Wednesday when I has similar symptoms and performed fine, I was set to run.

Attempting a similar route to last week headed up-to regents canal. A nice little incline at the start getting the heart beating. As with last time I lost the canal at Islington and couldn’t find the route back so just free ran a bit. I figure if I point in the right direction eventually I’ll find somewhere I know!

After a little while I thought I was eventually lost, reaching Bethnal Green I knew where I was but couldn’t figure how to get back. Following buses I eventually made it, by total accident, to Mile End. I have run past Mile End countless time so I was back to familiar territory, head towards Stratford and then follow the Central Line back home.

Whilst running I took the opportunity to catch up on @MT, I have missed lots and lots of episodes recently but I’m gradually catching up! Unfortunately during the second episode Martin started talking about picking up the pace in the final third of the run. I tried to do this a bit but think this coupled with the gradual incline from Mile End to home finished me off!

Good run though, tough, but expected. There was the added benefit that it was done and I had the weekend to chillax, in particular I had the opportunity to see Chris at the Sports Clinic who sorted my legs!

As I write this(on Monday) I feel fully relaxed, plotting my running week ahead…

Till next time
N

Rather unsurprisingly and just over one month after the release of the adidas MiCoach GPS app Nike have released an alternative. This morning I got an email from nike informing me as a nike+ member I should be the first to know about the nike+ iphone gps app and like a sucker to technology I went off to read all about it and check it out.

I was hoping that this would be the first of the two to join Heart Rate Monitor and GPS as I assumed the newer iphonescould interact with the device but alas, this still seems to be lacking from the build. Although it has led me to question whether the iphone 3gs/4 has Heart Rate facility? Answer in the comments below if you know! Anyway, over to the app itself – oddly they have charged £1.19, peculiar considering the Adidas one is free, I also would have expected some hype and fanfare over the app maybe free for ‘x’ days to get people aware of it, maybe that campaign is still to come however if you had paid and then they made it free I guess you’d be a bit annoyed!

Following a foolish stumble out of the office door last night I am not able to get out and test this app with a run today as I may have liked to have done. Apparently the GPS on the iphone 3 is nowhere near as good as on the newer phones, however I guess it should be as accurate as the micoach review from before. I guess in order to get to the real detail with these reviews I need to get a play with the iPhone 4 but in order to do that the cost somewhat outweighs that of buying a new Garmin!

The install of the app was pretty easy, the user interface felt much like that I was used to from my Nike+ of old. Nike+ saw me through many miles and up until March time I used it almost religiously racking up over 1000miles on the system, however I stopped using it finding my Garmin a lot more usable and accurate – the GPS version *should* rectify this! Fortunately for Nike its website in my mind is spot on, funky and very neat. The graphs presented are clever, albeit a bit difficult to understand, they could show the results in a slightly more obvious manner. I always disliked the fact that it didn’t store information about what track was being played but other than that it did everything that could be expected from an accelerometer.

The iPhone app seems to mimic the colour scheme and feel of the website creating a simple to use experience. Within minutes I had logged onto my online profile and was ready to start the app going. I decided to “go for a run”, which actually meant walking back from lunch which apparently took me 0.2 miles just to see if it worked. The interface was good, allowing the phone to be locked whilst showing useful information, it also appeared that you can get information to be spoken to you in different intervals. Once i clicked stop on the app it seemed to upload it automatically and it appeared on my nikeplus.com profile.

Obviously have been playing with social media for quite some while feeding into twitter and facebook neatly and cleverly, something that adidas micoach to work on and also having a quick squint at the webpage I can get the information and build my own interface for it – Perfect!! Should be a good test when I next get out for a run. I’m sure it will kill my battery so its only going to get a 4miler or so and as mentioned already I’m not expecting too much from its accuracy due to the phone not the app. Update to feature soon when I have actually gone for a run!

Also when I get a few mins free time I think im going to dig out my API attempt last time to facilitate a wordpress plugin or sorts for it. If there is demand for this out there please comment and I’ll get it going sooner rather than later!

Till next time.

Unsurprisingly for anyone who knows what happened to me on Sunday this post has taken a long time to come and to be honest there was question and doubt as to whether I should write it at all. Sadly there are no photo’s of me crossing the finishing line or with a big grin and a finishers medal and in just a few paragraphs I’m going to say what happened (or what I know of it…).

The day started off as planned, the clothes sorted the night before, breakfast eaten and Laura and I set off for the tube at 7am. Heading into London I got to Greenwich DLR and made the Green Start by 9am. Plenty of time to get prepared and relaxed, we had been allocated a tent to stand in so when the rain came we were sheltered.

At 9:45 the race started and off we went, I deliberately knew to hold back on my pace so this year I made a conservative effort to get my pace in around the 8:35 pace and all of my splits give or take hovered around this marker. Sadly – what I didn’t pay attention to is the Heart Rate… » Continue reading “Virgin London Marathon: The Post Mortem”

This blog is way overdue and probably should have been put up a couple of months ago when I really was in my peak fitness, since then I have let it slide a bit. That said I am still fairly fit and if anyone ever fancy’s a 10k run or spinning session I’ll join you and hopefully keep up with you! Anyway this is a little post as I thought it rather appropriate during a time where another great story of a man who lost 15 stone through running is being released.

Whilst my achievement may be nowhere near that scale and Mike had to overcome far more hurdles than me I still have a sense of pride as to where I have got over the last few years in particular the last 12 months…

The picture on the right shows me at a work 2005 Xmas party . This was around the peak of my weight, I did nothing in regards to keeping fit and ate 2 ‘big’ meals a day. Weight gain was inevitable and a lazy lifestyle just speeded that up. At this time I reached a waist of 36inches and think (although can’t remember) these may have sometimes been tight. Unlike others I can’t blame alcohol, curries or late night kebabs it was just a case of snacking and ultimately eating poor food. During a sequence of events that saw my life change over the next few months I was given a reason for change, and slowly this started to happen.

Initially taking up squash with a colleague and occasionally hitting the gym I got a bit fitter but not much it wasn’t until a few of us started running at work and I got my Nike+ kit did I really start to really enjoy keeping fit. From March 08 I started running in a pretty big way. Having been the kid who was ready with the excuse as to why not to run cross country at school this came as a bit of a surprise to me and probably anyone who knew me back then. I genuinely enjoyed running and with the Nike technology I could be geeky with it too. Perfect!

As the months carried on and I was routinely doing a couple of runs a week at minimum I decided to get into a 10k, being the moneysaver that I am I entered a challenge with my Nike+ and after 30days of racking up the most miles I could (including runs in Florida!) I managed to blag a place in the 2008 Capital 10k. By this point I was already significantly fitter and had started to shed some weight. I was still enjoying running so it was perfect. I completed that run in a very respectable 53 minutes but deep down I wasn’t happy. Others around me had done better and I could be just as good as them!

For most people I know 10k would be the point they gave up, not me. I like a challenge, from a young age I have always been a trier and from that age I also got used to not winning and not being particularly good at anything but I would always give it my best. I think it is this competitive and never wanting to fail mentality that pushed me into my most extreme challenge of my life.

Now I can quite remember the sequence of events but around October 2008 I got the rejection marathon magazine but was also scheduled to run the Great South (another Nike+ competition!). I was upping my weekly mileage all the time and following the 10miler I had to decide whether 09 would be my first marathon year. Again by this point my fitness was still getting better, a gym membership for fitness first which resides quite literally across the road also kept me in shape with the option of quick lunch break sessions.

Following a sad family event with my girlfriend I was introduced to Fairhavens. This is a large hospice which is based in Southend, at the time I found out they had charity places and decided to sign one of those scary contracts confirming I’d raise the necessary funds in order to gain my place. Once I signed my contract I was in and running was now to consume my life for the next few months.

As a reader of runners world I knew how important it was to follow a schedule but what they suggested seemed to involve at the min 5 days of running a week. I could fit it 3/4 but to be honest I enjoyed spinning to much to take up another night with running so I proceeded to ignore all schedules and go it alone. I ensured, pretty much without fail, that every weekend I would do one long run ranging from 10 up-to 20 miles during the peak. I was dedicated, over the next few months I could probably count on one hand the amount of miss runs I did due to the typical feeble excuses.

Around Xmas Laura introduces me to Jon Robson, a personal trainer. Forking out a fair amount of money I was to add a fairly intense gym session on top of my already hectic running schedule. It was from October – March I really felt my weight come off but still amazingly I was having fun. Obviously marathon training is tough and eats away your time you need to factor in long runs which ontop of you have to remember how much it will take to recover.

In April, on a stupidly hot day (for England) I put on my running shoes and pounded the 26.2 miles of London streets. Perhaps my ignoring of the running schedule came back too haunt me but I was not in anyway prepared for the heat and 4:34 later I crossed the finish line. Slower than I hoped but more incredibly more than a stone lighter than when I started!! (obviously that weight went back on quickly).

So by April 09 I was down to around 12stone 8, a weight I have maintained till today. No doubt I could be lighter if someone assessed my diet. Whilst I have cut out a lot of rubbish from what I eat, I still enjoy bad foods too much to cut them completely. I have found what I think is a healthy balance between being a super fit 6 pack mens health guy and enjoying my life enough and being healthy enough not to care!

Recently a few of my mates went out and did a 10k, it was this event that really reinforced that I was probably quite fit. Completing a couple of minutes faster than my closest friend and also not far of 45mins I was almost at that next level of running! Foolishly after that run I stopped for a bit, but my shoes are back out and I have ideas as to where my next runs will be…

Anyway, I think what is probably due is a “then and now” photo to compare side by side and here you go, hopefully the difference is noticeable…

Ok so that title maybe a little embellished but today our cruise pulled into Tunisia and as it was doing so I decided to don my running gear and do a few laps around the boat. A 30 min session was deemed long enough by me…it is a holiday after all!

5k later with a slight sweat due to the humidity I was done and guess I could proclaim to running s 5k in Africa!

Having won a hot stone massage in a raffle on day 1 I headed to that at 830 (pic isn’t me!)…that was interesting, to say the least. I have had a few massages over the last few months (mainly sports) thanks to my marathon training but this was very odd. Think I prefer massage hands to hot stones!

Anyway let the holiday continue including the eating far to much due to the 24 hour buffets!!