Saturday night, set the alarm for 6:30. Sunday morning, wake up naturally at 7:25am. Apparently a little care is needed with setting one's alarm: there is a setting that you need to watch out for if you are planning to be startled awake on a Sunday. Some pre-set alarms are set for weekdays, so setting my alarm for 6:30am wouldn't have woken me till Monday 6:30am.
Sunday 6:30am was to be my wake up to slowly prepare and gear up for a 10km race at Waiatarua reserve. For things I care about I'm usually hours earlier. For running I'd like to eat at least 2 hours before. Get my gear sorted. Have as many trips to the bathroom. Get to the venue and have as many trips to the bathroom. Warm up for myself, then do the group warm-up with the other competitors and then run without a care.
Fortunately everything else fell into place and I pretty much succeeded to do everything listed above and be ready for the benefit of 55 minutes extra sleep. Win! This was the second time I'd run Waiatarua out of my four entries. The first two were flooded cancellations. Last year was a relatively flooded non-cancellation. If you're planning to run around a wetland in winter you clearly need to be ready for the occasional inundation and a smattering of mud. It's a rare flat track, too; but that's a trap. Run flat tack on a flat track, you risk going too fast too early. It happened last year. And 2020 was a redux. The only solace was that I had a second wind in the last quarter that saw me through. It was still a disappointment after a pretty good cycle of preparation.
I'd put my poor performance to poor pacing, using my 2019 instincts to overestimate my 2020 fitness. But later in the day something stirred at the back of my throat that could give me an "out". I was coming down with cold symptoms by the afternoon. My wife had been unwell since Thursday evening so it wasn't a surprise. A couple of days on I didn't feel that bad - just more easily tired. I masked up for the few required work engagements on Monday and Tuesday and was generally "well" by Wednesday. It was this morning, Friday morning, that I thought I'd give running a go and didn't feel too bad. My wife had a Covid test on the Tuesday and we learned on Wednesday she definitely didn't have the virus. In the contrast of Auckland to Melbourne, you want to make sure you do your part to make sure that the viral genie stays in the bottle.
Melbourne is a fly in the ointment. To quote myself from a month ago: "Back in the early stages I remember being quite proud of the approach taken because it made sense and was clear. But there was immediate criticism of New Zealand's approach because of Australia's apparent success with a lighter lockdown. But no-one could tell which approach would work best. If there was one thing about the "strictest measures in the world" in NZ, it was a path to elimination. We still have a theoretical probability of another case, to be clear, but anything less that a stringent lockdown leaves a probability of further cases in the non-lockdown state both Australia and New Zealand are in." It didn't take an expert to spot that the less stringent the approach the more likely there was to be another outbreak and although other places in Australia had the odds on their side, Victoria rolled snake's eyes. With over 400 cases in one day, Melbourne with its four million population has quite a spike. For reference, New Zealand on its worst day had 146 cases. The only way to be safe is another lock-down. Any benefit in having a less than stringent lockdown has been lost when another 6 weeks of suppression is the best you can do.
The United States have raging outbreaks with most states not even thinking of lockdowns. The extent of the burn when it went this high in New York was only held back the tsunami was a lockdown. A few states have finally gone for masking up. It will be interesting to see if this almost laissez faire approach will somehow work. My intution would suggest that they've done well to hold the official death figures down but that it's not likely to stay that way. Even with the improved treatments that were learned since Italy and New York, if there aren't enough beds, ICUs, doctors and nurses, the health system will collapse and it will go from a seething pot to a boiled over oil fire.
