Boom!

Habitual running is a lot about goals, both short term and long, the latter which can span years. Round numbers lend themselves for goals. Some of them are arbitrary like the "Three hour marathon", "90 min' half" not to mention things like "four minute mile" (which I will never be able to do). Often when you start (or restart) running, you might knock off landmark times quite quickly and need to reset them, or adjust the long term ones to the new information you gain from your efforts.

As a runner, I run and race any distance between 5km and a marathon. 5km is the most accessible distance for most amateurs and as I've mentioned before there is literally no reason to enter "races" when you can race it at a ParkRun on any given Saturday morning for free. As a runner who prefers the longer distances, I only sparingly race 5km, and had been very reluctant to give up or interrupt a long run on a Saturday morning to go to a ParkRun. So my relationship with the 5km distance started mainly in my own personal runs, then a race or two for the Run Auckland Series, with a sprinkling of ParkRuns, in fact in my eighth year of doing ParkRuns, I have only done it 24 times! But of those 24, seven have been this year. Almost all of them have been "sandwich long runs" where I run about 10km to the venue, race the 5km and then run home, which is exactly what I did yesterday. 

My battles with the distance are reflected in my moving Personal Best:

2017:  21:22

2018: 20:20

2019: 19:54 (first time breaking 20 minutes at a ParkRun)

2020-2022: No ParkRuns due to Covid and not much running

2023: 20:23 (only one attempt)

2024, though, was a big year where I was truly fit and was training for speed and I was fully expecting to go under 19 minutes at some stage. My times over various locations, however, were: 19:44 (new PB), 19:36 (new PB), 19:23 (new PB), 19:42 and finally a casual 21:28 at Western Springs.

2025, I've been even fitter, and until yesterday my times were: 19:51, 19:25, 20:10, 19:17 (new PB in June), 20:16, 20:05... 

When you have been running for a long time the improvements in PB tend to be gradual. That I moved from 19:44 to 19:23 over 7 months and was a 21 second improvement is not unexpected. 21 seconds at race speed is a lot.

Yesterday though I did what I always did, I ran the 10km to Ōwairaka, arriving about 5 minutes before start. Then we were off. I felt for a speed that felt sustainable and ran over the "the big, beautiful bridge" an Ōwairaka feature, which you have to run over, run for about one km and then come and run back over, so pacing can be a little tricky. Racing is always better than running alone because you have people to pace you, and also the ability to make targets of the people in front. Both before and after the turn around point, I made the move to grind past some of the people in front of me. One of them tailed me though up the bridge and eventually past me, then I got him at a corner, and then he got me on the straight. I usually faded towards the end but perhaps because I had this guy on me and had a little left in the tank, I went at him and past him with less than 50m to go and scampered in for 4th. 

The time? 18:44. I had just ripped 33 seconds off from my previous PB, not just scraping under 19, but healthily under. It was almost unbelievable to myself and weird to think only three people were in front of me. (To be clear they were under no threat - I would need an extra 20 seconds to catch third.)

The ridiculous thing of course is that clearing one ceiling just leads you to the next one. Since ParkRuns are almost never flat, I might do what I did in 2024 which was to see what I can do on a flat track, but that's for another day/month/year. The marathon in two weeks is my priority and I want to make sure that my expectations there are also in check and met.

Twin projects

It's been about 6 months since my last blog, which really reflects what has been a pretty intense period, where my school moved campus, a busy period of care with mum, ambitious running load and a new linguistic project, which detracted from writing. I had a draft for a while to talk about the similarities between Trump's MAGA movement and Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but I didn't finish it and the situation in the States moves far too quickly for a slowly gestating blog post.

My linguistic project was to learn a completely unfamiliar language (or two) in my forties. Part of this is because it is something I have always enjoyed yet have not really done, and another is to see what works as an older learner, like many students are. My two target languages are Vietnamese and Farsi (Persian). Vietnamese is the language with the easier access to resources so I have been using what is available to me to learn as much as I can over the last two to three months.

I might not be the best example having learned several languages before and may have the "neuron pathways" that allow me to connect faster with unfamiliar words, grammar and pronunciation. So far I have found that I can learn it for reading and listening at quite an easy pace. The harder thing will be when I have a class or tutorial to start speaking, which has been the more difficult aspect for me. One of the tools I have used most was one that I had derided in the past, Duolingo. I had tried it in the past to keep my Korean language fresh but immediately thought it was using European language expressions and grammatical sense on a non-European language and gave it up. 

This time round, I recognise that there is variability in the quality across languages and time has served to improve them. Secondly, it is very good for vocabulary acquisition, which is a good place to start, and also sound recognition from the listening. I am enjoying it and will try to use it until there is a better way for practice. 

Running-wise, since my last post, this period has been the most intense of my life. Probably that's a sentence I could have put in almost any previous post because there is a ramping up effect at work. Since April where I managed to improve my 5k, half marathon and full marathon personal records, I went into a 10km race series for the first time since 2019. It is good to alternate goal distances during long training periods so the body gets different stimulus to improve. I was pretty competitive in the series, almost always in the top 10. In one race in Te Atatū I finally broke 40 minutes for a 10km race, and was pretty happy with my training trajectory. I was looking to break 40 again in the final 10km race but the day before while attempting a box-jump in the garage at home, I fell backwards and gained a suspected broken wrist instead. It knocked me out of racing and put my training on hold for 10 long days. Fortunately, a second x-ray confirmed it was not a fracture but a sprain, and with the cast removed, I could get back to training. The finale of the series was a half marathon. 10 days without training should not have decreased my fitness to any extent but I still felt like it took some time to get back to the freshness I had before, and in the half marathon, I went too fast, struggled, missed a turn (costing me about 20-30 seconds) and then eventually dragged myself home just under 1:30, which was not what I had expected. 

After the series I had no particular races in mind. But a person on Facebook needed to offload their Auckland Marathon entry, so I decided to help and thus I have a new goal, which is now just 3 weeks away from completing. Knocking on a fair amount of wood, my training since the cast came off and up to the marathon has been the smoothest of any lead-in and a few training runs have been immensely confidence building. I am used to having things "come up", whether they be niggles that knock out key weekends, or incidents like last year's "face plant" which happened four weeks before the Auckland Marathon and affected my peak weeks. Christchurch Marathon lead-in was fairly smooth, although I was not quite hitting my targets. For this lead-in, I am averaging about 100km a week, which is nailing my plan, and really lifting the bar in the training runs. So I have reasons to be confident. 

I hope this isn't the last post for the year. I will aim to update the progress of these two projects and maybe talk about the Mao/Trump analogy.