Busy doing nothing

Last night I stayed up much too late, playing on my xbox and waiting for my wife to return home. I should have gone to bed, but I couldn't sleep, and the allure of riding artificial motorcycles around a computer simulated track was just too much to resist. Eventually she came back in through the door, and we watched the first twenty minutes of Tucker And Dale Vs Evil, which is being marketed as doing for the hillbilly horror genre what Shaun Of The Dead did for zombies.

I'm not sure that the hillbilly horror genre is quite as rich a seam to mine as zombies. The only examples I can think of are Deliverance, (maybe) Cabin Fever and perhaps some of Rob Zombie's work, but that's not much. Also, the trailer for the film gives away 90% of the plot and the stunts, so although it's very enjoyable to watch a college kid plunge head-first into a woodchipper, it's not much of a surprise.

Somehow common sense prevailed, and instead of staying up all night (by now it was four a.m.) we went to bed, which meant first thing this morning we recommenced watching, from the woodchipper scene. It's a lovely film - gory, but never so disgusting that you feel reviled at yourself for watching it, and there's one lovely call back to the final scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with a man angrily flailing a chainsaw around. This isn't a film with an abundance of twists and suspense, but that's not why you watch it.  It's got a cute dog as well, which is a bonus.

Having watched that, we watched The Spy Who Loved Me, but I'll say nothing about that yet, because I'm saving that up for this month's Blogalongabond post.  But with that over, there was nothing left to do but eat cheese sandwiches and doze all afternoon.

Oops.  I mean I was meant to go and put some hard miles down.  I should have done that first thing and got them out the way, but feeling knackered from staying up late, and then busy watching films, made me incredibly lazy, so it wasn't until I was threatened with a wooden-spoon beating from my wife that I finally left the flat.  Even then, it took me the best part of an hour to get to Happy Valley and start running, feeling rather unenthusiastic due to the gloom, the rain, and wanting to stay at home and eat more cheese.

Once I got going, I was quite happy.  I managed to get the first two kilometres in at well below 5 minute pace, and although I then slipped back, I kept going steadily for two hours.  I've got a new toy: a foot pod for my Garmin, which is like a grown-up pedometer.  It's of little use outside, where I already have a GPS signal, but it does have one extra cool feature, which is cadence logging.  Now I can see that I take about 80 steps per minute when running, although there's nothing that tells me if that is particularly bad, good or indifferent.

It was quite a hard run though.  Having not run for a week, my body was not perfectly ready for this, and after two or three miles there was quite a lot of pain in my quads and my calves.  I'm assuming that when I get out of bed tomorrow, I'll be shambling like a very old man, but there's not much I can do about that now - I have to knuckle down and get the miles in before the marathon.

As I ran, there wasn't much to focus on at Happy Valley, apart from the smell of manure as you run around the southern end, and the vents from the restaurant at the north end, so I found myself racing a woman running in the opposite direction.  She was going at almost exactly the same pace as me, so if I went past her at 700 metre intervals then I was doing fine.  If I ran less than 700 metres before she went past me, that meant she was running faster than I was.  The things we do while we're trying to concentrate on 17 laps of a basically flat, featureless oval.  Maybe I should have told her I was racing her.  And perhaps I shouldn't have been proud that I was running for longer than she was, because she stopped a few laps before me.  Who knows? Perhaps she'd already done twenty laps before I got there.

On the last lap, I went a bit mental and sprinted it - 4:29 or so, which was unnecessary and far quicker than any other lap I'd done.  As I got to the 500 metre mark, I could feel myself wanting to weep - this is probably a sign that I'm pushing too hard.  Oh dear.

I took the tram home.  This was a good thing, because it took a very long time, so for once I got home and had stopped sweating.  And dinner was ready, and then we watched a third film, the very funny Easy A, and then I got crushed at Scrabble, and so to bed.  For a day in which I spent at least five hours watching television, it feels like I got quite a lot done.