Going the distance

At home this evening, neurotic from stress, I spent an hour loading old runs into Smashrun. I was shocked to discover that three weeks before I met my wife, not only did I get up at 4am to run a 10k, I didn't feel that was enough exercise so when I got home I ran another 15k round the Happy Valley racetrack.

Again and again I'd find evidence that I used to run a very long way in Hong Kong, distances that make my recent efforts laughable. It's all very well to run a half marathon around Singapore, seeing lots of different places. It's quite another thing to go out at two in the afternoon and run round Happy Valley 21 times, gulping gels and sucking from a succession of bottles of Pocari Sweat as you go. Here I was thinking that I was running more now I've moved to Singapore, when in fact all I needed to run more was to get a time machine and set it to the start of 2009.

Of course, I'm running much more consistently now. I look at my occasional blog entries from back then, and I might have gone for long runs, but I also subsisted on a diet of Lindt chocolate balls and nice and spicy Calbee potato crisps from the 7-11 next to my flat. Now we're in Singapore and the closest 7-11 is five minutes walk, the thought of all that junk food is not quite so persuasive. But I'm not running so far, either.

Perhaps after the next training cycle I'll load up with nothing but Mars bars and Haagen Dazs ice cream sandwiches and see whether that gets me fitter or not. I've a funny feeling about what the answer to that is.

This is a recovery week, so I've got slightly shorter distances to run than last week. I've still got to do some hill repetitions (always a challenge in Singapore) tomorrow, but that's nothing compared to today's horrible challenge: hopping one-legged round Marina Bay at six forty-five this morning. It may only have been for twenty seconds per leg, but boy did that make me suffer. At least there weren't any feral urchins around to laugh at me.