The weather

I must be one of very few Nonfarmers in Spain who thought this morning, "Oh good, it's cold and raining". And, considering that someone had smashed the window of the car I was driving (in order to steal items amounting in value to less than the cost of replacing said window) this is all the more surprising.

When my wife and I were deciding on whether to move to Spain to live or to stay in the UK, we wrote a list of "pros" and "cons". I remember quite clearly saying that her "pro" of "the weather in Spain" didn't count as a serious consideration. After moving to Spain, I saw just how wrong I was. While it is amazing to be able to go for a quick swim after work or to walk around town at 3 in the morning in a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, more than the heat it's the light that makes all the difference. The blue skies and just being able to see that the Sun is still there lift your spirits. My favourite time of year is winter in spite of it often being more biting than winters back home. Spring and Autumn in Madrid don't really exist as such although, if they did, I'm sure they would be my favourite seasons.

I've noticed that, since I started to do so much exercise outdoors, it has severely impacted my perception of the weather. As I work in an office, almost all the time I spend outside (other than at the weekend) is spent training. As far as I am concerned, it can never be too cold to go running - or, at least, I have not yet had that experience - but it is often too hot to go running. I enjoy training in London so much more, partly because it is a change of scenery, partly because I love running through cities but mostly because - as long as it is not raining heavily - the temperature is usually perfect for running. Perhaps that is why I am looking fondly at the grey Madrid skies above and looking forward to my cold and wet run at lunchtime.

NY Marathon Week 3/9

Week 3. Objective ECOs 700, actual ECOs 715

It's been a week of solving mysteries. The first mystery I decided to solve was "Where is Jonathan?". I'd sent him emails weeks ago and had started to actually worry that something bad had happened to him, or at least that there had been some important change afoot that I was unaware of. Jonathan has been my coach for the last 5 years and I haven't really heard from him since I decided to take 6 months away from following a structured training programme. I did receive a mysterious email from him during the summer, in which he said he had "something to tell me" but I never did find out what that something was. I realized I was actually a bit nervous to call him up in case I was upset by the reason for his absence and, in any case, I had decided to train myself for the New York Marathon, so in a way, I wanted to avoid situations that might make me change my mind. I discovered from a friend who went with us to Morocco last year that Jonathan has moved to Mexico to live! In fact, just as my sabbatical was finishing, he was taking a real one from the Universidad Europea de Madrid. This is not as unexpected as it might sound - I knew that he was trying to set up a branch of his triathlon school in Mexico and, furthermore, his wife is Colombian. It turns out that the main reason for the move is to study obesity in children, a subject in which the state of Yucatán where he is now based is a leading expert. I'm sure that the triathlon school will continue to run perfectly in Madrid but, by now, I know pretty well how the training plans are devised, I never train with the other athletes and I'm less concerned about maximising my performance than I was before my "break". The bottom line is that I want to see how far I can go on my own.

The other mystery is far less glamorous and it concerns my mountain bike. Cycling home on Monday I noticed that the back disc brake is once again rubbing, so much so that it is noticeably harder work. I've had the brakes looked at twice in the last month or so and the brake pads have worn down incredibly quickly. The guy in the bike shop reckons that the brake needs taking to bits and lubricating so I'll definitely leave that to him. I've had enough of fiddly and potentially costly home bike maintenance to last me for a while. It's a bit ironic considering that I was just thinking that one of the things I most like about my mountain bike is that I can fix everything that goes wrong with it myself.

People at work have started saying that I look tired or asking me whether I have returned to training - well, it's not as though I ever really stopped training but it's been a while since I last trained as hard as this. My calf muscles were stiff for the first time in ages so I found myself reaching for my Compex Runner which I use as I kind of self-massage. It had been so long since I had last used it that the battery had completely died. I discovered that you could buy a new one for about 60 € online or for only 20 € buy just the 4 cells without the sticker that holds them together. The catch is that you can only get the cells sent to you if you live in Switzerland which, perhaps not coincidentally, is where Compex is from.

Considering that this week was one of the two peaks before the Marathon, it is striking that I only went to the gym at lunchtime once, to do weights. The rest of the workouts were either series (intervals) of fast running which I always do on the treadmill these days, the long run I did on Sunday or the running to and from work on Thursday.

This weekend was the weekend of the "Migas", a local festival where my in-laws live in which this simple peasant food is prepared over open fires. My father in-law takes it pretty seriously as he often wins first prize  (a live lamb) although, this year, the prize will be awarded by raffle and not by decree.

That hat with a solar powered fan could be the next big thing for Ironman pros

As last year, there was a cycle race going on in parallel but, unlike last year, it was only open to juniors. I had thought of taking part this time but my father in-law hadn't realized that junior did not mean anyone younger than him...

Still, I'm quite glad to have had the temptation removed from me. These guys looked pretty professional and there was a big hill on the course that would have relegated me to the back of the pelotón and I would probably have soon found myself in a vacuum. The added pressure of my in-laws assuming that I would be the fastest cyclist just because I have done an Ironman wouldn't have helped either.

As usual, we did absolutely nothing except eat and sleep siestas. It's always the same when we go to Ciudad Real. But if you can't recharge their batteries when they stay with their parents or parents-in-law, then where can you? I actually woke up ahead of my alarm today for the first time that I can remember on a Monday.

Smile...

The other day I went for a longish run in the Casa de Campo in Madrid and was suddenly struck by the word SONRIE (smile) - each letter painted on a tree in such a way that the word is only spelt out from a particular vantage point. I wasn't carrying a camera at the time and, unfortunately, the only photo I can find on the internet was not taken from the right place.

SONRIE, it might never happen

The result was the (presumably) intended: I smiled and for a few minutes running was slightly easier on my legs. The same urban art bandits are no doubt responsible for this installation, made up of plastic cups inserted in the chicken wire of a fence by a roundabout near the Casa de Campo. This one seems to be directed at motorists rather than runners or cyclists.

I was reminded of this as I cycled home last night as I passed a graffito (yes, the singular of graffiti is indeed a grafito) scrawled on a wall near my house:

Sonrie que la vida son 3 días y ya vamos por el segundo.

Smile, life is 3 days and we are already on the second.

I'm not usually one for smiling for smiling's sake because I think that only devalues the currency of smiling, but I did find this quite profound. It appears to be a fairly common saying in Spanish.

NY Marathon Week 2/9

Week 2. Objective ECOs 600, actual ECOs 605

I always find it difficult to train effectively when I have to go on a business trip. Apart from the hours eaten up by the actual travelling and the fact that you can't realistically take your bike with you, neither can you skip out at lunchtime for a quick workout. On the other hand, the evenings tend to be a bit freer as there are no household or parenting duties to attend to (not that I normally do any of the former or much of the latter).

From my bike commute. This is where I had my Evel Knievel style accident 3 years ago

Monday was a fairly light day: commuting to work and back by bike, half an hour running as a warm up and then a weights session. Sometimes I can be feeling quite tired and achy on a Monday, especially if I have done a long run the day before (as is the case today) and yet doing some weights can make me feel less stiff; if I get any "DOMS" (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) from the weights, it tends to be two days after. Which is why I often try to do my hardest workout the day after my weights session.

So on the Tuesday I did two sets of four lots of five minutes at my AnT (Anaerobic Threshold) which meant, in practice, 5 of these at 17 kph and the last 3 at 16.5 kph. I was still wearing the accelerometer dongle thingy for the study I was doing for Santander Por Tu Corazón so I had that extra little motivation to do the workout properly without any "extended breaks". I was wearing the Polar Heart Rate strap for this one and the running machine was reporting some totally wacky numbers from 60-220 so I don't know how much useful data they will get out of it. As for the accelerometer, you are not supposed to get it wet so I don't know if it will have even lived beyond the first day as they turned off the little display, so there was no way of telling whether it was working. Anyway, I should get the results in a few months, so all will be revealed then (apart from any sensitive health information on this blog, of course!).

I flew to London on Wednesday and so it made sense to make this a rest day. Although, by the time I got to the hotel I was itching to do something. I hastily put on my running kit and headed out of the door, noting that it had just started to drizzle pleasantly. After two minutes it was raining so heavily that I started slipping around in my shoes, reminding me of my "red carpet" debacle in Vietnam. Something tells me that the bill would have amounted to more than the 80 euros that that little incident cost me. I ended up running a grand total of four minutes.

My second hard workout of the week was the next day, so perhaps it was just as well. I ran round and round Regent's park - three lots of 15 minutes progressing from just over my Aerobic Threshold (AT) to just under my Anaerobic Threshold. Every time I run around Regent's Park I end up getting totally disorientated and have to ask for directions back to Marylebone road: this time was no exception. I noticed a lot of people on road and triathlon bikes going round and round and round the park. I thought that it must be exceptionally boring to do that but then I realized that they would probably think the same thing about what I was doing, if they were actually bored enough to notice me.

The run that I had planned and had been looking forward to doing all week I finally got around to on Friday. My idea was to run from the hotel (near Great Portland Street) along the Regent's Canal all the way to the Olympic Stadium and back. It was the only chance I had to get to see the stadium and experience the thrill of remembering all that had been achieved there over the last couple of months in the Olympics and, more recently, the Paralympics. The canal stretches right across London and merges into other waterways but it ducks momentarily under Islington, popping back up just around the corner from where I used to live. I'd been down the towpath before but never so far and not for a very long time. There were all kinds of nice middle class hippy distractions along the way: a floating market, someone selling second hand books out of a longboat, pubs and winebars and babies being pushed along in their Bugaboos. The road signs under each bridge are the only reminder that you are cutting through the heart of London. That, and the occasional maniac on a bike who nearly knocks you into the water. Had I done this a week earlier or a week later I might have actually had a chance to see the stadium close up; unfortunately for me it was being guarded by a rather un-imposing asian man who was very surprised to hear how far I had run to get there. There was no persuading him and he seemed too nice to get into trouble by running past him or anything like that, so I turned around and headed home. In the end I covered 24 kilometres, passing the half marathon mark in just over 1 hour 35 minutes. I started to get a bit tired over the last half an hour but I was enjoying the run so much (and I had to get back in time to meet a friend) that I kept going at that pace, even if my heart rate went out of the range it was supposed to be in. It probably explains why I felt physically tired at the weekend and had stiff calf muscles for the first time since the Marathon I ran back in February!

IKEA floating market on Regent's Canal...

How quaint

As a consequence I left the 90 minute run to the very last minute on Sunday, now back in Madrid. I still felt very stiff and, to be honest, I would have preferred to put my feet up, but this is where having an objective like a Marathon to run makes all the difference. As long as there was no risk of injuring myself, I was going out of that door. In fact, the run itself wasn't too bad after all, and I actually felt much better for it. For some reason, I'd been in a pretty foul mood all day. Part if not all of that reason was because I'd tried again (in vain) to extract the broken screw from the idiotic piece of carbon I'd recently bought in order to raise the handlebars on my triathlon bike and decided that it was a lost cause. That's actually a very mild way of putting it. I decided that I would put a definitive end to all attempts to fix it in the future by taking a hammer to it and smashing it to pieces. Even this was unsuccessful as it is so tough that hitting it with a hammer just made it bounce several metres into the air. It nearly went into the neighbour's garden and I could just envision the embarrassing conversation that I would have to have in order to get it back to finish off the job. Nevertheless, it is quite definitely beyond all repair now, so that's that - it's completely screwed (if you'll forgive the pun). Needless to say, I wasn't terribly proud of myself after that little episode but at least I managed to do it out of sight of the kids. These kind of things have the potential to annoy me more than most people can imagine. Even I know that it is completely irrational and overblown and yet it takes me hours to get it out of my head, like an itchy spot on the end of your nose that you just have to scratch.

There is nothing like a good bit of shadenfraude to cheer oneself up or at least to put things in perspective ("at least there is someone worse off than me"). It's cheap and selfish but it works. As we were about to enter into the parking at the local cinema I saw a guy with a mountain bike on his roof rack just up ahead. It caught my eye because it still had a race number on it that had flipped upside down as a result of the wind. I started beeping frantically at him because I could see that he wan't going to make it. There was a big red and white stripy sign whose sole purpose was to warn you that you might hit the ceiling by instead making you hit it, instead. You'd think that they would make the sign slightly more forgiving but this one was so firmly rooted to its spot that it knocked the bike and the roof rack clean off the car. As I drove past the unfortunate victim I said how sorry I felt for him and he just shrugged and said "No pasa nada". Had that been me I would have gone berserk. Maybe I can try to take a leaf out of his book.

My wife asked me today if I would be buying another handlebar raiser thingy so that "she could be prepared" to which I said "no". I'll just have to make do with my aggressive position on my bike - it seems like it will be easier to adapt to it than adapt it to me. There was something unaesthetic and displeasing about raising the bar on the bike anyway and at least now I know how to take the handlebars off the bike for packing as well as the potential breaking points.

Normal position

Raised handlebars

Happy feet

One thing I always notice when I start training for a Marathon is that my feet have to go through a phase of toughening up. Even if I have been running regularly, the relentless onslaught of longer, harder and more densely packed workouts means one thing... Blisters.

The first thing is, obviously, to make sure that you are running with shoes that don't normally lead to blisters and with a reasonably good running technique. As you know, I am a follower of the minimalist running movement and precisely because minimalist shoes are so unforgiving, you quickly learn to run with as little force in any other direction than that necessary to overcome gravity: this reduces blisters from the feet sliding around in the shoe. Or, said the other way round, as minimalist shoes are not designed to restrict your feet like a kind of "crutch", they tend to be much more spacious, like the Run Amoc shoes I run with.

Having said that, from a sudden increase in activity, blisters are bound to appear on the toes and directly under the ball of the foot from the skin stretching and rubbing against the sole of the shoe as your foot "dorsiflexes" (a fancy way of saying that the toes bend upwards). I find treating blisters is a bit of a fine art.

Any blisters that do not support your weight while you run can be just left to their own devices to heal. That milky liquid inside them (appropriately called "serum") is full of natural goodness to speed up healing and acts as a cushion in the meantime. If the blister is open, then being left to dry out is just as effective. If you have to put a plaster on an open blister then putting just any kind of plaster can interfere with the healing process, not allowing the blister to dry out and form a scab. This is where those magic plasters by Compeed come into play - they trap the serum and therefore speed up the healing acting like a second skin, as if the blister had not burst in the first place. The idea is to leave the plaster on as long as possible or until the blister has completely healed.

The art comes into play when you have to bear weight on the blisters - in other words, if you can't wait for them to heal naturally before returning to training or competition. If they are closed, then it can be very painful to put weight on them because the serum adds to the pressure on already tender skin. The other issue is that, left to their own devices, the old outer skin dries up and cracks exposing a virgin skin beneath which is not really yet up to the rigours of vigourous running, so the whole cycle is likely to repeat itself.

In my experience, the trick is to lance the blisters as soon as they emerge so that the outer layer of skin is largely conserved and becomes thicker. On the other hand you don't want too much dead skin to build up on your feet. Firstly, this makes your feet less sensitive and is a bit like wearing thicker soled shoes: if you'd wanted to wear thicker soled shoes you wouldn't be running in minimalist shoes... Secondly, I have found that the islands of dead skin can move around while you run, causing further blisters and irritation in the joins between dead skin and live skin. The question is: how much to remove? Sometimes you start picking at a bit and a massive chunk comes off - if you are lucky you manage not to take any live skin off into the bargain and the new skin you reveal below is sufficiently mature by now to withstand your running demands. If you are unlucky then you are in the situation described in the next paragraph. The ideal thing is to try to avoid to this by lancing blisters as soon as possible and by regularly filing off "waffer thin" layers of dead skin from the soles of your feet and toes. I use one of those Ped Egg gadgets for this purpose and I keep a penknife handy for emergency lancing of blisters immediately after running.

Doubles as a cheese grater

The worst case are open blisters on the soles of your feet or toes. This is where Compeed comes in to save the day, but there is little you can do to avoid the cycle repeating itself once the new skin has come through (except build up your training more slowly). You can only hope that you catch the blister in time before it bursts the next time...

I read in Haile Gebrselassie's biography that he once jeopardized a 10K race by lancing blisters the night before which then became infected. I must say (while touching wood), that this has never happened to me and i never bother to use a sterilized implement to puncture the blisters nor do I usually put any disinfectant. That is not to say that neither of those two things would be a good idea.

NY Marathon Week 1/9

I'm starting to think that I'd like to prepare for this Marathon all by myself. I pretty much know the drill by now. I've made up a detailed plan for the first two weeks and a rough outline of how many ECOs ("training points") I would like to put in every week.

Week 1. Objective ECOs 400, actual ECOs 530

I think that the fact I have had to wear this activity monitor all week for the study I have been participating in has influenced me to do slightly more exercise than I had planned. Nevertheless, I would say that this week represents an average week taken over the whole year (including peaks for competition and troughs for holidays). I also think I did the series of 8 lots of 4 minutes at 17 kph on Wednesday much more conscientiously than usual because I felt as though I was being "watched"!

On Thursday I went to work on my bike and went home via a friend's house. I hadn't seen him since he'd done his Ironman in Klagenfurt so it was an opportunity to hear all the gory details. He did a good time on the bike and on the Marathon but his swim took him nearly an hour longer than he expected. In fact, he only just missed the cutoff by 3 minutes. But the remarkable thing is that he swears that he had no idea at the time: he looked at his watch on leaving the water and thought "Good, an hour and 17 minutes" and it was only later he realised that he had actually taken two hours and 17 minutes and has no idea what happened to that missing hour! My theory is that he was abducted by aliens... Either that, or he slept in and started the Ironman an hour late. It's one thing to take much longer than expected but another thing altogether not to even realise. I can't imagine having to swim for so long and then do the rest of the Ironman. In fact I hadn't seen this particular friend since almost a year before so I took the chance to reclaim my aero helmet that I leant him (he didn't get on with it so he didn't end up using it). The only problem was that I had to ride home on my mountain bike wearing it so I hope nobody spotted me. God knows what a fellow triathlete would have thought.

The strange thing (in a good way) was that I felt so fresh and full of energy on Friday that I decided to do a couple of longer series of 15 minutes running progressively faster from 15.5 kph to 16.5 kph. To have done a third set would have been the difference between an enjoyable workout and a hard workout so I left it at that, and, in any case, I had a one and a half hour run planned for the next day.

The "long run" on Saturday (in quotes because it is not really very long yet, but will build up over the next few weeks) was, as a result, a bit of a struggle. In retrospect it would probably have been wiser not to have run on Friday. After about half an hour a sharp pain in a tendon on the top of my right foot made it very difficult to run and I seriously considered packing it in there and then, just in case I did myself an injury. As I wasn't carrying a phone or much money, it would have been a bit of a hassle to get home any other way than on foot, so I decided to gingerly press on with the run. In the end the pain seemed to go away and it hasn't hurt since but it is something to keep an eye on.

After "cheating" on Friday, Sunday was going to be a genuine rest day. That is until my next door neighbour called round and asked if I fancied going on a short bike ride. I'd spent much of the day wrestling with my triathlon bike, trying to fit the new nose cone arrangement that would allow me to raise the bars by 3 cm but a screw had broken off in such a way that it is virtually impossible to get the stump out. That kind of thing makes me extremely nervous and obsessive so it did me the world of good to get out for a bit and clear my head for a bit.

Santander por tu corazón

What better place to find a bunch of willing Human Guinea Pigs than amongst the 6,500 employees of Santander who work in the "Cuidad Financiera" campus and whose employer is willing for us to take time out of the working day to take part in the tests.

The initiative is a joint collaboration between Valentín Fuster, an internationally renowned heart surgeon and Banco Santander (whose Head of Operations is one José María Fuster - I'm not sure if he is any relation). So far 2,000 people have taken part and the aim is to get to at least 3,000. The goal of the research is to find ways to detect heart disease before actual irreversible damage has taken place.

Yesterday it was my turn. The day before I had had to follow a diet that was low in fibre, no alcohol and, what was particularly hard for me, with no fizzy drinks. Actually, I got the date wrong so I followed this diet on Monday and turned up at the medical centre on Tuesday only to find that I was programmed for the Wednesday. So no fizzy drinks for another whole day. It was probably just as well because I was in such a rush to get there on time on the Tuesday that I got very stressed and probably would have recorded much higher pulse rates and blood pressure.

The tests started at 8:30 and took 6 hours(!) in total to complete. They included blood and urine tests, a CAT scan and an ultrasound exploration of the arteries in my neck, stomach and groin. The reason it took six hours is because I also had to complete a detailed questionnaire on my dietary habits and my physical and mental well being. Even though in the run up to the Ironman last year I had been very diligently recording everything I ate and drank, it was surprising just how difficult it was to estimate what I had been typically consuming over the last year. I'm not terribly confident that the results will be terribly accurate. It seems to me that it would be more accurate to ask participants to keep a food and drink diary for a week although I suspect that this introduces Heisenberg Uncertainty: it is a well known phenomena that if you count calories, you tend to consume less.

To measure my activity during a week, I have to wear a little device on the outside of my clothes:

This is an "accelerometer", much like the device built into iPhones. I asked whether it could tell if you were riding a bike (as your centre of gravity doesn't really move up and down very much, unless you are going over rough terrain) and they said that it could sense in three dimensions. But then I thought about it afterwards: if it can measure velocity somehow (perhaps by adding up the accelerations) then it will think that I am doing a lot of exercise when I drive a car... I think that the device can only really tell the difference between being sedentary and active as well as judging the quality of your sleep (rather like those apps that exist for the iPhone). I also have to wear a heart rate monitor which sends its data to the accelerometer for recording, so with these two bits of information it should be possible to calculate how many calories I am burning reasonably well. Of course there are many ways of doing this more accurately but it has to be a foolproof protocol that everyone can follow without problems. The fact is that people doing as much exercise as I do will be among the outliers in a population of office workers, so its not really that important to distinguish between running and cycling or to capture swimming (the device isn't waterproof). In any case, the battery life limitation means I only have to wear the heart rate band for the first 24 hours and another 12 hours of my choosing.

You may be wondering why I am wearing the device on the outside of my clothes. This is because it has a light sensor which is used to detect whether it is day or night. I also have to record the time I go to sleep (which is actually quite an annoying thing to try to do) and the time I wake up (which is when the alarm goes off, so at least that is easy). I would have thought that this information would be more useful than the light meter reading which, as I type this, is pressed up against my desk and probably thinks that I am fast asleep in a dark room. Wearing the device on the outside around the work campus is like a declaration of "I am over 40!" as that is the minimum age required to take part in the programme. That doesn't bother me in the slightest but it is a bit disgusting to have to put the sweat soaked strap over your shirt after a hard workout.

I'll have to go back again in 3 years and 6 years, even if I am no longer an employee of Santander or, for that matter, living in Madrid. In the meantime, I am very curious to see the kind of results they come up with, as well as anything they might find wrong with me.

Objective:New York Marathon 2012

So it's back to work in all senses of the word. There are only 9 weeks between now and the New York Marathon on the 3rd of November, so it's time to start gearing my training towards that. However I decide to run the race, I want to run it within myself so I need to train pretty much as I have done for the last few Marathons I've done.

It seems like my trainer Jonathan is still on holiday so I'm having to make things up a little bit. In fact, I don't think I will stick so fanatically to whatever training plan he comes up with this time - the more flexibility, the less stress I suffer - but it is important to respect as much as possible the volume, intensity and rest days. Jonathan uses a system similar to TRIMPs (TRaining IMPulses) called ECOs (Erm, I've COmpletely forgotten what this stands for) which allows us to compare volume and intensity across swimming (which I won't be doing much of), running and biking.

To put things in perspective, running a Marathon at the speed I run it scores between 400 and 500 ECOs, so it would be a good idea for the total number of ECOs for most weeks to be safely above that number. Another guideline is not to increase ECOs too sharply from one week to the next or, indeed, to reduce too dramatically because this can cause you to peak too early. The general idea is to build up to a couple of peaks of increasing height before the final taper. There are a number of key sessions which have to be included every week starting with the famous "long, steady run" but not forgetting some speed work which I believe is necessary not only if you want to run a Marathon reasonably fast but also for training the muscle fibres that get recruited towards the end of a Marathon when you have worn out all the usual suspects. Lastly, the intensity should be mostly low, aerobic work, with a relatively small proportion (10%-20%) of high intensity, high speed workouts. The philosophy behind "polarized training" is to avoid the middle ground which is where most people end up training by default: doing easy workouts too hard because they are boring and time consuming and therefore being too tired to do the high quality sessions as hard as they should be.

That's not to say that it is such a simple matter to come up with a good training programme but let's just say that it is enough to help me fill in the gaps. Last week I was in Asturias and only managed to clock up 225 ECOs. This week I'm aiming for about 400 so that I can build up from there.