Time to get back to work

As you will know if you have been following this blog, I have been on a little "sabbatical" since the end of April, in order to recharge my batteries, reduce stress and - hopefully - regain some motivation to compete or at least take part in races again. My idea was to focus on three main objectives:

1) Improve swimming

I think I can definitely tick that box, although there is still loads of room for improvement.

2) Enjoy training

I think this is also a "tick" although running in Vietnam was not much fun, if I am honest. I went for an hour long run in Madrid at lunch time yesterday - a time when no one else was foolish enough to be out in the street - and it felt like a luxury compared to the humidity in Vietnam.

3) Maintain form as much as is possible

I think I have done a reasonable job here. Obviously I'm not going to be able to run another Half Marathon in 1:19 without getting some serious grind in beforehand but it shouldn't be too traumatic either to start ramping up the quality and quantity of my training. Also, I am a bit on the heavy side (the scales told me 90.3 kg on my return from Vietnam) but it shouldn't be too much of a challenge to whittle off 4 or 5 kilos between now and the Marathon in New York in November. Even though I don't (currently) plan to "race" it, I'd still like to feel fit and not have to lug around any excess weight.

To give you some idea of what kind of training load I have been voluntarily subjecting myself to, this is how things compare to the run up to Seville Marathon at the end of February and the preparations for the ICAN Half Ironman (which, in the end, I didn't enter):

ECOs are like TRIMPS - a way of measuring training volume and intensity

The Seville Marathon was in Week 10

I still have a few more weeks of "sabbatical" to go - in any case, my trainer is probably on holidays - but it's probably time to start ramping up a little so that the start is not too much of a shock to the system.

Running and Cycling in Vietnam

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh)

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/208124608

Now I can see that I was ripped off by the cycle rickshaw that took me home after I got disorientated at the end of my run. I was less than a kilometre away from my hotel and just next to the same park!

Hoi An

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/208124652

An 8 kilometre out and back run with virtually no traffic and a chance to buy drinks at the halfway point.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/208124668

A 36 kilometre cycle ride up to the toll gate and back. If only I had decided to turn left instead of right, I perhaps would have avoided some of the worst traffic and had a more scenic route. Up until that point the scenery was breathtaking.

Es la Hoya!

OK, a fairly crap attempt to make a funny headline out of the name of Chris Hoy but all the best and most obvious ones have been taken because this guy is a legend.

After having missed most of the games due to being on holiday in Vietnam, it was tantalizing to have to make a stopover in London yesterday on what was one of the most interesting days for me. I would have loved to have been able to watch the Men's Triathlon, one of the few events for which you don't need a ticket. Luckily I was back home in time to be able to watch the final of the Men's Keirin which was effectively Chris Hoy's swan song (although it seems likely he'll be unable to resist taking part in the Commonwealth Games in 2014 in Glasgow, in his home country Scotland).

I don't think I have been as excited to watch a race since the Searle brothers won the Coxed Pair in Barcelona. (By the way, Greg Searle has just won a bronze medal in the Men's Eights, 20 years later!) The Keirin is a very peculiar race which is enormously popular in Japan, where billions of dollars are changed hands in betting on riders as if they were dogs or horses. A kind of motorbike with pedals leads the race off with the riders in tow - the contrast between the old fashioned motorbike (technical name: a derny) with rider sitting bolt upright and the cyclists crouched behind on their hi tech superbikes is quite striking - and then the speed is gradually ramped up until... all hell breaks loose and it is a mad scramble for the line.

Chris Hoy won in convincing style and, judging by how happy the silver and bronze medallists were with their result, it looked like it had been pretty much a forgone conclusion, although the Keirin is a very tactical race in which potentially anything can happen. This converts Chris Hoy - sorry, Sir Chris Hoy - in Great Britain's Olympian with the most gold medals (overtaking Sir Steve Redgrave). Ironic that it should be in such a tactical race when Hoy makes it very clear in his autobiography (which I read on holiday) that he got into track racing and, in particular the Kilo (1 km time trial), because it was a race whose outcome he could control almost mathematically. In spite of that he bows out virtually undefeated in the Keirin.

The end of the holidays is nigh

I haven't been posting lately which is a good sign in that I have been enjoying my holidays but not so good from a training point of view. But this time I decided to take a real holiday and allow myself to fatten up a little bit for when things pick up after the summer.

It's hard for even me - I feel more Spanish than English in many ways, having had some of my most important life experiences in Spain - to not feel extremely patriotic right now. An Englishman has won the Tour de France - and one who likes to say "cunt" a lot, something that particularly pleases me - and, at the time of writing, Great Britain is third in the medal table of the Olympics with 14 gold medals, behind the USA and China. If the medals were per capita then GB would be leagues ahead (although I'd have to check the population of Kazakstan to be sure). I was proudly telling my half English and half Spanish children that this was the result of the lottery funding of the past few years and my eldest remarked that it could have been spent on something more useful. He has a point, of course, but after food, shelter and sanitation, I think that culture (be it music, art or sport) has a fundamental importance in society. At least the money wasn't sent on superfluous airports, backhanders and bank bailouts as has been the case of Spain (currently in 36th place) which, by the way, has been disinvesting similarly in education and research. I have been a bit cut off from the Olympics converge which in the hotels I have been staying in, frustratingly seems to be limited to stills on BBC World News, but every morning I have been checking the results from the day before. I bet that people in the UK have changed their tune from the defeatist "It will be a logistic nightmare" to one of unashamed pride. Even I wish I could be there and it had never even crossed my mind to get tickets let alone a flight to London.

We've been in Mui Ne and Hoi An since I last posted and tonight we are going to Ha Long Bay before heading back home. The only thing I am looking forward to is a respite from the sticky humidity - and to being able to ride my bikes, if I am honest.

In Mui Ne I did some open water swimming in the sea. I'm convinced that the improvements I have made in technique are starting to trickle down into the much more challenging task of swimming in the sea with waves and under currents. I was curious to see how fast I was swimming so I puts Garmin in my iPhone arm band aroun my neck: 4.7 kmph out and 4.5 kph back. That would be a seriously sub 1 hour Ironman time so I think that the fractal noise from the GPS error will have greatly exaggerated the distance covered - something I can smooth out when I get home (POSTSCRIPT: it was exaggerated by a factor of 2!).

I reckon that if I built up running again from scratch, starting with a 20 minute easy run, I could eventually become acclimatized to such humid conditions. But that is not how I have been going about it, so I have continued to suffer. I did however, really enjoy one outing on a reasonably OK mountain bike (a Giant, no less). I was able to go at an average speed of 30 kph which was more like 28 kph taking into account road works and traffic jams. It was a beautiful route through paddy fields and little villages. In many ways I felt safer than in Spain - the roads are generally very good in Vietnam (surely one of the benefits of communism) and, being on two wheels, you are part of the crowd. Safety in numbers. At times I felt as though I was in a Keirin race - those Japanese track bicycle races that are lead off by a motorbike. It would have been great to have been able to tour on bikes - maybe next time.

POSTSCRIPT: How biased of me to think that Great Britain would score highly if the number of medals won were divided by the population of each country: Jamaica with only 2 million inhabitants and several gold medals was top in Beijing and may well be again this time. I realised that this is an example of a phenomenon described at the beginning of Daniel Kannehan's "Thinking Fast and Slow" book. Is the country with the highest number of gold medals by per person likely to be a small or a big country? What about the the country with the lowest number of gold medals per person? The answer, surprisingly, in both cases is that the country is likely to be small because the extreme cases (high medal rate and low medal rate) are more likely in a smaller sample size.

Saigon

There is not much to say about running in Ho Chi Minh (or Saigon as people still insist on calling it) that doesn't involve the traffic. I'd say this is the second least conducive place to running I have ever been in, Delhi being the reigning champion of this league of dubious merit. Having to watch your step in the most literal sense helps the time pass by while you are running but robs you of any opportunity to enjoy the surroundings.

At least in Saigon there are some pretty wide pavements or, at least that is what I thought when I plotted out my route in Garmin Connect. On the plus side there is no one walking and texting on their smart phones to avoid (unlike London) but instead you have to look out for mopeds riding up on the pavement to circumvent red traffic lights (police included). They say that you are nobody if you don't have a moped and people are very used to hearing them and getting out of the way; a runner, on the other hand, is hard to hear approaching.

I've mentioned crossing the road before. If you want to run for an hour you have to budget for an extra half an hour of road crossing. At one point I asked someone where the best place to cross the road was and he responded by escorting me across the road like a little old lady. I studied his technique and came to the conclusion that you first need to become one with the road, flowing with the traffic, and then you simply walk slowly and steadily to the other side. It felt like a Jedi test that could equally have been done with my eyes closed.

At some point I found a park and decided to cut through it. Everyone was out for their evening power walk and everyone (except me) was circling in an anti clockwise direction. Ironically, the only time I had to slow down to a walk was in a park.

Running alongside the river was noticeably cooler although the smell was quite unpleasant. It seems as though they are in the process of laying down a tow path - I say "in the process" because, in parts, I had to scramble up a mud bank. I think I managed to find the place where people go to run or jog. In fact, I was actually overtaken at one point - not that I was going particularly fast but I think the last time I was overtaken on a training run was some time last year! This guy was running in sandals.

After my unfortunate incident with the "red carpet" I decide to bin my shoes - they were on their last legs anyway. I'm now down to running in a pair of very minimalist shoes from Decathlon that only cost 10 euros.

Somehow I managed to get lost on the way back in spite of following the map on my Garmin GPS watch. I decided to get a cycle rickshaw back to the hotel (I was so sweaty I was too embarrassed to take any other form of transport). By the time I got back my family had already finished having dinner.

The red carpet treatment

Just as we were checking out we were told that we would have to pay for the carpet which, after several failed attempts to clean it, would have to be replaced in the end. They told us that it was an expensive imported carpet so I started to get nervous that they would charge us thousands of euros. Last year I got stung by the exorbitant (and unlimited) fees for using data while roaming (I should have known better) and this year, it was looking like I was going to have to pay another fortune for making a silly mistake.

As you can see from the bill, we were charged not thousands, but millions - two million, to be precise. Luckily the exchange rate is around 25,000 Vietnamese Dong to the euro, so this works out to only 80 euros - about the same as the shoes that caused the damage cost in the first place. (OK, the shoes weren't responsible, I was.) Still, if only I had been carrying a little more money while running so that I could have bought some flip flops to traipse back into the hotel in (amazingly, the only flip flops I could find were some ridiculous branded ones that cost the best part of twenty euros!).

I have to say that the hotel - the Sommerset Grand Hanoi - treated us extremely well, never once making me feel any worse for the accident than I already did and the charge was absolutely minimal. I dread to think how it would have been in another hotel in another country.

(If you look closely at the photo you can still see traces of red dye under my fingernail...)

Just as well

I did get rather soaked this morning on my run, but nothing like what would have happened had I been tempted by the cooler weather to go out for an evening run. The rain was up to half a meter deep within minutes of it starting to pour. It was a miracle we managed to get back to the hotel stalling only one taxi.