Training in the murder capital of the world

Marathon J

Travelling has made training hard, entertaining and travel do not make good bed fellows with a training program. Currently I’m in the murder capital of the world, if you use the metric of number of murders by population, so going for a 5 mile run is not that safe. I considered it for sprint training and then came to my senses, even Ross Kemp sh1t himself here.

So, woke up early and hit the hotel gym, 80 degrees and no aircon, this was going to be hard, the running machine was sophisticated. I had to ask the ersona raine for help, yes that’s spelt correctly, written one above the other, I could not see the other letters across her chest when face on! You’ll work it out. It looked like some Linux based operating system, so it was going to work then, but she showed me the quick start button, put the incline on 1, because that’s what she recommended and I was away. Man it was hot, I dialed in 7mph and I was off, 28 minutes in I thought of Marathon T’s heroic efforts earlier in the week, a full 30 mins at 8 mph, so I dialed that in......................... 15 seconds later I dialed it out! And struggled for breath. 105 second after that I hit warm down. That’s only a quarter of the time I need and I was spent, looking like a beetroot and struggling for air. My core temperature was too high, feeling slightly faint I showered and was still sweating hard, I stood in front of the aircon for a while then showered again, at last I was getting back to normal. Off to my first meeting of the day 08.30 local time 1.30pm in Jersey.

Later that day, 6.30pm, I arrived back at the hotel, conscious the next couple of days would be wiped out with meetings and travel home, I slipped on my slightly whiffy gear and headed back to the gym. No help needed this time, straight onto my machine. Still no aircon in the gym, I struggled to bang out 4 miles in 35 minutes, that’s right on the pace, but, after 35 minutes I was spent, the heat is a killer. The best part about the run was the music, I’d picked some old tracks on my ipod, the beat was not fast enough but the memories flooded back, this was from the days when I should have been doing silly things like running. Awesome tracks included:

Lovely day : Bill Withers
Party Freak: Cashflow
Precious little diamonds: Fox the fox….. remember that?
Roses are Red: Mac band

This got me thinking about compiling some music for the big day, the bpm obviously needs some thought.