Link: 10 Tips for Runners

A great list of tips here, titled "Ten Tips for Completing a Marathon".

Check it out!

WalkIt.com

Wow, this WalkIt service looks pretty neat. It's not available in Australia yet - or anywhere outside of London, it seems - but hopefully it'll cover Aussie cities in the future.

"Still in beta, Walkit.com website is a mapping site designed for perambulating pedestrians keen to do their bit to fight global warming.

Currently covering a large chunk of London, the site helps walkers plot cross-town journeys in a similar fashion to London Transport’s Journey Planner.

Users simply type in the postcode or street name of their start and end points and a zoomable street map (based on Streetmap.com) is generated, with the walking route clearly marked in blue.

If the user hasn’t been specific enough with their addresses, the interface offers up a list of more precise locations, including road intersections."

Read more about it here.

Temptation Part 4

We went to the movies tonight. TMNT, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles if you prefer. Man oh man is it hard to walk into a cinema, and actually get past the concession stand without buying anything. I'd say my resistance rate is probably something like 50/50 these days, but unfortunately, tonight fell on the "submission" side of the balance. I had a choctop ice-cream. Boysenberry. And boooy was it good.

What did I have for dinner, before going to the movies? A peanut butter sandwich. 474kj (about 123 calories, give or take) per tablespoon. How many tablespoons did I have? Probably about 3 or 4. Not the best dinner! We haven't done the food shopping in over a week - our car has cost us a lot in repairs over the past week - and we're running out of anything healthy. Not sure if that's much justification for going overboard on the peanut butter allotment, though.

Starting all over.

I was interstate for a week on work, a few weeks ago, and a complete brainfart at 5am in the morning lead to me leaving my bloody luggage there. I literally got all the way to the airport, onto the plane, and back into Melbourne before I'd realised I was minus all my luggage. I am a pillock.

Anyway, two weeks of stuffing around after that, and I manage to get it back. Couriers being idiots, the people over there taking almost a week to get me the info I needed before I could arrange shipping, and so forth.

Why do I bring this up? Because my running shoes were in my luggage. If I'd known it was going to take two weeks to get them back, I'd've just bought some new ones! Oh well.

Did I continue to eat properly in the intervening two weeks? Honestly, no. I didn't exactly eat horribly - steered clear of McDonald's and its ilk - but I probably had the odd Coke here and there, and I made the wrong dinner/lunch choices a few times.

The point is, I didn't do any exercise in that time. I could have gone swimming, I could have done situps and pushups and all the rest, but I didn't. Bloody unacceptable.

So anyway, I've got my shoes back. Have I been jogging in the week since I got them back? Once. My motorbike accident last November left me with a pretty sore knee, and it's been flaring up lately. I really can't figure out why, though. I was jogging in January, and in February, and in early March, and it was mostly fine. So why is it causing me a problem now? I went jogging the other day - that "once" that I mentioned - and I get a sharp pain in my knee whenever my left leg hits the ground. I'm quite worried, but right now I can't afford a visit to a physio.

Really not sure what to do.

More on Hydration.

I discovered this morning that going for a run without drinking much water the day before feels like absolute horror! Because tap water here in Adelaide is disgusting (I live in Melbourne, but I'm in Adelaide for a week on a work project), I've been drinking from boxed water from the supermarket. It's perfectly fine, but in limited supply since I only bought one box, haha. So I probably only drank about a litre of water yesterday, which is 2 less than usual.

This morning's jog was horrible! I even felt dizzy at one point. I've got a headache right now, but it's eased up a bit now that I've had a swim and a nice cold shower and about 4 glasses of water in the past 20 minutes.

Urgh. Failure!

I pulled out of today. It was because of a) how hot it was today (something like 36c), and b) the fact that I had no way to stay hydrated. I could have carried a bottle of water, but that would have gotten annoying. I tried my backpack, but it was too heavy and bounced around a lot without a waist strap, so that was no good either. I'm going to be in Adelaide next weekend so that's out too, but the following week I'm going to buy a CamelBak water backpack and see how that goes. They're pretty well priced, so that's good.

The Extra Long Hard Road

Tomorrow, I plan to do the following route. Without my dog! This will be a combination walk/jog, but I'll be aiming to jog further than I walk, and try to keep each walk distance shorter than the jog distance. Of course, The most I've ever done with that method was 6km a couple of weeks ago, so it remains to be seen if I can do it for 17km!