The state of the world

Roadrunners again last night, and a fairly brutal set it was too, made all the harder by the wind and rain. We were doing 4 sets of 4 x 600m, with a pace increase in each set. By the end of it my legs were tightening up nicely, and my hobble was coming on a treat. I was supposed to be having a sports massage immedaitely afterwards, but unfortunately it was cancelled at the last minute.I'm really glad I got to finish the set, as many people left early due to the appauling conditions. I really, really need to up my mileage (I keep saying that, don't I?), as my endurance is nowhere near the point it should be at.

I think Mondays are going to get harder, as a new outdoor circuits class has started (Bootcamp), and its at the same time as I normally run, so the plan is to run earlier, and then do Bootcamp immediately afterwards. If that doesn't kill me in short order nothing will. I've been signed up for a multi-terrain race in October called Commando Challenge, which looks like a great laugh, however its a team thing, and I don't want to let the others down, so have to knuckle down and start improving the distance and strength.

Geek wise, I've "invested" in a couple of new board games. Pandemic is a co-op game for 2-5 players, where the objective is to cure 4 diseases ravaging the earth. Its gotten good reviews on BoardGameGeek, and looks like a good alternative to Settlers of Catan for an hour filler slot. The other game is called Agricola, and is comically all in German (the english version is not out yet). In this you have to build up a farm in a set number of turns. I've given it one solo playthrough so far, and there is a lot of depth to it... I need to engage the other lads and give it a proper playthrough to see how good it is in practice.

On the work front, I'm now full time on the new project, and I've been given a few areas to work on. Its all very new, and its going to take a bit of time to get my head round the documentation style and project structure. On the plus side I've been blagged a window seat (views not great, but can't complain). They do have proper kitchen facilities here, which means proper tea for once.

SPeaking of work, I really should start doing some...

Gateway Gaming

In a spectacular example of romantic gestures I've been introducing Gill to non-standard (ie not available in Woolworths) board and card games. She already has some geek crudentials (is a programmer, has completed a version of Final Fantasy, is member of a D&D group), so thought I may as well go about increasing her geek license.

I've started with the better, less violent games at my disposal, and I've been using Fluxx, Settlers of Catan and Carsonnone. Settlers has the added bonus that I'm completely shit at it. Shes taken to them extremely well... Fluxx was broekn out during a powercut, and once the concept was grasped it went down well. Settlers was pcked up even quicker, and has actively been asked for since then, and Carsonnone was played for a couple of hours today, again with a large degree of success.

Its some way from cracking out Starcraft and getting her to butcher the opposition, but its not completely out of the question :-D

Sprinting sessions

Roadrunners last night was a brutal session. After a normal warm up (gentle run for about a kilometre, and some drills) we had to do a flat-out 800m, with a target of beating the time we did 5 weeks ago. I managed 2.21, which is a whole 4 seconds off my time, so pretty chuffed with that.

We went on to do about half an hour of something called "Bus Stops", where teams of 3 run with 2 people on the track at once, with one resting. Our team consisted of 2 similar paced runners, and one slower person...I was unfortunately the lead person when I was on track with the slower guy, and so ended up doing both my laps at full pace, while the others got a rest on one lap...

...and if that wasn't enough, we ended up with about 20 minutes of 200m relay sprints, which very nearly killed me. The problem with those is that there was another team of 3 with _very_ similar pacing to ours. It ended up with us racing them round (quite naturally we won :-) )

I'm really enjoying Roadrunners...its a very different challenge to anything I've done before, and its making me push myself a lot harder. I did the Woodley 10K at the weekend, and by my standards did fairly badly, going off too fast, and burning out halfway round. I was chatting to some of the other runners about how their various races went, and blaming one fairly quick guy I tried to stay with at the start (my fault really...I knew he was way faster than me). I have 6 weeks until my next race, and my focus in that time really has to be stamina and endurance, as that's where I'm really letting myself down at the moment.

Regarding the graphing stuff, I nearly have it working (just need to fine-tune the data ranges, then add in some file selection and image scaling options), at which point I'll be able to add the running data onto these posts. I consider this to be cool in a geeky kind of way...