marathon

Running the distance

Since I survived my first real running event and managed to get around despite my lack of character in relation to serious training I have decided to make it an annual event. So next year on the 22 May I will be running the GöteborgsVarvet again. I registered today.

is it worth it by wrote

This year I ran with a camera and took pictures of the race. Many of the pictures were really bad but those which I liked ended up here. Not sure if I will take the camera with me next year, maybe I should try liveblogging! But then again my hope is to take the race more seriously and dramatically reduce my time from 2:17 to under two hours… so maybe just twitter?

Posted on by mklang

How not to prepare for a run

In a few hours I am heading of to the starting line for GöteborgsVarvet the local annual half marathon and I am really, really not prepared. Some of the stuff is down to bad excuses – probably most of it. An ischias injury stopped my running for a few months. The yearly summer allergy kicked in a week ago which is annoying. So much for the bad luck section.

The real bad stuff was going to Uppsala to attend a great workshop this week. Lots of sitting and eating – the only exercise was intellectual and there was plenty of that. Great and entertaining but really crap for the running. Not to mention the fact that the nights were late and with too many beers.

Anyway I am off to the run soon way in the back at starting group 15 (way in the back) nr. 52041 – hope to make it around 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Run Fatboy Run

This post was almost called Run Forrest Run but the comedy Run Fatboy Run (it is a must see!) is more appropriate for several reasons – which will become obvious if you read on.

As a writer I am always slightly surprised and very flattered when someone says that they have read something I have written, it makes no difference whether the text is my blog or my PhD. When someone comments on my writing or responds to it the text becomes alive and an exchange of ideas begins. This is fun.

A few people seem to read my blog as a way of keeping track of me and what I am doing. To be fair this group mainly consists of my mother who likes to know where I am in the world (and occasionally why I am there) – Hello Mum!

With the dawn of social networking sites and microblogging more people are subjected to my shorter bursts of everyday information. Updating my status via ping.fm means that the trivial status line in facebook becomes a part of an ongoing background chatter. My friends can see what I am doing and some of them will comment on my actions. My comments on their comments will turn the whole thing into micro-conversations of massive trivia. Something is happening here – not sure what it all means… Yet.

Anyway this all came about when one of my work collegaues (and FB friends) dropped by my office and commented on the fact that many of my status updates on FB involved my running. She asked why this was. Suddenly all the little micro-comments had been harvested and analysed – in the nonchalant way in which the mind works and formulated into a question.

So it’s time to officially announce the fact that I am officially training for a specific goal. My running became vaguely serious in September last year when I succumbed to temptation and bought real running gear. I discussed this online too in a post called Slippery Slope to Spandex. Since then I have been running for fun and exercise.

Then a couple of weeks ago in a fit of misguided hubris I registered for my first ever race. And I mean EVER. I never even did sports as a kid. So now on the 16 May I shall be running a local half-marathon called Göteborgsvarvet. I will not be alone in this there are already over 36 000 runners registered.

So why write all this here? Well to paraphrase an aweful song which I haven’t been able to lose since my teenage years: it’s my blog and I’ll write if I want to. But in reality I want to write it down to increase the pressure, to make sure that I will go through with the whole affair. By placing this text online I am bringing to bear the tools of reputation and public shaming to make sure I will go through with this impluse decision.

Photo: Running man by Tleilaxus (CC BY-NC-SA)

All I can say is: run fatboy run…

Posted on by mklang

The value of hunger

Towards the end of The Godfather (1972) Vito Corleone has handed over his business to his son and he admits to getting more tired, older and less interested. He sums it all up with the words: “I like to drink wine more than I used to.” What the old man was saying was that he had lost his edge, his competitiveness – his hunger.

Not long ago I blogged about the importance of failure on daring to fail and learning from failure, instead of trying to forget it ever happened, but what is needed before this is the desire, drive, hunger to move ahead. Now hunger in situations like this is a strange thing since it is not really the same thing as wanting something – these are easily confused.

Wanting something is easy and requires no effort. I want to run a marathon, pass an exam, write a book or travel the world. Wants are cheap and plentiful. Hunger on the other hand is the drive that is required to acheive a want. It’s easy enough to quote Nike’s old slogan: Just do it! but actually doing it is not that easy.

Hunger comes and goes – there are plenty of tips and tricks around not to let your hunger be frizzled unneccessarily due to lack of some other need (sleep, food, exercise or time) but what can be done to ensure that the hunger remains within us?

Sorry if this seems like a strange rant – its just something that bugged me today.

Posted on by mklang