Observing a day

It's ANZAC day, which I do observe chiefly in my thoughts although very occasionally at a dawn service. This year I observe it in my usual way with a run with 45 days to go to the Kirikiri Marathon. Statutory holidays are interesting "islands" within a training block, like a little island in a river. A normal week would have its usual pattern of training, which for me usually is a rest day on Mondays, Tuesday to Thursday with a range of runs, Friday with a run if I'm in peak week, then two long runs of different lengths on the weekend. Workdays have a capping effect on distance and effort, with 15km being the maximum unless waking up super-early or leaving home late. But the "mid-week" medium-long run is really useful and fortunately that is what statutory holidays like ANZAC day can bring.

My ANZAC day running last year was a fizzer. The year had started pretty much the same as this year with consistent strong running and I had great hopes. But on the 22 April 2023, I ran with my friend Aaron J and he introduced me to a route called the Concrete Monster, which ascends steeply into the Waitākere hills. He is a natural runner of the kind that I'll never be - and when running with him I'm always trailing a bit behind and usually running faster than I would normally. The run itself is something I'm still pretty proud of, but the next day my quad was tight and sore and it took time to figure out that it was just a tight knot and not an injury. ANZAC day was thus a quite day at home in a week that I should be beginning my peak period of training.

It's 45 days to go to the Kirikiriroa Marathon so basically there are three weeks of "peak" training to go and then three weeks of taper. In 2023, Kirikiriroa was my sixth official marathon but my first since 2019, and the first time I had run that particular event. Training had been solid up to the Concrete Monster, but that quad issue, then an ankle niggle a few weeks later compromised the peak weeks. In the end I ran 3:34. I'd felt like a million dollars for 30km and then re-experienced "the Wall" that all marathon runners know so well with a struggle home in the last 12.2km. My target had been 3:28-3:30 but I shot well over.

If my recent hamstring issue was a reminder of anything it is that strength and conditioning are always going to be useful not just for the race, but more importantly for managing my way through the peak weeks without issue. None of the niggles in the last year and a half have been injuries fortunately but every niggle that requires days of rest and recovery takes away the momentum.

My run today was a confidence booster. 24km with 10km at what I hope will be my marathon pace of 4:30/km. If I can achieve this, I'll have a sub 3:10 marathon PB and a foundation to look at the benchmark 3 hour mark on a flatter, faster route. Even without the coming weeks, training calculators with my recent Waterfront and Parkrun performances, I should already be at 3:10 fitness, so I think aiming for it would become a conservative goal and give me the chance to check myself after the last hills and push the time lower if I feel I can.

I have the opportunity to put another half marathon race into my schedule as a time trial three weeks before the marathon. It's the Huntly Half, a famously fast run, which I haven't done before. It can be done and returned from in a morning and, provided the peak weeks go well, will be a great barometer for what I should be able to achieve in Kirikiriroa. I am pretty confident I should be able to better my Waterfront time if all things are smooth with training if I did it. I would aim for 1:26-1:27.

Anyway, just have to do the strength and conditioning, avoid rakes and uneven pavement, Covid, cyclonic weather conditions etc. and hope for the best!

To live, to die

I am a reader, yet for the occupational tumult that I've been in, I've had to make prioritising choices not to read much in the previous few years. Whenever things got busy, reading gave way to working and running. In 2022 it was only audiobooks that I "read". But injury and holidays give me an excuse to get back to it. 

Over Christmas I read Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, and a Chinese book, The Chronicles of a Blood Merchant (许三观卖血记）by Yu Hua (余华), The latter was the second book I had read by Yu Hua; the first was during the start of the pandemic, his most famous book, To Live, that was made into a movie. It was a delightful almost child-like read of some very serious topics, and in some ways it was an echo of my wife's grandfather - the protagonist was the son of a landlord who lost everything in the Revolution. (But as opposed to A Gong, the protagonist was a ne'er-do-well who wasted his money.) The Chronicles of a Blood Merchant and another book of Yu Hua, The Seventh Day, had sat on our bookshelf for four years until the present period to be read. I'm glad that holidays and then this hamstring niggle have given me the chance to read them.

The Chronicles of a Blood Merchant is another child-like tale of a simple man who discovers that selling his blood can give him money to address the crises that arise in his life. China at the time did not do blood donation, and in fact the act of giving blood was considered expending life energy and not an advisable thing to do, hence the buying of blood for the medical system. That weird premise is just a background detail of the sacrifice he made as his life tracks the Chinese Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and then the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, surely not some small moments, to get his family through. It is really the family focus that hits home in the most peculiar way in this story, as he discovers that his first firstborn of his three sons is not his. (The result of a rape by his wife's previous admirer.) And how he struggles with first rejecting him, then showing partiality, to accepting him as a son, then almost loving him at times beyond the sons that were his flesh and blood. Also it is a thorough exploration of how people see self-sacrifice and denial in their lives.

The Seventh Day was unexpected after these but it made sense by the end. It opens in the most peculiar way that, as a non-native reader, it made me question whether I understood the Chinese correctly: 

"It was thick and foggy when I walked out of my rental home, into a city that was wriggling awake in empty chaos. The place I was going was a funeral parlour, a place called a "crematorium" in the past. I received a notice to go there by nine a.m. The time of my cremation was half past nine."

It is a strangely beautiful book even if written from an ambivalently afterlife perspective on the life lived before and the affections with the world that has been. Again it was written child-like and the elements of surrealism that were in his other works are exaggerated here. 

I had read most of it before the Waterfront Half. My debilitating "hamstring injury" was addressed by a few specialised exercises and stretches, and just like my hamstring after Coatesville, it has not made a peep since. But I had new reason not to run much. In a great display of irony, the ankle on my other foot caused me a lot of angst. It started just after the race when I had a massage at the venue as a pre-emptive especially for my hamstring, but coming of the massage bench I put my left ankle on the ground and a bolt of pain almost sent me to the ground. I could walk but it felt as if I had sprained it. After a little walking I was manageable. My arch was sore and my upper ankle tight. The rest of the day was fine, I felt it tight the following morning but could still run 10km, but at work I couldn't walk naturally. The next day was the same, and on the third day, and another 10km run it finally felt a bit more normal. I managed to read a few more pages of The Seventh Day and got to the end tonight.

I ran 24km up one of the steepest roads in the Waitakeres with no trouble to my hamstring or my left ankle. My hip, well, it was cranky on the way down the hill. Looks like I've got some strengthening and conditioning to do!  

On the water front

Even in this scientific age, some feeling of superstition is hard to avoid. People talk about not jinxing things, and whether it is to avoid the risk of reputational damage, or just not to feel stupid, we don't generally state things in certain terms about the future. My last blog was published on a Sunday two weeks ago with a lot of expectation about an event, the Waterfront Half Marathon, which was beckoning to be yet another performance ceiling breaking event. Everything was auspicious for this - a clean sub-90 minute half marathon. My big talk was of a sub 1:28 result which would be a cathartic breaking of the 1:30 barrier that had always been such an issue for me. 

Well, if I had a decent memory, I should have the lead-in wasn't actually so auspicious before the last blog: my Coatesville Half run was marred by a hamstring issue. And I should have recognised that as a bad omen, or at least an important issue to work on, because just three days after the blog, and eleven days before the race, I set out in the morning on what would be my last real effort run before the event and promptly had an issue. The run had initially felt really good as my body demonstrated that it could handle pace and sustain it. But then just as I was about to take my foot off the gas that feeling in my hamstring returned, a tightening, the feeling of something bunching up, and then pain. It was exactly what had happened last time. So I stopped, stretched, and then as it was a work day tried jogging back the 4km home while not trying to aggravate it further... The whole return journey I was bothered by the fact that this was happening just eleven days before the Waterfront event and I would be losing some of my preparatory running.

Thinking back to the Coatesville hamstring issue, it had got better quite quickly with a post-race massage, a rest of a couple of days and some light running. So I tried repeating this treatment plan this time and while in Ashburton three days after the issue returned, I tried running gently and felt the issue come back on the run, and the sensation linger for a day. I tried some of my own exercises and stretches and on the following Wednesday, one whole week after the recurrence tried running but gave up after just 2km. I "gave in" and went to the physio. It was just four days before the event and I was feeling rather negative about the whole thing.

But the physio was great and she reminded me it was two years since my last visit! There was a good logic in my understanding of the injury (it was aggravated by pace and braking going downhill) and the treatment (strengthening at the lowest point on the hamstring which was not strong enough and improving flexibility). There was a nice new exercise, the neural stretch, that I enjoy doing and I'll probably include it into my strengthening regime. This whole episode made me think that I was very resilient physically last year but had upped my pace pleasingly in the last three months, but that I hadn't really done much to improve my tolerance of these kinds of efforts. 

So anyway, Thursday I did the prescribed exercises, Friday again. Saturday morning I went on an 8km fitness test/shake-out run. The tightening was there after two kilometres but I continued to run and found it didn't get any worse. I put three "race pace" 400m sections and it still didn't worsen. On that basis for the first time since the injury, I was positive to run the Waterfront Half, which was actually just this morning. 

Having run it before, I knew what to expect pre-race: in a word, pandemonium. They close Tamaki Drive and all the parking along it so when you add the vehicles of the 2500 runners and event staff, it makes for a stressful parking spot hunting expedition. Similar to Coatesville, I was a bit rushed, but fortunately managed to do everything I needed to do, and get into the starting chute through a side-branch. 

Ever since my recent fall, the GPS tracking on my watch had become very finicky. On this occasion, when 0700 hours ticked and the race began, my watch was still searching for signal after two fruitless minutes. I sprung my way through the early bunching, although a traffic island almost took me out (it looked like a clearing ahead - just didn't see the reason for it). My pace still looked slow on my watch but I knew from some familiar faces around me that I was going pretty quickly. Slightly worrying at the time was that I could feel tightness almost straight-away but it didn't affect my gait or pace. And in fact, not long after I didn't even think about it at all!

My biggest piece of luck was a running friend, Aaron J, noticing me and ran beside me. He is definitely in a faster class of running, and was unnerved that we were apparently in the same bunch so I asked him what his watch was giving him as a pace, to which he said: 4:04/km. (My watch was still finding its bearings with 4:29!). Now, for reference, 4:16 was my Coatesville pace. 4:10 was my goal pace for this race to get to 1:28, and I was going significantly faster than those times. It felt easy - and despite trying to slow down, the objective timings after the race showed I wasn't decelerating at all. I did 5km in 20:28, a pretty good parkrun time, and ran the second fastest 10km of my life, 41:08, in the first 10km of a 21.1km race... Aaron, though a very fast runner, had not been training much but is the kind of runner who can more or less, roll out of bed and run faster than most. He had humble goals and was happy to run with me while he found what pace worked for him. After about 10km I told him I'd drop back and until about the 14km I found it easy enough to sustain pace (which turned out later to be 4:06/km pace, which would have been a 1:26:30 finish if I had the gas to maintain it!). 

But after 14km my pace started to drop, at first without my feeling any difference. My watch started to indicate it and I was a bit worried that I might really start to decelerate. My hamstring was not even perceivable, although another quirky issue (my right hip flexor) did start to have some impact. Fortunately, though about 15-20 seconds per kilometre at times I still managed to recover and push towards the end. I cruised in the finish at 1:28:28, a personal best by 1 minute 30 seconds.

Now, 30 seconds faster would have gotten to my pre-injury goal of sub 1:28, but just getting to the end of the race without issue was the real prize. The PB was the cherry on top. I have confidence that my running has not been derailed and with continued conditioning I can build up another string of training for the Kirikiriroa Marathon in June. But I'll leave prognosticating about how that will go to.... after the event this time. 

Milestone

On Thursday, I crossed an interesting in my running, the "1000km for the year" mark. 1000km annually is not a big amount - for context, you can achieve it with just 20km a week and have two weeks to spare. In 2017, my first full year of running I was proud to break 2000km by New Years Eve. But with aspirations of being a 4000km a year runner, the 1000 mark is quite a critical one. In 2023 I crossed it almost right on pace, 1 April, which was a personal record. The years since 2017, 1000km has come up at a wide range of times:

2018 - 30 June

2019 - 6 April

2020 - 22 September

2021 - 27 June

2022 - Did not run 1000km

2023 - 1 April

2024 has so far been a wonderfully smooth start to the running year and on Thursday 21 March, I again crossed the 1000km for the year mark. Of course, it is an empty record if it doesn't confer any actual ability or potential with it. 2023's record did not translate into a faster marathon for me at either Kirikiriroa or North Shore, but the solid year that it was is probably the reason I performed well with my mile PB in December, Coatesville in February and the Hobsonville Point Parkrun. 

Since my performance at Coatesville, I have been very solid. I shook off the niggles quickly and stacked three weeks of mileage over 100km and kept working on my speed. The Waterfront Half awaits me in two weeks where I hope to translate this work and training into something symbolic.

I've only done the Waterfront Half once before in 2019 (see here). It remains my Personal Best time for the half marathon distance, 1:29:58. That is a speed of 4:16/km, which though I more or less achieved that at Coatesville, daunts me numerically. Based on my fitness now though, I should be able to beat it by two minutes with an average pace of 4:10/km over 21.1km. It is one of the mentally difficult things about running that you are preparing for something you never do in training. Every peak performance is in effect a leap of faith. If I am to go under 1:28:00, from beginning to end I will need to be right on, or thereabouts, a pace I have not maintained for more than 10km at any time in my life. On my run yesterday, I ran a 3x2mile run - this is where within a long run there are three segments that are specifically faster for 2 miles - and the fastest of the three two mile segments, on the flattest part of the run, was run in just over 4:10 pace, and once it was done, I was pretty done, too. So 4:10/km stands in my mind as a challenge. 

The secret sauce though is the taper. It is important for me mentally to think that the run yesterday was (a) a good run; (b) done while my body is still coming down from a fatiguing three big weeks; and that come race day, my body will be fresh and peaking, loaded with adrenalin and with fast people racing alongside me keeping me pegged to the target pace. That was the magic of Coatesville, too. In my head, a 1:30 on that course was not possible till I was on course, disbelieving my pace, and then still somehow managing to keep it going till (almost) the very end.

For perspective of what taper is looking like:

The week starting 26 February: 102km (6 days running)

The week starting 4 March: 114km (6 days running)

Last week: 115km (6 days running)

This week: 92km (5 days running)

Next week: 80km (5 days running)

Race week: 50km (4 days running), prior to the Sunday race day.

Fingers crossed that all works and my body rests well and is ready come 7 April.

Another record falls

Two weeks ago I ran my best effort but didn't record a numerical "personal best" for a particular distance. Yesterday, I ran my 13th ever parkrun, this time at Hobsonville Point, and carved 10 seconds off my previous record.

Parkruns are 5km timed runs that occur in parks all over the world (well, 23 different countries). It is a delightful story of organic growth of a good idea. Most runners, myself included, train for "big" events and are not primarily interested in the social side of running. Parkruns were started by an Englishman, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, who just wanted to have a regular, timed 5km run. The early advocates had volunteers to record times, but since then it has become more organised happening without fail at 8am on Saturdays, and now you can get your personalised barcode that you can take anywhere there's a parkrun, run and get your time. For serious runners, that's great but the unexpected benefit is that people who did not have a time as the main goal, but just wanted to have a routine social run. There will be people from all walks of life, some running, some walk/running and others just walking, chatting before, during and after. 

I have friends who are regular parkrunners. Some have it has part of their purpose. Others are just in-between a focussed training plan and just want to keep the legs turning over. Others are "retired" from focussed training and just want to maintain their fitness and identity as a runner. It hasn't really played a role in my running as evinced by my meagre 13 events in almost 6 years. For me it barely had a function in my running. Saturdays were the days I wanted to run long, and if I were to do a "race" I wouldn't just participate, I would want to do it as a time trial, or if a friend was in town. This occasion it fulfilled both of these purposes.

I have run several parkruns, Cornwall Park, Owairaka, Western Springs and even in Hagley Park (although unofficially). Hobsonville Point literally had its inaugural event on the same day as I recorded my previous 5km PB on the same day at Cornwall Park, 19 mins and 54 seconds. I was always planning to check it out but almost five years later, mainly with the motivation of running at the same event as a high school friend, I went. But it also fit well in my training. I was not yet cranking up my mileage on the weekends, I wanted a bit of a measure to consolidate my understanding of my fitness and generally felt I might be in a good place to break the five year standing PB. 

Before you start a 5km race, you need to have an idea of the pace you think you can maintain. For a runner, the margin of error with pace gets more difficult the shorter the event. There are calculators to figure out, based on a previous event, how fast you should be able to run. Based on Coatesville, I should be able to run 5km in the range of 19:00 to 19:30, which sounded surreal for me, maybe something in my mindset that I need to challenge. It demands a sustained sub-4 min/km pace for almost 20 minutes, when even for 10 minutes it'd be a challenge. The last kilometre of a well-paced 5km is very close to suffering.

But I had to trust my training and the information I had gained from my previous run. So after finding the course, chatting with my mate, under perfect conditions I started the run. I had imagined Hobsonville Point as a flat coastal track. I was a little bit wrong, though not hilly, it's got its fair share of undulation. And there are six sharp turns, which slow you down and force you to accelerate back to your pace. My pace for every kilometre were: 3'46" 3'59" 3'53" 4'01" 4'07" The last two kilometres were in the suffering category but I'm glad it didn't balloon as it can easily do. The final time, 19:44, just 10 seconds off my Cornwall Park PB of 2019. This was a relief but I was disappointed not to be able to hold on better to get it into the 19:00-19:30 area. But, as with my Coatesville effort, as long as I stay injury free, the signs are good for the rest of the year. I have a great foundation for all my events.

My return to Parkrun coincides with a controversy. My description above I hope shows how wholesome it started and how most people would take it. Unfortunately, any platform can be contested ground in the culture wars. Parkrun had built in records for male and female participants for their general metrics. Even though registration at Parkrun allows a range of responses to the gender question, either from suspicion or actual events, transgender females were believed to be recorded among "biological" females, which was thought to be biasing average results, taking records and introducing an element of unfairness for those who valued their statistics and standing.

I pity any organisation that suddenly has such quandary cast upon them because of the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't aspect to it. Parkrun opted out of it completely by taking away the gender aggregated statistics altogether. The topic came up with my high school friend but I hadn't followed and just said that transparency is always the best approach. After writing this, I felt more about the participation focus of such events and now think Parkrun did an appropriate move. Individual records are viewable, just not the course records by gender, or your standing within your gender. But in saying that it is silly that everything has to be contested. Those who reject transgender participants self-identifying taking part in a range of events might not have realised that since you don't generally confirm any of your details against a birth certificate, all categories of information for all but the Olympics is trusted when it is submitted. 

One critic however tweeted: "Rather than give females their fair sports results from parkrun – where it would be very easy to add course records for non-binary categories, they have removed all records, I hope parkrun will listen to the fact that the vast majority want a fair sport for all based on the biological reality of the bodies we run/race/compete with." Being a cis male, I am only speculating from the sidelines, but there is no compulsion for someone who identifies contrary to their birth certificate to put "non-binary" (which would be inaccurate, anyway) and not just put what they identify as. 

Back on track

2023 was a strange year in my running. It on one hand was the year that I ran the most, 3850km, more than the 3,111km in 2019; yet on the other hand, a year where I ran only two events and did not run my best. To be clear, I wasn't looking for personal bests - I was looking for a consistent year of running, and had two goals: a mileage goal of 4,000km in the year (not achieved) and a climbing goal of 52,000m ascent for the year (achieved) and that good performances might be a by-product. When the mileage goal started to slip out of reach, I switched to a new goal: pace.

For most of the year, I had been noticeably slower at the fastest part of my range compared to other years. To put some numbers to it, at my best I could run 5km in less than 20 minutes, but in late 2023 I would not be able to go under 21 minutes; in a half marathon at my best I could go under 1 hour 30 minutes, but I would struggle to go under 1 hour 40 minutes in 2023. These margins might seem small but the work to get them down would usually take a long time. So, I switched to pace training in December. The implications of this are that mileage comes down a bit and very specific work-outs are used to sharpen up. Such an example might be 10x400m, or 3x2mile runs, where you run particular distances at fast paces with rests in between. 

The surprising thing was that the fruit came quickly. I ran a mile in 5:49, a lifetime best. At the end of the year, I almost broke 20 minutes for the 5km park run (where humorously all runners had to squeeze past a van and its trailer on two parts of the route). My pace training continued into 2014 to prepare for my main target event, the Coatesville Half Marathon. 

I have a lot of affection for this event. Early in my running in 2017, I ran the Coatesville Classic (8km), which I described here: Crypticity's abound: Comeback and then the Half in 2019 (Crypticity's abound: Mark). Quoting myself for brevity: "The Coatesville Half course is notorious. It is the hilliest course of the series with one significant incline at 3km, another at 10km, another at 14km and another at 16km." In 2019, I ran 1 hour 37 minutes, which was a solid performance in what would be my best year in running, so I was looking for the run this year to be a bit of a bellwether for the year ahead.   

The lead-up through January was very good. In a time-trial I ran 1 hour 35 for a flat half marathon distance. On the Saturday eight days before the run, I ran two training runs that surprised me in pace that exceeded what I thought I was capable of, a 5x1mile and a 2x4mile. Unfortunately on the last one at the very end of the last 4 mile I felt a tightening in my hamstring and I jogged home very gently. I gave myself a two day rest and then did some light runs to test it out again. I felt OK so continued with my normal "week before" taper runs. And then we come to the day of the race.

After a poor night sleep, I woke naturally at 6:12am with a start. My shock at the time jolted my heart and mind into action. Somehow, my 5:30am alarm had not vibrated me awake. In fact, it claimed it had and was doing it every eight minutes, as if self-snoozing itself without any fuss. I had to leave by 6:30am to realistically get to the venue and be ready for the 7:30am race start, so I exploded out of bed, changed, coffeed and threw everything in a bag and left the driveway at 6:32am. So far no speeding tickets have been received, so my arrival in the Coatesville Pony Club car park at 7:07am can be said to have been smooth and without issue. I grabbed my racebib and then to the back of a very long queue for the portaloos. I tried my best to do some dynamic stretches while in the line, and then after a quick prep in the loo, jogged over to the middle of a tightly packed starting chute at 7:27am without any real warm-up. 

Perhaps due to the adrenalinised chaotic start to the morning, I was much faster than my race plan, which was to aim for 4:30/km pace (which would have me on a 1 hour 35 min finish speed) until the downhill speedy finish and go sub 1:35. I had to first push through the mid-pack runners to the front 10% to find people of a similar pace, and that meant my speed at the start was a bit reckless. Fortunately for me there was an easily recognisable Zimbabwean female runner, Ketina, who usually is about my pace, so I used her as an initial measure where I needed to be and I caught up to her and dropped a bit of pace for the hill. 

There began the very familiar pattern of my usual strategy: slow on this hills (letting my pace peers pace me) and then reeling them in on the flats before passing them on the downhills. Ketina disappeared after the first such iteration, and once I was at the top of the first hill, I sped up and didn't slow down. Looking at my watch, I was clearly in the 4:10-4:25/km range - too fast but feeling strangely comfortable. I kept going pulling past more pace peers to the halfway turn when I had a rather cruel realisation that I should have anticipated. My watch had measured my distance 200m short of what the marker was indicating. This was a problem because that meant I was going even faster than my watch was telling me. I could have been going 5 seconds per kilometre faster than I was reading off my watch. 

For any race, the best indication of whether you are going too fast is your breathing (and also one of the best ways to know if your running companions might be entering into a struggle phase). I checked myself and thought I was still breathing quite evenly so I held my pace for the last few hills and then made the final turn onto the downhill home straight. It was then that I knew that it should be just a matter of cruising to the finish line, a certain PB, probably a couple of minutes under, and done on one of the more difficult courses.

It wasn't to be though. About 2km from the finish, I felt the tightness in my hamstring return. I couldn't but cut pace just a little; then, a pain radiated out from that point, and I shortened my gait and cut pace once more. By the time I had entered the Coatesville Domain I was not enjoying running and would have had a noticeable limp. Only one person passed me though and I got over the line at 1:30:12, my third fastest half marathon time. 

For perspective, despite the niggle, I would say this is my best performance. My other two fastest times are 1:29:58 at the Waterfront Half, the flattest possible course. and 1:30:04 on the trickier Millwater Half. But none of them are like Coatesville. It's kind of amazing that after all these years though all three PBs are clustered within 14 seconds of each other after different 21.1km races.

I gave myself a break of four days from running and then ran 5km on Friday evening with hamstring sensations but no pain. This morning I ran 22km with only mild sensations that never amounted to anything and then a massage and some strengthening work. I hope the hamstring is just an oddity that with a bit of rehab I'll get back quickly onto a regular routine.

So the omens are bad/good. Bad that I picked up a niggle/weakness of some sort. But good in that I have the best foundation for a year of good performances. My next chances to race are:

- Hobsonville Point ParkRun 24/02/2024 (goal: under 19:30)

- Waterfront Half Marathon 07/04/2024 (goal: 1:27)

- Kirikiriroa Marathon 09/06/2024 (goal: under 3:20)

- North Shore Marathon 15/09/2024 (goal: under 3:15)

All with ideal training...

 

 

“You’re not actually legally obliged to have an opinion.”

Thus spoke Bill Maher in his show Real Time. He claims that social media has forced individuals, and corporation, to feel like they need to have a thought and a stance on every current event, whether it be the Israel-Hamas conflict, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the marital situation of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith and Elon Musk's running of the app formerly known as Twitter. You could easily argue that any consumer of news was similarly exposed in pre-social media times. His point is that people for some topics it has become obligatory to have an opinion, even when there is no realistic need; worse, to not have an opinion, presumably in some circles, is to be not caring. 

Having recently watched the New Zealand movie Uproar set in New Zealand at the time of the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand, you can imagine a time where this country was divided and those of an anti-tour opinion would see status quo or disinterested positions as actively supporting racism through a lack of a denouncement. But you could say that public opinion or making a bigger "scene" could trigger a symbolic cancellation of a tour or, more long term, political change locally, or even political change in South Africa. That was completely outside of the social media era but also it was a bit closer to home. 

The topic of apartheid in South Africa was probably understood well enough by both sides. Pro-tour people justified themselves that sport should be separate from politics, and even could argue that if anything rapprochement through sport could lead to the ends of the anti-tour position. Uproar touches on the irony of that time that many of the anti-tour activists have been focussed on the South African apartheid and blind to racial discrimination at home. 

The Israel-Palestine situation is one of the topics that Maher though was talking about, especially critical of university students in the US who protest against Israel in support of Palestine, without any condemnation of the 6 October attack by Hamas that "started" the current situation. Worse, the retaliation for the attacks have apparently reawakened the latent antisemitic tendencies in some parts of humanity. For New Zealand, while there are Israelis and Palestinians here (one of my colleagues of mine is half-Palestinian) and our Government at some stage will have to decide in what way it will support one or both sides, it seems strange to think that we must have a stance on the rights and the wrongs of it. 

I regard myself reasonably knowledgeable on the history of the region where Palestine and Israel sit for an average guy but still I would not want to say any rights or wrong overall. The Hamas attack was abhorrent but the situation prior means that asymmetric attacks (and defence in the case of human shields) were always probable. The government elected by the Israeli people was unhelpful but expectable in the context. The government elected by the Palestine people was unhelpful but expectable in the context. Zoom back to President Clinton's attempt at Camp David, the decision by Arafat to reject the deal was unhelpful but expectable... and you can go back further and further in the karmic cycle. At the end of the day, choosing to support either side sounds like supporting a side in a toxic relationship for a couple who cannot separate or divorce, but may well kill each other. Any support is just based on limited knowledge of the rights and wrongs.