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RE: Long March Rocket
Good Friday Running
A while ago when I was in the thick of marathon training, I frequently ran a 10km run in the mornings along the Pacific Highway near to my home, 5km out and 5km back, and at the time it seemed almost as nothing. Hardly worthwhile, even. It undulates for all of its length, but none of the hills are severe and it's a fast run along a good path.
But that was then. This morning ... 4:30 a.m. to be precise (4:30 a.m. is rapidly becoming my new friend) ... it was much tougher. I felt the inclines, and my sweat and heavy breathing gave away the fact that this is no longer a run I can consider "hardly worth the effort". I was thinking about this as I pounded out the last few kilometres, my feet no longer gliding over the concrete but now slapping it loudly as if I was wearing clown shoes, and I realised that "back then" I was running upwards of 200km per month. Now I'm running about half as much, and so I calculated that it should hurt a bit, as it is still a reasonably tough outing. While there are no serious hills it is unrelentingly undulating, and the return 5km leg is net uphill, so my rapidly elevating heart rate was not unwarranted.
In the end, it was unsurprising that this was one of my slower runs over this course, but what was a surprise was that I completed it in negative splits, so a pleasing effort after all.
I had wanted to do this run in particular because I don't recall ever running it on Good Friday before. I assumed, naively as it transpired, that the highway would be relatively quiet, but no, the traffic roar was still without let up, although the number of trucks was probably much less than usual.
A little later, when I arrived in the city for work it was crawling with people, mainly travelers. The coffee cart at Central Station was doing a brisk trade, and the excited chatter of hundreds of scouts apparently heading off to a camp in Canberra (the train on platform 3 ominously signed "Canberra - Scouts only!"), and causing a chaotic confusion as they mixed with a thousand other suitcase-hauling wanderers looking for the airport line train.
This chaos and confusion had me thinking back to my run, when I used the relative mindlessness of it to mull over the bombings in Brussels last Tuesday. And this brought me straight back to the turmoil I was seeing in the train station. I had long considered Sydney's Central Station a likely probable target for terrorism, and it's true that there is a permanent and quite strong police presence there, but on mornings like these, it would be all too easy for people to bring suitcase bombs and weapons into the station and cause unfathomable destruction.
However, there's little point really in over-contemplating these things. In troubled times of terrorism like these I think it's increasingly important to carry on as normally as possible. And so I run, and I have to say it's going well. I'm still really only in a base-building phase, but I feel good and have every right to feel optimistic about where I'm headed. And (to return to the over-contemplation for a moment) with the third anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing coming up very soon, I think it's doubly (triply?) important to keep on running.
And so I am.
Bugger the terrorists.
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Long March Rocket
