I’m in for Run Melbourne half

Started off today as usual with a trip into the Victoria Market, didn’t buy as much stuff as usual, probably because we didn’t use as much last week due to me being away I guess.

I mowed the back and front lawns, then we took the dog for a walk around Queens Park in Moonee Ponds.

Just before tea I went for a bike ride, just over 30.5km in about 1 hour and 10 minutes. It was really pleasant conditions for a ride, not too cold, bright but not too sunny and almost no wind. My knee is still a little niggly, I get a bit of a burning sensation sometimes – I’m not really sure what it is – there is a little bit of swelling too.

I entered the Run Melbourne Half Marathon today. I’d really like to better my 1:43 PB, but I’m not confident this will happen. To do so, I’d need to run the 21.1km at about the pace I did the 14.2km at R4TK, and I was really struggling at the end of that run, and had the benefit of Em & Jo to push me on. I haven’t done any runs longer than R4TK all year, and the right knee niggles are a concern. Oh well, I just needed the impetus of actually being registered for a longer race to get me doing some decent training I guess – we’ll see what happens.

Monthly totals – May

Running: 103 km @ average 5:01 min/km (436 km YTD)
Cycling: 121 km @ average 27.6 km/hr (1348 km YTD)
Swim: Only 1
Workout: None at the gym, 5 at home

Another light month, but at least I managed to get into three figures for the running.

The end of a busy, but good week …

A bit of a catch-up post tonight, because I have been really busy this week and haven’t posted since Tuesday.

The business trip to Burnie ended up very positively. It involves me taking over another small IT group from our facility down there, so my team has grown by about 14 people. I think everyone (the Burnie team and my existing team) are pretty positive about this, so whilst it adds some new challenges to the list, it will be a pretty good experience I think. It will mean I will have to travel down there every now and then, which will be okay, it is a lovely little place.

It was also an opportunity to travel with my boss (who resides in Singapore), and he also was in the office in Melbourne for yesterday and today. It was the first time I’ve really had an opportunity for extended 1-on-1, face to face time with him, and it has really helped. He is a really nice guy, and has expressed a lot of confidence in me, and that has eased my mind about the new job somewhat.

Now, I’m not too proud of this but I ate McDonalds on Wednesday! Only because we wanted to grab something before we got the plane back, and there didn’t appear to be much else in Burnie at 4pm! Now I can’t say “I haven’t eaten McDonalds for years” whenever anyone mentions it. I did choose one of the supposedly “healthy” choices and then had a chocolate sundae!

A couple of my new team members are training for the Burnie 10, and so I am thinking of joining them. The only problem is that it is only a week after the Melbourne Marathon, so I’m not sure if I’ll be up to it.

My boss accidentally left his mobile phone in the rental car in Burnie, but we had one of those really pleasant customer service experiences with a lovely girl called Renee, from Avis in Burnie. She was on the phone to me within 10 minutes of us landing in Melbourne, personally Express Posted it back first thing the next morning and was on the phone letting me know what was going on. So, the boss got his phone back before he headed back to Singapore this afternoon. So, the message is, if you need a rental car at anytime in the future – my recommendation is Avis.

We went out to dinner at Pure South on Southbank last night which was nice. Some wonderful Pinot Noir from the Tamar Valley was the highlight.

The highlight today at work was a comment in the quarterly employee magazine at work. It was an article about three new marketing trainees who have just joined the company. One of them said how wonderful the culture was at our company, and that he thought our IT team were the best in the world because they were always so responsive to their customers queries. This was on top of the facility manager in Burnie making a comment when we were out to lunch on Tuesday about how great the Melbourne Service Desk was. Amazing how just seeing and hearing things like that (and having your boss see and hear them too) can lift your spirits!

Next week is going to be busy as we are moving all the staff from the top floor back into the newly refurbished top floor of the office as well as implementing some IP telephony for the first time. My replacement (for my old position) is also going to be in town on a house-hunting trip (she is coming from the US) so it will be nice to meet her.

Tonight I went for a run with Alyssa – we only got about 1.5km into it and she started to complain about stomach pain, so we turned around and headed home. She ran through it but was a bit worried. I told her she was probably just experiencing her first bout of runner’s tummy, and this was confirmed a little while ago when her mum rang and said she was fine. So, it was just a short 3km run at 5:21 pace.

The end of a busy week workwise and another light week exercise wise.

Burnie

Well, I made it to Burnie – in one of these!

 

 

 

 

 

As many of you know, I am a nervous flyer at the best of times, so to walk out onto the tarmac, climb a ladder, into a plane with propellors – was a totally new experience for me. I have become somewhat used to the large jet planes, but the Saab 340A was actually not too bad – a quite pleasant flight.

Burnie is lovely – they had huge storms last night, causing a bit of water damage to our facility here, glad we didn’t come 24 hours earlier! The work went better than expected – there is certainly going to be some new challenges though. I’m travelling with my boss (who is based in Singapore) so it is actually a great opportunity to get to know him better.

I don’t think I’m coming down with anything – feeling okay. I actually got out for a short run tonight. It was dark, and a strange town, so I didn’t venture too far afield. Only a bit over 4km, but lots of hills. Still probably not enough to work off the two restaurant meals we’ve had today.

The wedding last night went well too, great to see some wonderful young people embarking on a future together.

No exercise and a wedding

Let’s call today a rest day shall we. A bad night last night, starting to feel like I’m coming down with something.

Tonight we have a wedding reception to attend, and up early tomorrow morning to be at the airport by 6am to catch an early flight to Tasmania.

An 8km slog

This morning I had plans to get out of bed early and go for a run, but you know what they say about the “best laid plans”. So, when I finally rolled out of my nice warm bed after 10am, a run was not had!

We drove out to Malmsbury for lunch, I had a nice beef curry pies and custard tart with coffee at the bakery in the main street, then walked up and down the main street and had a look in the art gallery.

After that we went to Airport West to buy me a small “overnight” suitcase. I have an overnight business trip down to Tasmania this week, and I think it will be the first of many, and we don’t have any smallish suitcases.

My run this evening was a real slog, 8km at 5:30 min/km and it felt really hard – the legs felt like dead weights for some reason, and I sweated like crazy – I hope I’m not coming down with something.

In his comment yesterday John asked “How many ways can you possibly sing ‘am I ever gonna see your face again?’”. If he was directing his question specifically to me, then there can only be one answer, and it is the same answer no matter what the song, the answer is “badly”.

A pretty normal Saturday

Today was a pretty normal Saturday, in fact my Saturdays all seem to be pretty much along the same routine.

Started off with our usual trip into the Victoria Market, picking up the usual trolley load of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, some nice Irrewarra Sourdough bread and my favourite passionfruit flavoured greek style yoghurt.

After returning home, we ventured out again to Highpoint to go to the Bridal Registry at Myers to select and pick up a wedding gift for one of my Service Desk team who is getting married next week. Whilst there I bought another live Angels CD (didn’t I do that last weekend), but this one has a lot of older remastered tracks with Doc Neeson, and it is quite different to the one I bought last week – both are great.

After lunch (Irrewarra Wholeweat sourdough toast with peanut butter), we took the dog for a walk up to Greenvale Reservoir. While we were there we saw a couple who looked really rough (lots of tattoos etc), but when the lady saw Jackie we struck up quite a conversation, and she was really lovely – I think sometimes we are often far too quick to judge people based on what they look like!

I then went for a great hour long ride on my bike, just a few laps around the local streets – it was about 29.5km in just over an hour.

We’ve just finished a beautiful minestrone soup for dinner, and I’ve just loaded some tracks from my new CD onto my iPod and am going to go do the dishes. After that I might grab the Lindt Chilli chocolate I bought today and go open a bottle of red – whaddya reckon Beki – sound like a good idea?

The week from hell …

It certainly has been the week from hell at work …. and I have a feeling next week ain’t going to be any better, with some domestic travel included. It also looks like my replacement is not going to be in place until at least August, so it looks like I’m doing my new job and my old job for another two months. Oh, well that’s enough whinging about work – it’s the weekend after all.

I went for a run with Alyssa after work, we did a 4.8km loop together at 5:18 min/km, then I did another 1.2km (600m out and back) to make it up to the equivalent of my 6km loop. I did this at a pretty quick pace, not sure how fast exactly, but it brought the overall average for the 6km back to 5:04 min/km.

Alyssa ran the next level of her cross-country yesterday up towards Mt Macedon. She was the first runner from her school home, and came 10th overall – a terrific effort.

We drove Kate and a friend into the MCG tonight for the Geelong vs Collingwood game, she’s going to be disappointed though, it looks like the Cats are getting their arses kicked!

Then Adrienne and I went out for tea, I had a nice Seafood Rissotto and a glass of red, very pleasant, but boring – I had the same thing last time I went to this restaurant!

Now settled down watching Good Guys Bad Guys on DVD – anyone remember that – it was Adrienne’s Mother’s Day present – a quite entertaining show from a few years ago. I’ve just made a nice cup of Lady Grey tea, which is really nice too (of course, I am not at all influenced by the fact that Nigella advertises it on TV).

A run at least …

10km @ 4:56 min/km

God computers can be a pain in the arse (2) …

Okay, if you want to upset people, what information technology service would you impact?

Yep, email, you got it in one.

What would be worse than the system being down?

Yep, that’s right losing people’s emails (in vast quantities).

Needless to say it has been a hellish couple of days – thank god for backups (that actually work).

Add to that sickness in the family, which so far I have avoided.

Add to that no time (or inclination) to exercise too much (the only exercise the last couple of days being a 30 minute home workout tonight).

Things must improve – they couldn’t get any worse!

God computers can be a pain in the arse …

I have spent most of the last six hours trying to get Kate’s laptop working. It is only about 2 months old and has Windows Vista on it (which I have never had anything to do with). It just wouldn’t boot up, got a little way into the boot sequence and stopped with a blank, black screen. Wouldn’t start in Safe mode either. Running the Dell diagnostics showed no problems, so I was pretty convinced it was a Windows issue, not hardware. As Kate had Uni work on there, with assignments due soon, she was a little worried.

We managed to get it booted off a CD, and the data on the hard disk looked okay. We managed to get a USB memory stick working and managed to get all her data copied off, then bit the bullet and re-installed Vista. This took friggin ages. Anyway it’s done now and we think all we have lost is 6 hours of our lives. Bloody Windows, bloody Microsoft. I know what Em is thinking right now too, and she is probably right – it probably wouldn’t have happened if we were using a Mac. Kate wanted to buy a Mac too, and I talked her out of it. Bloody idiot.

Today started off with a swim, the first one for the month. I have had a bit of a sore neck the last few days and I think the swim helped loosen that up a bit, either the swim or the spa afterwards. Anyway, the usual 60 laps or 1.5km were swum. Rant for the day is again, why do some swimmers feel the need to join you in your lane if there are free ones? It just doesn’t compute to me I’m afraid – what are they thinking?

An unsuccessful trip to Essendon DFO, trying to get a cheap pair of Sauconys. They had Omni’s for $90, but not in my size. A bit more success at JB though, where we did buy a new, cheap DVD player to replace one that has died, and I got a live Angels CD (I’m really going through an Angels phase at the moment). IT is the Angels Band Live At The Basement (the rest of the band without Doc Neeson). I think it might be accompanying me on a few runs this week!