Running

Excellent! My bro lives in Vancouver. I visited him in 2010 and was due to attempt a run up the Grouse Grind but the weather conspired against me. I'm back there in a couple of months and we've already scheduled a hike up the Grouse. Then me and MsPub will be heading through Seattle and Portland by bus (probably) before embarking on a two-week Pacific Coast Hwy bike tour to San Francisco. And yes, we'll be taking our running shoes with us, just to keep the running legs ticking over on "rest" days. Any tips on running/non-running in Seattle? (We've only got a couple of nights' stay-over on the way to and back from SF.)

I followed in @juanito's footsteps last night by turning up for a race in Battersea Park and not finishing. Ugh! It's a Veterans' AC 5 mile race series and I was feeling confident in having a go at my pb, 26:45. Just to confuse matters my autolap was set to km rather than miles, and in hindsight I started off a bit quick - opening km's 3:13, 3:14 - not helped by a local rival who is known for shooting off like a madman, then either running well or blowing up spectacularly. I'd settled into 2nd place, and started closing on him, but less than two miles into the race my pace started slowing as I felt my breathing was being massively hampered by the stuffy conditions in the park. Humidity 79% according to the forecast, and I suffer pretty badly when there's any pollen in parks. 3rd km split 3:19, so not drastic but it felt worse... I actually caught the guy so was leading the race by this time, but an annoying habit he has is putting in random surges, and together with the dodgy breathing, constant snot rockets to clear my airways, and ongoing confusion between km splits and mile markers, it all just gave me a complete head-fuck. Finally he took a convincing lead, my mental arithmetic was telling me that my PB was beginning to slip away, I felt bloody horrendous, and I had another race to look forward to on Saturday, so I called it a day.

The Garmin showed exactly 3 miles in 15:59, 5:20/mile, which equates to 26:40 for 5 miles, but I really was slowing at that point and just felt awful. Ah well, there's another one next month. Hopefully conditions will be more favourable, my head will be in a better place and I'll just HTFU and get on with it.