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I feel restless.

Here a fish, there a fish…

Well, I don’t generally get fish anyway, although I do love me a tuna sandwich.  Now, however, after having looked at this list, I’m wondering what I should do about my tuna sandwiches.  The choice of brands is limited in most of the grocery stores around here.

It seems to me that the list of fish to avoid is something I should print out and carry around, like the list of most and least pesticide-y produce that I carry in my purse for reference in grocery stores.

Marathon summary

It’s 5:30 a.m.; the dawn chorus started about half an hour ago with a crow’s call.  I’ve been awake since about 4 a.m., and at this point think it better to get up and get a bit of “work” done, rather than trying to fall back asleep for an hour.  So I’m sitting in the bed in the spare room, which has an east-facing window, listening to the various birds chattering about their plans for the day and typing up a summary of my marathon adventure.

My marathon experience started at dawn on Sunday, actually.  The plane was put onto an eastern approach into Heathrow, which meant that we took a wide loop over the city of London, right about this time of morning.  It was light enough that I was actually able to see the tents set up in the starting area at Greenwich Park, glowing white in the pale dawn.  The river snaked around silverly, broken up by the various bridges - including Tower Bridge, which I knew I would be running over.  I was able to pick out the Houses of Parliament, towards the end of the route, and although I don’t know the layout of London well enough to be able to pick out the Mall and Buckingham Palace, I was able to see Hyde Park, which is close-ish.  All in all, I really couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to the route, particularly as it all looked so serene in the dawn light that I felt more excited and joyous than apprehensive about the effort to come.

A met me at the airport and, after a brief and thankfully-undamaging run-in with a screw that decided to poke itself into the car tire, dropped me off at the Hounslow West Tube station.  I breezed through the gate, inordinately pleased to be allowed through for free, thanks to the runner number pinned to the front of my bright orange Farm Africa running vest.  Once I got to the platform, however, I noticed a number of other runners - all of us clutching our plastic “kit bags” in which we would be leaving our warmup clothes - questioning a Tube official.  It turned out that the Piccadilly line wasn’t running smoothly that morning; in point of fact, the next train probably wouldn’t be reaching the station for another twenty minutes to an hour.  Not good.  After a few minutes confusion, another runner called her husband and asked him to come back to the station where he had just dropped her and to pick her up and take her to another station.  She then offered me and another runner a ride, which we both gratefully accepted.  We piled into the car and headed off for the Ealing Broadway station, where we could catch the Central line, which was not experiencing delays.  During the ride, it came out that I would be running the marathon having just gotten in from a transatlantic flight; everyone in the car, possibly even including the four-year-old son, was astounded.  Anyway, in the end, we got to the station, caught a succession of tubes and trains, and made it to the starting areas. 

The race technically started at 9:45 a.m. for the mass start, but I didn’t cross the Blue starting line (there are three starting areas/lines, to help deal with the 35,000 runners) until 10 a.m. (pretty much exactly, which made it easier throughout the rest of the race to guesstimate my splits using the analog watch I was wearing).  For the first three or so miles, each start-area group (Blue, Green and Red) runs along a different course, and then everyone merges in.

Knowing that one of my biggest problems in any running is starting too fast, I purposefully slowed myself down and then looked around for someone to set my pace to.  I chose a woman running for a children’s leukemia charity who was wearing a multi-colored, multi-pointed, multi-belled hat, which made her easier to track.  It seemed to me then, and has since been verified by my split times, that she was somewhere in the 10-minutes-ish per mile pace, which I knew was about the pace that I wanted to go.  I stayed within a few yards of her for the first 10 k, until I lost her in the standstill crush at the corner around the Cutty Sark.  (That crush was also the first time I walked in the marathon; the first time I walked voluntarily was at mile 10.) I didn’t really mind losing her, because she had served her purpose, getting me past the first surge of energy/adrenaline at a steady pace that would leave me some reserves for the rest of the race.

Around about mile 12, I was hitting my first major slump, both energy-wise and emotionally.  Lost somewhat in my own thoughts, something suddenly clicked in my mind.  I looked up, startled, noticing that I was just about to go around a sharp corner to the right.  The buildings were thick on either side, but something told me… yes, I was right.  We rounded the corner, and the beautiful bulk of the Tower Bridge presented itself ahead of us.  I teared up.  And ran on, head craned up to look at the beautiful architecture glowing in the (current) sunlight, buoyed and energized by the cheering throngs that lined both sides of the bridge.  I would say the three or four minutes it took me to cross the bridge were - by far - the highlight of the race.  It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, although on an odd side note, the bridge definitely looks squatter from a vantage point on the span than my off-bridge conception of it.

With renewed enthusiasm, finishing off the half marathon was a doddle.  Again, the official timings verify what I thought at the time - that I did the 13.1 miles in almost exactly the same time that A and I did the Bristol Half Marathon back in September.  The only difference, of course, was that this time I was only halfway through, but I could still have quite happily stopped right there.  Ah well.  From there on out the marathon was much more about the mental effort than the physical, in that the physical effort and pain was inevitable and therefore the ability to keep going was based much more on my will to finish the bloody thing.

A was waiting at the cheering station that Farm Africa had set up just beyond the halfway point, and gave me a very cheering hug and kiss, as well as my mobile phone.  That phone, much as I’m generally not that keen on the idea of mobiles, actually helped a lot, because it meant that I was able to a.) call A to let him know where I was and find out when I would get my next encouragement kiss from the sidelines and b.) call A to let him know where I was and to get encouragement of the verbal kind.  For instance, the first time I called him was when I was at the 18 mile point.  He told me, in a surprised tone of voice, that he had missed me, then, as I was going faster than he thought I would be and he was standing at the 17 mile marker, waiting for me.  Knowing that I was exceeding his expectations for pace made me feel (completely unjustifiedly, but still) that I was being quite the roadrunner; that desire to do better than expected, to make both him and me really proud of my finishing time, was one of the things that really helped me in the hellish last six miles or so.

By the time I crossed the 20 mile point - at almost exactly 4 hours - I was in a pretty bad way.  I was limping quite pronouncedly, as the inner thigh muscle in my left leg was much more than twinging.  Also, in the 20-22 mile range it started raining again, but this time more or less pouring, really, really cold rain.  That was the closest I came to giving up, I think - it was miserable.  I wasn’t ever really going to give up, but that rainy spell was very much a case of keeping going purely because I was already going, not out of any mental drive, in a sort of clockwork-soldier fashion.  Thank goodness for the first aid stands; they were handing out those funny mylar blankets to everyone, which succeeded in keeping more rain from soaking into me, even if it didn’t really do anything to keep me warm.  I kept mine until just before the turn off of the Embankment, near Westminster, where a completely ridiculous desire to look good in my finishing photo, combined with sunshine, made me discard it.  On a side note, these sorts of races are the only time that I feel comfortable with littering, and actually take a perverse joy in throwing my emptied water bottle or whatever to the side of the road, to join the thousands others there.

Thank goodness, too, for the people lining the race, who make a point of cheering people by name (most of us had our names somewhere on our running shirts), particularly those who look like they are in difficulty.  It may sound cheesy, but it actually helped so much to hear “go Julia” or “keep up the good work, Julia,” etc., for those last six miles or so. 

Passing the 25 mile marker, I gave A one last call, found out where he was near the finish line, discarded my wrapping paper, and, about halfway through the mile, actually started runjoglimping again.  I jogged - as best I could - the entire last mile; I was determined to make a good finish.  And I did - the marathon website gives you your split times in a little line graph, and my pace between the last split, at 40 km (24.8 mi), and the finish line went from the 14-ish minutes per mile of most of the second half of the race back up to around 11 minutes per mile.

We turned the corner at the Houses of Parliament, heading up the Mall towards the finish line.  The sun was out, dappling through the trees that line the Mall.  All the supporters were cheering at the top of their lungs, even this far into the day.  When I came in reading distance of the “800 m left to go” sign, I sped up a little.  So too did I at the “385 m left to go sign.” And after seeing A again, I put on a burst of speed - it can’t really be called a true sprint, but it was a marathon sprint - and managed to cross the line at exactly 5 hours 26 minutes.

After that, I was crying for a couple of minutes, as I knew I would be.  I was also limping something awful; when A met up with me and we started walking towards the after-race reception being put on by Farm Africa, I was moving at more or less a snail’s pace.  I mean that literally - A had his GPS unit to help us find the reception, and it took us about five minutes to go the 450-ish yards that separated the meet-and-greet area from the Farmers’ Club at 3 Whitehall Court.

The reception was a godsend.  There were hot showers and massages to be had (although I finished too late to get a massage, but at least I was able to scald myself to my heart’s content in the shower), and food and liquids of almost all descriptions.  French bread, hummus and orange juice have never tasted so good.  I wish that I had been in a better state to appreciate my surroundings; how often am I likely to get to visit Whitehall?  After I had eaten as much as I could - not very much, actually, as my stomach wasn’t too settled - A and I limped off to the nearest Tube stop (Embankment), stopping only to get me a much-needed cup of tea.  I felt really quite proud of myself, being waved through the gates into the Tube on the basis of my finisher’s medal.  I fell asleep on the Tube, and again once we got into the car; I think I was awake for only about ten minutes of the two-and-a-half hour drive back to Gloucester, just long enough to speak very briefly with Mom and register that the weather was abysmal.

So now I’m done.  And you know what?  I will probably do another one.  Not this year or next - I’ll stick to half marathons - but probably within the next five years.  I don’t entirely know why.  It has a lot to do with pride and achievement, and a certain masochistic enjoyment of that level of physical challenge. ... But a little of that “enjoyment” goes a long way, which is why it won’t be for a few years yet.  In the meantime, I quite like being sure enough of my abilities to think of half marathons as, well, easy.  Who knew that long-distance running was so addictive?

Very proud of myself

I finished the London Marathon yesterday.  My finishing time was 5 hours, 24 minutes, of which I’m very proud.  (As a comparison, the last and only other marathon that I’ve done, the 2002 Portland Marathon with P., took me seven and a half hours to finish.  Granted, I hadn’t really trained for that one at all, but still - knocking two hours off my time is something to be happy about!) In the first half of the race, my pace hovered in the 10-11 minutes per mile range, and I finished the half-marathon in almost exactly the same time as A and I did the Bristol Half Marathon back in September - 2 hours 25 minutes 9 seconds.  My pace for the second half dropped by about three minutes per mile, except for in the last mile or so, when I managed (despite a fairly pronounced limp) to get myself back up to just over 11 minutes per mile.  I finished 29,535th out of 34,420 finishers.

All in all, I am really pleased, and except for a twinge in my right knee and incredibly sore inner-thigh muscles (why should those be sore?), I’m not feeling too terrible today.  I slept VERY soundly last night, though!

Ugh. What a night.

So, whilst at the mandatory college development day yesterday, one of my friends put on some vanilla perfume oil from the Body Shop.  She and I then had our last training session of the day together.  Over the course of the next hour and a half, I felt a migraine coming on.  By the time I got home - she gave me a ride - I was in the midst of the worst migraine I’ve had in a very long time - more than a year, actually.  I got home at about 3:30, and in the next five hours, ended up throwing up twice, as well as just generally lying on the bed with my microwaveable heat-thingy draped over my head, shaking uncontrollably and crying.  A finally got home, and managed to dig up one of the migraine tablets that my GP gave me ages ago, that I had never used before because I didn’t want to waste them on “little” migraines.  This one wasn’t little.  So I took one.  Whether it was that or my newly-emptied-and-newly-non-nauseous stomach, I don’t know, but I was finally able to fall asleep, truly asleep.  Thank goodness.  I woke up this morning, still tired and shaky, but blissfully, blessedly un-migraine-y.

Geez.  I normally thought stuff from the Body Shop was okay, as it’s usually just artificial scents that set me off.  I guess not.  ::sigh::

Portland, my Portland

Thanks to the bank holidays this weekend, and to the college development day scheduled for tomorrow, this is my last day of work before heading off to Portland next week.  And it’s ridiculous, but I’m actually feeling a little light-headed, I’m so much looking forward to going home.

That’s the crux of the matter - Portland is still “home” for me, although I live elsewhere.  I haven’t really, truly settled in to Gloucester.  It’s a nice enough town, but, well, I miss Portland every single day.  I am having a hard time lassoing my brain to the task at hand (Access database… wheeeee…), because all I really want to do is daydream about wandering around Portland for hours on end, poking into Powells, scarfing up Moonstruck chocolate chai frappes and Bahn Thai’s pad thai and standing on the Hawthorne bridge, staring at the city I love.

… I’m going to have to stop writing now, as I am so intensely homesick that I’m tearing up.

They’re doing it again…

The Alaskan senators have introduced legislation (yet again) to allow drilling in the Arctic Refuge if the price of oil hits $125/barrel for five days straight.  Senator Murkowski offers a trade-off: open the ANWR for drilling, and the federal government will use those revenues for alternative energy development.  In my mind, that’s not really a fair swap.  Plus, I’m pretty sure that most of the revenues will be used to lower the cost of gas at the pump, so it would better be stated that “a small percentage of the revenues will be used for alternative energy development.”

Anyway, I just want to use my infinitesimally-small part of the e-sphere to urge you to write to your senators and ask them not to back the new legislation.  Encourage them to put their backing behind legislation that would fund renewable energy R&D *without* the false trade of drilling in the ANWR.  Remind them that a great deal of American technological leadership is moribund, but that this area still hasn’t really even begun to be explored and is therefore wide open.  It doesn’t take very long - every single senator, as far as I can tell, has a web-based contact form, and if you write one good email, you can copy and paste it to the other senator. 

Stroke the ego

I received an unsolicited email from a publishing company in Germany today.  They want to publish my Reed thesis.  Looking into it a bit further, this company works on a print-on-demand basis and seem to specialize in picking up all those obscure, little theses that very few people actually have any interest in (like mine).  They give a small royalty to the author when a copy is sold.

Now, putting aside the fact that my thesis really isn’t all that great, which makes this seem like a bit of a scam to begin with, I’m just hesitant to believe in something that is unsolicited but promises money, supposedly takes no financial input, etc., etc.  I did a bit of searching online and other people have had the same question, and the overall response has mostly been a cautious “why not,” because it seems that this company actually does do what it says it does. 

However, picking back up the fact that my thesis really isn’t all that great, I’m not sure I want to worry about someone accidentally thinking it might help them in their work.  Realistically, I don’t think that there are that many academians interested in the dispossession of musicians in the Celtic fringe four hundred years ago.  But still, I don’t want to risk someone finding it!  Besides, if someone *really* wants my thesis, I’m pretty sure that they can borrow Reed’s copy through ILLN.

At least this has made for an interesting fifteen minutes.

Quiet running

I went for a run yesterday - twelve miles in total!  It took me only just over two hours, which makes me happy.  What also makes me happy is that I decided to try a new route.  I ran along the towpath that edges the Gloucester-Sharpness canal.  The closest access point is exactly a mile from my house, so I ran there and then started jogging away from the city.  It was wonderful, albeit hard on the stabilizer muscles.  Most of the time, I was running in the rut carved into the ground by all the people who use the towpath, but that rut wasn’t very smooth.  That’s fine, though - cross-training!

What made it wonderful was how quiet it was.  I only passed about ten people the entire time I was out - a number of the people who live in the canal boats walking their dogs, one bicyclist, one other runner, and two guys fishing.  Other than that, it was just me and the birds and the water and the plants.  I ran past teasels and thistles and nettles and cedar trees and brambles and freshly-tilled farmland.  Countless moor hens launched into a frantic, comic half-run, half-fly across the surface of the canal, desperate to put more space between us.  Ducks eyed me placidly from the fringes, and a single heron took off near the apex of my run.  It spattered with a bit of rain, but was mostly dry and not too cold.  Perfect.  I don’t think I’m going to run in the city much at all anymore.

Article

This one’s titled Plastic Ocean.

[Please] give, ‘cause I hurt!

You may have noticed a recent addition to my menu sidebar here.  You may or may not also remember the day, way back in December, when I mentioned that I’m going to be running the London Marathon - the same morning that I arrive back into the UK from my upcoming trip to Portland. 

Regardless of the insanity of my schedule, I am still doing the marathon.  And, what’s more, I’m running it for charity!  The charity Farm Africa, to be exact.  They help marginal farmers in eastern Africa help to build their livelihoods sustainably!  Given that A and I will be travelling through some of the countries wherein Farm Africa works during our travels this summer, it feels nice to think that I’m “giving back” somehow. 

The funny thing is, though, that my giving back counts on you being willing to give a little!  So, if you felt like helping me out, even with just a pound or two’s worth of donation, I would really appreciate it!  In return, I’ll break my week-long no-running streak and actually go do some training!

Eye for an eye

In an ideal world, nobody would hurt others’ property (or others, but that’s not what has induced this current rant).  This isn’t an ideal world.  In a more-satisfying world, people who screwed up others’ property would have their own property damaged to an equivalent extent.  For instance, I’m betting whoever it was who keyed our neighbors’ car along the entirety of one side, to the point that the key made a massive dent in the side of the car at the beginning of the strike, would be severely pissed off if the same thing was done to their own car.  (Or, if they don’t have a car, their bicycle or their iPod or whatever.) So what makes them think it’s okay to do that to someone else?  Perhaps, if things were more tit-for-tat, stupid people would think twice about damaging others’ property.

Grrrr.  Pissed off.

Philip Pullman

Here’s a bit from an interview with Philip Pullman about environmentalism.

Food miles

I was thinking about air transport this morning, and specifically wondering how the number of passenger flights related to the number of freight flights, and, within freight flights, how large a percentage was devoted to food transport.  Everyone goes on and on about cutting down one’s flight travel to help the environment, and I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t try.  But I wondered how much of an impact such restrictions would make when compared with transporting food around the world.  Specifically, I figured that the global food industry’s flights would probably outweigh (pun intended) the passenger travel industry.

I wasn’t able to find any coherent research into this - perhaps I haven’t found the magic combination of words for Google.  However, I found this report by Defra, a UK governmental body.  It says that “[f]ood transport by air experienced the most rapid growth of any mode since 1992, with air kilometres more than trebling.  Food transport by air has been rising by about 9 percent per year since 1992.”

I also found this report on the TIACA (The International Air Cargo Association) website.  Most interesting for me was the statement that “The Colography Group Inc. estimates total world airfreight in 2002 at 52.8 billion pounds. Estimates by others assert that perishables make up 14-18[%] of total air cargo worldwide. These shipments represent the largest segment of world cargo. This segment is forecast to increase 4% per year for the next five years.”

And finally, based off of this BTS report, in 2000, 638,902,993 passengers flew and 12,690,673.36 tons of freight were flown about the place.  (These are U.S. stats.) If we divide the total number of passengers in half and assume an average weight for a man of 190 pounds and an average weight for a woman of 160 pounds (yes, I’m rounding oddly, but this isn’t exactly the most scientific of entries), then the total weight of passengers transported about the country (?) in 2000 would be about 55,904,012 tons.

Which is significantly more than the 12 million-ish tons of freight flown around.  And which is really significantly more than the 1.8 million tons of food flown around the place, if you ignore dates and apply the 14% mentioned in the TIACA report to freight tonnage. 

Which kinda shoots my argument in the foot.  Fudge.

However, it’s still interesting to look at the Food Climate Research Network webpage.  And local food is still good.  ‘Cause it just is.  (Oh yes, oh yes, I’m going to do just dandy at grad school with that kind of argument. And with the complete lack of attention to research methods and restrictions that I’ve employed in this entry.)

Three cheers for Marks and Sparks!

Marks & Spencers has announced that it’s going to start charging 5 pence per plastic carrier bag.  Of course, European cut-price grocery store Lidl has been doing that for years now, but maybe some momentum will build up!