Author: e.v.

Again…?

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I woke up on Monday with a sore throat, and then as soon as I started eating breakfast my stomach announced it was upset too. Three days later and, yep, it’s definitely a virus of some kind. So far it’s not been too bad. My stomach is still a bit iffy but not terrible, and the sore throat has progressed to a bit of a cold but nothing much. Is it COVID? I don’t know, I don’t have any tests. The first time I had COVID it started with an upset stomach a few days before other symptoms appeared and the second time (in January) it started with a sore throat. So… maybe? Not that it makes any difference either way, except that hopefully since I had it relatively recently I’ve still got enough immunity that it won’t be too bad this time.

In computer game news, I finished Shadow of Mordor. I enjoyed it a lot and as it’s a long time since I last played a big budget computer game I was surprised by how polished it was. Maybe that’s just the standard now, but it I felt it was really well made. It also prompted me to start watching Rings of Power (the Amazon Lord of the Rings series), as the stories kind of overlap a little bit. Except that in the game Celebrimbor is a force to be reckoned with, whereas in the TV show he looks like a geography teacher.

I thought I’d have a break from Lord of the Rings before moving onto Shadow of War, the sequel. In the mean time I went with the Mad Max game. The Mad Max game is conceptually quite similar to Shadow Of Mordor (in terms of gameplay mechanics), but I’ve been underwhelmed by it. It feels like they made about 80% of the game really well but didn’t think about the final 20%. The writing is immature. It’s been a very long time since I saw Mad Max, so maybe this is in, but the first person you meet is called “Scrotus” and it doesn’t improve from then onwards. Almost everyone you meet is an angry psychopath who in the kind of lawless reality depicated would have been killed for being a total liability to themselves and everyone around them. Overall, though, the game is very polished but repetitive and not all that fun. Even just playing in short bursts on my Steam Deck I’m feeling bored by it. The driving feels nice, but wandering around on foot is dull.

I might try Subnautica next. People keep telling me that it’s amazing.

Coaching!

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

I’m about half way through the three month coaching period now and I can say it’s definitely improved my form. Has it improved my performance? Well I don’t really know, because I’d normally measure it by my Parkrun times, but we’ve been doing an interval workout on Thursday evenings, so by Saturday morning I’m not recovered enough for a 5k race effort (which I learnt the hard way – several times, just to make sure). I have a reasonably flat 10k on Sunday which I’m going to treat as a race effort, so as long as I can get the pacing right (big if) then the result will be informative.

My form has improved in the sense that I’m getting my weight and my hips more forward and I have better awareness of where my weight is while I’m running, my stride length has increased quite a lot because I’m spending more time in flight (though whether I can keep the stride at high cadence is another matter – I think this will require more endurance), and my left-right balance is steadily improving. The balance of ‘bad’ runs are now at the level that my good runs were to begin with, though there is still room for improvement.

Up until now the 1 to 1 sessions have been focused purely on weights to try to even up my strength, but we are going to shift to me-specific drills from now on. I’m not sure exactly what those are yet.

We do a lot of various drill routines before the interval session and also in the strength class. I do think they have a noticeable effect just before running because you are getting the motion into your legs and muscle memory which you then draw on when you start moving. A lot of it is focused on getting your knees high. You see it and think “isn’t that just wasted energy?” but actually it starts to make your stride feel very cyclical, with your leg kicking out behind you then swinging forward towards the high knee position and suddenly your stride is far longer than it was before.

But it’s only recently I feel like I’ve really got the movements working smoothly enough for it to help. Drills look so easy and fluid when you see someone on YouTube do them, but you have to practice the drill a lot before you can do it to a level that it’s actually beneficial. You don’t see the hours of them starting off and lifting their left leg and then thinking “err, my right arm should be coming up, not my left”.

I’ve enjoyed the weights though and she wants me to continue with them twice a week myself. I have a 50kg barbell/dumbell set from years ago and I’ve bought an extra 2x10kg plates for the deadlifts. This morning I deadlifted 40kg which is the most I’ve ever done, and it didn’t feel that heavy! I don’t think lifting any more than that is really going to help with running, but I would quite like to get it up to bodyweight.

Lucy Letby

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

As I have jury service coming up in a few months I find myself being more interested by news stories about court proceedings than I would otherwise have been. As such, I’ve been following the Lucy Letby case. She is a neonatal nurse who last week was convicted of murdering 7 babies. Overall I think it is very odd because none of the evidence seems particularly strong and I don’t think I would have reached the same conclusion that the jury did. Much was made of a supposedly confessional note that she had written, but having read it I think it’s a bit of a leap to consider it a confession instead of a mental outlet of someone under an incredible amount of stress. Some people are very willing to mentally entertain the idea that they have done something wrong when accused, even if they haven’t. I think the strongest evidence is the statistics, but I’m not convinced you can find someone guilty of multiple individual murders by statistical aggregation, and statistics is fraught with caveats anyway. You can prove a lot of nonsense with data if you are selective about what data you publish, and it can be difficult for an observer, especially one not well versed in statistics, to tell what data is not there.

I have tried to do more reading on this. It’s a very frustrating experience. The first thing is that news articles post-verdict are absolutely ghoulish. It’s just peering into someone’s rather banal private life. Even the BBC put out an article saying “what I learnt about Lucy Letby…” (spoiler alert: the author learnt that she had a crush on someone, she cries in high stress scenarios , she has a pink fluffy dressing gown, and other equally fascinating facts). The focus on her text messages is silly. They are only sinister if you assume she is a serial killer referring cryptically to her serial killing. Otherwise they’re just the exact same type of boring everyday messages that are on everyone’s phone.

News articles are quick to point out that deaths stopped after she was moved off the unit, but (following on from the concept of proving nonsense with statistics,) they never say if the unit is still treating the same number of patients, and other sources say that the unit was “downgraded” and no longer treats more serious cases.

I think you could find her guilty on the balance of probabilities, but not beyond reasonable doubt.

Analysis

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My coach finished her video analysis and the next stage was to go around to her home gym where she assessed my mobility. There was a lot of detail, but the main outcomes are:

1. My right hip flexor has nowhere near the same range of motion as my left. This is surprising to me as my left always feels very tight! Perhaps because it works harder. She’d spotted it on the video that I wasn’t getting as much hip extension on the right and confirmed it in her gym. It wasn’t just a small difference either.

2. My left shoulder/trap is very tight. She thinks this is contributing to my imbalance on a rotational level as it intereferes with my arm swing and I kind of throw my weight over to the right side. I’m not sure if she’d completely figured it out from the video, but she’d picked up that something was going on with my left arm. She had my do a few overhead squats and the moment I said the main place I was feeling it was in my left trap she started smirking as if she knew I was going to say that.

3. My landing is forward from my centre of balance, which seems to be caused by me leaning backwards a bit. It’s very obvious in the video stills. She thinks I’m a bit unusual with this because I seem to have a strong core and I’m not sagging in the middle, which is usually the problem with landing too far forward, I’m just getting my centre of balance wrong. Apparently I’m missing out on a lot of speed because I’m having to use my hamstrings to pull myself forward as soon as I hit the ground, rather than already being the right place (I think she’s right on this – I think I should be quite a bit faster and this looks like a big energy cost).

The first two she was quite pleased about because she thinks it’s easily fixable outside of running. I just need to loosen up the muscles and fascia. Ok, easier said than done, but lying on a foam roller for 15 minutes a day is a lot easier than altering my running form.

The leaning thing, however, is going to take some work. We were focusing on it last night during the group session. I think some of it is mental, in that you feel like you’re going to fall forward, and you just kind of need to switch off from that and keep putting your feet underneath you to catch yourself. I felt like I was keeping a lean for brief periods but it wasn’t coming easily.

I’m pleased about this too because the first two are things I would never have worked out on my own. I hadn’t realised that my right hip flexor was restricted and although I was vaguely aware of tension in my left shoulder I would never have considered that it would affect my running. I had worked out that my lean needed some work, but I’m sure I’ll get much better results with her than on my own with this.

Coach

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

It’s interesting how the verbs ‘coach’ and ‘train’ in the context of sports both mean something similar, and, as nouns, they are both public transport vehicles. I wonder what’s going on there.

Anyway, the more interesting thing is that I now have a running coach! I thought I was making progress with my balance but then I had a series of very unbalanced runs and my knee starting feeling a bit funny again, so I was going to go to the physio… and then it occurred to me that what I really need is someone who’s going to watch me regularly and give me feedback on how I’m moving, which you don’t get in a physio’s office. Conveniently there happens to be a parkrun regular who’s a professional coach and I know someone who’s been to her group sessions who says she’s very hot on running form. I sent her an email explaining it all and asked if she’d be interested, and she is!

So I’m with her for three months, and I get a weekly one to one session, a weekly group running session and a weekly group strength/mobility class. I did the first group running session last week. It involved a lot of agility work which I’ve never really done before and then a few intervals. On Monday I had the first one to one, which consisted of her filming me at increasing paces so she can analyse it and see how I’m moving. Last night was the first strength session, which included a lot of running drills. On Friday she’s going to assess my strength and mobility in her gym and then she’ll come up with a plan…

In other news, I took advantage of the recent sale on Steam to load up my Steam Deck with games! Even though I’m going to have even less time to play them for the next three months…

I also got a bunch from Humble Bundle choice for £8.99. I now have a big backlog to work through. I’ve played a few minutes of Fallout 4 and had to laugh when I tried to explore the town instead of going to the fallout shelter (vault) and was prompted evaporated by a nuclear explosion. But, to my surprise, Middle-Earth Shadow Of Mordor has really grabbed me. It’s an action adventure thingy that’s really well made and works well on controllers, and I’m enjoying sword fighting orcs. I think the Steam Deck might be my favourite purchase of the last decade. Other games I nabbed were Lego Star Wars, Star Wars Squadrons, The Outer Worlds (big RPG, but mixed reviews), Factory Town (low expectations but might be fun) and Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate, which is possibly the stupidest concept I’ve seen for a game (in a good way).

Also in very unrelated news, this Huw Edwards thing is terrible! The Sun ran a story accusing an unnamed person of soliciting child pornography citing the victim’s mother, but included enough information that it was quickly discerned to be Huw Edwards. Then the “victim’s” lawyer released a statement saying it was nonsense, and now the police have said that there’s no evidence a crime was committed and won’t be taking it any further. Now Huw Edwards is in hospital because of the effect to his mental health. I hope that he sues the Sun out of existence, but it’s a poor reflection on the country in general that people actually exchange money for these newspapers.

Balance!

~ e.v. ~ 4 Comments

Since I got my Running Dynamics Pod I’ve been focusing really hard on trying to get my left/right balance to centre. I think I’ve probably always had a strong right bias because I remember years ago noticing that the heel wears down on my right trainer much faster than the left. I think I probably overstride on my right leg, but not on the left. I became a bit more focused on this lately because my right hip keeps getting tight (which happens every so often) and then it progressed into knee pain too.

The good news is that my balance is improving! Not only that, but my overall contact time has reduced a little bit and my flight time (i.e. time off the ground) has increased quite a lot, which are proxies for good/efficient form.

But the trend still has me at only about 51.5%, so there’s still a way to go.

It’s actually quite difficult to work on this, because there isn’t much information online about left/right imbalances. Mostly advice is pretty generic and either not really actionable or not useful, so I’ve had to experiment quite a lot.

I’ve found generally that it helps to foam roll my quads and hips before I run, but some days the balance is way off and there’s not much I can do about it. I find that it’s worse on faster runs and tends to go downhill as I fatigue. However, it is improving. The outlier dot on the 11th is Two Castles, which was a 10k I ran at roughly tempo pace, which had me at about 54.7%. The last most dot is a 9k I ran yesterday at roughly the same tempo pace, and I was on 52.8%, which is still way off centre but a huge improvement.

I think I’m having most success with thinking about pushing off from the ground behind me. There are two competing schools of thought on this. One is to think about pulling your feet off the ground quickly, the other is to think about pushing behind you. I’ve tried both and I seem to get along better with the pushing idea.

I find that when I think about pushing, the weight in my feet shifts a bit more underneath and maybe behind me and my body seems to lean forward to compensate. The slight lean is important, I think the pushing idea doesn’t really make sense without it.

The second cue is to think about keeping my hips level and forward, which seems to help a lot with balance. It also kind of creates a pull through my abdomen and feels like (although I’m sure it doesn’t look like) the kind of classic elite runner pose with the strong hip extension that you see often in very fast runners, like Eluid Kipchoge here (who has the most graceful and effortless form I’ve seen):

For exercises to support this, I’m mostly focusing on:

  1. Stretching and foam rolling my quads and hip flexors, because I sit down too much and tightness here interferes with proper hip extension
  2. Core/abdominal exercises like bicycles and dead bugs
  3. Hamstring/glute strength like exercise ball curls (I bought such a ball for Monty, so I might as well use it!) and extensions against a resistance band.

You can spend a lot of time doing general hip strength exercises like fire hydrants and bridges and even squats, and I used to, but I’ve become a bit sceptical that they realy apply to running.

Two Castles

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The Two Castles 10k went…. Ok.

Two Castles is a 10k run between Warwick Castle and Kenilworth Castle. It’s a nice idea with two main disadvantages: 1. Kenilworth is about 40m higher than Warwick so it’s really the wrong way around, and 2. There’s not a lot of shade on the roads between them.

As is becoming tradition, it was a race day so the weather was really hot. There were a few familiar faces from parkrun there so we were standing around before hand, chatting in the grounds of Warwick Castle. Castles tend to have quite wide courtyard areas and relatively short walls, which means they aren’t very shady. I could feel my exposed skin getting baked even at 8:30 in the morning. The past few runs have been unusually warm for the time of year, but I think we’re now in official heat wave territory. I have to credit the organisers with handling it well, though. Compared to the Solihull half marathon, which I ran last August during a heatwave, there were more water stations and a lot more marshalls around.

Unlike on some previous races, my death-wish tolerance was quite low this time so I took it pretty steady and ran just under 48 minutes. Last weekend I did a 13k at 4:30/km, this one was 10k at 4:45/km. So that’s quite a bit slower. I decided that if I raced it, I might hit 45 minutes (which I wouldn’t even be happy with for a race effort anyway) and I’d feel grim for the next day or two. So I kept it at more of a mid tempo effort and felt all the better for it. It was actually very congested anyway, not helped by the weather causing people to slow down all the way along the course and walk up hills, so even at a more sedate pace I was having to weave around people the whole way, which meant I was expending a bit more energy than I should have been for the pace.

I think I made the right choice. One of my Strava enemies rivals friends who finished less than a minute behind me on the 13km last weekend ran it in 45:30 but said she felt sick the whole way. Been there, done that, this way was much better.

The hills weren’t too bad. Maybe I’m just getting better at them. A lot of people walking them whereas to me they felt alright. It was quite an undulating route with a lot of gradual climbing. Anything steep was pretty short lived.

Warwick Castle. Sorry about the lighting.
He didn’t run it with us

So anyway, let’s talk about ground contact time balance. This was the worst one yet, with 54.7% of my ground contact time on the right foot. 54.7% maybe doesn’t sound that bad looking at percentage points, but in terms of actual percentage difference it means I spent 20% more time on my right foot than my left, and that’s a lot!

I don’t want to read too much into one reading though. I’m using the Garmin Running Dynamics Pod, which clips onto the back of my shorts. I suspect that if it’s not perfectly centred it’ll bias it one way or the other, so it’s more something you have to look at in terms of trends rather than single data points. Regardless, it fits with my suspicion that I tend to rely on my right leg for power a lot more, which is going to show up on faster runs and hills.

In doing a few easy runs since, I’ve found that my left hip flexor is tight (well I knew that already) and I tend to move nearer to 50% if I really focus on pushing against that tightness through my stride. Yesterday I did a run that that was roughly 50-50 for the first few kilometres, which I think is because I did some squats and hip hikes to warm up. There’s lots to work on.

13

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I went for the 8 mile race instead of the 3 after all. I think it’s officially 8.2 miles. My watch got it as 13km. The conditions were warm and sunny, similar to the last few races. You don’t expect to have so much sun in England, but maybe that’s climate change for you.

I struggled with the sun in the last two races so I was a bit apprehensive. The route was on country roads which were heavily shaded in places and totally open in others. We started at 10:30 so some of the shade gradually reduced as the sun moved overhead. I was quite aggressive in trying to minimise my sun exposure on the course, even if it was just running right next to a hedge that gave my legs a bit of cover. I also carried my own bottle of water because these tiny charity runs tend to provide water in cups which are very difficult to drink from while moving.

And it went like this…

Oh what’s that? Is that even pacing? Yes, it went exactly to plan. I decided to go out at a 4:30/km pace (22:30 5k, 45:00 10k – nice round numbers), and I actually stuck to the plan and kept it solid the whole way.

I had the fun experience of gradually overtaking all the people who hadn’t paced it as well, which I was on the other side of last time!

The end result was that I felt great when I finished, with no hint of dehydration. It was a huge win for sensible pacing and a confidence boost in general after a string of races where I’ve struggled. I think the water helped too.

It’s not all good though. My right knee is feeling a bit niggly. Since this run, I now have a Garmin Running Dynamics Pod which gives me some more stats on my running form. I’ve used it twice so far and on both runs I spent a lot more time on my right leg than my left leg and the difference gets bigger on hills and trail paths (and hilly trails, well that’s even worse). That’s interesting to know and is probably my problem. Unfortunately it can’t tell me why, or how to balance it. You could take the view that the left leg is weaker and my body is compensating. You could also take the view that the left leg is working optimally and the right leg is slow (after all, a short ground contact time is good).

I need to figure this out on my own, but I think it’ll involve a lot of single leg plyometrics.

I have a 10k this weekend, which is the last race in the near future (thankfully!). I’ll be interested to see what my L/R balance is like on a sustained race effort.

Work

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

Work is annoying me a bit. I’m off this week, so Friday was my last day. My manager was off on Friday. I should have been tidying something up and getting it finished before being on holiday, but what actually happened was one of the sales staff decided to take advantage of my manager not being in to start harassing me directly. She phoned my personal mobile, which I ignored because I didn’t recognise the number. Then she phoned the landline and my sister picked it up! The reason for the call was to ask me to jump into a video meeting with her. FFS, just send an email. 🤦

So we had a video call for her to demonstrate something which my manager has already told her several times is correct behaviour and she doesn’t understand her test data. “But the test data is fine” she insisted. Anyway, apparently this was super urgent because it affects her ability to show it to clients, so I spent several hours going through it to find exactly where her test data wasn’t what she thought it was. Several emails later she still doesn’t really understand and helpfully suggests “I’m happy to do another call if it helps clarify”. No!

Needless to say I didn’t get any actual work done, and I was trying to fix a bug that will actually affect her ability to do show it to clients, so that will have to wait a week now. 🤷 Aaarrrgggghhhh. She is a nice person but oh my god.

10k!

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The 10k went much better than the half marathon two weeks ago. The weather was similar, with bright sunshine and about 18 degrees C. According to Garmin the course had about 60m of elevation. This raised my eyebrow because 60m over 10k is about the same as 30m over my local 5k Parkrun, which I regard as not flat but certainly not very hilly either, whereas the 10k felt pretty hilly. This led me down a rabbit hole of reading about how elevation data is calculated. The simple answer is that it’s calculated according to elevation mapping datasets, but these are noisy and imperfect. Then, small differences are smoothed out by a curve smoothing algorithm to try to account for the noise. If you change the smoothing parameters, my run gives a total elevation climb of anywhere between 32m and 180m. So in summary: garbage in, garbage out. Let’s just say that it was a two lap course with two climbs on each lap.

My time was 43:05 which got me 26th place out of just over 300. It’s towards the slower end of a 10k for me but it was hilly and hot. Two people passed me around the 7th-8th km and that was entirely on me for going out too fast and not being able to hold the pace (I only held as well as I did because I was trying to keep up with one of them). This is frustrating because my pacing over about 5k is usually either perfectly even or slightly negative (faster on the second half) but apparently pacing longer distances is still a mystery to me. Though the heat doesn’t help.

And as for the heat…. well, I didn’t die or feel unwell, but I definitely felt the sun. I think the forecast temperature is largely irrelevant compared to whether or not it’s clear sun, which is really what cooks both you and the road. I prepared better this time by wearing a very light running vest and drinking half a bottle of water 15-20 minutes before. But I think I actually got more dehydrated on this 10k than I did on the half marathon two weeks before. My ears blocked up right after I finished, which is something I’ve only experienced one other time from running, but it was also during a hot race and I think it’s a dehydration thing. There was water on the course but it was in little paper cups rather than bottles, so you couldn’t take it with you while running. I grabbed one cup, managed to get about half a mouthful into my mouth and then poured the rest over my head. I’d have fared a lot better with bottles because I’d have got more water into me and I could have kept pouring it over me for longer. Today I feel a bit headachy and probably worse than I did after the half.

My achilles tendon was fine until about 7km (on a hill) then gave me a 1/10 ache for the rest of the run. I’m trying to remember how this has developed. It’s a small ache in the mid-portion (i.e. slightly above the heel), which is supposedly easier to rehab than the insertional variant (i.e. right down at the bottom of the heel). I’ve been having tightness in my calves on and off for a few weeks so it all blurs together, but I think I didn’t feel anything in the actual tendon until last Monday. And I think that I’ve probably overstretched it in trying to sort out my calves. At the moment I can’t really stretch them at all without it starting to ache. So I think with a few easy days and no stretching (and definitely no hills this week), it should start recovering. I don’t feel like running today anyway…

Next on the calendar is another 10k in three weeks. But in two weeks there is a 3 mile/8 mile race very locally which I did last year. If it wasn’t for the achilles tendon I’d be signed up to the 8. I’ll see how it is by the end of the week, the 3 miles should be OK…