sam and the city

On the road to paris

Anyone who knows me for very long will know that I take my sports of choice very seriously. Generally speaking I refer to myself as a cyclist, however the over the past 12 months my beloved bike has been gathering cobwebs (metaphorically of course, I would never let such a thing really happen) while I've been pounding the pavement. The greater part of the last Australian winter was spent training for my first marathon in Adelaide, which I successfully completed in just over 4 hours. The time was a little slower than I would have liked, but considering my training program was somewhat interupted when I developed shinsplints, it wasn't too bad.

Thankfully now I'm am completely injury free and I'm in training for the Paris marathon on 09Apr2006. Thankfully for this event I'm starting from a somewhat stronger base than when I began training for Adelaide, when the furtherest that I could run was 5km. I did get something of a shock the other day when I suddenly realised that I should already be a week into my training program. Somehow I managed to convince myself that if I started training at the start of January I would have 4 months of preparation... as you can tell, I hadn't thought about it for too long! Anyway, it didn't really matter because my base fitness is already quite good and the first few weeks are easy.

Obviously breathing in smoke all day isn't really doing me a lot of good, but one good thing about working at a pub is that I usually don't have to start until well into the day, which means that I can go running in the daylight. And let me tell you, when it is well below 0 degrees you don't really need to add darkness to the equation when you're trying to drag yourself out of bed! The one time that I did have to get up really early to go for a run since I've been here resulted in the sweat in my hair freezing!

Living in Byfleet doesn't quite have the same excitement to it as would living in central London (it's only 50mins by train to Waterloo), but it does have its benefits. One of these is that it is located right alongside a canal system that was apparently constructed sometime before WWI in order to promote trade around the area. It wasn't a success, but it has now made for a very attractive place to go running/walking. People also seem to cruise up and down in their house boats (see picture), which I would imagine would be quite a relaxing activity on a nice summer's day.

The canal system goes in several directions. If you keep following it down stream you'll eventually run into the Thames. If you take one of the forks you'll make your way to Woking (home of the Mclaren F1 team - which I haven't managed to locate just yet). If you head up stream you seem to end up running through muddy fields... at which point the whole thing became far less attractive and I turned around!

If you notice any periods on here when I haven't written for a while, it's undoubtedly because I'm trying to run a huge number of kilometers and I'm exhausted!

posted by sam @ 8:57 pm