mike[space] dot net

Postings have become slightly more sparse on the ground of late, which I would like to attribute to being massively busy and simply having no time. And whilst it's true that I have become busier, it would most certainly be a stretch to say that I've been so busy I've had no time. That said, we now have a full cast for the webseries project (now officially titled "Out of Office" - website coming soon-ish), and we are building toward full production.

Just thought I'd write a quick catch up on the last week or so ... I have finished the first series of the webseries. It has a working title of "Out of Office", which I veer from really liking to a real sense of indifference. Never outright hatred, but I would like to come up with something better. More importantly, I am fairly happy with the series, and am very excited about the next steps - completing casting, read thru, edits to the script, and then shooting! The writing process has been an interesting one.

After almost 3 weeks of recovery, I have finally got back out to run round the park. Having taken a break just before twisting my ankle, it's been pretty much a month since I ran regularly, and it has been getting on my nerves more and more. This reached a peak at the Gyro 10k, which I went to watch but could not participate in. Whilst it was great to watch my friends doing so well, it was pretty depressing to not run in the race that had been my goal.

Unbelievable. After taking a week off for my metatarsal (suspected, but unconfirmed), I started running again on Tuesday. The run went well, if a little slowly, and I figured that I would probably be able to make up for lost time in advance of the race next weekend.

I spent a bit of time over the weekend trying to work out how to import all my old blog posts (pre-New Zealand) into the website. Sadly it didn't all work out, as the version of mysql i have on my laptop doesn't match up with that of the my hosting provider. So now I have to work out a different way of dealing with the import. A little disappointing all in all ...

Running continued today with a whole new milestone. After the thrill of my first serious interval training session last week, which gave me the biggest post training high I've ever experienced, I decided that today would be a distance run. I've found that a pace of around 6 min/km works out quite well for me as a sustainable pace, anything faster than that and I start to feel the strain too early to get any meaningful distance in the run. So off I went round Brockwell Park, my usual (I think I'm running regularly enough now that I can start using phrases like 'usual') stomping ground and got myself into a good rhythm. My longer runs have been roughly two laps of the park, which is around 6km, but I was still feeling pretty good at the end of the second lap, so decided that instead of just doing a half lap (for those of you who don't know the park, it's very conveniently setup for doing mini laps because of the path layout - check it out on google maps) I would push on for a full 3rd lap. I was surprised by how comfortable I was for almost all of it, and as I came to the corner for the end of the lap, I thought "might as well" and pushed on for the extra kilometer to prove to myself that I could handle the full distance of the upcoming race.

Monday, not so good. Decided that I wanted to run at a faster pace, but this meant that I only managed just over 3k before stopping. So I didn't really feel that satisfied by the run. But today, I did interval training (after speaking with Dave), which is apparently the only really effective way of improving your pace. I ran just under 6km, with increasing intervals of 500m/600m/700m/800m. It was knackering, and I felt properly shattered at the end, but I think that is also why I got the most satisfaction out of it that I have from any running this month. Feeling really good off the back of it, and am looking forward to the next one ...

When I went for my run on Wednesday with Dave my GPS lasted about 3 minutes before dying through lack of battery charge. I think I accidentally caused it to discharge by leaving it attached to the cradle, but not plugged in. Today I went for a run here in Belgium, and used it again (recharged it), but because I didn't reset it from the small amount of data it had in it from Wednesday, it wound up recording it as though I had actually done one long run from London to Belgium, some 330 odd kilometers. Fortunately it divide it into laps, so I figured it would be easy to simply delete the first lap, and get the data from the second. Sadly, of course, things are never that simple, and in spite of deleting the lap on the device, and in the software on my mac, the lap kept on showing up every time I imported into mapmyrun.com. Sadly the interface on there doesn't enable you to delete specific points on the mapped run, just the last one plotted.

So lots of posts of linkage lately, but not so much about me ... so this will be one of those nice and self-indulgent updates, where I shall cover the gamut of exciting things that have been occuring in my life of late. The Saturday just gone marked the third Saturday night in a row with a serious sesssion of Rock Band going on. I've got seriously into the singing, really throwing myself into it. I'm not sure I am necessarily all that good, but I've been getting respectable scores on some songs, and frankly it's so much fun it's well worth it. Sarah is probably the best singer we've had on it overall I reckon, although Dan and Jo were the big surprise at my birthday party!

Today I received my birthday present from Dave, a gps running device that I had seen him using when we raced back in February. I have decided recently that I am ditching the gym, and will be pursuing my efforts at a healthier lifestyle through running outside, so this seemed like the perfect thing to ask for. And of course Dave is more than happy to get me anything that might involve me suffering pain and feeling sick ;-)