Japanesey Run

Nursery Dreams (if you look closely you can see a teddy-bear and a friendly dancing owl)

Sinister bin shadow

Where I came in

The wolf-house

Today was another low heart-rate recovery run. It was cold and the wind was brisk so I wrapped up warm and took my rucksack and my camera. I didn't know where I was going to go so I just followed my nose. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me before that these slow runs are the ideal runs to take a camera out too.

Edinburgh is just full of buildings that are shouting to have their photograph taken but I found myself more taken with the blobs of light that dance around on the surface of things in this low winter light. There's something cheering about them. I began to speculate that I probably used to watch them from my pram. Not a theory I can prove or disprove, but I have that kind of feeling about them. Feeling settled and cosy and enjoying watching them bob around.

The next things to catch my attention were creepers on walls dying back. The guest house in the last photo reminded me of the wolf boys of Mexico.

Down at the water side the wind was blowing hard and icy. I was going to duck back up the cycle path but couldn't be bothered crossing the road as there's a kind of clunky three-way traffic system there and it can take a while to get across, so I carried on and thought I'd head up another way. Then I had a notion to run up the road that goes past the house where I was born. The challenge here was to keep a low heart-rate on a steep hill. It meant taking baby steps. The house didn't have much to say to me. But I realised that there was an awful lot of stuff about babies and being born in my head. Maybe it's because it's my birthday on Thursday.

Managed to keep my heart-rate at a super-low average rate of 126.

Anyhoo. Nice Morning. Better get studying before Peter comes home full of tales of the Borders XC.

That'll be the rain on.

I really hoped to get out a longer run today. 18 miles or something like that. But things were stacking up against me from the start. First of all I had a work's night out last night. I thought I wouldn't drink - but you know what it's like. You find yourself thinking "I can't actually stand this unless I drink". Not that they're not nice people. It's just kind of awkward when you're not at work with your workmates and it's so late at night (7pm) you'd normally be thinking about getting your jammies on and turning in, and you're so hungry you could actually eat your arm but it's not time to eat yet. Plus -  nurses can get pretty scornful if you don't drink.

I don't think I've drunk anything since about February. I can vaguely remember blogging about it. It was that much of a novelty. So I had a couple of glasses of Prosecco on an empty stomach and my face went numb and it was difficult to speak.

I had maybe a glass of wine with a meal too and then scurried down the road before I turned into a pumpkin. Peter was at home just getting himself organised for the Glenogle 33, as he was getting picked up at 5.30 this morning for it,  so the living room was festooned with running things and he was haring around packing things for all eventualities

I got off to bed way past my bedtime but had a reasonable night's sleep.

This morning one of the forecasts was saying it was going to start peeing down at 11am and the other was giving me until noon. I hoped they were both wrong and set off at about 9.30am from Gullane for North Berwick via the road with a plan to come back by the beach with the wind behind. In Gullane I stopped to get some pastry and a coffee. Well come on I was tired and a bit hungover, what was I meant to do?

While I was standing at the head of the beach eating pastry and drinking delicious coffee a young gull came over and asked where Peter was. It kept eyeing me. I knew what it was getting at. The sub-text was "If Peter was here he would give us some bread in return for a photo." "Well I'm not Peter" I retorted. In the end I did shake a few crumbs out of the bottom of the bag, but it walked away without taking them, shaking its head. "The hell with you" I said. We parted company.

The sky was lowering and dark but I kept just hoping that the forecast was wrong and maybe it wouldn't rain.
The sand was in good condition -flat and firm to run on. And the dark gloominess was  quite atmospheric. There's a very subtle shading of colour that goes on on a day like today that the camera never seems to capture. The sea was a very precise blue-grey and contrasted  nicely with the warmer pinky-brown sand. The people that were out were bundled up in lots of clothes and they made satisfying dark shapes, walking along the beach, throwing things for dogs.
My rucksack was keeping my back warm, which was a good thing. It was chilly out but I had the wind behind me and I didn't feel it once I'd got moving.

Just as I was drawing close to Gullane the rain started. At first I thought I would run on, via Aberlady and back the road, adding about 6 miles to my total, but the rain kept getting heavier and in the end it seemed fool-hardy to stay out and get totally soaked on a cold day when I was less than a mile from the car.

So I ran just shy of 12 miles. I was pretty wet by the time I got to the car and I think I probably did the right thing. I'll live to run long another day.

Laughing in the face of the tyrant.

I'm taking a week off work to catch up with myself. A week off means three days because the other things I do are not "work" as I don't get paid for them. Still it's taken the pressure off and I can feel it already. Reading for university has been excruciating as I'm doing a course, the first part of which is justifying the use of qualitative research. The arguments run very deep and argue that scientific positivism is just a stance, albeit the dominant one at the moment and not the only way and not the best way of looking into issues of a human nature. Aristotle introduced the idea of phronesis, an intellectual virtue which is gained from experience and practice and learning from the experience and practice of others. Practice is always localised and takes place in a specific context. Along came the natural sciences and their emphasis on universality and notions of phronesis were forgotten about. So much so that we don't have a word for it in our language.
Bent Flyvbjerg came along and  wrote a book - "Making Social Science Matter" - about all this. The University of Edinburgh liked it, and their students who are doing the "Between Counselling and Research 1" course were fated to have to read it. You can tell how difficult it is just by the sheer number of consonants in his name.
So it has taken me "on a journey". I knew that the outcome of most research papers that I have read - particularly for nursing - don't speak to me, don't answer a question I had asked, and give results that make you think "hmmmm, there's more than one way of explaining that", whereas an honest and first hand account of someone's actual experience of something was generally interesting and felt more useful. I have discovered that this is autoethnography. It might be what I've been doing here all along. (But I doubt it). It may be just an excuse to rattle on about yourself, but if so, so be it. And suddenly our reading for university has taken a turn from being about the current debates about the validity of different types of research and has taken me into the realm of autoethnography. Ya beauty. People rattling on about themselves and what they do. I have always loved it. I can't really be bothered with fiction but I love personal accounts of things.

So anyway. I got up early this morning to do some reading and then get out for one of my low heart rate recovery runs. The reading turned out to be easy and enjoyable- quite a change from tortuous sessions trying to wade through heady philosophical debates. I had read the first paper in no time. Then I went out for my run. I'm almost reluctant to say how good these runs are, I want to keep it to myself, but I needn't worry because I won't have many converts. The point is to go slow enough to keep my heart rate low. I think I should really be keeping it under 130 but this is just too much of a stretch so what I do is try to keep it nearer 130 than 140. Because I'm going to be running slowly I can dress up as warmly as I like. Going out and running and constantly telling myself to slow down is just so the opposite of what I normally do that it's a real pleasure. Running around feeling you could give it a whole lot more effort feels great. And also, I really did think Leith was a horrible place until I started doing this, but it gives you plenty of time to look around. I would still advise avoiding school children at all costs, but other than that, there's a lot of nice stuff in Leith.

The allotments at Leith Links are always good. All those little individual gardens adjusting to the seasons. Each one with a personality of its own.
Running up the Water of Leith there are usually a good assortment of birds. Today there were coots looking like spats and some marble grey looking birds with brown suede heads that caught my eye.
It being autumn, there were all the crunchy leaves lining the paths.
Coming back onto Leith Walk there were the smells, particularly cigarette smoke, fresh coffee and salami.

The only really difficult side of this kind of running is the thought "What if someone I know sees me running this slowly?" There's no easy answer to that...except earlier this year I was running at that speed and had no choice about it, which has put it in perspective. The tyrant in me who judges everyone who runs wearing furry ear muffs is the same tyrant who constantly berates me to run faster. He gets particularly loud when I think I might be spotted running like that. When I'm doing my slow running, I hear him and I have a laugh at him and ignore him and get back to the business of taking in the sights and sounds and smells of what surrounds me.

But I better go. I really do have stuff to do.

Going Coastal

Some wedding shenanigans yesterday resulted in us only running a 2 mile hill run. Not enough to satisfy the need for a good hard thrashing, but enough to have DOMs today. The weather forecast for today was looking appalling and it looked like the only half-decent weather window would be early on. As the clocks were going back over night it wasn't really all that early. So it was that we found ourselves at Gullane at 9am this morning.

It seemed like a good move. The sun was out and the wind was brisk but forecast to become a lot brisker later on. There were some very autumnal things going on. Orange leaves blowing about in the breezes.

At Aberlady bay there was no-one and their dog. There were some foot-prints, some paw prints and a bike tyre track. That was the nearest we got to seeing anyone until we got along to Gullane beach proper. The wind was well behind us and it was just as well. It made running very easy, although any small ups and downs when we were diverted into the dunes brought out shrieks of surprise as both our uphill and downhill legs protested.

Turning back into the wind up the path past Archerfields was a slog. We got some cover from the trees. The last mile on the road we pretend is the last mile of a half-marathon and the game is to pick your pace up even though your legs have had enough. Peter zoomed off. I "let" him and found myself thinking about something else and forgot to run at half-marathon pace. Oh well.

Back in Gullane we could heed the call of coffee and cakes or we could get out of there and go home and have some soup. So home we went. I am full of pea soup. If you squeezed me I could do an impression of the girl in The Exorcist.

Sunday Run

Life got in the way of my Saturday long run this weekend. Life in the form of something else to do. I have been churning out longer runs without even knowing why anyway, so I thought this weekend I'd do about 13 instead. Sunday turned out to be a much nicer day than forecast anyway, so I was glad about it.

Peter had raced on the Saturday (twice!), so he came along too. En route we texted Amanda to see if she wanted to come and she texted back to say she'd be leaving shortly. I thought that it might be nice to have a coffee and a bun right away, to pass the time until Amanda came. Then it turned out she was going to meet us further down the coast so there was no need to wait for her, but by this time the thought of coffee and buns had lodged firmly in my head. I was tired and hungry, so I just went with it!

We never found Amanda. We found her car but not her, although I know she's still alive because we've made contact since, so don't worry.

It was much warmer than it has been, perfectly comfortable to run in a vest. There is a big moon hidden somewhere beyond all the rain-cloud that is going about and this has been affecting the tides and we hit a really low tide. This is a real treat as it means being able to run below the rock-line rather than stumbling over big pebbles on the beach and getting spiked by the sharp grass that grows in the dunes.

Today I forced myself out for a 10 miler round the seat. It was a struggle. I think I had a cumulative lack of sleep to make up for so I spent the afternoon trying to read about Foucault and his power relations and succeeding in having a long, long snooze stretched out on the sofa.

I've got another yoginjury in the form of a sore neck this time but I'm off to yoga in a few minutes because I can't bear to miss it. Hope I survive in one piece.

Ho-hum, only a yum-yum

There was the usual kind of thinking behind today's long run. A brisk easterly was forecast and it would probably be a bit cold so I thought I'd take the train to North Berwick and run back as far as I could be bothered. I wanted to run 20 miles just because I've done a good few 18 milers and there doesn't seem to be any reason not to increase this a bit. Anyway it's a habit to run long and then run longer. I don't really know what it's for.

Peter and Bruce aka coastrider had agreed to meet for a long anticipated fat-wheeled bike and runner outing, so we got the train to North Berwick together and then parted company.

It was a cold wind and I was glad to turn my back on it. The sun would come out from time to time, cheering everything up, but in between times it was pretty cold and grey. I think I was tired after a hard week and I wasn't really going my best. Well not every run can be the best. All the stretch from NB to Aberlady was pretty good anyway. By Aberlady (about 11 miles) I was pretty hungry and thirsty. Sadly, they have ditched their coffee machine at the Londis. In the pastry section there was only a solitary yum-yum left. Not my favourite but it would do. Instead of a delicious coffee I had some cold, flat water, sitting on the wall on a cold grey day.

Well the running didn't get any better after this. At Seton Sands (16 miles) I had the quandary of what to do. Should I plug on to the Pans or Musselburgh or just call it a day? My tummy wasn't great and I was tired. Still, I didn't feel that bad and it seemed a shame to bail so early. I decided to have a coffee, even though it was late in the run, and run at least another 4 miles.

So I had a filter coffee standing next to a wall, trying to stay out the sharp wind. It was the same spot where Amanda and I stood in the winter, hiding from the horizontal snow, trying valiantly to train for the Highland Fling. That was torture. Looking back on it I don't know what the hell I was playing at. I felt terrible and was running really badly that day but for some reason we didn't give up. Amanda must have really struggled too. I was running around 10.40 pace. Anyhoo, things weren't so bad today.

So the next few miles weren't great and I had a growing sense of abdominal discomfort, but I made it to the middle of Musselburgh and caught a bus, and the run down the road from the bus-stop took me up to 21 miles for the day. Not a great average pace - but better than 10.40 pace! And my legs are a bit achy but not too bad.