Comics: I'm so fucken sick of comics

Which is probably why my blog will never be about anything. But I did enjoy my first theme week. I have in mind a topic for next week, that Harvard judging by his last post may enjoy.

But having just read fat-cyclists week worth of race reports on the Leadville 100 I thought I might talk about my race day with Shonesy up in Sydney on the weekend in similar style...

Sydney the prematch experience

Because of the City2Surf I end up in Sydney far more often than I'd like. But I noticed curiously enough that Sydney or at least the parts of it I see is much more iconic than Melbourne. As in Milk Bars still seem to exist, whereas Melbourne is all 7-Eleven now. Since I've become poor I appreciate 7-Eleven a whole lot less. Or maybe its just inflation, but when I was overseas, in every other country but Japan I missed 7-Eleven the most, even in the US. Japanese combini's deserve to rule the world. Put a Lawson's on every street corner and at least 3 times down each street I say!
Anyway, perhaps it was the luxury of having Suzanne the Van come and pick me up in the airport, having a cosy home with fluffy carpet to crash in, but Sydney didn't piss me off much this time, because I was looked after.
That said, on Friday night Shona was working so Greg and I stayed in and watched the opening ceremony, where we enjoyed not seeing www.getup.org.au's adds they had paid and booked with Channel 7, and Channel 7 the spineless coward mirror to the Australian publics spineless cowardly visage decided to just not run the ads and then lie like some chinese official about them.
But this I was blissfully unaware of. Still Shona and I have opposite lifestyles, she likes doing stuff, and I enjoy doing nothing. So sitting and watching TV suited me fine.
We then spent the Saturday in the car playing music, including Salt 'n' Pepa's "Shoop" and I can't remember what else until we were surrounded by the calm serenity of a national park who's name like most places I've been escapes me now.
And we wandered among the mangroves and some rocks, and once again I marvelled at the beauty of outdoors, quietly contemplating how wonderful and necessary National Parks are whilst vocalising only a desire to eat.
This amazingly took up most of the match day. I managed to quietly object to the notion of going out drinking and dancing before the race, which Shona saw the sense in, again that desire to do stuff, and not only do stuff but stuff with other people at odds with my desire to meditate on my race day strategy.

My race day strategy:


Was to stick with Shona, to ensure she didn't beat me to the Finish Line, she had afterall been training where I had only been steadily gaining weight over the last several months. I was trying to come up with good seeded excuses, like Cadel Evans going to the Olympics (and let me just say, for all the dedication, training and heartache Cadel goes through preparing for the tour de france, he doesn't deserve to win it until he cleans up his media presentability to be more of a hero like Lance Armstrong and less of a winging bitch kid).
Here again though Shona had me beat, she aparantly had some dodgy hip that had been playing up recently. I on the other hand had proved my fitness to myself on the preceding wednesday and then foolishly told people about it, creating the expectation that I would finish the race.
There was one area I had Shona trumped in, and this after she advised me 'I don't take advice on how to dress from you' which I seem to recall her telling me the year before.
But I had my giraffe stockings, and my loud-by-running-shoe-standards racing flats with the tartan print, combine this with my stupid haircut and Kareem Goggles and I would surely garner more attention than her throughout the race.
In the end my pre-match strategy came down to ditching the Kareem Goggles convinced they would fog up after 1km and piss me off for the rest of the race.

The day arrives

I woke up to my alarm, I had been enjoying sleeping even though I have pretty boring dreams, and not bland dreams quickly forgotten, but dreams about teaching elementary calculus, or commenting on the economy. That kind of boring.
Case in point last night I had a dream about a girl I had a crush on in highschool, she and I got trapped in an elevator and I spent the dream trying to have a conversation with the technician on the other end of the emergency intercom.
That has to win a trophy in boringness.
But I got up and had a breakfast of toast with Jam. I remembered hearing something about Jam samwiches being good for energy or something, then I remembered this was for diabetics.
Shona then went and injured herself again (I swear your honor) the details of which I won't go into, nevertheless it revealed my ineptitude in an emergency. Fortunately for her sake, though painful it wasn't an emergency. Could I have helped more than I did? Almost certainly. Have I learned anything from the incident? Ashamedly no.
This delayed us, so we bundled into the van.
Hitting the streets of Sydney before 9am revealed only one kind of person on the streets of Sydney, runners in the City 2 Surf. We had some Beyonce pump up music that was rudely interrupted by our arriving at the destination.
Then we discovered someone had written 'Prick' on the side of Greg's van. I like to think they were talking about me though.
Now onto the most important and memorable part of the race...

Standing around at the starting line

Not since pushing Miki single file through the New Years eve ost fireworks bridge to Flinders St Station have I had to tackle a crowd so big. Runners where spilling over into the park, waiting to literally jump into the race.
Shona and I took the stairs, and then again single file I cut like a knife through butter until we found some breathing space.
Then we stood around for 30 minutes+ chatting with the lady infront of us that was clearly planning to walk.
70,000 people occupying only 3 narrow streets is something to behold. And when the first group starts one can observe a torrent of people charge down a street. And like the dumb wilderbeasts human beings are I was left with a burning desire to also charge forth to wherever it fucking was they were going.
I had a blue bib number by the way, which meant I should have started in the second group, but in order to run with shona I started in the third group the green group. Maybe it was the other way around, anyway the original plan had been for Shona to start in my group but we were foiled by the introduction of technology.
I just point this out because I'm sure during the race a bunch of people noticed my different coloured bib number and drew the conclusion that they were doing really well. They weren't what they were witnessing was me beating them.
Anyway about 20 minutes after the race had officially started our group got to go.
200m back into the pack though, one embarrassingly gets overexcited and starts running when the gun goes. But because the person infront of you isn't moving very fast you compensate by putting all that running energy upwards. Then shortly after the starting gun fires you start walking again. So if asked 'did I run the whole way' technically speaking, no. Because I looked and felt stupid running at the start.
But 200m later we were off.

Passing People giving up fills me with pride

Well technically not everyone is giving up. There is a hilarious 'Back of the Pack' category where people put on crazy costumes, come with prams full of babies, or sport grey hair and bumbags, that is designated the last starting time by virtue of their tendancy to move slowly, like bad cholestorol in an artery.
Shona though was dismayed at the number of people walking from the get go that were in front of us. I naturally have contempt for anyone more organised than myself, and these people being infront of me meant they had managed to turn up earlier and wait around longer for the start of the race.
But I do question these people who are both organized enough to turn up early, yet not organized enough to either train to run the event or register for the group that is intended to walk the event.
Anyway the first 6 km of the event is all about dodging people. Not all of them walkers but there's a bunch of different paces people run at, and some people do stupid things like walk uphill and only run the flats and downhills. This is stupid because it actually hurts your knees more to run downhill than uphill.
Anyway trying to stick with Shona made this doubly interesting as we cut and weaved through the herd yet tried to stay together.
Many times I looked round in a panic. Sometimes I thought shona was running in her boring black outfit next to me, only to turn around and find it someone else entirely. But we stuck together just as good waffles do.

No-one is safe from perversion

Speaking strictly for myself, one great thing about a race with 70,000 participants are all the hot people running in it. So along with forgetting how far you've run because you've been trying to avid people and trying to find a place to actually run at your own pace, both constantly passing and constantly being passed as the race sorts itself out, the short term goal of trying to run up behind someone hot is a constant motivating factor.
I imagine this works better for girls than guys, or at least it would for me and my preference for short girls. Because just as a person is in reach for me, I find myself and my damned competitive nature having to pass them, and you just can't perve on someone while running backwards, its too obvious.
I cannot vouch for Shona having a dirty mind or a pure teflon surface, who knows how she is normally, but she did definitly pinch a guy's arse who was wearing shorts that said 'hot stuff' on them. That did happen.
She also pointed to me after the fact and the guy said 'I like it' or something.
She then also definitely said 'I want more arses to grab' or something to the exact same effect. But it seemed unfortunately that we had passed the hot stuff crowd for good.
Me I grabbed with my eyes not with my hands. Highlights include green shorts girl, white shirt and ipod girl, old shuffling guy, long braid girl and blonde in blue singlet girl.

Green shorts are rad, but competition is radder

At Heartbreak hill, I ran off on Shona after she threatened to punch me if I yelled at her. Not being able to fulfill my duty as personal trainer I endeavored to run far enough away as to cry.
Whilst my eyes may have seemed busy looking for talent. I had never forgotten that 'fun runs' are all about dominating the unwitting. I had also constantly been sizing up my competition. And whilst I wanted to run ahead and find green shorts girl, I also had noticed that we had been passed by and re-passed and re-passed by green shorts boy.
He was but a mere 30 meters infront of me on heartbreak hill. I caught that up but then lost him again when I stopped for a drink. I caught him again and then set about leaving him behind. Much to my content I passed the 5th member of City2Singapore, some singaporean team that had just like singaporeans gone out and bought matching consumerist shirts. They also started the race at the same time as Shonesy and I, and now I had clearly beaten them all, just like their parents beat them for losing tennis tournaments or piano competitions.
This left me in a quandrary though, luckily blue asian guy with maroon socks came to my rescue. We had virtually identical paces. I just pursued him for the next 4km or so, until...

I hit the wall

I don't know what the wall is like for other runners, but for me it is always related to the difference between my conceptual map and the actual terrain. Thus on a new course I never hit the wall. Anything I have run before though has a wall.
It is in brief, the part of the course that I plumb forgot about. On lake wendoree it was the bit around Grammer boat shed, a good 30 degrees of the circle or 800m of a 6km course. I just forget every time that I have to run it, usually because it is the boring part where my mind spaces out. But if you don't anticipate it, suddenly when you are on it your race just gets a whole lot longer.
In my minds eye you see I recall vaguely you get to the top of heartbreak hill, then begin your descent onto Bondi, but instead you actually run through 3 or 4 km more of bendy streets with no view of anything.
It was just at this point that I thought 'Okay priority is no longer beating blue asian with maroon socks, but just finishing' so I backed off on the pursuit and he got ahead of me.
The next corner I sighted the sea and new it was figuratively all downhill from there, so again I tried to track down blue asian. Alas I had lost him in the crowd.

The deceptively long finish line

You actually run past the finish line, when heading along the Bondi boulevard. And so the finish line is at least 1km long. This is painful. Particularly as visibility from the ground is painfully poor.
Thus when constantly trying to guess where I should break into a sprint for, a burst of energy would propel my head above the masses and I'd see that when I thought I only had 200m left there was at least 800m to go. And this happened 3 or 4 times.
It happened even after I turned the final corner, because I tucked in my chin turned out into the faster outer lane and started sprinting. When I thought 'I can't sprint much longer' and looked up I still had 200m to go. So I just undramatically 'ran' across the finish line.

Worried for Shona

After about 20 minutes I managed to work my way past the pavillions to where I could see the finish line. I stood there for another 20 minutes, and was furious to observe green shorts girl run past the finish line 30 minutes after me. This meant I had passed her again without noticing.
When Shona was a no show, I got worried. I headed for meeting point 'N' which I had chosen for 'Never give up' and stood there for what seemed like another 30 minutes.
I began to picture what may have happened, Shona never making it up heartbreak hill because I hadn't been there to yell at her.
Her collapsing, face planting onto the bitumen like she did in Ballarat that time (not my fault I swear). The ambulance crew asking her if she needed to call her friend. And then explaining that I hadn't packed my mobile phone.
When they ask if they can send someone to inform me, she would have to tell them through her bitter tears of self defeat 'We agreed to meet at 'N', (sob) for...Never give up (burst into tears)' then I spied Greg, and then Shona walking up casually towards me.
Turned out she ran the last part of the race easier than I did (mentally) and finished shortly after me.

Greg's GPS

Greg is really proud of his GPS, and he used it to find his car after the race.

Going home

Then I went home, and had to pay $14.40 for a train ride of only like 5 stops to get to the airport, and was reminded of why I hate Sydney.