Not Just Any Saturday Night!

It's Saturday night and I should be at the rugby watching the Super 14 final between the Crusaders (our local team) and New South Wales Warratahs. However, I'm stuck at home loading up with carbs and ensuring I am hydrated ready for tomorrow's marathon.

I must admit that I am beginning to feel slightly nervous now but that's probably a good thing, or so I'm told. Have I done enough training? Probably but I feel like I have not done enough over the last couple of weeks Will my sore foot be okay? Probably but I'm sure it will be aching by midday tomorrow. What will the weather be like? Actually, the forecast is for rain developing but as we know forecasters are often wrong.

Watch this space to see how the run goes. However, there are two things that I'm definitely looking forward to: the finish line and Pommeroy's pub. The plan is to spend the afternoon in the pub having a nice roast and few ales!

Idle?

As neither of us has written an entry for a while, you will be forgiven for thinking that we have been rather inactive. However, the truth of the matter is that we have been very busy recently. Obviously, not with work but with play! Anyway, here’s an update of what we have been up to and what we are planning to do.

Marathon Training
Currently, our main focus is the Christchurch Marathon which is on Sunday 1st June. Chantal will be running the half-marathon and I will be doing the full distance. This is something that I had wanted to tick off my ‘To Do List’ but in recent years had given up on the idea due to the sheer amount of training time needed. Running every other day, come rain or shine did not seem appealing. However, now that we are into sport in a big way, this year seemed an ideal to time to finally knock one off.

We are well into our training programme and it certainly has not been as hard or time consuming as I feared. In fact, I’m slightly concerned that it is the opposite and that I will be under prepared. Logic tells me that the programme is working well and that the reason I am finding it easy is that my body is adapting to the gradually increasing run times (and the early mornings). Basically, my programme consists of a long weekend run and three or four shorter, week day runs! We shall see how the programme has worked in a month’s time and whether I achieve my target time of 3 ½ hours.

Hockey
Of course being autumn, the hockey season has started and once again Chantal and I are both playing grass and Astroturf hockey for Selwyn. Therefore, weekends are mostly hockey filled but this season we will miss a few more games than in previous seasons. Obviously we will miss the games over the weekend of the marathon but we also be going away for a couple of weekends and doing additional activities.

New Job

Well, sort of! I returned to NGC, now AMS for my third stint at the end of January. However, I've just taken on a new position so have spent the last week in training and will go up to Auckland/Hamilton for a three day training trip - my first business trip! I don't count school campsn as no flights and hotels are involved! I can't say I am disappointed to have a good office based job!

Multisport Kayaking

Yes we have started another new activity. In a moment of incoherent thinking, we have decided to compete in next year’s Coast to Coast race as a team. As one of the legs is a 70 km kayak down the Waimakiriri River, we need to become competent paddlers and hold Grade 2 certificates. Chantal will be paddling this leg in the actual race but I want to have the certification, too, so that I can compete in other multisport events.

Anyway, we decided to kick start our training by doing a multisport kayaking course. The first session was a rolling session in a nice heated pool. No problems there except that I did feel rather ill after all the rolling so had to stop the car on the way home for a quick spew! The next two sessions were on the Waimakiriri River. This was more like it and was when we started to use multisport kayaks. Actually, we used sea kayaks but ones that are well suited to the Waimak and are stable for inexperienced paddlers, i.e. us!Luckily both river sessions brought glorious weather: blue skies, warm temperatures and very light winds. We could not have hoped for better conditions! As with everything in life, there were skills to be learnt and practised before we got to the fun part, i.e. down river kayaking! Think of P.E lessons in which skills are practised before kids get to the part that they really want to do: the game! So the mornings were spent practising multisport paddling, edging, eddy turns and ferry gliding. The best bit of the whole course was on the final afternoon when we completed the final 15km of the Coast to Coast course. Along the way down we put a few of our newly learnt skills into practice, rode some good bumpy sections and learnt how to choose a route down a braided river. It was great fun, and I’m glad to say that neither of us had a swim apart from me at the end when I was trying to ride a stationary wave. I’m pleased to say that I did catch it the first time but messed it up when I wanted a second go.Once the marathon is over we will need to spend some time on the river practising our newly acquired skills so that they become second nature. We also need to find the money to buy at least one good kayak, preferably two, as well as all the gear. Kayaking is not cheap!