Happy Hills

Hills by mcneilmahon at Garmin Connect – Details.

Wasn’t expecting to run at all today but after missing out yesterday with a sore foot was more than happy to go for a cheeky one with Mer this afternoon.  We cycled out to the orange juice man at the big lake in Palermo (Mer’s put a photo of me enjoying my juice and the sun on facebook) and then ran up to the new bridge near the River stadium.  The football team may now be B quality, but the bridge is A grade when it comes to some hill training, at least as such a flat city as Buenos Aires is concerned.

It was my first hill training since I started my comeback and it went well.  Five times up, skipping back down the stairs and walking back to the bottom of the hill before heading up again.  When we’d done the five circuits we ran back easily to the top of the lake and cycled home.

Not much time for thinking with all that stopping and starting but was lovely to get out in the sun and a few things occured to me:

I need to plan Wednesday morning well since I forgot I’m observing half an hour after #eltchat finishes, forgetful plonker that I am.

Tomorrow I need to start with coordinating and get a lot of it done, talking to all the possible workshop givers to get them all online so it’s as ready as can be as early as can be.

And tweet all day long, without getting distracted from my work.

And look into hangouts a bit more.

Maybe I should be approaching publishers directly about a course book – sending them a proposal like you would for a novel – I should at least be looking into it.

Nice and Easy

Easy by mcneilmahon at Garmin Connect – Details.

A relatively short but still quite pleasingly quick Tuesday evening run.  I do need to plan my running better though.  I left home not knowing whether I was going to do hill work or easy and started out thinking hills but then changed my mind when I imagined Mer would want to do hills tomorrow and so went for easy.

The new running style, straight and pushing from the backside forwards while trying to use my quads more is working well at the moment.  I hope that’s why I’m going quicker, I certainly feel like I’m running softer which is vital for me (clumsy oaf that I am) if I want to avoid repeated injuries.

Since I was thinking a lot about my posture and form once I’d decided what kind of run to do, I didn’t do much by the way of thinking this evening, just the following:

This part of the blog is pure self-motivation.  I hope people realise recording my runs here and posting the Garmin maps etc. is simply a way of gettign me to run – I get motivated by thinking I’ll be publishing my run once I get home.

Why does that motivate me?  I like statistics, I love the technology that Garmin gives me, I love being able to see the improvements I make visually on the screen, and I enjoy the recording of my mental notes as well, it helps me remember some of the littler thoughts that I may come back to one day, you never know.

And so Running Roads is helping me to run better and hopefully will help me to run smarter.  Will Singing Songs get me writing songs again?  Will it ever encourage me to publish my longer writing here? Will the teaching areas help with my teaching?   We’ll see.

Sunday morning circles

Fast by mcneilmahon at Garmin Connect – Details.

A different place to run on Sunday and a different way of doing it.  Having had a late night elt chat and steak and ale pie and all the trimmings (minus Get Carter) with @alastairjgrant the night before, I was woken up worse for wear and dragged off to the CEMIC hospital in Saavedra to welcome Mateo Nicastro to the world.

Then down to Parque Sarmiento to try and keep up with Mer while she ran her fast run.  Having run on Saturday and suffering from the worst hangover I’ve had since Spurs lost 4 – 0 to Real Madrid (although that one didn’t involve alcohol), I was determined to prove I could still enjoy a Sunday morning run with the missus.  She was determined to run me into the ground for misbehaving the night before.

I kept up pretty well (notwithstanding an early water stop) as we did a fifteen minute warm up trot around the park, but once the fast 20mins started I was struggling.  So I took to enjoying the sunshine and the Sunday morning walkers as I watched Mer drift away from me and into the distance.  I also tried to enjoy the pain my body was putting me through.  My legs, after their pacey 5K yesterday were trying to outdo my stomach in their whining, but the stomach, laced with steak and whiskey and cigar smoke was always going to win.

But amidst all of this pain and sunshine, I still managed a few thoughts to take home and add to my running roads blog:

Never have a second whiskey when you’ve drunk other drinks beforehand.

Keep the gas mark low when cooking that steak and ale pie.

Did Al get home ok?

There’s such a huge divide between positive thinking and negative thinking.  How can I help negative thinkers enjoy their lives more, or think more positively?

Let’s hope Mateo is a positive thinker.  Are we born thinking in a particular way, perhaps due to the chemical make up of our brains, or are we conditioned to thinking that way by our parents / environment?

Al and I might need more and more concrete ideas for our blog before we launch it.  Or is momentum more important?

Auxiliary verbs prove the existence of the perfect aspect unfortunately.  Bugger.  I didn’t deserve that second whiskey then.

There were probably other thoughts too, but I’ve forgotten them due to the pain.  How long will this hangover last.

My first fartlek

http://connect.garmin.com:80/activity/embed/98982581

Yesterday the wife made me go for a fartlek session – wasn’t sure I was ready for such stress on the body while recovering from injury.

But in the end I managed to run quite fast during our 200m sprints, I was happy to hold a good sprinting pace throughout the 200m and not flag before the end.  The knees and foot held up, although the hammies and achilles were sore enough during the slow warm down lap.  So much sprinting and the wife’s company meant not much time for thinking, but the following occured:

This Blog will serve as a means of sharing what I already have and do and hopefully encouraging others to share too.

Is launching a blog during a major EFL conference a good thing or a bad thing?  Am I competing for attention or will it be easier to get the blog out there?

#eltchat this afternoon was excellent – Promoting Critical Thinking in the classroom, I’m glad I proposed the topic, that it won and that I made sure I could attend.  You definitely need to prepare yourself to have something worth saying to say.  I definitely should become a regular for a while, until I more connected.  And should I publish it here in Printing Press?

I need to organise my life so I can go to LABCI next year – why aren’t I there now? Ignorance? Laziness? Lack of contacts?

I need to improve my talk ‘Professionally Developing’ for the ABS conference in August here in Buenos Aires – can’t rely just on how I did it last year in Veracruz and Cuernavaca, Mexico.   Include more concrete examples, links, suggestions, not just the idea itself.

Fast and free-thinking

http://connect.garmin.com:80/activity/embed/98229824

We ran 12km yesterday in preparation for an all-you-can-eat visit to Rodizzio, to thank our cousin and estate agent for all his help during our house move at the back end of last year.  So the idea of today’s run was a quick and easy one, but then I got in the mood and decided to try and get as close to 6min/km pace as possible and maintain it for five minutes.  In the end I wasn’t too far away.  

Some of the thoughts that I can remember that occured to me while running today:

My branding lessons can be much broader – get away from the branding book

Do a straight test-teach-test lesson on the adjectives from the branding onion

Include language analyses for all new / useful language I include in my lesson plans – to help inexperienced teachers get into the habit of doing (or at least thinking) them themselves

Will anyone ever read my blog? 

What would come of it? 

What will Mer think of it? 

Running Roads

BA10K 2009

Random updates on my runs, especially the races and the ones that help me think.