Running in the proper north

The double summer time debate rumbles on with another piece on the beeb web site looking at the arguments for variable time zones in the UK.  Whilst reading this I was reminded of my times in Sweden and how the swedes cope with short winter days and their addiction to exercise. 

Sweden is up north.  A long way north.  The southern most large city of Malmo aligns to Newcastle while Gothenburg is level with Aberdeen and Stockholm is on a par with Lerwick in the Shetland isles.  Sweden is also on central european time. 

I have visited both Gothenburg and Stockholm in winter and yes it is dark.  But the swedes seem more able to use floodlighting to enable sport and exercise in the dark winter.  And this is at all levels - not just large city sports arenas.  I was amazed to see a small football pitch in a tiny village just outside Gothenburg full floodlit one evening. 

I also had the pleasure of running 10k on purpose laid trails at a fantastic community sports complex on the Gothenburg outskirts which has fully lit trails of 2.5, 5 and 8km.  After the run there was the chance for sauna and then an outdoor plunge pool at a bracing 11C. At that point I switched from swedish to more basic anglo-saxon!  Apparently, when it snows, the routes are also used for cross county skiing, again under floodlights: and I bet they clear the ice off the plunge pool

So it is possible to exercise in the dark north.  But how many UK cities, towns an villages can boast any kind of floodlit facilities let alone running trails? I would hazard a guess at not many.  If anyone knows of any, let me know.

Double Summer Running

The suggestion that the UK should switch to so called double summer time (or normal European time as we could call it save for the fear of antagonising Daily Mail readers) is again doing the rounds in the media.  As before the debate centres on the benefits of more evening daylight providing leisure and fitness opportunities against the prospect of long dark winter mornings.  This set me thinking about how such a move would impact me and my grandly insane search for fitness and physical wellbeing.

I am generally an evening runner.  Ergo, longer evening would undoubtedly increase the opportunities for running in daylight.  I would be able to use a greater of variety of local routes; at present I have only one street-lit route available during the dark winter evenings.  I would also have a greater opportunity to cycle mid-week so thus far the proposal for double summer time looks good to me.

Of course, not all runners are evening biased.  Many prefer to run first thing in the morning and for these people the move to double summer time would reduce the number of mornings with useful pre-work daylight. 

Time to look at the hard numbers I think to see what we are really dealing with here.

I started by consulting the official sunrise and sunset times for Birmingham in the UK in 2011 courtesy of the HM Nautical Almanac Office (http://websurf.hmnao.com/surfbin/first.cgi).  We also need some boundaries in which to consider options.  Based on my own preferences and circumstances I propose the following:

1. that work accounts for 10 hours/day somewhere between 8am and 6pm including up to one hour travelling each way;
2. most people’s work aligns to the hours of daylight (I know this is probably the most contentious assumption but let’s work with it);
3. any daylight before 7am is being slept through;
4. to be really useful for leisure and exercise sunset needs to be after 7pm.

Under current UK time we find that for a staggering 213 days a year the sun rises before 7am.  Great for milking cows and the early runners but for me this amounts to 268 daylight hours unavailable by virtue of being at the wrong end of the day.  Under double summer time the number of days on which the sun rises before 7am falls to only 52 clustered, unsurprisingly, around midsummer.

At the other end of the day, Birmingham can currently look forward to 182 days in 2011 on which sunset occurs after 7pm.  Under double summer time this would rise to 225; an increase of 43 more days available for useful training.  Great news.  Case made.  Or is it?

The price of course is the darker mornings.  Currently Birmingham can expect 50 days in 2011 to have sunrise after 8am.  A move to double summer time would see this leap to 152.  Put like this I am not sure that 43 additional leisure evenings justifies 98 more days of waking to an alarm sounding in the pitch black of the pre-dawn. 

Fear not though for I have a solution.  Andy Time. 

Armed with the 2011 sunrise/sunset data, I can now reveal that if we were to switch to summer time at the end of February rather than the end of March we could gain an extra 17 useful training days with no increase in the number of days with a post 8am sunrise.  This may not sound like much but the days in question are those at a really key part of the year just ahead of all those spring events.  The opportunity to come out of winter training and rediscover those long forgotten summer routes a month early would be a great way to invigorate tired legs.

Andy Time is a simple and easy solution that does not require a three year trial or convert tactics to get past the anti-Europe xenophobes.  It does still leave the majority of all that slept through, pre-7am daylight wasted but I’m sure there are plenty out there in Grand Insanity land who will use it  - madly.

Rule of 2 breaks down when wet

I was watching the indoor athletics yesterday and I was reminded about my general rule of thumb which always serves to remind me just how slow I run.  In general the elite athletes run twice as fast as I do. In fact this rule of thumb has proved remarkably reliable; world best half marathon times are typically around 60 minutes, I do it in round 2 hours.  Elite 10k runners take around 25-30 mins; my best is 51.5mins. So confident am I that this rule holds, I predict that if I were to enter a 5k race I would finish with a time around 25-26 mins.

I also think my rule of 2 works for most other fun runners. For example, nearly 50% of all the finishers of the 2009 Cardiff Half Marathon  finished with time between 1.8 and 2.2 times that of the world elite norm. Thats over 3000 runners all following my rule of 2 to within 10%.

So does the rule help with the rest of the triathlon?

The worlds road cycling elite barrel along for 4,5,6 hours at average speeds around 50km/hr (or 30mph).  So the rule of two would predict my efforts on a bike to result in average speeds of 15mph. Today I did a ride over the Malvern Hills averaging 12.9mph but that was hilly. Other rides on the flat have so far yielded average speeds in the 14-15 mph region.  So despite the fact that my rides are not 4+ hours it would appear that the rule of 2 is working on the bike.

So what about the swimming.  My tri swim in July is over 750m so what is the typical elite swimmer times for 800m?  Well Rebecca Adlington knocks out 800m in around 8mins or less so the rule of 2 says I should be hitting around 16mins for 32 lengths of my local pool.  Sadly, I am not even close. 32 lengths is taking me more like 30mins so the rule 2 has broken completely.  Not just a slight extension to 2.2 or 2.5 but a complete collapse to a factor 4. Does water add its own rule of 2 making my rule a rule of 2 squared?  I don't know the answer but I am already pretty sure I will not be completing my first tri swim in under 15 minutes.  I will be happy with anything inside of a rule of 4.

Welcome

Welcome to Grand Insanity. A suitably cryptic title which sums up what many close friends and family regard as the only explanation for decision to enter my first triathlon this July.

In fact madness was the general verdict when I entered my first half marathon back in 2006 and my ongoing (but so far unsuccessful) to enter the London Marathon.

Despite this, I still go out running hoping to beat the last time. Now I have to add cycling and swimming to the training; perhaps a degree of insanity is indeed present.

So this blog will cover reflections of my training for the Upton Triathlon. It will not be a diary of training runs, rides or swims repleat with times and performance analysis; I will leave that to proper tri-nuts. Rather, I hope to blog interesting, light-hearted or just plain abstract thoughts and observations arising out of my apparent insanity.


Enjoy