mike[space] dot net

So little time to say it. I don't quite understand how I can be in a position where I'm my own boss, but don't seem to be able to find time to keep my blog up to date. I suppose one of the impacts of twitter is that my need to spout off in public is served, without any of that tedious mucking about with writing coherent, cogent sentences.

Anyway, enough excuses, this is just a quick catch up to distract me from the process of colour grading November Rain, which is proving a little tricky with some of the lighting. So what's been going on since the half marathon?

A typical Sunday morning will often see me sleep right through it, stagger blearily from my bed around lunchtime and weigh up the pros and cons of heading to the local cafe for a greasy spoon breakfast. So it was with some trepidation that I set my alarm for 7AM on Saturday night, knowing that I was planning on heading into the centre of London for my first 10k race. A night of disturbed sleep followed, my dreams filled with delayed buses, missed trains and various other time related concerns.

April was a pretty crappy month for my running, with only four runs logged, one of which was actually an abject failure. So for May, I am endeavouring to recapture my running mojo. I basically concluded that the problems that I had developed were twofold.

With apologies to Haruki Marukami for the blatant theft of the title. This post was originally going to be looking back over the last year, but it's wound up solely discussing running. So I'll try and get to the rest of my life in the next few days.

Postings have become slightly more sparse on the ground of late, which I would like to attribute to being massively busy and simply having no time. And whilst it's true that I have become busier, it would most certainly be a stretch to say that I've been so busy I've had no time. That said, we now have a full cast for the webseries project (now officially titled "Out of Office" - website coming soon-ish), and we are building toward full production.

Just thought I'd write a quick catch up on the last week or so ... I have finished the first series of the webseries. It has a working title of "Out of Office", which I veer from really liking to a real sense of indifference. Never outright hatred, but I would like to come up with something better. More importantly, I am fairly happy with the series, and am very excited about the next steps - completing casting, read thru, edits to the script, and then shooting! The writing process has been an interesting one.

After almost 3 weeks of recovery, I have finally got back out to run round the park. Having taken a break just before twisting my ankle, it's been pretty much a month since I ran regularly, and it has been getting on my nerves more and more. This reached a peak at the Gyro 10k, which I went to watch but could not participate in. Whilst it was great to watch my friends doing so well, it was pretty depressing to not run in the race that had been my goal.

Unbelievable. After taking a week off for my metatarsal (suspected, but unconfirmed), I started running again on Tuesday. The run went well, if a little slowly, and I figured that I would probably be able to make up for lost time in advance of the race next weekend.

I spent a bit of time over the weekend trying to work out how to import all my old blog posts (pre-New Zealand) into the website. Sadly it didn't all work out, as the version of mysql i have on my laptop doesn't match up with that of the my hosting provider. So now I have to work out a different way of dealing with the import. A little disappointing all in all ...

Running continued today with a whole new milestone. After the thrill of my first serious interval training session last week, which gave me the biggest post training high I've ever experienced, I decided that today would be a distance run. I've found that a pace of around 6 min/km works out quite well for me as a sustainable pace, anything faster than that and I start to feel the strain too early to get any meaningful distance in the run. So off I went round Brockwell Park, my usual (I think I'm running regularly enough now that I can start using phrases like 'usual') stomping ground and got myself into a good rhythm. My longer runs have been roughly two laps of the park, which is around 6km, but I was still feeling pretty good at the end of the second lap, so decided that instead of just doing a half lap (for those of you who don't know the park, it's very conveniently setup for doing mini laps because of the path layout - check it out on google maps) I would push on for a full 3rd lap. I was surprised by how comfortable I was for almost all of it, and as I came to the corner for the end of the lap, I thought "might as well" and pushed on for the extra kilometer to prove to myself that I could handle the full distance of the upcoming race.