Another Personal Best

Despite not achieving my goal of running under 1 hour and 45 minutes I was pleased to have run a personal best time of 1:45:29 in yesterday's Berlin half marathon. The first really warm and sunny weekend made the going tough for the participants, and I have to admit to struggling in the blazing sun. I made a point of stopping at every refreshment point to tank up with water, which also slowed me down a bit,  and I also set off at an overly ambitious tempo. It's my third Berlin Half and each time I've improved my time. How long I can carry on like that will be interesting to see. Next year I'll be in a new age group, so I will have the advantage of being one of the youngest in the over-55s. Even if I don't improve my time, maybe I'll improve my placing in my age group. 

 

Here are the statistics with last year's in brackets):

net time: 1:45:29 (1:46:35)
10 km time: 47:59 (50:12)
overall position: 2929 (4408)
position (age group) 291 (442)

4:59 per km (5:03)
average speed: 12.00 km/h(11.88)

And now I'm looking ahead to the Berlin Big 25 in five weeks time, which I've entered twice before, but never actually run due to ill health.

After the Retreat the Countdown has Begun

Yesterday I returned from a refreshing weekend retreat that I co-led with Karunabandhu in Strodehne an der Havel. In all nineteen of us stayed from Friday until Sunday afternoon at the youth house and enjoyed a peaceful, as well as a quite intensive time together. The theme of the weekend was generosity and everyone contributed to the harmonious and pleasant atmosphere, and wholeheartedly joined in the programme of meditation, communication exercises, talks, discussions, ritual and periods of silence. There was of course time to go for walks and explore the surrounding countryside too. The weather was pleasant enough too. 

With the half marathon now less than a week away I am reducing my training quite considerably, but I did go for a brief interval training on Saturday: 7 x 400 meters. Just a couple more runs before the big day on Sunday. I'd like to beat my personal best time of course, and ideally I'll run under 1 hour and 45 minutes. We'll see...

Meditating for Japan

This morning I got up early to get to the Buddhist centre for 6.30. I suspect many others around the world have  also experienced a sense of helplessness in the face of last week's earthquake and its consequences. While meditating last Tuesday I had the idea of offering a meditation at the Buddhist centre exactly a week after the earthquake struck. So I lead a Metta Bhavana meditation this morning at 6.45am ,in which the seventeen of us,who turned up systematically worked to develop loving kindness towards all beings, and thereby also gain a sense of solidarity with all beings, even though there might be little we can do that will be of direct help to those suffering the terrible effects of the earthquake.

Reading about Running among other Things

Claudia bought me a book at the start of the week by Haruki Murakami called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I am consuming avidly at every opportunity. Even though Claudia gave me the German edition, I am getting through it at a good pace. I have to admit that I had never heard of the author before, but am interested in learning more of his work, although I guess the subject  matter will be different. What I Talk About... is a collection of reflections and memoires about his life, especially his daily running, accounts of his first marathon and a 100 km ultra marthon, and how all this relates to his work as a novelist. From what I have read so far, he seems a very 'sympathisch' (what DO we say in English? Likeable?) person and I can relate to a lot of what he writes about running. (Photo of Haruki Murakami by wakarimasita of Flickr)

Unfortunately I don't make as much time in my daily lif e as I would sometimes like to have, to read as much as I sometimes want to. One of the benefits of teaching English at the TAZ (a German daily newspaper) has been the regular reading of English books, which we discuss each week. Our most recent book is The Other Hand by Chris Cleeve about a young Nigerian refugee, which is also gripping, though in a completely different way. Over the years that I have been teaching this group, we have read a wide range of books, from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole to The White Tiger and The Room.

A Cold Spell

Training is continuing to go well, despite the return of freezing temperatures., dropping to -12°  at nights. So far we've been spared the snow though. At the weekend I took repossession of the pulse meter, which had to have a new battery and a service. The last time it worked anything like reliably was during the marathon last September, and even then it played up right at the start, so that I ran the whole time not really knowing my time. Of course I now realise I've probably been training too fast, after today's easy run at 70% of my maximum heart rate. Actually I don't believe it is possible to run that slowly. I always end up running at around 75 or 80 %. 

One observation from today's run: I regularly pass people pushing their babies in prams and wheelchairs, sometimes men (most of whom don't look at all happy with their task), and sometimes women (who also look pretty unimpressed). What I particularly noticed today is that almost all the women were talking into their mobile phones. One could speculate on the effects of this phenomenon, and on the reasons for it. But not today. I need to go to bed.

A Week at Padmaloka

Last week I was on retreat at Padmaloka, the retreat centre near Norwich in East England where I lived and worked between 1994 and 2000. I have been back several times since I moved to Berlin and my retreat this time was as ever a joy. There was plenty of meditation and discussion on the topic of the Imagination, raised by a paper by Subhuti, recently circulated among members of the Triratna Order entitled Re-Imagining the Buddha. During the week I also managed to keep up my training schedule and avoided getting ill, with the help of Master Lam's Chi Kung 'cold prevention strategy', which I learnt from his book, The Way of Energy, from which I learnt chi kung several years ago, and was the source of inspiration to practice it over many years. Since learning this form of chi kung incidentally, I stopped having the regular problems with my back, from which I had suffered over many years, probably on account of simply becoming more aware of my body and its movements than I had been before.

Since arriving back home I have had a very full round of meetings and appointments. There has been some excitement at Buddhistisches Tor around the arrival of a film crew from ARD who have been making a documentary for showing in the autumn. While leading the meditation on Sangha evening on Tuesday, which was filmed, I was very aware of the opportunity that unusual experiences give us to experience our responses. Such occasions prevent us from falling into our habitual ways of being and so we more clearly experience the tendencies of the mind, usually tending towards one of the extremes of aversion or desire. Apprently they have been awarded prizes for other documentaries, for example one called "Gut sein auf Probe - Ein Egoist engagiert sich" (Good on test - an egoist commits himself).

A Marathon in a week

The first week of my training for the half marathon went well. I ran 40 km in the course of the week - which is more or less the same as I ran in September in one day. This morning I ran another 12 km and noticed towards the end that my hair had frozen, or more correctly, the sweat in my hair had frozen. When I touched it I was reminded of the time I stopped coming my hair, thirty something years ago and developed natural dreadlocks. I was also reminded of my winter cycling tour in Dorset in January 1991, when my beard froze and I took on the appearance of an arctic explorer, and thereby attracting a little attention when stopping to visit shops for refreshments.

Anyway, the training feels good, despite the cold, and I am looking forward to running in the Berlin half marathon for the third time in a row.

This is part of the course I ran on Sunday in Luckenwalde