This goose is cooked

It’s 37 degrees outside the office where I am typing this… I decided not to run today. That’s the best day to day plan I think, schedule something every day and when the weather turns fowl, have the day off.

This goose is cooked!

I would like to find a goose mascot for summer. I bought a soft toy pelican at Renmark and named him Murray the Pelican, he looks great, but we need a goose.

This heat brings back memories of track at 6pm in daylight saving time at Bruce, trying to race 3k with a hot northerly.

Playing it by ear seems (at my age) to be the best way to approach races now. I seem to have gotten overly anxious about achieving some of the targets I have set, and consequently have done a lot worse in “big” races recently compared with low key ones. This is so opposite to thirty years ago when I would always seem to lift for the big races! Maybe it’s because there have been too many big races on my calendar, but anyway for next season I would like to adopt the low key approach for everything, as many other runners seem to do and get away with.

Of course as a coach I have the challenge of bringing some of the runners “up” for their races, while others need calming down. In my own case the problem is having sufficient time to warm-up and mobilise ancient joints, muscles and tendons, while keeping the mind calm for all that time.

So for a change I will try an on-going low key approach and see if it helps. You will notice that (a) I will announce my goals to achieve during the season, while at the same time (b) when I race I will adopt a suck-it-and-see approach, no time goal.

And early in the season, softly softly.