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My first half marathon - The Sydney "Run the bridge" one on Sunday 23rd Sep 2007!

Keeping up the run training since City2Surf I was worried on the Wednesday just before the big race that I was going down with something since I was aching and feeling slightly feverish. From that day on I did absolutely no training - call it tapering - but for me this was survival!!

I made sure I got a good nights sleep on Friday night since I knew that with a 6.20am race start (yes - you're reading that right) and a friends 'Boogie Nights' the night before, the excitement pre-race you get, I wasn't going to be sleeping very much on Saturday night!


Luckily my office is just up the road from Sydney harbour bridge and so at 5am I was collecting a few others to drive the 20mins from home to the car park under our building.




Arriving at 5.30am you think you have plenty of time but with so many people there it took ages to drop of my post race plastic bag and then the line 20mins out from race start for the portaloos did not move fast enough so I had to cut 90secs into my run time by taking a pit stop at the 5km mark - not good.


The rest of the race was pretty good for me since I kept a fairly constant race pace and was starting to eat into the 90secs I lost. I thought I'd calculated it perfectly when I approached the 20km mark which was at circular quay (near Wildfire restaurant) but as I raced around the quay towards the opera house the seconds to my target time seemed to get smaller and smaller with no finish post in sight. I was really sprinting the final 200m and as my goal time (1:45) passed I remembered from our coach to be aware that the distance is actually just shy of 21.1k! Doh! That extra 100m meant I missed my target by about 12seconds!


Overall though I guess I was happy with my time for a first half marathon and after taking into account my health just before and my unexpected pitstop I felt my race result was very good.


For a few more photos taken by the official race photographers see this link. If I find any others taken by others I'll upload them :)

Sydney Winter - Running season!

In order to maintain fitness and to fight those cold winters night in Sydney, a lot of people turn to running as the sport of choice. In fact there's more than a few races on during this time and the most popular one is the Sydney City to Surf 14km run on the 2nd Sunday in August. This is quite an up and down course which includes what's known as "heartbreak hill".

However before that there's a fairly flat fast course race a couple of weeks (July 22nd) before called the Sutherland to the Surf which is 11km long. Running this race was great preparation and I was quite happy to do it in under 51mins.

I thought I was fully prepared for the race but one thing I hadn't factored into the equation was the weather. Every year the race day always seems to be spookily sunny and this year was no exception but it was an amazing 26C - especially since it's still Winter. (The following Sunday it was raining hard all morning and was 15C!). The good news was that I beat my personal best by going under 70mins but my official time was 70min 19sec because the guy handing out bits of paper with your time at the finish must have run out of my time or he was getting ahead of himself. No point in making a fuss! However I managed to find someone who finished around my time and the video footage around their time shows me running under the clock at 69mins 57 secs. To see this

1. Go here
2. Select camera 1
3. Wait until 69:57 and I'm under the finish line on the far left in black with a white baseball cap. You might want to pause it since by 69:59 I'm at the bottom left corner about to go out of shot!

How often do you meet the right person? - Once

"Once" is the name of a wonderful film set in Dublin about a busker who meets a stuggling to survive Eastern European woman who is also a musician. This film is not a blockbuster and the main characters are actually musicians first and actors second which is great - since most of the film is about musicians and their lives. For me the music is sometimes powerful and sometimes hauntingly beautiful and the film provides a great insight into the process of writing/composing a song. I initially thought that he was much the stronger musically - especially after the scene at the beginning where he's singing his own powerful song in the evening. Then we get to hear her play piano where she blows both him and me away and then there is a scene where she is walking along the streets singing the hauntingly beautiful lyrics to music he has composed.

These are my two favourite tracks and you can hear them on this official website if the youtube links below don't work in the future.

• When your minds made up
• If you want me

You might not like this film if you're not a fan of the music but this film won the audience award in the Sundance film festival and it's quite highly rated in both imdb and metacritic.

Finished my Masters Degree!!!

Wooo hooo.......................

Just in case you didn't know. I finished my last exam/module (12 total) last month and the results are out. I've passed. I need a break from studying for a while to relax and unwind after all those hours hitting the books. Just have to think of a suitable celebration event now. My graduation will be in April 2008 I think.

Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) - "Must see film of 2007"

Tonight I went to see a film with a couple of friends starring Eric Bana and apparently it had received great reviews. That film was called "Romulus My Father" based upon a book which was a true story. I haven't seen such a depressing and lacklustre film for a long time. According to Helen Garner (The Monthly), "I know I will never forget it" - I know what she means. This awful film will stay with me for a long time. According to this review it's was a difficult subject matter but I'd like to save you some time and recommend you DO NOT SEE THAT FILM!!

However, my recommendation is to see another film I saw recently which is as good if not better as the Romulus film was bad. This film won the best foreign film award at the Oscars this year and I can't praise it highly enough. It's simply a masterpiece and one of the amazing thing is that it is the directors first film. I look forward to seeing more of his work. Don't read any reviews about "LIVES OF OTHERS" - just go and see it. You will not be disappointed as most of the four of us were tonight when we left the cinema after watching that other film. The good news about the Romulus film was it made me realise how good LIVES OF OTHERS was and hopefully will mean you will go and see it :) All I will say is that it is set in East Germany before the Berlin wall came down.

Wet and Stormy New South Wales

Some people think that it's eternal sunshine down here in Australia but you might be surprised to know that at the start of Winter here (starts June 1), a number of areas have been hit by major rainfall causing flooding, wind and storms have washed a super tankers onto a beach and people have died as roads have collapsed. See here for news and pictures.