The sky is not falling. While I’ve not been keeping detailed records I believe it has rained or snowed every day since I returned to Hangzhou three weeks ago. This is unusual, most years it doesn’t snow here at all and I’m sure I don’t remember it ever raining so much. D keeps making jokes about British weather and how I brought it with me. It certainly feels that way. It snowed again overnight, I’ve lost count of how many days of snow we’ve had now.

But…

Today it has neither rained nor snowed. It’s partly cloudy and the bits that weren’t clouds were actually blue-ish. The affect on me, despite being sat in an office with all the blinds down all day (grr) is significant.

The snowfall in the last couple of days has caused transportation chaos. That’s not really true. The snowfall in the last couple of days has exasperated transportation chaos. Next Thursday is Chinese New Year. At Chinese New Year, to varying degrees, the whole country stops for 2 weeks. Everybody goes home and for the vast majority of city dwellers home is somewhere other than where they live. Only a little over a million of the 7 million people who currently live in greater Hangzhou are actually from here. The transport system was already in its usual thrice annual holiday melt-down, the snow has just exasperated the problem and like everything in China on an epic scale. As an indicator I read today that the number of people stranded in train stations in the city of Guangzhou has dropped from half a million to around two hundred thousand. That’s a lot of people.

Fortunately I don’t have to go anywhere for another week (we’re off to the outlaws for New Year of course) and here in Hangzhou the office is walkable from home and the pub is walkable from the office.

I planned to do a plug for Podrunner Intervals but I’ve just checked and apparently I’ve not blogged about Podrunner, how can this be?

Before we start, Podrunner is a podcast. If you don’t know what a podcast is then slap yourself up side the head and then go and read some of these.

Podrunner describes itself as: Fixed-BPM; Nonstop; High Energy; One Hour; Workout Music; Weekly; Free. The music is what I would describe as ‘house’ music, but I never was very good with the finer points of dance music terminology. I always tended to listen to dance music when running and since discovering Podrunner I listen to little else. There is a new mix out every week so (provided that iTunes manages to drag it through the gloop of China’s international internet connectivity) you get something new to listen to each week.

The different BPM thing is interesting, I tend to just listen to the latest mix, I do find though that within a certain range I fall in step with the music and consequently run faster or slower (slightly) but anything too extreme and my subconscious stops trying to keep up. So 161 BPM will probably make me run faster but 171 BPM and I’ll revert to default pace. Mostly I just like the music.

Podrunner is the brainchild of DJ Steve Boyett, he also puts out a podcast called Groovelectric which is similar music and more sensible BPM, this is good music for cocooning yourself from the sound of slurping tea in the office.

So back to where we started, plugging Podrunner Intervals, varied BPM music for interval training coming out on the first of Feb which should be interesting.

Check it out.

A friend has put me on to a couple of New Scientist articles (here and here) that together suggest both that humans have evolved several characteristics that allow humans to run long distances, an ability that separates us from other primates, and that this ability gave early humans and their predecessors an evolutionary boost.

The characteristics mentioned include muscles, highly developed in humans that are not required for walking alone. As well as large joints to distribute force and new research suggesting that we have duplicate copies of gene that means we are able better able to produce energy from fat during prolonged exercise.

The evolutionary boost apparently comes from being able to cover greater distances to find food, potentially beating quicker animals across the savannah by going slower for longer.

There you have it an answer to all the people who say that running is bad for you, we were built (trying hard not to use the word designed) for it.

Off to a good start on the first day of the New Year with my 300For30 challenge by running a somewhat humbling 10k.

I signed up for the Resolution Run a 10k at 11am on New Year’s Day around Newcastle’s Town Moor. I thought it was going to be a fun run, it was in fact an event run by small crowd of very serious club runners. That was humbling enough but the course didn’t help either, the terrain was hard and it undulated a lot more than I’m used to as well. It was a sobering experience for someone who has just set about running 300 race kilometers in the next 12 months.

10 down, 290 to go.

Photos on Flickr.

Happy New Year Tiny Tim! Happy New Year one and all!

Important announcement time, it’s now 2008 and and, shock horror, I’m going to turn 30 this year. Eeek.

Well I can’t let this vaguely interesting calendar event pass without marking it some way, so over the last couple of months I’ve been trying different schemes out for size.

The one I’ve settled on is 300 For 30! That is to say I intend to run 300 race kilometers during 2008, 10 kilometers for every year of my existence. By race kilometers I mean run races up to a total of 300 kilometers during the year, so that’s 7 marathons or 15 half marathons or some combination. Not a small undertaking for someone who, famously, has yet to run a full marathon.

So there you have it, details I guess will emerge as time goes on, I have a bunch of ideas, watch this space!