Bays of Glory: Take the weather with you
Saturday, 17 January 2026
So, I’ve just swum 70 lengths of Karori Pool and am now reading last June’s Runners World.
Fitter Than Ever, The No-Sweat Speed Hack, A-Beat Injury Plan For Older Runners.
This after the boss reminded me I had volunteered to be this year’s sucker-in-training for February’s Round the Bays.
Tomorrow it’s off to the gym to throw not much weight around.
I did the run last year. So did the boss. He keeps reminding me he did it four minutes faster. I keep reminding him he should have given he’s 20 years younger then me.
My running “career” began decades ago; the first steps a six-minute jog along a country road in the back-blocks of Masterton.
I have since run several half marathons and any number of 10km races, from a baseline of if you can run for an hour, you’re good to go.
I can’t ever recall actually training for a race, though I do remember an 18km run out to Pencarrow before a half marathon decades ago. Not training doesn’t mean not running because I do a lot of that. It just means that over the years I have become so used to a consistent pace that my results have been, well, pretty consistent.
Of course, better times require more effort than just making sure you’ve had a piece of toast and a strong coffee before you hit the pavement.
Effort, according to the experts, means strength training, practice runs, fast runs, slower runs, longer runs, goals…
Up until now, I have had zero goals with my running. I run, that’s it; in every weather, which is sort of a given in Wellington ‒ that 46kg person being blown backwards on Sunday was me ‒ and anywhere. I’ve run in Vilnius and in Rome during separate holidays. I call it self- discipline, friends “madness”.
But the boss’ challenge, because surely that’s what it was, is preying on my mind. I’m swinging between taking veteran athlete Michele Alison’s advice–she follows what she calls the “window training method”, as in “you get out of bed in the morning, take a look out the window and say to yourself, ‘shit, it’s a nice day to go for a run’ or not” ‒ or the somewhat more standard “you’ve only got four weeks, try this” method.
That includes a range of tempo and speed work, which to my ADHD brain sounds as terrifying as attempting an easy sudoko puzzle. “After a warm-up, do 3 x 800m, with two-minute recoveries between each repeat and a three-minutes recovery at the end of the set,” says Runners World. “Then, do 3 x 400m, with 90-second recoveries between them and a five-minutes recovery at the end of the set. Do both sets at your goal 5K pace or quicker. Next, run for 10 minutes at tempo (or ‘comfortably hard’) pace and rest for five minutes. Finally, do 4 x 200m at a fast but not all-out pace, with 60-second recoveries.”
I’m old enough to know about the legendary Kiwi coach Arthur Lydiard’s Fart-lek style workouts, which used markers over both flat and hilly tracks to indicate points at which sprint and middle-distance changes in pace were supposed to be made.
Controversially Lydiard also insisted his “students”, who included greats like Peter Snell and Murray Halberg, run 100 miles (160 km) a week as part of their training.
I’m game for a bit of quick stepping between power poles and trying for a fast last kilometre but distance-wise I’ll be sticking to my 30-ish kms a week.
I shall report back on progress, or otherwise, next Saturday.
Southern Cross Round the Bays is an 8.4km fun run coming to Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in February and March. To register, visit roundthebays.co.nz