Setting Goals and Starting Training.
Last year I ran an official time of 4:01:00 in the Sydney Marathon. There is a fairly obvious goal to beat there, aside from beating my previous score I want to really arrive at the Opera House well before the 4 hour mark.
Target Time for Sydney Marathon 2004:
3 hours, 50 minutes
On Sunday I started my training programme, with a 20km run around the half marathon course that I ran earlier this year (less 1 km). I was keeping it slow and steady, carefully watching my heart rate and keeping it between 160 and 170 beats per minute. The then cyclist hit me.
Afterwards I academically reviewed my heart rate monitor and, without an increase in my physical activity, (if fact with a relative decrease in activity due to the a sudden opportunity for a lie down) my heart rate had jumped up to over 185 bpm. This may give an indication to the level of contained pedestrian rage that I was experiencing after being hit on a footpath by a cyclist.
Running towards intersection. Bike rounds corner on footpath.
This is where my memory has a snapshot of bike front wheel, handlebars and cyclist mass about to impact me from range of about 1 metre.
Then there was the blur of my hands going out to cushion the impact before I found my self skidding backwards on my ass with a befuddled cyclist looking down on me trying to understand why my face was changing colour from red (from the running), to white (from the shock) and then…
Well by this time I had quickly done a body and equipment stocktake and decided that everything was more or less intact. No screaming pain - check. No major blood leaks - check. Heart rate monitor undamaged - check. Cyclist injured - fail.
That must have been when the heart rate jolted into high gear. My face must have gone red, veins pulsing in my forehead, as my desire to murder that cyclist nearly took over. As my rage cup did runneth over I started yelling at this chap with words that a mother would not be proud of. A few of the repeatable ones were “footpath”, “feet”, “cyclist”, “idiot”, “what were you thinking” etc.
Then an internal override button was hit that just said “walk away”. So I did. This may have been possible because there was pretty much no response from the cyclist anyway. Had he tried to disagree the result may have been different. I dusted myself down and carried on with the next 12 km of my run.
It took the next 5 km to get my heart rate back under 165 bpm.
On the bright side I had smashed the shiny plastic horn right off his handlebars on impact. 
