1:24:13

That is my Sprint distance triathlon finishing time, more or less. I lost the timing chip on the water, which is a pain in the ass and the reason I had no idea of my real finishing time until now. I had a rough idea, of course,  and I was nearly sure it was below 1h30m, but I could not be sure(swimming in the pool is not AT ALL the same as open water swimming so my pool times were a very rough estimation of my open water times). I finished 179th of 366 on my category and 242th of 521 on the general, which is not bad; after all, I was doing my first tri, I had not trained that much on the bike mainly due to a lack of bike and I hadn't run in like three weeks because of my left knee(but I think I could have finished the Olympic distance, suffering a lot, but I would have finished below 3h :) ).

Given that I know my total time now and I know that the bike took 40 minutes(actually 40m30s is more likely, I should have actually practised the timing on the forerunner before the actual race which would have avoid, among others things, a risky turn that could have finished my race and smashed my face...). Anyway, the forerunner time is 39:07 but you have to add a minute and a half because that's more or less how much it had passed when I realized my timer was still counting as "T1". That makes 40:30 for the bike(not bad, given that it was the first bike outdoor bike ride I had in like a year and I had never ridden a road bike before). The run was not my fastest, but it was not my slower 5km either, 23m45s(after 750m swim and a 20km bike ride). Stupidly enough, Garmin connect does not support for multisport mode and I don't have the transition times at hand now. But the first one took me like 3 min and the second like 1min, I think. That makes, 4 min on transitions(really bad, but putting my shirt on wet turned out to be very tricky). That makes for a total of 68m15s for anything but the swim and hence a swimming time of 16:02 approximately. By looking at the results list and finding someone with a similar time that means I came out of the water positioned around 125th. Which, given that I think it counts the people in the first, fast, wave too, it's not bad. But I'd swear that I came out of the water top 20 of my wave. Anyway, next time I'll be more careful with the damn stupid chip(and I'll be getting my own fat velcro strap).

Times aside, it was an awesome day, although my brother got a bit bored with all the waiting and specially when I was racing. There was a lot of people and the Olympic distance guys and girls were awesome. And, after all, I got a new PB :).

Next one: Olympic distance on August 17th :)(I have not registered yet, but that's very likely to happen).

PS: I lost my sport climbing virginity last Sunday, in Portland, I did my first outdoors(and ever actually) lead with an F4 climb :) (I need to find it's name on the guide).

2nd PS: I should read a book from time to time so my English stops free falling into such rubbish.

A big blank canvas... with some scribbles

It says: Lanzarote, Kona, Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc and Marathon des Sables.

The rest: time will tell, there's no hurry. I have plenty of years to do it and I plan to reach triple figures.

PS: I finished my half-marathon in 1:50:30. I am very proud of the result even though I run slower than in the first one, although I finished much stronger. Now, I'll be racing my first triathlon in six days, in the city that I was born. A place that has a special colour. It's a sprint one, the shortest possible one, but as I say, I have the rest of my life to build up the distance.

Thoughts on chocolate covered coffee beans

Because some days 10km is not enough...

Today is already feeling too long.

It's on baby!

81 days to go.

I was going to title this Songs for days when nothing works, then I went for my run, had a great session and realized I only have 81 days to my turning 26 crisis solving half-marathon. And actually only 80 days until I turn 26.

I did, indeed, started training for it officially or at least, I started the training plan I will be following. I started running with the nike running website training plans a couple of years ago with the 5k beginners and after a year break from running I went back in September to the 10k intermediate 1 and now I have upgraded to the half-marathon intermediate 2. It surely could be better, but I'm very pleased with my progress. By the way, I seem not to be able to stop listening to this song:



As I was saying or at least you could guess from the original title for this entry, I had a very unproductive and frustrating day work-wise as I could not make my program work and I seem unable to detect what was going wrong with it. But my running, on the treadmill though, changed my mood. For my first day, the training plan had prepared some intervals(this plan is described as a plan that concentrates on quality work and speed work for those trying to improve their times). 4x800m and 4x200m in particular and a total of around 10km running. It happens that whenever I am introducing something relatively new in my training I experience during the previous hours or even days some mild anxiety. It's like going from school to high school or from high school to uni but in a scaled down version. It happened to me the first time I run 10 miles, I was somewhat nervous about not finishing(I had actually aborted a 9miles run the previous week). It didn't happen the time I run a half-marathon in the treadmill but that's just because it was not planned and it actually happened the week after that when I went for a planned 22km long run. Hence it's not really odd that it happened yesterday again. I mean, I've run 10km before, and in fact that its becoming a somewhat short run these days and I always finish it feeling I need at least a couple of kilometers more. It was the intervals that were making me nervous, my former training plan had them, but since November I was a bit sloppy and dropped them and concentrated only on logging miles(truth be told, I've been running at a high pace the whole time so I've been doing sloppy permanent Fartlek or at least pushing my heart a lot). As I was saying, intervals were making me nervous so I decided to err on the side of caution because I wanted to be able to finish all of them, not just run a very fast one and not be able to even run the whole 10km(I dropped them last time because I had a horrible session where I could only run two intervals and was destroyed after that and I kind of chickened out a bit). I did so and had a lovely session with, I think good paces. My cadence was shit though.


Note: This has been waiting to be finished for more than a week, but now that I read it, I think there's nothing more too add, so, I'll just publish it as it is.

Most marvellous thing in the universe

And sometimes, most beautiful too. I was just reading the EROS BLOG from the Spanish newspaper El Pais, somewhat lefthanded but kind of neutral, and to me possibly the only readable one. Although sometimes I'd like to email some of their writers either a dictionary of the Spanish language or a grammar or both. And that being me and my own grammar is sloppy. I can only imagine what goes through the mind of those well educated who also read it. Anyway, I digress, I was reading that blog and I was admiring the pictures of their last post about noises that lovers make in bed. If you're curious, I discovered the other day, when listening to Love of Lesbian in Spotify,that the same way that you can buy a CD with sounds from the middle of the amazonic forest, you can buy CD's with sounds of orgasms and sex(or listen to them in Spotify if you feel like it). Again, I digress. What I was about to say is that in that post, the pictures are taken from the blog I have just discovered and which from what I've seen so far, is a wonderful recollection of artistic pictures of naked bodies. And that is the most beautiful thing ever evolved in the universe(that we know of).

Scatology

Or my theory on the new Facebook timeline cover picture.

Because I am sure I am not the first one to think of, and possibly someone has already done it, using that cover to put a picture of my erect penis in all its glory. I mean, it's not like I am thinking of actually doing it, but my theory is that it was created by some facebook engineer with that in mind. A sort of twenty first century equivalent of photocopying one's arse when the office is empty but broadcast to the entire world this time.

On the other hand this post may just be a proof of the unusual connections that happen between the neurons in my brain.

I'm going to be my own Pavlov's dog...

Pavlov's dog or classical conditioning is something I've read/heard of plenty of times(although I have not read the wikipedia entry I link to). Also, it's somewhat what I've realized I've been experiencing lately when I am somewhere and one of the FOUR songs they have always on at the gym starts playing. I just feel like I need to move, I need/want to start exercising. It works surprisingly effectively and I have not even been to the gym that many times. So I, in my infinite wisdom, have decided to try something similar to what Sheldon tries with Penny in the following clip:

But on myself. Just to see what happens. I, again in my infinite wisdom, think that instead of using chocolates I'll go for the cheapest and always available option of inflicting a bit of pain. Possibly the result of negative feedback for conditioning it's described in the wikipedia entry but it will be more fun to see whether it works or not. I'm also not sure that self-conditioning will work, but yet again, I'll just have to try.

What kind of pain? Well, first thing that I thought of was extreme pain as in that produced by hitting my infinitely sensitive to pain testicles. I'm just NOT going to do it. So I'll go for something less stupid like pinching myself or something similar. After all, I just want to test whether I can slightly modify my own behaviour indirectly or induce an indirect repetitive response to something, not get injured or loose my reproductive abilities.

"Exercise is for people who can't handle drugs and alcohol"

That is Lily Tomlin being quoted at the beginning of chapter 3 in Dean Karnazes's Run! 26.2 Stories of Blisters and Bliss. I got the Kindle version last night just by chance as it was very cheap, 2 pounds. It's the second runners kind of book a read lately that is not a training manual or a nutrition book, although this is different from the first one.

The first one, about which I've been thinking of writing for a while, was Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami's is an autobiography as a kind of memoir from a writer who has been running for as long as he has been writing. I enjoyed reading it. Karnaze's, although I've only read three chapters, is different as it is made of short stories, twenty six of them, one for every mile in a marathon. It seems like a collection of thoughts and anecdotes which makes it different from Murakami's as he is using running and his running history as an excuse to write about himself and his own personal history.

But today I want to write about what Karnaze's writes on his third story, the so called runner's high. According to wikipedia neuroscientists have no clear evidence on what it is that is responsible for that high, and this is of course only anecdotal and personal experience, but it's true that after I have run or after I have had an exercise session that taxes my body next to what I estimate are it's limits I feel what I, from my total lack of experience with drugs other than love or coffee, can only describe as a high. I am not entirely sure about the biochemistry underlying it, it may be endorphins or it maybe something different but as far as my personal experience is concerned, I can confirm it happens(whatever it is, the underlying mechanism must be biochemical because it happens in my brain and everything happening there is biochemistry(although I admit that I'm just playing with the words, cloaking everything under the name of biochemistry and just going on, but hey, I may as well claim it to be quantum mechanical and I'd still be right, but, at least in this particular case, it's not about me being right)).

Does it create an addiction? Do I feel withdrawal symptoms if I don't run? My answer is affirmative to the later and as for the former, I'll quote Karnazes's "Yes, so what of it?". That is what I told my mum when, I find it very ironic as she smokes and smokes a lot, warned me the other day with the wise phrase "be careful, that may become addictive". But I guess that suits my personality very well, I think I can become a very passionate and focused person if I feel like it(that is not necessarily all good and can, as it has in the past, backfire though). And that endorphins kick I get after some miles or some laps in the pool or lifting my ass up a wall is what makes me go back to my running shoes and also is responsible for part of my misery and grumpiness on the days I don't or a I can't run or exercise.

Yesterday was my day off and that and some other reasons made it not the best day, that's why today, with hopefully rested legs(the only reason why I did not run yesterday is because I could hardly run 7 km on Tuesday and at a very slow pace) I'll try to get some miles under the belt as I'm anticipating I'll need them this afternoon or more accurately I'll need those endorphins.

On a zombie apocalypse and how to survie it... (part 1)

Yes, it's Christmas and it's supposed to be a time of peace and love, but well, I've been getting up to date with The Walking Dead tv series. That has derived in myself, as any reasonable person would do, considering how the zombie apocalypse would occur around here and how I could survive it. Long story short, if I'm in Spain, I can do a good job. If this happens in the UK, I'm screwed. I don't even think they've ever heard of the concept of "window bars" or "solid doors".

If I elaborate a bit more, the fact is that, just by default, pretty much any traditional small town house in Spain, or at least in the south which is where I am familiar with, is zombie proof. We have massively solid doors, which are open the whole day and only closed at night as we have what we call Zaguán, a kind of small room traditionally with some azulejo(painted ceramic tiled work) and only then we have the kind of doors that you can find as front door in the UK. That second set of doors is not everywhere, but most of the houses have those. So, my point being that you can just close the real door and it's pretty much zombie proof. As for the windows, we have window bars, so, that's also covered. Hence, by definition, we are zombie proof as well as masked serial killer proof too. In the UK, well, doors and windows are easily broken so zombies, who happen not to worry about neighbours or police noticing them breaking in, would not have a problem. The same argument is valid for garden fences, those in the UK may keep foxes or dogs out of your garden but if you wanted to, you could kick them down. In my hometown, it's all a solid wall and if it happens to be a thin one or a not very tall one that you could jump over, it's usually topped with some cement and broken glass icing, that may not work for zombies, but walls tend to be resistant. We would be safer by default. Of course, if you happen to be trapped in a zombie infested house, getting out of there is harder in a Spanish one.

Weaponry, some may argue, would be our weakest point as Europe is kind of civilized and we ain't no cowboys around here. But hey, at least in rural towns, I'd say that 5 out of ten male adults hunt. We may not have big rifles, though as, at least around my home-town, we don't have any deer to hunt so the only kind of hunting they do(I've never actually been near a any kind of gun other than those that policemen carry) is quail hunting. But I guess that from a short distance those guns could open up a zombie head. And it's coming to short distances where all the tools people tend to have at home for gardening can be used for zombie head breaking. I guess British gardeners would have the same kind of tools, so we are even on that point, although that would only be useful in a one on one or maybe against a couple of zombies as you may find in a Spanish house. The problem with trying to clean a zombie infested British house is that the noises would alert the other zombies around and given the openness of the British ones, well, you're screwed.

Also, I visited a medieval castle(or well, a reconstructed very old one) in Cordoba. And my brother and I had some fun planning how to survive zombies in there. Also, they had a kind of collection of swords and I found what would be my chosen zombie killing weapon, a Spanish alfanje. Although the one they had there looked more or less like this one

My house is particularly well positioned as we have a big supermarket and a food store building next to it. And we have a well(although I'm not sure that water is drinkable). So, yay! I guess I could manage to resist the first outbreak and then slowly gain terrain cleaning house by house. The fact that we would not be the only survivors is a real possibility of course as pretty much every house around here has the same kind of default zombie proofness. But that, maybe, will be part 2 of my thoughts on a Zombie apocalypse.

If you happen to be curious about how a story would set in this part of the globe, there is already a trilogy set in the south of Spain. It is also masterfully written by Carlos Sisi and you are lucky because you can find the first book already translated in English: The Wanderers

I have this stupid thing with some songs...

I just cannot stop listening to them for some time, just play it again and again...



A friend showed me this one like two months ago, I listened to it for like a couple of days, but this blog was in some kind of limbo at the time, so I could not post it. Today, I saw it again because someone posted it on facebook... and I've been clicking replay since then.

On the other hand, I've survived my third massive family meal in less than 12 hours(I'll write about my family traditional two dinners in a row in Christmas eve in other post). That was somewhat eased by my 8 miles run yesterday and my 10km today. Turns out that wind can make a run on a flat surface much harder than running on hills. I must be turning into a masochist because I did enjoy every step of it. And I've spent a very nice evening working with my father and my brother on a Bachar ladder to play with in the garage and now my arms are tired and my ego has been deleted as I'm unable to go up without using my legs... :s

I love my Bachar ladder! It's really fun! :) Although the best part was working hand in hand with my brother and my father, we don't get to do that very often anymore :).

Also, given the stupidly depressing nature of the lyrics of that song, I need to compensate with something for this to remain a neutral post:



:).

And this one is just because I saw it on the sidebar on youtube and I like this song.



This is more a collection of scattered thoughts than a proper post. I guess my future me will just be able to get a glimpse of what was going through my mind now that I'm writing and will possibly have no clue what I really meant with this. Current me thinks that he does not mean much, he likes those songs and he enjoyed building the Bachar ladder.

Merry Newtonmas everyone!

Of course, there is no better way to say it than this:

I wanna jump!

I just want to jump!

What I was thinking on the train today...

Over the past seven years I may have done this trip, the one that takes you from Granada to Seville in the train, about a hundred times or possibly more. I've done it in all kinds of weather except for, I'd say,a heavily snowed one. But every single time the beauty of the Andalusian landscape strucks me with its tapestry of olive trees over the smooth domes with some rocky mountains, nothing of proper height, in the background. Here and there you get some wind turbines which some may argue are not beautiful, but here, even those are. That tapestry it's a very peculiar mixture of nature and human work, as the regular pattern used for the trees makes it look, from a certain distance, like a dotted portrait. Of course, this is much older than that concept by possibly some hundreds years.

Today was a lovely late december day in Granada. It was a very sunny september like day, indeed I think it burnt my cheeks a bit. By a lovely sun I mean that which warms your skin everywhere within photon reach and makes you take layers off. I ended up walking just on my t-shirt and accidentally my hat, but that's only because I had been swimming and I had wet hair. Of course, that's mainly due to the cosine of theta factor on top of the square of the distance from the sun to the earth in the equation that, approximately but very accurately, describes how the power of that our nearest star reaches the surface of this, our home planet(times a constant which depends on the units). It's that cosine of theta as I say, that makes the sun a bit of a bizarre joke up north in the Perfidious Albion, where you can only enjoy it from behind a window glass and only if you are inside a heated room. It does not happen to me anymore but in the beginning, not only one or two but many times I've seen the luminosity of a bright day from the inside of a not as often as I'd have liked heated room and I have gone outside just to catch some photons only to be slapped by a freezing air and having to convince myself that it is indeed a sunny day because my eyes are more sensitive to luminosity and if I look nearly straightforwardly at the direction of the sun, I have to close them.

From the balcony of a friend's apartment you can see, as if you had just gone there to enjoy the views, the city of Granada in all its charm. The cathedral towers on the bottom, with the Alhambra in the middle and the fractal snowed mountains of Sierra Nevada with their cake like frost on top. The everytime recognizable shape of Mulhacen, which appears sketched in plenty of touristic references to the city, in its whitest version with the bluest and cleanest sky on top. That was not the best thing there, of course. That's just the place, a framework made of a conglomerate of naturally formed mountains with some human additions, but it's the human side of it that it's most amazing. I say that because I consider myself a very lucky person as it seems that when counted, the number of good people I've met in my life outnumbers that of whoresons by a lot. And in Granada I've met a lot of them, good people I mean. Not all of them are still there as life has shuffled them around the globe but visiting the ones, even though I've not seen all of them as my trip was very short, reminds me that I'm a very lucky self-conscious tad of atoms.

I want to grow a beard...

I just don't have the necessary patience, at least now. Indeed, I shaved sooner after deciding I was going to grow one than the previous week when I simply did not shave because I forgot about it. So, I'll have to just put a picture of a guy with a beard:

That also happens to be a song that I've been listening to in continuous mode pretty much since I came across it. Before listening to this guys, I've just listened to Pegasus Bridge, a band I also came across by pure chance(some random Spotify magic). There are three songs I keep just going back to.





and



Sadly, these guys are no longer a band so there's not going to be more Pegasus Bridge, but I like these three.

Mediterranean

He was sitting on the shore. It was already after sunset and the only light was that of a shimmering lamp somewhere around. The sound of the waves dying against the rock filled everything, creating an isolating and relaxing atmosphere. That led him, although I am not going to say that it was inevitably, to consider whether she was also looking at the same sea at that particular moment, it was as if "he could feel it". But then out of the complexity that the human mind is, a thought landed on his mind: "Wait, that's just bollocks". Following that, the sea opened in two, allowing a stage to emerge and on that stage was Tim Minchin.

My best me

It's been in my head for the last days. Who's my best me? I mean, of all the me's I've been, who would beat the shit out of the others? Physically I mean. I like to think I'm at least as wise as yesterday or wiser, so, intellectually I should be my best me at every moment(or maybe I'm just becoming more and more an obnoxious prick). I can possibly point out three periods when I was at the peak of my physique: 16, 18 and 25 years old(although I'm still building up now). It's a bit tricky as those periods have been physique peak at different sports. For example, if we considered fighting, 16 years old me would kick all my others not ass but heads quite easily, not even breaking into sweat as I was competing at a decent level in Taekwondo at the time. On the other hand, I think 18 year old me was a better swimmer or at least had a better training and when it comes to running definitively I am at my peak( hopefully I'll change that next month and the month after that and so on... and I hope to take my swimming to a new level to :) )

I miss Taekwondo. I wish there was a Taekwondo school around. I mean, WTF Taekwondo, the olympic one, not ITF. There are a couple of ITF gym's around, I just don't like it(although I've never tried it). I'd love to get back to some amateur competitions, although I'm sure I'd be beaten up badly. I digress, but well, I'm writing hence I can do whatever I want :).

I'm learning to dance

Pretty much all my life I've consider myself a bit of a clumsy person not in the sense that I could not do the stuff, I could do it. It just would not look as clean as it should. At some point in the past I was good at Taekwondo, I could do all kinds of double and multiple, jump and spinning kicks. It just was not ballet-dancer-clean-like but it was effective and I did kick hard(if I warm up enough, I can still do some stuff).

On the other hand there was some music I recognize I've never been good. I've been told I'm kind of a Chandler style dancer, as in:



Which, truth be told, it's quite an accurate description of my dancing skills. Not that I dance much better these days or not that I actually care, I just enjoy the music, but recently someone tried to convince myself that I dance like this:


I wish.

Anyway, I've given up on ever learning to dance properly and I do just enjoy the music if I'm in the mood, at least on the horizontal plane. And yes, this was all a deceiving introduction, stupid you may say but I felt like writing it. I am learning to dance in the vertical plane, or tilted or, I hope that if I train enough in some time I'll be able to turn my dance floor around pi.

I am learning to climb and I love it. It's tremendously fun and challenging. As I say, and I'm just borrowing Eric Horst words, climbing is a vertical or a horizontally hanging dance. Most people, myself in the beginning included, think that it only requires a tremendous amount of physical strength and nothing else. It could not be more wrong. Of course it requires a minimum of upper body strength but that's easily achievable and it's only then when you start realizing how complex this sport is. I'm a newbie, I've only been to the walls a few times, but I'm hooked. In particular I boulder, with no ropes and I do it in the indoor gym because that's what I have available. Bouldering it's the equivalent of having a big rock and climbing it up just for the sake of it. Few moves but hopefully challenging ones. I've tried ropes a couple of times but either I was tired from bouldering or I just lack the stamina needed for it, I'm not quite convinced I like it that much, but I have to get better at it, someday. As I was writing, climbing is a vertical dance but it's also a live physics/optimization problem: your goal is to move in the most efficient way and compensating all the forces so as to get the most stable position. Which appeals to the physicists in me, well, I'm a physicists so that's basically saying that it appeals me.

Indicentally, last night I inaugurated the list of worst climbing sessions ever. It was the third time I went climbing in less than 7 days with running in between so I was a bit tired and I could feel my joints, my right elbow in particular, a bit stressed so I ended up not staying for more than one and a half hours and failing at pretty much everything I attempted(other than the easy traverse and the yellow roof traverse route). That was the last session of the year, in the UK at least, and that left me a bit disappointed, but hey, not everyday can be tremendously good, some days are just going to be bad. I've had those days running too, when I had to walk back a couple of miles back home just because after 4 or 5 miles my legs just decided to stop. I guess I needed to be reminded of the importance of recovery.

I shall be a half-crazy one

After some consideration, maybe too much, I've decided that I'm going to run half-marathons and shorter races this year(I already spoke of the half-marathon as my distance in the previous post). Maybe not even run that many races, but train for such short distances. I started last year with a beginners plan for a 5k, then run a 10k charity run and then stopped due to my own stupidity and in-adaptation to cold weather . I started running again back in September, being optimistic and pushy, I took the intermediate 10km race plan as mine and I've been following it regularly(more or less) although ignoring most of the quality training. I must say, I'm tremendously pleased with the results, I've gone from suffering for finishing 8km in one hour to covering over 20km in a bit more than two hours. But as I said in the first post, this is just the beginning.

The main reason behind my decision is that I think, I may be totally wrong though, that I should take advantage of my age, I'm only 25 after all, and train for faster times. I will have time to go far as I age. Or that's my plan.

Beware of the hills...

Or how reality slaps back.

After last Sunday I should've rested but instead I took advantage of my horrible swimming technique. Given that I don't kick, swimming would not bother my legs at all, and the little kicking I do, theoretically, could work as some kind of "active recovery". Plus, I wanted to avoid not moving for a day which I solved quite effectively as I ended up going to the pool three days in a row. On the other hand, pushing myself on the water a bit was something I had to do it as I'm not sure I will be able swim at all in the coming weeks until term starts again. Yes, term is over now and what was Hoghwarts has become a nicely decorated version of Azkaban, again, but I'll just have to be here for like a week and then I'm back to my motherland.

Motherland's a weird place but needless to say I kind of feel my roots. I surely have an Spanish character, not to mention a thick accent. But other than that, I have adapted more or less al-right to life in this land of pirates(although my fellow Britons learned about them as "patriotic sailors" in their history lessons) so as much as I'm looking forward to a couple of weeks of not having to worry about cooking and mostly having to worry about reminding my grandparents and my mother that my stomach has a finite size and capacity and running, I also know that a couple of weeks is possibly the upper limit of how long I can stay home without getting tired of it. We'll see. I'll get back to the present now.

As I subtitled it, I was hit by reality today. Very nicely but firmly and I think it is something good. I went for a long run, this time outside, with some wonderful friends of mine who showed me a lovely new running route. This route in particular happens to be also of a distance equal to that of a half-marathon, my distance, so it was perfect to test my finishing time estimate of about a couple of hours(not to mention my estimate of being able to finish). With an altitude change of 150 meters, it's as much an altitude change as you can get around here. I finally ran it in 2h and 20 minutes approximately. It's not like I was trying to run fast, I was going with my friends so I went at their pace. But after finishing(and having to walk the last bit of the hill because of the complaints coming from my right knee) I was totally knackered and I am actually not sure that running faster would have been possible to finish. So, all in all, I'm not that kind of superhuman that I was getting convinced I am, I'm still pretty awesome though :) . And I need to start training seriously and doing proper quality training. Also, I really need to get strength training in if I don't want me knees to be fucked up.

But I finished with a smile and, given that I didn't finish at my doorstep, I just kept running a bit longer, completing 14 miles(22.5km). It felt/feels good.

PS: This time my nipples are fine. Just in case you were worrying about it.

Note to my future self:

Don't put too much parsley on an omelette.

Also, remove the thick bits.

Other than that, man, that was an awesome omelette!

:)