Após 15 milhas da maratona de Loch Ness, deparei-me com esta placa. Dei uma espreitadela aos outros corredores à minha volta mas ninguém ria. Bolas, era eu o único lusófono.
Percorremos Dores e chegámos à proxima vila escocesa, Naspernas.
Boring English Post today. Tugaposting will resume shortly.
This post is going live on Saturday when I’ll be in Inverness. That’s further north in Britain than I’ve ever been before so I am very excited. I’m doing the Loch Ness Marathon and I am getting sponsored for a homeless charity called Cyrenians. We’ve probably all noticed there’s been a rise of homelessness as a result of a few different social trends coming together in the last few years. It takes me back to the early nineties when I used to work in a night shelter in King’s Cross. We had a few good years in between, when things seemed to be getting better, but it’s all gone sour again and it’s disappointing too see.
Anyway, as you probably know, giving money direct to homeless people can sometimes be a bit problematic, but giving to an organisation that provides services is a good way of really helping in sustainable, observable ways, and that’s why I chose this charity.
So, if you’d like to help out and help me meet the (ahem) slightly ambitious target I have pledged to meet, here is the page! Contributors get access to the selfies I am planning to take with the monster if I am lucky enough to meet him. Thanks in advance!
Attempting to take notes while listening in real time, without skips or pauses, to this video from Hugo Barreto. I’m not going to polish this one or check it, so it’ll probably be full of errors, I just wanted to practice my listening skills.
Começou a correr em 2012. Eis as suas dicas.
Obter ténis adequados.
Usar protetor solar
Hidratação é importante, não só no fim do treino.
Nutrição, se correres uma hora ou mais
Não ter treinos iguais. É importante fazer treinos mais ou menos intensos, incluindo intervalos.
Descansar entre os treinos
Dormir bem para recuperar a força
Fazer treino muscular para fortalecer os músculos das pernas.
Fazer aquecimento antes de todos os treinos
Fazer um plano estruturado.
Também acrescentou mais duas dicas
Recomenda-se nos usarmos provas como parte do treino, e não sermos em modo competitivo em todas as provas, apenas um ou dois treinos chaves.
Experimentar um aquecimento mais estruturado: correr durante algum tempo antes da prova.
My run of bad luck… or rather my non-run of bad luck continues. I was due to do the Meia Maratona dos Descobrimentos in a week and a half but I’ve had a weird infection that’s blocked my nose for weeks and left me unable to train or to sleep, and it’s not shifting, so I have had to drop out. Probably just as well because I also can’t afford it, but that’s another story!
Being an optimist (most of the time) I subscribed for the EDP Lisbon Half Marathon in March and I’ll probably try and do one closer to home later in December if I can get well again in the next week or so. I’m on antibiotics and steroid sprays and saline rinses. It’s weird, not like a cold, not like a flu or covid, just like someone has filled my nostrils with plaster of paris. I just want it to stop.
Super-optimist me wants to go for the Lisbon Marathon in December if the March run goes well. I’ve done 2 marathons before but mever managed to finish one runnning all 26 miles. In the Brighton one I hit a wall at 20 miles and just stopped for no reason and ended up walking about 3 miles before I could get running again. Disappointing. And as for the South Downs Marathon… well, I was just hopelessly out of my depth there! Hot day, savage hills, not enough training, not enough water. Took me about 6 hours!
I;ve heard Portugal has a strong running culture. I am not quite sure where it is. I mean obviously there are super-stars like Rosa Mota (who is still going strong) and my early influence, Jessica Agosto (hey, not bad, seven-years-ago-me, I can see you’ve made a couple of mistakes there but you were doing Ok for a newbie!), but I think there’s only one park run venue, I haven’t seen many runners around parks, and when I went running in Madeira earlier this year people looked at me like I was a lunatic. You’ve only to check the relative availability of the Lisbon Marathon (just sign up) vs the London one (join a lottery months in advance and hope the gods of running smile upon you).
I’ve always wanted to do a run in Portugal though: it’s a bucket list goal, just to see what the vibe is like. This is my third attempt now. Third time lucky right? Right?
I tend to follow mostly Booktube channels when I want to watch a video in portuguese but I’m training for a half marathon at the moment, so I’ve started watching this guy’s videos. He’s quite good on how to prepare and train. I don’t have as much free time as him I think, so I won’t be following his tips religiously, but it’s a good way of getting both training tips and listening practice at the same time. It’s quite a hard listen but I can manage, only dropping the occasional word.
Not interested in running? No worries, I definitely recommend looking for portuguese words related to something you are interested in, because it’s easier to focus on something you like, using visual clues to work out what they mean, rather than listen to something that’s aimed at learners but the subject matter is dull as ditch water. Throw in something specifically portuguese so as to avoid the Brazilian channels. So, in my case, “Meia maratona Lisboa” scored some decent hits and gave me plenty of channels to choose from.
Capítulo 1 (Domingo)
Vou participar numa corrida daqui a duas horas. Não me sinto em condições para correr. Acho que vai ser difícil… Vou na mesma, mas fica a dica: antes duma corrida, bolo de chocolate não vale a pena*. Existem rações mais nutritivas.
Capítulo 2 (Segunda feira
É provável que vocês estejam à espera duma atualização sobre a minha corrida de ontem e que não dormiram por se perguntarem “Mas conseguiu ganhar a medalha? E será que ele marcou um novo recorde da distância do seu grupo etário?”
Infelizmente, fiz uma série de escolhas pouco sábias. Fui de bicicleta até ao campo de corrida. Uma hora de ciclismo sob o sol abrasador não é aconselhável. Ainda por cima, antes de sair da casa, não bebi nada a não ser café. Tomei uns goles de água logo antes do início mas foi muito pouco e muito tarde. Rapidamente, fiquei desidratado e sobreaquecido e logo depois abrandei a minha velocidade e a corrida tornou-se uma caminhada. Nem sequer posso culpar o bolo de chocolate.
* It was rightly pointed out that this is crazy talk, chocolate cake is always worth it.
Penso passar uma semana em Coimbra. Há um festival de corrida em Agosto e apetece-me participar e depois passar uma semana a trabalhar, isolado num hotel sem distrações*. Será uma boa oportunidade de conhecer Coimbra sem fazer umas segundas férias** (já planeamos passar uns dias em França). Não sei precisamente quando mas vou fazer o meu plano em breve.
* You don’t say “without distraction” – it’s plural. I guess in English we focus on distraction as a mental state of being unable to work because of a chaotic environment, whereas in Português the emphasis is on the individual events causing that state of mind…?
**Férias is plural so by estension “a second holiday” is also plural.
I still haven’t definitely decided to go. In a plot twist, my daughter says she’d quite like to come along too. She has an EPQ project to work on, so we can have an intensive study week with relaxed, touristy evenings, I guess. That should be a fun experiment. I’ve never done this sort of thing before.
This is a short text trying to fit in as many expressions of will, intention or desire as possible. The expressions are from the Camões Institute’s C1 course. Thanks to Dani for the corrections.
Está nos meus planos fazer uma corrida daqui a três semanas. Tenho ideias de melhorar o meu desempenho da última corrida. Morro de vontade de manter uma velocidade alta durante a corrida inteira. Não suporto (a idea de) que* os meus tempos possam voltar a ser de mais do que uma hora como nas corridas do verão passado. Fiquei eufórico quando corri dez quilómetros em 55 minutos em outubro. Claro que preferia correr ainda mais rápido! Tenho ganas de ganhar a corrida mas não é provável e no fim das contas, deliro com cada corrida na qual ultrapasso os meus limites. Um dia claro cairia muito bem, e viria mesmo a calhar** se houvesse um vento forte nas minhas costas. Queira Deus que o clima*** esteja bom porque morro de aborrecimento quando corro em condições cinzentas e ventosas.
*=”I can’t bear (the idea) that…” This construction needs a noun immediately after it and when the verb does come, it’s subjunctive.
**=”vir a calhar” is a weird one and I think I got it wrong in the original text. Calha is a gutter so I took “vir a calhar” as something negative but it’s more like “being channelled in the right direction” so, like “cair muito bem” it has a sense of things turning out well by good luck. There’s a ciberdúvidas article about the expression if you want to know more. Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I made such a mess of this sentence that the marker didn’t really get what I was driving at at all 😔
***=I wanted to write “o tempo” but since that means “time” as well as “weather” it seems like it would be super-confusing here! Clima is more like “climate” than weather of course, so it sounds a little bit off.
Tenho tentado muitas vezes recentemente correr 10 quilómetros dentro de uma hora, mas em corrida após corrida os meus tempos tenho andado do lado errado da hora. Pois, tenho meio século*. Quiçá não deva estar assim tão chocado com** o meu declínio!
Mas enquanto há vida há esperança. Ontem finalmente atingi o meu objetivo. Depois de passar 5 semanas a treinar e a evitar hidratos de carbono e de ter perdido quatro quilogramas, fiz mais uma corrida num parque, à*”” chuva e cruzei a meta em 57:05. Muuuuiiito mais rápido do que o normal. Fiquei tão orgulhoso. Ainda há vida nestas pernas velhas.
(quando os organizadores deu me o meu número pessoal, foi 666. Que susto! Espero que a minha vitória não seja devida a Satã)
*=Tenho meio século sounds better than tenho um meio século – I have half century = I’m half (a) century old.
**=chocado com is another of those situations where the preposition isn’t what you expect. It’s “shocked with” not “shocked by”
***=and another! At the rain, not in the rain.
Luso 