Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I .......

Time to resolve, vow, declare and fully intend to do better and be better.

Yes, it is resolution time again.

Many years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution: Never make another News year’s resolution!

May I say folks – it has been rather easy to keep.

I heartily recommend it.

Why don’t we try New Year’s absolutions, dissolutions, or better still convolutions.

The last one I really like: New Year's Convolutions. It has a ring -a ding ding to it.

Take time this year to make things far more complicated than they ever needed to be. People will thank you for your convolutions.

Obscure, obfuscate,confound and confuse issues to your heart's content.

Bewilder and bamboozle people and they will admire you deeply.

It is the surest way to make sure nothing is accomplished.

Anyhoo, Happy New Year, dear reader.

My secret love’s no secret anymore……

It is time for that great Calliope secret to a great performance - secret training.

We will have barely scraped into 2010 when a couple of key events will confront the New Zealand race walking community.

The first, on January 10th, will be a 20 km trial to select teams of four men and four women to compete in an inaugural Trans-Tasman challenge against an under 23 Australian team.

The second, on February 22nd, will be the actual Trans-Tasman test in Hobart. It will be the first time in around 28 years that a New Zealand Australia challenge has taken place.

This blogger is hoping to front up in the January 10 trial. Although the men’s qualifying time of 1hr 50 is somewhat beyond my current race walking talents, the trial will be an opportunity to improve on my personal best in trying to approach the 2 hr mark.

I am entering a phase of  secret training  for the event.

We Calliope athletes are renown for secret training!

I am hoping my friend Tyrell, one of the great  secret trainers of all time will give me tips on how to keep my  secret training a secret – cos  this here blog certainly isn’t helping!

The picture below shows me out on one of my secret training sessions.

Now I hear you saying "where the heck is he?"

Well folks, that's a secret!!

What a wonderful world...

The il mondo trophy event is very arguably the most significant event on the race walking calendar. Once again this year, only the most elite walkers fronted up to Greenwoods corner for this auspicious occasion.


It involves 3 laps of a 2 km circuit which for the most part is either downhill or uphill. Someparts were particularly steep as the photo on the left makes clear.

Drama unfolded near the beginning as David gained a significant early lead on Mike. Yours truly fell in well behind Brooke and Alana to occupy fifth spot. Mike soon caught David and lead by almost 3 minutes at the finish.

Meanwhile back among hoi polloi walkers, an epic battle was being fought out for third place. By some Christmas miracle I caught the two lovely ladies during the second lap. The crowds were aghast in amazement. People on roofs clapped and ovated.

Up the final steep section we strove and strode stride for stride. I carefully explained to the girls that the sand was wet because the seaweed. This knowledge seemed to upset their rhythm. The tension was palpable.

At the finish it was a dead heat for third as these here results testify.

After the obligatory radio and TV interviews, we adjourned to a local coffee bar to plan the next great race.

You've come such a long way With no one to comfort you Or to tell you you're needed .....

The Calliope Athletic Club wound up for the year with its prize giving and Christmas party last Wednesday night.

Prior to the party, two events captured the imagination of the crowd: a one mile run followed by a one mile walk.

(For those of you brought up in the decimal age – one mile is 1609 metres to the nearest metre.)

Doing these mile events brought tears to many of the more mature athletes as they remembered those halcyon imperial days of old when they were fleet of foot.


It is an established rule in the club, that those aforementioned mature athletes may not have the assistance of their zimmer frames. However, a special zimmer frame race is envisioned as a future possibility.

Over 35 athletes (aged between 9 and 72) competed in the two events. Rod, the meeting director and astute timekeeper, deftly recored all times to one-hundredth of a second (as you do).

My friend Mike won the mile walk in 7:30 (a time not to be sneezed at). Yours truly managed a sound 8:25, passing the 1500 in 7:50.

Then it was on to the prize giving. Allan and Peter handed out cups and shields left, right and center. Certificates flew in all directions. Sandra brought a wheelbarrow for her collection.

Particularly notable was the fact that the marathon walk championship cup (won by Dave) was twice the size of the half marathon walk cup.  - ponder that folks!

Then a rather raunchy, risqué Santa turned up to dispense $10 secret gifts to the gathered Calliope congregation.

Finally came the hour of separation. We couldn't speak.

It had all been too much ....

Poor, poor Joseph, what'cha gonna do? Things look bad for you, hey, what'cha gonna do?

The poster has certainly caused some consternation in the Christian ranks.
Actually, the poster allows me to introduce an interesting topic - well interesting to me anyhooo.

SEMIOTICS

Semiotics is the study of how meaning in constructed through signs and symbols.

Signs and symbols include things like "ordinary language", logos, and pictures. The semiotics of traffic lights are fairly obvious.

Now those who rant and rave about the above poster, don't really appreciate semiotics.

The poster has a number of elements that contribute to its meaning: The words, the pictures, the relationship of the words to the pictures.

But there are other issues as well. The viewer/reader brings his/her own understandings to the interpretation.

Also the poster exists within larger contexts of culture and a range of other texts - the main one being the Bible.

So the first thing that must be said is that interpretations will be many and varied.

And that is precisely why this poster is of value at this time of year. It promotes discussion. It sidelines santa!

However, look at the semiotics of this next image!

How might it be interpreted?

And this last one from Japan.

I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me ....

What is it about Christmas that brings out the nicest and nastiest in folks?

Christmas can be fuming, fiery blend. It is a time of unsurpassed unrealistic expectations and mind-bending nostalgia. All of this can be a recipe for stress, loneliness, disappointment and an acute sense of loss when loved ones are no longer around.

Now I am starting to sound just a smidgen negative and I don’t want to.

Perhaps there are two Christmas stories running at the same time:

1. The rather inconvenient story of the humble baby from Nazareth, born in a barn. The one who clearly enunciated that the way to happiness was to seek a both transcendent yet internal reality and presence that could not be gained by any temporal reliance on materialistic external factors.

2. Then there is that other story. Our own individual story that we concoct in our heads about just how our Christmases should (must?) be. “This Christmas Story” is fed by unceasing commercial and media propaganda. The story, more often than not, repeats the mantra that our personal happiness depends on external factors: presents, goodies, events, people and everything going perfectly (or at least semi-swimmingly).

So it seems at Christmas there is a quintessential clash of narratives. I confess, like many others, I often find myself caught swinging between the two stories.

Perhaps it is a clash between presence and presents.

still remains within the sound of silence ...

Tinnitus. Now that’s a nasty little word folks.

If a young person asks me for a good career to go into, I say audiology. Get into the hearing aid game cos the demand is going to go up in the next few years.

How do I know this? (you ask) Well, if you travel to work by bus each day, it is a very easy deduction to make.

At least one third of the bus is securely buttoned into their ipods. And a tidy numbers of these tuned-in people have their ear-phones rattling, hissing and shaking. Indeed, there can be people many seats away and yet this guzzling, grating and grunting of ear-phones is easy to hear over the traffic and engine noise.

Now folks, a simple deduction or three can be made.

Firstly, they are tuned into a decibel level of around ten million; whereas the threshold of pain is 140.

Secondly, a key reason for this is that the young person is already partially deaf.

 And thirdly, the persons in question are prime candidates for tinnitus and early onset deafness in the prime of their pulchritude.

Now tinnitus is prove postive that silence can be very noisy. It is an intense and often very upsetting ringing in the ears. The most common cause is noise induced hearing loss.

Just how bad are ipods for your future hearing prospects? This article makes for sober reading.

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen friendly old girl of a town ….

The song was from the film Hans Christian Anderson. Danny Kaye sang it.

Han’s Christian Andersen was of course a great writer of fairly tales. How he would have loved to be in Copenhagen and attend the Climate Change Conference!

We are being called upon to be the generation that saves the planet! Wow! Heady stuff!

Don't ya just love a challenge!

There will probably be readings from the Climate Change Bible - the latest IPCC report.

The faithful will flock to Copenhagen - imagine the Carbon Footprint. No doubt the great apostle will be there, Al Gore.

Mike Moore in a recent Nu Zulun Heruld article warns of the danger of allowing the Climate Change "message" to reach the status of a religious faith. He points out how a judge in England "ruled that an employee's green views should be protected under legislation that makes it unlawful to discriminate because of someone's religious beliefs".

And I know the lucky old sun, he's got nothing to do ....But roll around heaven all day

I do belief in climate change, but I don't think we take the real cause seriously enough.

Walking back to happiness woopah oh yeah yeah ...

Pedestrianism. Now folks there's a strange old word. It was all the rage in New Zealand in the latter part of the 19th century.

The word occasionally referred to running and walking in general. But more often than not it denoted long distance walking races between professional athletes. And of course the general public placed wagers on these reknowned professional athletes.

These competitive walking events can be traced back to the late 16 century in England.

The above is an article from the Evening Post of January 26th 1889.

The fact that they covered almost 100 miles or 169 km in 15 hours is rather staggering. They were cutting out 11.26 km every hour or 5 min 20 per kilometres. That means they would have passed the 50 km mark in 4hr 26 mins.

Clearly they may have had a somewhat loose definition of walking in those days and we can well suppose from these times that a good deal of running was involved in this particular race. Or perhaps the writer of the article got it wrong and it was a 24 hour race. Some of these events were labelled "Go as you please" and some were more strict.

There were international competitions. Here is one from the Evening Post of February 14th 1888. The times and distances in this case seem far more reasonable. Or one might assume that things were stricter in the Home country (as the colonials referred to England in those days).

Hancock and Scott had many competitions over the years, both in England and New Zealand. In this case Scott covers 64 miles in 12 hours or some 108 km. And that is still getting along at a very good clip indeed.

Some of these competitions were indoors with laps as short as 80 yards and covering over 70 miles! Now work out how many laps you would have to do! Hawera and Normanby Star, December 1st 1883.

We will leave the last word to Laurie who walked just under a marathon in 5 hrs and 6 mins. Evening Post 22nd October, 1885.

And that is Frank the pedestrian signing off ...