Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Some mental calculations suggest that the weekend's Venice event probably contributed somewhere between 1 and 2 million euros to the Italian economy. This means that all it would take is to organise one of these every weekend for the next 20,000 years and Italy's debts would be cleared.

One of the local paper headlines yesterday didn't require much translation (as long as you knew that Berlusconi's nickname was 'Il Cavaliere') - 'L'uscita del Cavaliere - festa i piazza'. Must say I didn't see much evidence of any festas in Venice's piazzas (although that might have been different had we been a bit later for dinner - we walked past the Occupy Venice camp just before his resignation was announced), but then most of the people in Venetian streets are not actually Italians.

Also saw the splits from Sunday. Going left on our long leg (5-6) cost me a minute or so - obviously the crowds on the Rialto bridge and surrounding streets (the right option) weren't as much of a barrier as I thought they might have been. The splits also suggest that either my start wasn't as fast as I thought it was or others were slowing down more at the end - my late splits were a little better than the early ones.

Some new company for today's run in the form of Rebecca Minty, who's moving here early next year to work for an NGO which campaigns against torture (she's a human rights lawyer) and is over here at the moment, partly for a meeting and partly to set things up for next year (including trying to navigate the challenging local real estate market). Her mission is to try to convince countries in the Asia-Pacific to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture; I had assumed said protocol was signed only by countries that would never dream of practising torture in the hope of embarrassing those which do, but in fact not even Australia has ratified it yet - ostensibly because of a federal-state dispute over who is responsible for independent inspections of detention facilities, but one wonders if a desire to keep open the option of outsourcing the torture of the Mahdoub Habibs of this world to countries like Pakistan and Egypt has something to do with it. (You won't be surprised to hear that the Americans didn't even bother turning up to the meeting).

The run itself was a fairly straightforward out and back along the lake shore from her hotel (which is fairly close to where I stayed last time) as far as the swimming area on the south side of the lake. Definitely knew that I'd been in a race yesterday (and that perhaps I hadn't had as much sleep as I would have liked, thanks to a combination of a 11.45 p.m. arrival last night and a 4.30 a.m. telemarketing call on my mobile), but not too bad on the whole.