Stephane's thoughts corner…

Stephane Bailliez's thoughts on everything

Allan (who is now having an office next to mine at The Venice Project rather than 2 floors away -ie: just have to cross the hall to bug him on ######## and ######## implementation) suggested to train for the 15km Fortis Bruggenloop Rotterdam scheduled on Feb. 25, 2007. That’s 1.5 month of training in front of us.

15km is nothing normally serious, but it’s just a matter of doing it without hammering your body. But as we’ve both only been doing a bit of squash and gym at the SportCity next to the office in the last couple of months, that will at least give us an objective as well as trying to be a bit more careful about our diet.

I have a couple of kg to get rid of slowly and need to get me a very good pair of decent running shoes.

I’m trying to be a bit more slow and progressive in my approach to training as I was in the past.. I’m not 20 anymore and the way I was running (or getting back to run) when I was 20 something, does not seem to be really working when I’m over 30 (surprise, surprise…)

Last year, I injured myself pretty seriously by overtraining and doing sometimes 10km in the morning, 10km in the evening while running on hard surface (it’s not like living in the city makes it easy to run on the grass…). That was pretty sililly, Especially when afterwards you realize that running shoes where not exactly in tip-top shape. I have neutral feet so running shoe usage does not really show well on the sole but more on the shock absorption capacity, and when you’re over 80kg this is not something that should be neglected.

Basically what happened to me was a plantar fasciitis on both feet and it took me a year to get over that pain. The one on left feet disappeared somewhat within 6 months, on the right one it took another 3 months.

Point in case, chosing a good pair of shoes adapted to your foot type (supinator, pronator or neutral) and foot arch and body weight is important. So avoid going into a non-technical shoe store to get running shoes. (that works until you injure yourself).

I received yesterday the DVDs of Blue Planet (4 DVDs) and the new Planet Earth (5 DVDs). Enough to get me busy for a while.
I wanted to buy the Blue Planet DVDs for quite a while, in fact since 2003 when I was travelling/diving in South Africa and invited to stay overnight to home of South African video producer Fred Richardson. Fred showed me the video and I was absolutely amazed and thought ‘I have to get it’. For some reasons it did not happen until now.

Blue Planet present some incredible footage of scenes hardly ever seen anywhere. It’s more than certainly something that will be re-published in HD-DVD in less than 2 years. The only negative thing is the use of additional sound effects on a few specific scenes which can be misleading for the non-informed public and get sometimes irritating when all you would like is actually listen to the the ‘world of silence’ noise.

In addition I got the Planet Earth and Wildlife Photographer of the Year: Portfolio 16 books.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year host truely magnificent and inspirational pictures. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition is owned by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife Magazine. I might want to do a quick trip to London some day to catch up with some friends and drop by the Exposition as well.