Quick update

Since my goal is to post a running related rant every Tuesday, I just had to put a few words down today. I am afraid I don't have much to report. This last week has been very bad in terms of running. There has been no running! I have walked a bit, like 16km in total for the week, but mostly I've been working on my methodology and ethics approval application. My time management skills need some serious work, I tell you. This is ridiculous. As soon as things get busy, I drop the running. I don't understand it. I love to run. I want to get better at running. But, it is just not happening. I am not going to stress about it too much, but will just try to do my best and be better at making the time to go for my runs.

This lovely Tuesday evening I'm sitting here with my laptop working on my ethics application. I have to send it to my supervisors tonight so they can read it over tomorrow and send it back to my with their comments. I have a week to submit. So if it isn't good enough now, I might have to wait another month for the next submission date. And I don't want to do that so the pressure is on!

Sorry, this is not a PhD post. Back to running. I saw this photo on the Runner's World page on Facebook earlier.

This is so true. It is all in your head, basically. And now I need to get my head back on right. Time management, here I come!

Cheers :)

 

Productivity ...

I love PhD Comics, they are just so funny. And a great way to procrastinate. Or when you just need to feel like you are not alone in the universe. Recommend you check them out.



This week (and many weeks before that!) has been a little like that comic. I've been going to my office and sitting by my computer all day, working away, but still have the feeling that I haven't actually done enough. Very strange. So, I've decided to try to log my work. I got that idea from my friend and office neighbour Sherrie, you can read her blog here! I am hoping that by logging my reading and writing, I can see just what it is I am doing. I will also have to log when I take brakes, when I'm working on my tutoring, when I'm going through emails and social media, etc. I am doing this because I think I am being to hard on myself. Sometimes I may spend the whole day 'writing' but only produce a couple of paragraphs. But that can often be a lot, because there is a lot of reading, thinking and gaining understanding of what I am writing that goes on behind the scenes, so to speak. I need to remember my Reggio Emilia philosophy here, it is the process not the outcome that is important. Well, obviously the outcome is important but I hope you get my drift. My proposal can only be between 20 and 30 pages, but it will have taken me 7-8 months to produce that document, so you can imagine the thinking, reading, writing, re-writing, re-reading, re-thinking, editing, changing, reconstructing, re-re-thinking and re-re-writing, and then some re-re-re-writing that needs to go on for me to be able to produce a quality proposal that will be accepted. It often feels like I'm going in circles, like a cat chasing its tail. But then I have days filled with 'Eureka' and feel extremely clever and on the top of my game, only to be knocked down to Earth by reality the next day. Like I've said before, this adventure is a roller coaster ride!

Yesterday I went on a Waikato river cruise with a group of academics. We had a BBQ and wine tasting and I had a great time. It was great to talk to people from Iceland, Sweden, Scotland and New Zealand and just have fun. But, staying up late and drinking all that wine caused me to oversleep this morning! I'm such a 'hen-head' as we say in Iceland. Not good for my productivity log! And I have just over a week for my ethics approval application deadline so I have no time to waste. Looks like this will be a long working weekend! But last night was worth it ...

Running update

This last week I've been on point with my training and running goals. Last Tuesday, I went to the gym and got my tempo run in plus leg training. The tempo run went very well. I only did 3km, am working very slowly to build my mileage, but I was in the lactate threshold zone of my heart rate for most of the run, minus a short warm up and cool down. I was very happy with my effort and felt good afterwards. Regarding leg workouts, I don't go overboard when I have leg day. At least I didn't think I was going overboard. I did 10 normal squats, 10 lounges (each leg) and 10 one-legged squats (each leg). Now, that does not sound like a lot. But OMG, I was so sore for days after this. I am just so weak, it is seriously not funny. I guess all I can say is that I will hopefully get stronger and be able to do more. According to Runners Connect, runners shouldn't really use the leg-machines at a gym, it is more effective to just do free-standing leg workouts. So that's what I'm doing. I didn't use any weights, just my own. I was like a duck, couldn't walk properly for a couple of days. Crazy!

On Thursday, I went for my recovery run, where you should be in the recovery training zone. That means running VERY slowly, at least in my case. In fact, I had to alternate between running and walking, cause I just couldn't run slow enough! My heart-rate kept going too high. And, remember, I was sore as hell, so I didn't manage to run/walk very far. I actually cut the run short, and only went 1,6km, my thighs were just screaming. Hahaha, this is so embarrassing! Sunday was long run day, and it was lovely. My soreness had gone away and I had such a great run. I was actually pleasantly surprised that my average pace was 7.40m/km, still within the long run heart rate, so that was a happy discovery. I was sure I would have to run in the 8m/km range. I want to be able to 6m/km for the half marathon, to reach my 2.20 goal, so it is doable I suppose. Whether I will make it this August, we will have to see.

Even though this has been a good week on the training front, my eating front has been troublesome. I don't know what is happening. I just keep having these crazy cravings. Maybe I'm bored. Tired of eating like I'm eating. Because I don't think these cravings are physical. I think it is all in my head. And I can get bored quite easily, I need things to be exiting and fun. So now I am looking into what I can do differently to keep myself motivated. Maybe I am also getting tired of the lack of weight loss in the last month or so. I've basically been the same weight now for way too long, and it is frustrating. I'm going to 'hydrate my brain' as we say in Iceland, and try to find a way to get out of this rut. I need to get some clothes for autumn and winter. I was thinking that I should get them a size smaller than I use now, so that will motivate me cause I am quite poor and can't be buying clothes again if I don't fit into what I have. But I'm not sure if that is a good idea or not. What do you guys think? Anyway, we'll see. Right now, all I have time for is to do my methodology and ethical approval application. An important deadline is fast approaching!

Cheers :)

A week to cherish

This has been a good week.

Last weekend I spent a lot of time finishing grading my students' first assignment as well as giving them feedback on their online discussions. And I was working on my proposal. But I managed to watch a couple of movies and sleep in, and go to the gym. So it was a very productive weekend, which is usually not the case as I really like my super lazy weekends.

This week I have been working on my methodology. Well, I've been starting to work on my methodology. Need to do a lot of reading around it as you might expect. I feel like I've been working so hard all week, but I don't yet have a lot to show for it as of yet! Tuesday was 'ShutUpAndWrite' Tuesday on Twitter, and I participated as usual. I love these sessions. It's only an hour and it is just nice to share with others what you are doing and see what others are doing. Today (Friday), we have our Doctoral Writing Conversations workshop and we will have a SUaW session as well. That will be fun, I'm sure. If you don't know what this is, you can check it out here. I like these kind of things. Writing you PhD can be a very lonely project so being able to share something, even just a sentence or to about what you are doing with other people, even strangers, is great. I like it. And Twitter is great for networking and following people you find interesting.

I guess my weeks are quite boring these days. I am getting closer to serious deadlines, like the one for my ethical approval. So there is very little going on with me other than PhD and running. The only social thing that happens is at lunch, basically. I'm hoping things will calm down after Easter, when I've finished this tutoring job, and then I can hopefully do something more fun in the weekends and evenings. Now, I'm just so exhausted when I go home in the afternoons, and I spend at least 1 hour every evening working as a tutor, so by 10pm, I'm comatosed.

My proposal is going well. I got very positive feedback from one of my supervisors and feel like I am really in 'da zone' when it comes to my literature review. It still need a lot of fine tuning and editing and some clarifications here and there, but the core of it is good. Now I just look forward to getting feedback from my other supervisor. But meanwhile I am working on my methodology. What joy! Yes, that is sarcasm. Well, not completely. I am a very structured person. I like to plan things, write things down, make lists and tables and have a visible cue to what I need to do. My planner looks like this:

 

So as you can see, I am a teenage girl ;) Seriously, though, just making things look nice and fun and not so serious all the time, makes all the difference to me. Obviously, this is not how my methodology will look like!



I do like that I am progressing well enough to be able to start working on the methodology, but it is the process of getting my head around epistemology and ontology and all that good stuff that is a little bit tricky. My research is a qualitative one. If I am understanding it correctly, my epistemological stance is social constructionism, the belief that knowledge is constructed through interactions with others. I'm not sure yet how to define my ontology! Foucault is my lens and through that lens I am using an ethnomethodological approach, finding out how people (in my case toddlers) make sense of the world. My research design is a case study. I will be examining certain phenomena in a certain early childhood setting. My research methods will be participant observations and document analysis. My analytical tools will be conversation analysis and discourse analysis, possibly critical discourse analysis. This is the skeleton of my research. Now I just have to work to understand exactly what all of those terms mean! Lovely.

Have a great weekend and see you next week :)

New Running Goals

I know I am going a little crazy with blog posts this week, but it seems I found my muse ;)
I have made a plan for how to use this blog. I talked about it a little in my post last Friday, but basically I will post PhD Adventure blogs on Fridays, every week!, and Running blogs on Tuesdays, every week. I've got things organised and planned through, with an outline of how every blog should look like, so let's dive in. As today is Tuesday, here is my Running blog for the week.



I had very high goals for this year's running. I like to aim for the stars, so to speak. I want to run a marathon and figured it would be a great way to celebrate turning 40 by running 42.2 km in the Auckland Marathon in November. I also planned to run 2 halfmarathons, at least one 10K and twelve 5K park runs. Then things changed. Because of all the changes I made to my eating, I simply did not have the ability to train in January and most of February. I am back on track now, with 3-4 runs a week plus strength training so I needed to re-evaluate my goals.

First of all, I am forced to postpone my first marathon. I won't be anywhere near Auckland in November so that it just not an option. I am not going to be ready in August, for the Reykjavik marathon, and I won't be able to travel to any place in Europe in October/November, so my marathon ambition has been put on ice. There is always next year! I have not run a 5K yet this year. Hopefully I will be able to take part in my first park run at the end of March. We will see, I am not going to stress about it. The 10K is still on the table. Where and when, I have no idea. There is a 10K race close to my hometown in August, but the timing might not be suitable so I still don't know if I will be able to keep that goal. That leaves the half marathon. I have already signed up for the 21.1K distance in the Reykjavik marathon in late August. And I am still hoping I can find the money to go to Wellington for the first weekend of July to run the half marathon distance in the Wellington Marathon. At least I will run one half marathon this year. I really look forward to it.

I have basically created my own training plan. I have an overall idea of mileage and how to increase it slowly, but I only plan one week at a time in advance. There is no 12 week plan or 16 week plan or anything like that that I am following. I need to get better at listening to my body (mostly my knee!) and having a long term plan doesn't help me do that. I subscribed to emails from Runners Connect, just the free stuff, and it is fantastic. I would love to be able to get more personal assistance from them, one day maybe, but at the moment the free emails will have to do. There is so much good information, and a lot of it is new to me. They talk about training with a heart beat monitor, how to strength train properly as a runner, how to build mileage, what to eat (which I ignore as they are still using the traditional 'you have to eat carbs' method) and just a lot of good information. I have started using the heart rate method. I was doing that last year as well, but now I'm taking it to the next level. Taking it very seriously and not looking at my pace at all. And I am building my mileage very slowly. When it comes to how much I run (or will run as I am just starting up again), my thinking is that I will do 3 weeks of build up (15km, 16,5km, 18km/week) and then have an easy week (15km), and then build up again for another 3 weeks (18km, 20km, 22km/week), or something similar to that. I really need to keep my knee healthy. The plan is to do 4 types of runs. Day 1 is an interval (fartlek or pyramid) plus strength.  During the intervals you go up to the anaerobic training zone, it is a VO2 max speed work. Day 2 is a tempo run in the lactate threshold zone, plus strength training. Day 3 is a recovery run, and day 4 is the long run in the aerobic training zone. Those weeks when I can only run 3 days, I will leave out either the interval run or the tempo run. The recovery run is very important so that one is always staying, as well as the long run.

My strength training consists of upper body workouts, lower body workouts and core work, the basics. I do the core work more or less every day that I run. I have such a week core. I can barely do 30sec of plank! That needs to change. I am also doing yoga. Just at home using YouTube, for example this video. I am working on my flexibility so this sessions is perfect for me. And it is not too long, so I can easily do it in the mornings before breakfast. The plan is to do yoga on days I don't run. Would love to create a good yoga habit and do it everyday. That is still a work in procress. So, this is my training schedule. Next week I will go into more detail about certain aspects of my training.

Keep calm and run like the wind :)

My PhD Challenges

I am enjoying my PhD Adventure very much. There are ups and downs, for sure, but I cannot help but feel privileged and fortunate being able to chase this ambition of mine, to follow my dream. I know that there are a lot of people, a lot of women, who are just as capable as I am but not able to follow their own dreams, whether it be in education or anywhere else, because of a vast array of reasons. So I count my blessings and try to put everything I have into my work and PhD experience. There are, however, some challenges that I have to overcome on a daily basis in order for this to be a successful Adventure. I am sure many of you have these same challenges, and deal with them in many different ways. Here are some of mine, in no particular order.

1. Language. English is my second language. I started learning English when I was 12 years old. Before that, I may have known some phrases and words, but not a lot. I loved my English lessons. All through school I excelled at English. I went off to University and did my first Bachelors degree in English language and literature at the University of Iceland. And I did a good job. My thesis was on Jonathan Swift and his A Modest Proposal, which is probably the best satire ever written. Later, I went off to do my Masters degree in early childhood education and care, and as it was an international masters, all the courses and the thesis, was in English. And I did a very good job. English has almost become my natural language, I think in English most of the time, I obviously write a lot in English, but not only academic stuff, sometimes I will write my grocery list in English. It has just become natural to me to use that language. Don't get me wrong, I am making sure that I keep my Icelandic roots, but English is my day-to-day language and therefore it has taken over my brain, I suppose. But it is not my native language. And I do sometimes struggle with it. I obviously have an accent, which apparently sound Scandinavian! My accent differs from situations to situations. Sometimes it is very strong. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes I am lost for words. Even though my vocabulary is quite big, sometimes I cannot find the words I need in that particular situation. And that can be very frustrating. In these last few months, I have found that my vocabulary is getting bigger and more sophisticated. So that is great. But writing a doctoral dissertation, around 100.000 words, in English, will take effort. I am more than willing to do the work, but sometimes it feels difficult and frustrating. This is, however, a challenge I am more than willing to take on and quite capable as well!

2. Being 17000 km from home! I googled it and that is the distance I was given between New Zealand and Iceland! It is hard being so far away from the people you love. For me, what I find the hardest, is the time difference. I am 12 hours ahead of Iceland and Ireland, and 13 hours ahead of Norway. So I cannot just call people when I feel like it. They might be sleeping or at work when I am relaxing at home, feeling like Skyping, chatting on Facebook or calling them on the phone. Or I might be trying to work during day time here while they would love to talk. And of course the knowledge that I cannot just jump on a plane on go home for the weekend, like I could while living in Oslo. So this is definitely a challenge. I am obviously tackling it by going to Iceland for my data collection (among other reasons) so that should help somewhat. But as I am not planning on moving back to Iceland on a permanent basis in the near future, this is a challenge I will have to take on for the long run. I guess 'make one's bed and lie in it' is referring to exactly this situation!

3. My personality! I am an introvert. Which will make me a very good researcher because I can spend for ever just reading and writing, and just spending my free time with people I already know and feel comfortable with. But one of the goals of PhD is networking. You need to get to know other people in your field, both to build your own reputation, but also to collaborate on projects, to make connections that can help you get funding as well as help you get a job after you finish. So I am going out of my comfort zone by doing this PhD. My comfort zone has been getting bigger and bigger for the last 12 years, when I got fed up with my insecurities and shyness and just had to do something about this fear I had of social interactions. I took public speaking classes, even took part in a public speaking competition with my local JCI chapter, which we won. I also took classes on project management and how to organise and manage meetings. I sat on the board of my JCI chapter and tried to do my best to organise events and learn how to be more social. I was also a union rep at my job. I played in a solo recital when I was doing my piano exams, a whole concert with Chopin, Bach, Beethoven and others. I was my class rep for one year of my masters programme. I sang duets in my choir in Oslo. I sang solo in a master class with my singing teacher and fellow students. I sat on the board of the Icelandic Association in Oslo and organised a couple of event through them. And now I am working with Sherrie, and hopefully others, to create social and academic events for us and our fellow PhD students at the Faculty of Education. And I am even contemplating becoming a board member (or at least a volunteer) at the Post Graduate Student Association at the uni. I actually went to a Pizza night earlier today, with the PGSA (didn't have any pizza though!), although I actually hate these kind of events. There is nothing as terrifying to me as small talk. Seriously! It is the worst thing in the world. And none of my closest friends were going to this event, I knew Carrie, the outgoing president of PGSA, whom I know, was going to be there, and maybe a few others that I kind of know, but the whole situation just made me very nervous. I almost walked past the place. I actually did walk past the place. But then I turned back and faced my fears. And it was fine. I managed to have some small talk, and thankfully almost everybody wanted to talk about being a PhD student anyway, so there was plenty to talk about. This is a challenge I am taking on with all my might, I am sure it will be difficult and even painful at times, but I refuse to let my insecurities and old baggage drag me down. So here I am, expanding my comfort zone centimetre by centimetre!

I could probably go on and on about the things I find challenging and difficult. But I won't. Indeed, I think my next post will be about the positive things about my Adventure. Not that those challenges are negative. I am learning and growing as a person, as an academic as well as professionally, so I love those challenges. They are what makes this PhD Adventure worth it. And it is worth it. I have no doubt at all. Magic happens at the end of your comfort zone. And I love magic :)

Bryndis

Aims and objectives!

For the past few weeks I have been wondering what to do about this blog. I like the idea of having a blog. I like to write down my thoughts and reflections and stories from my life, and I like sharing them with others. But for some reason I just haven’t been very active here on my blog even though I would want to. I think that may be because of lack of structure. What is this blog about? What is its purpose? So I have come up with some answers to those questions that will hopefully make it easier for me to put up blog posts more regularly. In fact, I have decided to do weekly blogs. At least! I plan on using Fridays for my blogging days. Well, not the whole Friday, but you know. I might blog more often, but for now I am giving myself a task, organising my schedule and an hour or two on Fridays will be dedicated to my blog.

The big question is, what is this blog going to be about. I suppose I will mostly be posting the same things I have been posting, just more regularly. I call myself the RunningResearcher. That kind of says it all. I am struggling a little bit with my running motivation these days but I feel that I am getting it back little by little. I think that might be because it is starting to get cooler here, autumn is just around the corner, and there is nothing better than going for a run in the cool air. My body is also starting to get fat adapted, so I am able to run and exercise more every day. I will, therefore, very likely talk about my running ‘journey’ on this blog, and I might talk a little about my overall ‘health journey’, like my new way of eating, the fact that I am trying to get into yoga again, and strength training that works for runners. So the Running part of my dual identity will certainly be visible on here. The Researcher part of me will probably be dominant, though.

I am now in my fifth month of my PhD. Here in New Zealand, when you start your PhD, you start with a sort of ‘conditional enrolment’, and in the first 6 months you work on your research proposal, get ethical approval and then present your proposal to a panel of experts. They will then decide if you can go on to ‘confirmed enrolment’, which means that you can continue with your research, start gathering data and things like that. They can also tell you that you need to work on the proposal some more, giving you feedback and time to fix what needs to be fixed. Or they can just tell you to go home! Obviously, I am working towards the first option! You can extend those 6 months if you need to, and I will probably extend a couple of months. That is because my initial idea was to conduct my research here in Hamilton, in the NZ context. But, after considering a lot of different things, I decided to change my context to Iceland. So I will be gathering my data in Iceland. Cannot wait to go back there, but that means that I needed to do some changes to my proposal, and it always takes time to get things in place. Anyway, the proposal is split into different sections. You need to state the aim and objectives of the research, why this is a significant topic worth researching, you need to present a literature review of previous research on your topic and where your research sits within the field and what it might add to the knowledge base. You need to address all ethical issues, present your methodology and have a clear timeframe of how your research will progress. So those are a lot of things you need to do in 6 months! At this moment, I am “finished” with the first parts of my proposal and am now starting to work on my methodology and ethical approval application. I think everything is going well and I am making good progress. You often get discouraged when you are working on something, and all of a sudden it doesn’t seem to make any sense. The other day I was almost in tears because I just couldn’t see what I needed to see in my literature, how I could connect this to that. But then the next day, I was in cloud nine because everything was making such great sense. This PhD is definitely a rollercoaster ride! But I love it, the good and the bad.

See you next week :)