All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey
It’s a while since I thumped the marathon tub. Let’s do it now.
Taking the baton from the desperate lunge of the previous entry, I did manage to see the doc — eventually. He rang in sick first time round — a self-referential conundrum of the type I enjoy — but I persisted, despite the dial on the knee throbostat clicking back a few notches by the time I got there. He prodded the unco-operative joint, and peered at it like it was an exotic marsupial twitching in a cage.
The eventual verdict was that ‘wear and tear’ is the culprit. In other words, I’m getting old and this is what happens. I had mixed feelings about this. I wasn’t sure I believed it. I wanted a more technical explanation. One minute I was gambolling like a spring lamb; next I was hit with a pain so bad I couldn’t get out of bed. I wanted the cause of knee-death to be more dramatic and more persuasive than ‘natural causes’.
But my rarely-seen more sensible half was relieved that the good doctor hadn’t donned his black cap before delivering the judgement. Even if the explanation was a bit weedy, there appears to be nothing obvious and seriously wrong. And he did mention that until recently he’d worked as an orthopaedic specialist at the hospital — so I’d have thought he’d be well placed to recognise a dicky knee when one arrived in his surgery.
His advice was that a return to the plodding life was likely to do it more good than harm, and that I should spit in the eye of my Boston Marathon anxieties. He didn’t use those exact words, but that’s my translation.
More practically, he said something that did start a train of useful thought. That I should think about running less often, and resting, or cross-training, more. The ‘less is more’ idea was the battle cry of the Mighty Swede of this parish, as he trained for the Two Oceans Marathon earlier this year.
It would be cheeky to take ‘less is more’ too literally, considering that I’ve barely run in the last two or three months. But I take it to mean quality over quantity, and it led me to dig out and rediscover a training schedule I’d read about in Runner’s World magazine a year or two back. It’s a 3-runs-per-week marathon plan, and was devised by the Furman Institute of Running & Scientific Training, an impressive sounding body, but one whose over-complex name was almost certainly chosen for its 22 carat acronymical value.
FIRST is essentially an offshoot of a university department in Greenville, South Carolina. It may well be just a room, or even a desk. Or perhaps it has no furniture whatever to its name. What it does have is this 3-runs-per-week marathon plan, which I’ve decided to try out.
There are two flavours: fast and slow, though needless to say they don’t call them this. The idea isn’t new but it’s good to see it with different wrapping paper. Each of the 16 or 18 week plans has a long run (bit slower than intended marathon pace), a tempo run (bit slower than 10K pace) and a speed session (about 10K pace). In between are a couple of easy cross-training sessions. It’s about time I got the bike out again.
The Boston Marathon is 20 weeks to the day tomorrow, which gives me a couple of weeks to drop a few pounds and become plodworthy. I’m up for it.
This week hasn’t been bad — the best for a couple of months. I’ve managed three runs. Two gentle 3.5 milers at the start of the week, and a more testing 6 miles today along the muddy towpath of the canal.
It was a windy, rainswept afternoon which explains why I saw no one apart from an invisible fisherman. All his gear was neatly laid out around his temporary home — but angler was there none. Maybe he’d been dragged beneath the choppy waters by an alligator flushed down the toilet years earlier in Whitley Wood.
My training hasn’t officially started, but it was hard not to consider this the first day of the Boston campaign. It was therefore an occasion for momentous thoughts. As I trudged, I forced myself to think the unthinkable. The unthinkable is something I think about quite often. It’s this: that I should give up alcohol for the duration.
Yes I know. But…
It would make a major difference to my chances of success. I’d lose weight much more quickly. The booze itself isn’t as calorific as the Enemy claims, but as I’ve often observed in these pages, it’s all the rubbish food I shovel down my neck at the same time that causes me such grief. I find it almost impossible to enjoy a pint in the pub without a bag of crisps or peanuts. At home, a glass of robust red wine is but a ghost of its true identity without a plate of cheese and biscuits. And once the crap food damn is breached like this, more must inevitably follow.
So abstinence makes some sort of sense, though it would be tough. Christmas isn’t a problem as I’m surrounded by teetotallers. I can think of a couple of impending social engagements that might challenge a non-drinker. And of course, there’s the little matter of the RC AGM in Almeria at the end of January…
As I plodded and pondered, Jez Lowe’s latest album entertained me. (Don’t worry, no one else has heard of him either.) As my desolate, wintry run reached its closing stages I was wondering which of these lilting shipyard ballads deserved the Track du Jour nomination. However, with the iPod now back on shuffle mode, something popped up that I’d not heard in a long time: a tune that instantly transported me back to my first university term in 1979. More specifically, to an appalling pub called the Phoenix in the Precinct Centre below the hall of residence I lived in for a while. It must have been the convenience of the place, but a few of us seemed to go there far more often than its ambience merited.
One of the few saving graces of the boozer was a cracking jukebox. Through that first, grim winter there was one song that seemed to offer us hope of something better to come. I, or one of the others in the gang, would ensure it was played several times each evening. Whenever those first few insistent bars of accoustic guitar appeared, conversation seemed to cease for a few moments, as though some sort of window on a wider, brighter world was being wrenched open.
On this blustery, nondescript afternoon, how great to hear that intro again, followed by those yearning lyrics.
All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey
I went for a walk on a winter’s day
I’d be safe and warm if I was in L.A.
California dreamin’
On such a winter’s day
California Dreamin’. This is now my campaign song, even if I may have to think of it as Massachusetts Dreamin’. Hope and hollowness, pain and spiritual lyricism, all bundled up together.
Sure sounds like a worthy marathon anthem to me.
