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Sunday, 3 April 2005Perhaps the past really is a foreign country.Ambling idly through my teens the other day, I came across a tiny snicket I'd not noticed before. Peering down it, I see myself walking home from the pub one evening, aged about 17, and coming across a very fat skinhead with his left hand around the throat of a pretty girl. In his right hand he had a hefty claw hammer, and was waving this around above her head. He was shouting drunkenly: "If you don't fall in love wiv me, I'm gonna smash yer fackin' face in, yer bitch." Call me conventional, but this didn't seem to be much of a seduction strategy. It did set me thinking though. The hard routes to the summit often masquerade as the easy ones, and vice versa. For everyone's sake, I should have advised him of this, but wasn't minded to interfere. Let's take the bullet train through the next 30 years, eventually gliding to a halt six hours into yesterday morning. I cursed into the pillow. Got up, ate dry toast and a banana, then drank a glass of some gloopy Waitrose stuff made from exotic fruits. The carton implied that imbibing this material would see an end to all my troubles. Time to find out. At seven o'clock I was out the door and away for my last long run of this Hamburg campaign. In the empty early morning, running across an open field, through the thin mist, it was almost too painfully gorgeous. Just one too many mornings, and a thousand miles behind. Mile Two. Back on the lane. Past the waving postman. "Lovely day", he calls out. Then: "Lucky you! Some of us have to work!" Into mile 3, and I'm still chewing over his words. Some of us have to work. Indeed. Through the deer park, and back around the golf course. Even at this time, the fairways are congested with middle-aged, Tory-voting men in outlandish trousers. I fancy that golf is like Gorgonzola, or the mysterious durian fruit. The taste may be glorious but there's something about the aroma that puts me off. Around Mile Seven I pass home, and duck into my front garden to download some Boots' isotonic lemon. Isotonic Lemon? Didn't I see them on the same bill as Kraftwerk at the Marquee Club in the seventies...? It's well after 8 o'clock now, and the sun is getting high. My shirt is sweat-wet, and I can feel my heart pumping beneath it. Within a minute I'm on my way again. The second circuit is harder. As every mile passes, I find myself still shouting out loud: Mile Eight! Mile Nine! Mile Ten! Mile ten, and I'm feeling the first signs of weariness. The pistons are getting sluggish. I can feel my breathing now. You don't notice it for ages. Then you do. You notice the air being sucked in and drawn out again; it's like pulling a rope through a narrow tube. I feel my neck stiffening. I try rotating my head, but there's a painful crackling and grinding sensation in my neck, so I stop. The cure is worse than the disease. It's really quite hot now. April hot. We've not seen the sun for months, remember. Maybe you had to be there, I dunno. But you should have heard the birds. I don't ever remember them like this. Mile twelve. Past the old fire station for the third time. Or is it the fourth? My route today is a local six miler that I'm repeating three times, with just enough variation to keep it interesting. Here's a tip for you. Most of us have a route we run regularly. A round-the-block run. When it threatens to bore you, just do it in reverse. It's like looking through a telescope the wrong way round. You'll be surprised at how different the world becomes. 13.4 miles. Two thirds of the way to 20, and right on cue, I'm back in my front garden, glugging more liquid lemon stuff from my Great North Run 2003 souvenir water bottle.  The final third is tough. It becomes a mechanical chug. I get through 14 and 15 but thereafter is something I've almost forgotten about now. Head-down, get through it. Just get through it. I'd hoped to make it through without a walk break, but on 16 miles, I just had to take a breather. I walk for a minute then carry on. Same on 17 and 18, and very probably again on 19 and 20, but I can't remember much about them.
20.4 miles. All gone. Finito. In ze bin. Last long run. Job's a good un. Done and dusted. Buttoned up. 20.4 miles, and not yet midday. In the warm sunshine I sat on the doorstep and carefully removed my shoes. Hot sweat ran down my nose and into the corners of my mouth. M is waking up around now. It's her long lie-in day. As I thump up the stairs and into the shower, she calls out sleepily: "What have you been up to?" Well, what had I been up to? "Nothing much", I call back. An hour later we drive into London. Halfway down the Goldhawk Road, I turned the car over to M, and jumped out. She goes onto the V & A. The only objet d'art I'm interested in at the moment is a pint of Guinness. This glass of beer is like a three course meal and a good cigar. In the pub I bump into Nik, who I've not seen for 2 years. We talk about his shin splints and lack of running. As we walk to the match I give him a pep talk. I meet up with Andy, who sits next to me in the South Africa Road. He looks relieved. He can drink again after giving it up for Lent. "What a pleasure it is to wake up with a dreadful hangover again", he tells me. We comprehensively outplay Sunderland but they beat us 3-1, which is probably why they are top of the league. A travesty. After the game, I eventually meet up with M again and we drive off to Chiswick, where we enjoy a fine dinner with some old wine trade friends, Monsieur B and his wife, A. It's a splendid evening. We absorb a lot of good wine and take a long hike through our twenties and thirties. It's years since I drank such decent stuff. Top of the shop was the 1983 Château Gruaud-Larose, a great second-growth Saint-Julien. Preceded by some good Australian fizz, a 99 Meursault and a densely packed Spanish number called Flor de Pingus, which was a new one on me. Plus some other stuff. On the long journey home I thought about all these wonderful wines. They were good, but I also thought about the moment this morning when I sat on my doorstep in the spring sunshine, struggling to pull my trainers off. And I thought about the taste of my 20 mile sweat. Salty, but so sweet. And do you know which I thought tasted better...? Don't be stupid. The Gruaud-Larose won it by a mile. By twenty miles.
*** The hammered skinhead was disarmed, incidentally, by an even fatter taxi driver.
Tuesday, 5 April 2005The least startling newsflash of the year so far came late morning, with the announcement of a general election on May 5th.The thought of four weeks in which no baby is safe from the rasping upper lip of some grinning, matey candidate fills most people with dismay - but I'm delighted. An election is like the World Cup or the Olympics to me. A quadrennial treat, rich in drama. The jousting may be verbal rather than athletic, but the competitive element is there for us all to marvel at. This evening I teamed up with the local running club again to do a perky 4.8 miles. How different it is to have daylight on these runs. I've spent half a winter dodging wheelie bins that lunge at me in the darkness on these jaunts. I half suspected that Tilehurst must be a land of perpetual night. But no. This evening I saw a green, parkland hill. More than that, I ran across it. In the light. Then we headed down and down, arriving eventually at the River Thames, along which we ran for a mile or so, perhaps more. I enter my three week marathon taper in reasonable working order. No strains or pulls or mysterious infections yet. My main concern is a marked loss of energy. I seem to have been suffering from a slow puncture over the last few weeks. I remember some of these outings with the Tilehurst gang a couple of months ago when I felt strong and really up for a brisk run. Now I'm panting and struggling to keep up. But I don't even have the energy to worry about it. The excitement about the race hasn't yet started. This doesn't worry me. It will happen, and anyway, it would be more draining to be feeling hyper at this stage. The Runner's World forum has become hysterical about the impending London Marathon. People are squealing and fainting all over the shop. Too emotional too soon. Their doctors should be prescribing the political pages of The Times for the next couple of weeks. That would keep the blood pressure down. Saturday, 9 April 2005Being able to distinguish between a trough and a mere dip is a bit like owning a grapefruit knife. It's hardly ever needed, but invaluable when it is.I'm having a dip. Today was supposed to be my 12 mile long run day, as part of the wind down to the Hamburg Marathon in two weeks time. 12 miles today, went the daydream, with a restful 3 or 4 tomorrow. Butit hasn't happened, and with the few beers consumed this evening, I'm not sure it will happen tomorrow either. I woke up knackered after a late night in front of the computer, where I'd been kicking off the lengthy (in fact, eternal) task of sprucing up this website and migrating over to runningcommentary.net.It's been on the cards for over a year now, and can't be put off any longer. The site's been going for 3½ years now and needs some fresh impetus. For a long time, the diaries and the forum have been the only moving parts, and I want this to change to increase the site's usefulness. I also need to dabble in a few TLAs like RSS, PHP and XML, but, in the words of the great Mississippi John Hurt, that ain't nobody's business but my own. (Unless, of course.....) So I stayed up half the night doing stuff, then woke this morning feeling like doing nothing. It's an unwanted disruption to the marathon training which, on the whole, has gone pretty well. I've run only twice this week, and need to keep my enthusiasm topped up. The first time I went through this I'd have been very dispirited by missing a run and feeling as floppy as I have done all week. But it's happened a few times before, and I now know that, well, these things happen. It's an old cliché, but it's how you respond to setbacks rather than whether or not they occur, that's important. We'll see... Sunday, 10 April 2005 How many people under 40 know what this is?
Until this morning, I hadn't realised how low in our esteem the humble bicycle bell had fallen. It seems to have been all but eliminated. Running down the canal for 12 miles, I was overtaken by a total of 34 bikes. I've no objection to them on the towpath. The average cyclist looks like a quivering sack of jelly abandoned on a garden wall, so it's probably the only exercise these poor people get. Moreover, the path is part of the SUSTRANS network, so I expect to see the weekend cyclist, and believe in our harmonious coexistence. But some of them are complete tossers. Perhaps the excess weight that most of their machines are already carrying means that accessories have to be kept to a minimum. Bells are now a thing of the past. Several times today I was plodding along through the sweaty, virtual world of the runner, that misty place beyond the reach of mere map co-ordinates, when I was shaken into the inferior, real world by one of these reckless blubber bags whimpering past me, an inch from my ear. It was like being snatched from my sleep by the sound of a dustbin crashing through the window.
Today's running bulletin was better, but something still ain't quite right. I can't deny that last night's beer and Chinese takeaway wasn't ideal long-run preparation, but there's something more. I'm just not as energised as I was earlier in the campaign. Awoke at 7, floated to the hushed kitchen for toast and banana and freshly-squeezed orange juice and black coffee. Sometimes I feel sad about not having kids. At other times, like when I visit Sainsbury's on a Saturday morning, I feel sort of lucky. My weekly descent to the kitchen early on a Sunday, hunting for pre-run calories, is another time I'm glad. It's hard to find true stillness and solitude in the modern world, unless you're a cleaner in the QPR trophy room. On a Sunday morning, I know that if I had kids they'd now be yanking my dressing gown, demanding cartoons and breakfast and love. And beating the hell out of each other. Being 'child-free', whatever the emotional drawbacks, is surely one of the last outposts of true peace. These fifteen early minutes I spend in the kitchen are among the most tranquil of the week. The taking of bread, and of fruit, in the stillness of a Sunday morning, before a run, is like some ceremonial sacrament. The hour or two waiting for breakfast to sink, are spent in front of the computer, scanning the world. I don't even know for sure if I'll run. Perhaps I had too much beer last night. I feel, not hungover, but a bit dehydrated and not wholly in control of the situation. But I know that if I don't run, I'll hate myself. It will gnaw away at my emotional state in this vital pre-marathon period. So I decide to run. Around 10:00, I dress and go. It's positively warm these days. As I mentioned recently, the transitional period between mid-winter and mid-spring seems not to have happened. It went from being bloody cold to mild/warm-hot almost overnight. I put on a skimpy teeshirt and shorts, plus brand new socks and brand new shoes, and departed. Brand new shoes? Brand new socks? I know. I read that stuff about the taper. I believed it. It said that one of your duties during the 3-week taper should be to buy some new shoes and break them in a bit. I'm a marketing man's dream. I currently reside at that shameful intersection of race paranoia and reasonable disposable income. They suggest new shoes? Quick. New shoes. We must have new shoes. The run was a curate's egg. Fine until 8 miles, then began to drag. Suddenly I was carrying a sack of spuds on my back. A couple of walk-breaks dragged down the last 2 or 3 miles, but I made it home. 12 miles. I was listening to Adrian Chiles on the radio this evening. I've always liked this affable Brummie, moreso since I discovered in an article in the Independent that he runs. Anyway, on his football phone-in show he loves hearing from depressed fans sloping away from another defeat for their team. He really understands what football is all about. When one near-suicidal Aston Villa fan called in to bewail West Bromwich Albion's last minute equaliser, you could hear him rubbing his hands with glee. "Ah", he drawled, "Now then. This is good, dismal stuff." Good dismal stuff. I thought about that for a while, and realised that this website has been churning out, well, I don't know about good, but certainly dismal stuff for a while now. I'm hoping it's just a pre-marathon thing. I need a bit of a fillip. Come on. I need to hear a bicycle bell soon. BRINGGGG-GGG! BRINGGGG-GGG!. Tuesday, 12 April 2005I'm an early-morning-run evangelist. Odd then, that this morning's was one of the very few early runs I've done on this current marathon campaign. The habit evaporated during that long, wearying spell working away from home last year, and I've not yet picked it up again.As the world turns into spring, it's a good time to rediscover this life-enhancing habit. The sun was out at 6:40 this morning, but it was cool and slightly raw. Good waking-up weather. It must be a traumatic experience for the body. One minute supine, warm and shut down. Five or ten minutes later, pounding along a chilly street. You can imagine the warning sirens blaring out through your internal organs. All hands on deck. I'm having a shoe crisis. I started using two new pairs at the beginning of my marathon training, just after Christmas. Each pair now has around 200 miles on them. This is an annoying figure. Sufficiently high to have punctured their illusory youthful irrepressibility, but not quite enough to think of abandoning them. I have two new pairs. The ones I wore for my Sunday 12 miler are the same as these other two: New Balance 854s. But I was a bit concerned to find a blister raising its head after about mile 10. Then I have another pair, this time New Balance 856s, which I thought would be similar but turn out to be lighter and a bit less cushioned. So now I don't know what to do. Perhaps someone else can solve my problem? I posted the above couple of paragraphs on the Runner's World forum... The run was pretty brisk, all things considered. Reminded me what's so good about morning running. It makes you go sort of... brainy for a while. Though not quite brainy enough to decide what shoes to wear. Wednesday, 13 April 2005Bigger, better, bouncier news. Yes, bouncy. Tonight I felt bouncy.Have I ever talked about the running bounce? I must have. Sometimes, for no very good reason, you just feel like you're bouncing along the road without the usual effort. It's a good feeling. It means, or I take it as meaning, that there's something in reserve. I'm not plodding along on empty, panting and wheezing and aching. A feeling of controlled strength, and one that gives you confidence. Just the usual round-the-block 3½ miles tonight, then back in time to listen to Liverpool surprisingly hold out against Juventus to reach the Champions League semis. What a celebration there'll be if they manage to get through to the final. Looks like I'll be spending some time in a Hamburg bar somewhere watching the first leg. An appalling prospect... Thursday, 14 April 2005Perhaps this is the boost I was looking for. I weigh less today than I have done since... since records began, 2½ years ago.When I 'ran' London and Chicago in 2002 I was under 200 pounds, though I don't seem to have a record of the exact weights. My post-marathon visit to the Chicago Cheesecake Factory (just go and look at the 35 cheesecakes on their menu....) was the first step on the road to renewed corpulence. I've hovered between 215 and 220 for most of the intervening period, but for this marathon I've made a real effort to move down again. This morning I was 204, and I'd love to dip below 200 for Hamburg in 9 days time. It has to be unwise to attempt a sudden weight loss in the week before the race, but I'll hope to continue the downward drift. There's a definite correlation between weight reduction and faster, more confident running, though it throws up a paradox in the last week or two of marathon training. I know that a further dip in weight would help me in Hamburg, yet I have to square that with final week carbo-loading. But this raises the question - is the ancient ftuffinge Of Ye Face as it was known in Shakespeare's day, a sound nutritional principle, or just a hearty tradition? Yes, I know the theory. That we should top up carbohydrate levels to have plenty of glycogen to fuel the more desperate stretches towards the end of the marathon. Understood. But I have to reconcile that with the tendency for me to feel like Mister Blobby on race morning as a result. This is how I want to feel as I line up at the start in Hamburg: 
Sunday, 17 April 2005London Marathon day.It's my favourite session of the year. A sunlit, Sunday morning, and here I am, armchaired in front of the TV, in the thick of my marathon preparation. As I write, Paula Radcliffe is well on her way to another record-breaking victory. I feel ambivalent towards her. Her ability is beyond question, but the Paula industry is dispiriting. It spoils the purity of the story. Is she an athlete or a commodity? The obvious answer is "both", but I don't much care for the ratio. I'm happier with my own marathon prospects than I was this time in 2002, when I did the race. I've done more training than when I did Chicago later that year. And Copenhagen last year was a comparative shambles. This time I've been able to use my experience of previous campaigns to try and make things easier for myself. The training's been different. I've not been so strict about midweek runs. I've done them, usually three, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but I've not bothered escalating the distances too much. I started off running a total of 11-15 midweek miles, and that's how I finished up. The second important difference was to take the weekend long runs more seriously. The third was making a strict effort to lose a few pounds. The proof of the pudding will come next weekend. It will still be a murderous plod in a comic time, but I'm happy that I've done my realistic best to prepare. Yesterday's final weekend 'long run' wasn't really long at all. 6.2 miles. It struck me that I ran exactly the same distance - 10km - as I did on the first day of the year. Yesterday was a stroll in the sunshine. I felt strong and confident, and treated the run as a gentle plod along the canal on a warm spring morning. Remarkably though, it took me less time yesterday to cover the distance than it had in January when I was in a race. It's a vivid illustration of my improvement. My route yesterday was a sort of final farewell to the training. I chose the canal because it's where I've done most of my long runs, and because it's the quietest place to be around here. Final preparatory thoughts will come in the next week, and I spent much of this run reminding myself of that. From now on in, it's mental... The afternoon was spent at Loftus Road, watching QPR draw with Leeds "You're not famous anymore" United. Another match we should have won against another team who offered little. Our season is now all but over. I have to decide soon whether to renew my season ticket yet again. Every year I say I won't, and every year I do. This time however, the club has announced price rises of between 30% and 60%, depending on how you interpret them, which is making the decision a little easier. At the moment, I'm thinking that I won't renew, but still go to about 10 home games. It will roughly halve the cost, give me a lot of my life back, and radically reduce my stress levels. We'll see. After the game I drove up to Mayfair to take up the kind invitation I had from Sweder and his charity, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, to attend their pre-London Marathon pasta party. What a great part of London this is. It's so rare that I have the need to be here, but I just love driving round Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, floating past all those opulent buildings, glimpsing other lifestyles. I used to feel resentful about it, but I must have mellowed. Now I find it culturally and architecturally fascinating, rather than socially divisive or politically inflammatory. I just don't care enough about it anymore. The JDRF do was at the plush Naval Club in Hill Street. An enjoyable event, with good speeches and a decent plateful of nosh on offer. Ash (Sweder from the forum) paced anxiously round the room, discharging his responsibilities as the boss of the FLM runners, but must have been delighted that the evening went so well. STOP PRESS: Paula Radcliffe wins London in 2:17, just outside her world record. Sweder comes in in 4:06, which I think he'll be happy with. Well done everyone. Wednesday, 20 April 2005I suppose I should be crafting some portentous paragraph about the impending marathon, but there's too much fluster to contend with here. As usual, I'm not well prepared for the trip so it's going to be another last-minute job. It might be a good thing.Had a good, brisk run on Monday evening, and nothing since. I should try to get out for half an hour tomorrow, then that will probably be it. It's always difficult to judge what to do in this final week. Over-training or under-training? Whatever you do doesn't feel right. I've had a reasonable 2005 so far, managing to collect a few PBs along the way, though I seem to have lost the zip I felt during the Reading and Silverstone Halfs. Perhaps two races on successive weekends took something out of me. In theory, based on those results, I should be capable of getting 4:30 in Hamburg - but I'm not going to attempt it. We all know that a man's reach must exceed his grasp, but in marathon running, it doesn't pay to be over-ambitious. There's a fine balance to be struck between positive thinking and realism. If you get it wrong, you start too quickly and fade well before the end, ending up in a worse position than you would have been if you'd started more slowly. I've still not managed to get under 5 hours in a marathon, so that has to be my sole target. If I manage it, I can start devising a 4:30 strategy for 2006. But not right now. So that's it. Thanks to everyone for their good wishes. Will aim to post the news of the race on the forum, then file a full report when I'm back - probably the end of next week. Toodlepip. Saturday, 23 April 2005 - HamburgMy only previous experience of Germany amounts to a brief, and patchy, recollection of a hundred soldiers pointing guns in my direction, on the other side of a rainy aeroplane window. I was out of my head on a cocktail of severe food poisoning, homesickness and amphetamine psychosis, and this wasn't what I needed.An hour or so earlier, the pilot of the Afghan Air plane transporting me from Delhi to London had made a dramatic announcement over the public address system. He was crying. Russian soldiers had recently marched into his village and destroyed it, he said. He didn't know what had happened to his family. He didn't want to go back and find out, he told us. We listened to this rambling, tearful speech with some nervousness. Was he going to end it all, taking us with him? I rather hoped not. Perhaps severe food poisoning, homesickness and amphetamine psychosis wasn't that bad after all, eh? Phew. His plan was only to defect to the west. This was 1982, and we still talked about "the west" as that place where all the nice people lived. The Soviet Union was still that behemoth of nastiness, the bad strain of socialism, living behind its iron curtain with those innocent prisoners - Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia..., surviving on cabbage soup and an absence of electric guitars. A world with no bananas. We didn't like to imagine it. Well, we did really. It was a compelling vision. So a defecting pilot wasn't totally unexpected. In fact, nothing was unexpected when flying Afghan Air, but I'll save my Kabul airport anecdotes for another time. The long and short of it is that we bowled up at Frankfurt Airport without an invite, and half the West German army came to greet us. It remained my sole experience of the place, and let's face it, it wasn't a lot to go on. I like tabula rasa trips. And yet... and yet it hasn't quite turned out that way. I've been struck by how much Germany I have under my skin. I've been surprised by the resonances I feel about a place that I've never visited before. And I'm ashamed to say that much of it is faintly negative. But comic too. Yes, Germany is seriously comical. Take yesterday. I arrived at the marathon expo, in the Messehallen, Hamburg's major conference centre, without the letter confirming my entry. I'd presumed it wouldn't be any big deal. I approached the Information Desk and explained. The response was alarming. Much shaking of heads. "Zis could be a pwoblem. A seee-wious pwoblem..." Crikey. Don't say that to me. Sometimes you don't need a heart-rate monitor to know what's happening in your chest. I was directed to the quaintly-named Trouble Desk, where I joined a long queue of other people facing seee-wious pwoblems of their own. It took me an hour to get to the front, by which time I'd accepted that Hamburg wasn't going to happen for me. But I'd run anyway, I decided. I'd run without a number, even though it meant I'd get no medal, and would risk getting hoiked off the course by some indignant official. But I waited anyway to be told the news officially. It was during this long wait that I began to examine my prejudices about Germany. I hope they're not shameful prejudices. In fact, I'm hoping they aren't really prejudices at all. I'd like to think they are light-hearted. More than that - I'd like to think they're parodies of prejudice. But there was something almost scary about queuing up like this to face officialdom. Scary? Or funny? It was both. I was genuinely anxious that I'd be forbidden from entering the race. But I was also amused by the way this situation had slipped so comfortably into a template of national stereotyping; a template I didn't even realise I'd brought with me. "Show me your papers". It was the crowning glory of the experience, as I was asked for my passport and driving licence. Would she notice they were fake? Would my trembling hand give me away? My last chance of freedom. I mustn't blow it now. Ah, those childhood memories of Colditz (the TV drama series, that is) have a lot to answer for. The Great Escape. I hate myself for thinking these things, though I hope that coming clean about it may partly absolve me. Of course, there turned out to be no big problem at all. The very pleasant lady was as helpful as I could have hoped, and after looking me up on the database and checking my ID, wrote me a note of authorisation to take to the next helpful lady in the chain - the one giving out race packets and plastic baggage sacks. It looks good. The number (16636) was in a sealed window envelope containing a thick wodge of instructions and maps. In the bag was a good quality towel and a jar of vaseline. Along with the free pair of disposable gloves and the plastic cape, there was something undeniably... kinky about this apparatus. A teeshirt and chip finalised the haul, and we made good our escape. This is a big expo. Bigger than London and much bigger than Copenhagen. Probably on a par with Chicago, though I can't be sure. I can't remember much about that one. We took the underground back to the hotel, the Kronprinz, situated conveniently right outside the main station, and after a brief snooze, I went for a run. It was just a nerve-settling, casual 2½ miler, but it didn't do the job. It made me more nervous, not less. I didn't feel good. I felt my left calf like I've not felt it recently, and I felt my right thigh like I've not felt it recently. Not the hamstring but that inner-thigh muscle. It felt tight enough to be able to play the opening bars of Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker. And what an appropriate title. Perhaps it was my tiredness that made this such a rotten run. I didn't feel like it at all. Perhaps I should have run more in midweek instead. I've been out only Monday and now Friday. The other big anxiety is my shoes. I agonised over what to bring with me. Should I take the brand new pair with only 20 miles on them, but that haven't had a long run in them? Or should I take my tried-and-tested 200 milers even though they've lost their bounce? After taking soundings from the Runners World forum, I went for the latter, but I wonder how wise this decision was. Running in them last night, particularly after the last week or two of short runs in the new ones, brought home how tired these shoes seem to be. They really did seem flat and lifeless. I need them to support and drive me for 26 miles tomorrow. I don't want to do, or use, anything that's going to make that job harder. But it's too late to do anything about it now. They're the only running shoes I have with me. I tried to put these questions out of my mind for the rest of the evening. We went out to carbo-load at the local pizzeria, and got to bed by about 10:30. Today's been less frenetic. The highlight was a bus trip around the marathon course. I could say a lot about the course, and the city, but I'll wait till the race report. I bought the trip as an optional extra when I registered, and am glad I did. It helps to visualise the task. But it's a bloody long way, boys. I keep thinking: if it took the bus 2 hours to get round, how long will it take me? I'll find out tomorrow..... Sunday 24 April 2005 - Hamburg MarathonMany a truth is inadvertently spoken in clumsy translation. At least two good examples appeared in the marathon goody-bag I collected from the expo on Friday. One of the pre-race instructions, intended kindly no doubt, is "Don't forget to say goodbye to your friends and family before you start the marathon".They mean "Don't clog up the start area", but their version has a sense of dire finality that will resonate with certain participants. Make no mistake, Hamburg is a truly great urban marathon. The crowd support is fervent and loud, and without meaning to invoke unreasonable racial stereotypes, it's no surprise that the organisation is simply flawless. Here, there are no untied ends to stumble over. I felt irrationally confident about this one from the moment I awoke, at 3:50 a.m. It wasn't excessive enthusiasm or nervousness that dragged me from my slumbers at such a twirly time, but the return of the two blokes in the next door hotel room. English, naturally. I'd engaged them in uneasy conversation earlier in the day, when I'd discovered the main objective of their visit: "The search for the ultimate bender." They went on to explain that there had been 14 on the party but that two of their mates had "disappeared" last night. I didn't think it decent to enquire further. I mentioned the marathon, and tried explaining that I needed a good night's sleep. But I could see from their glazed eyes that I sounded like some middle-aged keep-fit bore whose only pleasure in life was trying to avoid death. Somewhat implausibly, they promised to be quiet when they returned from their 8 hour piss-up on the Reeperbahn. Which is why I wasn't too surprised to be woken by the sound of them clattering back to their room at ten to four in the morning. They were singing heartily. No chaps, this isn't the f***ing way to Amarillo... And that was that. They quickly fell unconscious, but it was too late for me. I didn't get back to sleep. Good old Hal Higdon. His advice is to ensure a good night's sleep the night-before-the-night-before the marathon. This is the important one, says Hal. Adrenaline, he says, will get you through a disrupted sleep the night before the race, but only if you have something in reserve from the night before. This advice saved me. If you can call it salvation... At least the first half of the day was a resounding success. At 6 a.m. I couldn't put off the inevitable any longer, and got up to start the pre-race sacramental rituals. The taking of the currant buns and bananas, and the final glass of water. Naked, in the dark. Then a dribbly shower that seemed more of an annointment than a cleanser. The silence was louder than the shower. M slept on. I peered through the curtains at the scene below. Hotel Kronprinz is in Kirchenallee, directly opposite the main Hamburg railway station, and even at 7 a.m. there were plenty of people in trainers, carrying their plastic, drawstrung baggage, striding purposefully across the pedestrianised square towards Hauptbahnhof, the central station, just three stops on the Underground from the race start.  Where did this Bodyglide come from? Goody-bags melt into each other, just like the races to which they belong. I don't know where I got it, but I'll give it a go. Feet, thighs, nipples. Adopting a belt and braces approach, I give the Bodyglide a patina of Vaseline. Then it's the lycra undershorts. The singlet I bought at the Chicago marathon - the one with ANDY inscribed on it. Thorlo socks. I've had these socks ever since the London marathon campaign in 2002. Reebok shorts. These are even older. I bought these in Oxford Street in January 2001, the month I thought I'd try running. They're nearly dead. The webbed innards have disintegrated under the relentless torrent of corrosive scrotal sweat and other, less respectable corporeal exudations. The original navy blue has now been bleached by effort into something less bold. They even have splashes of paint on them. But I stick with them, for reasons partly practical - they have two large pockets - and partly sentimental - we've travelled a long way together. Hamburg is my 31st race, and I've worn these things in every one, as well as on training runs that can be counted in their hundreds.
And then those blasted shoes. In the interests of a fair historical record, I should say that they felt OK on marathon morning. Not bouncy and pumped up, but at least sort of grizzled and sinewy and businesslike, and ready to pull out a final performance for the old man. Then it's the velcro chip strap, bought at the expo. Something similar came free for the Reading Half, and I liked it. I'm intimidated by those naked chips you get that you're expected to thread expertly through your laces, rendering them impossible to remove after the race without dissecting your shoes. Or is there some masonic technique imparted to the rest of the running world that passed me by? I don't like to ask. A chip strap has a band you tread through the chip, before velcro-wrapping the whole thing round your sock. Simple. Last item is my canary-yellow Hal Higdon cap, worn partly to keep the sun out of my eyes, and partly to make it easier to recognise myself in the later stages of the race. Just imagine it. Mile 23. Crowded, chaotic water station. Disoriented, you look round, desperately trying to work out which one you are. Answer? Yellow cap. Works every time. The plastic sack gets filled with...stuff. My personal effects. A fleece, a notebook and pencil, a solitary Compeed, Bob Glover's Competitive Runners's Handbook. (He's the bloke who wrote it, incidentally, not the one who lent it to me - just in case there's a non-runner reading this. It's just that "Bob Glover" sounds like a retired Geography teacher, or the chap who runs the village bicycle repair shop - the sort of rotund, balding chap who'll engage you in conversation over the garden fence on a Sunday morning, in the middle of mowing the lawn. That said, probably not the type to own a book called The Competitive Runner's Handbook. But I digress...) Some headache pills. Mints. Water. Contact lens solution. Vaseline. Towel. None of it's necessary beyond the fleece. The fleece is the one thing I need to take, but a baggage sack with just a fleece in it doesn't seem right. Too light and unimportant. What if? This is a marathon and this is Germany, and today I am... Herr Onze-Sideofcaution. Tiptoe to the door. Before turning the handle, I look round. M is still asleep. What now? Oh. Do I wake her just to say goodbye? Am I superstitious? What if I die during the race? Waking her - inconsiderate or considerate? Would it be for her benefit or for mine? I bequeath an affectionate glance, and depart in silence. Any lingering bubble of melancholy is popped as I pass the room of the lads next door. Oh, this is funny. They didn't quite manage to complete their Saturday night lives. It's like a scene from the last moments of Pompeii, with the townsfolk frozen in their final agonies. The door is wide open. One guy sits sprawled in an armchair in his Y-fronts. The other fully clothed, half kneeling, half lying across his bed. So near, yet so far. Both snoring loudly. Thank you god. Just like London on marathon morning, the Underground is flooded with people on their way to the race. Spectators seem to be over-dressed to compensate for their running partners. Ever noticed that? They wear overcoats and do a theatrical shiver from time to time, as though to send some subliminal message to their companions. Admonitory or sympathetic? And so to the starting pen of the 2005 Hamburg Marathon, where only the first timers will be overtly nervous. Most of the rest display a touchingly naive optimism. Here are the grizzled, sinewy old timers looking complacent. The muscley young athletes, brimming with testosterone, but too cool to be seen looking over-excited. Another group, the one I belong to, are those who aren't marathon virgins but still struggle with the reality of what we are about to receive. We aren't dumb. We've made the effort to discover the ingredients of a successful run, but haven't had the time, the determination, or the nous, to acquire them all. Some of the preferred constituents, like youth, are no longer available to us, and we must do the best we can without it. Others, like ideal weight, are available, but hard work. Family life, self-esteem, effort, equipment, motivation, freedom from injury - all are members of this multi-conceptual cocktail. Perhaps we don't try hard enough, or perhaps we try too hard. Or maybe the effort is high enough, but we don't get the recipe quite right. I suspect that's it. I don't hear the starting gun in Hamburg, I just hear a wild shriek. It's an apt substitute. When you start your marathon training, the finish line seems like a very distant shore indeed. Yet now, one of the 33,000 shuffling towards the start, it seems somehow even further away. Before today it's all hypothetical. Now it's real, and it becomes a quite different challenge. Just before I cross the line, I notice an earnest looking, grey-haired man holding up a piece of cardboard on which he's written in ballpoint pen: PAIN IS TEMPORARY, PROUD IS FOREVER. This time I have a firm strategy. Yes, it's probably the same firm strategy I had in Copenhagen and Chicago and in London. Last time it didn't quite work out, but this time it has to succeed. This time I'll see it through. The magic numbers are 6:45. That's to be my kilometre pace, and it should be easy to sustain... There's a mild panic when my watch says 7 minutes, then 8, with no 1 km sign in sight. When it reaches 9 minutes, I relax again. I must have missed it. Sure enough, 2 km appears, on 13:10, giving me the luxury of being able to slow down for a few seconds as I pass the sign. Some people spurt down the Reeperbahn, but I prefer to dribble, taking in the curious sights. We pass bars called The Blue Banana, Blue Nights, Blue Touch, Blue Moon. A shop called Bad Meets Evil. And the name that represents a passport to international eating pleasure: Kentucky Fried Chicken. The weather was just about perfect for a marathon. Cool and bright. The Hamburg spectators were magnificent from the start. The usual estimate is around half a million people, though I don't know how such a figure is arrived at. There's something rather too... round about 500,000. My instincts say that there were fewer (just) here than in London in 2002, though this lot seemed crazier and more noisy. Percussion of all kinds, ranging from kids gleefully banging saucepan lids together, through dreamy tabla players, right up to the ferocious Hells Angel thundering out his weltschmerz on a full size drum kit by the side of the road.  Second to percussion came wind: whistles, flutes, harmonicas and even a tuba or two. Most didn't bother with any implements at all. Vocal chords are pretty good at this noise thing. They hollered and raged with delight and excitement. Today we are all demented pedestrians, and today we've taken over the city. In a world of subtle suppression, a marathon may be as close to anarchy as we will ever see. It becomes a temporary public expression of a youthful zeitgeist normally half-concealed.
Those early miles were just grand. Absolutely capital. Through the pandemonium, we ran through the cool, shady streets of Sen and Altona, beneath the pollarded trees and the tall, elegant apartment blocks. Not for the first, nor the last, time today, I feel strangely European. I find myself bopping alongside Running Rock Man for a few minutes. Running Rock Man pushes a portable music player. Some kind of massive speaker on wheels. It's blaring out "Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It keeps me buoyant for a few minutes, but I decide that the pleasure may wear thin after an hour or two, so I let him go ahead of me. The next musical interlude is Aretha Franklin squawking "Freedom" from a sound system dangling over a balcony. This song is laced with something infectious, and something akin to hysteria spreads quickly through the runners as they pass. Much whooping and twirling and clapping. For a few surreal seconds, we're a scene from "Fame". A man with a carrier bag of live, wriggling eels holds one out to tempt passing runners. The women squeal and he cackles. Amid the abandon and the chaos of the honking horns and the roaring and whooping, you catch glimpses of the other world. The expressionless, elderly lady dressed in black, peering down from another apartment balcony. What is she making of it all? I wondered this from time to time through the race, and wondered what else she had seen in her life. It's so easy to fall into the pattern. All is cool. Cool urban running and cool accoustics. This is running as relaxation. I could have had a brief nap without falling over. I'm shocked when someone suddenly calls out my name. Three or four women with painted faces are shouting my name hysterically. Ah yes, name on my shirt. I'd forgotten. The long pleasant Konigstrasse and Bernadottenstrasse take us up to the 6 km mark, and here we swing round in a sharp U-turn, back towards the city centre. This next 5km sweeps us along the Elbchaussee, the dock road. The docks? In most cities this would evoke a desolate, pot-holed plod through a depeopled landscape of warehouse complexes and pyramids of rusting containers. But this is Hamburg, and here the docks are a feature. This long stretch along the waterside and the giant cargo ships is Millionaire's Row - one of several in the city. Yep, container ships really can be sexy. Porsches and Mercedes line the driveways, and even if the spectators here seem more well-heeled than in the opening stages, they are no more restrained. Around 10 km, the road suddenly dips and enters a gentle but long, long decline, and below me a sight that makes me catch my breath. The shot so beloved of the TV camera: it's that tidal wave of bobbing heads; each one of us a different coloured bit of flotsam on that rolling ocean of runners. It's the moment I've waited for - the moment when all that ever is and was and will be about this place on this day in this race, is packaged up and presented to me, ready to take home and admire for the rest of time, while all else will be left to fade. Three young English runners are chatting behind me as we curl down the hill, alongside the gigantic ships hooting their way out towards the North Sea. I catch fragments of their breathless conversation. "I'm so glad I missed out on London now", says one. "Just think, we'd never have seen all this." It's an interesting comment. The London Marathon is a great race and a great occasion, but I challenge the assumption held by many that it's the only marathon worth doing. People: get out more. We pass the imposing Fischmarket and sweep left along Hafenrandstrassen towards Jungfernstieg, the exclusive shopping district. Then past the superbly-named Rathaus (local parliament). Then we sink into a deep and dark underpass behind the main railway station, and find ourselves running beneath the city centre. It's a strangely intimate stretch. Dozens of people, men and women, take the opportunity to 'do a Radcliffe', and urinate. No one minds peeing in front of other runners, apparently.  We re-emerge alongside the Art Gallery and here I see M, squealing in a very un-M-like fashion. She takes a couple of corking pictures. What I like about them is that they seem to convey just how good I was feeling at this point. Most race photos look like something you might find in a post-mortem file. We're about 17 kilometres in now, and everything is marvellous. I feel strong and capable and confident. My pacing is still spot-on. I seem to have discovered the secret of marathon running. Let me rephrase that. I always knew it, but this time I've decided to act on it. Even pacing. As long as I can keep this up, I'll be fine. We exchange waves and whoops and I press on through the city and up around the Alster Lake. There's something calming about this placid, turquoise expanse of water with its tall, spectacular fountain. Like the Maidan in Calcutta, it's 'the lungs of the city'. Perhaps it's the sight of the water but now I'm sweating heavily. The sun that was just bright at the start is still bright but now it's burning too. I notice that I'm taking on far more water than normal. Usually I have a couple of sips at each water station. Here, I find myself swallowing two full cups every couple of kilometres. This was the first warning that something might be going wrong. 
The next mile or two slowly drag us north through the modern, elegant suburbs flanking Beethovenstrasse. The kilometres seemed to be getting longer, though my watch told me I was still on target pace. The first 10K were covered in 01:07:13, the second 10K were 7 seconds faster, 01:07:06. But as I got past the 20, the inside of my thighs were beginning to hurt, and as we crossed the half way mark, just a mile or so later, they were tight and aching. Really aching. That was the first half of the race, and that was... just about... the race. What happened in the second half? I can look at a map of the course, and I can see the route winding its way north through Uberseering and Rathenaustrasse and then, around 30 km, tipping over and plummeting south towards the distant finish line. I recall being there, struggling along, half walking, half running, but little has embedded itself in my memory. I was kaputt. My upper legs had seized up, and I was juddering along like a drunk on stilts. The legs weren't bending in the middle. It was painful, but there's nothing heroic to report. It actually became rather boring because I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios. I couldn't get that line out of my head. It was supposed to be the day of the Übermensch - Nietzsche's Superman - but instead I'd become John Prine's wretched Sam Stone. What do I recall from this second half? I recall a blind man sitting beneath a weeping willow, playing the pan pipes. I remember passing a colossal amplifier through which a grinning rastafarian was thundering a bass guitar. The street vibrated beneath my feet as I passed. Above all, I remember feeling disappointed. I remember thinking that it's not failure that threatens us. It's optimism. It's things we've never had. We are haunted by hope, and it's hope that truly destroys us. It was a feeling that lasted for nearly ten desolate miles. The game was up. I wasn't deranged or hallucinating - unfortunately. That would have been some minor consolation. Something had gone wrong, I knew, and I struggled to know what to do. For a while I tried to be practical. Next time, there should be some gym work and leg-strengthening exercises. Perhaps more hills.... And these damn shoes - must improve shoe strategy. Did I blow it all with an inadequate final week? Maybe I should have tried even harder to shift a few pounds. I had to listen to this loose change of censure and self-castigation jangling around for miles, knowing that these weren't really the solution. The marathon is more than a race; it's a puzzle, a game, a riddle. Perhaps I'd never find the answer. Suddenly, the very idea of another one of these things began to seem remote and pointless... But there were high points during those last 10 or 12 miles. The crowd remained sensational. They had more energy than the runners, and some of it did seem to transfer over to us. Frequently, as I stopped to walk, I found myself being cajoled and clapped and shouted at by knots of cheerleaders. And they made a difference. More than once, I ended up clapping them, as they lifted me back onto my running feet. But the one really remarkable example of mind over matter came around Mile 21 when, for no reason at all, I had a flashback to the start of the race. That elderly man with his sign, and the spindly, charming misspelling. PAIN IS TEMPORARY, PROUD IS FOREVER. It hadn't registered much at the time, but it had been filed away somewhere, and now, when it was needed, it popped up. It's the oldest marathon cliché in the book, but as it came to me now, I really did feel something stirring. I'd heard it said a thousand times but perhaps I'd never given it much thought. I thought about it now. We always say that the last few miles of a marathon make you hyper-emotional and vulnerable. I think it's caused not by too much emotion but by too little. It's an evacuation of the senses, not a filling up, and it's this vacuum that sucks in whatever sentient fuel is going. It was in this state of emotional impoverishment that the image of the man with the sign arrived, and it hit me with a thud - a very positive thud. Something spread from my head to my legs, and for 10 minutes I really did run again. Here's the proof. For first 14 miles of the race, my times were: 10:45 10:51 10:36 10:41 10:55 10:46 10:55 10:43 10:39 10:32 10:29 10:41 10:32 10:57 With a target pace of 10:50, these splits are fine. Then at mile 15 it started to go wrong: 11:42 12:22 11:19 12:35 13:29 13:38 Into mile 21, and my PAIN IS TEMPORARY, PROUD IS FOREVER moment happened. The split for mile 21? 09:22 But I couldn't keep it up, and the last 4 miles came in as: 12:31 13:33 13:50 13:16 By mile 17 or 18, I knew that I was going to miss out on my main target of getting round in under 5 hours. I'd have to accept that, but it never occurred to me that a PB wasn't going to happen. My previous best, 5:16 in Chicago, had to be beaten today. And it was. As the miles ticked down, I was pretty sure I would do it, and this was a great consolation to me. In the end I made it home in 5:10:10, 6 minutes faster than Chicago. Other stats: 10km: 01:07:13 20km: 02:14:19 (01:07:06) 30km: 03:30:14 (01:15:55) 40km: 04:51:43 (01:21:29) The figures show how those first two 10K stretches were bang-on, separated by just 7 seconds. But then the third 10K drifted out almost 10 minutes, with the fourth a further 6 minutes slower. And there, in two short sentences, is the story of my Hamburg Marathon 2005. Through the finish line and floated back into the expo hall to cash in my chip and generally enjoy that fuzzy post-marathon feeling. I wandered out again and into a Turkish supermarket to buy a bar of chocolate. There was a small internet café at the back, so I took the weary opportunity of letting the chaps on the forum know how I'd got on. On the Underground back to Central Station, I worked out my post-marathon training schedule. Just as one needs to train for a marathon, one needs to train for no marathon, I reasoned. I still have my plan sketched out, here in my notebook. It says simply: SAUSAGE - BEER - SHOWER. At the station, I chomped on two bratwurst with chilli and emptied a couple of beers down my throat, while staring blankly at a TV screen. Some unknown people were playing football on it. Then it was the awkward totter back to the hotel for a shower and a long, contemplative soak. Hamburg was over. It's a great marathon, and one I'd recommend to anyone - novice or elite. The course is pancakacious, a nailed-on PB for anyone in reasonable shape. The crowds are wild and wunderbar. On the day it didn't quite happen for me the way I wanted it to, and the way I expected it to. Right up to halfway through the race, I thought this story would have a different ending. But if our stories always had predictable, perfect endings, joy would soon become wearisome. I wasn't going to let this slight disappointment turn into a disaster. It wasn't a disaster. I knocked 6 minutes off my PB, and it was my 5th PB in 5 races. That's enough to make it a success, and if not utterly elated, I could at least be satisfied. Eventually I was able to winch myself out of the old-fashioned, high-sided bath and delicately pad myself dry. The aches were coming. There's only one thing you can wear on the top half after a marathon, so I pulled on my commemorative race tee-shirt and lay on the bed. As I said at the start, many a truth is inadvertently spoken in clumsy translation, or cultural confusion. On the teeshirt, beneath the Hamburg Marathon 2005 logo, is just one word in large block capitals: FINISHED. Lying there on that sunlit afternoon, high above the city, floating away into weary unconsciousness, it was the perfect summary. |
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