Wednesday, 11 May 2005

That was then, but this is now.

Like anything else worth doing, running is a path of constant learning, and this, I now see, extends to race reports, and to the way they extrude into running itself. Last night, I finally posted my Hamburg stories - the preamble about the Expo, and race day itself. They'd been hanging around me like one of those faint injuries that you can't quite shake off.

Finalising the tale and uploading it fulfilled two functions that seem paradoxical. On the one hand it was like a stopper, bunging up the Hamburg adventure for good. Putting it to bed, as publishing chaps like to say. Signing it off. On the other, the act meant the simultaneous dislodging and release of something else. It's allowed me to think about running again, and to make some plans. It was a chore that needed doing, and now that it's done, I see that it was interfering in other areas, and preventing the return to some sort of normality. The buzzword is "closure".

I'd not spent a moment thinking about future running goals, yet within half an hour of filing the report, I'd entered the Loch Ness Marathon - Sunday 2nd October, 2005. And just in case this wasn't resolute enough, I've reserved a seat on an EasyJet flight from Gatwick to Inverness for the day before. All booked and paid for. Job done.

Without being conscious of it, I seemed to have reached the decision that it's time to look beyond the headline urban marathons. Indisputably great events; staggering manifestations of human interaction; festivals of running; celebrations of human endeavour. All good stuff. The urban marathon is the public face of running, the one that attracts the elites and the journos. But there must be more to it than that, and it's time I had a peek at running's secret garden - the rural marathon. Not the same as an off-road or cross-country marathon. That's the hard core, a present to leave unopened beneath the tree for the time being. The rural marathon is one that uses public roads and well-established tracks, but set far from the big city and the hullabaloo.

Loch Ness is a place I have ancient associations with. As a teenager, the second and third times I ran away from home I hitch-hiked to the Outer Hebrides via Glencoe, Inverness and the long Loch Ness Road. But it's not some maudlin magnet that pulls me back there now - though undoubtedly that may add a pinch of spice to the experience. No, it's simply that I know the area to be astonishingly picturesque. It can provide the vast emptiness and inspirational beauty I want from a fifth marathon.

Last year there were 942 finishers, ranging in times from 2:27 to 7:15. With the hills and bumpy terrain, I fully expect to be closer to that second figure than the first - but I don't mind this time. It's another reason for wanting a change of scene. How nice, I thought, to run for pleasure, and not get too hung up on the pursuit of a time. The chance of a PB wouldn't be turned down, but it's not my priority this time.

I've run three times in the past week. Only the first - last Saturday - was truly... nearly unpleasant. It was the usual first-run-after-a-layoff. I felt fat and slow and incongruous on the streets in my skimpy running gear. I panted and flapped a lot. 3 miles. Repeated on Monday, but this time felt much better. It was even fast - only the 4th time this year (70 runs) that I've averaged sub-10 minute miles.

And this morning, up at 6:30 for a rare early-morning jog. The weather was perfect: bright sun and mild. I took it easy. Early in the morning, without a proper warm-up, muscles cold and stiff, isn't the time to try speeding beyond your comfort zone. I pulled the run out another half mile today, just to ease myself into the longer distances again.

Good to be back.

Tuesday, 17 May 2005

Imagine some soaring orchestral music......, then a husky, seductive voice says slowly: Because you can never have too many rodents....

It's the slogan of eRodent, a rat enthusiast's website I've been ferreting about on recently. In fact there's a second slogan which I also thought pretty good. It takes a different, and perhaps more threatening tack: They're small and they're furry, and they know where you live.

Apart from rats, these people are also keen on wildlife ponds, which is why I've been looking at their site. Our large, scrubby front garden has finally been cleared and levelled, and we are now busy making exotic plans for its cultivation.

I mention this by way of confessing, rather pitifully, that most of my recent exercise has come not from high-velocity fell running, but from gardening. It's time this effeminate indolence was swept away.

I made a start this evening, when I teamed up with the Reading Joggers in Tilehurst, my first jaunt with these fine people since before Hamburg. The run was good - 4.7 hilly miles. It reminded me that there are some really quite picturesque spots in an area I usually think of being a fairly uninspiring swathe of residentia.

Talking of silly words, one that I didn't make up is triskaidekaphobia, pronounced (apparently) tris-ky-dek-uh-FOH-bee-uh, a noun defined as "a morbid fear of the number 13 or the date Friday the 13th".

I gleaned this from a recent "Word Of The Day" email. This admirable service is offered by www.dictionary.com. You can subscribe here. For a while now, I've had the idea that I should aim to include each word-of-the-day in one of these diary entries, without trying to make it sound too contrived. I'll give it a go.

One of the nice things about embarking on a new marathon training programme is planning what races to do. The summer is a time for roasting on a 10 kilometre spit, and some of these smaller events have a charm that you miss out on at the big urban runfests. For instance, I noticed one 10K race offering a banana as a 'memento', though I couldn't help thinking this was a little ill-advised.

I've not yet reached the traditional pre-marathon entry where I opine on the subject of Things I Will Do Differently This Time Around, but when I do, I may decide that I overdid things a bit by doing the Reading and Silverstone Halfs on successive weekends. It seemed fine at the time, and I was delighted with the two PBs, but in retrospect, I felt as though two halfs in 8 days exhausted some indefinable inner resource that I never quite managed to replenish before the marathon.

So it's not just triskaidekaphobiacs who'll be wary about half marathons this summer.

Phew.

Thursday, 19 May 2005

The tail-end of the football season is never an easy running time. Too many compulsory, disruptive pub visits to factor in. After a good run with the club on Tuesday night I was looking forward to a week of consolidatory plods around the lanes before my next race - the Hogweed's 10K in Yate - on Monday evening.

But last night I had a rendezvous to keep at one of the village menageries that has Sky TV. After getting home late, I calculated that a run and the necessary ablutions would make me late for what turned out to be an appointment with disappointment; Ipswich v West Ham turned out to be less of a contest than I'd hoped. But that's always a delicious part of the risk. One should always endeavour to be punctual, so I abandoned the run in favour of football and mild drunkenness, which of course spilled over into today, pushing yet another run off the agenda.

I'm starting to look into races to run through the summer and autumn. The former will be mainly recreational 10Ks, but I suppose the autumn ones'll get a bit more serious as the Loch Ness monster approaches. I'm struggling a bit though to find races that fit in with my schedule. I'd thought I'd finally do the Windsor Half this year but it's the week before the marathon, so that's out. The week before that is another race I've had on my list for 3 years: the New Forest Half. This might just squeeze in, though I'm not sure that racing (albeit my rather leisurely interpretation of the word) during the taper is a great idea. A week or two earlier and we're into August, which sounds a bit hot to be running half marathons.

Perhaps I'll stick to the smaller events. I've been struck by the number of midweek races there are in the summer months. I'd not noticed this before. Sounds like a good way of ensuring midweek speed sessions.

I have to keep saying -- mainly to remind myself -- that my aim for Loch Ness is to enjoy running. The scenery will be great, and it's probably too hilly to think of another PB, so pleasure would seem to be the main objective. I'd even thought that I'd try running it without a watch. How interesting would that be? And how might it affect my race? Perhaps it would allow me to just relax and enjoy the environment. The race is chipped, so I could be sure of getting an accurate time at the end. It sounds like a plan.

But like most of my plans at the moment, I may not think too much more about it until after Monday week. There's the final of the FA Cup on Saturday, the Champions League on Wednesday and the play-offs next weekend. After that, I'm hoping to rediscover some sort of normality.

Sunday 22 May 2005

Early yesterday, Cup Final morning, I can't recall what it was now, but something led me to an internet page. I was probably obediently researching some arbitrary request from my wife. Contemporary dance. Modern Jazz. An exhibition of surrealist paintings or abstract sculpture. When it comes to art, she's the Arsenal to my Corinthian Casuals.

Donovan, 1965

Whatever it was, I found myself beholding a page with a marginal mention that caught my eye: Donovan in Reading, it said. Donovan? Now there's a name I'd not heard in a long time. I clicked on the link, and found myself at the website of The Hexagon, Reading's slightly outmoded theatre and arts centre. Donovan? Crikey. There was his picture. Yep, that's him alright.

Whatever happened to Donovan...? I was about to find out.

The item told me that he was making an appearance at the Hexagon on.... let's see.... May 21st. May 21st? When's that? Have I missed it? May 21st? That's this evening!

I called out to M: "Do you want to see Donovan this evening?" The reply came back: "Yeah, why not?"

Oh, the underestimated pleasures of not having kids.

Listen to Catch The Wind.

When Catch The Wind first made it into the charts in 1965, Donovan was 18 years old, and immediately touted as Britain's answer to Bob Dylan. This wasn't fair on either of them. Donovan was always a relative lightweight, but that didn't stop him producing some of the most enduring songs of the sixties.

I've talked before about my first big football match - the 1967 League Cup Final - in which 3rd Division QPR overcame West Brom from the First. 9 years old, I remember standing on the massive Wembley terraces, overwhelmed by the sound of tens of thousands of QPR fans singing "We're just mad about Rodney, Rodney's just mad about us", in homage to Rodney Marsh. To the tune of Mellow Yellow, of course.

I also remember as a kid, lying in bed, sick, off school, listening to There Is A Mountain.

Caterpillar sheds his skin
To find the butterfly within.

I'm trying to link that to the story of the Cup Final, but there was no butterfly within for the armchair neutral. Arsenal v Manchester United, a mouth-watering prospect to all lovers of the Beautiful Game. The reality was that Arsenal were poor, and rather against recent form, it was left to Manchester United to play the football. On chances and possession, United should have had Arsenal conquered by half time. But they couldn't get the ball in the net, and it was spiralled down into a penalty shoot-out that Arsenal won. There's no justice in football, which is one of the many reasons I like it.

So anyway, we went to see Donovan. The only tickets left, funnily enough, were in the front row, right in the middle. (Does he spit when he sings, I wondered?)

Donovan 2005

And here he is, shambling onto the stage, grinning like the kid that we all still want him to be, his guitar slung over his back like the hobo we all still want him to be.

He grins. Phew, he's the same old hippy.

He begins to spin some tale about the Beat Café. This is a virtual venue to which we are all invited, and where his life is played out. He sings a song we don't know about gypsies and mystical starlit nights on roads through vast deserts. Now it's 1964, he tells us. He walks into his Beat Café and starts playing... Catch The Wind.

He's still good, and he can still charm an audience.

Listen to Colours.

Colours, Sunshine Superman, Universal Soldier, Season Of The Witch, There Is A Mountain, interspersed with poetry, mystical ramblings, new songs, and a lot of giggling. Then as an encore he picked up an electric guitar and blew us away with Mellow Yellow.

When I'm plodding round Loch Ness in October, grinning, I want to be singing:

First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.

It could be the runner's anthem.

Monday 30 May 2005

Interesting experience yesterday.

Last week, I was up in Leeds for a couple of days, and took the opportunity of popping over to Huddersfield to rescue a five-years-garaged bike. I bought the machine (a mid-range Trek hybrid, for anyone interested) somewhere in the nineties.

[Aside: Hmm. When I was younger, people used to remark on my ability to remember dates. It was a party trick. Someone would recall a meeting, a football match, a party, a fight, from years before, and I'd say, "Ah yes, March Seventh, Nineteen Eighty Two". But now? Now I'm reduced to saying "Er, somewhere in the nineties..."]

The bike never got much use, but then Huddersfield isn't a great place for a novice cyclist. You spend your entire time either pushing the thing up hills, or freewheeling down the other side, screaming with terror. What was bought as an aid, quickly became a burden. I did manage a couple of decent weekend rides, but the struggle of getting out of the town into the countryside was too dispiriting (remember, I was a pallid, 40-cigs-a-day couch potato then), and eventually I did what 90% of bike-buyers seem to do - locked it up and consigned it to the back of the garage, to become a piece of redundant, melancholy sculpture. Punctured Aspiration Number 42.

Just recently, M has equipped herself with a bike bought cheaply through some work scheme, and it prompted me to salvage mine. The idea had been floating round the back of my mind since I started running: good, non-impact cross-training, and a chance to explore new routes.

The garage had become rather congested since I was last there. The remnants of my nineties have been augmented by those of a series of forgotten tenants, and I had to sort of dig through the back of some IKEA wardrobe, abandoned in mid-construction, till I arrived in my own Narnia, where the bike awaited me. Even in the gloom, I could see it was in a distressed state. Rather sadly, the once regal burgundy frame was now speckled with rust; the chain and gears had seized up, and the brake blocks had shrivelled and popped out, disappearing somewhere beneath the ankle-deep detritus.

The long-overdue TLC will come later, but first, it needed a good service. After getting it back south, I trawled the Yellow Pages before taking it into the Reading branch of Action Bikes. A full service, they told me, including replacing the chain and cassette would be about £130. If this was New York, I'd have barked ferociously: "Whatcha take me for, some kinda schmuck?", and marched out. But in that rather pathetic way that British consumers do, I shrugged my shoulders. Sounded very steep, I thought, but what could I do? I almost apologised for wanting to leave it with them, and went home, waiting for them to call. It would take a day, they said.

Two days passed without them starting work on it. Good. By this time, I had a Plan B, and needed an excuse to get it off them.

I'd made a further trawl, this time through the Internet, producing the name of Bob Bristow, a local bike mechanic. Sounded like a good chap, so I called him. "Just pop it round this afternoon", he said. So I rescued the bike for the second time in 4 days, this time from Action Bikes. They weren't too happy. "We won't charge you for keeping it overnight", said the sullen manager. Rather cheeky. I thought.

I found Bob's house, tucked away in a near-charming, residential part of central Reading that I didn't know existed. Gosh. This is what the town must have been like before it was ruined by improvements.

He opened the door cheerily, and asked me to bring the bike into his garage-workshop. It was barely managing to cling onto itself as I winched it out of the back of the car. He lifted it into a bike stand and began a very curious examination. "Let's see if the wheels are in true", he said. He spun each in turn, but instead of peering at them, he put his ear close to the wheel and listened. The back wheel was OK but the front would need adjusting, he told me. I asked about the chain and cassette, that Action Bikes had insisted needed replacing (for only an extra £35). He ran his fingers expertly round each link in the chain, then across the sprockets of the cassette before pronouncing them to be in perfectly good health. "Nothing a few spots of oil won't solve".

He continued his astonishing diagnosis of the entire bike, his fingers gliding over every moving part, his extraordinary hearing catching at sounds that evidently meant something to him, if not to me. And finally I realised. Rather astounded, it suddenly struck me that Bob Bristow is totally blind. It's a terrible confession, but my immediate thought was "Oh no, he'll never be able to do this". But then I made myself see sense. He'd already demonstrated his expertise and his dedication. And he was a professional bike mechanic. How could I doubt him?

Back home, I was sufficiently enthused to borrow M's new bike and go for a 12 mile ride along the canal into Reading, and back along the main road, checking out the provision for cyclists. Pretty good, I'd say, and enormously improved in recent years. It's now almost possible to cycle the whole way along dedicated cycle paths and cycle lanes, a la Holland. This is good news. Cycling on a main road these days is a perilous business. Imagine you're a cat, having to strut across a yard filled with starving dogs. That's what it's like.

It was my first time on a bike in more than five years, and took a while to adjust. Bombing along the canal at what seemed like break-neck speed, wearing my GPS gadget, _colin, I was shocked to discover, on checking my pace, that this is how fast Paula Radcliffe runs a marathon. And not just for a breathless mile or two, like me on the bike, but for 26...

Today I considered a run, but instead settled for a trip to the pub to see the last football match of the season - the play-off final between West Ham and Preston. A disappointing, overawed display from Preston allowed the chirpy geezers to escape into the Premiership. It left me in a saturnine mood, if I'm honest. The Hammers had stumbled through the season, looking quite unsuited for promotion compared with some of the other sides I saw - Ipswich, Derby, Preston and Wolves had all looked silkier. But it has to be conceded, they pulled out the performances when it mattered, so I have to say good luck to 'em. If I'm honest, it's only envy that stops me being more gracious...

Tuesday 31 May 2005

Today, officially, I begin training for the Loch Ness marathon on October 2nd.

Why today? Because I guess I'll be following some variation of one of the Hal Higdon training plans, and they all last 18 weeks. This week is Week 1 (or Week 18, as Hal describes it). Furthermore, Monday is always a rest day, so Tuesday is when it all kicks off.

Today is Tuesday, and today it all kicked off.

Not many people know that Ferdinand Smallpeice [sic] Esquire was the Town Clerk of Guildford in 1902. I knew not this snippet myself afore this evening. All was revealed, however, as I waited for Nigel of this parish to arrive. Our rendezvous was outside the White House pub, a tempting establishment on the River Wey in the centre of the town. I stood on the bridge, evidently constructed in the year of Ferdinand Smallpeice's Town Clerkship, replacing the one washed away in February 1900. The commemorative plaque told me all I needed to know. I'll be frank. It was a little bit more than I needed to know.

Ash and Andy had cried off from the run, and I nearly did so too. The prospect of 7 hilly miles on a warm evening, after a 4-week lay-off, was pretty dreadful. I tried to negotiate my way out of it, suggesting a run later in the summer, but all I got was an offer to reduce the distance to 3½. I'm too pliant. Fair enough, I thought. Ducking out of a 3½ miler on Day 1 of my marathon training seemed recreant, and would have presaged a summer of weedy cop-outs.

The run was really pleasant. Nigel was recovering from injury, so I thought it unreasonable to push him too hard. We took it slowly, following the gently meandering path along the riverside, allowing ample opportunity to enjoy the early evening sunshine as it suffused the tranquil, rustic environment. Very Surrey. We passed beneath willows and hot air balloons, Nigel in full tour guide mode. I learnt all sorts of stuff about the place that I'd been dying to know, like the etymology of the town's name, and the measures being taken to obscure the sight of the semi-used business park from the posh people who live on the hill. Like, er, Nigel.... Tee hee.

OK, so it wasn't quite true to suggest that I had to restrain my athletic instincts. In fact, it was me who was doing the lagging. I had to stop a couple of times to deal with a stitch, and generally felt pretty terrible. The worst part was that 3½ miles mysteriously morphed into 5 without a lot of discussion - and the last mile was tough.

This might sound odd to non-runners. Didn't I complete a marathon just 4 weeks ago? Yes, I did. But fitness - albeit my version of fitness - wanes rapidly if you spend your free time in the pub watching football, and if you spend your non-pub time eating sausages and chocolate and ice cream, and working your way through the wine rack. Yesterday for instance I was forced by circumstance to consume several pints of Timothy Taylor's Landlord and a few glorious glasses of Barolo. Followed by that midnight giant deep pan pepperoni pizza with extra chillies. Is this how Paula Radcliffe prepared for her London Marathon triumph this year? Possibly not.

It's rare to drink alcohol before a working day, but play-off day? The very last day of the football season? Impossible to resist. Anyway, I don't suppose it helped me run.

But let's move on, learning our lessons where they present themselves. The first runs are on the board, so to speak. The first run, anyway. Yep, I need about 70 or 80 more before October. 5 miles crossed off, and about 450 to go.

Afterwards, we managed a couple of pints and a Madras-level Chicken Balti, just to ensure that our bodies weren't too traumatised by the unexpected stresses of healthy living. No point in taking unnecessary risks, eh?

May has been a dull old month for anyone new to the website, and there's every chance it might become a bit duller for a while. We chatted over our meal about the important stuff. Football and Iraq. Why have I stopped mentioning the war? I didn't realise that I had. I suppose everything that can be said has been said. All we can do now is wait for the great unravelling. We talked about writing, and various writing projects.

I started writing a book about running last summer: wrote 30,000 words, then stopped. It's time I cranked it up again and finished it. Trouble is, I spend most of my creative energy explaining to my boss why I'm late for work again. The little that's left over is dribbled over the RunningCommentary. I need to channel more of the effort into the book and get the damn thing done.

If I keep saying it, who knows? It may happen. A public thanks to Nigel for nagging me about it. I seem congenitally incapable of believing that I can do certain things. It's always a shock to be told by people that they think I can.

POSTSCRIPT:

Collected my bike today (Wed June 1st) from Bob the Bike mechanic, and took it for a tough 90 minute ride. It's in superb condition, and apart from the few spots of rust that I can rub off at the weekend, it's just like new. The shop, Action Bikes, where I first took the bike, you'll recall, wanted to charge me a minimum of £135. Bob Bristow charged me just £31. Anyone in the Reading area who wants a great job done on their bike should mail him at bobbristow@waitrose.com or call 0118 9582056. Very highly recommended.

Talk to the foot...

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