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Tuesday 5 September 2006If the Chinese can do it, so can I. September 5th - the Running Commentary New Year. The point where we throw off the excesses of summer and tuck into healthier fare. I've said something similar a hundred times. Most recent entries here record the explosion of good intentions. We know what happens next. Yes indeed, many good intentions have exploded in this space. Things have changed. Things are different now. Perhaps it was last week's first yawn of autumn. Or the distant growl of winter. Perhaps I'm wary of making a public fool of myself by calling too many new dawns. Perhaps it was the recent correspondence on the forum about the need to nurture and pamper the runner within. In fact, it was all of those things, and it was also my entry, last Friday, to the 35 mile Two Oceans Marathon in South Africa, next April. It concentrates the mind, and that's what I'd been missing. A race entry alone isn't enough, as I discovered on Sunday morning. I squinted through my turbulent hangover at the bedside clock at various points between 8 and 9, but it was never going to happen. The Oracle 10K will have to wait another year. I hope the previous evening's party had been enjoyable. A couple of memory fragments have made their way back to base, but I'm now resigned to them being the lone survivors. The festivities were in North London; I woke in my bed in West Berkshire. How I got from one to the other is a question I'll have to pose to M at some opportune moment. I'll, er, I'll not trouble her on the subject for a while though. Perhaps a year or two will soften and blur her own, contrasting, violently acute, powers of recollection. I did however manage a feeble plod later that day, and another this evening. Both were run-walks rather than runs, and I imagine this may still be the case a week from now. The week after next, however, I must hope that things are falling into place a bit more. That's the scheduled, or rescheduled, start of the 8 week preliminary Two Oceans training plan I'm hoping will really throw me back in the saddle. It's immediately followed by the full-on, 21-week schedule I found on the Two Oceans website. I like the plan. It's aimed at someone like me, aspiring to get home before the 7 hour cut-off. Yes. Another year, another cruel race. Another cut-off with which to stress, to terrorise, and to haunt myself. Readers who've been around more than a few months may recall that Zurich and its 5 hour limit perturbed me for most of last winter and spring. It perturbed me until the afternoon of April 9th, when I tottered home in 4 hours 56 minutes to avoid the humiliation of being dragged from the course sans medal, sans existence. At the moment, I don't stand an earthly. Cats and snowballs in hell spring to mind. Of course, it's what I told myself all last winter too. Out with the old, in with the new, eh? Happy New Year. Comment
on this in the monthly forum thread, or visit the
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Wednesday 6 September 2006Another leaden 3½ mile run-walk this evening, but I may have glimpsed the first rays of hope on the dark horizon. During the last mile or two, just as I was resigning myself to the usual extended, and enforced, warm-down walk, I found one or two of those... bouncy moments when I could almost kid myself I was running freely, and with self-confidence. The big difference is the re-emergence of genuine optimism. I may have to tolerate another... 3 or 6 or even 20 crap runs before a truly good one appears. But it will happen. I now know it. Last week, I couldn't admit to the probability of experiencing a proper run ever again. It was a trick once known, but now forgotten. I'd unlearnt how to ride that bike. But that's all gone now. Payday is on the way, and I'm going to enjoy the dividend I'll be due after all these painful, daily installments. Comment
on this in the monthly forum thread, or visit the
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Thursday 7 September 2006 Donald
Trump's comedy barnet, part sculpture, part hibernating mammal, is
rightly considered suitable for late-night viewing only, so the TV
series constructed in its honour, The Apprentice,
means little sleep for the tiny community of people entertained both by
weighty business issues and the irresistible bitchiness of
(superbly-misnamed) "reality TV". Another well-past-midnight climb up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire meant I'd got home from work feeling too tired to go out for a run this evening. But after dumping my work clothes and staring out of the window at the fading daylight, at the warm breeze rattling the trees at the end of the garden, I'd no choice. These are perfect evenings for getting out of the house and into the countryside. September in England may be autumn, but it's autumn in the arms of summer, and should be celebrated. Sticking to my recent routine, I walked for the first few hundred yards before veering away into open country at a semi-jog. Recently, I've been making it up as I go along. Formal intervals, informal fartlek, hell-for-leather sprinting, leaning on a field gate pretending to stretch my calf muscles, strolling, speed-walking... you name it. If it's a method of two-legged self-propulsion, I've been doing it. Tonight I strapped myself into the iPod and blasted off to the sound of Modern Times, Bob Dylan's new album. It's largely treacley, phlegmy R ‘n’ B but it's Dylan, and we fans treat him like we treat most OAPs -- with a certain amount of patronising tolerance. On this website, I'm the only Dylanite for miles, but if you want to check out anything, try "Workingman's Blues", which includes a line which seems splendidly inappropriate for a pop song: "The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down". I had some recent correspondence about Dylan with fellow QPR fan and Brightonian Ron Gould. Ron is a long time folkie, and has stories to die for. Tragically, he hates Dylan, despite being part of the London and Greenwich Village folk scenes in the early sixties (or perhaps because he was there). He takes up the story about an album session: "Well, as I remember it, the people that were playing were von Schmidt, Fariña, Ethan Signer and Bob Dylan... I sang choruses on some of the things -- I definitely sang on 'Glory Glory' -- but I can't make any claims to fame... There was the tape-recorder, sitting on the shop counter, and just one microphone, into which everyone in the room had to sing and play. We were all so primitive that everything was done pretty much in one take... What happened was that Richard and Eric von Schmidt were there first and they recorded a blues... then Signer turned up... and then, about two tunes later, that's when Dylan came in with the bottles of Guinness... but he didn't have an opener... Then Rick von Schmidt handed Dylan an already opened bottle of Guinness, and Dylan took it up to his mouth, took a swig, pulled a face and said, My God what is this? And then he tipped the rest of it on the floor... Doug [Dobell] didn't like his shop floor being messed up... But after that, it seemed to calm down and there was just a lot of playing and drinking. Basically that was it. It was just a one-off that we did and nobody thought it would ever come to anything..."Most of the Running Commentary community is already anti-Dylan. What will they think when they discover he also despises Guinness? Such random worries kept me occupied for most of the next 40 minutes. After Dylan, I shuffled on through Tommy Makem, Loudon Wainwright III, Lloyd Cole and Leonard Cohen, before realising that I was sweating with effort for the first time in many months. More than that, the run:walk ratio was now reaching towards 5:1, from the 1:1 of last week. I could feel myself beaming, albeit through gritted teeth, as I crunched along the gravel path through the deer park. By now, the sun had gone. Instead, the moon hung in the sky like a newly-lit lantern, illuminating the open fields and long straight road back home. I'm still a long, long way out. Worse, I'm still in the dungeon -- but for 45 minutes this evening, I was able to get the trapdoor open an inch or two -- just enough to get a glimpse of the Promised Land, and just enough to keep the enthusiasm, the effort and the resolve burning as brightly as tonight's moon. As I panted past the long window of the Red Lion, I noticed a horribly plump drinker pointing at me and cackling derisively. Sometimes it helps to see oneself as others see you. I'm not talking about me here -- I'm talking about him. The gloomy truth is that for the last few months I've been him rather than the guy running past. In my imagination, I could see myself jabbing my forefinger back at the fat beer guzzler. I have only two words for him: "You're fired!" Comment
on this in the monthly forum thread, or visit the
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Tuesday 19 September 2006 - Notes From A Cool IslandThere's nothing the British like so much as a joke they really know, so it's been impossible to mention to anyone in recent weeks that I'm going to, or have just come back from, Iceland, without some mention of Tesco or Sainsbury's. As they throw their head back and guffaw loudly, I quietly thank the god of destiny that I wasn't born with a jokey name. Someone did once point out that my name is an anagram of LARDY NEW MAN, but I've resolved never to mention this to anyone. I once worked with a chap who carried the burden of his name. One wonders what the parents of little Albert Hall were thinking of as they made their way to the font. Anyway, we had a great holiday. Iceland is a remarkable and inspirational country. Literally an "awesome" experience. It saddens me to have to put that word in inverted commas, but it's been abducted by aliens hell-bent on trying to change its meaning. Americans now think that awesome is a synonym for "pretty good" or "quite large". Iceland is truly awesome; it produces a sense of awe in the visitor. Its land-mass is about the same as England's but the population is only just 200,000, or around the size of a town like Reading, or Southampton, or Derby. So apart from its extraordinary natural beauty it has a raw wildness, and with it, something that's hard to find in Europe -- a feeling of remoteness and isolation that gives you a chance to be alone with yourself and to ponder the state of your relationship with this lump of muck spinning onwards through space. We don't normally associate a ring road with driving pleasure, but Iceland's is 2,500 kilometres long, and it will take your breath away. It stretches round the perimeter of the island, embracing the contours, shooting up and down the spectacular fjords and along the cliff tops. If you see two cars within the same hour, you're in a traffic jam. It reminds the weary, Western European urban car owner that driving can be hugely entertaining and even genuinely thrilling. But while driving there is good enough, Iceland is a country that should ideally be seen and understood and enjoyed on foot. With more time and different company, I'd have liked the chance to walk long stretches. Instead, I made do by running in short, early morning sessions. The physical training benefit probably didn't amount to much, but mentally, these patches of solitude helped a lot, and seem to have completed the task of reigniting my faltering enthusiasm and ambition. To run before breakfast in a vast, empty, mountainous landscape, devoid of people and traffic, with no sound but the occasional mournful bleating of a sheep, the white noise of the distant sea breaking on the cliffs, and the cadenced crunch of plodding feet on gravel, all wrapped up in a fresh 7 or 8 degrees, is all you will ever need to reunderstand and to relearn everything that a hot boozy World Cup summer in Britain tried to brainwash out of you. Weirdly, although I was apparently totally alone, I had the sense that I was being watched, or even watched over. I was in my own Truman story, but utterly safe -- both protected and protecting. It reminded me of a long run I did one Sunday afternoon in February, 2002, when I was training for my first marathon: ...now it was a friendlier, brighter road, and the countryside seemed more awake and more content with itself. At one point, in a kind of semi-hallucinatory spell I heard some church bells far off across the valley, and had a quite unexpected Adlestrop moment that brought tears to my eyes. I felt like a ghost; an actor declaiming to an empty theatre; a flickering candle in a darkened cathedral. This nervous shadow in a vast, hollow landscape. For a moment I was in someone else's story. Then I came back. This is what running can be. It's not often you get such a moment of insight. That first time was in the rough wintry countryside of Southern Gloucestershire. This time it happened in Dyrhólaey, the southernmost tip of Iceland, a remote peninsular with empty, basalt-black sandy beaches and a craggy coastline. The cliffs here are said to be the home of ten million puffins but disappointingly, they were all out for the day when we visited. In fact, we'd missed them by a couple of weeks. It seems they fly out to sea for the winter months and just bob around in mid-ocean, chomping fish until it's time to return to these cliffs in spring for the party season. The next day I ran in Hofn, 300 km further north. This wasn't quite so successful. On the one day that I stepped outside without my cap and jacket, I found it cold and teeming with rain. The guy on reception duty had stared at me with such amazement as I crept past that I couldn't face the humiliation of returning within a minute of leaving to collect these items, so I shrugged, and plodded off towards the small harbour for a trip round the outside of the fish-canning factory. Again, much incredulity from the odd local. Running seems to be a minority interest in this country. Indeed, on the entire trip, the only time I saw another runner was when I ran past a bathroom showroom in Reykjavik and spotted my own grotesque reflection in a long, horizontal mirror. It was in Hofn that I came across the first of many fans of English football. The manager of the hotel we stayed in is a fanatical Arsenal supporter. He confided in me that most lunchtimes last year were spent chewing herrings in front of a computer screen, on which he watched a web-cam image of the new Emirates Stadium being built in North London. Perhaps he was a puffin in a previous life. The following morning, we woke in Egilsstadir in the north east of the country. Running along the main road around this small town was probably my least scenic jaunt of the trip, yet the most successful in running terms. At last, I managed to dump my run-walk days. Only 45 minutes, but they were 45 continuous jogging minutes. No walking. Hurrah! The moment of triumph didn't last long. It's true that my keenness to run never wavered, and I went out for pre-breakfast sessions almost everywhere we stayed. There was the crazy lunar landscape around Lake Myvatn, the quaint streets of Akueyri and Reykjavik, and the mottled lavafields near Geysir in the south. I tried to do my duty everywhere -- but after the first few days, I just couldn't. Why not? Because halfway through the holiday, I got taken violently fat. My lard quotient has rocketed in the past few months. The week before the trip, sick of being 30 pounds heavier than I was in Zurich, I started to eat properly again, and managed to lose 4 or 5 pounds. It was this small weight dividend that had helped me out of the run:walk routine in Egilsstadir. But eventually, Icelandic cuisine got the better of me, and I slipped back into that lardy quicksand. Iceland is a pretty barren land, and this lack of greenery extends to its cuisine. It's meat and sweet-heavy. Add to that my inability to drive any distance without a constant supply of toffees and Everton Mints, and you'll get the unpleasant picture. I OD-ed on sugar and fat, and for the last half of the trip felt noticeably... more substantial than I had earlier on. I got home to confirm that the gains of the previous week had been wiped out. More than wiped out. But we move on. With exactly 200 days to go to the Two Oceans race in Cape Town, it's déjà vu all over again. Marathon number 6 starts here. 200 days is much further out than usual, but I need a longer run up this time. The race... let's say, offers 8.6 miles more pleasure than the standard 26.2 marathon. And it's hilly. More challenging are those 30 pounds that I didn't have when I plodded round Zurich in April. But 200 days is enough time. Excess blubber is burdensome enough without the unnecessary ballast of pessimism. Finishing a long race is a great feeling, but setting off on the training is pretty good too. Every long race campaign must start with an explosion of excitement and a sense of adventure, or it serves no purpose for me. When I lose that, I lose the thrill, and that's when I'll stop. As the training proceeds, I'm likely to get disillusioned and negative. Last time it was gloom about my chances of getting round Zurich before the 5 hour cut-off. This time, it will be anxiety about the need to pull another 15 kilometres from an empty locker, and about getting through the distance in the 7 hour time limit. But if I don't do that, I don't get my medal -- and that would never do. Oh. I dread the thought of sounding too goody-goody about this. Or about anything else, come to that. Last night I ran with The Clash on my iPod. It's a minor regret that I never saw them live. In fact, I didn't like them much in their heyday. In 1978 we'd all prematurely 'moved on' to JJ Cale and Dire Straits. Worthy enough I suppose, but it's only from the reluctant vantage point of middle age that I now recognise the essential analgesia of such anodyne AOR. I didn't want the chaotic pain of punk then. But now? Now it seems to have been converted back into adrenaline via some mysterious midlife filter. But the great Joe Strummer and the Clash are long gone. Heck, even Mick Jones is suddenly older than me. Mick's choice of middle-aged rebellion is the same as mine -- the poor fellow sits behind me at Loftus Road. Good health is the new depravity, marathon running the favoured hallucinogen. We once wanted to change the world. Now all we crave is a new PB. We fought the laws of nature, and the laws of nature won. And that's not funny either... Comment
on this in the monthly forum thread, or visit the
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Saturday 23 September 2006Bad run today. Chugged along the canal for 3 kilometres before having to stop for a walk, and never really got going again. I amused myself by listening to a collection of podcasts from Hal Higdon and the US Runner's World magazine, the latter mainly on the subject of the New York Marathon. I've had it in mind that I have so few marathons in me that I should aim to do them in different countries, so I've not seriously thought about doing another in the US. I'm not even sure if Brits are allowed to travel there anymore. But if we are, perhaps I should think about the NY Marathon sometime. It sounds like quite an event, despite the need to be bussed out of town at 4 in the morning, or whatever. I spent almost an hour listening to the podcasts. I'd forgotten what a laid back voice Higdon has. He doesn't sound like a runner. I met Hal several times during the week I ran Chicago in 2002, but I don't remember him sounding quite so... down home. Anyway, apart from a decent quote from Willie Sutton who, when asked why he robbed banks, replied "Because that's where the money is", I don't think I learnt a great deal. This set me wondering whether marathon running has a finite core of information. I've read a couple of Hal's books, plus various other running how-tos, so it shouldn't be surprising that I've heard most of it before. I could almost have written these podcasts for him. This certainly isn't to downplay the usefulness of the material. The advice is good. But I seem always to be looking for more, and perhaps the truth is that beyond this point, there isn't a whole lot more to discover. Or to discover from other people. Maybe it's all up to me now.
I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record but I really need to put
that book together. Marathon Running For Fat,
Lazy Gits.
Comment
on this in the monthly forum thread, or visit the
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Thursday 28 September 2006I predict a diet. Comment
on this in the monthly forum thread, or visit the
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