Sunday 2 December 2007
All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey
It’s a while since I thumped the marathon tub. Let’s do it now.
Taking the baton from the desperate lunge of the previous entry, I did manage to see the doc — eventually. He rang in sick first time round — a self-referential conundrum of the type I enjoy — but I persisted, despite the dial on the knee throbostat clicking back a few notches by the time I got there. He prodded the unco-operative joint, and peered at it like it was an exotic marsupial twitching in a cage.
The eventual verdict was that ‘wear and tear’ is the culprit. In other words, I’m getting old and this is what happens. I had mixed feelings about this. I wasn’t sure I believed it. I wanted a more technical explanation. One minute I was gambolling like a spring lamb; next I was hit with a pain so bad I couldn’t get out of bed. I wanted the cause of knee-death to be more dramatic and more persuasive than ‘natural causes’.
But my rarely-seen more sensible half was relieved that the good doctor hadn’t donned his black cap before delivering the judgement. Even if the explanation was a bit weedy, there appears to be nothing obvious and seriously wrong. And he did mention that until recently he’d worked as an orthopaedic specialist at the hospital — so I’d have thought he’d be well placed to recognise a dicky knee when one arrived in his surgery.
His advice was that a return to the plodding life was likely to do it more good than harm, and that I should spit in the eye of my Boston Marathon anxieties. He didn’t use those exact words, but that’s my translation.
More practically, he said something that did start a train of useful thought. That I should think about running less often, and resting, or cross-training, more. The ‘less is more’ idea was the battle cry of the Mighty Swede of this parish, as he trained for the Two Oceans Marathon earlier this year.
It would be cheeky to take ‘less is more’ too literally, considering that I’ve barely run in the last two or three months. But I take it to mean quality over quantity, and it led me to dig out and rediscover a training schedule I’d read about in Runner’s World magazine a year or two back. It’s a 3-runs-per-week marathon plan, and was devised by the Furman Institute of Running & Scientific Training, an impressive sounding body, but one whose over-complex name was almost certainly chosen for its 22 carat acronymical value.
FIRST is essentially an offshoot of a university department in Greenville, South Carolina. It may well be just a room, or even a desk. Or perhaps it has no furniture whatever to its name. What it does have is this 3-runs-per-week marathon plan, which I’ve decided to try out.
There are two flavours: fast and slow, though needless to say they don’t call them this. The idea isn’t new but it’s good to see it with different wrapping paper. Each of the 16 or 18 week plans has a long run (bit slower than intended marathon pace), a tempo run (bit slower than 10K pace) and a speed session (about 10K pace). In between are a couple of easy cross-training sessions. It’s about time I got the bike out again.
The Boston Marathon is 20 weeks to the day tomorrow, which gives me a couple of weeks to drop a few pounds and become plodworthy. I’m up for it.
This week hasn’t been bad — the best for a couple of months. I’ve managed three runs. Two gentle 3.5 milers at the start of the week, and a more testing 6 miles today along the muddy towpath of the canal.
It was a windy, rainswept afternoon which explains why I saw no one apart from an invisible fisherman. All his gear was neatly laid out around his temporary home — but angler was there none. Maybe he’d been dragged beneath the choppy waters by an alligator flushed down the toilet years earlier in Whitley Wood.
My training hasn’t officially started, but it was hard not to consider this the first day of the Boston campaign. It was therefore an occasion for momentous thoughts. As I trudged, I forced myself to think the unthinkable. The unthinkable is something I think about quite often. It’s this: that I should give up alcohol for the duration.
Yes I know. But…
It would make a major difference to my chances of success. I’d lose weight much more quickly. The booze itself isn’t as calorific as the Enemy claims, but as I’ve often observed in these pages, it’s all the rubbish food I shovel down my neck at the same time that causes me such grief. I find it almost impossible to enjoy a pint in the pub without a bag of crisps or peanuts. At home, a glass of robust red wine is but a ghost of its true identity without a plate of cheese and biscuits. And once the crap food damn is breached like this, more must inevitably follow.
So abstinence makes some sort of sense, though it would be tough. Christmas isn't a problem as I'm surrounded by teetotallers. I can think of a couple of impending social engagements that might challenge a non-drinker. And of course, there's the little matter of the RC AGM in Almeria at the end of January...
As I plodded and pondered, Jez Lowe’s latest album entertained me. (Don’t worry, no one else has heard of him either.) As my desolate, wintry run reached its closing stages I was wondering which of these lilting shipyard ballads deserved the Track du Jour nomination. However, with the iPod now back on shuffle mode, something popped up that I’d not heard in a long time: a tune that instantly transported me back to my first university term in 1979. More specifically, to an appalling pub called the Phoenix in the Precinct Centre below the hall of residence I lived in for a while. It must have been the convenience of the place, but a few of us seemed to go there far more often than its ambience merited.
One of the few saving graces of the boozer was a cracking jukebox. Through that first, grim winter there was one song that seemed to offer us hope of something better to come. I, or one of the others in the gang, would ensure it was played several times each evening. Whenever those first few insistent bars of accoustic guitar appeared, conversation seemed to cease for a few moments, as though some sort of window on a wider, brighter world was being wrenched open.
On this blustery, nondescript afternoon, how great to hear that intro again, followed by those yearning lyrics.
All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey
I went for a walk on a winter's day
I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.
California dreamin'
On such a winter's day
California Dreamin'. This is now my campaign song, even if I may have to think of it as Massachusetts Dreamin’. Hope and hollowness, pain and spiritual lyricism, all bundled up together.
Sure sounds like a worthy marathon anthem to me.
Sunday 16 December 2007
Tyra-knee-saurus Rex
Yesterday, for the first time in nearly 40 years, I went to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. I wanted to look upon these mighty works and despair, just as I had done as a kid. But I fancy the Tyrannosaurus Rex has shrunk a little since I was 10. Back then it was an unimaginably frightful behemoth. Yesterday I was surprised and disappointed to find that something in the intervening years had drained the shock and fear from the experience.
By the time I left the museum it was harshly wintry and dark, with the temperature dropping to freezing. I walked past the outdoor ice rink that's become a regular Christmas feature of the Cromwell Road. Beneath the illuminated trees the ice glistened like glass. The skaters' delighted squeals mingled with the distant sound of a brass band playing Hark the Herald Angels Sing. For the first time this year, I felt a pang of Christmas.
A couple of minutes later I was sitting in the glorious foyer of the V & A, waiting for M to finish her exhibition visit. She'd invited me to accompany her, but The Golden Age of Couture, Paris and London, 1947-1957 hadn't roared at me in quite the same way as the dinosaurs had.
With a few minutes to kill, I reached into my jacket pocket for the book I'd grabbed on the way out. I haven't read any George Sheehan for a few months. With my Boston training due to start in a couple of days, I need to summon all the help I can. I opened it and read these words:
For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear the leaves and listen to rain and look to the day when it all is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight. For them, sport is not a test but a therapy, not a trial but a reward, not a question but an answer.
Cheers George. Unlike the Tyrannosaurus Rex, you never disappoint.
I reflected on all these matters this morning, as I chugged my six stately miles up and down the canal towpath. It's my last day of freedom before the Boston schedule kicks in. I've been here several times before: marathon kick-offs, but I have to concede that they haven't always lived up to their billing. I can think of at least three occasions when the marathon bugle would have been better off kept in its case.
My main worry this time round isn't motivation. If you need motivation to run Boston, you're in the wrong game. Apart from wanting to take part in the world's oldest and most celebrated marathon, I've committed to raising at least £1500 for the JDRF. It's the least I can do for the charity which has been a friend of this site for some time now. In fact I should acknowledge that without the JDRF, I wouldn't be taking part in this race. Apart from a handful of charity places, Boston is a qualification-only event. Someone of even my advanced years would have to have a recent marathon time of 3:35 to get a place. My existing marathon PB would win me a qualifying place only if I was more than 80 years old. Check your qualifying time here.
I'll be reminding people of the charity sub-plot as the campaign proceeds. Thank you in advance. :-)
I'm not going to whine on about my knee, but it remains my biggest worry. I know that I weigh too much, but it's in my power to lose a few pounds. I know that my stamina is poor, but I can work on that — it's up to me whether I do the long runs that will extend my energy. Motivation can be worked on, as can my charity target. All these things are within my power, and I've no one to blame if I fail. But my knee? My knee has been troubling me for several weeks now, and I expect it to continue to do so. I can do a few things to help it along like wear an elasticated support and limit the ratio of concrete miles against those softer and kinder ones. I've become a glucosamine nut. But the fundamental problem — whatever it is — remains, and I have to hope that it doesn't become the spanner in the works of my training.
Today, as with all recent runs, I could feel it with every step. I won't exaggerate and say that it is horribly painful: it isn't. It's just a sort of uncomfortable twinge that flashes on and off each time I put any weight on my left foot. It's not disabling. I can live with the discomfort. The fear I have is that it's a flag for some bigger problem that will finally reveal itself only at the end of some half marathon.
Just six miles today but I felt them all. I'm unfit and overweight, but a week or two of regular runs and a moderate eating plan should tighten up a few nuts.
It's been interesting to read the slightly panicky messages from johnnyb on the forum recently, as they remind me of myself, 6 years ago, when I too realised that I'd talked myself into a first marathon. I occasionally glance back at those early entries to remind myself of what it was like.
It's where the T. Rex comes in. You never forget the fear of meeting your first dinosaur, but once you've survived one or two, you get a little complacent. Perhaps it's where my dodgy knee has a valuable role to play after all. I've been lucky with injuries over these past six years. The knee anxiety is a new experience for me, and I've no idea down which path — success or failure — it will lead me. As long as it continues to worry me, that necessary tension exists after all — the tension that separates us from our goals and hopes, and keeps us keen and competitive and industrious and resourceful and focused.
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