Saturday 17 February 2007

Strategy for a Marathon

by Marnie Mueller

I will start

when the gun goes off.

I will run

for five miles.

Feeling good,

I will run

to the tenth mile.

At the tenth

I will say,

"Only three more

to the halfway."

At the halfway mark,

13.1 miles,

I will know

fifteen is in reach.

At fifteen miles

I will say,

"You've run twenty before,

keep going."

At twenty

I will say,

"Run home."

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Monday 26 February 2007

Not everyone appreciated the staccato insight offered by Marnie Mueller's poem in the previous entry. For some true doggerel, how about:

Toucans in their nests agree
Guinness is good for you
Open some today and see
What one or Toucan do

I gazed for some minutes at this original Guinness poster in Dolan's Bar, down the Dock Road in Limerick, last Tuesday evening, trying to force it to scan. I never made it. I wondered how Dorothy L. Sayers, reputed to have written the verse when she worked as a copywriter for Guinness's advertising agency back in the 1930s, had imagined it to sound.

The best beer slogan I ever saw appeared in Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim": Bowen's Beer Makes You Drunk.

I've not felt particularly lucky of late, something of which my brief stop in Dolan's made me profoundly aware. For an hour or so I was unspeakably happy. The Guinness was like black syrup, sucked through a dense dab of whipped cream. Oh Jesus. As perfect a pint of this elixir as you could ever hope to meet. In the far corner, the traditional music was striking up as I reached the halfway point of my second pint. Mother of Mary. The high water mark of my month, no question.

Bugger it, perhaps of my life.

This year I become fifty, the sort of milestone that produces questions and thoughts once considered way out of bounds. Is it time to give up alcohol completely? Contrary to the impression you may get from reading these pages, I don't actually drink much. The trouble is, when I do, I tend to enjoy myself way too much. Sublime episodes like Dolan's Bar in Limerick are just priceless. But I suppose the cynic in me says yeah, some moments are priceless, but usually they're merely very expensive -- in all senses of the word -- and these are the ones I'd be happy to leave behind for good.

But it's the other, knock-on stuff.

I'm increasingly aware of the negative impact that booze has on my running. I'm not talking about getting blathered (which very rarely happens these days). No, I'm talking about just a couple of glasses of wine with a meal. It's enough for me to wake the next morning with the sense that a tiny but critical wire's been disconnected somewhere, or a screw has worked loose. Not enough to immobilise me, but just enough to produce a rattle. Just enough to put me off. Pathetic.

And there's a further, worse implication. When I don't run, I don't write. Here's the evidence. Check out the last few dates I posted entries on this site.

It becomes ever clearer that running is a pivotal activity for me -- pivotal in its effect on my general sense of health and wellbeing and optimism; and on getting stuff that needs to be.... written written.

I was horribly ill over the weekend: the natural culmination of a petrified fortnight of comfort food and pessimism. The illness, I'm beginning to see, was a good thing. Cathartic.

This afternoon, from my little home-office eyrie, I looked out over the neighbouring gardens and for the first time in a year, and had that utterly thrilling sensation. As the sunshine slowly brightened, like the lights gradually coming up over a darkened stage, it suddenly hit me.

Spring is here, boys. Spring is here.

Leaves are appearing on the shrubs. The daffs and tulips are out. The starlings are building their nests in the eaves again. All it needed was that twiddly D chord and George Harrison, and the scene would have been complete. This was almost as good as that second pint of Guinness in Dolan's Bar.

Tomorrow morning, people. Tomorrow morning.

Winter is gone. Tomorrow, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the mountain one more time... tomorrow, I start again.

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Wednesday 28 February 2007

Yesterday?

Yesterday morning I was up at sunrise, running 5 miles in record time while the world was still comatose.

A couple of hours later, rattling with endorphins, I march into my boss's office and tell him where he's going wrong. He rewards me with a stellar promotion and a payrise that promises me permanent financial security.

Y'know, I sometimes wonder why I don't just fabricate the lot. Ever since someone called into question my balmy summer of love with the French diplomat's German wife in Darjeeling, I've thought, "Why bother, really?"

Take Two.

Yesterday I overslept. I went to work and felt ill all day. I was hoarse and shivery, and every now and then I would wipe the sweat from my temples -- and not the sort of temples you get in Darjeeling, through whose sacred grounds Hildegarde and I would walk after chess and late afternoon tea (Orange Pekoe Unbroken Leaves) at Glenary's, and before meeting up with the prison governor for spicy snacks and ice cold beer and whisky chasers, as we were wont to do.

1982.

The same year that QPR got to the FA Cup Final. Twice.

And a great Bordeaux vintage.

Five years later I was in Pomerol, picking grapes and getting drunk every night. It was the summer of the Chateau Palmer story that I once mentioned here.

Early one evening, poking around in a cupboard in the kitchen of the cottage we were staying in, I came across a packet of Darjeeling Orange Pekoe, so I made a small pot and sat on the sunlit verandah and drunk it, grinning from ear to ear.

And then? Only one thing for it really. I uncorked a decent bottle of St Emilion. The 1982 vintage of course. I poured a large glass and held it up to watch the sun slowly sinking through it and thought about September 1982.

The very same rays that matured these grapes on the vine, were simultaneously ripening my youth in the Himalayas. Ah yes. The sun shone on me that year.

The Tea, The Tea -- Isn't that an Iris Murdoch novel?

Orange Pekoe. The very name is enough, but give me a cup, and I really am somewhere else and nowhere at all.

Better to be upbeat than beat-up. It's what I found I'd written on my pad this morning, when I emerged from the weekly team meeting. I think it's the first time I've ever written anything during a meeting apart from the date. I have drawersful of notebooks filled with pages on which is written nothing but "Mtg:", followed by a date and a doodle or two.

But today? Today when I looked, I'd written Better to be upbeat than beat-up. It's now my motto of the month, even though the month ends in less than two hours.

But it's where I am, and there are worse places I could be. I've been to them over the past couple of weeks. But I've escaped again, and here I am, limping away from the hole in the fence. Upbeat.

Still haven't run, but it's OK. I'm optimistic and excited and confident about it all again now. I'm just slightly ill still. Let us not be precipitous.

Talking of lettuce, I've been eating excessively healthily for three days now, and the benefits are starting to ooze through my pores. Energy, and a positive outlook. That's me at the moment. I'm looking forward to getting out there and running, more so than I think I have in a long time.

That's it.

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