The years are ganging up on me. One of those significant birthdays pops up this year, so I should attempt a last hurrah; a final bout against Old Father Time and his wingèd chariot. The idea of aiming for another marathon toyed with me, probably based on the adage that there’s no fool like an old fool — particularly where I’m involved. But last time I tried that, Berlin 2013, I ended up in a Zurich hospital, writhing on a padded table like a trapped snake, as an exasperated doctor and nurse tried to restrain me long enough to inject steroids into a couple of collapsed vertebrae. … …
Author: andy
Today, 30 July 2016, is the 50th anniversary of England’s finest football moment. I was born in 1957, and until I found the trapdoor to adulthood, and escaped to university in the late seventies, lived in a dull London suburb called Wembley. London’s under-10s were too young to appreciate the Swinging Sixties, but we didn’t mind. We had more pressing concerns, like scrambling round crumbling bomb sites and being chased down empty streets by aggrieved, fist-waving adults barking dark threats to take us “down the station.” My personal list of approved recreational options included perhaps the greatest playground of all – Wembley Stadium. The old place stood right across the road from my primary school, St Joseph’s. Those famous twin … …
Someone I admired early in my plodding career was Julie Welch, whose resignedly matter-of-fact tale of the London Marathon, 26.2, I found strangely inspiring. Her piece on the Serpies website still brings a distant sheen to the old eyeballs, ten years after I last read it. The lachrymosity is part nostalgia, part melancholy, part euphoria, and part Chianti. Her post-running life has been somewhat pedestrian: she became a long distance walker. Some ex-runners crank up the heart rate with cycling, or slope off to the piste. Others, unable to cope with the indignity of retirement, retreat to the potting shed with a half bottle of vodka concealed inside their Daily Express. Me? As mentioned in my last, … …
So. Erg. Yes. Erg. This is a new word for me, and one with a satisfyingly quasi-onomatoepic quality, reflecting the sound I made, internally at least, when it appeared on my doorstep: the point at which I realised there was no going back. For a three-letter word it packs quite a complicated linguistic punch, but I’ll stick with the job in hand. To the red-faced, bulging-eyeballed cognoscenti, an erg is an indoor rowing machine, and I now own one. Here’s why. My London Marathon attempt fizzled out in a puddle of sloth, pessimisim and demotivation that grew with my list of nostalgic injuries: calf muscles, whiney left knee, back pain. It was the last of those — the lower-back twinges … …
The previous entry was a circuitous way of reporting a little enforced downtime. One lives and learns, as last week’s painful, swollen ankle could attest. The lesson? That high-speed IKEA shopping and MBT footwear are not perfect partners. A less specific refresher lesson in imperfect pairings was the one featuring increasing age and injuries. My period of pre-training training is an acknowledgment that I’d at least thought about this one, though I suppose I’ll now have to think about it some more. This time I was let off with a warning: the damage seems to have repaired itself. And I have the consolation of a length of MDF and some kitchen implements to admire briefly before their inevitable archiving. In … …
Let me apologise in advance to Antonio. Here’s a question you probably won’t be able to answer: ‘Any other JAM fans out there?” Ambiguous on a good day, but the capitals add another dimension of uncertainty. If I say that I’m listening to an MP3 called JAM69, you take another step into the darkness, because of the long-defunct Hersham-based, hairless, raucous beat combo of a similar name. In fact, the audio is BBC’s Just A Minute, though with arch naughty boy Kenneth Williams in the class of ’69, hardly more refined than the yearnings of dissatisfaction produced by the punky skin’eads of Sham 69. Anyway, I got thinking about Just A Minute because in a recent episode, the subject … …
I bought a new gadget recently to remove the top from a boiled egg. The packaging urged me to believe that at last, I could say goodbye forever to those ragged-edged, egg fracture blues. How I made it this far in life without owning such a device, or even knowing about it, is a mystery. Late on Sunday morning, still smarting from the previous day’s IKEA 5K, I limped into the kitchen, keen to give this new lifestyle aid a rigorous workout. Two eggs were removed from the fridge and placed on the worktop, where their temperature would rise to a level at which they wouldn’t crack in a pan of boiling water. As I gazed at them, I wondered … …
Despite the words of his Bobness, don’t pity this poor immigrant — even if I do trample through the mud here and there. Any discombobulation I’ve felt since arriving, nearly four years ago, has largely evaporated — if it existed at all — but it’s a subject I reflect on from time to time. The disorientation of the immigrant is built with big, obvious blocks: new job, social circle, language. Then there’s the currency and driving on the wrong side of the road and that lake outside the window. But the small things make an impact too, like being trusted to get on trains and buses without having your ticket checked, and guiltily noticing that your Swiss colleagues clean their … …
It’s been a while, but let’s lift the latch and see what blows in. It’s good to be sweating and feeling the heart-rate soar once again. I experienced this at the weekend, when studying my bank statement and working out how much I was paying for the gym that I rarely visit. And so, today, a rather ferocious lunchtime session — my first in a long while. In terms of time, I couldn’t afford more than 25 minutes on the cross-trainer and 25 on the treadmill, but it’s a start. Nothing else resembling a run has occurred since the Berlin adventure last September — 317 days ago. It’s time to start thinking about the next, and almost certainly the last, … …
As I glanced at my GPS watch on Saturday afternoon, a moment after it finished recharging, I fancied I heard a snatch of this drifting in through the open balcony door. The watch was last stopped on September 29 at 15.15pm. It was now March 29 at 15.15, precisely six months — to the minute — since I’d tottered across the finish line in Berlin. Six months since I’d done any exercise worthy of a sports watch. If indeed Berlin had been worthy of such a device: perhaps a calendar would have been more appropriate. After 6 months of strategic ignorance about how long it had taken me to stumble the 26 miles, yesterday the watch blurted out its shameful … …