Despite the shocking contents of the Daily Telegraph letters page, kids don’t seem much worse today than when I was a feral adolescent. I can’t help thinking that had the 13 year old me seen the 46 year old me plodding down the street, puffing and panting, I’d have needed no encouragement to laugh, shout abuse and throw things at me. The kids round here are generally pretty inoffensive, so it was a pleasant surprise today to find myself being coarsely insulted by a bunch of pubescents as I overtook them on my way to the canal.
“I could walk faster than that!”, I heard one girl sneer as I passed.
“No you couldn’t, you’re too fat”, I called back.
A chorus of indignant shrieks and squeals arose. “Oi!” shouted one acned boy, as his chaotic hormones got the better of him. I could hear his furious footsteps coming up behind me. Hmmm. How much damage could be inflicted with a deft elbow to the face? The manoeuvre was never called upon. He was just starting on some squeaky tirade about my generous physique when I crossed a side road by the station. Cataclysmically, he never made it. The poor chap must have caught his toe on the kerb, and his speech suddenly became a strangled, panicky wail. A tense second of silence, then the unmistakable sound of a thighful of tender juvenile flesh rapidly eroding on a metre or so of rough concrete. I was tempted to smile, but thought better of it. Instead, I opened my mouth and issued an eighty-decibel cackle. A splendid start to the morning.
Today was another of those bright wintry days that could have been designed with the runner in mind. We’ve been lucky recently. The canal towpath can be a lovely place to run when it wants to be. On the left is a strip of forest, and just beyond, the bird-laden lakes that draw twitchers from across the region. On the other side of the canal is open fields, where you sometimes see deer bouncing around, or the occasional nonchalant fox. The canal itself is the winding silver guide through this quintessential English scene.
The training schedule called for 7 miles but today I was aiming for 8, and ended up with 8.3.
This wasn’t a particularly long stretch by the standards of many runners, but after so many short midweekers, it felt like one to me. It set me thinking about the differences between the long weekend run and the bread-and-butter, 3 or 4 mile jaunts, and this in turn led into my thought for the week: that we should try to celebrate the long run instead of worrying about it.
Every standard training plan for distance running includes a weekly long run, designed to build endurance and stamina. It’s easy for new runners and even the newish, like me, to develop an instant dread for this fixture. Maybe it isn’t surprising, especially if you’re going further than you’ve been before. If you’re training for a first marathon, every long run can be a trip into uncharted territory. Non-runners tend to think of the race itself as the only challenge, but no, the entire marathon journey is a long mountain range of challenges, each peak tougher to climb than the previous one.
They end up becoming more than challenges. We fixate, we obsess. They become the enemy. That’s the way we approach the long runs when we’re new to the game. It makes us feel better. The idea of sacrifice and achievement and self-heroism seems to be part of the marathon mythology for new runners, and something I went through myself. But as time goes on, you slowly learn both to enjoy the sense of achievement that comes from a long run, and to appreciate the real material benefits of the run itself. We finally get through the cappuccino froth and into the coffee.
We may not get much faster, but confidence grows, and the long run seems to change its role as we grow more assured. We now know that we can make the distance, and gradually it ceases to become the week’s punishment, or even the week’s major task for which all those piddly midweek runs are merely preparation. The long run becomes the reward for ticking off those short training jaunts, and it reminds us that this is where the real pleasure of running is found. Perhaps I’d feel differently if I had to do my long runs through industrial estates and retail parks and city centres, but to be able to head off into the countryside for a couple of hours to run and to breathe and to think and to admire nature, is a thrill and a privilege.
