That envelope must be quite a long way off by now, because I keep pushing it – albeit in my own, unremarkable, way.
I wonder if it’s heading for the moon? Most of us are, according to David Hays and his otherwise useful running spreadsheet. It has a page called “Around The World” which has a couple of graphics showing how far we’ve run in our lives, and how much further we have to go before we, er, reach the moon. In my case, 248,568 miles. Right, I see. I’ll have a pint of what David Hays has been drinking. Someone should write a book about it: The Lunarness of the Long Distance Runner.
A couple of rather spooky events today. Unusually loyal readers may remember as far back as last Sunday. I went out for a run while Arsenal were losing 1-0 to Chelsea in the FA Cup. I went running to save the world, and succeeded, returning to find that Arsenal had won 2-1. Today, Arsenal were again playing Chelsea – in the league this time. I started listening to the commentary, but turned it off after 30 seconds – Chelsea had scored in 28. This time I knew what to do. I went for a run. Could it work again? It could. I returned a couple of hours later to find that Arsenal had come back to win… 2-1.
The other strange happening centred round a sudden desire to eat porridge. We rarely eat porridge in this household, but I read something in midweek by Hal Higdon about how good a bowl of this legendary cultural adhesive could be after a run. Except Americans don’t call it porridge, they give it the unappetising name of “oatmeal”. British porridge sales would nosedive if we ever attached such a monochromatic monicker to this mythical substance. But anyway, Hal suddenly dropped porridge into my head this week, and it must have lodged in the back of my semi-consciousness, because as I reached about mile 9 today, I began suddenly to think how good it would be to eat some.
It can’t be just me. Food becomes an obsession towards the end of a long run. I start to calculate how many calories I’ve expended. These are quickly converted into food tokens to be used when I get home. Being a benign sort of fellow, I offer a particularly generous exchange rate to runners. I run through my options like a waiter on the brink of hysteria. Poached egg on toast. Bagels and honey and bananas. Muesli with extra fruit chopped into it. Home made-smoothies. Kippers and scrambled egg with toast. And today, another word makes its emotional debut: porridge. Porridge. It seemed so right, yet I knew I couldn’t be bothered to make it. I needed rapid refuelling. I needed not fast food, and certainly not a food fast, but food, fast. That comma makes all the difference. Porridge, porridge. Did we even have any? Another time, perhaps, I thought.
But guess what I saw as I limped into the kitchen after my run? A note from M: “Decided to make some porridge this morning, but made too much. Help yourself to the bowl in the fridge if you want to”.
At last. At last, I’ve discovered what marriage is really for. I’d picked up hints before now, and developed the odd hypothesis, but today I felt I got somewhere near the true heart of the answer.
I ran 11 miles along the canal. For the first time since I was training for Chicago, eighteen months ago, I took a water-belt with me. It’s not a habit I’ve found easy to pick up. Running is a sort of natural, unharnessed, activity, so to have something heavy strapped round your middle, encouraging your gargantuan belly to bounce up and down even more than usual, doesn’t seem right.
But today it wasn’t bad at all. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lost around 8 pounds this past week, making the weight of the water bottle insignificant. It also meant I could take a handful of jelly babies, long championed in Runners World magazine as being ideal carb quick-shots. The small pouch in the water belt was an ideal storage chamber, and certainly better than the pocket of my shorts, once the venue of a terrible jelly baby calamity which, forgive me, I’d prefer not to relive right now.
Runners like to talk about their gait, or their arm positions when they run, or their breathing. But I want to know about jelly baby technique, because I’m not at all sure I got it right. I tend to, well, just eat them. Chomp chomp, gone in a few seconds. Is that right? I tried sucking a few, but I couldn’t get the intensity quite right. Too vigorous and it just vanished; too passive and it gradually melted into a sort of sweet puss that clung to my gums like a horrendous mouth ulcer that had just exploded.
I saw nothing in Tim Noakes’s redoubtable Lore Of Running about jelly baby technique. Nothing on the Hal Higdon website. I’ll have to post a message on the RW forum. Or perhaps go straight to the top, and write to Paula Radcliffe. It’s a while since we’ve been in touch. I’m sure she’ll have relived our handshake after the Chicago Marathon many times. (Oh yeah, and remember that fat English bloke who wouldn’t let go of me?)
This week’s weight loss has made a real difference, as mentioned yesterday. I’ve taken the advice of Antonio, the loquacious Almerian frugivore** who contributes regularly to the forum. Plenty of fruit throughout the day, and no alcohol. Yes, you read that right. No beer this week. A heavy price to pay, but maybe… just maybe… worth it.
In the short term.
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** I was talking to someone this week about the words “loquacious” and “frugivorous”. But, he said, they’re not words you’d ever actually use, are they? I guess not.
