I’ve committed adultery.
That’s how it feels, anyway.
I’ve deserted Hal for Bob.
I blame it on my illness. I’m almost never ill. So I find it sort of interesting when I am. It’s only a bad head cold, but enough to keep me away from work for a couple of days. No running of course. So I’ve been using some of my time to read Bob Glover’s Competitive Runner’s Handbook. I’ve been aware of this book for at least three years, but the very title was too off-putting to even pluck from the shelf for a book shop browse. But some correspondence on a running forum recently persuaded me that its bark might be worse than its bite, so I bought a copy. And it’s good.
I’ve been reading the stuff about marathon training with particular interest. I plan to do one in the spring, and have decided my usual training regime needs a splash of Tabasco. Glover’s plans appeal to me for two reasons. One is that they are 16 weeks rather than Hal Higdon’s 18. Last time I did a Hal plan, I felt that 18 was a little long for someone with a reasonable training base. It stretches into the distance just a bit too far. 16 is only 2 weeks less but I’m hoping it will make a psychological difference.
The basic structure of the two is the same: rest days on Monday and Friday, lengthening weekend run. But the second positive difference for me is that Glover’s plans have longer midweek runs and a kinder weekend schedule. The long runs escalate slightly quicker, but the second weekend run is always just a 3 miler, while Higdon’s plans (apart from the Novice schedule which has just one weekend run) tend to have a second weekend run of 5, 6, 7, 8 miles. This is just too much for me.
So I’m going to give Bob a chance.
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It’s Remembrance Day. There was a touching thread on a football website today, where people were posting poems and messages and stuff. (It also taught me that one Evelyn Lintott, apparently the first QPR player to play for England, died on the Somme in 1916). One guy, who I’m fairly sure is a runner from something he once said about marathoning, posted a Charles Sorley poem that I’d not seen before. (Sorley died in the trenches in 1915, aged 20). I thought it combined running and the troubled times in which he lived rather well. Here it is.
The Song of the Ungirt Runners
We swing ungirded hips,
And lightened are our eyes,
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
We know not whom we trust
Nor whitherward we fare,
But we run because we must
Through the great wide air.
The waters of the seas
Are troubled as by storm.
The tempest strips the trees
And does not leave them warm.
Does the tearing tempest pause?
Do the tree-tops ask it why?
So we run without a cause
‘Neath the big bare sky.
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
But the storm the water whips
And the wave howls to the skies.
The winds arise and strike it
And scatter it like sand,
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
