Some good emails this week, including one from a disgruntled Chelsea fan called Rufus who wrote to me from an internet café in Santiago, Chile, to protest about something I wrote about his club on the Runners World website. All I said was that they were corrupting the entire sport, and that there was no honour in buying the Premiership and the Champions League with stolen roubles. Fairly uncontroversial, I’d have thought.
I’ve also had a couple of mails which have got me thinking about my race schedule. I don’t recall saying much about it here, so I’ll mention that I’ve entered two races within six days of each other just after Christmas – Cliveden on December 27th and the Hyde Park 10K on New Years Day.
Cliveden’s a pig in a poke. I can’t find a definitive description of what it’s supposed to be, or even how long it is. Either 5.3 miles or 6 miles. Cross country or trail. Murderous or enjoyable. A hangover is variously essential or deeply unhelpful. I do know that it takes place at Cliveden, the house near Maidenhead once owned by the Astors, and venue of celebrated house-parties in the twenties and thirties. And I do know that it involves running up and down a large steep hill not once, not twice, but three times. I was going to add: “The mud is legendary”, but I can’t believe that mud can ever be described as legendary.
I don’t really do mud, and don’t have many hills under my belt, whatever the scales may say, so something will have to give. I even bought a pair of Gel Guts, the curiously named off-road shoes from Asics that were well reviewed when they came out last year. I’ve been meaning to buy a pair for a while, and when I found some reduced by £20 (to £29) last week, well, I could restrain myself no longer.
Talking of shoes, I heard today that the always-cheap New Balance factory shop were offering an extra 20% off this week, so I’ve dived in there and bought another pair of 854s and a pair of the new 856s. Along with the as-yet unused pair I bought in last year’s sale, I now have four pairs of unworn shoes. Caramba.
The other race is the opposite of Cliveden. Very much a known quantity. I did it in 2003. In a way, a rather dull race, being a circuit of some of Hyde Park’s inner paths, repeated three times. But I like its symbolism. A race on New Year’s Day says something about your intentions for the year ahead. Buggers up your New Year’s Eve though.
End of January comes the Almeria Half Marathon. Then in March we have the Reading and Silverstone Halfs on successive weekends. Then April, with some kind of marathon somewhere. Padua is still the likely one.
For training purposes I’ve assumed I’ll be doing a marathon at the end of April. This means my 16-week Bob Glover training plan kicks in, neatly, in the first week of the year. The Hyde Park 10K, if I get there, will be the final weekend before proper training starts. I call it “proper training” because the four weeks before that need to have at least 20 miles in each if I’m not to get off on the wrong foot with Coach Bob.
This week hasn’t been great so far. I managed 3½ leisurely miles on Sunday,followed by a scheduled rest day. On Tuesday I found myself plodding four miles in Dartford once more. This really is among the bleakest sort of urban landscape available to mankind. Not bleak in the sense of derelict or dilapidated. Just the opposite. It’s modern. But it’s anodyne. Sterile. It’s a concrete pillow, smothering your appetite for life. For a while it drains you of all hope. Down the long dual carriageway, past the Asda depot, BurgerKing and McDonald’s. Oh god, I can’t go on.
I couldn’t face it yesterday or today.
