I recently bought an iPod Nano, and have been teasing myself with its possibilities. Started off with a few rather unsatisfying weeks, re-exploring the less hospitable, outer territories of my own MP3-ised CD collection. Since then I’ve been back on safer ground — the spoken word. It’s a wholly different experience. Being a lifelong BBC Radio 4 addict, this shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was. It’s the different context that’s startled me. There’s something surreal about hearing languid, disembodied voices while out running. I suppose this is what believing in god must be like.
On the subject of which, I heard yet another cracking Mark Twain quotation yesterday, while listening to the podcast of Start The Week in my hotel room. It’s a good edition (well worth catching if you’re reading this before 20th March), featuring those two old adversaries in the evolution/creationism debate, Richard Dawkins and Richard Harries. The discussion began with Twain’s observation, that Faith is believing what you know ain’t so. Huckleberry Finn’s perspicacity would have been lost on me when I last read it. Almost 40 years on, I should revisit, just like I’m revisiting Dusseldorf.
I arrived back yesterday, late afternoon, not feeling much like running. The hangover was mild, but travelling amplifies it. It’s like carrying an extra piece of baggage. After unpacking, and marvelling at how much running gear I’d brought, I felt obliged to get out there, but knew as soon as I stepped outside that this wasn’t going to work. The day was hostile and I felt remote from it. If you begin a run by yawning, you know the game’s up. I spent just a minute or two outside the hotel, listening to the cold wind gusting mournfully through the angular stainless steel sculpture, before opting to kick the idea into touch.
Today was better. My early fears about the Germans being lunch-averse and working 12 hour days are deeply unfounded. It’s quite OK to leave your desk on the stroke of 5 o’clock. Good news for the runner, and with clocks here an hour ahead of the UK, I have me an extra hour of daylight to burn.
I’m less than gruntled with my new GPS gadget, the Garmin Forerunner 305. This is the successor to the 301. Combines speed/distance with heart rate monitor, the same as its predecessor, but has been reconfigured into a more watch-like package. Maybe I’m in a GPS blackspot here, but it’s taking almost 10 minutes to pick up a satellite, and some of the readings are bizarre. If the calorie readings were true I’d be sporting the figure of Kate Moss by now.
The GPS finally woke up just as I reached the tree-lined, tarmac path alongside the Rhine.
We’re fighting the final days of winter here. It’s still cold in Dusseldorf, but there is sunshine to be had if you seize your chances. Again, there were plenty of runners about and even an inline skater or two, reminding me of last year’s Hamburg Marathon where skaters are allowed. Cheats.
Back to the iPod. I have a confession to make. I nearly blurted it out at the start of this entry, but managed to rein myself in. I can hold back no longer. Here’s the simple, chilling fact: For the past week or so, I’ve been listening to self-improvement audio books. Wait, wait, please…. hear me out. You see, it was like this. When I hit on the idea of talk, I began scanning the web for cheap sources of spoken-word audio. Not surprisingly, eBay turned out to be a good source. You can pick up hundreds of hours of great radio classics like Dad’s Army and Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes for a few pounds. If that’s not your thing, there’s Harry "F" Potter, or the complete works of literary luminaries like Shakespeare and Stephen King. Or indeed, a DVD containing 186 self improvement books. Eh?
Well why not, I thought? I can never motivate myself sufficiently to read those volumes on how to increase your motivation. Perhaps if I could just listen to them, something might squeeze in and embed itself in my subconscious?
Some of the stuff is unintentionally hilarious. So far, I’ve discovered Brian Tracy’s 21 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws Of Money, followed by Ab Jackson telling me How to Organize Your Life And Get Rid of Clutter. On reflection, Alan Watts Teaches Meditation wasn’t an ideal treatise to absorb while trying to run for an hour. My body got more confused than ever as this velvetty-voiced Englishman calmly urged me to find the groove with the eternal now.
Still to come are titles like Awaken the Giant Within (and if I can cope with further internal disruption, there always its companion volume, Unleash The Power Within). If I need to chill out after all that, there’s Super Self Esteem Hypnosis, Procrastination to Motivation, Dale Carnegie’s Stop Worrying And Start Living, and Dane Spotts’ Attracting Wealth And Prosperity. On the off-chance that I’m not yet god, and still have some time to spare before buying out Roman Abramovitch and Donald Trump, I can complete my personal transformation with David Lieberman’s Get Anyone To Do Anything, Dennis Waitley’s Psychology of Winning, and Charles Faulkner’s Success Mastery With NLP. What’s NLP? The suspense is agonising, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the P stood for Power. Most of these instruction manuals promise power and money.
These declamations dribble into each other, like puddles of piss at the start of a race. After a while it’s hard to disentangle one earnest, urgent American salesman from another. And that’s what they are — salesmen. They promise me unshackled power, wealth, influence and personal fulfillment. And yet… while I know that many of these people are unscrupulous fanny merchants, am I alone in finding the genre strangely compelling? What they say to me is rarely new, but you have to be impressed by their brass neck. And just occasionally, you do hear something that is genuinely thought-provoking and useful.
Yesterday’s 8½ mile trot along the Rhine at dusk was accompanied by the affable Brian Tracy, the chap who told me last week about those 21 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws Of Money. This time it was all about Thinking Big. Yes, I can achieve anything I want if I decide that it is to be. I have trouble with this claim, because it is clearly a lie. No matter how ambitious, determined and hard-working I am, I will never win the Men’s Singles title at Wimbledon. I will never score the winning goal in the World Cup Final. This verboten area beyond realistic ambition is never addressed. But despite that, this recording did succeed in setting me thinking.
I thought about the book I was supposed to have finished writing last year; about my business ideas, and how they tend not to leave the drawing board. I thought about my Zurich Marathon doubts, and about my all-or-nothing nutritional cycles. It’s something well beyond inertia; more of a nagging belief that… that people like me don’t do things like this. But wasn’t the London Marathon in 2002 supposed to sweep all that away? What happened to the brave new post-marathon world? Interestingly, I believe it did materialise, and that it is still there. I just seem not to have walked through its open doors yet.
This might sound like a gloomy, introspective plod along the banks of the Rhine but it was anything but. Despite, or perhaps because, I’d not run much recently, I felt strong and confident. This was one of those bouncy runs I’ve talked about before. The scenery isn’t spectacular but it’s easy on the eye. The stuff I was listening to wasn’t a stick to beat myself with but a branch to cling onto, and with which to haul myself out of something that I didn’t even know I’d fallen into.
I took some snaps, reproduced here with the help of Photoshop.
I thought about Zurich too. I thought some more about something that crossed my mind recently. It’s pretty simple really. If I don’t get my target, it’s no big deal. It just means I’ll have to run another marathon to try again. And if that fails, well bring on the next one. I’ll have to succeed sometime.
It’s a question of… faith?
Ooops.
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