Another bloody crossroads.
It’s been an interesting week. But first, I’d better plug a gap or two.
It was all going so well. The first three weeks of the marathon plan had gone as planned, with no missed runs that weren’t compensated for. Then 8th June arrived. The schedule called for a step-back week, with a long run of only 6 or 7 miles. It’s what I nearly did, and should have done, on the Saturday morning. Instead, I spent the day working in the garden, which may well have been the sort of effort required by the schedule, though it didn’t occur to me on the day.
Sunday was sunny and hot — the warmest day of the year so far. I woke early and entertained myself with MLCM’s excellent description of his long beach run. It inspired me, but perhaps inspired me in the wrong way.
A web search reminded me of the Kennet Kanter, a 10 miler in Devizes, along the canal, over the border in Wiltshire. Did I really want to do a race? 10 miles was further than I fancied on a hot day, but it was a chance to tick another race box, and the event would surely carry me along in a way that a solitary plod might not in this heat?
I was still silently rowing with myself, listing the pros and cons, as I drove down the M4. But there was no turning back now, so I tried to end the soul-searching and concentrate on the challenge ahead. It was easy enough to find distractions as I dipped down through Marlborough and drove through the stream of picturesque Wiltshire villages towards Devizes.
Not a place I’d been before, but it was pleasant enough. Picturesque, with a large green in the centre of town. Startlingly English. No Nelson Mandela School here, I suspect.
I found the sports centre and parked up. Reaching into my bag, I found that the water bottle received at the previous week’s Newbury 10K had leaked its entire contents into my wallet, so I spent several minutes distributing banknotes, stamps, receipts for Marks and Spencers’ tuna layered salads bought from the Brackley services on the A43 in Northamptonshire, the St Mary Magdeline prayer card, train tickets, HMRC cheques that I really ought to pay in… and so on, around the dashboard of the car, leaving the strong sunshine and cold air blower to do its stuff. Must have been quite a sight. Part Lexus, part tribute to morris dancing. Which in turn made it very Devizes, perhaps.
Enough cash and stamps were eventually sufficiently dehydrated to pay for my entry in the sports hall, after which I made my way to the green for the start of the race. Here, chatting to one of the organisers, I heard that the heat had led to a number of 10 mile entrants drop down to the 5km. It was another clue that perhaps this wasn’t a wise move, though in retrospect, the strongest indication of all was the fact that my legs and back still ached from the previous day’s exertions in the garden. But there is, they say, no fool like the old fool, and I grinned back, and waited for the hooter.
Within a minute I was last, but wasn’t worried about it. The usual back markers have gone out too fast, I thought, and plodded on.
More disconcerting was turning a corner after a mile, and finding that I couldn’t see any runners at all. Had I gone the wrong way? Apparently not, as I could see a water stop in the distance. Eventually reaching it, I stopped to glug a couple of cups, and throw a few more over my head and down my neck. This was going to be hard.
I just didn’t feel like it. Despite drinking plenty of water the previous day, and that morning, I felt strangely dehydrated and over-heated. Any strength in my legs had been replaced with jelly. What was going on?
Hindsight is a miraculous thing. I really should have picked up the strong signals, and just stopped at that point. I’m sure it happens once in a while for most runners. It’s happened to me on training runs. I’ve set off, and realised after half a mile that it just isn’t going to happen. But it seemed wrong to give up in a race, so I soldiered on, already knowing that I was in dead trouble.
Much worse was to come. I can’t recall exactly how it happened, but I managed to aggravate the knee trouble that’s miraculously stayed away for the last few months. I didn’t twist my ankle on a kerb, or fall down a pot hole, or whack it against a lamp post. Just two or three miles in, we passed over a stretch of hard, rutted grass alongside the canal. On the other side of it, as I returned to the tow path, I was suddenly aware of a big pain in my left knee. No swelling, no boney lumps, just a sharp pain with a slow, rhythmic throb. I’d passed up opportunities to stop my participation in the race before now, but I shouldn’t have spurned this one. For inexplicable reasons, I decided to continue — even though I could barely jog, and knew I would be walking most of the rest of the distance.
So. I was going to finish last in a race. I’d waited for this moment for more than 6 years and now, in my 50th race, it was going to happen.
I have to describe one bizarre episode. About 6 miles in, the sweeper bike appeared. “You are the devil, arriving to take the hindmost”, I proclaimed. “Eh? Er no, but I’m glad I caught you just in time”, he said. “We’ve had a report that someone has moved one of the signs up ahead. I’m just going to investigate”.
Around the next corner, I found him standing at a field gate, beyond which a large arrow on a post appeared. “Ignore this sign”, he said. You need to take that path on the other side of the hedge…”
So I chugged up the overgrown track, feeling somewhat doubtful about the instruction, even though the sign had appeared slightly out of place. It dredged up the two semiotic titbits I have stored under a pile of rotting carpet in a tin-lined chest under the floorboards of an ante-room behind a distant shelf at the end of one of the thousands of long stacks at the back of my head, ready to be produced when the subject of meaningless signs is teased to the surface. One is a sign saying simply: PLEASE IGNORE THIS SIGN. The other, that I saw in Private Eye about 30 years ago says nothing but: DO NOT THROW STONES AT THIS SIGN.
Perhaps 200 yards up this path, I started to hear some frantic shouting behind me. I carried on for a while then stopped when I realised the shouting was getting louder. It was the chap who wasn’t the devil, offering a breathless apology. The sign in the field had been right after all. We retraced our steps, and he pointed me across the large field. “On the far side you’ll find a stile”, he stated confidently. Or was there, I wondered later, just a tinge of doubt in his voice?
So I set off across the bumpy, furrowed field, heading for a distant white post that signified, I presumed, the stile. Eventually arriving there, I found that there was no stile. The white post belonged to a locked gate over which barbed wire had been wound. Hmmm. I trotted back to the middle of the field, thigh deep in rough grass and wild flowers, where I renewed my acquaintance with the non-diabolical but suitably red-faced official.
“Sorry about that. They said there’s a stile here somewhere“. We stood there, surveying the distant boundaries. We also took stock of the high grass. “Doesn’t look like two hundred people just ran this way”, I suggested.
He took out his mobile phone and moved off. “Let me try again”. And so, as the fellow’s anxious tones floated through the flora, I actually sat down in the middle of this meadow, shut my eyes, and turned my face towards the hot sun.
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
It’s a while since we had an Adlestrop moment on this website, but here was one, if only to help me guess what some of the flowers may have been.
It must have been the most absurd moment in any race I had ever taken part in. A race! A running race, and here I was, lying in the long grass, smile on my face, enjoying a few rays. Madness, but the sort of madness that possibly sums up my athletic prowess. My work HR profile describes me as “field-based”. So this is what they mean.
What seemed like a very long time later, I limped across the finishing line of the Kennet Kanter, to a soundtrack of unnecessarily polite applause. The hardy marshals said nice things to me, gave me a wholly undeserved medal and bottle of by-now hot water, and immediately started to dismantle the stalls.
I can’t think of a gloomier race experience than this one. Usually, at the end of a disappointing race, I think “Well at least it’s another x miles to add to the spreadsheet”. But I didn’t have even that compensation here. I had no intention of glossing over this failure by pretending it was a 10 mile run.
Two days later, the knee was still throbbing, if less violently. A trip to the doctor’s was called for, even though I was not expecting much in the way of good news. It wasn’t quite a telling off, but the doc essentially told me that I’d put too much stress on the knee too quickly.
I was not told to give up aiming for a marathon, but was advised to take a break of a couple of weeks, and then start back slowly, with the understanding that a mid-September marathon may be asking too much. It was a good chat, during which I heard some things I should have worked out for myself. Most people will be familiar with that old cliché that “you shouldn’t play squash to get fit, but should get fit to play squash”. The doctor said something similar about running and weight loss. Running to lose weight was fine, was the message, but should really be done in combination with other activities like cycling, walking, gym work, swimming, and even gardening. Over-emphasising one activity wasn’t spreading the effort around enough. I should be aiming to lose weight and gain fitness before embarking on a structured marathon campaign, not starting a marathon plan in order to lose weight and get fit.
As for the knee, I got a repeat of the message received last time I was sat in that chair. There’s nothing in particular wrong with it. It’s a temporary injury, and essentially a protest by my body against all this sudden extra stress being placed on it. It will be happy enough with a marathon, but only after a more gradual approach.
The two weeks of enforced rest have just come to an end, and I now need to make some decisions. More of that another time
Moving away from running, I’ve had adventures over the past 4 days: skirmishes with the spirits of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. My relationship with all these guys changed this week.
But first, I think it’s time for a beer.
