Some men, it is said, pay prostitutes just to have a conversation with them. I have a similar relationship with Phil Chalmers, the sports therapist who tortured my calf into obedience in the lead-up to the Boston Marathon.
Like, I suspect, a tart’s recreation room, Phil’s studio is lined with equipment, offering varying degrees of cardiovascular menace: rowing machine, bike, medicine balls, fitballs, weights, and other instruments I don’t dare enquire about in case he invites me to get off my arse and do something with them. An appalling thought. Mercifully, I’m never required to do anything active. We just sit and talk, then I give him some money and leave, feeling suitably relieved. When he writes his memoirs, he may say: “I’ve had some very odd clients in my time. I remember one delusional fat guy who didn’t want any action, but would pay me just to sit and talk about training plans. Oh yes, I’ve come across some right weirdos in this game.”
It’s money well spent. I come away laden with good advice, encouragement, and newly cleaned lenses in these old running goggles.
Pre-arrival, the goal of a sub-2 hour half marathon still seemed to belong in someone else’s universe, but now I’m almost persuaded it’s not a wholly unrealistic target. It seems I have one huge thing in my favour — my stomach. Yes, the source of my pessimism turns out to be the item that offers me hope. I forget that I have more much lard to burn off then I seem to think. Whether I can shed enough of the stuff is one of the known unknowns, but if I can push on past my usual limit of 200-205 pounds, the unexplored territory beyond could yield truly surprising possibilities.
We talked about my two major goals — a sub-60 minutes 10K and a sub-2 half. These are broken down into milestones and intermediate targets. All I’m asked to do for the next three weeks is work on losing weight and getting a bit of strength back in my legs. There won’t be much running in that period; just enough to get round the Crawley 10K in 3 weeks. Getting through that in 70 minutes is the first, seemingly modest, aim. After that, the harder work starts which should see me through the Brighton 10K in less than 65 minutes, before the Hyde Park new year 10K offers a great opportunity of that sub-60 PB.
Beyond that, we have the aim of a 2:10 Almeria Half at the end of January, with Reading on March 21 as the best opportunity of the big prize: the sub-2. Here’s the timeline with proportionate spacing:
Oh how neatly it all pans out on paper. And how nice to plot things in Excel, and pronounce the venture a great success. There is just the little matter of turning a plan into reality. Someone emailed me a while ago, asking (in a sympathetic way) why I insisted on talking about plans and aspirations in such detail. Wasn’t I just setting myself up for disappointment or even derision? The simple answer was yes, making these things public is indeed setting myself up for disappointment and derision — which is precisely why I do it. It was the whole raison d’etre of this website, back in 2001. If I made my London Marathon training public, I was surely less likely to backtrack? Today, I’m still deploying that ruse. It means I’ve made a number of ludicrously over-ambitious claims over the years, and have paid the red-faced, dry-mouthed, awkward price many times. But it’s also forced me into reaching places I would never otherwise have got to. We can meet back here in March next year to assess which it’s to be — humiliation or some form of glory.
Phil and I discussed a plan in some detail. The main points, for anyone interested, are these (in no particular order):
- Greater use of the heart-rate monitor
- 3 quality runs a week, introduced gradually. The weekly Reading Park Run 5K can be used as a tempo run post-Crawley, and up to the end of 2009
- Work on core fitness to improve running form and conserve energy
- Treadmill intervals, later replaced by hill reps
- Lose a lot of weight
- Cross-training, particularly biking, rower, and selected resistance machines
- Must minimise risk of injury – stretching, warm-ups etc.
- Regular revision of targets
Nothing in that list is new or unexpected, but it was good to be able to talk about them again, and reinforce their importance. I’ve tried all of these things at different times, but not rigorously enough. Which introduces another requirement, and probably the most important: the need to keep mentally strong, and keen. It’s harder than it sounds. If I could maintain my current mindset through the next 176 days — 25 weeks — I would gleefully take bets on reaching the target. But I can’t ignore experience, and the flat fact is that I’ve never yet managed to keep my focus from one end of the campaign to the other. Maybe it’s the natural way. No normal runner looks back over an extended period of training and sees a straight line. At best, it’s gently undulating. At worst, if injuries and binge-drinking weekends feature, progress looks more like a profile of the Himalayas. That’s my more realistic challenge: not creating a straight line, but moving from the Himalayan model to the benignly wavy one.
Key to all of this is weight. And with those weary words, the annual healthy living campaign begins. It’s been in full, organic swing for a week or two now. It’s odd how easily desire switches from naughty diet to good. Through my 22 weeks of beer and burgers and late-night cheese-and-ice-cream sprees, the very idea of raw, unprocessed food seemed deeply unappealing. Now it’s all stir-fries and salads and high-fibre breakfasts and lemon tea, and I’m already fantasising about the yellow pepper and beetroot I’ll be chopping into tomorrow’s lunchtime salad. Like running itself, it’s all momentum. Negative or positive, forwards or backwards: it’s hard to jump on that treadmill of new habit, but once we’re on, it’s usually easier to keep going than to jump off again.
Losing weight is important for many reasons, but three in particular:
- Lower weight = faster pace
- Lower weight = fewer injuries
- Lower weight = higher self-esteem, more positive approach to the goals
I don’t need to add much explanation to that. The rake-like Phil made the forlorn point that he was no longer thinking in terms of improving PBs at his age (48) as he didn’t have much scope for making the sort of marginal changes that drive improvement. He trains meticulously and leads as healthy a lifestyle as possible without being obsessive. (He enjoys decent ale but has an enviable Sweder-like ability to not allow this to affect his running). On the other hand, I have heaps of scope for improvement: better training, healthier lifestyle, and most important, reducing my excess ballast. To illustrate the point, he handed me a medicine ball. For a moment, I had palpitations — was he going to ask me to do something sweaty with it? No, he just wanted me to hold it. Blimey, it was quite a handful. “That’s only five kilos”, he said. “Think how many of those you’re carrying that you don’t need to”.
Gulp. Going by average estimates of healthy weight for someone my height, the answer is roughly 5½, or 27 kilos. 5½ of those medicine balls!! Trying to run with just one of them would be a strain. I can’t see how I could do it. But 5½? By coincidence, I have not only 27 kilos to lose, but there are 27 weeks to the Reading Half. How very neat — 1 kg per week. If past experience is a guide, there is no chance of losing that much in that period. I’ll start off well, but will plateau at around the 205 pound mark, around 15 kilos short of the 27.
So there we have it. Will I make all the usual errors and find myself, a year from now, looking back over my standard 2:20 Reading, and writing yet another of these time-for-action, this-time-will-be-different entries? Oh, probably, yes. But a man can daydream, and from one of those reveries a tangible reality must one day form. I’ll try to make it this one.
