OK, it’s back to business. The seven weeks since Hamburg have been profoundly unhealthy. In that time I’ve run only 10 times. I’ve stuffed myself with empty calories and fat, and sunk into the sort of lethargy that only a marathon can provoke. It’s a familiar experience. The (perhaps surprising) consolation is that I never feel a sense of sacrifice or gloom about buckling under again. Conversely, I get a great feeling of relief. When I talk to non-active friends, they seem to think that getting down to four or five months of marathon training must be like walking into a prison cell. But it’s exactly the opposite – it’s like being released from one. There are 16 weeks to … …
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Life throws a great handful of stuff at you. Some fragments stick, some bounce off and land on someone else; most hit you and end up just blowin’ in the wind. One bit that stuck to me, years ago, was one my sisters telling me about a teacher of hers who adored Jane Austen. At that time, she’d taught Austen for more than two decades to hundreds of girls, yet there was one book that she hadn’t read, and didn’t plan on reading till she retired from teaching. She needed something to look forward to. I have a similar thing with Bob Dylan. For years now, I’ve had a bootleg copy of Dylan live at the Philharmonic Hall in New … …
Week 1 of my 18 week marathon training for Loch Ness hasn’t been a staggering success. Tuesday’s plodding 5 miler in Guildford was to be a painful-but-necessary sort of inaugural dam-busting run. Flowing from that evening would be the purer athletic juices, as it. as it were. And I’m sure it was of beneficial, but I’ve not been able to build on it. The very next day, I came down with a rare spot of illness. Nothing serious, just a sore throat and phlegmy chest – but enough to rule out running. Instead I managed a gentle bike ride on Wednesday, but had to skip Thursday and Friday completely. The weekend’s been a bit brighter. The cold had pretty much … …
Today, officially, I begin training for the Loch Ness marathon on October 2nd. Why today? Because I guess I’ll be following some variation of one of the Hal Higdon training plans, and they all last 18 weeks. This week is Week 1 (or Week 18, as Hal describes it). Furthermore, Monday is always a rest day, so Tuesday is when it all kicks off. Today is Tuesday, and today it all kicked off. Not many people know that Ferdinand Smallpeice [sic] Esquire was the Town Clerk of Guildford in 1902. I knew not this snippet myself afore this evening. All was revealed, however, as I waited for Nigel of this parish to arrive. Our rendezvous was outside the White House … …
Interesting experience yesterday. Last week, I was up in Leeds for a couple of days, and took the opportunity of popping over to Huddersfield to rescue a five-years-garaged bike. I bought the machine (a mid-range Trek hybrid, for anyone interested) somewhere in the nineties. [Aside: Hmm. When I was younger, people used to remark on my ability to remember dates. It was a party trick. Someone would recall a meeting, a football match, a party, a fight, from years before, and I’d say, “Ah yes, March Seventh, Nineteen Eighty Two”. But now? Now I’m reduced to saying “Er, somewhere in the nineties…”] The bike never got much use, but then Huddersfield isn’t a great place for a novice cyclist. … …
Early yesterday, Cup Final morning, I can’t recall what it was now, but something led me to an internet page. I was probably obediently researching some arbitrary request from my wife. Contemporary dance. Modern Jazz. An exhibition of surrealist paintings or abstract sculpture. When it comes to art, she’s the Arsenal to my Corinthian Casuals. Whatever it was, I found myself beholding a page with a marginal mention that caught my eye: Donovan in Reading, it said. Donovan? Now there’s a name I’d not heard in a long time. I clicked on the link, and found myself at the website of The Hexagon, Reading’s slightly outmoded theatre and arts centre. Donovan? Crikey. There was his picture. Yep, that’s … …
The tail-end of the football season is never an easy running time. Too many compulsory, disruptive pub visits to factor in. After a good run with the club on Tuesday night I was looking forward to a week of consolidatory plods around the lanes before my next race – the Hogweed’s 10K in Yate – on Monday evening. But last night I had a rendezvous to keep at one of the village menageries that has Sky TV. After getting home late, I calculated that a run and the necessary ablutions would make me late for what turned out to be an appointment with disappointment; Ipswich v West Ham turned out to be less of a contest than I’d hoped. But … …
Imagine some soaring orchestral music……, then a husky, seductive voice says slowly: Because you can never have too many rodents…. It’s the slogan of eRodent, a rat enthusiast’s website I’ve been ferreting about on recently. In fact there’s a second slogan which I also thought pretty good. It takes a different, and perhaps more threatening tack: They’re small and they’re furry, and they know where you live. Apart from rats, these people are also keen on wildlife ponds, which is why I’ve been looking at their site. Our large, scrubby front garden has finally been cleared and levelled, and we are now busy making exotic plans for its cultivation. I mention this by way of confessing, rather pitifully, … …
That was then, but this is now. Like anything else worth doing, running is a path of constant learning, and this, I now see, extends to race reports, and to the way they extrude into running itself. Last night, I finally posted my Hamburg stories – the preamble about the Expo, and race day itself. They’d been hanging around me like one of those faint injuries that you can’t quite shake off. Finalising the tale and uploading it fulfilled two functions that seem paradoxical. On the one hand it was like a stopper, bunging up the Hamburg adventure for good. Putting it to bed, as publishing chaps like to say. Signing it off. On the other, the act meant the … …
Many a truth is inadvertently spoken in clumsy translation. At least two good examples appeared in the marathon goody-bag I collected from the expo on Friday. One of the pre-race instructions, intended kindly no doubt, is “Don’t forget to say goodbye to your friends and family before you start the marathon”. They mean “Don’t clog up the start area”, but their version has a sense of dire finality that will resonate with certain participants. Make no mistake, Hamburg is a truly great urban marathon. The crowd support is fervent and loud, and without meaning to invoke unreasonable racial stereotypes, it’s no surprise that the organisation is simply flawless. Here, there are no untied ends to stumble over. I felt irrationally … …