Category: Running

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On Mutlow Hill

I’ve done a couple of really long training runs this month, both of them on Fleam Dyke and the Roman Road. I love being out on these old, old routes. Fleam Dyke is a Saxon construction which runs for four or five miles south east from just outside Fulbourn. It’s more or less parallel to the Roman Road to the south and you run along the top of it. There are fewer people on it than on the Roman Road. I didn’t see another soul the first time I ran there at the beginning of the month and yesterday I saw less than half a dozen people in two hours, all of them round Mutlow Hill.

The Roman Road is a thing of beauty. It’s my absolute favourite place to run. You pick it up just south east of Cambridge where it runs parallel to the modern road towards Linton. It runs almost all the way to Haverhill. There is a circular route which was established by the Friends of the Roman Road and Fleam Dyke which joins the two together. I use the Icknield Way or Harcamlow Way which runs through Balsham to get from one to the other.

Well, I try to anyway. I get lost whenever I leave the straight lines of the Dyke or the Roman Road. I know that where I need to be is somewhere “over there” but then the path I’m on goes all wiggly on me. I’m going to have to start carrying a compass and map with me. I check the route I want on a map before I set out but it never quite matches the terrain or I forget a turning or something. Anyway.

I’ve now done two runs over 20 miles along these routes and I’m smitten. The Roman Road is wide and relatively firm underfoot for most of its length. Fleam Dyke is narrow. You’re running along the top of the dyke and there are places where tree roots are a definite trip hazard for tired legs. There are steps up and down breaches in the dyke. I think it’s what experienced trail racers would call a “technical run.” It’s also breathtakingly beautiful in places.

Yesterday, I stopped for my final gel and a drink on Mutlow Hill. If the archaeologists are right, then people have been stopping here for 4,000 years. It’s a Bronze Age barrow and was an Anglo-Saxon meeting place. It’s one of the most beautiful places around here. I had one of those “who the fuck do I think I am” moments standing by a tree at the top of the hill. I thought that while it was very beautiful, the greenery was a bit sparse and yellow in the heat. The chalky, disturbed soil must be quite poor up there. I had completely forgotten that just because there was a path and a handful of people around, that even although people had been managing this landscape for four millennia, it was still a wild place. What reminded me was the sight of a couple of butterflies intent on a spot of lepidopterile rumpy-pumpy. It was windy up there and they were blown past me quite quickly but they still gave me pause: who am I to criticise the butterflies’ love pad?

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Duathleticism

I have committed cycling the last couple of weekends. I know. I always said that cycling was basically cheating. I used to hate those smug bastards with their two-wheeled ways, spinning along merrily in sociable bunches of two or three, chatting away easily as they cruised past me on my long runs. I was the one working hard. I was the one who was making a real effort. Not them. Not them with their silly helmets and their carbon crotch rockets and shorts Linford Christie would think twice about putting on. They didn’t appear to be doing anything at all. Cycling? Pah! It’s for people who weren’t hard enough to run.

Ummm…

I have silly shorts you have to smear unguents into now. I have shoes I can only wear one one bike. I have two bikes. I have one bike made from carbon fibre and air and the other of aluminium and spite. I have to wear different shoes for each bike because the pedals are different on each bike. I have a helmet which makes me look like a weird hybrid of Alien and Scot. I have discovered new ways to spend money I really, really don’t have on stuff I’ve found that I really, really need. And sometimes I properly need things like food instead of gels and to pay a bill instead of a new tyre and things become all tense and angsty.

I am obsessing over my time up the hill to Fulbourne. I have become a slave to Strava. If you don’t know about Strava and you like your stats or are a bit competitive but already have a full online life, do not – and I can’t emphasise this enough – do not look at Strava. Don’t.

The last two Sundays, I’ve run in the morning and ridden in the afternoon. It was easy the first week. I’d just bimbled round the Gogs and Wandlebury in the morning and I was still feeling quite fresh. Yesterday was different. Yesterday, I smashed myself in a PB attempt at the Cambourne 10k in which I went off a little too hard and died on my arse at 4k. God knows how I held on. For the rest of the race, I kept Stuart Mills’ words of wisdom in the front of my mind, “It’s not pain. It’s a challenge.” The TORQ Trail Team selection doobrie paid dividends. There was a strong wind at times, and some insidious climbs at least two of which were into the wind but I just about kept it together. The bit I normally enjoy is a downhill section around a lake just after 5k. Yesterday, that was straight into a 20mph headwind and it was tough work. I was running at the front of a group for most of it because nobody else would take on the wind. I got round in 44:41 for 81st gun time (44:31 and 83rd on the chip), over a minute faster than last year when I was 143rd. I was completely broken by the end. The sprint finish I needed to stay in front of a group who were chasing me down finished me off. I took one place from a woman on the line but lost two to other blokes in the final couple of hundred metres. I thought that one of them was a club mate who had started beside me but they were a bit further back.

So, how do you recover from that sort of effort? Recovery drink, a massage, a proper protein and carb meal and the afternoon in front of the telly watching a re-run of the F1, right? I suppose you could do that. What I did was have a cake, a bit of milk shake, a cup of tea and a couple of rice cakes with peanut butter before I anointed bits of myself with chamois cream, got into those ridiculous shorts and headed out for a 30 mile ride. In the end, I cut it short because I couldn’t face the climb up to Balsham into that headwind yesterday. I did just over 30k in an hour and ten.

Cambourne is my anniversary race, the first one I did when I started running so it’s a bit special for me. When I’m Dictator Presidential Emperor of Earth for Life, I’m going to have the New Year start on the same weekend as the Cambourne 10k and make everyonel celebrate by running around a beautiful 10k course instead of getting drunk and having inadvisable sex. The first year I did this race, I spent the afternoon eating pancakes with cream and Nutella. Last year, I celebrated my PB by sitting in a jacuzzi. This year, I flogged my guts out on the bike because I could. I was shouting at the wind and singing songs to the grass verges and having one of the best afternoons of my life – not actually spent in the intimate company of my beloved wife – and I didn’t feel like I was cheating at all.

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I’m All Torq

I feel slightly sick. I spent a chunk of today learning about nutrition strategies. TORQ Fitness, purveyors of fine nutrition products to the running and cycling classes invitied me along to an assessment day for their new trail running team. I spent a fascinating few hours learning about nutrition for exercise, psychological strategies for success and a little bit of injury prevention. I put all that to good use this evening by not stretching after my run this afternoon, driving home, getting cramp in my calves, eating pizza and half a family-sized tub of very nice Green & Black’s vanilla ice cream. With maple syrup. I’m pretty much every kind of awesome.

I’ve been thinking a lot about nutrition for performance of late. Julie Pashley at GCAN put together a couple of coach workshops on nutrition for beginner athletes and elite athletes respectively. They were excellent. There was lots of science I didn’t understand at the time. I’ve had to go away and do more reading on physiology and energy use in the body. I love that, I really do. I like it when one thing that you read leads you to another and another and then you find yourself reading and learning about things that you never expected. I haven’t done that since since I was at university and lost weeks because I tried to read Fleurs du Mal instead of getting on with Chekhov and the collections of really, really dull 19th Century Russian verse I was supposed to be reading. My French wasn’t up to Baudelaire but that didn’t stop me. I was enjoying the intellectual journey too much.

The nutrition session today was what originally attracted me to take part and it was excellent but the highlight for me was Stuart Mills’ talk on the psychology of success. Stuart is an ultrarunner, a Kiwi who has represented Great Britain in the ultradistance world championships. He is also an academic as in sports science and has a blog which I’m looking forward to reading immensely, If I remember what he said accurately – and I wasn’t taking notes so I may get things very wrong in places – his attitude to race preparation is to concentrate as much on mental preparation as on physical training. He might acknowledge negative thoughts and feelings but only to find positive strategies for dealing with them. Pain is a negative. Challenge is a positive. Live in the moment even if the moment is full of pain, or challenge as he would have it. Don’t count down the miles. For example, when you get to Mile 20 in a marathon don’t think “Great! Only 10k to go!” We run because we love it. Why would we want the run to end?

I try to turn that into a positive. I’ve reached 20 miles. How fucking incredible is that? I’ve been running for about three hours and I’m still going. For someone who didn’t run three years ago, that’s tremendous. I do get a huge kick out of movement, rapid movement. Well, rapid for me. There is joy in movement even when continuing that movement is a challenge. To answer the question about wanting the run to end, we have a goal in every race that we do. It’s usually a time goal, and one that’s tied to the end of the race: 26.2 miles and not our time at Mile 20.

Positivity can only carry you so far. You need the physical preparation, the long runs, the tempos and hill session and the run until you puke reps on the track. Confidence is good. I have my “Train hard. Rock up. Run like fuck.” thing going on. I think this is the common ground Stuart and I share. He notes that training hard gives you confidence which leads to an improved perfomance. It’s not the training which improves your performance so much as the confidence that training engenders. It’s an interesting idea. My performance at the Cambridge Half was all down to a couple of really good training sessions in the week before the race which gave me the confidence to rock up and run like fuck. I could have run 1:42 and change but I just sneaked under 1:39 because I was feeling incredible.

There’s a lot to think about and a lot to process. I really want to carry on with this process and having the support of the TORQ Trail Team would be a help. I might spend even more time training on the Roman Road. I’ve entered an 18 mile trail race in the Lake District in August as a way to relax after the stress of the Cambridge Triathlon. I’m contemplating another in October after the Great Barrow Challenge. I could do 25k reasonably easily but today has got me thinking about doing the 50k instead. I’ve said I’m not doing a marathon this year but I didn’t say anything about not doing an ultra.

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Less Than Handy

I am a complete plonker. Everybody who knows me knows this. Most are kind enough not to mention it, at least in my presence. I’m a clumsy plonker at the best of times and during the winter things only get worse. I can guarantee falling over at least a couple of times when it gets slippery in spite of wearing grippy shoes and trying really hard not to. I usually fall over in full view of attractive women or men with a physical sense of humour.

I was supposed to be running the Folksworth 15 on Sunday. The race was canceled because the very sensible organisers thought that they would have lots of Richards on their hands had they gone ahead with it. Instead of flogging my sorry arse round fifteen miles of hills through wind and snow, I headed off with some mates for twelve gentle miles around the Gogs, the Roman Road and Wandlebury.

It was beautiful. There was snow on the ground and more falling as we set off. The car park was icy and treacherous but once we got onto the snowier surface of the dog park, it became much easier to move. The route Phil chose is one I know a bit since it uses the same trails as Alan B does for his 9 Miles of Hills. The surfaces on the trails were mostly snowy and grip was good in the Saucony Peregrine trail shoes I was wearing. Things were a little more difficult when we came off the Roman Road and headed down the road from Worsted Lodge towards Babraham. The tarmac surface was as icy as the car park had been,

I fell over. Of course I did. I fell over like I have dozens of times. I was jogging gently down a slippery part of the road and had just told Andrew to be careful around here when my legs were no longer where they should have been. When I was at school, I once had the chance to play a set of kettle drums. I liked the resonance when I beat the skin and held the side of the drum. Ever since then, I’ve thought of kettle drums when I fall over. There is a proper thump of stomach and lungs and bladder and bowels all the other cavities of the body when you go down in a oner. I didn’t notice putting my hand out but I must have done because my left middle finger wasn’t bending inside its glove. I gave Andrew – who was asking me if I was all right – a very crooked bird and said I probably wasn’t.

We’d been right at the back of the group and I tottered the rest of the way down the hill to meet up with the others who had crossed the main road. I showed off my very crooked bird, the sight of which was beginning to make me queasy. It wasn’t painful at that point but I thought it might become painful when the endorphins began to subside. I worked very gently from the knuckles and pulled the finger straight again. Some of the others wanted to head back with me to make sure I was okay but I didn’t want to spoil their run further so I set off on my own back up the side of the main Cambridge-Haverhill road. My hand felt funny from time to time but it wasn’t painful and I began to push the pace a bit. Because we’d been bimbling along and chatting my legs were fine in spite of having run five miles or so and I was able to push a bit back up the hill.

A&E at Addenbrookes dealt with me swiftly and competently. I was in and out of the hospital in less than an hour and a half and that included about half an hour of me wandering around a silent and empty, Sunday morning hospital. They checked out my finger, x-rayed it, spotted a teeny-tiny chip floating around in the joint, gave me advice about keeping it mobilised and icing it from time to time and sent me on my way.

I woke up during the night with pain in my wrist. I couldn’t move my hand much in the morning so I headed back to A&E. I explained what was going on and again I was seen very efficiently. I couldn’t have more x-rays immediately but I was given another assessment. I had a second round of x-rays which showed a chip from my triquetral. I may have damaged my scaphoid as well but it would require bone scans to be certain since the images from my x-rays aren’t clear. My wrist wasn’t hurting on Sunday morning which is why I didn’t mention it then.

I haven’t trained since then, not really. I had a kettlebells class booked for today which I couldn’t attend. I won’t be going for a while. To add slight insult to minor injury, the very nice cross-training gloves I ordered arrived this afternoon. I ran on a treadmill at Green’s this evening and it was horrible. I’d planned a 50 minute session but could no longer be arsed after five minutes. I stuck it out for a mile, the absolute minimum I could justify as a run for the purposes of Jantastic. I managed a few Russian Twists having assured myself that I could hold the medicine ball and some planks resting on my elbows and toes. I couldn’t do the rest of that workout because it all involves resting my weight on my hands – twisting planks and press-ups and all that torturous modern jazz.

I’ll be doing more running on that dreadmill, at least until the ice disappears. My joy is as palpable as dysentery. For the first time in my life, I really, really want the thaw to come. So come on, I’d like a nice calm westerly and mild weather for the rest of the winter. No more snow days. No more ice. Sorry, kids.

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Inauguration

We inaugurated Wimpole Estate parkrun this morning. An astonishing 292 runners completed the challenging 5k course and we’ve had rave reviews so far. I couldn’t be more pleased for the team who have worked so hard for the past few months to make sure that we get off the ground. I’m the event director but I’m a bit like the Roman centurion in the Bible story who says “Do this” and someone does it. It’s been a team effort. All I’ve done is wonder for example whether someone might want to pull a volunteer roster together and lo! Paul pulled a volunteer roster together.

There were some remarkable parkrun personalities there. I talked briefly to Andrew Lane, a parkrun pioneer, one of the thirteen people at the very first Bushy Park time trial. He said that two weeks later there were only eleven runners at Bushy. This morning there were 1,027 runners at Bushy parkrun and thousands of others at 200 different locations around the world, from New Zealand to the USA. Colin and Elaine Brassington have completed 144 and 131 parkruns respectively. I met them first at the St Neots Half Marathon in 2011. They’re enthusiastic Fetchies as well as parkrunners. Alice Holmes has 52 parkruns under her belt, two more than me and she is much, much younger than me. Our youngest finisher this morning is five years old and she is inspiring.

I find everyone who comes to parkrun inspirational in one way or another and that is one reason why I wanted to have a second parkrun near Cambridge. I wanted to have somewhere else for people to be one another’s inspiration. I’ve written before about finding my friends more heroic than my heroes, if that makes sense. I love seeing my friends succeed and when I struggle with my running, I need only chat to Chris or Paul or Carla or Al or Clare or Caz and things seem better. My friends are amazing and I want them to have somewhere else for them to be amazing in.

We will have more stories to tell one another in the weeks and months ahead. We’ll become fitter and quicker. We can’t possibly get our feet much wetter or colder. We’ll make friends and eat cake and race together and stand with one another because parkrun is a family. I quite like being the eccentric, forgetful uncle.

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It Was All A Bit Runny

One day, not so long ago, a writer went off to do writerly, authorial things with her writerly authorial friends and left her runny husband behind to attempt athleticism for the weekend. They both had a marvellous time. She was witty and erudite, met lots of friends, networked subtly, drank very nice whisky in a dark bar with an illustrious new chum and all in all had the sort of weekends writers can only dream about. Meanwhile, her husband ran so much and so hard he was sick. Twice. He loved it. Not the puking, that would be weird.

They say that’s it’s good for couples to have shared interests and it’s true. It’s also good for them to have things they can do on their own. I had a completely brilliant weekend of running fun and Anne did her thing in peace and quiet. We do have a shared interest in books and history. I love wandering around museums with her, even if I spend far too much time reading the labels on the exhibits and she’d rather take in the objects and do more research at home later.

This weekend, Anne was doing her own thing again. I ran my 50th parkrun at Milton Country Park on Saturday morning, had a wee jog round the course at our new parkrun at the Wimpole Estate and then today gave my ugly, weak legs a complete thrashing at the Cambridgeshire Cross Country Championships where I came 100th in a time of 53:13. I didn’t really have time to enjoy my 50th at Milton because I was in too much of a hurry to get out to Wimpole and get set up for our test event. I posted a respectable 23:30, had a brief struggle with the Chunder Monkey on the finishing line – which I won, by the way – grabbed a very good mocha from Cafe Diem and escaped from Milton only 20 minutes behind schedule because I was too chatty with my mates there.

When I got to Milton, I dropped the Great Big Box of Stuff off and went for a jog round the course to check conditions for the briefing. They were damp in some places and downright muddy as all fuck in others. I even lost a shoe at one point. It’s a challenging course with one major climb finishing at the 2k point with my favourite view of Cambridgeshire. During the summer, it’s going to be a quick one but it’s too boggy just now for outright speed. There are a couple of places where it’s actually ankle-deep in water but you soon thrash and splash your way through those.

The test event went well, everyone had a good time, nobody got lost and the marshals and volunteers were top notch. Our first official run is next Saturday morning at 9:00am. Please come and join us.

I was only slightly broken after a brisk 5k followed an hour later by a challenging one so I wasn’t too worried about the Counties this morning. I had a complete shocker at this race last year. I was 103rd out 109 in 53:02 and felt dreadful all the way round. I was 11 seconds slower this year but felt quicker. I probably paced it much better. I started from the back and cruised up the first hill. I enjoy hills and mud. Anne said to me this evening that she doesn’t understand a definition of fun which includes running up and down a muddy, slippery park. Once I got into the rhythm and began to take the brakes off on the downhills, I really began to enjoy myself.

I managed not to come last. I was 100th out 121 this year. It’s just possible that three of the men ahead of me last year died in the interim because I had my arse handed to me in grand style by some fairly elderly gentlemen. I hope not. Everyone behind me today was either older than me or carrying more weight than me. So were quite a lot of men ahead of me.

We were all out in our club vests. My vest means a lot to me. When it goes over my head, I feel part of the team and our team did very well today. I was never in a school sports team. I lacked both the raw talent and the will to train and improve so I didn’t deserve a place ahead of boys who have both talent and a work ethic in training. I work at training now because I want to give as much to the team as they have given to me.

I have had such a splendid weekend of running with my friends during the day and coming home to fine dinners in the evening. I’m a very lucky man. Weekends like this happen so infrequently and unexpectedly. I’d like to thank everyone who has made mine so good. You all know who you are.

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It’s Always the Last Mile

I had a lovely run today, 13 miles of it. Well, it was lovely for the first 10 miles, quite hard for the the next two and just woeful for the final mile. It’s always like that for me on training runs. Today’s was special for me for two reasons: it was my first longish run for a while and I completed it with my friend JuliaD, who made sure I got to the end of it just when I was dying on my arse. For those of you who don’t know, Julia and I started our running career in the same running group two years ago and she’s the real source of a lot of my supposed thoughtful comments on running and life.

We set off at what felt like a very easy pace but was actually well under 5:45 per km. Julia was planning 33km so I thought that would be a bit quick for her. I was only planning to do about 12 or 13 miles so I thought the pace was fine for me. Julia and I were jogging along, step-for-step. I was trying to put Helen’s advice on efficient running into practice and it seemed to work, for the most part. I was concentrating on keeping my stride short, my cadence up, allowing my shoulders to counter-rotate and my legs to swing from the outside of my hips. My feet – not yet in my new inov8 shoes – were relaxing into the surface of the road and I was allowing them to feed energy back into the next stride. The entire concept of free energy is intriguing.

We paused after 50 minutes to take on a gel and some water. I had shot blocks with me but I forgot about them. I turn into such a burpy man for a few minutes after I’ve had a gel. I like the Gu ones but I find even they become unpalatable after 20 miles. It’s one of the reasons I tend to do my long runs on my own: I’d rather not inflict the product of my gastric tract on my friends. I like them too much.

We got to a foot tunnel under the A14 at about 10 miles which was flooded following yesterday’s thunderstorm. The thunderstorm was a stonker. Anne and I were shopping in Tesco when it hit. We waited for a few minutes but it showed not the least sign of abating. I decided to make a run for the car and bring it round to collect Anne. Now, I’m not the world’s best sprinter but running through the torrents was an intense experience. I felt as if I was flying, my feet only just kissing the ground, my knees lifting high and my heels coming as far up behind me as ever they have done. I covered less than a 100m and it was only a fleeting few seconds but they were some of the best seconds of my life.

Swings and roundabouts…

The roundabout to yesterday’s swinging time was that flooded foot tunnel under the main road. We couldn’t cross the A14. It would have been suicidal. We tried to find another way through the hotel but only found a succession of dead ends. Finally, we just got on with it and splashed through the ankle-deep water in the tunnel. It was a bit squelchy for a couple of hundred metres but the cold water soon drained away and our feet soon warmed the cold water still soaking our socks. We settled into the same rhythm again quite quickly but I was beginning to tire. I was trying to keep my steps light and quick and managed until the final mile when my form went completely. I was just clinging on by then. Julia got me home in the end but she effortlessly breezed away from me in the last 400m.

It’s always the last mile which gets me. I know that’s an obvious thing. I wouldn’t be much of an endurance runner if I died in the first mile. I always want to finish strongly but I think that today I was just too quick earlier in the run. I was carried away running with my friend. I just wanted to keep up and blew up instead. Next time, I’ll make sure the last mile isn’t a complete disaster.

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Getting Carried Away With It All

I was going to write a race report about last weekend’s Amsterdam Marathon and Half Marathon. My achilles injury prevented me from running but I went out anyway to support my friends and clubmates because I’d paid for the trip already. I had a tremendous time and everyone had a stonker. There were amazing marathon debuts and PBs galore.

I may have got carried away with it all. When my friends do well, I want to do well too. It’s partly a result of having heroes for friends. My running heroes are not only Mo, Galen, Haile and the untterably beautiful David Rudisha. Nor are they Cram, Coe and Ovett. I’ve been inspired by all of them, of course but it’s what my club mates do which drives me on more than anything.

ChrisHurk set his new PB in Amsterdam and it’s only three seconds slower than mine. I have no doubt that he could have gone faster on a less congested course and a small, embittered, obsidian-dark part of me is glad he didn’t manage it. We’re going to have a bit of a smackdown at the Cambridge Half as a result. It’s a pancake flat course and while it might be a bit congested in places the atmosphere is such that we’ll have lots of support to cane it. I joked that I’ll just sit on his shoulder until the final 100m then outsprint him to the finish. I think it would be more accurate to say that we’ll pace each other round and really go for it only when we know that we’re going to get home in PBs. If things go well over the winter then we’ll go faster than 1:40 but I was so carried away with things that I had visions of 1:35. While it’s good to have ambitious targets, there are practical limits to ambitions.

We were talking about the Marathon Talk Magic Mile on the Saturday night. I was really impressed with Tom Williams’ improvement from 6:07 last year to 5:00.3 this year. My mile PB is 6:03 and I rashly said that with Marathon Talk’s six months of perfect training, I could match that. It was only when I remembered that Uffish’s mile PB is 5:07 and brotherjohn’s best is 5:10 that I worked out just how ridiculous I sounded. I wasn’t even drunk but I was as high as a kite on friendship. My friends’ enthusiasm wound me up like one of those old chattering clockwork teeth toys and set me off across the table. I was only embarrassed later and that is embarrassing too.

This entire post was partly inspired by Simon Freeman’s post on his blog. He says that what we need are heroes and he’s right. I like knowing that elite athletes are out and doing great things. I do want to emulate them in small ways. I’m more driven by the great things my friends do with a fraction of the time to train available to them in comparison to the elites. Just because they have 20% of the training time doesn’t mean that they give anything less than 100% in the time they have.

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A Mile And A Mile And A Bit

I’ve had a bit of a thrash this week and sort of enjoyed it. Hard running doesn’t scare me when I don’t know how hard to run. Hard running when I do know in advance just how much it’s going to hurt gives me the complete, nightmare, screaming heebie-jeebies.I finally ran my Magic Mile on Friday lunchtime. I met Diane who was going to pace me on her bike after I’d done a brief warm-up and caned it for a time of 6:16 over an out-and-back course. The weather was blustery and I had a headwind on the outward leg which which was also ever so slightly downhill. My splits were remarkably palindromic. I logged 1:30.8, 1:36.3, 1:36.8 and 1:31.3 for each quarter-mile. I felt okay in the first quarter but came out of shelter and into the wind in the second. The lactic built horribly in the third and the last quarter was just clinging on.Diane had placed an orange plastic bag of sand at the finishing line and I could see it from about 200m out. There is an odd effect in racing. Time shrinks but distance increases. This is especially true when you’re going for a time. The time you have available runs out much more quickly than you are able to cover the ground between you and the finishing line. That little orange bag of sand sat there in the distance while I could hear the second hand screaming round the watch faster and faster.

I took a little time to recover. I couldn’t just collapse and heave my lungs out onto the pavement. I wanted to. Really wanted to. Firstly, I had to look manly because I had not only Diane as an audience, but there was another young man I’d passed a couple of hundred yards back down the path. He was coming up and it’s never seemly to have someone you have just steamed past step over you a couple of minutes later. You just look like a sad, old man in the throes of a heart attack. I didn’t fall over but I did wobble a bit.

I didn’t do parkrun yesterday. They needed volunteers so I acted as timer instead. It was good to see so many PBs. I don’t think I pushed the button too soon on any of them. I took part instead in the Chariots of Fire relay round the centre of Cambridge and through some of the colleges. Teams of six run the course of 1.7 miles and conditions were good. There was a little rain in the air part-way through the race but it didn’t affect things for me. We were worried that it might be a little slippery over the cobbles in the colleges but in the end, only Ruth found things a little tricky. The rest of us were lucky.

I picked up six places in the first half-mile but lost three between there and the end. I can console myself with the thought that each place was lost to someone much younger than me even if one of them was to a girl: I got chicked. No matter, I had a good battle with one of them for the best part of a mile and we weren’t hanging around. At one point, we passed a slower runner, one on each side, going into a tight turn into one of the colleges. She must have had a bit of a fright, poor thing. He finally kicked harder than me with about 400m to go. I couldn’t quite summon up enough to stay with him with all the lactic my legs had built up but at least I wasn’t overtaken by anyone else from that point to the end. I crossed the line then stopped my watch on 10:59. I was pleased with the time.

The whole race was a bit of a blur. Unlike the Cambridge Half, there just wasn’t time to soak up the atmosphere. It wasn’t until we were heading for the pub after the race that I noticed that we’d run along the side of King’s Chapel. There was still a string of runners on the course. I was pleased for us all as a team. We had all run well. I don’t yet know what our combined time was. We won’t get individual lap times which is a bit of a shame. There is no chip timing. It’s probably just as well. I don’t want to take it too seriously. Honest.

I found Chariots easier than the Mile. That’s not only because I wasn’t running quite so hard. It was a new experience for me; I genuinely didn’t know what to expect. I know that running a Mile is a really stupid thing to do. I’ve done enough of them now to know it hurts. Happily, it doesn’t hurt for long if you can run hard enough. I didn’t really know how hard to run this morning. I was racing other people and picking them off or running only hard enough to stave them off. My time wasn’t important for once. That was fun.

People were asking about my shoes. Once again, I didn’t really notice them. I’m getting used to them now and apart from a little twanging from my calves which disappeared after I’d stretched and rolled them, there were no ill effects. I’ve seen photographs of me in action this morning and I’m almost looking athletic. My head is still too far forward but I’m nicely upright and balanced in most of the pics. I just need to find a way of pulling my head up a bit more. I’m much more vertical than I used to be. I still lean forward when I’m accelerating up to speed but I can cruise quite quickly and keep that upright position. I’m definitely making progress.

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Picking Up The Pace

These new shoes of mine are a bit quick. That sounds a bit odd but runners will know what I mean. Sometimes when you pull on a pair of shoes and go for a first run, they will feel fast. That was the case with my patriotic Green Silences and the Kinvara 3s. A nice, light pair of shoes can do wonders for your self-confidence as a runner. You will suddenly feel 30 seconds a mile faster. I can barely keep up with myself in these inov-8s.

I’m giving the shoes credit because it can’t be me. I haven’t really got The Drill nailed. I don’t have a handle yet on this efficient running lark. It’s all still a work in progress but I am getting quicker again and it feels great. I did the club session of 4 x 6:00 on Tuesday night and managed to nail it. The first rep was horrid and the slowest of the four. The other three felt easier but were actually slightly quicker. I ran 1.38km, 1.45km, 1.39km and 1.42km for each rep. I was tailing off a little towards the end of each rep and I just wanted to die when the second one was not really coming to an end quite quickly enough for me. I had just enough breath to yell at Neil to blow his fucking whistle to bring the rep to an end.

Hard running wasn’t actually all that hard. Once again I tried to keep my cadence up and my stride length short. I held my body more upright without my usual forward lean. I would check my form at the end of every straight or whenever I felt myself relax into my old ways. The entire check process is one I call mindful running. I try to be aware of what my body is doing as I run. It’s not easy and I really need to arrange for someone to film me as I run just so that I know that what I’m doing looks right as well as feels right. I also need to send Helen about 30 seconds of film for her to have a look at it. I’ll see if I can arrange that next week.

In the meantime, I have my Magic Mile tomorrow and Chariots of Fire on Sunday. I’m going to wear my fast shoes and do my level best to keep up with them.

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