Author: Richard

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Of Punishment Beatings, Kettlebells and Magic Rubber Pants. With Additional Christopher Biggins.

I ache this week. I’m also bone tired. I haven’t felt this tired since… Let me think. Oh, that’s right. I haven’t felt this tired since last January when I was in marathon training. I’m not doing a marathon this year and I’m certainly not doing one in April or May.

So why do my legs feel as if they’ve been used as practice pieces for apprentices on the Provisional IRA’s Introduction to Punishment Beatings course?

“Declan, Declan! You’re doin’ it wrong again, ye feckin’ eejit. Knees first, then ankles.”

“Sorry, sir. He just won’t lie still, like. An’ he keeps goin’ on about refuellin’ strategies for a half marathon being completely feckin’ useless. I think he’s a bit mad.”

Now there’s a City and Guilds course specification I’d like to see.

Anyway.

One of the reasons everything hurts quite as badly as it does is probably the kettlebells class I had with Will of Cambridge Kettlebells on Wednesday night. A little bit of history here. Well, I say history, but I’m going to make most of it up. History isn’t just the story of the past, it’s the stories we tell each other to learn from the past. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the Russian army was a brutal place for its young recruits. One of the punishments meted out to to these poor sods was carrying cannonballs around the place. When cannonballs became scarce because of the introduction of newer forms of artillery which used different ammunition, one of the brighter NCOs started to hoard the old ones at his dacha just outside Yaroslavl. He welded handles to them because he thought he would be able to abuse recruits more efficiently if more of them could hold onto 20-kilo pieces of shot without dropping them onto their own feet or lobbing them at the back of the head of the poor sod in front of them and the kettlebell was born.

One day, he defected from the Russian army to a fitness studio in New York where he found that he no longer received complaints from people when he tried to punish them with his little cannonballs. Instead, they called him a fitness guru. His classes were filled for months ahead of time with people eager to be given the sort of punishment he used to dole out to someone found molesting the regimental horse. He was confused and slightly saddened but soon perked up when he was given a large pile of cash for his stash of ratty cannonballs.

Will isn’t a Russian army NCO. I could detect no sociopathic tendencies. I was surprised to be the only other bloke there. Kettlebells seem a little macho but I was as wrong in this as I am in my historical research. Will warmed us up, showed us how to lift a kettlebell safely then started to run through some basic exercises. We did double-handed swings. If you do it right, all the power you need to move the kettlebell comes from what Will called a “hip snap.” I thought immediately about the hip thrust in Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Of course you can’t get the swing right if you bring your knees in tight.

We did some squats and sumo squats and single-arm swings and changed from one single-arm swing to the other and at the end of the hour I was completely wiped. I did love it and I can’t wait to go back next week but it was harder work than I’d expected.

Anne Christmas present for me arrived this week. It’s not every day that a man is happy to receive rubber pants from his wife. Mine are made by Zone3 and they’re buoyancy shorts, made from wetsuit neoprene and intended to give swimmers a little extra help to float nice and flat in the water. Aside from feeling slightly kinky wearing black rubber in public for the first time, I enjoyed using them. I took them to the pool after the kettlebell session. They’re not as buoyant as a pull-buoy so I’m slower in them over 50m than I am with the pull-buoy but much quicker than I am with no aids at all so they do work. I was too knackered to do more than a handful of lengths on Wednesday but I’ll use them again when I go to the pool later today and for tomorrow’s swim.

What I’m not going to do under any circumstances ever is wear them while doing the Time Warp. Oh no. Not me.

NB There’s a gratuitous Christopher Biggins sausage appreciation shot in that clip. You have been warned.

 

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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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They Think It’s All Over

We had the final assessment for 8 Weeks to Natural on Saturday afternoon. Like the first session, it was at the Parliament Hill track on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Once again, Simon from Sponge Marketing was playing host, Tom was taking photographs and Helen was our coach. It was a good session for nearly everyone. Danae wasn’t back from her hols and couldn’t make it which was a shame and Tim arrived near the end of the afternoon straight off the plane to Gatwick. That was commitment!

I struggled to do two or three laps of the track. I could walk reasonably well but even a few hundred metres of drill was enough to set my achilles twanging. I couldn’t do more than shuffle round with little fluency or economy. I just wanted to show willing, really. ActionJen had a mahoosive blister following her half marathon debut and was suffering too. We both dropped out after handful of slow, uncomfortable laps and watched our friends whizz around the track elegantly and with hardly any apparent effort.

Helen said that even over the handful of laps we had managed, she had been able to assess our progress. I was pleased that I had discernable progress to show. She said that we could spend the rest of the time on the track or take to the slopes of Parliament Hill for a hill session. I watched with some jealousy as the others had the hill session to end all hill sessions. I love hills. ActionJen and I stood to one side as under Helen’s careful coaching and incessant encouragement, the group flew up and down Parliament Hill. We’ve decided that when we’re both fit again, we’ll ask Helen for a shared coaching session and do some hills too.Sadly, I don’t know when that’s going to happen. I’m making very slow progress. Even the very little that I did on Saturday has put me back beyond where I was originally.

We still don’t know who has won the competition. That’s really not that important. Each of us has made progress towards a more efficient running style, one which in time will carry us farther and at greater speed than we had been able to maintain before. I think I’m a winner from that point of view. I have a pair of delicately trashed Bare-Xs which I would happily run back into a burning building to save once I was sure wife, step-son, cats and chicken were safe and inov-8 are giving us another pair of shoes each. I’ve chosen the Bare-Grips which I hope will carry me through the latter part of the cross country season.

My thanks go to Simon and the people at Sponge Marketing for organising everything, to inov-8 for the opportunity to do it and all the goodies – buy their stuff! – to my fellow 8 Weeks competitors for their blogs and company and most of all to Helen Hall for her coaching, mentoring, advice and encouragement. I’ve loved every second of it.

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Why I Run

The inov8 8 Weeks to Natural campaign has started me thinking about why I run. It would be easier for me to say what I don’t run for. I don’t do it for the glory or the fame. I’m a middle-aged man who is never going to be quick enough for that.

I don’t do it for money, even though The Sore Legs Tour is raising small amounts of money for Macmillan Cancer Support. (All donations gratefully accepted.)

I don’t do it for the medals but I’m proud of the ones I’ve received for completing those races, especially my first one from Cambourne 10k last year and my two marathon medals from Moray 2011 and London this year. I prefer the t-shirts, in fact. I feel especially attached to the lovely, soft cotton one from the Moray Marathon which I wear after a hard race because it’s so comfortable. It’s yellow and cheap and feels like a duster in the making but I worked hard for it for months, not just the time I spent running around Morayshire.

I don’t do it for my friends even though most of my friends now are runners. I was a bit of a lonely soul before. I enjoyed reading most and that’s pretty much the definition of a solitary pleasure. I could share my other pastimes like old cars and older music but I felt better when I went to race meetings on my own or listened to music sat quietly in a church or concert. The shared experience of music is something I left behind somehow when I stopped going to gigs. I never played or sang well enough to make much music with friends either.

Now that I run, I share my time with runners who have become my friends and that’s pulled me out of my shell. I’ll now happily spend time with people as long as I can have my me time too. Some of my friends who weren’t runners before are runners now and a few of them have come out as runners. It used to be a shameful practice, done late at night or very early in the morning, in parks or public gardens or along ill-lit back streets where few went for other purposes. They’d hide the special clothes and shoes they bought in secret from specialist shops or over the internet. Now, because they see me at it they feel empowered themselves. They’re out and they’re proud.

I still don’t do it for them.

I don’t do it for my health. I have asthma and was on the border of COPD. I was smoking and being an arse about it. I’ve written before about my love affair with cigarettes. I don’t want to go through it all again. I’ll just say this: they were wonderful for a while and then they wanted me to die and I don’t want to remember that bit. I just want to remember the good times. Pubs after hours with a beer in one hand, a fag in the other, a buzz in my head and bonhomie in my breast. That’s all gone now and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it.

There are compensations. I’m now much less likely to contract lung cancer or heart disease. I’ve reduced the chances of stroke. My asthma has improved and I’m no longer in danger from COPD. I can come in and snog my wife and not worry about the smell of cigarette smoke on my breath. I no longer consume quite so many mints.

But that’s still not why I run.

I run because I feel the joy of movement. When I’m running and I feel the blood in my veins and the air in my lungs and my legs and arms drive me on. When it’s going well – and for the most part it’s been going very well since I started 8 Weeks to Natural – it feels brilliant to run. I feel very free and my movements are easy whether I’m sprinting hard up a hill or cruising along on a long run. It’s partly the training and the new techniques I’ve learned and partly it comes from my head being in a good place.

It just feels good to run.

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Unaccustomed As I Am

I’ve been in an unusual position for me recently: the front. Well, sort of. At the race on Sunday, the organisers had laid out starting pens. We were asked to segregate ourselves with the quicker towards the front and the slower towards the rear. I was going for my sub-45 so I went to the front of the 40:00-45:00 pen. There weren’t that many people in front of me. I looked behind and there was a wall of people starting at 50:00-55:00. I thought “That can’t possibly be right. There must be more people in front of me than this” I’d been at the front of a start pen before, in Edinburgh and that didn’t end well.We all moved forward for the start and when the gun went I was overtaken by a few runners but I wasn’t swamped. The race leaders were still in sight at the 2k marker and I haven’t been in that situation before. They were gone by 3k after some twists and turns and dips and climbs but it was exhilarating to have been so close to the leaders for so long. I finished in 51st place. Had I known I was that far up the order, I would have pushed just a little harder to stay ahead of the last guy.

Then yesterday evening I had a night of fartlek fun at the C&C Tuesday night training. I was in with the speedy boys (and girl) for the first time and I wasn’t completely left for dead. Yes, I was coming in at the back of the group but I wasn’t hopelessly off the pace and I would have been off the front of the slower group. I’ve noticed that I’ve been moving up the pace groups as time has gone on but this is the first time I’ve been playing with the big boys.

There is more to my step up in performance than my nice new shoes. (Sorry, inov-8.) That I’ve been working hard on becoming fitter, running with Coach B more regularly, I’m doing more core work and Helen Hall’s efficient running programme have all played their part too. It’s left me wondering how much faster I can go. If I’m another five minutes quicker at the same race next year, I’ll be knocking on the door of the top 20 and that’s where the serious people hang out. I am inspired to do well by my friends and clubmates all of whom are putting in excellent performances and setting PBs too. I just can’t just sit back when everybody else is doing so well. I feel left out.

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It’s Not That Easy, Really

I’ve had a few problems in the last week in my transition. It’s not been all bad but I’ve been struggling to reconcile my coaches’ different emphases on how to run more efficiently. Coach B (not his real name) thinks that you’ll save energy if you take fewer strides and has been encouraging his athletes to extend their stride slightly on each step. Coach Helen is firmly of the opinion that a high cadence and short strides are the most efficient way to cover the ground. I’ve been working with Coach B for almost a year and I’ve made huge progress under his tutelage. I’ve only been working with Helen since we started the 8 Weeks to Natural programme but in that time, I’ve seen the benefits of her approach too. The truth of the matter is that I’m now very confused.

I thought my form had improved markedly but some photographs and film taken at the weekend have changed that. You can see the worst of the photographs below. (Thanks to Paul Homewood for the picture.)

And I thought it was going so well. Photograph © Paul Homewood, 2012

I’m just bimbling along here. There is no pressure so I should be able to run very nicely. This photo would suggest that I’m not actually doing that. My left heel is about to touch down first. I thought that I was landing nicely on my midfoot, allowing my heel just to touch the earth, gathering the energy in my foot and feeding that energy back into the next stride. The photo would suggest that here at least I’m landing on my heel.

The film Martyn Brearley shot shows that my feet were landing better but that I’m not really moving my left arm. That feeds through to my right leg which is imbalanced as a result. There is a difference in that I’m running barefoot in the video. Most people automatically assume a better posture when they take their shoes and socks off to run. You get that light, quick step thing going easily when you don’t have rubber and plastic surrounding your foot.

In spite of my dodgy form, I managed a nice, 75 second PB at the Bourn to Run 10k yesterday and posted a sub-45:00 time for the first time ever. It felt surprisingly easy. I haven’t run at that pace for such a long time in ages. I’ve been able to cane it over 800m, 1km or a mile but the more measured but still brisk pace I hit yesterday felt a lot more relaxed than I thought it would. I had a couple of wobbles around 4km when I just wanted to step off the course and drink beer until I felt better. My mood at that point wasn’t improved by a runner whose choice of music was more than obvious to everyone within six feet of him. I hope his ears were bleeding from the over-pressure in his eardrums by the end. I dropped him between 4 and 5km only to have him overtake me just after 8km. He slowed down after he passed me so I took the place back and pressed on. I dropped him easily between there and the finishing line.

Hills weren’t a problem. I kept my stride short and my cadence up and was taking yards out of the competition on each climb. I strode out as much as I could on the way down the hill but kept my cadence high too. There was a nice downhill stretch from 8km to the finish so I was able to dispatch the noisy young man easily enough. I tried to make up another place. There was a runner about seven or eight yards ahead of me and I made ground on him until we entered the park where the finish was held. My adversary ducked through into the park only three or four strides ahead of me. I burst through to see him vanishing into the distance. I kicked as hard as I could but I wasn’t going to make up that ground in only 80m.

My 44:25 chip time is almost five minutes faster than last year. That’s the difference that working with Coach B has made. It’s why I want to reconcile the new techniques I’m learning from Helen with his approach. I’d be foolish to do anything else.

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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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