In the Blood

At the end of one March afternoon in 1994, when I was 16 years old, our history teacher arrived later to the last lesson of the day, closed the door behind him and announced: ‘Harvie, you have a message from Death’.

The, now faded, piece of paper to which he was referring was a fax from a family friend offering a tip on a French horse called The Fellow who was running in that year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup. What followed was an illicit two-year correspondence featuring increasingly encrypted horse racing tips (the threat of interception and odds being slashed were of greater risk than expulsion) that resulted in three Cheltenham Gold Cup winning tickets. It also earned me a, well, completely unearned reputation as the most successful tipster at school, having never even stepped into a paddock. Nearly 20 years later I still carry in my wallet the race report for Shawiya’s victory at the Triumph Hurdle, my last win before I was busted.

John Jeremiah Sullivan was at least born into horse country when he went back to start researching his memoir Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son. His father, Mike Sullivan, a sports writer who had covered three decades in the trade, was living his final months and Sullivan-fils asked what his most cherished memory from the press box was. ‘I was at Secretariat’s Derby, in ’73. That was…just beauty, you know?’

Sullivan had grown up listening to his dad thumping at the typewriter in the basement, watched him dose himself in not just beer, but pitchers of the stuff, but each time he tried to get himself on a level with his dad – to impress him that he had been paying attention – his dad would laugh and change the subject. The veneer of adulthood would remain impenetrable until the very end. It would take until Sullivan start on Blood Horses, long after his dad had died, before he would get to know either what that ‘beauty’ was, or indeed what ran through his father’s vein’s other than beer and Kools cigarettes.

The hardest part of writing about Blood Horses is resisting the temptation to quote sections of it at length. Sullivan could have written a book about Secretariat, although there would have been little to add to William Nack’s masterpiece on the horse. Or he could have written a memoir about his father that would have sat nicely on the shelf at home, if nowhere else. Instead, what he has written is a something that transcends the sport, horses, sport-writing itself. It is a masterclass is elegy to his late father, and quite simply the best book, of any description, I have read in the last two years.

But even that does not do it justice. And it was only when I was rifling through the boxes of letters, where I had found the fax, that I have kept from those school days – the reason for keeping I have long since forgotten – that I realized what Blood Horses really is about. For Sullivan the Secretariat Kentucky Derby of 1973 is his equivalent of Charles Kane’s Rosebud in Citizen Kane. It is a story of a relationship between father and son that was never fulfilled while he was growing up, the kind that can only be fully realized in remembrance. It is a book about coming to terms with the passing of an adored father, and a way of reaching back, one last time, to hear him clunking at his craft in the basement. It should be required reading for anyone scratching their heads at the confusion that is adulthood, wondering what it means to be a father or a son.

Lizzy Hawker, Mrs H and a good start to the year

Way back in August, when Sir Bradley Wiggins was plain old ‘Wiggo’, I put a post out about looking for someone to write a running book for me. There was a flurry of interest – mostly along the lines ‘what would you like me to write for you?’, which sort of missed the point. And then silence. Not the silence of keyboards being thwacked, heads being scratched. More the ‘oh, look it’s series 4 of Spiral, I’ll write a proposal in the morning kind of silence’. Writing’s a tricky business – it takes a lot of time. On your own. It’s not at all like running. Well, maybe a bit.

More months passed. Then we found out that Mrs H was pregnant, I went to New York, Richie McCaw came over and signed my book (before we beat them – who could forget that). In other words – there were distractions. 

Around the same time an athlete, whose name is not yet up there with Mo Farah, happened to turn in an astonishing performance at the Spartathlon to put her on the podium – the first time any female runner has achieved this. And when she got home, she started writing a book. ‘Well, I never’, as the Fat Control might have said.

It is difficult to put Lizzy Hawker on the spectrum of British athletes. There is no such title as ‘world number one female ultra-runner’, and to say that she is the best ultra-distance runner this country has ever produced neither puts in perspective the trail-blazing quality of what she has done, nor how limited in public awareness and sponsorship this sport is at the moment. That said, running through New York with a friend of mine I mentioned the book, ‘what the Lizzy Hawker?’ Enough said.

And now, if you listen very carefully, you can hear the sound of her story being written down. Perched up in the Alps, between training sessions, she is writing the story that took her from someone who had run a marathon or two, onto 100-kilometre races and multiple winner of the UTMB. Not bad for someone who started life in Upminster, has never had a coach and did most of her early running while finishing her PhD. It promises to be sensational and inspirational in equal measure.

So, the year began on a good note, and now comes the hard work. The running book market has become increasingly crowded in recent years – a sign, for sure, that there is an appetite to be sated. But where Lizzy’s story is unique is not only in the journey, and that she is telling it from the inside, but – mostly importantly – as a female writer. Alex Hemmingsley’s Running Like a Girl, out next month, is the only book that I can think of that appeals directly to a female audience, and Alex would be the first to admit she’s not cut from the same cloth as Lizzy.

So, all of you out there who got in touch – and you know who you are – the bar has been set, the gauntlet thrown down – but my door is open and you know where I am.

January pains

Ah, pain. I missed you.

It’s a subject close to the heart of every ultra-distance running. Like the Eskimos and their 180 different words for snow, runners categorise pain in multiple ways, and are familiar with all of them.

Last Saturday marked the first ultra of the 2013 calendar. 250 runners lined up at the Shoulder of Mutton pub in Wendover for a 45-mile canter to Little Venice in London. There were many familiar faces, and most talked of grand ambitions for the year – a first hundred-miler here, a double Spartathlon there. This was not idle bragging, but a carefully orchestrated testing of the water: get through the mud, sleet, wind and the pain and the year’s off to the right start.

I did not, though, expect to see someone line up with their arm in plaster.  It was not clear whether it was a broken arm, or just the wrist. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. I did hear him fend off one questioning spectator by saying ‘well, I’m not going to run on it, am I?’, Nor did I expect to read later of a runner, who had covered this course more times than I’ve done sit-ups, say that she had been hit by piriformis pains at mile 13 and still finished. (Even without looking it up, it sounds horrific). As I said, pain comes in many guises. And it always gets through. Like water, it finds the weakest spot and whether it takes one hour or ten, it eventually succeeds. And once it has you, it doesn’t leave.

Mud: No way round it.

It was in the mud by the aerodrome at 18 miles that it got me last time, and I nearly quit at the 26 mile check-point. I had certainly been undercooked, and this year was determined not to become completely unstuck. Although I hadn’t trained nearly as much as I should have done, having disappeared into something of a black hole over Christmas, this time I kept the mantra ‘go slow, keep moving’ in my head. I also threw every trick I had at the pain when it came calling at about 2pm. Don’t let them fool you – the drugs do work. But, and this is the other reason why pain is so close to the hearts of runners, 6, 7, 8 hours on the hoof is a long time to be doing anything let alone the same thing.

 

Arthur Schopenhauer, who knew a bit about suffering

And this is where it gets you. It got to Schopenhauer and it got to Nietzsche – neither of whom knew much about lycra, but who spent a great deal of time alone en plein air contemplating their lot, and what role suffering has to play in it. (If you would like to read my MA thesis on the subject I have spare copies…) By the time of the final turn – 13 miles to go, I was starting to crack up. Shards of pain splintered through my shoulders, abdomen, knees and ankles. I knew it would pass, as it always did, but not before the inevitable thought: ‘bollocks to this, I want to go home’.

In the end, I snuck in under 8 hours, 7:54 to be precise, which was something of a miracle. And then all I wanted was a big mac, which I have not eaten since 2007 in Tel Aviv airport. I can’t say that it made me feel like a morally better person, as the pain was supposed to, but it did stop me falling off my bike and puking up on the way home.

A new kind of pain emerged as soon as I got up from the kitchen floor, where I seem to spend most of my time at the moment, having put the finishing touch to the boy’s Ikea kitchen set. Forget his growing pains, setting first in my quads, the seizure held onto me through most of the weekend, not even abating through the night when, according to Mrs H, I kept ‘turning over like a kebab’. Nothing, though, compares to the jarring, crunching, thundering pain of banging your head against a door frame a full tilt – carrying, of all things, Mrs H’s handbag. Three days later it’s still reverberating down my spine. Or perhaps that the indignity of walking around with an unexplained lump on my head. As someone in the office said: ’Did you do that when running?’ ‘Er, I didn’t run on my head, did I?’

Not the New York Marathon

When, at the start of autumn, your boss tells you to go to New York on a shopping trip to acquire some new books, it’s inevitable that you pack a pair of trainers. The New York Marathon is one of the oldest in the calendar, and it was covering this race a generation ago, for the Observer, that Chris Brasher returned to London with the famous challenge – can London do the same?

The Bronx is Burning

When I landed at JFK, Hurricane Sandy had been and gone, leaving a multi-billion dollar bill, and snow was piled up against the airport terminal wall. From the coast to the Hudson River there were scenes reminiscent of the hellacious squalor of New York in the late 70s when the city was about to implode under piles of uncollected rubbish, ruined building and a broken economy, so brilliantly described in The Bronx is Burning.

Brooklyn Bridge

As for Manhattan, at least, a few broken branches and some out-of-place sandbags aside – it was difficult to tell what all the fuss was about. But the marathon, which would have started out on Staten Island and provided a neat tourist guide to the devastation spots, had been cancelled. ‘There would have been riots’, I was told by one editor who had helped with the clear up.

From my apartment in the East Village, most of my running took me south along the East River, under the colossal bridges to Brooklyn, and downtown to Wall Street. This was East of D Street, as in ‘You’re Dead Street’, so-called by my cousin who lived here a while ago, because it was so dangerous. Clearly things have moved on, as the only sign of subversion was a bag of skunk someone had left on a park bench.

Skunk, New York style

The best run of the week was saved until last. I met Aram at 7.30am in Astor Place to head over Brooklyn Bridge, and past the impressive Barclay Center, home of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. Then it was up Atlantic Avenue to Prospect Park. Mrs H reckoned that there were deer and sheep here, as there had once been in Central Park. I couldn’t see any, but it was still early and the temperature a bit frisky.

Twice a year publishers gather – in London and Frankfurt – to chew the fat over the Next Big Thing. Nothing beats this way of doing business though. I would never have found out about Nick Clark in an aircraft hangar in Frankfurt, or about an unbelievable collection of American Boxing writing, or a book that I hope will be the new Will Fiennes. There is nothing like seeing New Yorkers in their native environment.

A week after arrival there was still water on the subway floor, and like post-1977 it’s going to a long while to get the city back to normal. But I will definitely be back – next year I hope, and just in time for the New York Marathon, storm warnings permitting.

Abandon All Hope: Think More Clearly

Everyone needs a race like this once in a while.

I had signed up to the Dusk ’til Dawn 50-miler months ago, getting the last spot in the list of 100 places, and knew fully what to expect. 50 miles, 9000ft of ascent (and descent, obviously), mud (lots of) and a race filled with darkness.

Changing trains at Sheffield on Saturday afternoon, to a rickety service that connected to Manchester through the Peak District, other runners swiftly appeared out of the weekender masses. Rucksacks were packed high and tight, water bottles clasped, strange coloured liquids sloshing around. And the shoes – mud-caked trail shoes that looked like they had seen the wars. I had gone so far as preparing a meal out of the boy’s Thomas the Tank Engine pasta and had a couple of pork pies in reserve.

Abandon all Hope

The train belted out of the tunnel into the Hope Valley and into some of the most beautiful English countryside I have ever seen. The cold wind from the north had cleared the skies, but the leaves clung on, golden and rich. It was perfect running weather. Or so I thought until we got to the briefing at T-40 minutes. It was going to be wet. The ground had turned to river in some parts, others had been churned up by caterpillar tracks. There was also snow on its way.

The race started with a steep ascent and descent – designed for those who wanted a taste

The start line

of what was to come and could abandon before heading too far out of Castleton. The first to retire did so here when he realised that neither his torch or spare torch worked. He made his way to the pub, had a pint and called the organisers. So efficient were they, in this and everything else in the race, that they got to him before he could order a second.

The first ascent at Lose Hill

As with all trail races groups emerged swiftly and gaps were opening up at the first check marker at 3 miles. (The eventual winner, Charlie Sharpe had over an hour on the next runner at the finish). And then night sunk on us, dropping like a stone into the valley. Where there had been a golden arc of winter sun there was just black silence. With that the temperature dropped, our breath turning to fog in front of us, caught in the haze of the head torches. I had been dreaming about this race for months to experience this kind of non-violent attrition against the elements. At that moment I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the world.

Friday Night Lights

On the train up I had been reading the brilliant account of a small-town Texan college American Football Team called Friday Night Lights. Written in 1988 (remember Michael Dukakis?) it’s THE American story as seen through the Permian Panthers, whose games every Friday night fill the stadium to its 20,000 capacity. It it is hard to impress in one paragraph how good this book is, not least at showing how much the rest of this town, in a Texan dust bowl lives and breathes on these games. Failure is not an option.

The corrosion set in around the 19-mile mark. The group of five I was in were making good progress, set to reach the 20-mile check-point in exactly 4 hours. The trouble began with Ringo Starr, or more exactly the sound track to Thomas the Tank Engine, which has been on repeat at home since the summer, and I could just not get it out of my head. This, I knew, was all part of the exfoliation process that these distances are about. You scrape off the layers inside your head until you’re left with silence.

By the time I had left check-point two, I was shaking violently. I have been here before, but it had been a while and I was not used to the cramps that took hold of my stomach, nor the incessant desire to vomit. I was falling further and further back from the group, and when they turned their head torches off, to save batteries, I knew that the end, for me at least, was in sight.

I hung onto them for another 90 minutes, until we reached a main road and I was bundled into a marshall’s car and wrapped my stomach in the space blanket I had taken with me on every long run but never used. Now I know what they are for. 26 miles in five and a half hours is not much to write home about, although I was 16th overall, but it was a lesson re-learnt – you can’t blag your way around these races.

To be avoided at all costs.

I can not thank the volunteers who looked after me enough. We sat in the warmth for a couple of hours waiting for the grim sweeper to come through and then they shuttled me back to the start where I had the best cup of tea of my life, although I did manage to spill half of it over my hands as they were shaking so much. Then it was a shower and bed. Meanwhile out on the course, visibility had been reduced to 20 metres, the thermometer had dipped below -2 degrees and that didn’t take into account the wind.

The speed of the first runners home meant that from 2am until 8.30am, when I got a lift to the station to leave Hope, there was a team of volunteers standing in the cold and the rain to cheer them across the finish line and into the kitchen for the fry-up of their lives. I’ve taken part in some well organised races before but nothing like this. Chapeau, chaps. I’ll definitely be signing up for next year, better prepared though.

Would anyone like to write a running book for me?

It’s almost a year since I arrived at Aurum Press to look after the sports’ list, and last week I acquired my seventh and eighth book. One on the secret swimming spots in London and the other about the crazy years between 1971-75 when Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman fought each other five times for the World Heavyweight Championship belt. Both, for very different reasons, are going to be blistering books.

So far, though, no running books have come my way. As a sub-genre books about running tend to fall into one or more of three categories. There is the straight-memoir/inspirational book à la Scott Jurek, which Bloomsbury have recently published. Then there is the historical/biographical story, usually involving two Victorian gentlemen, a wager and some bonkers distance that they have to cover wearing only pyjamas and surviving on beer and gruel. Mark Whitaker’s Running for Their Lives is an excellent example. Then there is the ‘what can they teach me about running’ category involving a writer embedding themselves into an unfamiliar culture to find out the secret to running like Mo Farah. Chris McDougall’s Born to Run, and more recently (and a far better book) is Adharanand Finn’s Running with the Kenyans.

What these two last books have that the others don’t, is the pearl of any great story. By placing themselves, and by extension us, at the heart (but not the centre) of the narrative the authors allow us to dream that if we too had been born there, or had the time to up sticks and spend six months running in the Rift Valley then we too would be on the verge of breaking two hours for the marathon. But they also give us a warts and all picture of the pain that is endured by those whose story we are following. All without us having to leave our living room. We can then close the book with a sigh thinking ‘ah, that could have been me’, before we get up to boil the kettle.

Now that the story of how the Kenyan’s hold the secret to breaking the two-hour marathon has been told, and a fad of bare-foot running has been launched on the back of the story of an obscure, forgotten tribe in Mexico, the question is where to turn to next – where in the world will a story of the holy grail of distance running come from. (This is key because it endurance running rather than the sprint). There are the monks of Mount Hiei in Japan, whose distance running takes place over many years and is the route to enlightenment.

There is also the story of Budhia Singh, the marathon boy in India, but these are stories we are familiar with already. So, this is the question – where else in the world can a story like Running with the Kenyans be found, and who would like to write it for me. Answers on a postcard if you’re interested.

Speed of Light

You can’t really come to Edinburgh and not bring your trainers. Well, that’s not quite true. The first time I visited, in 1997, I ended up, for the first and last time, in a strip club. ‘Titillating and demeaning at the same time’ was how one friend described it. And that was before the curry. That was not the reason I was up there earlier this week. Rather, I had been invited to join a panel discussing ideals in athletic endeavour. My specialist subject was failure, about which I am something of an expert.

I arrived early enough in the evening to get a run in before dinner and bounced out of my hotel for what I thought would be a gentle hour of stretching the legs. Before I had even hit my stride the outline of Arthur’s Seat emerge from behind a supermarket. I had seen it before, of course, it is impossible to miss. But I had never thought about running up it.

Arthur’s Seat by daylight

90 minutes later, and two cruel (remember, I am a Londoner) ascents done my thighs were humming with cramp. For the first time in years I ran as cold a bath as possible and stayed in it as long as I could bear.

The view though was spectacular. Train lines etched out of the city, the Firth of Forth was placid – it even looked warm. After a curry (no strip club) and a decent night’s sleep I wobbled out of the hotel in wet running gear and ran and down it twice more. 24 hours later I can only just walk in a straight line. And to think that I’ll be doing that for 50 miles through the dark in 2 months time.

At Arthur’s Seat for sundown

I am not the only one to have been taken by the view – it plays a key part in David Nicholls’ million-copy selling One Day. More recently Angus Farquhar of the NVA has create a work of art from 4,000 fell runner and walkers across Arthur’s Seat called the Speed of Light. It is an astonishing spectacle of light in motion and a miracle of choreography since it involves runners of all capabilities maintaining the same distance of 10 metres between themselves in ascent and descent, for nearly two hours before changing light suits in a seamless transition unnoticeable to the naked eye. If you are in Edinburgh for the festival you must track it down as anyone can take part. It runs from Thursday 9 Aug – Sat 1 Sep 2012, more info at the festival website.

Speed of Light