Bin Bags at Dawn

Weight lifting

Ideally, I would have commandeered my son. At just shy of two year’s old he has hit 11kg and is tall enough to sit comfortably on my shoulders. But the problem is that he wriggles so much that it’s hard enough to keep him there for five minutes, let alone for the duration of a 10-mile run.

What I really need are hills, because I have started trailing in earnest for the next big race. In October I’ll be heading for the Peak District and a 50-miler through the night, appropriately called Dusk ’til Dawn, which has a total elevation of 9,200 feet, with the worst to come from 36 miles to the finish. As British Cycling found earlier this year, when they filed their course for the Olympic Road Race, there isn’t an elevation within a hundred miles of London that is worthy of being called a hill. The course they submitted included one lap of Box Hill. It was rejected. So too the route with three laps. Fair enough, since it would barely feature as more than an abrasion on the flattest stage of the Tour de France. Nine laps, however, now that would be a challenge.

This is the reason why Mark Cavendish has spent the spring trimming another 9lbs off his already wired body frame. He’ll never win the Tour because he struggles over the mountains, but for the Olympics he has given himself the kind of chance he needs to get over, round and down Box Hill and have enough time to regroup ahead of the sprint finish. It also helps that he’s been living up a volcano for the last few months with Bradley Wiggins and the Sky Team.

Not exactly Mont Ventoux

The closest thing to a vertical climb I have is a 100 metre ascent to the Lavender Hill Police Station – not exactly Mont Ventoux, you might say. I’d have to run up it close to a hundred times to get anything like the benefit of being up in the Peak District, and since there is a rather good pub at the bottom of the slope it’s unlikely that I’d make it much beyond the second length. I had also heard that there was a team on the Coastal Trail ultra who were running with a brick in the packs, just for a laugh. I haven’t got to the bottom of it, but I have a feeling that you know who has got something to do with it.

All of which has meant that I’ve had to return to the tried and tested method of donning a bin liner under several layers of clothes to sweat it out. It’s heavily reliant on the English summer coming good, although so long as it’s humid that’s always good for getting the sweat boiling up. Last night, as the storm clouds brewed over Wimbledon soap suds were frothing out of my top, which is a good indicator of hard labour.

As for the boy, I might have to resort to using him for bicep curls for the time being.

Lost in Transition: Or Why I’ll Never Be a Triathlete

It took me until Sunday morning to realise that I never knew how to ride a bike. Throughout most of my life – from the age of seven, when I cycled to school, and would spend my summer evenings pretending to be Stephen Roche, and now to commuting across London on a single-speed two-wheeler – I have cycled almost everyday. And yet, as I was overtaken going up hill in the last five kilometres of the Bradford-upon-Avon triathlon by someone twice my age and half my size, it dawn on me that riding a bike properly is actually quite an art.

It had all started so well. I had signed up for the triathlon just before Easter on the repeated promise that the weather last year had been stunning. And the appeal of a 1.5km  swim in the river followed by 40km on the bike and then a 10km run was only heightened by the fact that it would be a weekend in the countryside and the boy could crash around by the river with Mrs H while I somewhere over the hill.

By the time that Alex and I were standing on the river bank the water temperature had fallen to 12.8 degrees. The swim had been reduced to 1km because of the current after 5 weeks of rain, and while he was still muttering about how warm it had been last year, I was busy worrying whether two swimming caps was really enough.

As it turned out the swim was the least of my worries. After 25 minutes in the river we were dragged onto the bank unceremoniously like line caught tuna being hauled on deck, and on our way to the transition area to change out of our swimming gear to get on the bike. It took me nearly six whole minutes to complete this task. Granted I forgot I had to get the wetsuit over the timing chip on my ankle and ended up rolling on the grass like a dog trying to scratch his back. But six minutes! I’ve had board meetings that have been shorter than that.

And then it was onto the bike. The real surprise was that I was actually ahead of Alex when we got out of the water, but that time was lost in transition and by the time we were out of the gate he was well ahead of me. I later found out that he thought I was still ahead which is why he bolted, but try as I might I couldn’t catch him. I could give you the excuse that my head was all over the place from the swim or that my stomach seemed to have taken leave of its senses, but really it was that there wasn’t enough in the legs.

Kilometre 30 and in search of a cup of tea

The real selling point of the race was that it went past Alex’s parents’ house at kilometre 30. By this time I was way off the back but loving every minute. I was expecting to see the boy standing on the wall waving, but the garden was empty and when I got off the bike and knocked on the door, hopeful of a cup of tea, there was no answer. Instead they were waiting at the bottom of the hill and by the time Louis had sat on the bike and changed the gears I was 12 minutes down on Alex. And there was still an almighty hill to climb back up.

T2, the second transition, was a breeze. Off the bike, and a change of shoes while chewing half a banana that I think was mine, I bounced into the 10km run. If there was one thing I knew how to do it was run. Except it didn’t quite work like that. My legs were all over the place. More intend on going from side to side and with a foreshortened step – a result of an hour on the bike – my son had a better technique than this, and it took 2km for my legs to wake up.

By the time I crossed the finish line in 2 hours 40 minutes – a full 50 minutes behind the winner who had passed through the transition area in 2 minutes flat – I had climbed to 96th out of 120 overall. And that’s the point. Even when I was running my first marathons it was never really about racing, more about surviving. This was all about competition, about finding the fastest line around the buoys or the perfect position to descend the hills in. (There were guys there wearing aerodynamic helmets, as if every millisecond did actually count).

None of this is to say I won’t be back, and it has piqued my interest in the Dart 10km swim and an idea that goes back to when I was 18 to cycle the length of France as fast as possible. In the meantime it’s back to what I know best and I’ve just signed up to the Dusk ’til Dawn 50-miler in the Peak District in October. I expect it to be spicy, what with all the hills, but guaranteed that there won’t be wetsuit in sight, and plenty of tea.

Chris Brasher, The London Marathon and the quest to break two hours

I started writing this post at 2am on the morning of the 2012 London Marathon. As I finished my carb-packed breakfast, I thought it a fitting homage to Chris Brasher, the Marathon’s founder, who called up the current organiser, David Bedford, around about this time in the morning, in 1981, and said something like, ‘we’ve got this little race going on, would you join us?’ Bedford had just returned from an end of evening curry. But, tired and emotional as he no doubt was, he dragged out his running shoes and headed for Greenwich. The rest, as they say, is history.

This will be the third time that I have run the course of the London Marathon in reverse: starting beneath Big Ben at 4am and heading for Greenwich. And while the number of those running this year has ballooned from 2 in 2009 to 6 in 2011 to 14 in 2012, amongst the chatter there will be plenty of time to reflect on the life of Brasher, without whom none of us would be here, and who is the subject of an excellent biography by John Bryant.

Brasher was, to put it mildly, a singular fellow, but this is not the problem that faces the biographer. Consider for a moment that one person links the 4-minute mile, where he paced Roger Bannister, the 1956 Olympics, where he won gold in the 3000m steeple chase, the invention of modern orienteering and the patenting of the Brasher walking boot. There is more than a little of the Forrest Gump in Brasher. He was not so much a witness through his goggled lenses (he was never much of a looker) to some of the momentous occasions in modern athletic history as making it.

Although for most readers of Bryant’s book all road lead to the creation of the London Marathon, the trouble is to know where to start the story. Bryant tackles the chronology and the multi-layered history of Brasher’s life with great lightness. (Here I must declare an interest since I work for the publisher of his book). And Bryant admirably confronts head-on the fact that if Brasher took exception to you, as he was more than likely to, he could be more than direct. There is a story that when news of his death reached the night desk at one national paper the editor couldn’t find anyone to write his obituary who had a good word to say about him. But when did nice blokes make for interesting biographies?

To properly book-end the London Marathon (it is now Monday afternoon) it’s to the Kenyans that we must turn. In Running with the Kenyans Adharanand Finn did what all good journalists do when researching a story, and upped sticks with his family to live and train in Kenya with some of the best distance runners in the world. No slacker – he has recorded 1:18 for the Edinburgh Half Marathon – the regime, the natural talent and the sheer ergonomic beauty of these runners made even the top Europeans, who decamp there to learn their secrets, look like part-timers. As if to prove his point Kenyans took first place in both the men and women’s race yesterday.

Of the 12 of us who set off from Big Ben 2 called it a day at Tower Bridge – one was tapering for the Bob Graham in a couple of weeks – and a handful ended up in a hospital and took an age to find their way out. All of which meant that Alex and I crossed the start line together, for the third time, at 8am and made our way for a fry up and a pint in the local pub. As we watched the final runners arrive for the start – Wombles, Peppa Pigs etc – we glanced up at the TV to see the elite setting off. Already the Kenyans were putting clear water between themselves and the rest.

If you want to know what it is like, really like, to run like this and, more importantly, what it will take to break the 2-hour record I offer you two possibilities. Either, the next time you go to the gym turn the running machine up to its maximum pace – 18 kph in my case – and see how long you can last. I managed 27 seconds. And even that would not have got me 2:04:44, Wilson Kipsang’s time yesterday. Or, you could pour a cup of tea and read Finn’s truly excellent book. Raising a pint of Sagres to the screen, I knew exactly what the rest of Sunday held for me.

NOHTARAM NODNOL EHT

The boss has gone away for Easter and the sun has turned to snow. It can mean only one thing – the final countdown to the London Marathon has begun.

Last year I put word out that a few of us were going to be running the course of the marathon backwards. Starting at 4am by Big Ben, the closest you can get to the finish line what with all the TV equipment, we would head to Greenwich for 8am. I would then turn around and do it all again. Seven of us made it that morning, a good number I thought given the time of day, but I sensed disappointment in some un-named quarters that there weren’t more.

This year that should all be different since I’m not in charge. Before he took off for the Barkley 100 in the US, James Adams put out the word that on the 4th chime of Big Ben we’d be off. I’ve seen a list of 20 names so far, but since there are no ballots for this one, we’ll be taking entry applications up until about 3.59am. So, if you would like to come and join us, you know where we’ll be.

This will be third outing on this route, but I’m more excited about it that I have been any race in a while. I suspect that it has as much to do with the cafe in Greenwich where we’re likely to end up as we did back in 2009. At 9am, while runners streamed past clutching isotonic drinks as they made their way to the Greenwich start line, Alex and I gorged on bacon and eggs. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts more than one person had that ‘what-on-earth-are-they-doing?’ look on their face. Because every training manual puts the fry-up in the bottom drawer. We raised a cup of tea and wished them well.

With 19 days left to go it’s probably a bit late to get in any more serious miles, especially since Easter eggs are just around the corner. Instead I’ll go straight into tapering which includes the tried and tested routine of sipping lots of beer – for the carbohydrates, of course. So, if you’re passing through Camden in the next couple of weeks, give me a buzz. There are plenty of good pubs round here, and who knows – I might even stand you a pint.

Hear Hull Here

Last month I gave a TEDx talk up in Hull for Why We Run. Nuff said, here it is:

And if you’re sitting tightly, here’s Andy Kirkpatrick. Psycho. Vertical.

For the full playlist, courtesy of the lovely people at Hull TEDx go to  http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDDB2E6D40B447E7B

The Lakes

‘What would you do if you were forced to stop running?’

I’d been dreading this question for sometime, and at the excellent Ways With Words Festival in the Lake District on Monday my time finally came. A friend of mine was called into the doctors last month and was told never to run again. He’s still not recovered from the shock. And others who have faced the same ignominy have jumped on the bike with relish. But we all know that it’s not the same.

The truth is that I am not quite sure. My mum keeps going on about my knees. ‘Your knees, your knees!’, and she sound like Peter Sellers dressed up as Quasimodo. ‘The Bells! The Bells!’ (Below at 1 minute 30). She’s just been to the doctor about her own knees, so she may have a point.

Regardless, the question was asked in the same week that I was asked whether I’d ever consider doing an iron man triathlon – 2.4 miles in the water, 112 miles on the bike and then 26.2 miles on foot. Again I ummed and erred, saying something that sounded like I was wimping out – this was also the week when the peddle on my bike sheered off in the middle of Hyde Park leaving me to cycle one-legged up-hill to Camden – no mean feat.

But then all it takes is a reminder of what an iron man can do to you. If you have not seen the below, it is worth watching in its entirety.

So, no, in short I won’t be doing an Iron Man anytime soon, especially given that the talk on Monday was at the foothills of the snow-covered Fells where I’d come three years ago for the Bob Graham. The pictures I took hardly do justice to the beauty of the place, but I deeply regretted not bring my running kit with me, even though I had heard that several people had been rescued off the Fells the day before. There is a certain pride in being reduced to a jibbering wreck by a race, but give me a pair of trainers, an open space and a bit of sunshine and I’m the happiest fool around.

Official publication of the paperback of Why We Run

For the first year of my son’s life I hardly ran at all. Amid the chaos of the early months of fatherhood, the furthest I ran was the double London Marathon from Big Ben to the start and back, and I was piled so high with caffeine, since he had not slept for two nights, that when it was over I could barely remember having done it at all.

The reasons were both banal and familiar. I had reached adulthood and every mile had to be stolen against the clock, and when I did go out I would, invariably, cut short the run in case something had happened in my absence. Family life became a tightly choreographed routine – each run was precursored with days of planning: when will you leave? When will you be back? Should we wait for lunch? Places I had come to know intimately with my feet, whose every elevation, texture and contour I could have once recited, were locked away in the attic with the winter running clothes.

To neuter the fear that my running days were over I bought new running shoes and, improbably, I joined the Serpentine Running Club. On Wednesdays after work I would, too rarely, join them by Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park to cover seven miles before heading to the pub. I began to realised how much my centre of gravity had shifted. My balance was off because of the weight that I had put on in the past year, and after an hour I could feel my legs disappearing off at peculiar angles as they tired. I had known, if only fleetingly, what it was like to run with grace. This was not it.

But could some form of that previous life still be captured, however fleetingly? At night I would creep, barefoot, onto the roof of our house while the family were asleep and sit looking out east to the City and the horizon towards St Paul’s and the North Downs, and imagine being out there on the pavements reeling in some mythical finish line. And it was here that I kept the dream of returning to Greece alive.

In the beginning I returned to the maps. They showed London’s postal districts packed out like squares of wheat. With the glimpse of the skyline in front of me I had the second great aesthetic revelation of my life. The maps were sublime. I had never contemplated an object as magnificent, as rich in emotion and meaning as this 1/25,000 representation of the capital. Each borough, every side street, was fully represented down to the direction from which they should be approached. I felt the thrill of human life, of millions of souls, most who would be asleep as I nudged my finger over them, unseen. This was ‘the other place’ that the novelist Haruki Murakami talked of disappearing to. Some nights I would stare at them too long and I would reconcile that the maps were far more interesting than the territory, that I could stay here and live out the adventure simply by tracing my fingers over the contours.

Apart from during races I had never run late into the night and I was tentative when it came to closing the door behind me. It is no coincidence that I started running further and harder the more settled into our new family life we all became, when my teeth no longer felt like they were going to fall out of my head from all the sugar that I was consuming just to stay awake. Over the months, night running became a counter-point to my new daily routine. I ran for hours East and North, past five storeys of empty car parks, echoing the silence of miles of uninhabited streets and dark, locked offices, into suburbs I had grown to know intimately in two-dimension. Towards dawn I would look up and find myself, as if by accident, miles from home. Next came a shift in the city’s distant commotion – the day’s beginning. I had to get off the streets. In the dark I had seen something of the runner I had once been, breath hovering out in front of me, my legs vanished completely from view as, once again, I became the single eye in motion.

What surprised me most was to see just how many people there were on the streets – running at 4am. If we acknowledged each other, it was only briefly, as is always the case. Even though it is a growing phenomenon, each of us is locked into our own reverie. We come here to get away from other people, to enjoy these precious moments of solitude before normal daylight service resumes.

Making for home down Primrose Hill and round Regent’s Park, I would scale the perimeter of Hyde Park, the runner as transgressor, finally liberated. I would turn off my head torch and switch from my fluorescent top to a black disguise to run undetected as the first planes sparkled in along the Heathrow flight path. Out the other side I waited for the traffic and when the moment came, flung each leg over the fence, scared for the first time in a long while at the thought of being caught. Through Vauxhall, Portuguese and Somali families would already be rising to get shutters up and fruit arranged on the pavement stalls. Leaves and litter spewed across the road, apocalyptically. I had reached the end of the world. Back behind the front door I would shower, change and crawl onto the roof to watch the city wake, waiting for the first yelp of the morning to indicate that the day had begun and that the adventure was over for another night.

Why We Run paperback launched at Hull TEDx

Consider the following. You are hanging to the side of a vertical rock face having spent 10 days climbing 1200 metres straight up. It has taken 3 attempts to get this far, and there are 50 metres to the top, when suddenly you hear your son’s voice – his actual voice – ‘get away, dad’.

Andy Kirkpatrick, the acclaimed author of Psychovertical, had 15 minutes on stage yesterday at the TEDx event in Hull to describe what it’s like to take on one of the most intimidating climbs in the world. As he said himself, he could have talked for hours on a subject that has long been his obsession, but also left his girlfriend, the para-Olympic hopeful Karen Darke, in a wheelchair. For the second time in 2 days I heard that climbing, even this kind of ascent, is not really about the summit, but about something much more personal. (I have just finished Nan Shepherd’s beautifully lyrical The Living Mountain, which follows a similar theme). The last clip Andy showed in his talk was of his climbing kit parachuting to the foot of the wall as he soon followed with a massive grin on his face.

 

I was at the event as the least accomplished of the speakers, which included Felicity Aston, who has recently returned from the Antarctic as the first woman to ski solo to the South Pole as well as a number of high-qualified and fascinating scientists talking about everything from the Hadron Collider to the search for alien life.

I had come up the night before, gone for a run through Hull and done a session on the treadmill to put some final thoughts together as I still get incredibly nervous before going on stage. The military precision of the TEDx organisers left nothing to chance. Except for what to do when, with 5 minutes to go, I squirted liquid soap down the front of my trousers. A dark stain was only made worse when water was applied, reminding me of the morning that my university flatmate squirted washing up liquid into his eye just before his finals exam. He wrote three papers with a handkerchief held to his eye and still got a First.

Now back in London the next stop is the official publication of the paperback of Why We Run, out in March. Then it’s off to Cumbria for the Ways With Words Festival and a chance to spend an evening out on the Fells. London hasn’t got any hillier since I last ran there, and 20 minutes at 7% gradient on a treadmill will only get you so far. Still, at least there’ll be a pint and a warm bath at the end of it, which I don’t think you’d find halfway up a cliff face or mid-way across the Antarctic.

Christopher Hitchens – The perfect running companion

One month in and nearly every resolution I made on New Year’s Eve has been broken. There’s half a bottle of red wine by the fridge and the chocolate cake that was supposed to last the week had gone by the start of the ludicrous and dull Birdsong. 85kg on the scales became, momentarily, 82kg post the Country to Capital, but like Greece in crisis, the ballooning continues unchecked.

There is one resolution that has passed into week 4. As Mrs H and I heaved another load of books into the study I promised her I wouldn’t buy a new book all year. An odd, and rather dull resolution that serves little purpose, it has proved the hardest to keep to, especially since we are both in the business. But now that We, the Drowned (you must read it) is on the shelf, down has come The Art of Fielding – Chad Harbach’s proof that sport and fiction can co-exist, as well as George F Will’s Men at Work – also about Baseball. I may not be able to tell you when my next run is, but I’ve got my reading mapped out for the next eight months already, or at least until the next series of The Killing comes out.

The richest treasure though was taking ownership of The Story of Swimming, which I had swapped with a duplicate Christmas present. That and the late Christopher Hitchens’s collection of essays Arguably have been taking up the hours between episodes of Borgen. Give a man a rocking chair and page after page on the solitary pleasure of wild swimming or the Hitch on Dickens and peaceful silence ensues. Hitchens said the closest he came to sport was a game of tennis with Martin Amis 40 years ago, and he certainly never saw the point of it, or its literary merit. What he would have made of The Art of Fielding one can only guess – but I could think of no better companion on a 12 hour yomp than someone who wrote more in one week than most people read in a lifetime, (Arguably is available as a download), and the world is a much quieter place for his passing.

Come in No. 83, your time is up

If you want to know how not to prepare for the race of your life you could do worse than read Michael Hutchinson’s delightful (and delightfully funny) book on his attempt to break the hour record on a bike. No slouch – he has a handful for national time trial records to his name – a week before he was due to attempt to cycle further than anyone in history in one hour, at the Manchester Velodrome, he was dragging a cardboard box across London in the middle of a heat wave only to discover that it contained the wrong bike.

The closest I’ve come to ‘the Hutch’ is being lapped (twice) by him around Richmond park some years ago. However, I would suggest that preparation for running your first ultra for nine months could be better served than turning up at the wrong station (Paddington) at 6am on a Saturday morning to be told that trains for Wendover leave from Waterloo (incorrect), and then hurtling to Marylebone for the 6.30am train, leaving a packed breakfast and lunch somewhere on the Euston Road.

Equus Meloncholia - the only despondent face seen all day.

All was forgotten when the whistle blew at the start line at 8.51am outside The Shoulder of Mutton pub and 200 runners skipped off down the road in -4 degrees. There was not a wheeze of wind, and just as well, as we started the 45 miles cross-country to meet the Grand Union Canal and head back to Paddington.

For most this is a start-of-year blowing out of the cobwebs. A friend of mine had put on 6kg since September, something even I could not match. For others it was a stepping stone to the MdS. I had no ambition at all. Given that I had run fewer than 100 miles in the previous 4 months I had considered even getting out of the woods a minor miracle. As it was, that wasn’t as easy as it sounded.  I followed one group down a dead-end, and then another to a 10 ft high fence covered in razor wire. Twice I tried to take matters into my own hands. Twice I ended up far behind the group I had aimed to put some distance on.

By 25 miles the familiar gremlins had begun to craw: legs seizing up, head lilted over – you know the feeling. But it was my back that was killing me – too much time spent leaning over the cot. With the third checkpoint in sight I was already figuring out how to throw in the towel and get home in time for the boy’s bath.

And then I saw the pork pies. There’s not much that gets between a man and his pork pie and washed down with a cup of tea, with the sun still on my face I resolved to bludgeon my way to the 31-mile checkpoint.

Few races at this time of year take place in such glorious weather and I think that even some of the spectators were wishing that they had put their trainers on as on days like this there are few greater pleasures than lilting over the countryside, and few simpler 

Another day on the Northern Circular

than turning over the page of a map, another checkpoint counted off. That the route took us over the clogged artery of the Northern Circle made feeling even more satisfying.

Having spluttered my way along the last 15 miles, nearly chocking on a flapjack, I trundled into Little Venice just after 6pm, a stately 8:34 for the race. For the final few hours I had fantasised about a burger and chips and a curry. In the end I got both, but not before cycling home – not something I would recommend – and putting the boy the bed.

The Hutch had a second attempt at the hour, and in perfect conditions he nearly did it, getting to 45 minutes at record speed. He is now though in semi-retirement, his bike not quite hung up (he still sleeps in an oxygen-deprived tent to boost the red blood cells). I had feared that my running days were coming to an end, simply because I don’t have the time to clock up the miles as I should, and over the weekend I envisaged a graceful retirement to kicking a ball around the park. However, the science suggests that I have yet to peak as an ultra-distance runner, and contrary to what I imagined I don’t bad as I expected – 7 pints goes a long way in a recovery. So, it’s back to the calendar and time to mull over another race. I heard there was one in Greece in September. I’d better talk to Mrs H first though…