Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Come on, Colo-Rectal!

As loyal readers will know, my one exercise vice these days is running. I've recently started to get myself back into training after hardly running at all for months, which has been an interesting yet sweaty experience, but I'm in no condition at all to get back to entering any races quite yet unless I want to post times which would be good for, say, an 85-year old veteran woman. Thus it was that I found myself hanging around the start line of the Shakespeare Marathon (and half-marathon) in Stratford-on-Avon earlier today in the capacity of a supporter rather than a participant, seeing off my brother who was foolhardily doing the Shakespeare again after cramping up after 22 miles or so last year and having to spend quarter of an hour lying in a ditch waving at fellow participants to show that no, really, he was fine and there was no need to call a medevac team. He did finish,

It was interesting to be a spectator for once, and having to categorise people for the purpose of selecting good supporter-ish things to yell at them. At mass-participation events like this there are always a fair number of fast lads prowling around the front row before the race wearing club vests and looking as if they're planning on ambling round the course in a quick 2 hours 10 before heading down the pub for a quick jar with Haile, Hendrick and the boys. It's usually quite easy to find ways of demonstrating your support for them - usually their club's name is written on the front of their vest, so you can just read it off and shout "Come on, Bedford!" or "Come on, Serpentine!". Dead easy. The same goes for the slower runners who are in club colours - read the name and holler "Come on, Cardiff!" or whatever. This can get more difficult when you're dealing with those clubs out there which have self-deprecatory names, though - anyone who doesn't realise that they're running with someone from, say, the Stragglers may well get quite offended at a cheerful "Come on, Stragglers!" which they think is aimed at them.

Some clubs foolishly rely on their colours for recognition. This is usually a bad idea as club vests come in all combination of colours (blue with red stripe, green with purple bands, or in the case of my own Serpentine club a rather stylish red with two gold hoops around the chest). There are probably various anoraks out there who can recognise every club in the UK from one brief glimpse of its colours, but I'm certainly not one of them. Unless they're from a really famous club like Thames Hare and Hounds (oldest cross-country club in the world, plain white vest with their emblem on on the front) it's definitely a good idea to put the name there in nice big letters. This also prevents confusion during, say, marathons where some competitors get their names put on their vests to help with support. If you're not careful you can find people thinking you're a member of some club called Barbara or Steve.

The trickiest people to support, though, are the charity runners, most of whom wear tops with the name of the charity they're running for on them. This presents problems. Most charities work against bad things, and standing by the road yelling "Come on, breast cancer!" or "Come on, leukaemia!" or "Come on, child abuse!" is likely to give people the wrong idea and maybe even get you arrested for, well, just being tasteless. I tried to avoid doing this, but when a bunch of guys came by in T-shirts boldly proclaiming themselves to be running for Warwick Colo-Rectal (presumably the unit of that name at Warwick Hospital) I was unable to resist encouraging them with a hearty "Come on, Colo-Rectal!". After all, it's not often you can shout that in public with impunity, especially on the genteel streets of Stratford-upon-Avon.

In the absence of anything else to shout, though, I decided to just fall back to all the things people have shouted at me during races in order to get my own back for all the "Nearly there!"s when the race was about halfway through, and the "Great stuff!"s from days when, well, I just wasn't running well at all and was doing really badly. So to anyone who may have heard "Nearly there!", "Awesome, dude!", "Hey, you're strong! You rock, man!" or "C'mon, last hundred metres - time for that big sprint finish!" approximately five minutes into the Shakespeare Marathon today, I apologise.

Marathons, plan B

I've been massively lax as far as running is concerned for the past few months. My theory is that due to my taking a ridiculously long time to recover at all after the Dublin marathon last October I didn't have the momentum to keep running through the winter. When you're not feeling all that fit the dark evenings and cold aren't all that appealing. I guess I can also say something about the lack of objectives - I haven't raced (okay, run in a race) since Dublin that I can remember, and losing out in the London lottery didn't help either. What this all adds up to is that at the time of writing I haven't run at all since late February, and my waistline is beginning to reflect this rather embarrassingly.

This means that obviously my desire to do Comrades this year definitely ain't happening, which is just as well given that I'll be in the middle of getting into a new job around that time anyway. But I still want to do at least one big race this year to kick myself into getting back into condition. It's too late for a spring marathon, but this autumn's a different matter. Should it be a classic landmark race, like Athens? A fast, flat PB-certainty of a course like Amsterdam?

Nope. I've got unfinished business with Dublin after the unremitting undulation of the course, which, if I remember, the organisers have the cheek to describe as "largely flat". I suppose it is largely flat on average as the course is a loop, but other than that... well. The unremitting undulation and my own lack of training eventually forced me to intermittently walk over the last few miles, and this time I want to get it right. I'm chasing last year's time (also a PB) of 3:40, which I'm pretty sure I can beat quite handsomely if I prepare properly this time. It's getting on for 1:40 slower than the world record, so there's obviously room for improvement.

The London Lottery

It's that time of year again, when the Runners World message boards start to fill up once again with "Has your cheque been cashed? On what day? Did you bequeath?" discussions. That's right - the deadline for ballot entry to the London Marathon has passed. We're into those few weeks between the close of entries and the letters going out. Depending on their fortunes in the ballot, tens of thousands of people will be receiving either a perky magazine saying "Hey! You're in! Cool!" on the cover, or a magazine with a picture of a dejected-looking dropout on the cover and lots of patronising advice about how you can still run another marathon combined with a zillion adverts from charities looking to get rid of their Gold Bond places. In fact, it's quite likely that the Google adwords at the top of the main page will fill up with various adverts for charities looking to get rid of GB places once this entry appears.

Such is the depressing reality of attempting to enter the London Marathon (sorry, the Flora London Marathon) as just another mediocre racer who wants to run in club colours and not have to raise a four-figure sum of money for a charity to get a place. It works like this. Some entries are allocated to charities, who pay several hundred pounds per entry. These are called "Gold Bond" places, and are usually passed on by the charities to would-be participants in exchange for a pledge to raise a certain non-trivial amount of money. Some people who are rich enough to do so just accept a Gold Bond place and write a cheque themselves for the large amount of money necessary to do so, while others use it as a way of persuading people to sponsor them in the hope that they'll be able to raise the necessary funds. It's basically a good-natured form of charitable blackmail, and in its defence it raises a whole lot of money for charity every year.

If you're fast - and given my age and sex that means sub-3:00 in the last year or so - you can apply for a guaranteed place under the Good for Age rules. If you're really fast, you can get a championship place where you get to line up at the front with Haile and Paula and Hendrick and the lads. Also fair enough - after all, the London Marathon also doubles as the British marathon championships.

But if you're in the middle - if you're a casual (or committed yet not fast enough for GFA) racer who just wants a chance to enter one of the best races in the world, which has a course that's famous for being fast and flat and with plenty of potential for personal bests - you're stuffed, and have to throw yourself on the mercy of the ballot. The number of ballot entrants always far, far outweighs the number of ballot places available, so most people generally assume they aren't going to be successful. There are a few consolation prizes thrown in - if you choose to bequeath your entry fee to the race charities if you're unsuccessful your chance is slightly improved, and the ballot is weighted slightly depending on your projected finishing time (I put down 3:30) and the number of times you've been unsuccessful in the last five years. If you're unsuccessful five years in a row, you can claim a place anyway. But it's still a pretty depressing exercise.

There are also places available to clubs for distribution to their members as they see fit, but as there are many people in my club who are far more deserving than I am (as they do a lot more) I wouldn't consider myself qualified to apply.

I really don't like this system. The people who lose out are, basically, people like me - enthusiastic but not-fast-enough-for-GFA racers who enjoy what they do, but who just don't have the time or inclination to go through the charity grind just to run a race. Slower people - the ones who just want to do a marathon because it's a good way to raise money for charity, or the ones who are walking or who don't worry too much about their times anyway but are doing it with friends - are perfect for taking up charity places. There are corporate and supporting body places as well, none of which mere mortals have a chance of getting (although some of those get sold on the black market to the highest bidder, a price far more than the £26 affiliated entry fee). But the mediocre racers like me who are keen as hell to have a go at the London course, know that we've definitely got a lot of potential for improving on our current PBs, and just want to enjoy running one of the world's classic races have to go through the miserable experience of repeated rejections in the ballot just for the slightest chance at lining up at some point in the future. It seems that you're allowed to treat London as a race if you're elite or GFA, but other than that - hey, it's a fun-runner's world, everyone's a winner, and why would anyone want to be so selfish as to just run it without even putting on a bunny suit and carrying a bucket?

My opinion is that it's an awful system, but I can't really think of too many ways to make it better. It does need a rethink, though, as right now you've basically got only a small chance of getting into the race in a given year if you're in my position. It's uncharitable and unkind and generally unpleasant of me to think so, but I can't help but find myself thinking that the people ambling around with their friends in 6 hours could have done that any time, and didn't really need to do it under race conditions...

And yes, it does look I was unsuccessful again in this year's ballot, in case you were wondering what sparked this rant. My cheque was cashed on 2 November, which by previous years' records appears to be the date that unsuccessful (but bequeathed) entries' cheques were cashed. And yes, there are other marathons out there - I've run a couple of them already - but for reasons mentioned above, I'd really like to have a go at London.

Dublin Marathon

On Halloween morning it had been raining overnight, but was more or less dry as I peered out of the window at 0645. A quick breakfast later, I decided that there wasn't really any excuse for just going back to bed and staying in the warm, so pulled on my shorts, club vest and shoes and headed down the road to the start on Nassau St.

This was about the time it started raining. It started raining that proper determined Irish rain, and at twenty minutes before the start time the start itself was still almost entirely empty as people crammed themselves into the spaces under shop awnings looking for a bit of shelter. A couple of the elite runners at the front were seen hiding in phone boxes. Then we were called out to line up, so couldn't avoid getting properly wet any more. After an impressively wet 20 minutes involving standing in the rain while the bloke on the PA wittered on, the gun finally went and we were off. By now everything and everybody was soaked, so we set off in a kind of squelching mass as peoples' shoes tried to squeeze out the water. I was already grateful for the Vaseline I'd applied to my feet in an attempt to avoid blisters, but which was doing a secondary job of helping keep my feet dry.

The first few miles were spent working our way out of the city centre and up to the Phoenix Park. The traditional congestion of the first two miles cleared itself out and I settled into a fairly easy pace of about 5 minutes/km - a little faster than if I'd been completely paranoid, but reasonably sustainable. We crested the long shallow climb through the park at about the six mile mark, and I split through the 10k point in about 53:20. Not too bad. At about this point, the rain eased off and then stopped entirely. The weather remained overcast and dull and windy, but the rain only returned briefly a couple more times before the finish. A couple more miles downhill took us out of the park and back onto the streets. There was plenty of support around even given the bad weather, and kind local residents were handing out goodies like Jelly Babies and pieces of fruit. The large number of American participants also led to plenty of vocal American support, although I regret to say I didn't hear "Awesome, dude! You rock!" once. Shame.

From nine miles to the halfway point the trend was uphill again, and still going nicely I split through the half in almost exactly 1:50. I was happy with this pace - it wasn't exactly rocketing along, but I could live with it having not exactly done a lot of training for this marathon. And as my personal best was 3:48 anyway, I wasn't really aiming for anything other than a finish in a vaguely sensible time. A new PB would be nice, but it wasn't an essential.

The second half of the race is somewhat more uppy-downy than the first. The official description of the course is "mostly flat", but as race organisers always claim their courses are sort-of-flat even if they go straight up the north face of the Eiger (in which case they might concede that it was "gently undulating") I was expecting some hilliness. The hills weren't big, but there were quite a few of them, including a two-mile uphill slog between miles 19 and 21. According to my data, the ascent was only about 30m, but at that stage it makes a hell of a difference. But hey, I kept the pace up anyway, and hit the mile 21 marker at 2:55.

At mile 23 the lack of training and lack of preparation (and being ill for much of last week) suddenly made itself known and I hit the wall hard. My legs just weren't interested in holding the pace any more, and even after dropping it a little I just couldn't resist the occasional brief walk break. These continued until I was sufficiently embarrassed to start running again, and at least that way I kept moving. My pace dropped a lot - to about 5:50-6:00/km on average - but I was still on course at least for a PB.

The final insult on the course is the last mile - although you're tantalisingly close to the finish in Merrion Square, the course sends you off down Westland Row for a nice lap of Trinity College to make up the distance. I turned into the home straight with my eyes peeled for the finish, but it was nowhere in sight so I walked a bit more in protest. The 26 mile marker gave me the kick I needed to put in a proper finish, and at the end of Nassau St the course turned sharp right onto Merrion Square and there was the stealth finish line, about 75m away. I summoned a kick, passed a few people on the final straight and crossed the line in 3:40:44, according to my timing chip. This made me the 1521st finisher out of 7932, and the 837th senior male. Not stellar, but I was happy to have finished in one piece.

Feeling mostly relieved at having not only finished but also set a new PB, I picked up the enormously chunky medal and my T-shirt before heading back to the hotel, showering off all the gunk and crashing for a few hours. That evening I didn't get very far - out to Wagamama (about 150m from the hotel), then a couple of pints of Guinness in the Hairy Lemon (about 50m from the hotel) to restore vital nutrients and hydration. At that point I was thinking "Why do I do this? Maybe I should just stick to more sensible distances and forget about marathons..", but a few days later that's turned into "So, if I ran 3:40 while untrained and badly prepared, what are the chances of dropping that to 3:20-something if I actually train diligently for the next one?". Must be a glutton for punishment.

Comrades

I've been doing a lot of pondering about my various running plans for next year since my last entry on the subject, and in particular whether to aim for Comrades next June. Normally, if asked whether I'd like to spend my birthday running about 90km from Durban to Pietermaritzburg I'd mutter something about preferring to spend it in the pub, but, well, last night Darth Vader came down from the planet Vulcan and said that if I didn't enter Comrades next year, he'd melt my brain. As well as the brain-melting stuff, Comrades is one of the world's great races - and it's a seriously competitive race for an ultramarathon, which might explain why certain darlings of the US ultramarathon scene haven't made an appearance there yet.

I should be able to put myself in a reasonable position to finish Comrades at least slightly respectably (before the cutoff gun, in other words) with some diligent training between now and June. The good news is that the kind of hilly road races and cross-country which typify the British winter racing scene make for excellent endurance training, and aiming for a spring marathon should help things along as well. The only obstacle is the need to run a qualifying marathon between now and next June, but as the qualifying time is 5:00 that should hopefully not present a problem...

Anyway, entries for next year haven't even opened yet, so I'll see how I feel over the next couple of months (and particularly at Dublin on 31 October) before deciding whether or not I really want to go and run a terribly long way in South Africa next summer (well, austral winter).

One year on

The first anniversary of my first run passed quietly a couple of weeks ago. Annoyingly, at the time I was injured due to an overly psychotic run round my favourite hills 'n' trails route, so I've only just got around to tallying up the statistics.

So, in my first year I have...

• Run 1397km in three different pairs of shoes (all Asics - 1090, 2090 and 2100). This took 122 hours at an average speed of 11.4km/h.
• Raced two 5ks - in 22:48 and 23:01 (don't even ask)
• Raced four 10ks - in 47:48, 44:43, 42:40 and 42:35.
• Raced one half marathon in 1:46:29 (rather slower than I hoped for - it was a very hot day)
• Raced one marathon in 3:48:18 (but I want to improve that)
• Raced a number of sundry other ten-milers, eight-milers and the like.

So what were the highlights? Well, there plenty of lowlights (injuries suck, and crashing and burning with cramp in a Last Friday 5k was pretty humiliating too), but the good bits were things like:

• Hilly road races - small, friendly races like the Alton 10 and the Hog's Back are some of the most fun you can have with your running shoes on.
• Going out on cold winter evenings wearing just a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and not really feeling cold.
• Discovering that a lot of the doom-laden talk about how hard marathons are is bunk, and that it's really just a matter of eating mounds of pasta beforehand, making sure you don't get blisters, and keeping your legs moving for 42km.
• Getting away with wearing Lycra in public.
• Discovering a whole new range of geeky gadgets and gizmos to play with.
• Discovering that hey, there's at least one sporting activity at which I don't totally suck. I'm not a great runner, but my race performances are generally well clear of DFL.

I'm now not injured any more, but I've decided that the shin splints came at exactly the wrong time to allow me to get myself back in shape for the Loch Ness Marathon. I've decided that the best option is therefore to reluctantly miss that race (a real shame - it's a marathon! and it's in the Highlands!) and concentrate on being in shape for the Cabbage Patch 10 half way through October and the Dublin City Marathon a couple of weeks later. I'm looking forward to both.

My plans for the next year are still uncertain, but things which I'd like to think I can do over the next year or so include:

• Getting my 10k time as close to 40 minutes as possible. Sub-40 would be nice, but we'll have to see.
• Aiming for a 3:30 or thereabouts marathon. If I actually train properly I should be able to take some time off my 3:48 PB, and my half-marathon PB (1:45) could use some improvement too.
• Do the Hogs Back and Alton races again (see above).
• Thinking about entering the Comrades Marathon (actually a 90km ultramarathon) at some point. Comrades is one of the world's great races - South Africans will tell you it's the world's greatest race (but then again, Americans will often claim that the Boston Marathon is, so such claims should be taken with a pinch of salt). Next year might even be a possibility, and would be preferable to 2007 as 2006 will be an up run. We'll see.

Returning to running (and wiggly lines)

Having returned to regular running the Sunday before last and been rather alarmed by the degree to which my cardiovascular fitness had dimished, I was curious to find out how long it'd take for my heart rate during exercise to return to something sensible rather than the insane averages I was seeing in the high 180s - my heart usually works fast, but these readings were getting ridiculous.

After less than two weeks, I was therefore pleased to see something of an improvement, as the wiggly lines on this graph (courtesy of my nerdy Polar S625X heart rate / SD monitor) indicate:

Sure, the heart rate (that's the top red line) is a little scary, especially when looked at by more experienced runners than myself, but that's an improvement of about 10bpm on the same (somewhat hilly) route a week earlier, when I also ran significantly slower. So that's a reasonably healthy pace and already a beginning of a return to reasonable cardiovascular condition after only about a week and a half, which I tested with my first long run in months yesterday - only 20km, but it went well enough to give me some more confidence.

Let's just hope that the fitness keeps building up as the three races (that's two marathons and a 10-miler) I have entered in October get closer, eh? If they go well, I might decide I've got no alternative but to start fantasising about entering Comrades.

Bad habits

Yesterday I went out for my first run in exactly five weeks. Various circumstances (of which laziness and hot weather were not the least important) had conspired to stop me running for a while. I was also expecting to shortly be leaving on my long walk and so wasn't worrying too much about training, but as this has now been postponed I figured I should start getting myself back into shape for the two marathons I'm still entered for in October.

So out I went, with the intention of covering a reasonable distance (an undulating 10km) but without worrying about how long it took in order to figure out just how unfit I've become. It was certainly good to be out again, and gratifying that my legs and muscles still seemed to remember what they were for. The alarming thing, though, was my heart rate. It was a hot evening and much of the run was in direct sunlight, but that alone shouldn't have pushed my heart rate over 185 and even over 190 for some of the time. The maximum recorded was 199, probably on one of the uphill sections, which is not exactly a million miles from my absolute max HR. The average over the entire run was 185, where normally I'd expect it - especially at such a gentle pace - to be around 172-174.

In the end I survived okay, getting round the fairly hilly 10.5k in 55 minutes and change. I guess, however, that cardiovascular fitness drops off faster than muscle and bone during breaks in training. The good news is that cardiovascular fitness also develops much faster, so things should be back to something approaching normal in a few weeks. After that it's going to be time to sharpen up for the Loch Ness Marathon on 2 October, which I still plan to do despite the walk being postponed, and the Dublin City Marathon on the 31st, which I still, well, hope to do, but that depends on how things go at Inverness.

Incidentally - did the three Ethiopians who took all three medals (Tirunesh Dibaba, Berhane Adere and Ejegayehu Dibaba) in the women's 10,000m at Helsinki on Saturday take the idea that the 10,000m is a 400m race with a 24-lap warmup to heart or what? Kudos also to Paula for turning out for the 10,000 - in a field like that, coming ninth in an event which isn't your primary focus is pretty damn good anyway, whatever the armchair pundits on the BBC Sport website might say (sample paraphrase - "she just didn't bother trying to win because there wasn't enough money in it for her". Uh-huh, just like there's a massive appearance fee and huge prizes on offer for the marathon next Sunday, right?).

Copenhagen '05

Twenty minutes before the start of the Copenhagen Marathon the rain started. It was in a torrential downpour that I squeezed myself into the start area at the bottom of Vester Voldgade, and the gun was bracketed by a couple of enormous thunderclaps before the rain eased off a few seconds later. By the time I crossed the line two minutes after the gun it had stopped entirely.

Given that I'd only had a month to train, my plan was to take things nice and easy and finish... eventually. I started with my brother Dave, and we set a nice easy 5:30-5:40/km pace. The first few kilometres passed gently as my obligatory 5km warmup worked its way out of my system and towards the end of the first lap (Copenhagen is a three-lap course, the first and third being more or less identical) we were running well, knocking off kilometres in the 5:05-5:15 range and passing the 4-hour pacemakers on the cobbled stretch along the waterfront. The first and second loops are linked by a long trip along Kalvebod Brygge and Ingerslevsgade, and it was along here that the race leader passed us going the other way. He was followed a few minutes later by my other brother Rob, who looked to be in pretty good shape and somewhere around the 26km mark.

The second loop was slightly more uppy-downy than the first as it cross-crossed a few overpasses and underpasses, and we passed the halfway mark in 1:57 - just about bang on target. The route then swung through the Carlsberg complex - including a trip through the striking Elephant Gate with its decorative elephants and, yes, swastikas. At the 25km mark we rejoined Ingerslevsgade, and passed the back markers slogging up towards the beginning of the second loop and still with a long, long way to go. I felt a sudden surge of respect for people who were happy to be out on the road for over six hours, given that the sun was now out and it was beginning to warm up a little.

There were knots of supporters more or less everywhere, which was kind of nice - there were also assorted brass bands and samba bands and jazz bands making noise. Occasionally people would read the front of my club vest, and the resulting shouts of "Come on, Serpentine!" certainly helped me along.

A couple of energy gels later it was the beginning of the third (and final) lap. With under 15km to go we were still doing okay, but dropped the pace a little as insurance as we approached the 32km mark - 20 miles, home of (insert ominous chord here) The Wall. The last 10km of a marathon is when most of the race happens - for a lot of people, the marathon is a 10k race with a 20-mile training run beforehand, and your job is to get yourself to the 32km marker with enough energy to see you reliably through to the finish line.

Dave was starting to get some trouble from one of his legs at this point and was happy for me to go on ahead, so as I was feeling okay I upped the pace a little. I was suffering a little, but not unduly, and was able to maintain kilometre splits between 4:27 and 4:56 over the rest of the race. A long-delayed pee break held me up a little, but as I came out of the Fælledparken and back up towards the waterfront I was going well, overtaking a lot of people on the way.

After passing the Little Mermaid (who I didn't notice, again) and hitting the cobbles around the 40km mark I began to feel somewhat tired, but the lift provided by realising that I'd probably be finished in about 10 minutes kept me going - still passing people and now wondering if I was going to see the 3:45 pacemakers appear in the distance. Once off the waterfront there was one of those annoying "gotcha!" bits that tend to crop up in races - up the side of a road and back down the other side to add a bit of distance and make the course up to the required 42.195km. A couple more tight turns and then we were on Christian's Brygge - the home straight - and the crowds of spectators were starting to thicken. I was definitely running out of fuel at this point but kept the pace up anyway, doing both the 40th and 41st kilometres in 4:48. Towards the finish the crowds thickened further until I was running down a narrow strip of road cordoned off by barriers with supporters lining each side. And then there was the 42km marker (the graph I have here claims I did km42 in 4:30-something, but I'm not sure I believe it), I looked over my shoulder at the guy following me, said "So, just the point 195 left, then?", and then there was a timing mat, and then I was finished, feeling pretty washed out but much better than I'd expected.

A young lady placed a medal the size of a dinner plate with a rather fetching view of the new Copenhagen Opera House around my neck, I got handed a plastic sheet to wrap myself in, and I staggered away from the finish. I found a bench and sat on it to eat the (enormously welcome) yoghurt I'd been given, met up with the rest of the party, and went off to have a shower and reintegrate myself into polite society.

In the end I finished 1544th out 4058 finishers (plus a bunch of people who didn't finish) with a chip time of 3:48:18, better than I'd expected to do. The only problem is that one of the first thoughts I had after crossing the finish line was "I wonder how much faster I could do this if I trained properly?". I guess I'll think about that once my legs have stopped hurting.

'Til next time, them...

Eat my shorts, Dr. Atkins.

Well, here I am in Copenhagen, which is (I'm told) just about the cheapest capital in the Nordic universe - if so, then remind me never to try eating out in Oslo. I can remember paying for a meal once in Reykjavik, but only because I had to make special arrangements with my bank to finance it - it should all be paid off by 2015 at this rate, but that's dependent on what happens to interest rates. I think what I'm getting at here is that it's not the cheapest city in the world, but then again neither is anywhere in this corner of northern Europe.

Over the last few days I've eaten inordinate amounts of pasta in order to carbo load in the hope that my muscles and liver are now stuffed with yummy glycogen, although it has to be said that restaurant portions of pasta are not good for these purposes. Thursday night was probably the most impressive - I boiled up 300g of pasta and scoffed the lot, and very enjoyable it was too, not to mention over 70% carbohydrate by weight. I have my vest with my number pinned to it, I have my timing chip, I have the pair of shoes in which I've got the most experience of running longer distances, I have my shorts, I have energy gels. There's probably not much else I can do now other than get up in the morning, have a light breakfast and wander down to the start. We'll just have to see how it goes. Fingers crossed, etc - my plan is to start somewhere near the four-hour pacers, but if it becomes apparent that that's overambitious I'll switch into "just finish" mode and take as long as it takes.

In the meantime, my room's got a wonderful view of the lines heading into Copenhagen's main station...

Flat and fastish

My last pre-marathon "are my legs working?" test was today - the Oxford Town and Gown 10k. This is officially a charity fun run through the streets of Oxford, but as it also has an SEAA road race permit and a measured course they don't seem to mind having people along who aren't going to be doing it dressed as Wombles. It's officially described as "fast and flat", which is one of those clichéd terms used to describe courses (like "gently undulating" and "testing"). The start was chaotic - the race HQ was in the University Parks with the start on Fyfield Road nearby. Getting from A to B involved squeezing 4000 people through a narrow alleyway which seemed to be closed for a while. We all milled around a bit and I found myself behind a couple of guys wearing T-shirts saying "It takes guts to win.. and we've got them!", which I deciphered as "We have just disembowelled Haile Gebrselassie". I don't think I saw them again after the start. When we were finally allowed through I was still working my way through the back of the start towards the 40-45 minute markers when, oh, the race started. Well, that was sudden.

Having a thousand people in front of you who haven't paid any attention to the need to space themselves at the start based on finish time is a bit of a pain, to say the least. The fact that the race was chip timed made the fact that I took a minute and a half to cross the start line marginally less annoying, but there was still a lot of traffic to negotiate before hitting a clear bit of road.

The congested race meant I was never entirely comfortable - there was always someone to sneak past or a bit of pavement-hopping needed to escape a bunch of people who looked like they wanted to expound the "let's all hold hands and go as fast as the slowest person wants to!" school, and passing the 8km marker I decided to just hold on for a reasonable finish rather than chasing a PB. However, the 9th km went nice and fast so with a big push all the way through the tenth km (conveniently on the tail of a guy who was about as fast as me and panting so loudly that I could have closed my eyes and pretended I was racing Emil Zatopek) and a final all-out sprint up the finishing straight I just managed to shave, at least by my watch, 5 seconds off my PB - 42:35. What my official chip time will be I don't know, but that's the time I'm writing down anyway.

This is not a world-shaking time, but it's good for me, and tells me that I should at least finish a marathon in under ten hours next weekend. My knee was very angry at me for a while after today's finish, but the last couple of k's had been run very fast indeed (again, fast for me) and I don't think I'll be getting anywhere near that pace next Sunday. My name, after all, is not Paula.

Undulating my legs off

The last couple of weeks before a marathon are usually spent tapering - reducing training load significantly in order to give your body a chance to be nicely recovered in time for the race. A popular rule of thumb is that it takes a fortnight for training to have an effect, so running yourself in the ground in the last days before a marathon is not going to help much.

This is quite nice from my point of view, as it means my feet have a chance to stop aching and finish healing up the blisters which appeared during the massive spike of training I've done over the past couple of weeks. The effect even of this relatively small amount of training has been noticeable, though. Last Sunday I found myself lining up for the Alton 10 - ten miles of constant uppy-downiness in the depths of Hampshire. The course is definitely "undulating" in that I don't remember any actual flat sections - it consists largely of long, shallow uphill sections and steep downhills. Even the start is downhill - and as it's in the same place, the finish is uphill. I redeemed myself fairly well, finishing in just under 1:13 - not bad for me over that distance - and felt a lot better afterwards than I have done after a lot of longer runs before.

Hopefully this means that I've been able to build at least a little bit more endurance. 42km doesn't seem like quite so infinite a distance as it did even a few months ago, and I'm reasonably confident that I can at least think about finishing Copenhagen. A run round behind the 4-hour pacemakers for most of the course still seems likely - with my lack of preparation, most race strategies other than "go off at a maintainable pace and hold that until you finish" aren't available to me. And anyway, finishers at Copenhagen get hot chocolate in the repatriation area rather than unpleasant sports drinks. How's that for civilised? If it's good hot chocolate, that's something I'd definitely run 26 miles for.

Things could still change, though. We shall see.

Unrecovery runs

Having spent the remainder of Sunday and Monday feeling slightly wobbly in the aftermath of a long run and probably not enough food (and possibly also courtesy of Young's Special, an interesting beer that has the property of causing hangovers without the inconvenient drunkenness part), I really didn't want to go for a run yesterday. This was partially because of the attendant aches and pains which were still causing me trouble, but mostly because I'm a big coward and was feeling sorry for myself due to the various blisters and grazed knees and so on I'm currently dealing with. In the end, though, it was fairly simple - no run, no marathon in a couple of weeks. I can't really afford to be lazy.

Off I trotted for the prescribed 9km - not very long, but a reasonable recovery run after 32km on Sunday. Even at a nice easy pace the first 5km were difficult and painful. I usually take about 5km to warm up anyway, and when combined with legs which still hadn't forgiven me for Sunday it was.. well, "interesting" is the word I should probably use, as all of the other words I can think of aren't polite enough to put on the World Wide Web. The route I was taking is not that easy on the legs at the best of times - the pavements of Long Ditton are heavily cambered in places and show every sign of being maintained by a council which considers facilities for pedestrians to be an unnecessary extravagance - but still, it really shouldn't have hurt quite that much. "Right", I was thinking, "that's it, just give it up, go home, withdraw from the race and enjoy your non-running trip to Denmark anyway."

Mercifully, things eased up enormously after my traditional warmup time, and the remainder was tolerable but slow. The first run after a very long run followed by a rest day is generally going to be fairly horrid anyway, but at least it reminded my legs of what they're there for. It 'll be interesting to see how they cope with today's 12km. The good news is that I've survived a hard week of training which most sensible people build up to over several months relatively unscathed (it was always going to hurt at least a little bit) and the training gets a lot easier from here until the marathon. The bad news is that 42km is still going to be 10km longer than I've ever run, which makes me a little uneasy.

Once again, we shall see.

Now the weather hates me.

After a nice long spell of the weather being reasonably cool for the time of year and generally overcast - in other words, perfect running weather - it seems to be settling into "intermittently hot and sunny", which right now is exactly what I don't want. Running in cool weather or even in the rain is great, but running in hot sun is just exhausting. It's especially exhausting if you're me - not only have I done virtually all of my running in the evening, but I also find myself overheating at the slightest provocation when it's anything other than the depths of winter and I'm wearing more than a short-sleeved T-shirt. Sunny, therefore, is not something I like to run in.

So naturally, as soon as I throw myself headlong into the last four weeks of a 16-week marathon training programme the weather gets nice and I start sweating a lot. Including last Sunday's half-marathon I logged 67km in the last week, and today was the dreaded Long Run Day. If you're starting training properly, long runs start out at about 18km and get longer. If you're me, though, it's necessary to hurry things along a bit and go straight in at the deep end with a 32km epic. Officially it's the last really long run - three weeks before the marathon, but in my case it was the first time I'd covered the distance. I'd planned out a route along the river for this one - the Thames is flat and so's Copenhagen. The plan was to start good and early before it had a chance to get hot.

Unfortunately, a reasonably local sporting team seemed to have some success last night (mostly the result of some Russian chap writing a cheque for 200 million quid, I think - and people whine about the amount of money elite athletes get paid...) so I was kept awake until all hours by the local chav population going "uuuuuhhhhuurrrrr, yuuuurrrrrhhhh, cheeelseeeuuhhh..." outside and celebrating by having fights and shouting matches. As a result I didn't hit the road until 0945, in full sun. It got hot quickly and through fantastic planning on my part I wasn't able to procure any liquids until about 18km in, at which point I was suffering badly. Having downed a half-litre of Lucozade Sport in one go and another half-litre of water I struggled from that point along narrow pavements next to busy main roads with cars whooshing past in the sun - no fun at all - until reaching the more civilised environs of Hampton Court Palace. I'll admit to having taken a couple of walk breaks along the way.

From here it was a little easier as the sun went in and it even rained a teeny, tiny bit. I was also on home turf and heading for home, but that didn't stop the glycogen depletion kicking in big-time about 2km out. Eventually staggered home in just under three hours - 2:57.

What this means is that I can certainly still attempt to finish a marathon in the next month. Today's run was on the back of a heavy week with not one, but two races, and allowing myself to get as dehydrated as I did was stupid and contributed a lot to my suffering. Race day will be at the end of a taper so I'll be (theoretically) in better shape, fresher, and having stuffed myself with tonnes of pasta over the week leading up to the race, much better fuelled. Once again, we'll see.

Impetuous foolishness

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Since I was going to be in town at the same time in order to keep my brother company while he ran the Copenhagen Marathon, why didn't I just enter the race anyway? Sure, I'm in no state to run a marathon, I've never actually run a marathon before, and I've got almost exactly a month to get myself in shape for an event which most Learned Authorities recommend taking several months to prepare for, but apart from that, why not?

I could always drop out without too much shame, I thought, if it proved to be too much for me to complete. If I did manage to finish, I wouldn't have to worry about time - just getting round the thing would be enough, and next time I did a marathon I'd actually train properly and thus be more or less guaranteed a stonking new PB. So I mailed off my entry.

Then I ran my first competitive half-marathon last weekend, the Shakespeare Half-Marathon, and by God it was awful. I nearly died. I had to take a couple of walk breaks, and even with those my pace suffered badly in the heat. The entire race from about mile 7 onwards was spent cursing whoever thought that 1300 - yes, one in the afternoon - would be a good time to start a long-distance race. I'd never been so glad to see a finish line looming in front of me in my whole (very short) racing career, and my time of 1:46:27 was respectable but disappointing as I knew I could do better than that. It was very, very hot however, so that's my excuse. "If this gives me so much trouble", I thought, "how the hell am I going to do twice this distance next month? No way! Cancel! Withdraw!".

I felt a lot better after a shower (though don't ask about the chafeing, which will be with me for some time yet) and thought that well, if I at least followed the last four weeks of a reasonable marathon training programme I might be in with a fighting chance. And anyway, Copenhagen's not known for its hot, sunny climate.

And so it was that after a day off running on Monday I plunged straight into the last few weeks of one of Hal Higdon's pre-cooked training schedules, modified a bit to accomodate a couple of short races I'm entered in before Copenhagen. It's at least forced me to finally learn to run slowly, as if I'd tried doing anything at my more usual pace a mere couple of days after an arduous half-marathon I just woudn't have got anywhere. So I stepped back the pace to 5:15-5:30/km and good heavens, I could suddenly keep going for ages.

Today I ran just short of 15km at the same pace without any great discomfort other than in the first couple of km as my legs warmed up. This has made me happy, and made me feel a lot better about the prescribed 20-mile training run this Sunday - it'll be long and tedious, but at least I should be able to get around it. And if I can get round a 20-mile training run, that puts me a long way towards being able to get round a marathon. We'd still have to see, but I'm at least a little optimistic.

I feel very stupid for not having worked out what "slow running" meant before. Almost all of my running has been done in the narrow pace range of sort of 4:30-4:50, maybe 4:00-4:20 at race pace. All of a sudden, I find that if I run at 5:15-5:30 I feel as if I could just keep going forever. It's hardly rocket science, and it's something that all the Eminent Running Authorities talk about, but I feel stupid for not having paid attention to it earlier. It would probably have saved me a good few muscle-pain-related days off if I had.

But yes, as far as Copenhagen is concerned we'll have to see. The race appears to be full of lots of scary, healthy Nordic types with names like Sven and Bent and Lars and various things with the letter ø in them, and not nearly as full of people taking 6 hours to get round the course in a Womble suit as London is. Still, it's hard to come absolutely dead last in a marathon.

Things to do on Sunday when you're bored

I'd been a very naughty boy and not run for a week since the Croydon 10k last Sunday, mostly for lame reasons like "my legs still hurt a bit". This wouldn't normally worry me much, but given that I'm doing my first half-marathon - the Shakespeare Half-Marathon - in a couple of weeks the lack of running was beginning to worry me rather. I don't really care what my time is at Stratford as long as it's not silly, so as long as I can get round the distance I'll be happy.

I hadn't yet run 21km in training, though, so in a moment of impetuous impulse yesterday my brain told me that it would be fun to go out for a nice long run. Then, I figured, I'd be able to say "Oh, I've run the distance, so I can finish the race. Nothing to it." with a reasonable amount of confidence. Conveniently, the distance from my flat to Richmond Bridge, across the river and back down the other side is almost exactly a half-marathon - 21.2km according to the GPS. It's also a fairly nice route, although the Thames-side path between Teddington Lock and Richmond gets fairly rocky and hard on the feet at times.

Going out and doing this after no running at all for a week was a little foolhardy, and I had visions of the Wise Old Men Of Running standing waggling their fingers at me like a less impressed version of Yoda and Ben Kenobi at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Long runs, they say, should be counterbalanced with shorter runs and speedwork rather than launched into after a week of nothing. That, they say (and they're right), is a Serious Recipe For Injury.

But I did it anyway. It was a fairly fun run, though given the warm weather and the utter lack of preparation I began to flag a bit towards the end. The important bit was that I managed to hold my target pace for the run - a fairly leisurely 5 min/km - for the duration, finishing almost bang on 1:45. This was made a bit more fun by the fact that the footpath was flooded at about the 9km mark. Being very stupid I just waded through and squelched along for the next 12km, which got me some strange looks from passers-by in the genteel suburbs of Richmond and Teddington. Next time I shall attempt to be intelligent and consider taking my shoes off before wading through a stream that comes most of the way to my knees - running with soaking wet feet is a great way to get blisters.

The gods of running have been angered by my impetuosity and have afflicted me with sore legs today. They should clear up soon. I hope so, anyway.

Croydon 2: The Revenge

The Croydon 10k is nothing if not a friendly race - there's definitely an atmosphere there which I've never encountered in any of the other races I've run over my long 6-month career. It's more of a pleasant morning out than a race (although mercifully without bouncy castles), and while there are still plenty of fast people around to intimidate runners like me there's a hefty fun run element which rather lightens the mood. While American races often involve hanging around at the start while everyone puts their hand on their heart and warbles The Star-Spangled Banner with moist eyes, in Croydon we delayed the start for a minute in order to cause maximum embarrassment to one of the starters, a junior international 400m runner whose 18th birthday is today, by singing Happy Birthday . And just about everyone was singing. Sometimes I'm proud of my country.

The course is anything but fun-run fodder. It's described in the modest language used for these things as "undulating", which translates as "goes up and down a lot". There's a total ascent of about 125m, which is fairly non-trivial for a 10k. The uppy-downy wouldn't be too bad if that wasn't combined with a course which twists and turns around suburban Croydon, each sharp turn into another suburban road bringing yet another change of gradient. There's a single water station at about 6.5km, at which I drank about a third of a cup and - for the first time ever - dumped the rest over my head. This felt very nice and cooling for the first few seconds before turning into merely feeling wet. The last couple of k's seem designed to taunt - "All downhill from here!" called a helpful spectator, and a couple of hundred metres on I found that they were lying as a final short yet sharp piece of ascent loomed up before the final trundle downhill onto the final stretch up to the park entrance and the finish.

This is main road and all of a sudden there's no shade any more. The "400m to go" board taunted me as I realised that the finishing kick usually reserved for the last few hundred metres of the race just wasn't there - I was just holding pace up to the finish, but mercifully so was everyone else. There were a few half-hearted attempts to break away, but nobody really changed place much over the last 500m. This is just as well, as a couple of kilometres earlier I'd passed a marshal with a counter who called "99.. 100.. Keep it up and you're in the top 100!" and therefore wasn't really in the mood to lose any ground. For a solid middle-of-the-packer such as me being in the top 100 is a good thing, and almost as much of a thrill as being on the first page of results when they print them in tiny type in the local paper.

And then that was it - into the park, past the guy with the microphone who inexplicably told the world "Number 17, Mike Knell. Ring that bell, Mike!" (you tell me..), over the line and into the finishing chute where I heard "That's 100!" from a time recorder somewhere behind me a few seconds later. A glance at the number caller's sheet confirmed that yes indeed, I've finished in the first hundred for the first time, and in a new personal best (two minutes off my previous PB, set on the flat-as-a-pancake Serpentine 10k on New Year's Day) of 42:40 by my watch. I got a medal from the Mayor of Croydon as per last time, though this time the rate at which people were finishing was low enough that I got the full handshake-and-medal-round-neck routine. Better than winning Olympic gold, I tell you, and with less of that troublesome flag-raising routine.

Which is good, although beating your PB has the drawback that next time you race the distance you'll feel the need to try and beat it again. What's better, though, is the fact that instead of Lucozade Sport and energy gels this race actually had a proper, honest-to-goodness refreshment tent where I could obtain a cup of coffee and a splendid home-made rock bun for the absurdly reasonable price of 90p. Given that I'd bought a cup of coffee at East Croydon station on the way out and been charged £1.60 for it this made me inordinately happy, as did sitting on the grass soaking up a bit of sun, munching on a rock bun and listening to the stragglers coming in.

I'd already collected my bag from the wonderfully efficient bag store run by a local scout group, leaving them a small donation in exchange (people who don't leave a small donation at these things deserve to be made to carry their bags round the course), so headed for home after stopping for a chat about the undulatingness of the course with a couple of other people in Serpentine colours. All in all it was a very pleasant morning out and a most enjoyable race, undulating or no. I recommend it.

I'll even forgive them for playing the theme from Chariots Of Fire both at the start and at the finish, an act which I thought was prohibited by law. Anyway, the film was about sprinters, not distance runners...

Croydon on a Sunday

It's the six-monthly Croydon 10k this Sunday, and as it was the very first race I ran nearly six months ago (in a racing career spanning.. months) I couldn't resist entering it again to see if I can do any better than last time. I ran 47:53 in October, have since beaten that with 44:43 at the Serpentine New Years 10k, and might be able to shave a bit off that with a following wind this Sunday. There's something faintly disconcerting about my race number - I've been given number 17 for this one, which to some people may look like a "scary elite runner" type of number (in some races, low numbers are reserved for scary fast people). Fortunately, in my case it just means "seventeenth person to register", and in any case any illusions people might pick up will evaporate shortly after the start.

The organisers have cunningly done their bit to make sure that nobody fails to warm up properly by scheduling the race for a day when there's no service on the Tramlink to Lloyd Park tram stop, meaning that I'll get a nice jog down from East Croydon station in order to be at the start by 1015 and a nice jog back again once I'm finished. Croydon on a Sunday morning is an odd place - almost completely dead other than for the odd straggler crawling home from a night out and the odd early-rising lunatic (often in the literal sense, after my experience of getting to the race last October). Still, the race should be fun provided my knee's stopped hurting by then after a maybe-slightly-too-vigorous outing at a hideously late hour last night.

Finally, take a look at the route profile. I've been trying to work out exactly how a race where the start and finish are in the same place can have a net ascent of 50 metres without erecting an enormous amount of scaffolding or digging a really big hole. Answers on a postcard...

Why? Why? WHY?

It's getting on for three in the morning after a long day of sending off invoices (okay, an invoice), playing far too much World of Warcraft (Rock is now a level 19 paladin, no less) and latterly, in the silence of the middle of the night, working a bit on my Mac mail server project thing. The necessary bits to do mail scanning for viruses and other nasties are proving to be easy to install once, but harder to script...

Also today, I went for a run. I go for a run most days - my current attempt at bringing myself to a sensible level of training is to run five days on then one day off, although recently the blocks have been shorter as I've been taking it easy due to being a little sore from some ill-advised attempts to run faster. While a 3:52 kilometre was nice, it certainly made me remember it the next day.

Today the weather was generally 'orrible - there was hail, snow and rain in Surbiton and the aftermath was yet another cold, damp, dark evening with a bitter wind. Even in winter I usually just run in a technical T-shirt and a pair of lycra shorts, which is always good for astonished looks from the folk who seem to wear their entire wardrobe (they must be melting inside all of that), but made the decision today given the weather to wear my long running tights instead. Yup, it was that cold. While thawing out in the shower afterwards, I found myself asking "Why exactly do I do this? I mean, I make myself go out and run round the depths of Surbiton and Kingston in the cold and in the dark. Afterwards my legs often hurt. So why do I do this? I could just as easily stay at home and work on important things, like dinging level 20 with Rock."

This is a very good question which nobody's ever been able satisfactorily to answer. There are plenty of new-age type folk out there who'll tell you earnestly that the reason they run is "Because out there on the road is where you really discover who you are", or "Because it's just yourself against your body, and if you can overcome your body you can overcome anything". Well, great, yes, but out there on the road I always discover who I am - a thirty-something computer nerd with, all too often, sore feet. Now that that's sorted and I know who I am, how about the other one? Well, it's not really me against my body either. I need at least some co-operation from my body or I wouldn't get round, right? I know what your body not co-operating feels like and if it doesn't want to run, it just won't run.

Other people will tell you about the well-known phenomenon of the "runner's high", that cheery little burst of endorphins which is supposed to appear when you're running particularly well and which is supposed to contribute to the addictive qualities of running. That's fine too, but believe me - when it's 8:30pm, the temperature's about -2C with windchill and your feet hurt the last thing you're likely to experience is the runner's high.

In the end I came to the conclusion that I do it because being able to run faster than other people is fun, and because getting a little exercise in lets me eat just about anything I want with impunity as well as being able to feel justified in sitting on my bum all day in front of a computer. And, finally, for some weird reason I just enjoy it. I don't dare tell anyone about that, though, because those reasons don't sound nearly new-age enough. Sorry.

The bad bits (as well as the good)

It seems that today the bad running habits I've developed all decided to catch up with me at once. Since taking a couple of weeks off in November with a minor but annoying injury I've been running regularly but poorly - taking several days off then running a long way. For me, "a long way" is anything over about 10km. As a result, when I run the next day or the day after that it's usually excruciatingly painful as all the little aches and pains and bits of damage caused by the long run gang up on me. In particular, this often leads to excruciating pain in my right foot after a couple of kilometres which is sometimes bad enough that I have to stop and sit down feeling miserable for a couple of minutes until the pain abates.

As a result it'll usually be a few days before I run again, so as it's been a while I decide to make that run a long one.. and the cycle begins again as my poorly-conditioned legs try and cope.

A quick scan of my running log (this is unedited, so beware of rude words) reveals this pattern - a few days off, a long run, then lots of comments next to the run after that saying how much it hurt, then time off. Today it was even worse than usual, and as a result I found myself having to walk home from Kingston for the first time ever and feeling pretty miserable about it. This is pretty bad as far as I'm concerned. I enjoy running, it's one of the things I've been able to start doing and do fairly well at more or less from the get-go, and I don't want to be forced to give it up just because of a few bad runs.

While the race I was entered for tomorrow is definitely now out of the question, I've come to the conclusion that apart from lots of ibuprofen and ice what's really needed is a week off to take care of the remaining aches and pains followed by a return to more regular running than I've been doing recently. These will have to be fairly short runs rather than the current "couple of long ones a week" regime, which means I'm going to have to be a bit more disciplined and not run ten miles instead of four just because I feel okay. With any luck, a few weeks of this will get me back into the condition I was in a couple of months back (which was by no means great, but was certainly adequate) and give me something to build on. While I can still be described as a beginner to the sport, it's provided me with enough fun over the last few months that I'm happy to put the effort in to get it right.

In more cheerful and completely unrelated news, I have just noticed that the BBC have quietly slipped The Box Of Delights out on DVD. Hurrah! About time too, say I.

Buying running shoes

One of the pieces of wisdom which beginning runners such as myself always get drummed into them by the great and the wise is that you should always go to a specialist running shop to buy running shoes. While the likes of JJB Sports ('serious about running' according to their advert in the London Marathon entrant magazine, which is odd as they don't sell very much in the way of running kit) are okay for cross-trainers designed to look good when you're out with your mates, running is just about the most demanding thing you can do to your feet and knees. It's therefore important to make sure your shoes are the right shoes and that they work for you, otherwise you'll probably give up in despair after a bit when your knees or ankles put you in a world of hurt.

To do this, you need to go to a running shop. Running shops will typically look fairly intimidating from the outside but the staff are usually friendly and should know what they're talking about. They certainly shouldn't let you buy a pair of shoes which aren't right for you unless you're really insistent that that's what you really want to do. Finding a pair of shoes which are more or less right for you is generally a matter of doing more than just picking the ones with the best colour scheme. If you believe some people, finding the right shoe for a beginning runner is an operation of similiar complexity to, say, bringing peace to the Middle East or sending a manned mission to Mars. At most shops (except places like JJB, which you've already been warned about) they'll watch you run up and down a bit outside the shop or inside on a treadmill before shuffling through the piles of boxes and producing a couple of pairs of shoes which might be a reasonable fit. You can then try these on and repeat the testing cycle until you find a pair which feel right. It's a bit like the bit in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone where Harry's buying his first wand. Expect talk about biomechanics and pronation - file this away for future use so that the next time you have to buy shoes you can drop lines like "Yeah, I'm a mild overpronator with a heavy heel-strike" into the conversation. You can also use this in the pub if you want people to nod knowingly at you.

Finally, you need to develop a ferocious brand loyalty in order to be able to hold your own in arguments about whether Asics are better than Saucony or whether New Balance midsoles wear out faster than Nike. Being able to imply with a straight face that anybody who chooses to wear a different brand to you is playing fast and loose with their feet and risking terrible, crippling, life-destroying injuries is a skill well worth acquiring. You should never waver in this belief even if you acquire terrible, crippling, life-destroying injuries yourself when running in your brand of choice. If this happens, blame the injuries on your unusual running technique or simply on the phase of the moon.

Back in business

After a couple of weeks of tentative running every few days and being all nervous, I decided to go for my first longer (not long as in long, but long as in longer than short) run a couple of days ago to see just how out of shape I was. Amazingly, it wasn't bad at all and ended up a little short of 15km - up the Thames as far as Ham and back again in nice gentle five-minute Ks. And I could even still walk afterwards. Yay, I thought. I can still run.

As I was feeling pretty good yesterday, I thought I'd see if I could run two days in a row for the first time since October. I am allegedly running an 8-mile race on the 12th of this month, so I ran another 8km or so including a couple of hills just to check that I can still go up as well as along.
However, this triumphant return to form was kind of marred by the fact that I then managed to lose my footing quite spectacularly on a deceptively flat and dry bit of pavement in Kingston and face-planted into the ground rather hard. My right side took most of the impact, but in the end (despite having a splitting headache for a couple of minutes afterwards) it was nothing worse than a skinned shoulder and knee. Oh, and a gouge out of the back of my hand. Having taken another spill in Kingston a couple of months ago, I have concluded that I must be one of the world's clumsiest runners. Alternatively, I could just blame it on my shoes. You can blame anything on your shoes if you're creative enough.

As a result of this I now have some exciting aches and pains, particularly down my right hand side, which will make today an enforced rest day. Oh, and I also got blisters on my feet. And to cap it all, today the postman delivered my copy of what can only be called the "Hey, You're A Loser!" magazine that informed me of my failure to get an entry for next year's London Marathon (sorry, Flora London Marathon) in the ballot. This is no great loss as I was fairly likely to take a deferral to 2006 anyway (I'm in no desperate hurry to run a marathon, thanks), but it does mean I have to enter the ballot again next year and go through all that rigmarole. It's a small mercy that at least the free energy gel which was also included didn't get squashed in the post like quite a number apparently have.

So if over the next few weeks you see people wearing grey rain jackets with the LM logo on them, be nice to them - they're the ones who didn't get a ballot place and bequeathed their entry fee to the race charities. I shall wear mine next year to stand next to the course a few miles in and harangue groups of people in silly wigs who appear to be walking the entire distance.

The irritation of injury

There's been a lack of blethering about running here for the last couple of weeks. The reason for this is that I haven't been actually doing any due to what's rather grandly termed "injury", and had to wait until I could, say, walk downstairs without stabbing pains in the back of my right calf.

What happened? As far as I can tell it was a classic case of hubris. It's a well-known thing that runners who push too hard and too fast run a serious risk of getting injured in their second or third month of running, and this happened almost two months to the day after I started running. On the Monday, I'd done quite a hard and fast run, much harder than my usual fairly relaxed five-minute kilometres. The next morning I noticed pain in my right calf and knee, so took that day and the next day off to give them a chance to recover. In my head I couldn't get away from the fact that I'd already entered the Serpentine Last Friday 5k which was coming up in two days, so made myself go out for a run on the Thursday despite still being in pain.

And oh, it was horrible stuff. Uncoordinated, painful staggering with my feet killing me and at least two stops needed on the outbound leg, clearing up somewhat as I turned for home but still mostly kept going through sheer willpower rather than enjoyment as there, well, wasn't any enjoyment.

The next morning, after lots of vacillating between "look, running would be stupid" and "but I've entered already!" I finally gave in and decided to run. I set myself the target of getting round without collapsing, showed up at the start and nervously set off. Gritted teeth, willpower and finding a couple of other runners to pace myself behind got me around the course, though it was absolutely no fun at all. To my surprise I finished 166th in 22:48, which considering that given my condition I'd have been delighted with 25 minutes was pretty good. It was a painful and unpleasant affair, though, and not the kind of run I want to make a habit of as if they were all like that then, well, I'd probably take up knitting instead.

Of course, the next morning my body was telling me how stupid I'd been, and I finally came to my senses and obeyed the first rule of injury assessment - stop running. After a few days the pain became a bit more focused and I came to the conclusion after consulting the books that I'd probably done some fairly minor damage to my achilles tendon as the symptoms and the circumstances matched perfectly. Minor it may have been (serious achilles tendon damage is, by all accounts, agonising), but all I could really do was wait it out while cursing my own stupidity for running on an injury and aggravating it further.

Over the last couple of days the pain finally went away, leaving just the odd twinge, and after not having any trouble today I finally decided that maybe I'd be able to go on my first run in over a fortnight. After getting changed and procrastinating for a long time through nervousness I took a deep breath and headed out of the door and found that hallelujah, I can still run! I could, in fact, still run strongly and at a good pace and had few problems other than a few aches and pains which I used to get when I'd just started running reminding me that they were still there. I'd also overdressed a bit - thermal T-shirt and long running tights - so was uncomfortably hot, despite the fact that many others seemed to be wearing fleece jackets and tracksuit bottoms and hats and such. I can only assume that I'm cold-blooded compared with most people.

By and large, though, it felt fine - some minor twinges afterwards, but not worse than those produced by the average run, and as my brain thought "Ah! I remember this!" it gave me an extra big dose of endorphins which probably helped a bit. It's definitely good to be - hopefully - back, albeit having learned a fairly important lesson in the process. Going to have to take it easy and be careful for the next couple of weeks, but at least it's now less likely that my entry to the Hog's Back next month will be wasted.

Increasing mileage

I'm looking at my running log on the screen and feeling a little despondent. Last Sunday I went for my first 10-mile (16km) long run, which took just over 81 minutes door to door - a merry little jaunt it was, despite getting sloshed liberally with rain on the way back into Surbiton. The day after that I went out and ran a hard 8km with bursts of speed when I felt like it (this type of unstructured interval training is known by the best word in the world - fartlek), which was tiring but satisfying as it showed me how much speed I've gained in the past couple of weeks. Yesterday I was still rather achey from the hard work on Monday, so decided not to go running, and besides, I had an important appointment to keep in the pub.

Today, my right calf muscle is still painful - nothing too nasty, but feels like a pulled muscle. I can walk fine (two miles today just walking from the station to work) but running would probably be a bad idea. The good news is that the weather is kind of cold and wet, so I'm glad not to have to go out in it. The bad news is that taking it easy is the last thing I want to do right now - I've had a great run (no pun intended) up to now, and right now I'd love nothing more than to go out and keep it going. But, well, people who don't listen to their body telling them to take it easy for a couple of days end up injured.

Still, there's little point in complaining. I've also been able to cheer myself up by laughing uproariously at my latest acquisition from the iTunes Music Store. Granted, when it was recorded it wasn't intended to be funny, but there's nothing quite like listening to William Shatner reciting lyrics. At least Leonard Nimoy can sing.

Geek toys for runners

I've alluded before to the useful way in which way running allows a gadget geek such as myself to access a whole new area of nifty technical toys. Heart rate monitors, clothing made of nifty wicking microfibres, a zillion types of shoe including ones with big scary spikes on the bottom and equipment to analyse your gait and work out why you get cramp in your right calf after ten minutes, hi-tech water bottles, energy gels, heart rate monitors which log distance and speed and interface to your mobile phone to provide nifty graphs of your performance, you name it.

Whether all this stuff actually performs the fundamental functions of making you run faster or increasing endurance is open to debate, but I have a theory that gadgets are good for distance running as they give you something to play with en route and stop you getting bored. Because it's obviously critical to make sure that you're training at exactly, say, 160 beats per minute on the HRM - not 162 or 159, 160 - you spend plenty of time trying to hit that target and before you know it - hey presto - you've finished your run. Of course, that assumes that you don't run into a lamp post or a pillar-box on the way due to being preoccupied with whatever's strapped to your wrist. Don't laugh - only a few days ago I ran, gently, into a pillar box and almost ended up finding myself unintentionally cuddling the thing after a woman I was about to overtake on the pavement suddenly stopped to post a letter. We both apologised profusely at each other repeatedly in one of those fantastic British apology competitions before going on our respective ways.

This is, I guess, a convoluted way of getting round to what I originally wanted to say, which is that I've found what is possibly the geekiest piece of running kit available - the Garmin Forerunner 201. Geeks will immediately spy that this is a GPS doodad from the Garmin label attached to it. It's a GPS receiver which straps to your wrist and performs various useful functions for the runner - just dial in the pace you want to run and it'll nag you when appropriate, log your run and lap speeds, manage your interval sessions with the precision and forceful authority of a 1970s East German coach, and generally act as an extremely geeky accessory for the geeky runner.

The first time I saw that such a thing was available I had that "it MUST BE MINE!" feeling that's familiar from the first times I saw things like MacOS X, Baldur's Gate, the DVD release of The Day Today and the iPod. I'm currently holding back my gadget-geek instincts in a vain attempt not to order one, but I'm not sure how long I can hold on.

Just as well I've got a bunch of stuff lined up for selling on eBay and Amazon, really.

The Pros and Cons and Then-Agains of Running

Pro: Chicks dig guys in Lycra.
Con: Chicks don't dig me in Lycra.
Then Again: I can't really say I blame them.

Pro: You can do it in all weathers.
Con: This makes it a lot harder to find excuses not to run.
Then Again: There's something strangely satisfying about being able to go out and not really care about getting soaked.

Pro: Reading running magazines on the train makes you look healthy.
Con: Running magazines aren't really that interesting - how many group tests of shoes under 70 quid can you do?
Then Again: All the race information stuff, which is why most people buy running magazines, is on the Web anyway.

Pro: Running can be good for asthma.
Con: Running shorts are usually short on useful pockets for carrying things like inhalers.
Then Again: If they had more pockets they'd just get filled up with useless crap and weigh me down.

Pro: The experts say you can get your partner to give you a soothing sports massage after you've been for a hard run.
Con: You need to get a partner first.
Then Again: "Sports massage" sounds like a euphemism for some particularly sordid practice anyway.

Pro: Impress your peer group! Run marathons!
Con: The London Marathon is now mostly only open to people dressed as rhinos and cartoon characters unless you've already run a sub-three hour marathon.
Then Again: 42 kilometres is an awfully long way, and if you want to get around London there's the tube.

Pro: The satisfaction of finishing a good long run.
Con: Finding out what other people consider to be "a good long run".
Then Again: It's still a hell of a lot further than most people can run without keeling over in cardiac arrest.

Pro: Special technical fabrics actually do make you more comfortable.
Con: If you're not careful you can end up looking like a walking advert for, say, the well-known company with the swoosh.
Then Again: The logos are much smaller on their actual sportswear than on the stuff they sell to people who just want to be seen wearing things with logos on.

Con: Morons may occasionally heckle you.
Pro: You can call their bluff by challenging them to race you over 5k.
Then Again: They might beat you.

Pro: Beating your personal best time or longest distance run.
Con: The subsequent muscle pain.
Then Again: The muscle pain goes away eventually.

Con: The risk of addiction and consequent overtraining.
Pro: As addictions go, it's a lot healthier than heroin.
Then Again: A day's supply of heroin probably costs less than a technical T-shirt.

Pro: It's an excuse for men to wear Lycra tights with nothing on underneath in public.
Con: It's an excuse for men to wear Lycra tights with nothing on underneath in public.
Then Again: Thank God for long baggy T-shirts.

Another attack of the runs

The thing about running is that it's sort of the opposite of playing with computers. When you start computing, all you need is a computer, which will cost you at least a few hundred quid unless you're very lucky and can somehow pick one up from somebody else or do anything else which lets you avoid the curse of going to PC World and asking one of their Helpful Sales Assistants (tm) what sort of computer to buy (and regretting it a few months later when you've learned a bit). Later on you can get upgrades and accessories and so on, but they'll generally cost less than your initial outlay on the machine. Unless, of course, you have an inkjet printer that needs a complete set of new cartridges, in which case you might as well take out the second mortgage right now.

When you start running, all you need is a pair of shoes suitable for running in. This could just be any pair of trainers, but a pair of decent running shoes is a must. However, all but the most snazzy ultra-technical gold-plated running shoes will cost less than a computer. You could run in trainers, even those silly ones with what look like rubber shock-absorbers in the heels, but you'd be wise to bear in mind the words of my psycho ultramarathonning brother - "Oh, I've seen people run races in those. Well, come to think of it, I've seen people start races in those."

My shoes cost £65, which is sort of about what you'd expect to pay for a decent shoe without too many whizzy features. A lot less than a computer (and a lot less than a set of cartridges for my Photosmart 7960 at PC World), but ah, that's just the beginning of it. With a pair of shoes, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt or two you can certainly get running, but then you start reading running magazines and running websites and suddenly find out that hell, there's a whole new area of geeky toys which you can buy now you've found out that they exist.

Heart rate monitors, rain jackets, wind jackets, pedometers, gloves, clothing made out of special microfibre materials which wick perspiration away from the body, "hydration packs" (posh word for a rucksack with a water bladder and a long straw), specialised hats, specialised socks, energy bars, bum bags, shoe bags, you name it. No single item costs particularly much unless you go for the massively high-end stuff which for most people, including me as a rank newbie, is absolutely not necessary, but buy a few bits and pieces here and there and you can suddenly find you've spent a lot of money. However - and this is the good bit for a computer geek - it's important to remember that it is extremely hard for a beginning runner to spend more than the cost of a 15" Powerbook or even a fairly cheapo PC on running clobber, so this makes me feel better.

I now have a stretchy T-shirt which allegedly wicks moisture away from the skin and makes me less sweaty (which it does, except in the band where my heart rate monitor sensor attaches round my chest and holds the fabric away from the skin) and some extremely short shorts which are actually more comfortable than my cheapo shorts, and will probably soon have to figure out what to wear to run in when it gets colder as winter draws in which will probably involve more shopping. Of course, one of the other primary functions of running gear is to make you look like more like Someone Who Is Running rather than like someone who's just trying to get somewhere in a hurry before the buffet's all been eaten, so the more skintight Lycra you can sport the more passers-by will consider you a force to be reckoned with. There is another side to this, of course. If your kit looks too new, it'll be obvious to other runners that you are just a rank newbie with delusions of grandeur and more money than sense (quite common around London), so it's important to get caught in a few rainstorms to make sure everything gets soaked and starts to pick up that "used" look. At the elite end of the road or cross-country running scale, the more mud stains, frays and holes you can get into your thermals and Ron Hills the more you'll be able to intimidate your opponents with your years of experience and implied ability to casually pass them as if they were standing still while you give them a little nod and pass a cheery remark about the weather.

Most improbably, I've now been running for about five weeks and am still enjoying it despite getting massively lost in Thames Ditton last night and running almost 15km rather than 12 as a result. Curse these Tory councils with their low council tax rates and no decent street signage, but at least I got to discover why long-distance runners all seem to have a pot of Vaseline in their bags. I, too, now have a pot of Vaseline of my very own - by far the least expensive piece of running kit I've bought and, probably, the one which will give the most return on the investment.

The ups and downs of running

The last time we left our intrepid hero (that's me) I'd just finished my first run. It should be noted that this is a fairly liberal interpretation of the word "run", considering that in reality it was a 28-minute attempt to walk, run and stagger a distance of just over two miles (3.6km). Still, I'd managed to finish it without dropping dead, which was the first obstacle. "From now on in", say the gurus, "it should just get better".

I took the next day off for two reasons. Firstly, the gurus all give stern warnings about not having plenty of days off at the beginning as your body needs time off to repair the damage and work on building up muscles and whatnot (technical term). Secondly, my legs hurt. The next day I went out again and did the same run, only this time it took me 0:25:38, which is two minutes faster. I also ran more than I did the first time. After another run two days later the time was 0:21:52, with a comment in my running log about "bananas and pre-emptive Ventolin". It looked like I was starting to get used to this running lark, even if what I was doing still couldn't technically be described as running.

On the Saturday morning I got up, had breakfast, went out for a run, realised why it's stupid to do that after you've just eaten and cut the run short, staggering home and deciding not to do that again. The next day (yes! the first two consecutive days!) I managed the full 3.6km, but it was a hot day and I felt like throwing up afterwards. Yuck. After all this, it was pleasantly gratifying a couple of days later to be able to write "Zero walking!" in my log.

Of course, "zero" means "zero voluntary walking" in this context - the disadvantage of running round the streets of Surbiton and Kingston for at least part of the route is that your speed is at least partially dictated by the need to cross roads without getting run over. It can be rather useful to have to stop to wait for traffic if you're a bit knackered, though - not only do you get to have a bit of a breather, but you get to look as if you're only standing still through having to wait for the traffic. Double whammy! Hurrah!

What this meant, of course, was that I needed to start making my runs (now I could properly call them runs because they actually involved running) longer. Out came streetmap.co.uk and a piece of string, and I found a nice little extension that brought the run up to 5km. This route was christened "Kingston Yuppies" because the far end of the loop involved running through the astonishingly expensive flats about 200m short of Kingston Bridge while the designer patrons of the various cafes around the base of the buildings looked at me in a way that said "Running? I thought that was something you did on a treadmill in the gym, darling!".

Anyway - over the following couple of weeks, despite the sore legs, being harangued by odd women on the Kingston riverside path and having abuse hurled at me by brats on bikes, getting soaked when it rained, twinges, stitches and wheeziness, I got gradually less rubbish and this evening finally managed to run five miles (five point three, in fact - 8.6km) without stopping. It took 46 minutes 19 seconds, which means that my average speed was 11.1km/h. I always seem to run at 11km/h - my last twelve runs have all averaged 11 +/-0.3km/h. If I try and run slower, I run at 11km/h. If I try and run faster, I still run at 11km/h but get more knackered anyway.

My legs still hurt afterwards, though.

Breaking the 15 minute mile

All the literature says that people who are just starting running should start out gently so as to not turn all the complex bits of mechanical and hydraulic engineering that legs are made of into so much biological mush. The effect, one is led to believe, is similiar to that of the transporter malfunction in the first Star Trek film which turns a hapless test subject into a pile of molecularly scrambled mince. Not wishing this to happen (if I'm going to be a redshirt it'll be in an even-numbered Trek movie, dammit), I sought out some suggested training schedules on the web.

Most beginner's programmes are for people whose entire life consists of the office, home and the car inbetween. I'm a little fitter than that, so it was faintly frustrating to find that most of the programmes on the web started out with things like "In the first week, walk for five minutes every other day". Uh, I can walk forever. It's 20 minutes from the station to the place I'm working at the moment. What I wanted to do was run. Still, I knew better than to overstretch myself and turn into the aforementioned pile of biogoop, so I kind of took the Serpentine running club's programme and combined it with their other programme to come up with a kind of "don't push yourself" regime that would probably suit me okay provided I didn't do anything overwhelmingly stupid.

Anyway, I digress. Our intrepid hero had just stepped out of the front door in running shoes for the first time, so let's catch up with him. It won't take long, as he hasn't got far yet.

The plan in my mind for this first time out was to do what I could in half an hour. This turned out to be down to the Thames, along a bit and then back up though Kingston - a total of 3.6km (if you want miles, work'em out yourself - this is the 21st century, for heavens' sake). I figured that if I could so something in half an hour then I'd have at least accomplished something even if it was just doing something in shorts and running shoes which I could have accomplished in about the same time in jeans and boots. Still, it's the thought that counts.

I turned left out of the front door and walked briskly down the first couple of streets as, let's face it, if I'd started running straight away I'd have only been kidding myself and bringing forward the point at which my legs would inevitably fall off. After a few hundred metres I was feeling dangerous enough to try a little run and accelerated into one. So far, so good, but I didn't want to break myself so after a while it was back to a walk. Brighton Road had a few people wandering up and down it so I ran that bit to disguise my enormous lack of fitness.

After running for a bit my arms and legs started to do their own thing. Once it got to the point that they were flailing around in a way that was beginning to move me backwards and sideways more than forwards I gave up and walked for a bit instead. Down onto Portsmouth Road I, er, walked, and along to the beginning of the footpath along the Thames that links Surbiton to Kingston. On the footpath I ran a bit, then walked a bit, then ran a bit, then headed back up to the main road and across to head for home. A meander through Kingston gave me the dangerously impetuous impulse to run a little more, so I did, then walked along most of Claremont Road, across the Surbiton station footbridge, and back home with a feeling of immense relief. I immediately drank a lot of water and collapsed in a weird wobbly heap.

Another thing which the literature says is that you should always keep a running log. This is so you know how far you've run this week and how long it took you. It's also so you can make notes of exactly how rubbish you felt afterwards. I'd already downloaded an Excel spreadsheet for the purpose (hey, Excel's useful for something!) and now dutifully filled in my time - 28 minutes approximately, as I didn't bother timing it to the second - and distance. It promptly informed me that I'd run at 7.7km/h and that it reckoned that with that sort of performance I'd finish a marathon in 6 hours and 18 minutes, a speed at which I could probably walk a marathon distance. No matter, as I wasn't actually looking to run a marathon anyway. I was more interested in getting to Kingston and back without needing hospitalisation right now, thanks.

However, I felt good and slightly smug despite the appallingly depressing numbers. I'd accomplished something by going out at all, which was the important thing. Now I just had to repeat the exercise a few hundred times and maybe I'd be able to call myself a proper runner.

One factor which helped me get round the run this time was that miraculously, this was the only time I've been out in running shoes that I didn't pass a whole bunch of other people out running and looking much more healthy and confident than myself. I saw a couple of others at a distance, but there wasn't any of that passing people a couple of metres away on the street and having to look as if you were just out for a relaxing stroll in the park and not at all puffing away red-facedly and desperately.

To be continued.. (if you're lucky, I'll talk about the oddities of stretching)

Exer-what?

For some time I've been peering at my slowly-growing midriff and thinking that I should really do something about that. Sometime. When there's nothing else of interest happening. When the stars are right. When I've managed to acquire a pair of shoes suitable for exercising in.

Eventually I ran out of excuses. But what sort of exercise could I do? Not having a car makes it difficult to head off to the mountains for the weekend as I did when I was younger. Most gyms are full of scary machinery and keen young types clutching bottles of Evian who would look with mocking disdain at my love-handles and think I was just some sad nerd who was there to ogle their firm, pert, toned bodies. Team sports take far too much organisation and anyway, I was the geeky kid at school who always got picked last for soccer. What I can do, though (back to not having a car again) is walk. I can walk and walk until my feet fall off. So, I reasoned, I could walk, only faster. I know! Let's call it "running!"

And so it came to pass that I made the decision to Take Up Running. I could have said I was taking up jogging instead, but Taking Up Running sounds a lot more serious. It seemed like the difference between erotica and porn. "I'm going out for a run" implies "Look! I am fit and healthy, gazelle-like in my sprightly step! I am going to run 25 miles in half an hour!". "I'm going for a jog", however, signifies exactly what I would be doing - puffing breathlessly and desperately around the streets