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I left Bankside in good spirits, looking forward not only to the shortest day's cycling but also retracing roads I had once used regularly. The challenge was to see how well I could recognise the roads and landmarks and hence find my way. It would be an experiment because I couldn't fully picture the route in abstract, before I started, I couldn't really remember it clearly at all. All I knew was that I would start by walking the bike over the Millennium Bridge after which it would be St Paul's, then Old Street.
As I walked over the bridge I marvelled at its elegance (I enjoy economy of form and clever engineering). It is a triumph of design, never mind its troubled beginning. I was there on the day it opened, when it became famous for its wobble. Watching from the Tate Modern we were saying to each other “Surely its not meant to do that” as we saw people clinging to the handrails, looking very queasy. To my shame I didn't think there was anything wrong, I thought it might be a design feature and they had allowed from movement to add an extra bit of excitement. “Cool”, I thought (Shows how superficial I am).
But there two related benefits from the disaster. The first was learning from mistakes. The engineers had to examine why their original design could not withstand the congruence of two exceptional circumstances: high wind and masses of people walking in file (the wobble was brought on by a charity walk). Their conclusions have added considerably to the knowledge of bridge design. The second is that they worked on the bridge until it was right and now it is great. In some ways I appreciate it all the more because of its difficult beginning.
I take a great deal of comfort from both those aspects of the story and always want to apply them to my running. The famous phrase of George Sheehan is that as a runner you are an experiment of one. It is very easy to look at that and concentrate on the idea of individuality but to me the key word is experiment. We should approach our training with the attitude of an engineer. First we should look to existing knowledge, design a programme, and then evaluate. It is important to be able to recognise mistakes (and sometimes this is difficult because we become irrationally attached to a certain way of doing things) and then redesign, try again, and work until things come right.
Failure is important for learning and it is one of my failures that during my life I have too often tried to avoid its lessons. This does not mean I have lead a life of smooth success (far from it). It means that too often I have closed my eyes rather than admit something was wrong, and at other times I have gone out of my way to avoid situations where I might fail. The latter is particular grave because on many occasions I have shunned challenges and suffered through sitting on the sidelines. Only now, as I grow older, am I able to face up to this as a mental fragility. Perhaps I am a very, very late developer or maybe I just discovered running too late.
It is through running and treating it as a series of challenges that I have been able to find a prism through which to look at other aspects of my life and see things more clearly.
I see this cycling journey as a continuation of this process, which is why I am happy to write about it in a running blog. I am using the physical exertion as a mechanism to look at my past more clearly. Just like running, being on a bike gives you the sense of being part of the landscape and so gives you a strong sense of place. It is this sense I want to unlock so that I can clearly picture myself as I was and remember things I had forgotten. Physical exertion also has a way of clearing the mind and helps you look at things more objectively.
This is important because this is not a sentimental journey - it is one of discovery.
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