90% Half Mental

Here is something to get librarians very excited as it shows the power of classification. If you classify cleaning as exercise, instead of drudgery, then it not only has an effect on the mind it also has physical implications and can cause o weight loss.

This is rather startling as I have always been a believer in the rather austere school of weight management, i.e. it is purely a matter of calories consumed against calories expended, with an underlying assumption that there is a fairly standard tariff for energy burning i.e. if you did a certain activity you would expend set amount of calories. But this does not seem to be totally the case.

Perhaps I should not been surprised because the power of the placebo effect is well known. This is a variation without pills or pseudo interventions where you do yourself good by thinking that you are doing yourself good.

I think it is important that it is not a conscious cause and effect but rather it is the subconscious effect of real belief that you are doing exercise. If you directly tried to think yourself thin I don't think it would work because there would always be a part of your brain that knew it was a bit artificial - and this would ruin the effect. However if you can see what you do in a new light everything changes

It is the same with running. I don't think I can just tell myself I am a better at running and then expect to see an improvement. However I do believe that if I followed a coach or training schedule I had faith in, then that placebo variant would kick-in. There would be the physiological effect of doing the exercise but it would be amplified by the belief I was doing the right thing.

I almost believe that any method works - as long as it provides a structure and an explanation so that there is also a rational explanation for what is happening. Almost from the beginning of time there have been arguments about training regimes, especially between those who believe in lots of mile and those who emphasise speed and intensity. There has never been any resolution because different approaches have been successful for different athletes. It will probably always be so because the most important thing is that the athlete believes that their training regime is right for them. In other words, if the mind is right the body will follow.


I always liked the famous Yogi Berra quote that "baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical". My variant for running is that it is 90% half mental.

Fat Lip and Bluebells

This weekend, while people were involved some minor mass-participation event in London, I was running in Ashridge. It is a regular route but one I never tire of - no matter how many times I run or cycle the paths. Every time I visit there are subtle changes in light, vegetation and wildlife; and I love seeing the seasonal changes. Sometimes I think there is no finer place to be.

However it is now especially vivid because the bluebells are out and fresh. One part of the route is just a tremendous carpet of violet/blue with a tracery of narrow paths. Wonderful!

There is a downside to running off road - you have to be careful where you put your feet. There are dangers in the tree roots. Last time I ran here I was feeling happy and relaxed, with my mind wandering in a daydreamy fashion when suddenly I found myself flat on the floor. I had caught my foot in a root and fallen forward so suddenly I didn't have time to break my fall. I landed flat on my face - just like that. Luckily I have a squashy nose so there was nothing broken but it did make me think of two clichés afresh:

• Eat dirt - Yes I had taken a full bite of earth
• Fat lip - an entirely accurate description
  
  

I also realised that I still have the instincts of a runner because my first action on falling was to push the pause button on my watch.

After a Rather Long Gap ...

I have not been here for more than three months now. It is amazing how you can drift into the habit of not doing something and then look back and say "was it that long ago?"

…. Well yes it was that long ago and so it is high time I stopped burying my head and started getting back to normal.

It has been a strange few months though. There has been the tail end of my concerns about my heart and blood pressure. My wife has had shingles, and the firm I work for has been taken over by another company, who are now in the process of realising synergies (i.e. management speak for redundancies). There have also been normal domestic disasters such as the kitchen flooding.

Somehow or other I have lost track and just not kept up with blogging. But there is no reason not to start again because running is now quite good and this is a running blog.

Firstly my health seems to have recovered. The echocardiogram showed nothing in particular, just some thickening and minor valve leakage, whilst the exercise test showed nothing unusual at all. So everything is OK. The only conclusion is that I had some sort of infection that hung around for about three months.

However I have changed my pattern of running and, accidentally, rediscovered my own style. I believe that we all have our own style - not just in the way we run but also how often, how far and how fast we train. The big trick is in recognising it amongst all the conflicting advice.

Some people have to run everyday, some people need to go far, others want to run shorter with more intensity and there are training schedules for all these approaches. However my approach is much more recreational, it is not for nothing that I call myself a soft-core runner.

• Firstly I have the idea that no run is a training run - it is a run for its own sake, something to lift the spirits and be enjoyed on its own terms. This means that progress is seen as an indirect benefit not the main aim of a programme.

• Secondly I am happier if I only run about three times a week as this helps maintain a freshness and stops me thinking of the run as a duty.

• Thirdly I run at a pace that feels comfortable - neither too slow nor too fast. With this I depart from all the training advice, which dictates that you do long mileage at a very easy pace and mix this with speed sessions. With me there is little difference in pace between long and short runs, only about three quarters of a minute.

• Fourthly, I concentrate on trying to keep my body relaxed. I might not have the build to float over the ground but I don't have to try to pound it into submission.

• Fifthly I make a point of having a good long stretching session at the end.

I have only been running about 10-15 miles a week but this feels quite comfortable and gives me a chance to look ahead to the rest of the year. Perhaps I will run three half marathons and see if I can improve my time over the series. I don't know

But I think my first target should be to regularly update this blog!!!

Not Really a Plan

For someone who has always taken their body for granted I find my current state very frustrating. The only thing I know is that my heart still beats faster when I exercise, my blood pressure is high and I feel low. I have now been on blood pressure tablets for four weeks and I think I have got used to them - not too many symptoms apart from a dry throat - and the pressure is coming down but nothing very dramatic.

I tried another run, the first for a month. This time a circuit of 0.3 of a mile. In 15 laps my average heart rate rose from 146 to 167 for the same easy pace!

After I finished I felt better and more relaxed. I did more stretching than normal and thought that the way ahead was a small amount of easy running combined with a better regime of stretching. Later in the day I read the data from my Polar and immediately felt depressed again. At the moment I think that being low could be part of the problem. I am drawing a black cloak around myself and hibernating.

It will be better when I know something more definite - but that will be some time. The echo cardiogram is not until February and I have just had a letter from the hospital saying that they are a bit busy at the moment and the cardiologist will get round to me some time or other. Ah well

In the meantime I need to re-establish an exercise routine. I think I will start with cycling. It has always been my default activity and it is that it is very easy to vary the intensity level. You can pootle along, admiring the scenery, or you can wind it up a bit. Mostly I will be pootling. Running will be governed by my hrm as I do not want my heart rate to go too high. This means it will probably be a mixture of the slow and the walk.

Usually at this time I would be setting some goals for the upcoming year. In 2006 there was a modest plan of two marathons - I failed completely. In April I had a chest infection and did not start and in October I abandoned. This year there will be no running targets, just the aim of keeping going, of getting out into the countryside, without any care for pace.

On Driving a Car on Christmas Day

On Christmas day the world slows just a little. You can walk down the street and notice that the few people about are walking at a slower place, more relaxed. They are more likely to look up and acknowledge others. It is just a bit easier. Early morning there is also a stillness as people are indoors with their families and gifts.

But it no longer lasts all day. The traffic soon picks up and people are on the move, visiting and fulfilling family obligations. I noticed this particularly this year because I was one of those people. Between 9 and 11.30 I was out collecting my son from Cambridge (as he doesn't drive it is the only way to get him home for the Christmas meal. I have done this for a number of years and it is almost like a little ritual, going up with my younger daughter. We usually leave earlier and play stupid games like guessing the number of cars we will see before the motorway, in a strange way we can enjoying being amongst the few out and about. But the extra hour or so this year made a big difference. Families were on the move and the driving was almost as fraught as normal. The number of cars on the road was not enough to cause any delays but the speed and aggression of the driving was just the same, as if it is impossible to relax behind the wheel. There should at least be one day when things are easier.

There is only one answer - do less driving. So I am in my car, with a round trip of about 115 miles wondering what everyone else is doing on the road and how I can cut down. How do you unpick routines, and arrangements built round the car? It is not easy and there is no way that I want to go cold turkey and give up having a vehicle - it is too useful. However I have to work on ways of reducing its use and changing habits.

It is a bit like running - habit is everything. Going for an occasional run is no problem, the key is in having a regular pattern. In fact one of the lessons running has taught me is that progress is built on consistency. The only problem is I am just not very good at applying it!

In fact I think my major project for next year is to look at my patterns of living to see if they contribute to or detract from well-being. Then make changes that can be applied consistently. They may be small things like doing a little stretching every day or bigger things like work, but the project is to try to find more balance.

So my Christmas wish to everyone who reads this is that their daily patterns are in balance and they find fulfilment in the New Year.

Not Running ; Not healthy; Not Happy

My last post has pleased me enormously for two reasons. The first was the discovery of the poet Donald Justice. - I liked his poem so much I then bought his Collected Works. The other reason was that it gave me a reason to think about my father. I wrote briefly about him but I though much more and it gave me pleasure to think of his essential decency - he was a good man.

However recently I have been dwelling rather mawkishly on a different part of my genetic heritage - my heart. My father was 64 when he died of heart failure, his brother was a bit older and my grandfather was 70. As I get older I become more aware of this brush of the icy fingers upon the shoulder. Mostly I get on with things. I run, cycle, do yoga, and am active. Physical fitness is an important part of my internal sense of identity but at the moment this sense of myself is swaying underneath me.

The problem I had with my heart rate in the Beachy Head Marathon has not gone away. Although I rested for a couple of weeks, when I ran again I still could not keep my heart rate down. So I went to the doctor only to find that my blood pressure was also crazy high.

I have since had various test on blood and urine (all of which have come back negative, apart from marginally high cholesterol) but during the last three weeks the lowest blood pressure reading has been 166 over 94. This is not good and I am now taking pills to reduce it and will be referred to a cardiologist.

Damn I feel low! Taking pills for blood pressure puts me with the unfit and frail - the half well (this is a bit irrational but is how I think at the moment). It opens up my fears and I really have not felt like going outside for a run. Damn!

I must give myself a good talking to, get outside, get out of the slough and remember this line from Theodore Roethke, "A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait."

There is no reason to be despairing

P.S.
Actually as one of the reasons for running is to feel part of the landscape the whole of the section of the poem is worth quoting:

It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.

It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.

Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

I recently found this poem by Donald Justice. Although I am 16 years older than the specified age I can say it is still like that - only more so. You are no longer on the landing but a few more steps up.

Every time when I get up in the morning I look in the mirror and I see my fathers face. He was only eight years older than my current age when he died and my last memories of his face mean the similarity is quite close. Every time when I get up in the morning.

My father was an active man but he never allowed himself to spend that activity in pure recreation. He was always landscaping the garden or refurbishing the house - building and improving. That was until he retired when he felt he had the time to play golf as well.

Me I spend my activity in running or cycling, with no objective beyond the sensation of the moment. I look round at all the jobs that need doing and how I could have made the house better, if only I had been more like my dad. But that is not the way it is - I have made different choices.

I run and for me that gently puts a foot in one of those closing doors and keeps it ajar.

More About Honesty

When I talked about the honesty of running a couple of posts ago, I was talking about the participatory activity I know, not top level sport. With International athletics there is something else beside talent and dedication - the shadow of drugs.

I have no idea who has or has not taken drugs, what drugs have been used or to what extent but I know that they have been taken. When they are talked about it is in terms the race between methods of detection and methods of evasion and the black and white morality of cheating . When attention is paid to the individual athlete the focus is on the potential physical damage. I have heard very little about the psychological effects of internalising a huge lie.

Every athlete who dopes knows what they are doing, yet I can only think of a few cases where, when caught, an athlete admits to what they were doing. In the face of all evidence innocence is usually protested and the story is that the athlete is a victim of a conspiracy. This is often stated with such fervour that I am convinced that the athlete believes it themselves and that they have somehow split their brains so that one half doesn’t admit what the other half is doing.

In some ways I can see why this is important because part of the personal affirmation an athlete gets is knowing that they are better than the others, being the best , proving themselves. There can be no affirmation if you believe your success is due to having a better chemist - therefore the drug cannot exist as a factor. But what doe sit do to there sense of reality?


The reason I am thinking about this is that at the moment I am reading The Death of Marco Pantani, which is an immensely sad story. I have never read such a clear exposition of the way drugs were used in the sport, and in particular how Pantani’s success was based on EPO. Yet he denied this till the end and his manager still speaks in nonsensical evasions and justifications. His decline, paranoia, and cocaine use and eventual death all show someone cast adrift from reality.

Last week I also listened, on Radio 4, to Ben Johnson talking to Michael Buerk. He has an even more complicated position. He admits that he took drugs but still claims that the test that showed positive in Seoul was fixed and that he was tricked into giving evidence in the drug inquiry in Canada.

I suppose that we all have a tendency to explain things away, put a gloss on our achievements, justify what we do and make excuses for failure. It could be that top athletes develop this capacity alongside their athletic prowess - but if it is developed too much it becomes delusional. It must be very difficult for those for whom running or cycling is no longer a simple pleasure but sense of identity, a reason for being, a livelihood.

Not being any sort of athlete I have no such problems or temptation to try to prove I am faster than I am. So I will stick with my assertion that, for me and many others, one of the main attractions of running is its honesty.

Nice Race - Shame about Number 618

Preamble - Heart Rate Monitors.

For a time, when my hrm and Garmin both broke, I ran without any toys at all, with the idea of being totally open to the unmediated feeling of the run. However I soon moved back to the HRM. Without it I found that the pace of my slow runs edged up and my faster runs edged down. I wasn’t too worried about the faster runs as those don’t feature too much in my programme but running the slower runs faster meant I did not savour them as much. So I went back to regulating them by heart-rate and immediately felt better.

Because I look fairly closely at my heart rate I have a very clear idea of how many beats I take for any given level of exertion. Although I am not over fussed by precise percentages the feedback from the hrm is a good indicator of how things are going. If I am not feeling 100% I have a rule of thumb that says anything up to about 10 beats above the normal rate is OK.

Beachy Head Marathon

I was really looking forward to running this: I know the area well and love the views; I prefer running off- road; running downhill is fun and if the slope is too steep you can always walk up. But it ended up a total failure.

All week I had been struggling with a virus but thought it was just one of those niggling things that happens before a race, so I put it to one side. But as soon as started I knew I was in trouble as my legs felt as if they had no power. Ah well I thought, just be very conservative, run slowly, walk where necessary and don’t worry about how long it takes. Although I did this I became increasingly worried because my heart rate was sky high, 15-20 beats about what it should have been and no matter how much I slowed I could not get it down and I was feeling more tired. After eight mile I felt as if I had run 20 and on a flattish section at slow pace my heart rate was over 180. At that point I knew I could not go on.

I met my wife in Alfriston and abandoned and boy did I feel low. The sensible hat was thinking I had done the right thing and that there was no point in trying to carry on but the emotionally I was thinking it was a failure and that one should not quit.

As I was standing by the car, talking about these feelings, I glanced at my heart rate and was shocked to find that it was still at a level of my normal slow runs; it was barely coming down at all. Things were definitely not right

Postscript - The Event

Despite my personal unhappiness I think this is a great event. I love the mixture of walkers and runners, people running with their dogs or just being out for an adventure. Everyone was very friendly and the scenery is lovely. I think I will have to return.

Honesty, Public Discourse and a Virtual Running Club

I have written before about the honesty of running - for the most part you get out what you put in. This nowhere more clearly shown than on the Hard Training thread of the Runners World forum. The seriousness with which they approach their training and the number of mile they run is hugely impressive. Last week a number of them ran the Abingdon marathon and there were loads of good times with some pbs.

I know they all deserved it because they have all been open in describing their training and ambitions. By following the thread you are able to watch as they work out the best ways to train, discuss problems and ask for advice. To me it seems a model of how things, anything, can be achieved: individual commitment and work, collaboration, honest appraisal and a willingness to listen. It is all done with humour and mutual appreciation.

I was thinking about this when reading a couple of things. The first was the NAO report on the failure to pay agricultural grants, which is a case study in how things should not be done, the loss of confidence in the civil service that feels it has to hand over tricky problems to consultants and the defensiveness and evasiveness so that the full scale of the problem is not admitted until it is too late. The other thing was an article by Armando Iannucci on how we now look to comedy as a source of truth in public discourse.

It is a rather brilliant article about the way we discuss serious issues, or rather the way we no longer discuss them seriously:

“When the only way a Prime Minister can get round his wife publicly calling his Chancellor a liar is with a joke, then what's left for a joke-writer to do? Comedy is so prevalent now, it's cool by association. So politicians speak and act according to the rhythms of comedy. Labour trying to portray Cameron as a chameleon - it's an attempted sketch.

This has come about for three reasons: politicians have stopped speaking to us properly, the media has stopped examining their actions in anything like a forensic way, and broadcast culture has become so watered down, so scared of fact, that people are less inclined to turn to anything other than entertainment for information.”

I read agree with it and then feel slightly depressed. The only answer is to go for a run. As I said before running is about honesty and as such it is the perfect antidote to management speak and obfuscations. I run in the woods. I can feel the bracken brush my legs and see the deer cross the path. Again I can feel rooted. But running is only good for me as an individual - it helps my mood, helps me sort things out. It does nothing for the public good.

However there is always the model of Mike Gratton’s Hard Training group which shows that when people come together with a common purpose great things can be achieved. I much prefer to think of this than the Rural payments Agency.

Subjectively I am a Good Runner

Now I know that by all objective criteria, every single measure you care to think of, I am an undistinguished runner. I am not particularly fast, I do not have exceptional endurance and I lack compensating fortitude. In any race the most I can aspire to is middle. However that does no matter because subjectively I am really quite good.

This does not mean I run along imagining I am better than I am or pretending I am someone like Roger Banister breaking 4 minutes - that would be silly! (One of the things I like about running is its total honesty; you can only run as well as your conditioning, with no excuses). It means that I can run well enough to feel enriched.

I can run long enough and comfortably enough to get an enhanced sense of place, whether in woods or hills, alongside rivers or canals. I have this strange belief the to appreciate somewhere you have to be physically engaged, and running does this. Also it gives me space to think, it is both stimulating an calming and when you hit a rhythm your mind can just freewheel. At the same time it is always directly showing you what kind of person you are - your mental attitude and the way your body works And then finally when you finish, you can feel a sense of peace and emptiness - in other words it is a preparation for meditation.

All these things I can manage, which is why I think that subjectively I am quite good at running. Others can have glory and achievement but if I can gain a few moments of contentment then I am successful.

Golf - on the other side of the tracks

Although I have often talked about my canal run, I have never mentioned that for part of the way it borders the Grove golf course. Partly this is because it does not affect the run - it is only a short stretch and somehow it does not seem to be part of the landscape. Partly it is because it brings out the grumpy old man in me.

It is not that I don't like golf as a sport (I actually think it is fascinating), but there are social attitudes that I find distressing and some of the courses with their artificial contours and alien grasses, kept unnaturally green by constant watering in times of water shortage, make me feel uneasy. I am also rather contemptuous of golf buggies. Surely the point of the game is to walk the five mile, as well as playing the strokes.

Whenever I run past the Grove I always look at the number of buggies and puff my chest out with some rather spurious sense of moral superiority: "Look at me I have just run all the way from Hemel and you lot can't even walk round the course." Then the inverted snobbery kicks in and I start to think about the difference in cost - I only needs trainers and a few bits of technical clothing, whereas the round of golf at such a course is an example of conspicuous consumption. (The green fee for one round of golf at the Grove is £125!). I always think this and then think I am being a bit earnest and pompous and tell myself to get back to the running. I can only worry about what I do for recreation, not what other people do.

It is only really the Grove that brings out this golf inspired grumpiness. On my other staple run, around Ashridge and Berkhamsted Common, I run on footpaths that cut across Berkhamsted Golf Club. But I think this course is rather lovely. It looks as if it has merely been cleared from the trees and bracken and follows the natural contours of the land, without even the intrusion of a sand trap. I run close to the golfers and sometimes pass a comment when they are looking for a lost ball near my path. They are playing their sport and I am engaged in mine and somehow that feels OK.

The reason I mention all this is because the Grove has just hosted a major tournament, won by Tiger Woods. It has been all over the news but for some reason it has always been described and "The Grove, Hertfordshire". Obviously "The Grove, Watford" is not posh enough.

Hard-Core, Soft-Core

In this blog I try to describe the feelings and experiences of a non-competitive runner. Sometimes it is a matter of talking about the pleasure of seeing deer run through the woods of Ashridge, at other times it might be the sense of peaceful emptiness that can sweep over you at the end of a run. At all times the focus is on the experience and process, not the objective results of speed, heart rate and miles. Soft-core running seems a pretty good description.

This does not mean that I am uninterested in training schedules and the discipline of serious athletes; quite the reverse I am fascinated. I have enormous admiration for their ambition, dedication and talent. But sometimes I read something that pulls me up short and shows clearly the difference between my attitude and theirs.

A couple of days ago Windsurfin’ Susie wrote this.

Now I will allow a certain amount of hyperbole in playing up the dilemma of choosing whether to help someone or continue to measure your heart rate. However it shows how you can become obsessed with the need to run and measure, the potential for injury and disruption to training schedules. I compared this to my canal run of a couple of weeks ago where I met someone from my yoga class. I stopped; we chatted for a bit and the run became a bit more enjoyable because of the interruption.

PS
I find myself a bit uncomfortable with the idea that one should limit help to those who have not contributed in any way to their misfortune. When the problem is of your own making you suffer the double burden of being in a mess and feeling worse because you know it was your fault. I speak here as someone who can be pretty stupid.

I once ran out of petrol driving a hire car. The temperature gauge was in the same place on the dashboard as the fuel gauge in my own car. I glanced at it a few times, without really looking, my only thought was that the car had remarkable fuel economy because the dial had hardly moved. At that point it ground to a halt.

What We Did on Our Holidays

It is now September and somehow the whole of August has disappeared. How did that happen?

My sister in law has an old house in a village in the Charente region where we had an extended-family holiday: sister and brother-in-law, their daughter, my wife and younger daughter, later joined by my elder daughter and her boyfriend. Although that sounds like a recipe for tensions, we all get along pretty well and the whole time was relaxed. In particular my youngest and her cousin are only separated by 15 months and are more like twins, very giggly twins at that, so there was always a lot of laughter.

RUNNING

The village is in an undulating agricultural area. The main crops are sunflowers and vines but there is a wide range of arable crops. (Although there are local vines, most of the grapes are grown for Cognac, or the local speciality, pineau). All my running (such as it was) was on the roads but they were so quiet I almost felt I had the whole place to myself. It is a perfect place to train - big vistas, different things to look at, settlement every couple of miles, to act as markers and break things up, and enough variation in elevation to make you work but no killer hills to turn your legs to jelly.

If I had been dedicated I could have used the holiday for a serious running base but instead I did enough to keep ticking over, about 3 runs a week all easy paced. I designed routes to looped round a nearby village that had a baker, where I bought the bread for breakfast - it's always a good to feel that you have earned your breakfast.

When I go on holiday I try to run, at least a few times as it adds to the sense of place as somehow you feel closer to the landscape and pay attention to the way it changes. I run for that reason not as part of a training regime - eating, drinking and visiting and relaxing have to take precedence.

3 MONTHS LEAVE!

In the heart of France but all around are the English. In the village there are a number of people who have bought dilapidated old houses, for very little money, and are in the process of renovating them. It is all very gradual because most are limited by the amount of time they can spend in their holiday home but it provides a social focus because everyone visits each others house to see the progress. My brother-in-law is one of the stars of this community because he is one of the most practical people I know and is never happier than when making or doing. Another one of the stars is a Belgian who loves carpentry. He had just completed converting the attic into one of those elegant bedrooms that are all space and beams, sparsely furnished with a bed and a wardrobe. To do this he built a staircase out of oak. The secret of this was not only his skill but time. As a civil servant, over the age of fifty, in Belgium, he is able to take three months leave a year. He spends this time in France renovating his house.

Now I am not a jealous man but……….

NOW AND THEN

These houses, with their modern kitchens, large rooms, and clean exposed stonework are very attractive. However it is quite chastening to realise that before the conversions seven people might have lived in one room, with no internal sanitation in the house. It seems that without all the incomers renovating their holiday homes the village would have crumbled as the locals have moved out to find more modern homes.

One of the features uncovered by the renovations was a cavity, topped by a ledge, next to the fireplace. At night it was filled with the embers from the fire and a stew was put on the ledge fro slow cooking overnight. Looking round at the new kitchens with all their devices I wonder whether we will have to rediscover some of those thrifty methods, if we are going to cut down on greenhouse gases.

FOOD

It is no great secret that one of the highlights of a French holiday is the food. You go there to remind yourself what a great pleasure it can be. In all aspects there is a delight from the crops in the fields to the markets with the profusion of colour, shapes and smells that tempt you and make you want to try things, to the meal and wine served in the restaurants.

If there is one thing that defines me as a soft core runner it is my attitude to food. I cannot see it just as fuel, something that has to be ingested to keep the body going. Serious runners have that sort of attitude because they want to carry as little fat as possible and favour small regular snacks to keep the blood sugar level stable. I am beyond worrying about that, I only want to savour what should be one of the fundamental pleasures.

My body tends to show this a little bit but with soft core running, the running has to fit the lifestyle and body shape, not the other way around. You get as good as you can within your own, self defined, boundaries.

The holiday in France reminded me of that

Holiday Time

This blog is now going to France for a couple of weeks.

But it will return with tales of running amongst the sunflowers and vines or tales of sitting around and drinking wine.

Who knows what will happen.

Finding Your Way Pt. 2

I have just reread my last post and think it’s a bit jumbled. It had two main points; one was to say that Amsterdam is a lovely city that I greatly enjoyed exploring on foot; the other was to describe the way I try to not get lost in a strange city whilst running without a map. It was the failure of the second part that bothers me. I know it was a failure because my wife read it and said she did not understand what I was going on about.

It may be the old clichés about one of the main differences between men and women being map reading but most of our discussions, about how know where you are, end in mutual incomprehension.

Identify a couple of landmarks; find them on a map; and then look at the pattern of roads around them; keep that picture in your mind and then keep track of the turns you take when you are out. Simple …....I think.

Different canals

Yet again I have been running by canals but this time they had nothing to do with the industrial revolution and the long distance transport of goods and raw materials. Instead I went to Amsterdam for the first time and ran beside the 17th century houses and the water. It was tremendous. I loved the sense of being in the middle of a city but it feeling peaceful and relaxed.

I like cities in the early morning, watching them as they wake up. When the place is new there is an added mystery of not knowing where you are going or what you are going to see. Running adds to the sense of exploration.

I do however have certain rules to stop me getting lost. The first is to fix some landmark, or central space and know a route from there back to my hotel (in this case I used Rembrandt Plein). The next stage is to identify a road that feeds into that place that can be used for orientation (I chose a road running due south from the square). This means you can run around until you meet this road and then find your way back quite directly.

After that it is a matter of looking at the map to get a sense of the layout of the streets (Amsterdam is quit easy because it is like a series of semi-circles ), then lacing up the trainers and running. I like to challenging myself by taking a number of random turns, all the time trying to keep an internal picture of where I have been and where I am going. I find that the risk that I might lose my way forces me to look more closely at where I am going and my surroundings.

There are dangers in that you might end up in a bad area but there is no great risk of that by the canals of Amsterdam. If worried you can always ask the concierge where not to run but I do not like to ask where to run because I want to have the sense that I am in control of my wandering. Sometimes by not going to the more obvious sites you get a better sense of place.

The value of getting to know somewhere by foot is illustrated by the fact that my wife an I came back with a really positive view of the city. We had wandered the streets and relaxed in cafes and parks. At the same time a friend of ours had visited Amsterdam on business and in some free time took a trip into the centre, with his colleagues. They asked the taxi driver to take them to a nice café where they could watch the world go by but the taxi driver could not believe that four English males did not want to got to the red light district. After that was declined he dropped them nearby at Dam Square, which was not the place they were looking for. After a short time they went back to their hotel, thinking that the city was young, noisy and full of fast food.

Fact and Fiction

I have mentioned quite a few times that the Grand Union Canal is my home run. Every time I go there it feels secure, and familiar, yet at the same time there is always something new to notice. Even the name is good - the is something noble and Victorian about a Grand Union. But safety is not something that all canal runners can take for granted. A couple of months ago I noticed this story about alligator attacks in Florida, including an attack on someone running by a canal.

I know they are different types of canal but it did make me think about mild it is to run in the Home Counties. The climate is mild - you can mostly run all year round, the scenery is pleasantly undulating, people are pottering about on boats or strolling by the water. There is an air of easy contentment. However that was not my first thought. No - I immediately thought of Carl Hiassen. It could all have come from one of his novels, especially his first,
"Tourist Season" which is about a small group of terrorists who want to stop the relentless development of Miami and the destruction of the wilderness. It includes scenes of a crocodile munching on humans and also the canals.

At the same time I read about Steve Vaught a fat man who spent a year walking across America from coast to coast. He wanted to loose weight but more importantly reclaim his life(his blog is here). When reading about his story all I could think about was a novel I really enjoyed last year

I am drawn to stories about redemption through physical endeavour and a long lonely journey. By moving outside our normal range in order we see ourselves more clearly. In fiction it is easier to make a neat ending where everything becomes clear, whilst in real life it is likely to be messier, less clear. Steve Vaught was like that he did not loose as much weight as he wanted and his wife left him but he gained a number of insights and moved a long way in reshaping his nature.

I was struck by the coincidence of reading two stories where reality and fiction had become entwined.

So far I have yet to read the story of a middle aged man quietly running through the domesticated countryside of Hertfordshire, on a pleasantly warm morning, passing a few people out enjoying themselves. If there is such a story it would probably be called "Not a lot happened - but is a good way".

On Buying a Bike and Max Wall

Having been away for a bit, there are some things to catch up with.

One of the things that has given me most pleasure recently is that I have bought a new bike. Now I am going to waffle on about this, so those of you with no interest with cycles can look away now, except that I do wander onto other topics.

For the last 12 years all of my leisure cycling has been off road on a number of mountain bikes. My current one is a full-suspension Marin that is wonderful over the rough stuff but a bit of a camel on the tarmac. Lately however my thoughts have been turning to the idea of going back to a road bike.

I think this is because of the running and appreciating the way you can get into a rhythm that fills you up and in some way makes you content. Off road the experience is very different. You are constantly changing speed, direction and effort and the joy comes from having to concentrate all the time as you can never take the riding surface for granted.

Anyway after convincing myself that I would not be wasting my money on a fancy, the big problem was to work out what sort of bike I wanted. These days everything can be very specialised (no pun). So it was a process of elimination. Didn't want a tri bike - us non-swimmers do not do triathlons. Didn't want an out and out racing bike - I'm a bit old and want a bit more comfort. Didn't want a touring bike - I wanted at least some sense of responsiveness. The answer was a multi-purpose crosser.

Next decision was what material: titanium, carbon, aluminium or steel? In my price range the most common material is aluminium, with lots of advantages of lightness and stiffness and modern looks. But I was tempted by the idea of being a bit retro - steel is still a good material.

This all sounds like a logical way to buy a bike but logic has little to do with it, because what I really want is some sense of imaginative engagement. This might be a strange thing to ask of a machine but, as every bike I have owned has had its own personality, it is not that unusual. Bikes are customisable, tweakable and can be worked on. They might be the last machines that expose the way they work (everything else is moving to printed circuits and becoming a mysterious black box) and there is an elegance in that. You can see the form following the function.

So I brought something because I liked the idea of the company and their way with names: a Planet X Kaffenback.

Planet X are a small company from Yorkshire who design according to their own ideas of what works. There is a strong sense of people having the freedom to try things out. This can be seen in the website of
On One, their more idiosyncratic twin company. Their forum almost has a community feel and, in the best sense, personal.

They also have an attractive way with names. Kaffenback perfectly describes the focus of my Saturday morning rides. In addition their wheels have DN6 rims, which sounds sort of high tech - except it’s their postcode. However the thing that did it for me was that they call their tubing Max Wall, and the decal has an image of the great man.


For those of you who don't know, he was a comedian, born in 1908, the son a music-hall entertainer and thus steeped in that tradition. In his act he used to wear a rumpled formal jacket over black tights, with outsized shoes. He had a funny walk, with his bum stuck out and sometimes almost balletic movement. Above all he had an amazingly creased face that could crumple and gurn. At the end of his career he became a great Beckett actor to such an extent that sometimes I can see his face when I read the words.

I can remember seeing him in a variety show when I was about 11 or 12. The bill included Wilson Keppel and Betty, and Billy Cotton. If anything makes me realise how old I am it is the thought that I saw these people, from a different age, who you can only imagine in black and white (or more accurately faded brown and white). At the time I could have had no ideathat I was watching the end of a tradition.

I now love the idea that I have some direct connection to, some glimpse of, this past. When I think of this I also remember my grandfather, who shortly before his death locked himself in a room and recorded a number of music-hall songs.

I know I am taking about a cultural tradition and not something primeval but this reaching back reminds me of a few lines from a Stephen Spender poem:

What is precious is never to forget
The delight of blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning light, Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Now how did I get here from buying a bike?

I think all you can say is that for someone who uses the name Highway Kind - "didn't he ramble."

Oh and by the way the bike is great fun

Running Again

Looking at the date of my last blog I realise that it has been exactly 2 months since my last communication. It has been an empty time.

The reason for the gap has been simple: this is a running blog and I have not been running. The chest infection that caused me to abandon the Lochaber marathon lasted and lasted and lasted. It has taken me about 3 months to throw off the virus. During that time I tested my energy a few times but any exercise left my muscles feeling very watery - so I just eased up totally and just tried to get by until I felt strong again.

This has now happened. On Saturday I went back to my canal and ran to Watford. It was hot, my heart rate was way above normal and I ran very slowly. But it was great. Although my legs felt tired at the end, it was good honest muscular tiredness not an overall feeling of weakness. No longer was it a struggle and so now I can start to look forward again.

The great thing about my canal run is that, although it is familiar, there is always something new to notice. It is always fresh. It can be kids learning how to canoe, fishermen doing whatever they do (or as Steve Wright said "there is a fine line between a fisherman and an idiot standing by the water with a pole in his hand) someone repairing a barge, or just looking out for the trees and welcoming their shade.

I just like being there and we all need places we like to be.