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.