Taking The Treadmill Out Of The Gym

I always like to keep up-to-date with the stupid; but sometimes I am a little behind the trend, so I apologise if this is old news.

At first I thought it was just an elaborate piece of whimsy but it is more than that: it is an elaborate piece of whimsy with added engineering. They have taken something jokey and made it solid. With me it would have been a pub conversation, an amusing concept conjured after a few beers that would have been lost in the evening’s haze.

I have a sneaky admiration for people who not only remember these ideas but also add real work. They make the world a brighter place.

We need more playfulness.

Bike Forest website shows they have a number of such silly projects - or kinetic sculptures, as I think the are called.

A Year of Broken Things

This has started-off as the year of broken things: nothing too serious, nothing that can’t be repaired, but nevertheless frustrating.

Number 1 the internet – well perhaps not the whole internet, just my access to it. It started being intermittent over Christmas and stopped completely on 6th of Jan. Oh the problems of the bad weather – the engineers were all backed up and no one was available for a whole week! As it is one of the modern commandments that thou should be patient (that way you get less buggy software), I settled down to wait. The visit of the engineer coincided with more snow and it took more time getting his van away than fixing my problem. He just reset the modem said it was OK but didn’t do a lot. The internet only worked again for a few hours. Then nothing. Anther call, another wait for an engineer: but this time only for three days. The new engineer took one look at my modem, declared it knackered, replaced it and now everything is fine.

So I can continue blogging again.

Number 2 the car. This was all my own fault, and is if I haven’t demonstrated my own stupidity to myself often enough, this was a little reminder for the new year. A simple trip to Watford but unfortunately there was a big smash-up on the motorway. When I realised we would be stuck for some time I turned the engine off but forgot I had the headlights on (it was a gloomy grey day). The battery drained and I was unable to restart the engine, so I had to push the car to the hard shoulder and wait for assistance. Unfortunately the traffic was so badly backed-up they closed access to the motorway so the breakdown van could not get on for some time and after that could only crawl towards me. As a result it took 4 very cold hours to be rescued.

Number 3 me. I am sitting here with a sore throat, blocked-up nose, painful head, coughing as I type. Around my chair is a pool of self-pity (the true symptom of man-flu) as I realise that my running schedule is in danger of crumbling away, even though I know I will soon be mended

So 2010 has stated with a little moral reminder: things fall apart but eventually they can be fixed. I am going to take this to heart and make the mantra for the rest of year: “patience, patience, patience”.

Food Rules

I have written about Michael Pollan before and no doubt will do so again because food is a proper subject for a running blog and he is one of the best writers on the subject.

He is probably most famous for ‘In Defence of Food’ with its seven word piece of dietary advice: ‘eat food, mostly plants, not very much’. He also coined the phrase ‘edible foodlike substances’ for a lot of things that fill our supermarket shelves. So in 10 words he has said most of what you need to know about nutrition.

Of course there is more to it than that and sometimes you need a book to explain what those word mean but his rules for eating are basically very simple and self-explanatory:

· Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?"
· Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
· Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
· It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," . Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'
· Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love.

(The only amendment I would make would be to substitute ‘a great grandmother’ for my great grandmother, who I am sure would not have recognised all the exotic fruit and vegetables we now take for granted).

My excuse for bringing this up again is that he has just published another book with more pithy advice on eating. (Food Rules) uses maxims gathered from readers of the New York Times to guide us on our way and make us think about the way we live. The background to the project is explained here and some examples are here. None of them are as good as Pollan’s original seven words but many of them are successful in condensing a way of living into a simple rule of thumb, and that is always pleasing.

I am struck between the parallels of writing about food and writing about running. Essentially all you need to know can be distilled into very few words. Running and eating are both things the species has been doing very well since its inception (otherwise we wouldn’t be here), so we only need to be reminded of a few simple rules. But for both there are shelves full of literature (more for food, obviously, but the comparison still holds), ranging from science to anecdotes, encyclopaedias to top tips. In both cases the interested reader is happy to continue reading essentially the same information presented in different ways with new twists and find it fascinating and inspiring. In both cases there are lessons that can be directly applied,

In more than one way running and food are deeply entwined.

The New Year

A New Year; a new beginning but still very cold!

Much as I enjoyed my off-season I knew it could only be for a short time and that as soon as New Year began so would a new regime. Christmas had given me time for some re-evaluation but the break meant that I was keen to make the start
My main conclusion had been about the need for variety and to think of training as a series of waves (building up, falling back a little then building again). I have therefore started a 16 week schedule, which has a pattern of three weeks of increasing effort followed by a comparatively easy week. Within the programme is the standard mixture of long slow runs, steady runs, hills, speed, and threshold. But it is good to follow someone else’s ideas because left to myself I would do too many similarly paced runs of similar length.

Whether I actually race at the end is a moot point (I have a terrible record of ending up with coughs and wheezes and finding the actual race rather unpleasant). For me the object is to test my discipline in sticking to a programme and finding out if I can break my two hour psychological block (I seem to fall to pieces after that time).

Already there has been a result as I have rediscovered the pleasure of the short session - I had quite forgotten that a 20 minute run is just enough to make you feel you have put in some work whilst leaving you feeling fresh for the rest of the day. Over the years I have done too much steady plodding, thinking I had to run for at least 40 minutes every time. I had forgotten one of the golden rules of training is to do as little as is possible to achieve your objective and that short sessions can be good.

So I feel I have made a good start to my one running resolution of 2010, which is to look afresh at what I do, examine that which is merely habitual and try to recover the attitude I had when I first started, when everything was new.