Keeping Active Pt. 1 - The Olympic Legacy

The leaves are gone, it is dark early in the evening, and cold has now given way to rain, and in other parts of the country, flooding. It is winter and the glory of the summer Olympics already seems an age ago. When you are hunkering down against the weather it is hard to remember the feelings of warmth an openness which characterised that time. The reviews of the year remind us what happened and show many glorious moments but the hoopla has now over and it is time to look what at what was promised as a legacy. No not whether West Ham take over the Olympic Stadium (an issue on which I have vanishingly small interest and absolutely no opinion) but whether the population will become more active and participate more in sports. The slogan was: "inspire a generation" and the hope was that a festival showing the limits of human physical performance would seize our imaginations and encourage us to do more ourselves.

I have always been sceptical as to whether watching elite sport spurs many people on. Supporting a team is as much about identity as anything else and ou only have to see the number of beer bellies wearing team shirts to know that not all spectators are as active as they might be. A problems is that top sportsmen are so much more capable than the average person they might be a different, but closely related, species (how can someone sustain 5min miles for 26 miles?). What they do is outside normal in all honesty we cannot say to ourselves “I can do that”, instead our response is “Wow!”. It is possible that instead of inspiring imitation all the exceptional performances reinforce the idea that sport is for other people. 

Running is the sport with the lowest barrier to entry: anybody can buy a pair of trainers and get going but I would guess the London Marathon is a far bigger inspiration for participation than Usain Bolt. Seeing people of all shapes, sizes, ages and abilities, who each in their own way achieve something personally significant does make you think: ”I could do that!”  We are all more likely to accept a challenge if we think it is achievable and when there are people we can realistically measure ourselves against. After that it is a ladder: if we find we have some talent then we compete against better people, and so on, and so on. What this requires is an infrastructure of grassroot clubs with the coaching to encourage us all to give of our best. This infrastructure is ultimately far more important than a huge festival (no matter how great it  might be)

Don’t get me wrong I thought the Olympics were brilliant and also important in an unexpected way: like nothing else in my lifetime it showed us we were a cosmopolitan nation with a sense of identity more vibrant than is usually allowed.  The efficiency of the building, planning, and running of the games combined with the high spirits of the helpers and good nature of spectators showed we are not a broken society. After so many generations of politicians and news commentators telling us that we are failing in every conceivable way and all is rubbish, it gave everyone heart to see this big thing being done well. Self esteem is not only important for individuals it is also important for nations and for this reason the Olympics were a wonderful thing but that was not their intended legacy.  There is a big difference between the short term emotional release and the day-to-day work of getting more people permanently active.

 Evidence from previous Olympics is not encouraging. Perhaps this time will be different but as I have already said mass participation in sport requires infrastructure: playing fields with changing facilities, running tracks, cycleways, all-weather tennis courts, outdoor gyms, gyms, parks, all of which have to be maintained as well as built.  Clubs and leagues have to be staffed, volunteers have to give of their time, knowledge and enthusiasm and dreams have to be kept alive. In the summer, in a beautiful Olympic Park, surrounded by happy people, dreams are easy. In winter on a badly drained, muddy field with no working showers in the changing rooms it is more difficult. 

Perhaps it is now time to put aside 2012 as a marvellous year of elite sport and look at how well the rest of us, the sub-prime physical specimens, are doing at keeping active.

Transforming the Ordinary

Picasso - The Old Guitarist, 1903
Source: www.pablopicasso.org

As is my habit I was reading the saturday paper at a cafe, with coffee and a bun. Sometimes I was drawn to an article and absorbed, other times I watched the crowds and listened to fragments of disconnected conversation. It was a day when everybody had a business face as they sorted out presents and got ready for christmas. Brows were furrowed, lips were pursed, discussion carried an edge. I sat and thought, as I often do, about how little people look around. This room, in this town centre, was full of people not interacting, all were within their own world, physically sharing a common space but looking inward. 

How do we all sense the world? All of use with our own concerns and experiences, doing the same sort of thing but are we seeing them in the same way? How many of each person’s thoughts are commonplace, hardly worth remarking upon, and how many exceptional? In this room what were the unusual insights I was missing?

These are questions I often ask myself, especially as I continue this blog about a common activity where there is little new to say. So many people run in a similar hobbyist way and so many experiences are similar, I sometimes wonder whether they are worth talking about. But (and this is my excuse) they are felt differently, not only from person to person but in the same person from time to time. One day the ordinary is just that - ordinary, but on others it is transformed. Super good days may be rare but when they happen they offer up moments of clarity and contentment that are almost magical.

I thought of this when I read the article by Giles Fraser, which quoted a poem by Wallace Stevens. As is his wont he took a theological message, whereas I take it as an affirmation of the way the ordinary can also be something else. Never mind music and the arts, we can also run to find those moments.

P.S. The poem is said to be a reaction to the Picasso painting, which may be true but for me a key word is “shearsman” which is used to describe a tailor, a craftsman. To me is is not a poem just about art, it is about any craft - the practice of any skill. In this respect running, if done seriously enough, is also a craft.

The Man With the Blue Guitar 

One
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said to him, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.” 

Two
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If a serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar. 

Three
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar. 

Four
Tom-tom c'est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentarily declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

Is Running Bad For Your Heart?

Now here’s a funny thing: I was about to write a few linked posts about the importance of exercise for health and the difficulties of changing habits and persuading  adults to make even a minimal effort, when I came across an article warning that exercise might have dangers. (Not that there's anything in it to change my plans as only good things can happen if someone moves from inert to 150 minutes a week). No the dangers are for those who are are worried about their health but for those who become intoxicated by the challenges, the idea of pushing back physical limits, and addicted to the feeling of being both physically empty and extremely satisfied.  Doing too much, or more specifically taking part in endurance events like marathons, triathlons, or ultramarathons might not actually be too healthy. There may be some unwanted adaptations to the heart and it is possible there is a dose effect so that just as too little exercise is bad for a body running too much might not be so good!

The origin of the concern was a paper has been published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings entitled ‘Potential adverse cardiovascular effects from excessive endurance exercise’ and many of you might not want to read any further than the title. Feel free to close your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, say “I am not listening!’ or ‘this cannot possibly be right because I don’t want to believe it’. If you write for a newspaper you can do this at slightly greater length. That’s OK as long as you are clear in your mind why you run and know that if you run for more than about 30 minutes a day you do so for reasons other than health.  However although we might want to continue doing what we do we should not treat unwelcome sounding research like and leave it unopened like an unwanted bank statement. We must face it dispassionately to see what the researchers actually say and be prepared to put aside our preconceptions. Before doing so though we can be strengthened by the thought that what is actually proved in any scientific papers is usually very specific within precisely defined limits which often do not bear the weight of the more generalised (and lurid) headlines.

So what to make of the Mayo paper?  Well from my lofty position of a non-expert it looks like a good survey of what is known about the effect of extreme exertion on the heart. It shows evidence that the hearts of highly trained athletes can enlarge and thicken in a way that would be seen as worrying for a normal person and there can also be scarring and other damage. However we don’t know enough about what that means for overall health and longevity, as the authors recognise in the abstract: 

However, this concept is still hypothetical and there is some inconsistency in the reported findings. Furthermore, lifelong vigorous exercisers generally have low mortality rates and excellent functional capacity.

Nevertheless there is enough in this paper to get one thinking. But it must be emphasised that the authors are not warning about exercise of itself, instead they are raising the question as to whether there can be too much of a good thing. They explicitly offer no excuse for the couch potato to remain inert as their opening sentences make clear:

Regular exercise is one of the cornerstones of therapeutic lifestyle changes for producing optimal cardiovascular (CV) and overall health. Physical exercise, though not a drug, possesses many traits of a powerful pharmacological agent. A routine of daily physical activity (PA) stimulates a number of beneficial physiologic changes in the body and can be highly effective for prevention and treatment of many of our most prevalent and pernicious chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease (CHD), hypertension, heart failure, obesity, depression, and diabetes mellitus.¹ People who exercise regularly have markedly lower rates of disability and a mean life expectancy that is 7 years longer than that of their physically inactive contemporaries.

The point needs to be emphasised because there is no way you want a simplified message that running is bad for your health to seep into the public consciousness. It shouldn’t from this paper, which is a restrained academic review that does not editorialise. However that is done by the authors in the BMJ journal Heart, where they are clearer in describing the effect of exercise as a U curve where too much high intensity work loses some of the gains of a more moderate regime. (It can be found here but unless you have a subscription or access from a library it is not worth the £24 they want to charge. Instead watch the TED talk that covers the same ground). 

The article has caused more controversy because it inspired the article in the Wall Street Journal I previously mentioned. As is common for newspapers the headline and opening paragraphs were overly alarming, even if there was more balance further down the piece (as is also common in newspapers). This has been a push back with some people to contest the conclusions (e.g. here and here) and a little flurry of concern.

My take (for what it’s worth - and that is very little because it is just the intuitive response of someone who runs about a bit) is that I am very ready to believe that there is a sweet spot for exercise to offer maximum health benefits, which might not accord with the amount of work needed to fulfil other ambitions. It is very likely that more might not mean better especially for those of us over 50. But I am not sure if I have to worry too much. I may be old but the amount of running I do faster than 8 min miles is vanishingly small. I, like most people, am probably well within the boundaries of exercise being a good thing. However the problem is we cannot precisely define where those boundaries are. Take for example easy exercise: apparently we can walk as much as we like without hitting  a point of diminishing returns but does that also apply to slow, low intensity running?  If so the majority people who run marathons have no worries because, from the middle to the back of the pack, the long slow running dominates training (and the race). For most people the debate about a U shaped exercise curve is irrelevant because we don’t run hard or fast enough to reach the bottom of the U. The people at risk are the seriously competitive and they are the very people whose motivation has nothing to do with wellbeing or health. But the amount of that risk, if at all, is not yet known. 

It is all neatly summed up in an article in Outside about the original Mayo review: “high-intensity, high-volume exercise is really, at this point, a black box in terms it what it does for you over the long haul.”

The Mystery of Motion

One of the reasons for writing this blog was to try to make sense of the mysterious way running, a simple, repetitive activity, can be both immensely satisfying and mentally stimulating. Sometimes I still thinks it might be a dull grind (usually just before I leave the house on a mucky day) but experience has taught me otherwise. I know it is not true and running can make you feel more alive. But I don’t fully understand why and I don’t think I ever will. The best I can hope for is to be able accumulate fragments of evidence puzzle over the fact that even the simplest human movement can be a thing of wonder.  I was reminded of this in a startling way by an article in the Observer. It might not be about running but it is about the mystery of movement and the complexity of the interaction with the brain.  Anyway cycling is also a topic for this blog so it is right that I share it.

Apparently the video of the man with advanced Parkinson’s riding a bike has been around for 2 years (when a paper was published in the New England Journal of Medicine) but I knew nothing of it until now and so the surprise was complete. The only reaction is “Wow!”, “How can this be?”, “This isn’t right.” “It’ impossible!”. I was stupefied as I just could not compute what I was seeing and I still have no idea about how it is possible.

Riding is a learnt skill (obviously as nothing in our evolutionary history could have prepared us for a bike). It is therefore remarkable that this acquired ability can be embedded deeply enough to survive whilst the hard-wired capability of walking is attacked by the Parkinson’s disease. The suggestion that the pedals coming round act as a constant unconscious reminder of what to do is an ingenious idea but it is just a guess and anyway what happens if you freewheel? The other explanation that our base skills (like walking or running) have different neurological pathways to acquired skills and can be selectively targeted by the disease, seems to need a host of complicated proofs before it can become a solid hypothesis. We really have no idea about how and why.

I am both baffled and in awe. It has left me even more convinced of two things: the first is how unfathomable we all are as animals and the second is what a wonderful invention the bicycle is.

No More Heroes

Since the USADA report on Lance Armstrong it has been impossible to open a paper, listen to the radio, or go online without reading something about him and the cycling culture when he was the capo dei capi. It is as if a dam has been burst and all the cycling journalists have at last been been given opportunity to vent what they secretly knew and other journalists, with little specialist knowledge, have leapt aboard feeling they must say something. There is now no need to say any more - and I don’t want to. Except ... except the story is so fascinating there are always little strands hanging out, tempting you to pull and I want to tug at the idea of the hero.

There was a good interview on PM with Paul Willerton, a former team mate of Armstrong, who had been publicly protesting that Nike should withdraw their sponsorship. At one stage, after some sympathetic questioning, he got slightly emotional as he thought about the bullying Greg Lemond received and in that one small moment gave a little insight into how tough it must have been to live through the era and question the prevailing culture. The ability of someone (it could be anyone but in this case it was Lance Armstrong) to have enough power to be able to mobilise overwhelming force and relentlessly pursue anyone who got in their way, is one of the aspects of the affair that deserves further exploration. Perhaps a full analysis will be done but a part of the answer is related to something else Willerton said:

Nike wanted to create a Prefontaine figure; a legend out of someone who was merely a man. Nike didn’t care about cycling what they really cared about was taking someone like Lance Armstrong and moulding him into a marketing machine.

This is spot on. The whole story of the recovery from cancer and  the determination and raw sporting ability required to come back and conquer his sport is definitely the stuff of legend. Inspite of anything else it is a story of resolve and mental and physical strength. Obviously it has now been invalidated by the industrial scale of the drug taking (i.e. cheating) and his behaviour to others but while that was under wraps his profile was, in a sporting sense, heroic. This was exploited by Nike and Trek to shift huge amounts of product and build the brand in the public imagination. As they wanted to be associated with greatness so that a little bit of it could rub off on anybody who bought their goods, it was in their interests to build-up the extraordinariness of their champion. In doing so the attention and money they gave to Armstrong enhanced his stature, built and then reinforced his power. How could the UCI remain uninfluenced by a man who had presidents in his phone address book and was iconic in the American market? How could foot soldiers in the peloton, or others associated with the sport, stand-up to his might?

It is an illustration of the trend in modern capitalism - the concentration of power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands, whilst the rest of us are given the opportunity to bathe in pool of their reflected glory. In this case though it was also allied to the way our appreciation of sport has evolved from recreation, to support for the local team, to an industry built on celebrating champions we are encouraged to identify with. In such a system the ones at the top really do have all the power and the status of Lance Armstrong meant  he could control his world.

The question is though not whether he was or was not a hero but why we need such figures at all. For sure we all need exemplars and people who can embody our human potential but what forces so many of us to invest so much of ourselves in the impossible virtue of our champions? What is our hunger for myths?

Perhaps I should repeat these famous lines of Brecht:

 Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes
Galileo: No, unhappy the land in need of heroes

Honesty in Sport, Drug Taking in Sport

When I recently wrote recently that running was essentially honest, i.e. the figures did not lie and your times tell you precisely how good a runner you are, I was not talking about high level competition where money and prestige hang on racing results. Sport really is two different things: there is the recreational activity, where you challenge yourself and hope to find out more about your own nature. In the fullest sense it is amateur (no matter how methodically the task is approached) - it is done purely out of love and a sense of personal satisfaction. Then there is elite sport, which is a profession. People obviously come into it from love but once they reach a certain level it becomes a job and the results matter to other people as well as themselves. They become part of a system which exerts its own demands

In professional sport there is an ethos of doing all you can to develop an edge over other competitors and if there are not strict rules and adherence to those rules the line between right and wrong, honesty and lying can become blurred. If the main criteria is any advantage you can gain and you think other people are getting away with things that are not right what is there to stop someone going over to the dark side?

These questions are now as pertinent as ever. A couple of weeks ago came the news that Kenyan athletes were being investigated for doping. No! I reacted. I just did not want this to be the so. I had bought into the idea that Kenyan dominance of middle and long distance running was a mixture of genetics, a life time of running to get around, plus diet and good coaching. I really wanted to believe that it was all a combination of talent plus people like Brother O’Connell, who coaches David Rudisha. Nothing else. I wanted and still want the good story - but who knows if that is now the case.

What is no longer in doubt though is the sorry state of cycling during the reign of Lance Armstrong.  The USADA has finally published its case and fully exposed the culture of systematic doping and deceit.The reasoned decision and supplementary material are available here and the case is overwhelming. I have already spent too much time reading it with a sense of fascinated horror. Even though I already knew the broad outlines of what had happened, even though I have assumed for years that Armstrong must have doped to win seven Tour de France titles (think about it - if he was beating people who we know were taking drugs, either he was a different species of being or he was taking the same, or better stuff. None of his physiological test point to him being superhuman), there are still revelations and human stories. Stories about how nasty, vindictive and bullying Armstrong was and stories of the toll on other members of the team.

Take this excerpt about  David Zabriskie:

Bruyneel was respected by Zabriskie whose father had died a few years before, his life shortened by drug addiction. Zabriskie had sought refuge in cycling. Long hard training rides were cathartic and provided an escape from the difficult home life associated with a parent with an addiction. He had vowed never to give in to the temptation to use, never to end up like his father, furtively using drugs to feed his dependency and eroding his physical health.Barry was about five years older than Zabriskie; however, Zabriskie had been on the USPS team a year longer. The group met at or near a café, and the conversation proceeded in English. Bruyneel got right to the point. He and del Moral had brought two injectable products for Zabriskie and Barry, something known as “recovery” and the banned oxygen booster, erythropoietin (known as “EPO”). Zabriskie was shocked.This was the beginning of David’s third year on the team and he had not realized he would be required to dope. He realized, of course, that some cyclists in the peloton and likely some teammates fueled their success with banned substances. However, until now he had been largely shielded from the reality of drug use on the U.S. Postal Service Team.Zabriskie began to ask questions. He was fearful of the health implications of using EPO, and he had a slew of questions: would he be able to have children? would it cause any physical changes? Would he grow larger ears? The questions continued. Bruyneel responded, “everyone is doing it.” Bruyneel assured that if EPO was dangerous no professional cyclists would be having kids.David was cornered. He had embraced cycling to escape a life seared by drugs and now he felt that he could not say no and stay in his mentor’s good graces. He looked to Barry for support but he did not find it. Barry’s mind was made up. Barry had decided to use EPO, and he reinforced Bruyneel’s opinions that EPO use was required for success in the peloton.The group retired to Barry’s apartment where both David and Barry were injected with EPO by Dr. del Moral. Thus began a new stage in David Zabriskie’s cycling career – the doping stage. Cycling was no longer David’s refuge from drugs. When he went back to his room that night he cried.

When I read testimony like that I think of the cyclists as the poor bloody infantry. They have taken all the heat and guilt and been the ones who have been punished. In the meantime the team managers and doctors carry on as normal. It was the system which was corrupt. Cyclists believed there was no other way (sure they could have walked away from the sport but that is very difficult if you have staked everything on being a top professional).

We might think top sportsmen are at the apex of achievement and satisfaction (and surely some are) and they are to be envied and emulated (and again surely some are) but the are just as much a part of a system, with its own pressures and responsibilities as anybody in any other line of work. Their highs may be more dramatic and the requirements more intense but they are still bound by a culture and responsibilities. Sometimes those demands are just too great, as I believe they were for cyclists in the Armstrong years.

We tend to view sports individualistically i.e the way a person performs and the choices they make and then investing some of ourselves in our favourites and then make black and white judgements. But we only see half the picture if we ignore the context and don’t recognise the system. In cycling I do not think everyone who doped was a despicable cheat. Instead I think some good people got caught up in something beyond their control. All sport should be simple but sometimes things can be complicated, especially if money is involved.

Which brings me back to the difference between recreational and elite sport. the tremendous privilege we have as amateurs is that it is actually us as individuals. We do what we do for our own satisfaction and for no other reason. We can choose how much we want to be part of a system e.g. if we join a club and what type of club, or we can run on our own. We are honest because it makes no sense to be otherwise. All that matters is a sense of achievement and increased self-knowledge. 

We should constantly celebrate our freedom

Zebra Finch

This is an inconsequential little post but I wanted to show one of the strangest sights I have come across on a trail. It was on a walk in a small nature reserve in Saintes and I was so busy looking up and around that I almost missed this tiny bird burrowing into the grass of the path. A tiny zebra finch, completely unfazed by the presence of people. We got close but it was not at all agitated. It carried on so calmly i began to wonder if it was incapable of flight but after a time it hopped up and flew to a nearby branch. So it was just used to people. It must have been a household pet escaped from its cage. I wonder how long it will last i the wild? 

Back from Holiday

Back from holiday and it is  time to get back to some blogging.

We went, as we do most years, to a small village in south west France not far from Cognac. and it is the best running country I know. A rolling, open landscape with few hedges but an occasional lines of trees and small areas of woodland. You can see for miles, the sky is big and the light wonderfully clear. Criss-crossing are plenty of small, empty roads that make planning a route of any distance a doddle. As the land is undulating there is always some challenge so you know you have done some work but without the grinding intimidation of really steep slopes. 

In the height of summer you have to get out early before it gets too hot but nearer to autumn there is more latitude. Getting out at 8 - 8:230 was just fine. Once out the feeling is one of peace. Obviously the landscape is highly cultivated and everywhere there is evidence of people and  their work but with hardly anybody about you can feel you are on your own. You can stretch out without any sense of being crowded, and it encourages you to look around. Overhead there are birds and I am particularly taken with a buzzard who patrols the area - it is his. But you don't have to look at anything in particular: the sense of openness is enough.

The picture shows another feature - the allotments scattered around all the villages. This is a reminder (even if this particular allotment has mostly been harvested) of what I like about France - the food. Not the most unusual of insights perhaps but nevertheless true. Whether it is the restaurants or the riot of colourful vegetables in the markets, there is much that tastes good. 

So there you have it, my holiday defined in one short sentence: run a bit and eat a lot. Perhaps not a recipe for tip top fitness but as a holiday plan there is a lot to recommend it.

Running is Overwhelmingly Honest

It's one of the things I keep repeating: "running is honest', "running is honest", "running is honest". (Imagine I am panting this as a sort of mantra). It is all about personal truth and recognising that whatever dreams you may have about your own special qualities you are never any better than your time. The clock tells how good you are and how you compare with others and it is not susceptible to special pleading. There are no excuses - that is exactly how good you are. How you react is different and a matter of temperament and priorities. You can believe you are capable of much more and so train harder and smarter to improve, or you could accept it and say that you don't (or can't) spare any more time or energy and are happy to be as good as you are within the constraints you have imposed on yourself. Both responses are good, both are honest.

What you cannot do is lie. You cannot make up your times and pretend to be speedier and more athletic than you actually are. It not only goes against all morals and cuts against the reason for putting in the miles. Real runners should not lie. Running is about proving things to yourself. There might be an element of display, talking to others about your times and what you have done, but that happens out of obsession rather that boastfulness. In essence you are trying to find-out your capabilities and that is all that matters.

Running is honest and humbling. You know where you stand in the order of things, The shape of achievement is like a teardrop with most of us in the middle or bottom. For some people, with an inflated opinion of their own abilities (who believe that are born to be special) or a deranged need to be seen by others as exceptional, this is a problem. They might like running but find it is hard to cope with being demonstrably average. So some (I am sure it is a very, very tiny number) are tempted to lie and cheat, ignore the morality of the sport and move to the dark side.

There is a fascinating piece in the New Yorker about a middle aged dentist, Kip Litton, who has gone to enormous trouble to create the persona of a very fast masters runner. Many sub 3s marathons complete with intermediate chip times. However there are few race photos and little corroborating evidence from other runners. There have been doubts and  after investigation disqualifications.The evidence is overwhelming that his times are fictitious but there is still a mystery as to how he did it. He went to enormous trouble to pull off the illusion and even created his own race with other imaginary competitors. But why? I can only guess that he  had some pathological need to be seen as more than a small town dentist leading an average life. I suppose every activity will at some point attract such fabulists.

So what of politicians why would they lie? (Sorry if that seems like a dumb question). They deal in images and pictures, in describing a world that is all sunshine (if their policies are fully implements) and broken and rusting (if the policies of their opponents are implemented). Speeches are full of generalities and suggestion, with the aim of emotional connection rather than reasoned, evidence supported argument. Not quite telling the full truth is a stock in trade. However there is a line between that and telling an outright lie, which is usually observed, even if things are sometimes a bit blurry and sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between a misrepresentation and a falsehood. It is all part of the game. But there seems a chasm in integrity between fudging policy details  and telling a flat-out lie about yourself and your personal history.

Paul Ryan is the vice-president running mate of Mitt Romney and obviously wants to present himself as fit, energetic, and eager. In an interview he was asked if he still ran he replied: 

"Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don't run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or less." When what his personal best is, Ryan replied, "Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something."

Any runner knows this is just not credible. It's not that he might not have been capable of running sub 3 (who knows? He looks very fit) but that if he had done so he would know his precise time. it is not something you forget. You can only run a marathon that quickly after a lot of high quality training. It doesn't just happen. It is the culmination of years of work that dominates large parts of your life and becomes an important part of who you are and how you see yourself. After all that effort as sure as hell you remember your time.

No wonder Runner's World were suspicious and tried to check. In the end they found he had run one marathon in 1990 in 4 hours, 1 minute and 25 seconds. Now that is not bad at all and is a time many people (including myself) would be happy with but it is a world away from sub 3. It is not even the same type of race. It is not fudging your time with a bit of haziness. It is an outright lie

The thing I can't understand is why would he make something like that up. Saying you have run a marathon gets you enough brownie points why would you feel the need to pretend something more? My guess (and it is only a guess based on absolutely no evidence) is that he could not admit to being merely an average runner and was compelled to present himself as super fast. It also suggests he is a fantasist with an inflated idea of his own capabilities. In his dreams he would like to be that quick. So would I but the difference is I know it could never happen. He thinks he can pretend it already has.

I began racking my brains for some British equivalent of a politician who would lie about themselves and thought of Jeffrey Archer and the way he embellished his own biography. The difference is Jeffrey Archer was a genuinely quick athlete who represented Oxford University (although, of course, he was probably not entitled to).

Panorama Part 2 - shoes

Source: http://www.hgtv.com/landscaping/pretty-pots/index.html

The second part of the Panorama programme was about the claims of the running shoe industry. 

I don't want say anything about the barefoot vs cushioning debate (that ground has been well tilled in every runners forum for the past few years). Instead I want to mention one of those coincidences that can happen when you are thinking about one subject: something totally unrelated can become relevant. In this case an article in the latest London Review of Books about D H Lawrence's attitude to products of the modern world, the organic vs inorganic, the authentic vs inauthentic.

A world away from the claims of  Adidas and Nike you would assume, even if the essay title was 'Lady Chatterley's sneakers'. But no! Connie wore tennis shoes to meet Mellors in the woods and tennis shoes had crepe soles, which are at a less processed type of rubber product, i.e. not vulcanised, and at an interesting point in the continuum between natural and synthetic.  It is therefore obvious that any literary scholar worth his salt would discuss the efforts of the Rubber Growers Associations to promote the use of crepe shoes in the 1920s (oh do keep up!).

Some of their advertising was quoted:

‘The cushion of “live” rubber lessens fatigue and makes walking a pleasure,’ the advertisements claimed, ‘adding hours to endurance and a spring to every step.’ For nothing had been done, chemically or otherwise, to ‘impair the natural live quality and nerve of the virgin product’.

When I read it I was taken right back to the Panorama programme and the realisation that in essence the sales pitch of sports shoes has hardly changed. It might have added a sciency gloss but we still want something to help our endurance and give us more spring and if the current promotions for barefoot running shoes are about anything they are about being more natural.

The companies are still selling the same dreams.

Panorama on sports drinks

A month or so ago Panorama ran a programme on sports products (drinks, shoes, supplements) and really I had no intention of writing about it. The conclusion that we are oversold the benefits of these products is not startling and the style (which now seems to be the default for factual programmes) of having the presenter as an active participant, undergoing test, whilst making dramatic statements was a little tedious - so I didn't feel like saying anything.  But that was before things warmed up with a bit of academic venom.

Mark Burnley wrote this response and his lack of regard for Tim Noakes is quite obvious. Tim Noakes has replied and so we have a dispute about hydration and reputation that has a certain amount of animus but leaves me, as an outsider, feeling there is something else going on and I lack a bit of background. It probably relates to claims by Noakes that his work on the dangers of over drinking were suppressed by people and organisations in thrall to the sports drinks industry (in other words a conspiracy) and people on the other side thinking their integrity had been impugned. As they are all big boys and can take care of themselves they can get on with their fight. I'm not too interested in their relative personal honour, my concern is with the advice given to and the understanding of mid and back of the pack runners. This subject the Panorama programme addressed.

It was not "one of the most biased programme I've ever seen" neither was it a hatchet job on sports science. It was about the marketing of sports products and the way exaggerated claims might create a false impression of what was necessary for exercise. It stated quite clearly in the introduction that ⅕ of us go to the gym and 12 million take part in sport so their is an eager market for sports products and so they wanted to examine the claims made by companies. It was not an evaluation of sports science as a subject but about how science based claims were over leveraged.  In the case of sports drinks, the fact that they are sold in supermarkets and shifted in quantities far in excess of the number of endurance sessions suggests a number of people either like the taste (and are therefore drinking too much sugar) or believe they are necessary when they are not. In that context the programme's message that unless you are going long water is fine seems uncontroversial. Use of the drinks was not dismissed out of hand (they said they worked for athletes like Mo Farah and were good for endurance) but there was a concern that an exaggerated impression of their effectiveness and an overemphasis on hydration might lead to over drinking.

This is important because hyponatremia has caused death in some marathons and it has been the case, in the recent past, that marathon runners have been encouraged to drink as often and as much as possible - advice that cause this condition. (I have been to a marathon training camp where such advice was given). Although the official guidelines are much more conservative, old ideas can be persistent, especially if they are simple and to the point. 'Drink as much as you can' is easy to remember and act upon in a race and so hangs around. The importance of 'drink according to your thirst'  is not only that it is safer but also it is just as simple and easy to act upon. It therefore has a chance of replacing the older message. I thought the programme got this across quite effectively.

One of the Oxford scientists made an important point. The claim that performance deteriorates significantly if you dehydrate by 2% of bodyweight ("just" 2% in the Powerade literature) is widespread and oft repeated but in a marathon you can't action it. You cannot know how much you have lost at any one time, so out of fear of losing too much you will overcompensate. When you are running you work on simple rules of thumb and if you believe not drinking enough will be bad you will do all you can to make sure that doesn't happen. The operational understanding should be reversed: if you drink too much bad things could happen with the consequence that errors would be on the side of caution. A different mindset and one counter to a deep-seated cultural outlook: that if something is good then more is better (which is perhaps why drinks companies are so successful).

I'm sure there were some contributions to the programme that were edited out, perhaps they talked about optimum levels of hydration and and conflicting information. I don't know. I'm sure they would have been interesting if it had been a Horizon on the current state of scientific knowledge (and that would be a programme I would like to see) but this was Panorama. It was primarily about marketing distortions or myths and the way big companies can influence  our attitudes. Sometimes it doesn't matter very much but sometimes it does; but as information transfer is increasingly mediated by corporations we need to be ever more vigilant of the consequences. It is an important subject.

So there you have it. I saw a different programme to Mark Burnley. I saw something aimed at the more casual exerciser and general public. It looked at the science but only to the extent it was used to justify marketing claims and it was not about the overall state of that science. I didn't think it was great but neither did I think it terrible. I would however like to give this assurance as an outsider: I really did not come away with the impression that "sports science research was being conducted by either clueless muppets or industry shills"

The Meaning of Sport

Source: BBC

Saturday was probably the most exciting day of sport I can remember. Although the night, with its three GB athletics gold medal was uplifting and extraordinary in its own right it was only the culmination of a day of highs (mostly highs) and lows.

In the velodrome there had been the sight of the GB women's pursuit team, perfectly drilled riding for one another for their sixth consecutive world record. Such a relentless power applied with an economy of effort where only the legs seemed to be moving, was a wonder to watch. Afterwards at the medal ceremony the stadium was filled with noise as the whole crowd, led by Paul McCartney sang Hey Jude. It could have been a little bit cheesy but it wasn't. It was joyous. Community, celebration, connection between crowd and performer - everything was there.

Also there was a moment that showed something of the person within an athlete. Jo Rowsell took off her helmet to reveal a mostly bald head with a couple of tufts of hair. From the age of 10 she has suffered from alopecia and has had to grow into womanhood without one of the great signifiers of beauty (and to see what an important signifier hair is you only have to look  at the lustrous lock in any shampoo advert). It must have been  difficult but according to this article  cycling has helped build her confidence.  Wonderful - but it still takes a deal of courage to show the whole world your bald head and I am sure every alopecia sufferer will walk a little bit taller after having seen it.

That would have been enough for a normal day but there was much more. On the water there were two greatly contrasting rowing moments. One was an expression of joy and disbelief on the face of Katherine Copeland after she and Sophie Hosking had won their race. Wide eyed and opened mouthed she looked as if she could not believe it but in her expression she showed all the tumultuous emotion of sporting triumph and the reason people put themselves through so much. The other moment was the obverse - the pain of defeat.  Mark Hunter and Zac Purchase battled with the Danish crew and lost by the slimmest of margins to win silver rather than gold. They were so exhausted afterwards that they had almost to be lifted out of the boat and to give an interview to TV they had to prop each other up. They were distraught and the only thing they could think of saying was to apologise to everybody for letting them down. They had let nobody down. They had been heroic but because they did not meet their own target they felt the burden of the whole team upon their shoulders. (read Zac Purchase's account here).The interview went no further there was nothing anybody could say as everybody was moved and Steve Redgrave gently helped them away to a place of privacy where they could recover. If you ever wanted to see how people can invest every fibre of their being in a quest and what that means at the end, you only have to watch that clip. 

And so onto the evening in the athletics stadium where there was nothing but joy. Obviously winning three gold medals in one night is something that the GB team never do. It is impossible but somehow it happened. Not only that it happened to the people you would want. Greg Rutherford, the slightly surprising winner of the long jump has had to endure many ups and downs, injuries and a failure at Beijing that made him feel like giving up, so to eventually come out on top is one of those stories you want to happen. Nothing more can be said about Jessica Ennis and the gracious, sunny way she has born the burden of being the face of the games and the top medal hope. As for Mo Farah - well I just shared the joy and excitement of the BBC commentators.

But later there was something just as significant. At the press conference some numpty journalist asked whether he would have preferred to represent Somali rather than GB Mo Farah replied  "Look mate, this is my country. This is where I grew up, this is where I started life. This is my country and when I put on my Great Britain vest I'm proud. I'm very proud...To win the Olympics in the place you grew up and went to school just means so much to me."

Stick that in your pipe all those miserable people who complained about the multiculturalism of the opening ceremony. This is who we now are: a nation of many peoples and it is great that through the Olympics we have come together to celebrate it

Body Type, Aptitude and Skittles

One of my favourite moments of commentary from the Olympics on Friday was when Tomasz Majewski celebrated his victory in the shot put by running across the track to the crowd whilst the women's 10,000m was being raced. "He better not collide with them or he will scatter them like skittles." You could see his mental image: one big beefy man, a row of slight women and cartoon like fun. 

It highlighted was the way different body types are suited to different sports. Rowers for example tend to have a huge aerobic capacity and great endurance but I wouldn't fancy many of them in a marathon. Similarly you would not put any money on a basketball team made up of cyclists.  It is an obvious point but one that stopped me being convinced by the argument that champions are only made by focused hard work. I enjoyed Bounce by Matthew Syed and thought it contained lots of interesting evidence which showed most people could be better than they ever believed possible, if they practiced properly, with enough intensity, for enough hours. Nevertheless to be a champion, you have to have the right physical equipment for your event. You have to have enough aptitude to make the work worthwhile. The success of British cycling comes applying all the lessons of directed practice, analysing the different components of the sport and making sure no stone is left unturned. The athletes in their programme lead a disciplined rigorous life but before they are admitted they undergo all sorts of tests to make sure they have the necessary physical characteristics, the necessary talent. They know what is required and have identified people outside the sport with the requisite power and aerobic profiles and then encouraged them to take up cycling. Lizzie Armistead is an example. She had never even owned a bike before the age of 15, seven years later she has an Olympic silver medal for the road race. Champions are made from a mixture of talent, hard work, mental strength.

For the rest of us though aptitude is not so important. We can do what we want if we like it. we persist we will improve and in doing so affirm our own sense of worth, even if objectively we are at the back of the pack. For example I am not really built to be a distance runner, my shape is all wrong, but that does not stop me finding satisfaction in plodding along the canal. I can look at the slender frame of Mo Farah with limbs proportionally long and wonder at the sheer elegance of his stride and the beauty of his movement and know, that even if I had started as a young boy and worked as hard as possibly, I could never have approached his level of grace. That is fine I am not a competitive athlete my pleasure is more contemplative, more about the sensation of moving through the landscape, feeling the air, feeling the body working.

I may not be a natural but on the upside though I am not so susceptible to being scattered like a skittle

If only more people cycled

Recently there was a romantic piece in the Independent by Rob Penn on the joys of cycling. It concluded with a paragraph that sums up the reason why so many of us spend so much time on the roads cycling or running, on the hillsides walking or scrambling:

If you've ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you've ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you've ever wondered, swooping bird-like down a long hill on a bicycle, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary man touching the gods, then you share something fundamental with Bradley Wiggins, and you have reason to cheer him down the Champs-Elysées tomorrow.

It is a wonderful expression of how all of our individual efforts are connected.

But wait - scroll further down the comments column and there is antipathy and fear. It is amazing how many people have a visceral hatred of cycling because of boorish people who ignore the rules of the road and assume they can maintain a high speed in cities by relying on everyone else to get put of the way. I hate those people myself and can be as angry as anyone when jumping back to avoid a cyclist who will not stop for the lights. That is not cycling - it is selfish inconsiderate behaviour,  which happens in almost any form of human endeavour. But the images are so strong it is all some people think of when they think of cyclists.

The loathing must be countered because there is a growing momentum behind the idea that if more people use the bike for transport the health of the nation will be hugely improved. But for that to happen the infrastructure needs to be improved and that  means money and, for the first time in living memory, not putting the car first. In other words a radical step that requires at least the tacit support of a majority of people, so people who don't cycle themselves need to be persuaded that such measures are for the general good. Not easy, especially when you look at the reaction to some of the Olympic traffic lanes and proper, separated cycle lane would have the same effect. It can be done though as Holland and Denmark have proved but our culture is slightly different and we have a vociferous 'Top Gear' faction that makes such change difficult. 

Changing hearts and minds is always long and difficult but if it happens and more people cycle the idiots, the lycra louts,  seem less representative and the roads will also be safer. More people will feel the sense of exhilaration described by Rob Penn and fewer people will die prematurely through the diseases of sedentary living. 

It is an argument worth making.

Sport can mean something

Source: Associated Press

Even with the Olympics still to come and a number of other great sports stories that have already happened (who, for example, would ever have believed that a long-term journeyman tennis player, barely able to scratch a living, would, as a wildcard entry, win the Wimbledon doubles title?) I already know what sporting achievement will give me most delight in 2012. It happened yesterday when David Millar won Stage 12 of the Tour de France.

The stage itself was the least of it - a long breakaway, with a small group managing to stay away right to the end is worth cheering but is not in itself enough; such breaks are regularly attempted and each year one or two succeed. Even though David Millar initiated the move and demonstrated his skill at road racing, that is still makes it no more than a very good win,  not a great sporting moment. No those happen when some part of the story of the day transcend the mechanics of the event to make the victory mean more than a win. In this case, in Annonay Davézieux, it represented redemption.

Even though most people are now aware of the David Millar story it is worth repeating. He started in the sport when the organisation of British cycling was an amateurish shambles and so as a young man he did what all ambitious cyclists had to do: leave for Europe to find a team to learn what professional road racing really was. At that time being professional also meant taking drugs. Although he started off both innocent about their use and against them in principal, he was eventually worn down. He succumbed with an attitude (or internal justification) of “well it just has to be done” and “it is my duty to the team”. It gave him no satisfaction but he thought it was his job and so it was until he was caught, arrested and tried. Publicly humiliated, cast adrift by his team and the sport, he seemed at the time another sad story of someone with great talent destroyed by the dark side of his sport. For most athletes who have been convicted of drug use that is all there is - the end, a simple case of rise and fall. But that is not where it ended for him.

Firstly took full responsibility. He did not hide behind denials, he did not try to claim he knew nothing and it was an inadvertent mistake or other peoples fault. He did not say he was forced into it, he fully admitted what he had done. It was as if he wanted to find once more the integrity he had locked away, and be able to look people in the eye.

He was also aided by friends who would stand by him and nurse him back to mental health on the roads of Britain. Through that he was able to rediscover just how much he loved the sport and it is this love that is at the crux of his recovery. It gave him purpose and a cause: to prove top level cycling could be done clean. After serving his ban he not only pieced together his career he became an advocate. At the time there was a lot of scepticism and an awful lot of people were very absolute in their attitudes, believing that a doper is always a doper and so should always be a pariah. But he faced them head on and never shied away from the issues and in the end his love of the sport earned respect.

That in itself that is redemption enough but somehow a win in the Tour de France 9 years after his last stage win (when he was drugged)  ties everything together and presents it in one glorious moment. He was once lost but he found his way and his exultation in punching the air as he crossed the line spoke more than words.

To me that is what sport is all about: not only the struggle to be your best and define yourself but also the chance to recover and try again if things go wrong or you take a wrong turn. There is always hope,  the hope, that this time things will work out. There maybe stark outlines in that there are clear winners and losers but the metaphors and lessons can be taken into our, messier, everyday lives. Examples of endurance and will show what we ourselves can achieve in our own, less exalted context. And redemption...We all need stories of redemption. We need to know that nothing is totally lost and that even if things look bleak there is always the chance we can find ourselves again.

Support your local running store

One of the advantages of writing a blog is that occasionally you get free stuff to review. The idea of presents is always exciting so I like it when it happens, just as long as two tests are passed. Number 1: I have no serious reservations about the company. I know commercial companies are commercial companies and their main aim is not to sprinkle good cheer and fairy dust but I need to know they are not shysters and mountebanks (luckily banks have no great interest in running blogs). Number 2: I would use the product. I do not want stuff for the sake of stuff. I want to be polite: if someone gives me something I want to be able to write something nice about it.

Recently I was offered the chance to choose a running jacket from Up & Running  and this pleased me mightily because they are a company I am more than happy to endorse. They run my nearest running shop, in Watford, and every time I have used it I have come away happy. The staff have always been extremely friendly and helpful and that human contact combined with the feeling that the person is both keen about running and knows his stock adds an awful lot to the transaction. It is one of the reasons it is important for local shops survive in the face of competition from online bargains. 

However my sample product came from the online arm of the business and a very strange choice it is. Normally, in summer, I would not think the thing I need above everything else is a windproof, water repellant jacket but such has been the glory of June that is exactly what I thought. Crazy!

Now that I've got it I'm sure the weather will improve and there will be days of blue skies and balmy air with need for nothing more than a T shirt and shorts. I will just check. Oh no - Wind and spitting rain. Looks like my jacket is an excellent choice.

Juneathon 2012 Day 30 - Summary

Juneathon 2012 Day 30 - Summary

Gym - 35min

So Juneathon 2012 has finished and so I award myself a rosette. There is actually another reason for the photo - it has been a good year for the roses. This year's weather might bear little resemblance to the ideal of summer but the rain and moderate temperatures have obviously suited some plants and flowers. It is a pleasure to be out and appreciate how lush and green the landscape is. You see things are never all bad, which is a good link into my Juneathon efforts: it's not all bad.

After a virus, which had left me short of breath and feeble of limb for about 3 months, my only objective was to work on basic fitness. Cycling is quite good because it is load bearing there are times you can coast, walking is always the base of everything, and the gym is a way of working on strength. Rotating those three things seemed a balanced approach as they could all be done gently, at intensity that felt appropriate. I didn't include running because it felt too hard (I had one run with Tom during the month and it did indeed feel hard).

I might not have done anything of any great athletic virtue but this June has been a great success for one simple reason -  I stuck at it.  At the end of May I was not sure I would manage anything at all: I felt a great internal weariness and doing anything was a big effort. Now things are on the up and I have an optimism that I will be able to get fit again. It will take a long time because I am on the bottom rungs but at least I am on the ladder. Juneathon has been a beginning. 

So the stats have been:

Walking - 11 sessions, 15 hours, 44 miles

Cycling - 8 sessions, 9 hours, 122 miles

Gym - 10 sessions, 6 hours

Running - once, 2.9 miles