The Algarve

This blog is becoming as slow as my running. I have been back from the Algarve for a couple of weeks and not yet managed to post anything!

The running camp was such a good thing - the weather, people and activity were perfect. Below are a number of posts that describe some of the things I either learnt or observed. It does of course miss out a lot, like the pleasure of drinking coffee in a café overlooking the beach at the end of a run or the taste of the oranges that look manky on the outside but are wonderfully sweet… But then you can have too much information.

1 - Barefoot Runing

Imagine you are running on the compacted, wet sand of a beach. To your left the sea sparkles in the sun, to your right there are soft pillows of dry sand leading up to crumbly red sandstone cliffs. In front of you there is nothing else except the beach, sea and sky- the scene goes on for miles. You are running easily, barefoot, sometimes splashing in the water and for the moment feeling like a kid again.

This is what I will take back from the week - the sudden understanding of what felt good. It was most peculiar and almost accidental. On Sunday I had run back along the beach for the first time - it was quite pleasant but nothing special but I was running in my trainers. On Monday I started to do the same thing again. Halfway along, seeing others running barefoot I decided to do the same and suddenly everything felt better. My posture improved and I felt more upright, my stride shortened and my cadence increased. Before I had been heavy legged but that disappeared and the pain in my shins, that had been plaguing me, diminished.

It changed my week. I knew I didn't have the fitness to do two sessions a day and I had been wondering what to cut, the morning run or the afternoon training session. It was now clear that the most important thing was to run barefoot on the sand, in the morning

2 - The People

The great thing about the camp was the people. The whole atmosphere was friendly and positive.

All of the staff were incredibly open and helpful, enthusiastic and knowledgeable.

Mike Gratton himself, is warm and generous (as can be deduced from the way he helps people on the RW forum). Sue, the sports masseur said to me that he was immensely and that no one had a bad word to say about him because there was nothing bad to be said. Just by looking at the laughter lines around his eyes you knew that this was the case.

Bruce Tulloh reminded me of a benign colonial administrator from some early British movie - rather shy and diffident in speech but with an underlying strength and great moral fibre. He was someone you recognise as having a quiet virtue and is a great advert for the benefits of running. He was injured this week and it was the first time since 1955 that he had not run for over a week. I think he was born to be a runner. He has a slight build, mostly legs with his trunk being a small proportion of his height. (me I'm the complete opposite).

All of the people were great enthusiasts but Joe Beer gave the impression of being completely wrapped up in his subject. I had a really interesting conversation with him, where he had his laptop open used it to bringing up papers that supported points he was making - just like they were always on his mind.

Sue Wainwright did a great job of massaging my aching limbs but I think the conversation during the sessions was just as valuable.

There was an interesting mix of people who attended for example:

Bedders (of the RW forum) was one of the most positive people I have ever met. Bubbling with enthusiasm, so happy to be out and running all the time and just wanting to share it with everyone. Someone asked him if he had any races planned and then had to sit back and wait as an enormous list was reeled off. If you want to know something of the joy of running you only have to spend a short time in his company.

Two people worked in rural development, one in Malawi another in China. It was thought to provoking to be told about the problem of trying to develop sugar growing in Malawi, where there are enough men to cut the cane at the moment but not in the future because of AIDS.

Joyce Malley is a world champion masters Judo champion and the coach of the GB team and had that inner strength of someone who knows and enjoys what they do. We often chatted when running because we seemed to be about the same speed.

Triathletes - these people are really insane going for huge long cycle rides up hillsides and then going for runs. They have so much gusto.

Positive enthusiasm was everywhere.

3 - Easy Pace and Tempo

One of the key messages from Keith Anderson was the value of tempo runs. He said that intervals and other speed work was all very well but it did not build up speed endurance in the way of tempo runs. At his prime he was running for 60 minutes at his lactate threshold and put his success down to these sessions.

The soft-core runner in me was internally saying yes but no but yes. That sounds hard.

Afterwards I was talking with Joe Beer and he was saying that you actually don't need to do too many hard sessions. Research with successful athletes showed that they did a surprisingly high proportion of their mileage at an easy pace. If you think of an 80:20 distribution and you do 30 miles a week then you should only by doing 6 miles hard (and even that was not strictly necessary - certainly not at my standard).

So yes threshold work will do me good but it is probably more important to get in a good base.

4 - Nutrition

Probably the part of Joe Beer's talk that caused most interest was the idea that it was better not to eat before morning runs, well any run up to an hour, because it helped train the body to use fat as a fuel. As an example professional cyclists tend to train fasted, using just water, for up to two hours.

There was a certain amount of resistance to this from some people I was talking to as they said they felt cranky if the did not eat first thing. One girl was completely adamant and we could not persuade her to try it even once as a trial. That is fine because we all know what works for our own bodies and should stick with it. I know I like to run before eating and do it on all of my holidays where, because you have time to enjoy and feel you have earned it, the delayed breakfast is even more enjoyable. However I had no idea I was doing it for any good scientific reason!

I think that the point of fasted running was made to balance all the attention paid to refuelling and how we can get carried away with different sports products. He was for example sceptical about recovery drinks, saying we were much better off with real food. However he was very insistent about the need for gels during long races and made the point that a bad race might just as easily have been the result of bad fuelling as inadequate training.

The key point was however trying everything several times so that everything we did was habitual. He made the point that training is mostly regular and you don't do new things just before a race but with nutrition there is a temptation to change the normal pattern. Don't - stick with the food you like and get used to your gels at ever 30-40 minutes.

It is however one of the great paradoxes - we should be trying to combine running with a good healthy lifestyle by eating healthy wholesome foods, yet we are encouraged to consume quantities of these expensive chemical concoctions during racing and training. Ho hum.

5 - The Long Run is a Medium Session

That was what Mike Gratton said - you ought to do the run at an easy pace so that it does not feel like one of your hard sessions.

Hmmm I think the reaction of my body on a Sunday shows how far short I am of proper conditioning.

6 - The Trouble with Housework

The accommodation was quite austere. I had no problem with that, in fact I quite enjoyed the feeling of living like a monk.

I got into a simple domestic routine of keeping my few possessions in order, washing running kit, preparing simple meals mainly of bread, cheese and olives (and eating out at night). There was a pleasure in doing these small tasks. Because there was not much to do it was easy and I enjoyed the simplicity.

It gave me an insight about the pressure of housework at home and why it is a chore - there is just too much of it. No matter what you do there is always a lot more that could be done. Partly this is because of the amount of stuff we have (or have accumulated over the years). You not only own possessions they own you and need your attention in different ways.

It just reinforced the importance of this years resolution to get rid of unnecessary stuff.

7 - People Just Keep Coming Back

These camps have been run for 25 years. Norman is in his 70's and has been there from the beginning. So far he has been to 17 camps others also keep coming back. It says a lot about the week.

8 - Winter Breaks

I don't like the dullness of winter - going to work in the dark, coming back in the dark and the continued grey coldness is depressing. There is nothing like a burst of sunshine to raise the spirits. However it is a mighty shock when you come back and find it is still cold.

My target is the starting line



When I think about why running is good I think first of of the direct experience but then I think of the feeling of calm you get at the end. It is one of the things I value the most and a reason I find running so satisfying. It is like yoga (the function of which is to prepare the mind for meditation) it leaves you feeling empty but attentive. To attain that state I need to run for about 90 minutes at fairly easy pace, preferably by the canal or in the woods.

For the past year that is what I have done. I have not raced since October 2004, my focus has been the weekend and the longish run.. As a soft core runner I am quite happy with that but sometimes I feel I should both challenge myself more and connect with the community - in other words I should run a marathon..

My original plan was to leave it to autumn so that I could put in the training during the longer days when the weather is warmer. But about 5 weeks ago in a moment of impulse I entered Lochaber. I did this with some trepidation as I entered the race last year but had to pull out because of shin problems. I now have a bit of a mental block and worry that I will fail to get to the start line again, especially as my leg has never really healed and needs to be nursed. Perhaps that is why I have not mentioned this before - a superstitious feeling that it will not happen if I talk about it.

But you cannot do a marathon secretly, you have to plan and train and this has what I have been trying to do. But it has not been going smoothly and the switch from just running for the sake of it to running because you are obliged to, has caused some problems. The first thing has been illness. A couple of weeks into the schedule I caught flu. Under the old regime this would not have mattered as I would just have resumed running when my strength returned but this time I felt anxious because I was missing the important base sessions. Classic error I came back too strong and can now feel more pain in my leg, so have had to back off and cross train for a week.

However I am not down hearted. In my mind I only have a picture of me on the start line. That is all I am focussed on. Nothing more - no target time. All I want to do is get there and then the rest can take care of itself.

Oh and I have a cunning plan to try to get back on track. - I am going to a running camp in Portugal for a week. From the 9th March it will be me Mike Gratton and a couple of hundred others. If I get half as much out of it as Beanz and Pixie got out of TrailPlus, then that would be just dandy.

Just a toothbrush

In the last post bread and the supermarket supply chain was just a random example of how there is something interesting and extraordinary behind the most mundane of activities. Whether supermarkets are a force for good or evil is beside the point, the way they organise their distribution is impressive. Today I came across an article that clearly shows the intricacy and interdependencies of our global economy by looking at what goes into to the production and distribution of just one product.

It gives a different perspective to my run because although the example is an electric toothbrush but it could easily have been a pair of running shoes, a heart rate monitor or a technical T-shirt.

When I run I tend to think it is just me in the landscape doing something basic to being a human animal, something done by all of my forefathers. That is still the case but I now know more clearly I am also carrying the rest of the world on my shoulders, my wrist or on my feet.

Beige People

I was listening to Julian Cope on the radio when he was asked to cast a movie about the Liverpool scene of which he was part. He did not have any good answers about likely actors but nevertheless celebrated the colourful characters such as Bill Drummond, and Pete Burns. He then said someone else had become more and more bland until he had disappeared. I was reminded of Billy Connolly saying how he hated beige people. I guess it's the same emotion - the expansive, colourful character rejecting the dull.

I always feel a bit mixed when I hear such comments because although I love the extravagance of those people, their imagination and the courage to express what they feel, regardless of consequence, I also know that from the outside I am one of the beige people. I live in an average house on an average street. Every morning, along with thousands of others, I commute into to London. I have a close family and a small circle of friends and in social gatherings I tend to be rather reserved. However I do not say this with regret or in a self depreciating way - it's just the way it is.

It is also part of my aesthetic outlook, which is to look at the ordinary and try to find the extra-ordinary. It is always there - walk down any high street and look beyond the storefronts and you will always find some interesting juxtaposition of buildings: some history, some story. Sometimes I can be doing something as routine as supermarket shopping and be suddenly struck by how many loaves of bread have been sold. My normal perspective is the couple of loaves I buy but when I start to think about the scale of it all I am in awe of the amount of material that is grown, processed, organised, dispatched so that I can easily gather what I want. The whole supply chain is a wonder of analysis, organisation and reliability - each activity in the chain might be ordinary but combined result is a marvel.

That is just a small example of trying not to take things for granted. Running is part of this exercise.

I constantly repeat a small number of routes but I never get bored because I always see something new and am amazed at how I had missed it before. It is a constant reminder of how little I take in at any one time - there is always more to see. Sometimes it something that has always been there but unnoticed like the way the canal broadens and bends at a particular point. Other times it is an event on that day. On my last long run as I passed a donkey in a field it started to bray and until then I had never realised just how much they sounded like a door on a rusty hinge. I then realised I had never noticed that field and that donkey before.

By going over the ground many times I feel I know it better and can find the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.

If it is true for the landscape it is even more true for people. Look at any group of runners and usually they don't look like a gathering of beautiful people but within that group there will be any amazing array of personal stories and qualities.

If you look hard enough people are not beige.

Whale tales

A whale swam past my office today.

It's not often you can drop that into a conversation.

Unfortunately it has nothing to do with running - so I will have to stop there.

Run to the Border

It has been, you might say, a weekend of two halves.

Saturday was one of those miserable grunchy days where nothing goes quite right. Nothing disastrous, nothing to cause howls of despair and anguish, just a succession of low level frustrations that left me feeling anxious and grumpy by the evening.

However Sunday was long-run day but not any old long run, my absolute favourite – the run to Borders. This is an institution that helps my wife and I keep our communication channels open and clear. Every month we have a meeting at the Starbucks inside the Watford Borders. It gets us out of the house and any of pressures of having other things to do. We are relaxed and let our minds wander quite widely and associate freely. However we do keep notes so we can return to what we decided in the last time and see if there has been any progress. Sometimes yes and sometimes nothing has happened but there is never any recrimination, we only trying to look clearly at what we are doing.

Borders is about 10 miles away and I run there, mostly along the canal, whilst my wife drives the car and brings some clothes for me to change into. The stimulation of the run invariably puts me in the right frame of mind but yesterday was particularly good. After tightness of Saturday it was as if a weight had lifted. Instead of feeling ground down I felt as if I could stand relaxed and upright.

Sometimes you just know why you run.

It was also a good meeting. We talked about our main theme for the year – decluttering. We are going to go through all of our possessions and judge them against three criteria: are they useful, are they beautiful or do they have sentimental value? Every week we will make sure we have looked at something. Last week we sifted through kitchen cupboards and threw away bowls and tins that we had not used in years. This week we start on the books – something that is rather urgent as we have more of them than spaces to put them. By the end of the summer we should be able to get into the garage!

After that we tried to think of ways we could reduce our environmental footprint – save energy, recycle more, grow some of our own vegetables. There is a certain irony in driving ten mile to have a conversation about this but nevertheless we were showing intent. We were trying to take control and we made some progress.

So there you have it a weekend of two halves - with running having an important role in the turnaround.

Not broke

The summary of Peter Bradshaw’s review of Brokeback Mountain contains the sentence:

'Further than this, Brokeback Mountain is the story of how most of our lives, gay and straight, are defined by one moment in which things go gloriously and naturally right, when everything falls into place, but which is then infected by the bacilli of wrongness.'

For me that this insight is not exclusive to relationships; it applies to everything. I don’t know whether it is just me or whether it is the same for everyone, but with almost every activity I take seriously there is a moment of insight where I can see how things should be followed by a long struggle to try to make it so. Usually that struggle ends with failure and things never live up to the initial promise. Things once clear and simple become over complicated.

When I was younger I got terribly upset at this failure realise ideas. Now I understand that success or failure is not point - it is the process that is important. This understanding is the reason I like running - it is a constant reminder that the only thing that matters is to keep on keeping on. I have goals - if I make them, for a short time I feel good, if I fail, for a short time, I feel bad - they are like bubbles on a river. The continued satisfaction comes from the regularity of activity.

But for me to take running seriously there had to be a moment of insight when things seemed so ‘gloriously and naturally right’. That happened when I realised that I could run long. Until then I had a mental barrier - I couldn’t relate to the way other people could just keep going. Then one day I found a comfortable pace and my mind stopped thinking about what it was doing. I just carried on moving and instead of the world closing in with messages of ‘how much longer’ it opened up with a sense of wonder and the question ‘is this really me doing this?’

Since then there have been frustrations and difficulties - injuries and not being as fast as I want, or expect to be. My expectations shift and I am never quite satisfied. But somehow that initial sense of wonder keeps me going.

Christmas run

Went for a run this morning and I can’t think of a better way to start Christmas. Whilst my wife and elder daughter went to church, I ran alongside the canal. In our own way each of us were contemplative and felt in touch with the wider world - before we got down to the serious business of opening presents.

My run felt fresh. There were few people about - the odd dog walker and some couples out for a stroll - so I was determined to greet all of them. This is not my normal behaviour as us southerners are trained at an early age to avoid all eye contact and act as if we are invisible. I was thus not cheery and effusive but even my limited greeting was a bit too much for some people. Others though were really warm and that made it feel like Christmas day.

Down by the canal there were some narrow boats with smoke coming from their stoves and the smell of the burning coal was quite evocative. Open coal fires are now a rarity so the smell takes me right back to my early life. Even beyond that as I thought of early photographs of the canals and industrial towns, with smoke coming from a mass of chimneys and a black pall. From a few canal boats the smell can be nostalgic but it also remind us of how quality is now o much better. (I say this of course from Hemel Hempstead, which had an enormous black cloud of smoke overhead for a good few days).

There were other things that heightened the reality of the run. A woman dressed as an elf loading presents into a car made me smile, seeing kids out on new bicycles was just how it should be and the peeling of the church bells as I returned to the High Street brought everything together.

To all of you who read this have a very happy Christmas and to all of you who have posted comments in the past I would like to say how much I have appreciated them.

Smoke

No running today - it's probably not a good idea to be out breathing in the smoke fumes from the fuel depot explosion.

I have no dramatic stories to tell. I was asleep at 6am when I stirred to see my wfe looking out of the window. "wasssupp?" I mumbled. "There has just been a big explosion and the house shook" she replied "Oh" I said and fell back to sleep again. I have a really impressive, hair trigger, emergency reflex.

It was just like the big hurricane of 1987 when I slept through the whole thing and was only woken by the telephone. When I answered I sounded like a complete numpty, not knowing a thing about what had happened.

It is really rather strange today - I look out of the window on one side of my house and the sky is dark, whilst on the other side the sky is blue and bright.


 

Faster Smaller / Slower Larger

There is a lot of concern with the pace of modern living, with endless articles about stress, long hours, and the pressure of constant availability. Road rage is a symptom of anxiety about having ones progress checked, computer rage happens when things don’t work properly and take longer than expected, shopping rage happens when other people get in the way.

A lot of rage and a lot of expectation that everything can be done quickly and then quicker again.

There have been two recent books on the subject: Faster by James Gleick and In praise of slow by Carl Honoré. The first is really a descriptive list of ways that things have speeded up. The other book is more interesting because it has a central idea that things have gone too far and need to change.

The moment of epiphany for Carl Honoré was seeing an advert for One Minute Bedtime Stories and initially thinking it was a good idea. Then his brain kicked in and he started to think about what was important in putting your kid to bed and reading and how real communication takes time to develop.

The other side of the need for speed is that things have to be smaller and more digestible i.e. reduced to a size we can encompass in a glance. If the world is seen from the window of a speeding car then the scale is lost.

The importance of running is that it is a paradoxical antidote. One of the aims is to train to increase your speed. What is a race but going as fast as you can?

But this can only be achieved slowly. There are no short cuts. Training takes as long as it takes, as you cannot cheat your body. At the core of a training schedule is the long slow run – the building of endurance by running comfortably. You go at your own speed, it you try to go faster you will not last the distance.

The other thing is that you are part of the landscape and everything is in its proper scale. You can recover your sense of wonder at the landscape, or at buildings. Not only can you see things afresh every time you run, you actually feel the distance. Your physical capabilities limit your span and keep everything in proportion.

There is a poem by Theodore Roethke, The Waking:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

All you have to do is replace the word wake with run.

Why I did not run

Some months ago there was a Doonesbury cartoon where Mike asked his daughter what she thought of the appointment of John Bolton to the UN. She replied that he was just another right wing ideologue who never got over the left wing ideologues of his youth. You boomers are still refighting the 60s and since you are now running the show the rest of us have to suffer for it.

On the public level there might be a lot of truth in this observation but is it also true privately? I have therefore been spending some time sifting through my interest, beliefs and views to see what is hung over from the 60s and 70s - not only what I thought and did but also what I missed. One of the questions was: why did I ignore the first running boom?

The easy answer is that I never enjoyed running much at school. I was not a particularly competitive athlete (I suppose I just about attained mediocrity), but was fairly good at ball games. Running was thus something you did to get to the ball not something to be done for its own sake. Not only that, it was about bursts speed and uncomfortable if maintained for any length of time. But this is nowhere near the full answer.

At heart though I was not really serious about sport. I dropped organised team games by the age of 20 and what was left was a mixture of pick-up games or squash or tennis with friends. There were cultural reasons for this – there was a big divide between the social attitudes of a rugby club and the aesthetics of the counter culture. I was more interested in the latter.

Running should then have been the perfect sport, with none of the sports-jock, rugger-bugger ethos and being about self-actualisation. But I didn’t think of it that way – if I was not competitive, it was exercise and the idea of exercise for its own sake was alien. This is one of the great changes in social attitudes over the past 30 years. It is now generally acknowledged that exercise is a good thing in itself and running has helped bring this about. At the time however I was behind this curve, and exercise was just an unacknowledged by-product of activity. I was fit because I cycled 14 miles to work everyday but I never thought about it as sport - it was transport.

In this I showed a continuity of attitude with my parents (who were always active but in a purposeful way). So at a time when I had been questioning a lot of the social attitudes of my parents’ generation I actually shared some of their values.

Looking back I see even more of those continuities.

Letters to an Intimate Stranger

Rummaging through the jumbled attic I like to call my mind I thought about Jack Trevor Story.He was someone who took pride in being a professional writer, a craftsman, who wrote with great style and humour. In the 70s he wrote a well-regarded saturday column in the Guardian, that was later collected and published under the title ‘Letters to an Intimate Stranger’.

I think is a wonderful title and I remembered it because it is now a perfect description of what we do with blogs. I will sometimes write things I haven’t told other people and I am always impressed by the openness of the blogs I read.

But if we are intimate strangers I think the word 'strangers' needs to be redefined.