I’ve done a couple of races recently. It’s been fun. Two weeks ago I ran a half marathon in my home town and last weekend some club-mates and I ran a local 20 mile race as a warm up for the London Marathon.
This race was notable for a few things. One was that I was happy with my time and that it confirmed that my training has been going well, and the other was that for the first time ever I received an email from another athlete taking part. It was sent via our club secretary; here is an excerpt.
I politely (and very slightly through gritted teeth) applauded those lapping me. Of the 7 or 8 who did lap me, the only one who acknowledged this was your representative, Ed Banks. And not only did he say thank you, he had the breath and good manners to wish me good luck as well.
Obviously it was a pleasure to receive such a kind email from a complete stranger, but it got me thinking and I felt compelled to reply. To paraphrase my response, I told her that although she admires those of us towards the front of races, the respect and admiration is certainly reciprocated. She probably cannot identify with my situation, nor can I with hers, but ultimately we are doing the same thing. Running. The only difference is that she is doing it for longer, and I have a huge amount of respect for this. I know that nearly everyone who starts a race is there to work hard, to graft, and to put themselves through large amounts of pain in the hope they will succeed. The sender of this email was out on the road for nearly 4 hours, far longer than I have ever run for in my life.
If anyone is the hero in this story it is her and not me.
Tuesday 28th February 2012
Double world marathon champion Abel Kirui celebrating victory with a dance.
Today, for the first time in a long time my long run started from somewhere that wasn’t my front door. Well, that’s not strictly true as we drove to our start point a few weeks ago, but this morning’s long run was different in that it took place in another city. This weekend we visited some friends in Bristol, one of my favourite cities in Britain. The sun was out all weekend and the weather conditions were more befitting of a day in April than February; the run was spectacular. Fortunately my friend is also a keen runner, well versed in the Sunday ritual of doing a run whose distance in miles begins with the digit 2. No chance of missing my long run this week.
Starting in Clifton, we dropped down the hill for a couple of miles, into and back out of the city centre, before heading towards the suburb of Westbury. The first half of the run was through residential areas but the second half was where it started getting interesting. We came out of Shirehampton and turned left onto a ramp which appeared to just head towards another footpath. I then realised that this ramp took us right alongside the M5, the motorway that connects the south west with the rest of the country. A steady incline for about half a mile was followed by a descent of similar length and we crossed the river Avon with cars and lorries speeding past us. I’ve never run over such a long bridge before and the breathtaking view in both directions distracted us sufficiently from the soreness in our legs.
We passed a couple of small villages and before long we found ourselves on a path along the Avon heading back towards the centre of Bristol. There were no cars, buses, trains or any other vehicle in our way. Just a few hundred other people with exactly the same idea as us. We wound our way along the path, talking about important things, unimportant things, about running, about life in general. It occured to me that this is what running is all about. No watch, no goal, no idea what pace we ran the last mile at; just good company, good scenery and the sun in your face. Whilst we all gain pleasure from bettering our PBs and seeing our hard training pay off in races, running really offers much simpler pleasures than that. The act of running itself, for its own sake, and without any greater purpose, can often be enough to put the biggest smile on your face.
Turning a corner, we saw in front of us one of the most iconic and well-known structures in Bristol, Cifton Suspension Bridge, a stunning piece of engineering that passes right across the Avon Gorge. The sun was streaming through its famous arches as we approached and the bridge looked imposing as we passed underneath it. Nothing puts you in your place and reminds you of how small you really are like a massive bridge hundreds of feet above your head.
We crossed a much lower bridge and prepared for the inevitable, the climb back up to the top. Whilst the view was breathtaking in the metaphorical sense, the road back up to Clifton was breathtaking in a more literal sense. We were gasping for air at the top. From there we took in the view, passing the bridge from above this time, and ran the short distance back to Mark’s house. The rest of the day was spent enjoying Bristol at a rather more sedate pace, sightseeing and taking photos.
Last night’s hill session was great. I managed to get 5 guys to come down for a few reps of our usual hill, more people than I would normally train with on a Tuesday evening. The hill efforts we do are 400m long, starting on the flat and getting steeper as you climb. I had done the same session on my own the previous Tuesday and it had been a struggle right from the first effort. Training in a group is much easier. So to celebrate that fact I won’t talk about the session, I’ll tell you about the guys who did it.
Chris has been a member of the club for a while but has only just started training with us. He’s a sub-34 10k runner and a triathlete who looks likely to take a big chunk off his marathon PB in April. He started the session tentatively but absolutely blasted rep number 8, acting as rabbit for the whole group. Starting too fast can be a good thing though; it trains the body to deal with pain. And I could certainly feel he was in pain as I passed him half way up the hill.
Tim, star of last week’s blog, was also in attendance and became the first person to actually manage ten reps of the hill after having set out to do so. He has been putting the miles in recently and is very strong. I had to make do with pacing him half way on rep 9 as I was spent after 8.
Ben is a mountain goat. He ran every club race at cross country this winter and just seems to do better on an incline than on the flat. His powerful sprint also suggests that he could be a rather useful 400 meter runner, should distance running not prove to be his thing. We had a nice little battle on the 8th rep.
Last, but not least, Rob joined us after the first rep. He gradually worked his way into the session showing far greater patience than the rest of us. I didn’t see the end of his last rep, but reports (Tim) suggest that he adopted a sit and kick approach, something that clearly dates back to his days as a middle distance man. You see, Rob is a dormant volcano when it comes to running, but when he erupts he does it with style and devastating speed. The speed needed to run 1:59 and 4:04 doesn’t just go like that. Now it’s time to get this man in a race before they delete his power of 10 page.
One notable absentee was my usual training partner Mark, missing due to illness. He missed a good one.
It was recently brought to my attention that I haven’t written much recently. In fact, looking back through the pages of this blog, I note that that last thing I wrote that wasn’t just a summary of my week’s training was posted on December 22nd. Six weeks and nothing original. But on the plus side, I have been running plenty.
The man who brought this alarming fact to my attention is a friend, training partner and club-mate who goes by the name of Tim. Tim also writes about running. He’s good at it.
Tim is a distance runner who dabbles in the odd bit of architecture (or was it the other way round?) and it seems that his fondness for design has also led him to a very meticulous approach to designing his training. Last October I sat down with another runner-buddy and composed what I thought at the time was a detailed outline of the training we would do for the next six months. I emailed it to Tim who then sent me his. Whilst I had used the ‘that-looks-pretty-impressive’ approach to planning my training, Tim had created a plan using the ‘grounded-in-rigourous-sports-science’ approach, one not previously known to me. This is also a man who rarely deviates from the schedule and sets himself tough but attainable goals; in this case 15:50 for 5000m at the university champs in May.
Beyond the vocabulary I have learned from Tim (still not sure about the difference between a macrocycle and a mesocycle though) I have learned the importance of setting yourself goals and being meticulous in the way you plan your path to those goals.
So here’s my goal and plan. The goal is to break 15:15 for 5k by this time next year. The plan is to train harder and smarter.
