Advanced Marathoning tips (i): refection

Since I am on the road to recovery, now being able to run 10 miles, albeit in a painfully and shamefully tedious 85 minutes, I thought it time to dig into the slagheaps of my memory in search of inspirational training tips. And, bombarded with complaints about how long it is since I wrote a post (if a week's silence in the blogosphere is death, I am père lachaise), I thought I would share these nuggets of wisdom with you. Old runners are worse than old fishermen. The older I get, the better I could have been.

So this is the first post in a series of tips for marathoners looking to improve their PBs. Post ii, on advanced spitting technique, will follow shortly.

Eating. We need to do it a lot. When I first started running I couldn't figure out what was happening to me: I would begin to slow down towards the end of a run, as if I was out of energy. And I lost kilogrammes. These days, now I am more of an I-could-have-been-really-good runner, I am piling the kilogrammes on, of course, because at some point in between these events I learned how to eat. I have not, however, yet learned how not to eat. I am even contemplating running the London Marathon next year as Mr Blobby. Without fancy dress. Sean and I could compete to be the fastest Mr Blobby (long gone are the days when I contemplated competing to win the fastest Elvis race). I should add that I have never seen Mr Blobby, and don't know what he looks like, but I have read about him - or it - in newspapers.

So what to eat to get faster? Fruit of course, and protein and carbs in well-timed and measured doses. Of course, I'm too lazy and too busy for all that, so, malingering in the kitchen this morning with an hambre, I thought I would take a short cut. I would satisfy my complex nutritional needs with something that would really accelerate me. And then I remembered the biscuits my gorgeous girlfriend brought me back from her summer holiday in Bulgaria. Feast your eyes ...

Yes, no small claims made by these biscuits. They should be available on the NHS. And anything that cheers you up should make you go faster, right? You have to love Bulgaria: political rights, civil liberties, a temperate climate, centuries of empire concluded by centuries of Ottoman domination, (I'll skip World War II), and now biscuits that cheer you up. 'Antidepressant' is a better name even than 'Nice', better than biscuits named after mathematicians, like 'Leibniz' and 'Fig Newton'.

But they don't taste as good. They are chocolate wafers that taste like coffee you bought at a gas station in New Mexico and left sitting in the armrest before you drove through Texas and decide belatedly to drink in, I don't know, Georgia or somewhere. And they do not -- let me make this clear -- make you any faster or any less depressed. In fact, if you find yourself at a crossroads one day, out running along the Cam or the Mississippi, and the one path is labeled 'Antidepressant', that'll be the one that leads you to being the second fastest Mr Blobby in the spring.

So, advanced marathoning tip (i): eat wisely.

J

Curryworst and Weissbier

It is just before 9:00 am on Sunday 20 September, the morning of the Berlin marathon, and the race is about to start. The air is crisp with expectations and the scent of loose bowels. Haile glances at his flourescent adidas racing flats. The race organisers run through the usual preparations, and check that Vangelis' Chariots of Fire theme is cued to play. I look at my watch. Painedly. It's almost 9 am, and here I am in bed, looking first at my watch, then at the limbs of my beautiful girlfriend, crumpled beneath white sheets, and here I am nursing a sore head.

The hotel coffee is bad. More or less all drinks in Berlin are bad, except for the bier (though the spatburgunder is pleasant enough in context, you probably wouldn't go to an effort to import it). So I put on my jeans and wander off to a nearby strasse where I saw a row of cafes yesterday. As soon as I turn onto it there's a familiar guitar riff, and a band breaks into 'I Shot the Sheriff'. Groovy. I limp along the street, and the memories of passing down the long, straight, vacant strasse that lies ahead of me come rushing back. I used to be an athlete, I remember that now. And then there came the hamstring.

Hi-vis marshalls crowd water tables. Haile will be 8k into the race by now. He'll pass by here in a little less than an hour. I find a cafe and buy a large, muddy coffee, a large tea, and a couple of pieces of cake.

If I am guilty I will pay.

I limp back to the hotel, wrestle with the door holding drinks. It's the art-otel Berlin, elegantly themed in lime green and full of pictures of Andy Warhol, and the fancy electronic keys don't work. My head begins to clear, and soon I've dragged Nicky from the room so we can watch the end of the race. In the bright and cool sun we stand half a kilometre from the end, close to the Brandenburg gate. Cyclists pass by on the route, soaking up the atmosphere as if anyone cares about cyclists here.

Nicky charitably goes to Starbucks, which I've reluctantly learned to accept as a guarantee of a half-decent coffee. Then the runners approach. Haile first, and he passes us at 2:03:59, the same time at which he crossed the finish line last year. It's funny: he doesn't look like he's running very fast at all. I fumble with the camera and shoot the floor because I'm too busy watching him. Then the others. They're all wearing flourescent adidas racing shoes. I make a mental note to get a pair. Here's Kiprop, who came second in 2:07.04 (Haile finished in a leisurely 2:06.08, which isn't particularly overwhelming these days):

Note the shoes. And then came the others, including the pacer. I think his name was Negari Terfa, and he came in half a minute after Kiprop. It struck me as a little unfair that he ran under 2:08, and ran by as anonymously as the fat cyclists. It made me want to offer a little thought for all of the pacers in the world, who lead in the names for an agreed fee, and almost never win.

Then others pass, thousands of them. As the mortals run by I'm beginning to feel despondent. I see my own time from two years before pass ... that could be me. We don't stay but wander off to lunch. It's bad Italian food, but the weissbier is just fine. I will be back next year, and, racing flats or not, I will be neither hung over nor slow. It's time to get righteous again.

J

Return to the physiotherapist

I have been reading The Body Broken by Lynne Greenberg, a fellow Milton scholar. This is not a book about Milton, but a memoir about pain. Having recovered, with miraculous speed, from serious injuries sustained in a car crash when she was 18, nearly two decades later her body began to disintegrate, to un-heal. I remember meeting her between these two episodes, on a paddle steamer in Beaufort, South Carolina. That was before I became a runner, and before she fell apart. Her reflections are harrowing, and reading them has chastened me: I'm not going to write about my self-inflicted injury in terms of pain again, because it's just not up to it.

What I do need to write about is age and recovery. I also need to apologise for my last, out-of-character post, which has received more complaints than any previous post has received compliments. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I won’t do it again. Instead, I’m going to reflect upon my shortcomings.

Among the expressions of goodwill I received when news of my Decline and Fall spread was the following from Edward Jones, another Miltonist, and the fastest academic I have the pleasure to know (2:40 in Boston):

"Unfortunately the kind of injury you have combined with your personality do not match up well. The injury usually wins in the end by both chastening and not forgiving the personality. It is surely no comfort for you to know nor me to remember the decade of injuries I experienced from my early thirties to my early forties--except in one respect. After adjusting in my early forties in little ways (not beating myself up with speed, allowing ample recovery between quality workouts [4 days between them], and alternating shoes [3-4 pairs]), I have run 335 days a year since then. Last year I had a pr in terms of miles logged.

"You still have good years ahead and opportunities for better marathon times, but over forty runners must manipulate their bodies in ever so subtle ways in order to balance wear and tear with slowly decreasing VO2 max. I wish you good fortune with all of that."

So there’s my future: a Manichean struggle between a failing body and a raging struggle to outwit the inevitable. Lengthening times (race times, that is), shortening hamstrings. I hear the Raven look at my limp organs, and say: pathetic.

The physiotherapist took me seriously the second time. I explained that I'd found it hard to run. She nodded with her usual lack of concern. She goes through it again. “So how long do you run each day.” Last time she evidently switched off somewhere around “It depends …”

So I try to be more succinct. “My shortest run is eleven kilometres. My longest run is 37 kilometres.”

She looks confused. “In one go?”

Now I have her. “Yes.” She blinks twice before asking:

“Ok. Did you bring shorts?”

I still hadn’t brought shorts. I explained I was wearing decent underwear, without adding that my underwear is a lot more decent than my running shorts, even those pairs that are not torn, and certainly more decent than my Skins.

She begins to massage my leg, and this time there is plenty of pain. There is also a big bruise. She looks for some cause other than the injury, but there is none. She’s impressed.

I go out running every other day. It’s slow and I don’t enjoy it. I can’t understand why at first, but it begins to become apparent. One of the reasons I used to enjoy running was because it felt natural. I was good at it, and developed nice, efficient form. These days it’s all a struggle, and with concentration and effort I can run slowly. My footplant is quiet, at least, but I can feel the decline in efficiency that comes with a loss of core strength. I used to enjoy running because I was good; and I’m no longer good.

The next visit to the physio, I’m barely through the door before she says, “Could you get undressed please.” She massages the offending leg once again. It troubles her that I still don’t have much flexibility. Of course it’s not news to me. I’ve been like this for months, and have grown grimly accustomed to it. I’m just not getting any better. Is it because I’m not diligent enough in doing my prescribed stretches?

You see, I’m beginning to worry that it’s in my head. Perhaps running was just like this when I started five years ago, and I’ve forgotten that it involves struggle. Perhaps I am no longer motivated. Perhaps the weakness is in my mind. What’s injured is character. I re-read Edward’s email and think: do I really have the strength and resolve to go through that? Do I need to adjust to my age? Is mind or body inadequate here? Are they racing each other, to see which will give up first? Running used to be my struggle against adversity, an encounter with the non-rhetorical, the immiscibility of the physical world.

I think of John Milton writing glibly (in Greek) in the visitors books of European friends: “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” I try to think of ways that through my weakness I will be made more perfect in my strength. I hear an empty conch. Next weekend is the Berlin marathon, which I was scheduled to run. I’ll go anyway. And over my shoulder I hear the Raven look at my legs and say … pathetic.

J

Meme

I've been writing about i) angels and ii) asperger syndrome this month, so I have been thinking at length about memes, or cognate concepts bearing different names. I was a little surprised, then, to find that I'd been 'tagged' with a 'meme', which apparently means that I have an answer some questions and then invite some other people to answer the same questions. The tagger was my dear friend Mrs Trefusis, here, who has an inflated notion of me, for which I am very grateful. She makes the very valid point that as I'm no longer in a position to call myself a runner, then I need something else to blog about. So here goes.

What's the favourite thing you've ever written?

Milton's Angels: The Early Modern Imagination, forthcoming from Oxford University Press next February. If the question specifically designates a blog, then I have to confess that I am quite proud of some entries, while I regard others as fillers. I put much more effort into the entries on marathons. Only followers of this blog will have read the really good ones. They are:

• The Muezzin's Call - the Istanbul marathon.
• Five Bridges, Five Boroughs, and a Lake of Fire -- the 2005 NYC marathon.
• New York, 5 November 2006 -- the 2006 NYC marathon, with a guest appearance by Lance Armstrong.
• Basta problemi, on re-running the Milan marathon, was also quite good -- especially with the benefit of hindsight (the end of my 17-year marriage would begin when I got off the plane)

These were good because of the occasions. I was also quite pleased with an entry about the place that running sometimes holds in the bigger movements of your life, Recovery Runs, though that's a much more understated piece of writing.

What blog post do you wish you'd written?

Probably something by Brad Hickey -- such as this one -- because I would have liked to have had the meal (though the man isn't short of good meals, good wine and good company). I would also like to have won the Tour de France.

Choose a favourite quotation

Too many to choose from. Perhaps:

"Leaning, half rais'd, with looks of cordial love /
Hung over her enamoured"

Or:

"Hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

Or:

"Put me back on my bike."

Or:

"Sunt lachrymae rerum". (Because I love the economy of the Latin: "these are the tears of things" doesn't quite do it. See also: "Coelo tegitur non urnam habet.")

Or:

"Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

Or:

"Between the thought ..."

Or:

"Who if I cried would hear me among the angelic orders ..."

How could one possibly choose?

Three favourite words

That's tough again. Are the three words linked? Are they context sensitive? In which case "Agent Provocateur Shorts" have to be right up there with the most sublime words. If we're just talking nice, fancy words, my 14-year old self would have had a proper answer: umbrageous, incarnadine, desuetude. Perhaps numinous too. These days, I like all of my words, and feel that I need to hang onto as many as I can, as the years strip the elasticity of my brain cells and the words slip beyond reach.

Do you have a writing mentor, role model, influence or inspiration

Mnemosyne and Erato. And sometimes Clio.

What's your writing ambition?

Oh, to be Shakespeare, Joyce, the usual stuff.

Now I have to recommend three bloggers, which is tricky, because Mrs T. and all her friends -- MTFF, Belgian Waffle and so on -- have already been involved in this meme. And it seems unfair to drag in others, who have better things to write about: Brad Hickey, Fat Cyclist, Chris Priestly. So I respond: no. Basta.

J

The physiotherapist

Nurse Ratchett looked unimpressed as she dug her thumb deep into my hamstring and waited for a response.

That's how I had planned to start this, together with appropriate disclaimers about any resemblance between truth and blog being purely coincidental, but it worked out quite differently. My NHS physiotherapist was a diminutive Indian woman with a pleasant disposition. Having evidently signed up to the job in anticipation of helping people who can barely make it through the door, she adjusted to dealing with an endurance athlete suffering from a self-inflicted condition with equanimity.

Her diagnosis: I need to stretch. Who'd have thunk? We debate the merits of short versus long stretches. She is on the other side to me. She does stick her thumbs into the wound and can't find any soreness. Which is peculiar, as my masseuse, Zoe, who is almost qualified as a physio and should be hired by the British cycling team -- really -- had me writhing around on the table in the most exquisite raptures of agony not so long ago. You probably have to pay for that kind of stuff.

And then my physio tells me that I'll be running, slowly, and for 20 minutes, in a couple of weeks. And ushers me out of the door.

So I went home, and stretched. And then I put in my contact lenses and donned the lycra, got on my bike, and took to the B roads around the fens. And I put the hammer down. I cycled until my heart was louder than the air. And I held it right there, on the slight inclines and declines, through the cross winds, until my vision blurred at the edges. I held it just until the end of the kilometre, waiting for the beep of my GPS watch. And then I eased off, and then I went there again, and again. And then I cycled home and lay on the kitchen floor, and my head was as empty and echoing as a conch.

J

On inhabiting that liminal space between not yet being able to say 'I used to run' but being able to say 'I used to be a runner'

Or, why I hate Scotland (ii) ...

Seven weeks without running left me grimacing, but I knew that leaving it so long, without even trying a short one, was doing me good. When I put my shoes on again I would be ready to start training for the Berlin Marathon in September. I would come back refreshed, determined and therefore focussed.

So on Saturday I looked out of the window at a bright dawn, put my shoes on, adjusted the orthotics, and headed out along the Cam.
kilometre 1: I am slow to the point of stretching my own credulity. I hope that no one will see me. I knew, however, that it was going to be tough to start with. I have to remember how to run, how to pick my feet up, how to stay relaxed.
kilometer 2: still very slow, slower than 5'00" per kilometre, or 8 minute miling. I find the physical movement unfamiliar. I really have forgotten how to run.
kilometre 3: I'm stiff, but am I loosening up a little. I look at the watch and see that I'm running at 4'30" a kilometre, which is a bit more like it. I slow down almost immediately upon apprehending this.
kilometre 4: back to slow again. I think about turning around and heading back, having at least made a start. But I'm almost at the half-way point. It's nice along the river bank. My lungs feel ok, though my heart rate is probably a little high. Be still my heart.
kilometre 5-9: gradually I realise that my legs aren't going to loosen up. In fact the left is beginning to feel the same stiffness it felt in Edinburgh, a dull referred pain spreading along the leg. No stabbing or burning pain, but an immobile woodenness.
kilometre 10: in desperation I try to run faster. Perhaps I can just run through this. I can't. A rowing crew catch up with me as I lollop homewards.
kilometre 11: I really don't feel very good about this. I've made a start on the road to recovery, but it isn't going to be like it's been in the past, when I've been able to pick things up very quickly, and build mileage back to normal levels within a few weeks.

I walk the last few hundred metres. It's hard to walk. I stretch as best I can.

And then everything goes really pear-shaped. That afternoon I find it hard to walk. The next day the pain is real, stabbing, aching, undermining, just like it was after the ruin of Edinburgh. It hurts to sit. There's deep pain with movement, but also surface pain. I go for a cycle, but even that is hurting now. The injury hasn't gone away after all, despite 7 weeks of real rest.

Yesterday I went to see my GP. He uses words like "chronic" and "months", "physiotherapy" and "just one mile with walking". He draws some pictures to suggest the kinds of tearing I might have caused. Berlin in September? Not a chance. I am no longer a runner, and it's not clear that I ever will be again.

J

The King is Dead, Long Live ...

People have stopped asking me about my hamstring. It's probably as well: it's getting boring for everyone. I haven't run a step. I do have a new friend, though: Ms Bianchi. She's made of aluminium and carbon fibre. I hope that she'll stop my VO2 from plummeting into an asthmatic rut.

I picked her up yesterday, and soon remembered how to use clip-ins and brake-head gear shifters. And this morning I woke early and couldn't get back to sleep. So I downed a good load of coffee, and took to the road. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny morning, with only the faintest of mists rising from the fens, the breeze perfect for summer lycra. Somehow, however, while my legs and lungs presented no problem, my hands went numb, as if I was doing the death vice grip. I could barely change gear, or lift my hands from the drops. Seldom do technical problems present themselves in running. I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to get home. If a lorry didn't smash me into the ditch, I would fall off in any case, unable to manoeuvre.

By the time I reached Swaffham Bulbeck (via Midsummer Common, the river, Fen Ditton and then Quy and Lode), I was thinking of my friend Dean. Dean lost the use of a knee last year, and had to stop running. He has successfully returned, however, to his main sport, cycling. And last weekend he was involved in a two-day 600k race. That's a very long race. I'd only done about 16k, and was already contemplating my demise. I haven't heard from him since he set off ... does anyone know his whereabouts?

An hour after setting off, at about 6:30, I arrived at Nicky's house in Burwell. No one was awake. I stood outside her bedroom window and threw stones at it. I kept on missing, because my hands were numb. I called out and eventually she came downstairs and let me in. I made her a cup of tea, and set off home again. Could this be romance, I asked myself? This time my hands didn't feel so bad, and I made it in time to take the loaf out of the breadmaker. I miss running, but there's nothing like an early morning ride. I just need to fix the hands business - perhaps a month of intensively watching cycling on the TV would do it?

Normal service will be resumed shortly; in the meantime say hello to Ms Bianchi.J