Category: Long run

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Spectator sport

I sat reading in the tea-house for the duration of only one cup of quadspresso yesterday morning, before climbing about the magic carpet for a run.  I was due to attend a quiet ceremony to inter the ashes of John Brooks and was expecting my eldest brother to collect me.

I continued the 7mph tempo theme of the last two weeks, this time counting down twelve five-minute segments… which strangely varied in perceptual length from ten minutes to only a few seconds depending on how deeply engrossed I was thinking about something else at the time!

I was about fifteen minutes from the end when there was a knock on the window and I turned my head to see my brother running on the spot outside, bobbing up and down neatly in time with me.

He graciously allowed me to continue and stood chatting while I finished the balance of my seven miles and allotted one hour.  I probably wasn’t the best conversational partner though since I was dripping with sweat and was more than a little breathy!

We continued chatting while I tried to cool down outside, but to little avail… in fact, even after showering and changing I still felt like I had just climbed off the machine.  Thank goodness for the aircon in his car!

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Status anxiety

Most excellent blogger and friend Stuppsy has recently been asking where my running mojo had got to.  I’ve looked high, low and even in the pockets of running shorts that have been laundered, but all to no avail.  It’s temporarily absent… though I did find this nice clean ten-pound note.

Yesterday found me enjoying the peace of the tea-house and the moderate discomfort of philosopher Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety.

For an example of the discomfort, he quotes from the mid-nineteenth century psychologist William James:

‘With no attempt there can be no failure and with no failure no humiliation.  So our self- esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.  It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.  Thus

Self Esteem = Success divided by Pretensions.’

Of course, methinks, if you try to mix in Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s

‘Success = Skill plus Luck’, (and ignoring his real point, which is that great success = a little more skill and a lot more luck)

then, aside from the ensuing headache, you get

Self Esteem = the sum of Skill + Luck divided by (what I think of as) your Aspirations.

It strikes me that self-esteem should probably be at least 1 or above for us to be feeling good about ourselves, which means that if we aspire to greater things then we should be prepared to allocate time and effort to enhancing our skills and improving our nascent luck.

Curiously (for your writer really is making this up as he goes along!), another word for self-esteem is… mojo.

Sooooo…. if my running mojo is absent, then it probably = 0.  Assuming I still have at least some running skill and that luck remains relatively positive (at least I’ve not fallen over or pulled a muscle… lately), then what is missing is actually aspiration.  And as soon as aspiration rises above zero, then my mojo should return.

What all this means, in short, is that I need a new challenge.

Confused?  Hmmm… me too!

With half a book of these kinds of thoughts tying my head in knots yesterday, I retreated to the running machine to at least maintain my current skill level.

I continued the 7mph tempo from last week, noting that it was harder work, probably for the lack of a mid-week run.  What also didn’t help was the stitch I got from gulping down a Lucozade power-bar moments before I climbed aboard the machine… forcing me to focus on breathing rather than just being.

So 7 miles in one hour and apologies for the delayed posting… my office technology lacked mojo this morning and eventually conspired to stop me working altogether (and posting this).  We could choose to see something like this as unlucky, but as Alain de Botton might say (if asked), this is a matter of perspective… not so unlucky from the perspective of my parents, who got a little help in their garden as a result!

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A faster tempo hour

Sitting in the tea-house this morning deep in thought thanks to HBR, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to allocate any time to running.

I was still a little shell-shocked from having watched The Dark Knight Rises, the latest Batman movie, last night.  Whatever my expectations, I was stunned by the scale of this film… if you like fast-paced action films, then this is a must-see.  I really enjoyed it, even though we had somehow managed to miss the film that precedes it in the story… DVD being sought as I write this!

The highlight of my (already interesting) week was attending the Brighton Business School student awards on Friday and presenting Charlotte Horwood with the prize for Best Strategy Student, along with (appropriately) a one-year subscription to Harvard Business Review.  This was especially well deserved as she worked hard enough to graduate with a rare First!

I would encourage other business folk to engage with their local universities (not to mention schools and higher ed colleges)… it really is very inspiring!  Add to this the myriad ways that business and academia can collaborate to drive collective value and I’m surprised that more organisations don’t do it… though the 50 other organisations sponsoring prizes on Friday would seem to agree with me.

Despite the stuff buzzing around in my head this morning, I eventually reasoned that I needed to get on and run, so I climbed aboard the magic carpet with another tempo session in mind.

One of my curiosities at the moment is to what extent the conscious and subconscious can collaborate to good effect, so rather than trying to trick myself into running further that I initially planned, I simply decided to run for one hour at 7mph.

I covered the distance readout with a towel again so that I could focus purely on time-to-go and then set off.  My expectation was that the faster speed would preclude any deep thinking, but this was not the case at all.  In fact, at the end of an hour I had planned out two potentially interesting cognitive experiments.

With just over a minute to go I sneaked a look under the towel to make sure I was ahead of my 7 mile target, but found I was behind, so increased the speed to 9mph to catch up.

Overall, the run was relatively easy (as evidenced by the deep thought) including the short sprint and I could probably have run further if I had been in the mood.  This might well have had something to do with the mid-week run (from which I had tight calves for a couple of days).

Now I’m sitting back in the tea-house with my copy of HBR waiting patiently by my side… while I hurry to finish this post before my lap-top battery runs out!  Have a great week peops!

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Eye eye

For some reason my weekend seemed to blur into one long day… probably because I didn’t make it to bed on Saturday night.  In fact, with the exception of some short intermissions, I was awake for 36 hours straight.

The reason for this long day started  at 7.30pm on Saturday, after a circuit around the London Eye, when 15 of us started running along the Embankment in the direction of… well, the Brighton Eye.

I have been vehement in my absence at any such Ultra events that the other guys have been competing in over the years, but this one was conceived by Cliff and Andy so it seemed rude not to participate… though only after a considerable battle of willpower with myself!

We had two support cars which carried Andy’s spare shoes and most of his running wardrobe, though, to be fair, most of the others also had large kit bags.  This enabled the ensemble to run with micro-packs holding water and emergency supplies only.

Since I was avidly trying to avoid doing the run in the first place, I had not attended the planning sessions and so pitched up with all my gear in my running pack… which weighed about 7kg including 2 litres of water.  Dai tried to persuade me to decant some weight into the support cars but… well, I didn’t, choosing instead to lighten it slowly by consuming all the edibles!

The support cars met up with us at predetermined locations along the route and provided additional snacks, hot cups of tea and, for those that had them, fresh socks, shirts, trainers, legs etc.  This also meant that we could choose which sections we wanted to run, with some people running only a few sections and others running the whole way.

The general idea seemed to be to walk up any hills and run the rest of the time and I had hoped to complete the whole distance by going more slowly.  It quickly became apparent that this was not going to be possible since, in order to maximise the time spent off-road, the route was torturous.  Map-reading never having been my strong suite, I had to keep with the pace or get lost… although keeping up didn’t prevent the group from getting lost on a number of occasions!

As evening turned into night turned into morning, so the differential between my pace and the others’ slowly widened until I would catch up with them only when they stopped to figure out which way to go or at the next refreshment stop.

Eventually, on reaching the support cars at Weir Wood Reservoir at just after 7am , I decided to hang up my sodden shoes… everyone else  having already taken refreshments and continued on.  I had covered more than 43 miles in just under 12 hours.

My legs were tired and my shoulders ached from the pack but I could probably have continued further… but only at a much slower pace.  My mind was also tired though and the lure of an escape was too appealing so I joined the kit bags riding between check points.

The aim was that everybody would at least complete the first and last sections so I was fortunate to have more than six hours to recover until the last of the others had completed the next 18 miles.

I then rejoined the ensemble as we ran the final four miles into Brighton… though run is not the right word in my case and the others had to wait for me to catch up before we ran the final hundred metres together.

The event, which covered more than 65 miles in about 19.5 hours, was topped off by a ride on the Brighton Eye.

The gang of 16 (including Paula, our one permanent driver) were amazing throughout, though my Top Banana award has to go to Nikki who intended to do half but managed to complete the whole distance… and still managed to disappear off ahead of me in the final section!

I didn’t ask for sponsorship, but if anyone would like to donate a little money to charity in recognition of my efforts, then please go to my Just Giving site.  The charity, set up 20 years ago in memory of Big Man Daren’s brother Clive Packham, encourages Scouts to participate in adventurous activities by offsetting some of the costs of travel or training.  I particularly like it because they insist that the Scouts themselves present a formal case for the money they need and then make a final presentation of the event to the Trustees.

Even small donations will be very welcome!

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More magic machining

Since I will now be participating in the Eye to Eye run next weekend (rats!) I thought I should keep up the mileage, though how exactly you train for a 64 mile run I have no idea.  In 1976, as my brother and his friend Geoff prepared to kayak the 1,500 miles circumnavigation of Iceland, a local reporter asked how they had been preparing.  His answer was something along the lines of beer and large meals, which I think was lost on the reporter.  My best preparation is probably to get some pounds on too.

In the meantime though I went for another run on the machine.

Eager to find a way to make use of the Kindle I decided to listen to the book again, though since the earphones were a pain last week I just put it on speaker.  Unfortunately the volume doesn’t extend far and the magic machine drones at an equivalent level, but I found that I could read the text and listen so could get a sense of what’s going on… I know the book quite well anyway!

As part of my experimentation last weekend I went to sleep wearing the (uncomfortable) headphones to continue to listen to the book, though the scientific evidence is stacked against it being likely to make a difference to my understanding.  You have to give these things a try though, especially on a long bank holiday weekend.

I’m on firmer ground in my understanding that the mind takes in less information as the intensity of exercise increases and I demonstrated this effect to myself today.  I had started at 6mph for a mile and increased the speed by 0.2 each mile until I reached 7mph.

My intention then was to reduce back to 6mph and increase the gradient from it’s normal 2 to a more hilly 4.  Instead, however, I only reduced the speed to 6.8 and within half a mile I had realised my error.  My concentration suddenly lapsed on the book and despite reducing the gradient to 3, I still struggled to complete that mile at 6.8mph.  My subconscious also threw me a curve-ball by giving me motion sickness, presumably based on the fact that I was looking down whilst running rather than at the wall.

Either way I stopped reading and when I completed that mile I dropped the speed to 6.2mph for the final three miles.

The final result was 10 miles in 93 minutes, 6.45mph average.  I could have increased the speed at the end to keep the time to 90 minutes, but the aim for next weekend is to keep moving at a walking pace (even if I end up doing only a couple of the legs) so there is no point in exciting the fast-twitch muscles!

 

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New mind games

Anyone who has a Kindle will know that there’s a lady who lives inside it who can read your book to you, should you be otherwise engaged or too lazy to do it yourself.  They too might have tried this feature and will have also probably have chosen to leave the lady to twiddle her thumbs, on account of her intonation.  Or rather, relative lack of it.

But this gave me an idea.

We don’t necessarily have to be fully focused listening to something for the sub-conscious to take the information in, so an automaton voice could be quite useful for its monotonous clarity, even if the audible structure of the sentences don’t always make sense.

And since what I had in mind was a boring tempo run, I wondered if it might be an interesting way to inculcate myself with the contents of the book… rather appropriately a book on the subconscious.

Unfortunately the volume would not go high enough for me to be able to hear the words over the rumble of the running machine so I had to don earphones.  Kim was delighted!

This in itself had two side-effects.  Firstly I had to wear a t-shirt to clip the lead on to.  Secondly I had to hold the lead to stop it jumping around and being caught by my hands as I ran… the result of which would presumably be bye-bye Kindle lady as she jumped off the running machine console to land under my feet.

After a few dry runs and thus entangled I started to run and to listen.

I know that as we try to maintain a faster speed, so any surplus conscious processing reduces, so I had the perfect excuse to run slowly and I started out at 6mph and although I tried to go faster, settled on 6.5mph.  Around the five mile mark I realised I was going too slowly to meet my internal goal so I increased first to 6.6, then 6.7 and eventually 6.8mph.  With half a mile to go I increased again to 7.5mph in order to neatly complete 10 miles a few seconds under 90 minutes.  Average 6.67mph.

I have no way of measuring the results of the experiment, but it was certainly more of a positive distraction than the radio station I used to listen to when I’ve done longer distances on the machine in the past.

Why the longer distance?  I may or may not be running a leg or two in the Dargonne overnight Eye to Eye run in a few weeks time… it’s a 64-mile question that I don’t yet have the answer to.  I’ve said I will run if Cliff bought me a ticket to ride (on the London and Brighton Eyes) but only he knows the answer to that at the moment.

But I thought it was worth getting ready just in case!

Of course, I suppose I could be persuaded to do more than a token amount of it if there were a few leveraged monetary pledges for my favourite charity to encourage me and I will take any comments below into consideration…. though hopefully no-one will read this far through the post to take me up on the offer!

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More mind messing

From the range of garden activities yesterday, I cannot single any one out that made me feel tired, but the cumulative effect was clearly sufficient to knock me out for most of the evening and the rest of the night until 9.30am this morning.  And even then I was half asleep.

It’s way too easy to find excuses not to run, so despite not feeling in the mood I climbed aboard the machine with the intention of running 5 miles of lightweight intervals.

For two miles I swapped between sic and seven miles per hour, then the next two between seven and eight.  By this point I was already making bargains with my subconscious mind, battling the perceived tiredness rather than any real fatigue.  In the final mile I started on eight, then increased to 9mph before dropping back to seven and eventually six.

It seemed too little to do if I’m trying to regain sufficient fitness to be able to run with Mark, let alone participate in Cliff’s crazy caper… a run between the Eyes of London & Brighton, albeit taking the Girl’s option and running as part of a relay team.

Which reminds me that the Men’s Sussex Fitness League tables are currently in disarray.  Firstly, I don’t think that I’m even clinging to last place.  Secondly, a real Girl seems to be heading the table on account of her 3 hour 34 minute Brighton Marathon time… none other than Maria Lees.

Various excuses surely abound as to why the men weren’t in the running.  Cliff and Andy were paddling round in a kayak, Mark probably had some lame excuse for not getting a PB (but not quite as lame as my own one of not running it at all) whilst pretty much everyone had run the Paris Ecotrail 100km race a few weekends before.

Nevertheless Maria is surely heading the league!

All of which managed to persuade me to run a little further today before I switched the machine off.  I realised that to this point I had run an average of 7mph, so I ran on at this speed, persuading my subconscious that I would stop at 6 miles, although both of us knew that by then I would want to run the other mile to make it an hour.

The other weekend when I was egging myself on was much more of a struggle… counting down the laboured breaths to the next slower speed and to the end.  Today was more about just wanting to finish, but then again it wasn’t such an onerous session.

7.01 miles in 1 hour and I’m already planning what I’m going to do next in the garden!

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Marklighting

I had the pleasure of seeing Mark on Friday in a work context and the incredibly flowery shirt that he was wearing has led me to an admittedly spurious and totally illogical conclusion.  I don’t have a photo of  the aforementioned shirt so you’ll need to take my word for it, but the material must have been designed in the late 1960s!

I think that Mark was wearing it to distract onlookers from realising that his body was actually elsewhere, masquerading as a mannequin.  Fortunately I do have a photo of his body, standing casually in the window of a running shop in Queens Road, easily identifiable by the degree to which… er, I’m sorry to be blunt about this… his nipples stand out.

Mark won’t mind me mentioning this, I’m sure, since it is well known that he buys Vaseline in industrial containers to reduce friction rash in this area when running… and you can see why from this photo.

As those people who know both Mark and I will attest, there is a vague visual similarity between us.  It’s as if someone has squashed me from above, goatee and all, forcing my body and legs (yes, etcetera!) to bulge out.  This might help explain why he calls himself Mini-me, though the name could work for either of us!

But, for the record (Karen Scott) we’re not actually related… I meant to confess that I was pulling your leg, but got sidetracked… sorry!

Mark is busy competing in yet another marathon today (number 55?) and after my not running last weekend he shamed me into committing to a run today.  I decided the fastest way to get back into shape was on the treadmill, so after a couple of quadspressos and a banana this morning I climbed aboard with the aim of completing five miles.

I talk a lot (both here and in person) about the tension between conscious and sub-conscious and here was to be a battle worthy of mentioning.

I decided to do intervals, running every other quarter-mile at 6mph in order to recover.  The alternate quarter-miles started at at 6.5 mph and rose in 0.5 mph increments to 10 mph, before reducing again in the same way.

Adapting as the speed increased turned out to be okay, since the recovery period each time was quite generous, but having run a quarter-mile at 10 mph I didn’t manage to catch my breath before having to run at 9.5 mph.  This would have been okay if I was just running 5 miles, but by this point I had decided to run further and probably for an hour.

This is where the subconscious starts to kick in, trying valiantly to stop the body from running itself out of energy.  In a straight fight the conscious would always lose (you might be able to happily dance along a plank of wood on the ground, but place it between two rooftops and the subconscious will tell you it’s impossible to walk across), so instead it needs to play little tricks in order to get its way.

Strategies that I used today included: deciding that I would stop after the next recovery phase, be it the one following 10, 9.5 or 9 mph (and then not doing so on each occasion); focusing on something else by counting down the distance to the end of each faster quarter in breaths taken (five breaths to 0.1 mile); pointing out to myself that each interval was getting easier; and then by focusing on the pleasure of being able to write this post without having to confess that I wimped out when the going got tough.

There was eventually a compromise.  Having successfully got back down to 6.5 mph and run the subsequent recovery interval at 6 mph, I then relented and walked the final quarter to 8 miles as a cool-down.  At which point even the machine told me to STOP.

So 8 miles in just under 72 minutes, including the walk, averages at 6.67 mph and just about did me in… as you can see from my face below!

Having chilled my legs with a cold shower and eaten lots of peanut butter on toast I now feel pretty good, but only time will tell how well I will be able to walk come Tuesday morning.  All bets are off, but there’s a good chance that I will be walking markedly like a mannequin!

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Vicarious marathon running

With a whole load of great friends running in both the Brighton and the Paris marathons today, I couldn’t very well not go out for a run.

The sun was out but there was a chill north wind and I suspected that I had made a ‘wrong trousers’ choice as I ran off down the road directly into it… in my shorts.  It would have been a good day to run in the woods, but having not run for a while I was curious to see how far I could get and it’s easier to count the miles on my usual pavement run towards Clayton.

In fact it has been six weeks since I last ran (6 miles on the machine) and a further week still since I ran 10 miles, so my 10 mile plan was probably a little ambitious.

When I got to the London Road and the wind was behind me, the temperature in my gear became much more comfortable.  Three miles later, as I neared the turn point, I was even starting to get too warm but as soon as I turned back into the wind the temperature plummeted again.

It was clear from the little niggley leg pains from the second mile that I’d not run for a while, but I pushed forward regardless.  Today it was definitely my brain pushing my legs on and as I reached 7 miles they felt as if I had completed double that.  As I ran back up the road in the last mile they were definitely fading, so it was fortunate that the rest of me felt okay otherwise I would surely have had to walk.

All quite appropriate for a vicarious marathon… and no way could I have completed a full one today.

At 1:39 (and 59:91 seconds) the time wasn’t as bad as I thought, the return leg taking me 53 minutes against the 47 minute outbound one.  An overall average of 6mph on the nose.

Still not fast enough to keep up with Mark’s speed over 26.2 miles today.  Despite being ill and having completed the 50-mile Paris Ecotrail the other weekend, he still managed an average of 6.16mph , while Phil got a PB in Paris running 6.52mph.  I’ve yet to hear about the others but that probably means that they’re recovering… in the pub!

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Legs out and a lot of fun guys

Okay, so I knew it was a mistake putting old mushrooms in the compost heap last year… I even remember thinking so at the time.  What came as a surprise however, was the return on my error.

The bag was heavy enough that it felt like it contained potatoes… had my brother Nigel been around to advise on their edibility, I’m sure we would have had mushrooms for tea, and probably for about a week!

There had been a rat or mouse in the compost heap, evidenced by a very curious cat hanging around last week, so I decided to empty it yesterday.  Aside from the aforementioned mushies, my willing assistant Kim spent most of the afternoon sieving out around 200 litres of light compost from the heap, while the rest was returned to break down a little more.

While Kim worked her way resolutely through this task, I hollow tined the lawns front and back of the house (an equally thankless job), cut the edges and then scarified… thankfully using the machine!

It was a wonderful way to spend a beautiful spring day!

We awoke this morning to a second glorious day and after reading for a while, I got out to do my normal Sunday jaunt… somewhat surprised that I could walk after our garden exertions yesterday, let alone run.

With my sights set firmly on the Beacon and my legs out for all to see, I had a really enjoyable run out past Oldlands Mill and down through Ditchling.  There has been much in the news about low ground water levels and this was apparent from the comparatively small amount of mud.

One walker warned me that it was ‘a bit mucky up ahead’ but he and I clearly have different concepts of mucky… mine being that my runners are completely caked and I am slithering around like a speed-skater on ice, with mud splattering half way up my back.  There were a couple of muddy-ish pseudo-puddles but it was pretty much dry really

In contrast to last week, I had more than enough energy and ran up the Beacon, reaching the top in about 52 minutes.. the same sort of time it took me to run there with a pack on last summer.

I stretched out my legs a bit coming back down the tricky Beacon path (which again speaks volumes about how dry it was) and then down the next section to Ditchling.  This is often where I start to feel weary, but not today.  I ran up Lodge Hill with ease and back across to Oldlands Mill.

From here it was a relatively easy run back along the road to Burgess Hill and home.

10 miles in 1.41 meant that I had run a rare negative split and averaged 5.94mph, at least a little faster than my ‘pack’ runs last summer.  My prize was to allow myself to ignore the other chores I had planned for this afternoon… with a little help from the sofa!

Now, I wonder what’s for tea?