Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger

American Football collides with racial, economic and personal tensions; in a book which is ostensibly about a high-school football team, but really about the meaning of sport and its place in our society.

You could be forgiven when reading the cover of Friday Night Lights, that it is another clichéd heroic rags to riches story about a high-school football team. The sort of story where despite economic hardship and various other obstacles, the power of positivity and just believing things will go well wins the day; the type of story that doesn’t hold up well in the harsh light of reality. Friday Night Lights is not that book, it is a far deeper story going beyond what American football means in small-town America; to what sport (of any type) means for us.

The story takes place in Odessa, Texas, 1988. Right from the outset of the book Bissinger tells us that he moved his family to live with the people of Odessa, to understand what football meant for them. It sets the tone for this non-fiction story of a compassionate, but gritty and realistic, account of a season with the Permian Panthers. Bissinger hints at the fall-out the book created, and the bonds of trust he may have broken, to create this portrayal of Odessa; indeed we will never know in what guise Bissinger inserted himself into Odessa and what explanation he gave to the subjects of his book. Whilst some may question the impartiality of Bissinger, it is clear that he has gone to great efforts to paint of realistic picture of what high-school football means for the people of Odessa.

Augustments

What happens when you have to make adjustments to your August running schedule? You have a month of Augustments.

July to August has been a month of ups and downs for my running. Around mid-July I had managed to get both of my hamstrings healed and had started to ease back into structured training. It was a humbling process, as I had to start at paces that were slower than when I began training for London 2019. I was grateful to be training again, though I felt sluggish and tired from trying to play catch-up with my training for Valencia. It was just as I was trying to get back into full swing with my training, that I caught a horrible chest infection in the final week of July.

Born to run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen (Christopher McDougall).

Fleet of foot fantasy about the joys and marvels of running.

If you are completely new to the sport of running by way of signing up to your first marathon or parkrun there is no better way to feed your running bug than by reading this book. McDougall is an excellent story-teller, taking the reader along a wonderful ride through the predominant lens of ultra-running. The story that McDougall weaves is at once fascinating and exciting, as he explores the reasons why we run and what enables us to achieve such feats of endurance.

The story revolves around the now famous Tarahumara (a remote Mexican tribe), some eccentric characters such as Caballo Blanco and famous ultra-runners of the likes of Scott Jurek to name a few; and the race that takes place between Jurek and one of the Tarahumara. I won’t digress into the narrative, as that would ruin the book, however McDougall uses this so-called epic race to put forward a number of significant statements about the state of modern running.

Ultimately McDougall presents running in a sort romantic tradition, i.e. before the technological and commercial aspects were introduced to running, there was a pure or natural way of running that meant people could run for as far as their bodies would allow them to. The strongest part of this arguments comes from McDougall citing the Harvard academic Daniel Lieberman, who argued that humans were designed to run long distances to gradually wear down prey (e.g. deer); who could sprint in short bursts away from humans, but did not have their capacity for endurance. If this was as far as McDougall was willing to go by linking this research with the Tarahumara race, as well as the tribe itself, then that would not be so controversial.

Unplugging from the Narrative(s)

The Meaning of Existence
Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.


from
Poems the Size of Photographs, 2002, by Les Murray

To ITB or not to ITB

The world of English literature and running would be a very different place if William Shakespeare had written these- potentially immortal- words:

To ITB, or not ITB, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the legs to suffer
The hamstrings and Achilles of outrageous fortune,
Or to take massages against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That runners are heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.

Darling Buds of May....

Before you ask this isn’t some obscure reference to the recent events in British politics, rather it is my attempt to understand where my training should be heading next.

Reset

It’s been a strange time for me post-London. The main goal for the whole year had been to see whether I could hit a sub-2:50 marathon time, I did this at London, and now feel lost. This wasn’t something that I had planned for. The plan I had envisaged after London was to train hard for a number of 10ks, which would culminate in obtaining a personal best at a half marathon in October or November. This would potentially lay the foundations for deciding whether to go for a Winter marathon to see if I could improve my time from London. There is no reason why I can’t continue with this plan for a revised time for a Winter marathon, but I am still thinking about how and what the commitment will look like post-London.

After having some good exchanges with my coach about new paces that would be needed to get a personal best in the Winter, I have to say that I was pretty shocked at the new speeds I would need to be training at. I knew that I would need to work harder than I did in my training for London, but if I am completely honest I had never even considered running at those paces and what they would equate to for the shorter distances I intend to run over the Summer/ Autumn.

I think that’s partly where the feeling of being lost is coming from; in that I had never thought about running at those paces before that came as quite a shock. Indeed the time I ran at London was a shock to me as well. So there is definitely an element of not feeling entirely confident with what I have got to do next, which I appreciate is a key component of achieving my goals. If I don’t believe or cannot know how I can complete my training, then it’s certainly not going to help when I line up for a race.

VLM 2019: a day of reckoning

"Surely you are on for a personal best at London this year?", "just take it easy if you don't feel that good on the day" and "remember if the weather is like last year don't push too hard". I am sitting with my family on a warm Easter weekend in a homely Italian restaurant. The discussion has turned towards how everyone thinks I will do at the marathon. I have found- surprisingly- that my family have become uncannily good at predicting what I will do at each marathon, on the basis that they have been following my training and build-up races to that particular marathon. Numbers are banded around and bets are taken; with 2hrs 50mins and below even being mentioned as an outside chance for me. I laugh and say that would be a dream for me if I was to get near those times at London. My repeated attempts at reaping, what I would consider, a great run have yet to be the outcome from two years' worth of training. My stomach is full and my body feels relaxed (one of the many benefits of the taper period); so my thoughts- are quite naturally- turning to when I can lay down to sleep off all the food I have eaten.

Nevertheless the discussion about my potential times at London this year cause my stomach to tighten, various parts of my legs tense up and my mind to drift off to the all training I have done leading up to this year's London marathon. I still stand by Charlie Spedding's dictum- in his book 'Last to First'- that the London marathon is not a marathon for first-timers to be doing if they want to race it well. From previous experience the crowds that are meant to carry you around the course, lure you into a false sense of speed as you are carried along the course without even realising that your precious energy (and personal best potential!) is being sucked out along the first half of one of the greatest marathon courses in the world. By the time you are over half way through the course, it's too late and that feeling of ease in the first half turns to discomfort. The crowd becomes a wall of noise distracting you from the painful task of finishing a race that you have badly misjudged. You are a fighter who has walked into the harsh sting of an exquisitely timed counter-punch. That surprise is getting to and from Canary Wharf, so by the time you have made it back to the continuous crowds from mile 21 onwards your final remnants of willpower have been eroded and you are clinging on to the thought of just getting these last miles done. Yes I have definitely fallen prey to the temptation to go out too fast at London. Yet I have seen so many people achieve such wonderful runs and times at London, that I still hold out hope that I can do the same...