Leaping into the Unknown

The beach in Norfolk- besides me, my wife and my friends- is empty. The white foam topping the cresting waves and smothering the beach line, is the only thing that separates the steel blue sea from the grey sky stretching out to the horizon.

I walk along near my friends, with my wife further back and feel curiously detached. I think to myself is this what it feels like to be relaxed, or maybe I am just alone? The roaring of the waves and the whistling of the wind should make it hard to think; but in a strange way it is almost seems like white noise, slowing down my thoughts and giving me time to be present. Sort of like listening to one of those sea shells that you can hear the echo of the sea in.

Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness by Scott Jurek and Steve Friedman

A personal and revealing account of one of the greatest runners within ultramarathons. Jurek manages to blend his phenomenal running with a good argument to at least try to experiment with eating a vegan diet, which is made even more compelling by the fact that he advocated veganism before it became a part of today’s mainstream discourse on diet. Ultimately Jurek’s account goes beyond what it takes to succeed at the highest levels of ultra-running, and provides us with an insight into the man who came to dominate the sport in the 1990s and 2000s.

With the current running boom that we are experiencing it can be hard to find a reason to buy another book about another accomplished runner. How many times can one person read the same template of: I set the goal to win this major event, trial and tribulation ensues and finally victory occurs? Furthermore this notion to write running memoirs has spread to the everyday runners of our time, so that we can recognise the story of ourselves within them, finding a common suffering with the author we are reading. In many, but not all of these accounts, we find very little in the way of who these people actually are; in that we don’t know about what molded them or the uncomfortable parts of their running. This is what is so refreshing about Jurek’s book, we get to learn about the man behind the runner and how that has shaped him. This includes the uncomfortable moments of his personal life as well as his running.

Why the London Marathon can’t win and an annoying tick

I’m standing in one of the start pens of the Great Eastern Run 2019 (also known as the Peterbough Half Marathon); it’s cold, windy and everyone has been standing around for 45 minutes. We were meant to start at 10:30am, time is ticking away and we have only been drip fed information by the race organiser. The tannoy announcer asks for everyone’s attention and says that the race has been cancelled, due to a recommendation by the police. It is my first time at this race and it is not a great introduction, as runners go off in all directions; some go to get changed and others to do their 13 miles at whatever the cost. It turns out that the reason for the cancellation was because of a man acting suspiciously at mile 11, though the exact reason for why the police decided it was a threat will remain a mystery. From my personal perspective the race organisers could have been more adaptable to how they dealt with this problem. That said in this day and age of social media witch-hunts being conducted on a regular basis, it would have only taken one thing to go wrong and then the race organisers would have been crucified for not exercising caution. So after my initial frustration I can see why the race was cancelled.

Smile and say PAIN!

I feel like I want to throw up, as I am bent double and retching in the finishing funnel of the Middlesex 10k. The tight knotting in my stomach combined with the lack of air, makes me feel dizzy as I try to make my way down the funnel. Strewn around me are other exhausted runners, who I am guessing didn’t feel the need to be as sick as me. I always knew that September was going to be hard month of racing, and once I had understood the full implications of my torn hamstring; it was going to be a different sort of challenge. Whilst the way races went and the results haven’t gone how I would have planned or liked, I am still glad that I attempted this month of racing. If only for completing on the challenges that I set myself post-London Marathon, as well as the mental battles that I have found myself in.

Someone I ran with once said: “the distance of the race is not important, it’s how hard you choose to run it”. At the beginning of September I don’t necessarily know if I would have agreed with that statement. I may have cited the Buddhist monks who run to achieve enlightenment or Sri Chinmoy’s now (in)famous 3,100 mile race round a small square piece of land in New York for 60 days. Whilst I doubt that I will do anything as amazing or extreme as the examples shown above, I have come to learn the challenge of pushing myself at shorter distances than a half marathon. In some ways bringing more of a challenge for me than running a marathon. In short, and to potentially save you from having to read the rest of this post, racing shorter distances- when not fully fit- has tested me in more ways than I could imagine, but specifically and most acutely in my mental game.

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.