Guinness is good for you

"As highly-tuned athletes, we appreciate the necessity of treating our bodies with respect and the importance of ensuring proper replacement of nutrients after running. Consequently our Wednesday evening training is followed by an intensive "rehydration" session in one of the local hostelries (Guinness and London Pride are particularly popular) coupled with very good value high carbohydrate replacement foods (such as egg, chips & beans)." Marlborough Running Club's website somehow encapsulates what the sport should be all about and what, sadly, has been lost in recent times. It was certainly the reason that I joined a club back in the 70's. It also probably explains why Keith Firkin is now a member!

If any reader feels that this blog doesn't satiate their need for digesting inconsequential nonsense then I have just the answer: http://www.runnersblogs.blogspot.com/ is a site set-up for insomniacs who can't get enough of running blogs. It's a dumping ground for all types of running blogs, mine included, covering many aspects of the sport under various headings: Host Athlete; Elite Athlete; Humorous; Other Athlete (I know my place and should be thankful to still be categorised as athlete) and Other Blogs. There's some good topical stuff, with some great anecdotes on our sport, as well as plenty of dross. Some of them are almost as interesting as my blog.

Blogstar this week: Rob Forbes decided to watch England play in the World Cup in South Africa. He set off from Cirencester about eight months ago ... on his bike! 19,500km later he arrived in South Africa, via a 20km swim across the straits of Gibraltar, and promptly ran the Comrades Ultra Marathon from the high veldt of Pietermaritzburg to Durban with 23,500 others, a mere 89km (56 miles). And he performed superbly: at 23 he's only run one marathon before (2.45 at Berlin) so to complete the course 846th in 7:48:39 (3:40 marathon pace) was impressive indeed. A truly epic journey which you can read more about on http://www.tri4africa.co.uk/

Wednesday

So many endurance athletes struggle with Wednesday's training. To me it is the key day of the week but it is also the hardest to get right. The theory is do a track session on a Tuesday and maybe a fartlek or hill session on a Thursday. Most of us work during the day and might be able to get out for a 40 minute run at lunchtime at best. But if serious about performing at the marathon, a long midweek run is crucial and for most, doing this during the lunch hour is just not viable. So that leaves the evening and a 90 minute plus run after work is not an exciting proposition...

I promised a couple of posts ago to publish my old training schedule. This would make for too much excitement for one blog so instead I shall drip feed the reader with some of the finer points of a highly scientific process that took place through the late 70's and the 80's. Here is Wednesday.

Ranelagh's club night was a Wednesday, unusual as most clubs meet for a Tuesday night session. The faster runners would meet independently on a Tuesday for hills (plenty of them in Richmond) in winter and on an old gravel track at Harlequins' Rugby ground, The Stoop (this was a run down place before the onset of professional rugby union and is now much changed and has no track) in summer, followed by a few pints of Fullers in Twickenham.

Ranelagh's clubhouse - a corrugated iron shed when I first joined but then converted into a fine building thanks to a wonderfully generous legacy from a former member, Harry Sheer (a great cricketing chum of mine) - is set in the car park of The Dysart Arms pub opposite Richmond Park. Many a happy hour was spent in the pub on Wednesday evenings and on Saturdays after races when I used to help behind the bar. It was a good old fashioned pub with both a saloon and public bar, where the beer was cheaper, and a great landlord, Jim, who fully embraced the club and even came away on our annual outlying run weekend to Oxfordshire (best not to get into what happened on those trips in this blog ... oh dear!). The pub was featured in the opening credits of this year's London Marathon TV coverage when Sue Barker charted the initial discussions on the viability of the race that were held in the pub with the likes of Chris Brasher, John Disley and me! Sadly the pub has now been converted into Dysarts, a bistro type place with lousy beer, no atmosphere and a frosty relationship between pub & club (members drink at the top of Richmond Hill nowadays). A sad but inevitable consequence of today's society I guess.

Anyway, I digress. We met at 6pm on Wednesdays - it was always a struggle for me to get there, having commuted home from London then driven to Richmond. As a consequence of ongoing continuous heavy training I always felt like a zombie before Wednesday runs - possibly this was partly psychosomatic as I pondered the evening run - to the extent that it was a struggle to even jog at first, such was my weariness. Thankfully the others would be feeling the same and the first couple of miles along the flat paths in the park leading towards Kingston gate were always painfully slow with a lot of idle chat. But this was the perfect way to get into the run ...

As we approached Kingston the chat would gradually fade away and imperceptibly the pace start to pick up. No-one would say anything about this, it all happened naturally (there were no coaches in those days telling us to pick up the pace blah, blah, blah). By the time we reached a good hill just after the gate we were starting to really move, and off the top of the hill we were in top gear and absolutely flying. This hard threshold pace would be sustained to Robin Hood gate where, having done a couple of miles at pace we dropped down to a jog and regrouped. We started up again along the meadows towards Roehampton and the pace soon picked up; this time we sustained what must have been sub five minute miling all the way back to Richmond gate, another 2-3 miles. The lap of the park was about eight miles; we'd then regroup and add a few miles down into Richmond and back along the Thames towpath, generally at a good steady six minute miling, giving us about 13-14 miles in total. This was a hard session but so rewarding - the beer always tasted good afterwards as we chatted away into the evening.

This type of run is absolutely vital to a marathoner's armoury yet almost impossible to replicate. I tried it a couple of times a year or so ago on unsuspecting clubmates at Cirencester and it worked, but in today's regimented and structured coach induced training sessions this type of run cannot be categorised. It was all about feel and natural inclinations and was dictated somewhat by extreme weariness of the runners. Perhaps this is the problem today, runners don't experience that total wipeout fatigue that makes just walking a few strides so difficult. I wish I could bottle what I experienced all those years ago on a Wednesday evening and sprinkle it on today's runners.

My Blog Hero of the week (a new idea): Martin Croucher (see Jon Young's picture), fresh from taking part in the Two Oceans 36 miler in Cape Town, South Africa (a race I did a few years ago and would recommend to anyone, it knocks spots off London, NY etc), won the local Parkrun 5km race last Saturday. He doesn't profess to being a top athlete but just loves the sport - the fact that he's run races dressed up as various cartoon characters attests to this. He wrote a lovely piece for the Ciren AC website about surprisingly finding himself in the lead and how he dealt with it. This was his first ever race win and is something he'll never forget. Well done mate, thoroughly deserved and one to dine out on for years to come.

New target

I have only finished 20 marathons since my first one as a 19 year old in 1976, some 34 years ago. Given that I went through a phase of doing 3 or 4 a year in the mid 80's that leaves a lot of gaps. This week I read in Athletics Weekly that only a select few runners in the world have completed a sub 3 hour marathon in five separate decades. At London last weekend the first two Britons were added to this small group: Chris Finill who has run in all 30 Londons, and my old combatant from school days (he was at Roan, nr Greenwich, me Raynes Park), Steve Smythe. Steve won't thank me for reproducing this picture of the two of us battling it out in the Mitcham 25km in January 1981 (the Ranelagh gazette records that there was a strong northerly wind and a mid-race snow blast, hence the socks on my hands [running gloves hadn't been invented then nor colour photography it seems]).

This got me thinking and so I dusted off my old running records: had I run a marathon each decade? I knew that I went 10 years and then 15 years avoiding the classic distance, so wasn't sure how the dates slotted in. It transpires that I have indeed run marathons in four consecutive decades, the 70's (5), 80's(12), 90's(1) and 00's(2), all at 2.47 or faster, as recorded elsewhere on this blog. So I now have a new challenge: to run a sub 3 hour marathon this decade and maintain my long standing duel with Steve (he ran 2.46 last week). It was only a year ago that I ran 2.47 at Lochaber but, of course, it feels a lot longer than that given what has happened since. But surely I can muster up enough energy to potter round in sub 7's for a 2.50 something over the next 9½ years.

Whilst delving deep into my past I found this old picture from the last mile of the New York City Marathon 1981 (2:26). I might be biased having run six of them, but there is no doubt in my mind that this is the greatest of the city marathons - there is something special about the course, not least the fact that it goes through all five boroughs from Staten Island through Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and The Bronx ("you're in The Bronx now man so you gotta run fast" was the rather frightening proclamation on a banner at the 20 mile mark one year). Standing on the start line you can just about make out the famous Manhattan skyline (changed, sadly, since I was last there) on a clear day, and that's where you are headed. It's tough because it wasn't designed to be fast as later city marathons like London were, but as a consequence takes in all the best bits (and some of the worst, see above!), including the magnificent views onto Manhattan across the Queensboro' bridge and the delights of the rolling hills in Central Park for the last few miles.

Finally, great news from the selectors at uk:a after London on Sunday (you don't often hear that), so everything now geared towards Barcelona in July = hot!