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.
