Fifty Weeks Running Ruminations of a Rusty Runner

FIFTY WEEKS RUNNING RUMINATIONS OF A RUSTY RUNNER

January 1st 2011

hy? Why do we ask ‘Why?’? Arctic terns fly over One thing that I do know about running is that W 40,000 miles a year; the Dracunculus vulgaris no runners run all day, every day. Even for the most plant smells of rotting flesh; North American cicadas fanatical runner, running can occupy only a small have a life cycle of 13 or 17 years. But they do not ask fraction of a runner’s time. For the large majority of ‘Why?’. We ask ‘Why?’ of them. runners, their non-running activities are much more We also ask ‘Why?’ of each other, if we come important than their running. The answer to my across some apparently strange behaviour: Why does conundrum lies, perhaps, in the relationship between he wear a bow-tie every day? Why does she sing running and the rest of life. We shall see, perhaps. arias while gardening? Why does he collect Bulgarian I plan to write a thousand words or so each week stamps? If we feel bold, we might even ask the person about my running, with no doubt a few detours and directly. Rather more puzzlingly, we also ask ‘Why?’ of perhaps hiatuses along the way, as there are with my ourselves. Why do I continue to support Norwich City running. In the past I have always found it better to Football Club, despite decades of little achievement write an introduction such as this after I have written (that is, the football club, not me)? You would think that, what needs to be introduced (I have a slightly better if someone did something of their own volition, they idea what it’s about by then). A draft introduction is would know why they did so. useful as a guide but I expected to throw it away later. Nobody asks me why I run every day (well, almost That won’t do for a diary. It is against the spirit of a every day ... well, ok, some days). But I ask myself, in diary to come back and change the entries later. So, a subconscious way, every time I reach for the running whatever thoughts are expressed one week will stay shoes. After all, there must be a reason why, at my age expressed forever. (65), I reduce myself to sweaty exhaustion. To write at all one needs to have some image I have read quite a bit about running but I have in mind of the potential reader. I don’t know who, if read very little that relates to the way that I feel about anyone, will actually read these words other than me, running. I may not know why I run but I don’t think perhaps, in twenty years’ time. Perhaps they will be that it is really for any of the reasons that I read about. of interest to someone who runs or who thinks about Maybe my reasons will become clearer as a result of running or, since running is a ‘metaphor for life’ writing this diary. If so, they will only be my reasons. I according to some, to someone who lives or who thinks have no idea if they’ll be anybody else’s. about living. That about covers it.

First published in 2011 by Drakkar Press Limited, 20 Moorside Road, Brookhouse, Lancaster LA2 9PJ http://www.drakkar.co.uk

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1. Take up the Running 27. Running Away From Home 2. Running Commentary 28. Running Away From Home 3. Hitting the Ground Running (continued) 4. Do a Runner 29. Running Away From Home (continued) 5. Running Like Clockwork 30. Having A Clear Run At It 6. The School Run 31. System Failure, Run Recovery 7. Running Down the Clock 32. A Close-Run Thing 8. Run Amuck 33. Drug Running 9. Should Find A Running Banquet Ere They Rested 34. Running on Empty 10. In the Long Run 35. Run To A Standstill 11. Runner-Up 36. Running Sacred 12. Run Short 37. Up and Running 13. Running It Fine 38. Giving Me the Run Around 14. Sorry, I’ve Got To Run 39. Runs in the Family 15. Home Run 40. The Running of the Bulls 16. Out Run 41. I’d Run a Mile 17. Running Rife 42. Run Across 18. Running Gear 43. Run to Seed 19. On the Run 44. Run Aground 20. Can I Just Run Over That 45. Running a Risk Again? 46. Run Your Eyes Over These 21. Running the Gauntlet 47. Don’t Run Away With the Idea 22. A Run For Your Money 48. Running Wild 23. It’s Running A Little Funny 49. Running a Book On 24. Running Sore 50. Running Out of Time 25. Run the Good Race Map 26. Run For Your Life Index

Note for late-comers to this document: It was created and put on the web, week-by-week, through 2011. As promised in ‘the run-up’, I resisted the temptation to go back and tamper with any of the weekly entries, except to correct slips.

wise proverb tells us not to run before we can jog So I have this week restrained my natural A (or something like that). Muscles and joints that enthusiasm. Like everyone, I can’t wait to put my New have been dormant for a while do not take kindly to Year’s resolutions into action but my commitment to sudden excessive exertion. Last summer, for example, get back to running needs to be delicately nurtured. In I did some energetic wheel-barrowing for the first time this first week of the year, I have run a steady 14 miles for years and for a month afterwards my arms wouldn’t in four short runs (to the Waterworks Bridge, around let me pick up a cup or turn a door handle without the bridleway, up to the little bridge over Tarn Beck, complaining. and to the fishermen’s hut). This problem gets worse over the years. In our I don’t know what anyone reading this epistle will younger days our bodies forgive us after a day or two think of 14 miles, and so I probably need to put it into but I have learned to treat mine gently nowadays. I perspective. don’t suddenly surprise it; I creep up on it carefully. I A couple of years ago I started running again do very little at first, and then a tiny bit more, and then after not running for a few years. Last year, for a bit more, and eventually, before the muscles have the first time, I kept a record of how much I ran. I noticed, I have them performing prodigious feats of am sure that you would like me to share it with you. strength and endurance (I can but wish). According to my spreadsheet, which is a stickler for

Part of my running arena: Brookhouse, Caton, Halton and the Lune valley from Quarry Road. A standard short run is from Brookhouse to the Waterworks Bridge visible to the right. Quarry Road is the road up to the windmills, to which I usually run across fields rather than up the road (when I am fit enough).

4 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self precision, I ran 813 miles in 6488 minutes on 167 days which most universities have in order for staff to of the year. That is an average of 16 miles a week (or eat, drink and chat. The intention, perhaps, was to about 20 miles a week if you ignore those weeks when encourage staff and students to mingle. I didn’t see I didn’t run at all). You may think that is good or bad or, much mingling. Some staff brought sandwiches to more likely, ‘so what?’. I am just reporting the fact so eat in their offices, perhaps with colleagues. Others that you know where I am starting from. escaped to those green fields. They would grab their Over the Christmas period I didn’t run at all. It sports bag, walk to the gym, and be on the fields within is a time for the family, not to run away from the a few minutes. family. Ruth and Martin and Pamela and partners, plus I sometimes saw these strange people as I drove other relatives and friends, have a break from their around the university - bronzed (or weather-beaten) commitments, so I should have a break from running. Olympians pounding along the lanes, arms like pistons However, we are not entirely idle. Most days there is a and with a glazed look in their eyes. I then noticed the walk of some sort, sometimes up a mountain. seedy complexions of those with whom I was eating Knowing that I wouldn’t run for the two weeks sandwiches. I became increasingly depressed by around Christmas it seemed pointless to run for the two conversations invariably about the problems of life, the weeks before, especially as we had early snow and ice. university, and everything. Gradually I developed the Extrapolating this argument, I would never have run at thought that I’d rather join those out in the sunshine (or all last year, but I did, as I have just said. Nevertheless, rain or wind or snow, as the case may be). these first runs of January have been much like starting But not at first. I couldn’t expect to breeze into afresh. the gym along with proper athletes. It would be Even when, decades ago, I used to run ‘seriously’ too embarrassing when they powered away. First, I (and I realise that I am going to have to say something thought, I should get my body used to running and, in about my serious running later, as it’s all part of the the absence of any better idea, I decided to run home. reason why I am trying to run now) I never ran much Home was about seven miles away. I hadn’t done in December. It was always a struggle getting going anything sporty since I gave up playing football about again in January. And yet an enjoyable struggle, for the ten years before. But I didn’t lead an unhealthy life and process of gradually getting fitter is more satisfying, in the family and the job kept me active enough. I wasn’t a way, than actually being fit. in a hurry. Surely, I thought, anyone reasonably fit can And so, I am on my way. I have put 14 miles on the jog a few miles. Well, they can, but, notwithstanding clock. I will do my best to put on a few more during the my comments about muscle recovery above, not if they year, and also to add more words to this diary. But if I want to run again in the following week. should not run for a day or a week or a month, either I took things more gradually. Eventually, I got through injury, illness or idleness, then so be it. That is into the habit of, at 1 o’clock, joining the exodus to the what running is like for me nowadays. gym, and then running out, sometimes with others but Re-starting running is not the same as starting more often alone, as I didn’t wish to detain them. By running. The metaphysical question of why I continue December 1978 I was prepared to be persuaded to to try to run is deeper than the question of why I started join the Stepping Stones race, the annual staff versus running. I have an answer to the latter question, if not students race of about three miles, a loop over the the former (although, funnily enough, I suspect it is eponymous stepping stones. It was, thankfully, not an almost the opposite). altogether serious affair, partly because the students In 1977 I took up a new job at Lancaster University, always won. I came half-way, 26th out of 52. a green-field campus. Well, the campus was a green I began then, in 1978, to be accepted as a member field until they built on it but it remained surrounded of a running group. Today, however, I always run alone. by fields that were still green. While I would never have started running in 1978 For months, I was perplexed about what staff without the group to join, today all my motivation, such did during the lunch period. There were eight bars as it is, comes from within. We’ll see where it leads me on campus but nothing like a ‘senior common room’, in 2011.

ast week I reflected on why I started running but in his determination over 23 years to run at least one L I did not say anything about why I’ve started this marathon a year. diary. To be straightforward about it, it’s a direct result McDougall develops his ideas about natural of reading two books on running that I was given running through a search for a tribe with legendary last year - books written by Haruki Murakami1 and long-distance running prowess that lives hidden in Christopher McDougall2. the Mexican canyons. The Tarahumara Indians run No doubt it was meant well. I imagine that it was extraordinary distances without any of the advantages thought that the books would inspire me in my efforts that modern society is supposed to provide runners. I to run again. Unfortunately, I found almost nothing appreciate that the book is classified as nonfiction but I in them that corresponded to my own feelings about found that I could only read it as a fantasy novel. running, either now or as I remember them from long Both books reach a narrative climax with an ago. This diary is an attempt to draw out those feelings exceedingly long run, of 62 miles (100 kilometres) in so that I am better aware of them. I have no idea if they Murakami’s case and 50 miles over rough country in will be more typical of the ordinary runner than those McDougall’s case. They say that they took 11 hours of Murakami and McDougall. 34 minutes and over 12 hours, respectively. I believe Maybe it’s a cultural thing. I could not relate to the them. The important thing, as they make clear, is not evangelical obsession of the Japanese and American the time, although they are proud to tell us it, but that authors. There is, of course, a paradox here. Anyone they completed the course. who sets out to write about running is bound, you I do not know what will unfold in the following would think, to be somewhat obsessed by running. pages but I think I can safely guarantee that there will I fear that it will be difficult for me to convey, be no such climax. I have no targets in mind. Indeed, I through my half-hearted commitment to write a think it would be foolish to set any, at my age. I will be thousand words or so a week about the topic, that I am content with whatever transpires. only half-heartedly committed to running. It is quite I expect that I will return to the thoughts of likely that at times during the year I will lapse from one Murakami and McDougall (and possibly others) but in or both. That’s the way it is and should be. I am not a the meantime I am sure that you are agog to hear about robot. this week’s running. Actually, the word ‘lapse’ that I just used is the The weather has turned mild (wet and windy) after wrong one. It implies some failure. It suggests that a few very cold weeks but on Tuesday, in the interlude I have some duty to run and to write and that by not between the two, it was sunny and clear. I ran up the doing so I am being neglectful. That is part of what I hill in order to see the snow-capped Lake District hills am reacting against. When I run it’s because I want to, over the Lune valley, before the predicted rain came and when I don’t run it’s because I want not to. That’s all to wash the snow away. On crystal-clear days like this there is to it. Perhaps ‘half-hearted’ is the wrong word, Black Combe, 30 miles away, seems very close across too. Maybe ‘balanced’ or ‘realistic’ is better. Morecambe Bay, with the peaks from Coniston Old Murakami’s book explores his thoughts about Man to High Street arrayed to its right. A bonus was running, particularly concerning its parallels with his the sight, some eighty miles away, of the Isle of Man, primary occupation, writing novels. He reflects on the which is visible from my hill (Caton Moor) on only a role that running has played in his life, with thoughts few days of the year. on the deleterious effect of aging. He shows a long- On Sunday I ran up to the windmills, in cloud, term commitment to serious running, which is manifest but on the other days I sheltered from the wind by

running in the valley, giving me a total of 18 miles for that inevitably follows the first runs after a few weeks the week. off running. When one is fit it is easier: any soreness The natural world seems quiescent at the moment. is a strain and needs a rest. At the moment I am Nothing much moves down by the river, apart from proceeding cautiously, expecting (or, at least, hoping) the flocks of greylag and barnacle geese that gather that the soreness will gradually disappear as the in the winter, the former in the fields and the latter muscles toughen up. by and in the river. Otherwise, it is as if nature took This may seem a rather hesitant start to the year’s such a battering from the record low temperatures of running but it is not as hesitant as my starting this diary. December, with its snow and ice, that it is waiting to be I am fearful that the fates will consider themselves sure that it is safe to venture out. This is no doubt wise, tempted and will contrive to limit or even curtail my as the ‘real winter’ normally begins about now. running altogether, because of my audacity in thinking I am not moving much myself either. My running that I might be able to run and write about running for is intended mainly to gently exercise the legs, to try a whole year. to ensure that they don’t forget about the concept of running. I am trying not to stress the lungs and upset 1 Murakami, Haruki (2008), What I Talk About When I the breathing channels. I am running as slowly as I can Talk About Running, London: Harvill Secker. manage. I hardly think of it as running really. It is a sort 2 McDougall, Christopher (2009), Born to Run: The of down payment, necessary if there is to be any real Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners, and the Greatest running later. Race the World Has Never Seen, New York: Random It is difficult to tell the difference between the House. beginnings of a muscle strain and the slight soreness

ccording to McDougall (p9), “up to eight out of * Isn’t being ‘hurt’ the likely outcome of the macho, A every ten runners are hurt every year”. I am led masochistic running culture encouraged by many this week to reflect on that statement for two reasons. (including McDougall himself), in which, for example, First, I have eased back a little in my running. I to be a real runner you have to run for twelve hours think it wise not to over-stress my calf muscles. This up and down mountains? The ‘no pain, no gain’ is not fate intervening, as I feared it might last week. motto is familiar to all runners. It forces those of us Actually, I don’t think I believe in fate. Actions have not wanting to be thought wimps to run until it hurts, outcomes, intended or otherwise, but I am sure that the because otherwise there will be no improvement. action of writing this diary will not cause problems for Of course, some effort is necessary. Soreness and my running, through the malign interference of some discomfort are normal, but pain means that there is a agent called fate. It was the action of running two days problem. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to tell the in a row on the road that my calves did not like. The difference. fields were waterlogged but it would have been better * Why does he say “up to eight”? The figure is to run there. presumably less than eight. Two is less than eight but I am wondering if I count as one of McDougall’s I assume he doesn’t mean two. Later (p170) he says eight out of ten hurt runners. I wouldn’t say I’m ‘hurt’. I “65% to 80% of runners are injured each year”, again, can still run: I managed 15 miles in the week. I am just without references. So, let’s settle for 75%. not running as far or as fast as I would like. If I were * Does this 75% apply to all kinds of runner? Is it in training for the Olympics marathon then it might be true for: new runners who perhaps push themselves more of a concern. too hard?; for old runners who just run too much for Would McDougall consider me ‘hurt’? He believes their own good?; for long-distance runners?; for short- that running often leads to injuries and that this is mainly distance runners?; for great runners?; for ordinary because of poorly designed running shoes. If true, runners?; for fast runners?; for slow runners?; for this would be a serious matter for millions of runners runners who run once a fortnight?; for runners who run and for the billion-dollar running shoe industry. We twice a day?; for heavy runners?; for light runners?; for need therefore to know precisely what he means by his male runners?; for female runners? ... statement. He doesn’t say where he plucked his figure * What does he mean by ‘hurt’? Ask any runner if he from, if not the air, as he gives no references. But it is fit and he will respond with a list of ailments, sprains certainly raises many questions in my mind: and tweaks. This is because runners know that they * If you stopped ten people in the street at random are often teetering on the brink of their limits. They and asked them “Have you been hurt in the last year?”, have to be on the lookout for potential problems (and how many would answer “yes”? That, after all, is all it helps to have an excuse if running is not as successful that McDougall is saying about runners. as it is hoped). They know that the slightest problem * If his statement is true, is it so astonishing? How with any part of the body can make running difficult. many footballers, for example, are hurt every year? But they are not really hurt, by normal standards. If you take a squad of 25 players, as for Premiership * If a runner says on one day in the year “I’m a bit teams, and assume that one of them gets hurt every stiff from yesterday’s run. I’ll give it a miss today” does week, in training or in matches, then, on average, 20 that count as ‘hurt’? It sounds more like commonsense players will be hurt in a 40-week season, that is, 8 out to me. If I feel a tweak one day, I’ll have a brisk walk, of 10. That seems about right: most players miss one or not run, the next. I don’t consider myself ‘hurt’ but more games through injury during the season. McDougall probably would. But then he probably

8 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self wouldn’t consider me a runner if I couldn’t put up with because of a leg injury (although I have, of course, a tweak. given the legs the more-than-occasional day off and I * Is there any evidence that those who ran a lot in have found many other reasons not to run). the 1980s (like me) have more leg problems in old Last year my three longest breaks from running age than those who did not? McDougall says (p173) (apart from a holiday) were (1) after I tripped over that “the impact on your legs from running can be a tree root in Aughton Woods and tumbled heavily, up to twelve times your body weight”, implying that hurting my arm, (2) after I fell off a ladder while that cannot fail to do damage. Murakami (p127) says pruning the Escallonia, hurting my back, and (3) after I each footstep when you run is “a shock equivalent to slipped on ice, bruising my ribs. Would they count as three times your weight”. Which is it: twelve or three ‘hurt’ by McDougall? I was certainly hurt - and I was (perhaps it’s that “up to” again, in “up to twelve”)? running on two of those occasions, so does that make Surely, if running were bad for your legs, there would them running injuries? be evidence of infirm elderly ex-runners by now. It is impossible to reach general conclusions Without answers to all these questions, it is hard from one’s personal experience or from anecdotes. to judge the significance of McDougall’s ‘statistic’, For what it’s worth, I have, in over thirty years (on and although that hasn’t stopped those looking for a off), missed only a few days of running because ofleg pathway to painless running from throwing away their injuries. I have missed fewer days from leg injuries running shoes. than I have from other injuries and from minor illnesses My second reason for reflecting on McDougall’s (colds and coughs). statement is that I noticed from last year’s records that Perhaps I have been lucky. At all events, tomorrow on January 24th 2010 I began running again after a I will celebrate having my legs in running order for a few weeks rest to allow a calf strain to recover - and year. I certainly do not take this for granted. I might that since that day I have not missed a day’s running injure them the day after, who knows?

The weather has played its part in limiting my running. It rained all day Saturday and Sunday. The left photograph shows my riverside path to the Waterworks Bridge (the little island is normally on my path, with the river beyond it). The right photograph shows my path to the fishermen’s hut (this is normally a green field, with the river beyond the nearly submerged fence). I later discovered that the footbridge I (used to) cross to reach the hut has been washed away. I doubt that the Angling Club will be in hurry to replace it, as we are outside the fishing season. This is a pity, as the run up-river, now out of commission, is serenely peaceful in winter, when the frisky bullocks of summer are no longer there. I liked to run a little further up the river - to the hut, then to Claughton Beck, then to the River Wenning - as I became fitter.

here was a news item this week about a 73-year- there is not much one can do to improve it. Focus is T old man who was aiming to run ten marathons the ability to concentrate on the activity, ignoring any in ten days. The report showed him setting off on distractions. Endurance is the ability to persevere over a training run. My first reaction to his running style long periods. was that it lacked style and was hardly running. He I have not read any of Murakami’s novels but shuffled along, feet barely leaving the ground, with no many people have and he clearly has talent, focus and more forward momentum than if he were walking. My endurance as a novelist. What about as a runner? He second reaction was to realise that this man, though describes himself as an ordinary or mediocre runner. older than me, was aiming to run distances far further To appreciate fully what Murakami and McDougall tell than I could contemplate and that if I imagined that my us about running we should have an idea what sorts of own running style was more athletic than his then I was runner they are. probably deluding myself. Usain Bolt runs the 100 metres in 9.58 seconds1. Perhaps I need to re-think what being a ‘runner’ Haile Gebrselassie runs the marathon in 2:04 (that means. Murakami and McDougall do not define what is, 2 hours 4 minutes)2. Both are undeniably runners. they mean by a runner. They just assume that they Gebrselassie’s time works out at an average of 17.6 themselves are runners, on the basis, I suppose, that seconds per 100 metres. Or, to put it another way, anyone who runs is, by definition, a runner. I expect when Bolt breasts the tape, Gebrselassie would be that they would agree that anyone who writes is a only 54 metres down the track. The difference, of writer. course, is that while Bolt wheels away, arms aloft, in Murakami includes a discussion of the three triumph, Gebrselassie would continue for another most important factors in achieving success as a 42,141 metres at the same pace. novelist and, by implication, as a runner or anything Bolt is a sprinter, Gebrselassie is not. How fast else. He identifies talent, focus and endurance. Talent would an adult male have to be to reasonably be called is one’s innate ability at whatever it is. Being innate, a sprinter? Say, ¾ as fast as Bolt? That is, 12.8 seconds

The fishermen’s hut by the Lune, with Whernside and Ingleborough some 15 miles beyond.

10 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self for the 100 metres. Then if you run slower than that, you influences what they talk about when they talk about may run 100 metres but you are not really a sprinter. running. As for the extra-ordinary running of our McDougall says (p221) that “there are two kinds 73-year-old friend, I wish him well but whatever I am of great runners: sprinters and marathoners”. So looking for from my running nowadays it is not to be Gebrselassie, who is clearly a great runner, must be able to shuffle through ten marathons in ten days. a marathoner, although I know he doesn’t just run I’d much rather run for a few miles by the river. marathons. The photograph opposite was taken in December, Murakami and McDougall’s best times for the when the Lune iced over, but this week it has been more marathon are 3:30 and 3:48, respectively. When benign, dry with sunny spells - sufficiently so, in fact, Gebrselassie reaches his 54 metres, they would be to lure hundreds of lapwing, curlew and oystercatcher 32 and 29 metres down the track. Murakami and back to flock on the Lune floodplain. These are their McDougall are not ¾ as fast as Gebrselassie. So, first forays of the year as they contemplate their spring similarly, I don’t think that Murakami and McDougall migration up the valley to their breeding grounds. The can reasonably be described as marathoners just return of the curlew is particularly welcome as the first because they run marathons. Let’s not beat about the (perhaps premature) sign that the cold, dark days of bush: they are too slow to be called marathoners. They winter are over. have the focus and endurance but not the talent to be The birds are back but they are strangely quiet. called a marathoner. The lapwings fly in dignified ‘clouds’ with none of That’s fine: after all, McDougall said that a the erratic diving and turning that characterises their marathoner was a great runner and Murakami summer displays. The curlews, too, are all but silent, considers himself only ordinary and McDougall is still without their distinctive bubbling call so redolent of slower. But am I missing the point? The crucial thing is the high moors in summer. perhaps not the speed at which the marathon is run but I have found a way to run up-river despite the the distance (26.2 miles) that is covered. And Murakami footbridge having been washed away. I run in-land, a and McDougall run even further than marathons. little off the public footpath but close enough, I hope, They are ‘ultra-runners’. Perhaps, by running further because this is my favourite winter run. On Thursday, and further, if slower and slower, they will somehow for the first time since last March, I ran to Claughton become great runners in their own right. Beck and back, as part of my 24 miles for the week. Do they have talent as ultra-runners? Their times The path by the river is far from any road. Walkers for their 62 and 50 mile epics are about twice that of are so rare that the bullocks get over-excited if they the world records for those distances (worse, then, see one (even more so, a runner). Thankfully, the proportionally, than their marathon times). At their bullocks are in the sheds over winter. There is little ultra-running speed they would have covered 23 and sound except for the birds, muted as they are. As 18 metres respectively in the time that Bolt has run 100 I run up-river, I have wide views of Whernside and metres. Ingleborough beyond Hornby Castle, with the Caton It’s worth pausing to picture that. It’s hardly Moor windmills high on my right. Turning back, I ‘running’ at all, is it? You could walk it! Roughly am always impressed by how far I’ve run, when I see speaking, it’s like walking the length of a cricket pitch Brookhouse far distant on the southern slopes. I am in 10 seconds. Or, for American readers, walking from even more impressed if I am able to run back. the pitcher to the catcher on a baseball field in 10 seconds. 1 I apologise for all the numbers in this text. Running That is not my idea of running at all. Just because tends to be about numbers but less so than, say, cricket you can keep plodding along for hour after hour or baseball. doesn’t make it running, in my eyes. I can’t help feeling 2 Hours and minutes and seconds are separated with a that the motion needs to have some zip to it to count as : and . is a decimal point as usual. So 2:04:9.58 means running. 2 hours 4 minutes 9.58 seconds. 2:04 means 2 hours My point is that Murakami and McDougall are 4 minutes or 2 minutes 4 seconds depending on the ordinary runners who have done some extra-ordinary context. running. We, as readers, need to be aware that this

e-reading last week’s words I realise that I must (104.3 kilograms). I don’t know about Murakami. R come out and admit it: I am, or rather was, quite Running comes relatively naturally to me, although, of good at running and that is part of the reason that course, as I get older, the smoothness of my running I keep doing it. I hope that doesn’t sound boastful. has gradually disappeared. Whatever talent we have at anything - and ‘quite good’ Nonetheless, the memory of it, and the hope that is nothing special - is given to us. It is something to be a vestige of it may return, is part of the reason that I grateful for but not proud of. continue to try to run. I run because I enjoy running It is a weakness of mine that I prefer to do things - that is, the process of running. That may seem self- for which I have a modest competence. This has limited evident but many people say that they run in order to my life experiences considerably. I would rather stay lose weight, to raise money for charity, to have time to in what is nowadays called the comfort zone rather escape from life’s problems, and so on. These, to me, than make a fool of myself by attempting new activities are indirect, secondary benefits. To those for whom for which I expect that I have little talent. There is they are the main reason, running must seem like a an enormous list of activities that I could embarrass medicine to take for the good it will do. myself at: hang-gliding, camel-racing, playing the Whenever I start trying to run again, as I did on flute, yodelling, learning Yiddish, spitting prune stones January 1st, I reach a stage, usually after about three into cups (I knew someone who was dead good at weeks, when I begin to doubt that I will ever run that: you’d be sitting quietly eating your pudding and, comfortably again. I begin to fear that my body is plop, something dropped into your coffee cup from a clapped-out engine that, however tenderly I treat somewhere), ... it, just cannot manage any more. The legs seem Most people would, in my position, have long ago uncoordinated, the lungs are afire, breathing is accepted that they had gained all that they would ever laboured, energy is lacking. But I feel that I have, for gain from running and would have moved on to explore one more time at least, crossed this threshold. It no new experiences. They would say that life is too short longer seems inconceivable that I will run smoothly to keep on repeating the same old things. Certainly, again. there are no more ‘personal bests’ (PBs), beloved of As I get fitter, I can extend my range to places that runners, to be had at the age of 65. There are, however, I haven’t run to for a while. It’s like seeing old friends. PBs aplenty if I were to try completely new activities. On Sunday I ran up to the Caton Moor trig point, for I could, for example, time how long it takes me to spit the first time since last June. In fact, it was the first time 100 prune stones into a cup. for six months that I have run for an hour, and, a little But, forgetting all about PBs, I do gain satisfaction to my surprise, I felt quite comfortable. It was silent on from running well, relative to my age, of course. There the moor. No birds were to be seen, but I don’t blame is, for example, a physical exhilaration to be gained them: it was very cold up there. from running at speed down the fields from the The run up to the trig point is the most windmills. I am just beginning to feel, after a month straightforward of all my runs. From my doorstep it or so of tentative struggle, that I can push the body on, is uphill every step of the way, apart from two small and, yes, I am sure that the sense of competence does dips, for an ascent of a bit over 300 metres (1000 feet), add to my physical and mental well-being. and then back down again. It is satisfying to take the My body is better designed for running than challenge head-on and run up non-stop: it gives a it is for, say, weight-lifting or basketball. I am 5 feet sense of mastery over my local hill. I do think of it as 8 (1.73 metres) and 140 pounds (63.5 kilograms). ‘my’ hill, as I have, in over 30 years of running there, McDougall is 6 feet 4 (1.93 metres) and 230 pounds never seen anyone at my trig point, apart from the one

12 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self The track down from the Caton Moor trig point past the windmills. (It is supposed to be a bridleway but I have never seen a horse here. I have never seen a runner either, but there is the occasional walker to spoil my solitude.)

day of the year when they run up from the other side of I could understand it if, similar to me nowadays, they the moor for the Wray Gala race. just went for the occasional jog around the park, to I do think of it as ‘my’ trig point, too. Some years keep generally fit, but they chug along for hour after ago, the Ordnance Survey said that, as they didn’t need hour, day after day, month after month, as you must to their trig points anymore, volunteers could look after run marathons and beyond. them. I bid for the Caton Moor one. I never heard back Does it happen to the same degree with other from the Ordnance Survey. If anyone is looking after it activities? Are there people who swim, or skate, now, they are not doing a good job: I will have to take a or trampoline, for 12 hours at a time without being paint pot and brush next time I run up. particularly good at it? Is there perverse pleasure to Another reason for running there is that I might be gained in persevering to extreme lengths despite soon not be allowed to. There are proposals to cover some inadequacy? Do we actually admire those who the moor with a further 13 or 20 wind turbines, to persist in the face of adversity more than those for supplement the 8 already there. If approved, the whom it comes easily? turbines will effectively eliminate the main virtue that Do slow but persistent runners revel in the respect Caton Moor has - the view it affords of the Yorkshire gained from good runners? McDougall reports the Dales and Lake District peaks. following exchange with Scott Jurek, one of the world’s I said last week that I thought that to count as best ultra-runners, after his 50-mile race: running the motion needs to have some zip, a technical “You were amazing” Scott said. term which I carefully didn’t define. If anyone were “Yeah,” I said. “Amazingly slow”. to say that my current plod hardly has zip then I “That’s what I’m saying,” Scott insisted. “I’ve been wouldn’t argue too much. But I like to think that I run there, man ... It takes more guts than going fast”. at a respectable speed for a pensioner. My average This, remember, is McDougall writing about himself. speed last year was about 8 minutes per mile, which is He is saying that a supreme ultra-runner, a man who roughly the speed at which Murakami and McDougall has run over 165 miles in 24 hours, thinks that he ran their fastest marathons (but, of course, I am not (McDougall) is ‘amazing’ and has more guts than he running marathons!). (Jurek) has. I am not amazed that McDougall can run To tell the truth, I am bemused by those runners, 50 miles in 12 hours but I am amazed that he should like Murakami and McDougall, who invest so much want to. time and effort on an activity for which they have little I hope now that you will excuse my apparent natural aptitude and for whom running must always be boastfulness above. It is, it seems, much more a struggle rather than a pleasing physical endeavour. commendable to run far and slow than it is to run well.

n the spirit of candour that has infiltrated these pages indicates, it is not, I believe, because my personality I I now confess that I was a little disingenuous in my has changed. If it has then running has been a cause first diary entry. I did not start running in 1978. I had, rather than a consequence. like most people, run at school and had, unlike most At school I preferred football to athletics. Football people, enjoyed it. I am sure that the memory of those is, of course, a team game. Any personal success or school-days was part of the reason I took running up failure is secondary to that of the team. It is impossible (again) in 1978 rather than, say, swimming, of which the to win anything at football unless the team does so. only school-day memory I have is of being pushed into I realised in the first year at grammar school that the water to test the ‘sink or swim’ theory. I sank. there were several footballers more talented than Murakami says that running suits his personality me. As a result, I was only on the fringes of the school because he doesn’t enjoy team sports and is not team. But talent is not always a blessing. Football competitive. Neither applied to me at school. I don’t came too easily to some boys. Often, they did not believe one’s personality fundamentally changes apply their individual abilities to the best advantage through life, although one’s physical state, environment of the team, to the frustration of the teachers in charge. and social context certainly do. If I am now more Consequently, over the years, they faded from football. individualistic and less competitive, as my running In the end, I played four full years in the school first team and became captain. I learned that, as Murakami would put it, focus and endurance can compensate for a relative lack of talent. I would have played football all year if it were possible but the summer term was for cricket. I saw little point in standing in a field all afternoon so, along with a handful of others, opted for athletics, that is, running, in my case. I don’t recall any coaching. We were just left to run around the track as we wished. We couldn’t run all afternoon so we developed a form of interval training, with rather more intervals than training, I suspect. The training, such as it was, was more than the cricketers got and when the school sports day came around I was comparatively fit. I usually won one or more of the 440 yards, 880 yards and 1 mile, which were regarded as long-distance races for us. I was excessively competitive, to the mystification, I expect, of most boys. I am sure my head-to-head battle with Whitehouse up the home straight in the 1960 440 yards is talked about to this day. It ranks alongside the Coe-Ovett tussles in the Olympics. I was judged to have come second, by the way. I still hope that a Some young fellow winning some race photograph will turn up to prove the judges wrong. in about 1960. According to the Athletics Association the athletics

14 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self year started in June, whereas the school year started in me puffing along. September. This meant that I, being born in July, was Running is part of who I am and I am reluctant racing against boys most of whom were in the school to lose it, as we inevitably lose so much of ourselves year below me. as we get older. I wouldn’t be trying to run now if I One year I adopted a strategy intended to hadn’t run in the 1980s; and I probably wouldn’t have emphasise my literally superior class. In the longer run in the 1980s if I hadn’t run in the 1960s. I run now races, I sprinted off from the gun, leaving the others because I can and because I am reasonably good at it all far behind (the conventional thing was to jog (or was). I don’t run because my personality prefers round until the last bend and then sprint for the tape). non-competitive, non-team sports. If it were possible, Sometimes I ran the first lap of the 880 yards faster than I’d rather play football but I haven’t found a team with a the 440 yards winning time. After the first lap, I just vacancy for a 65-year-old midfield general who mainly hung on as best I could. It always worked: the others gesticulates from the centre circle. just ignored me and had a race between themselves. Perhaps that’s it: running is for those who are not I never set any school records. My best time for able to do anything else while running. the 880 yards was a shade over 2 minutes. At that time, Now, in case you are wondering why I’ve said the world record was about 1:45. So, 2 minutes was nothing about this week’s running, that’s because quite nippy. Enough to enable me to run for Norfolk I haven’t done any. We’ve had some wild, wet and a couple of times but then Norfolk is not renowned for windy weather that demanded more commitment and its athletes. determination to run than I have. Athletics is not a team game. There may be an In any case, I have some sort of bug. A fast pulse, ‘athletics team’ and one may be inspired by a team- runny nose, aching legs, and generally feeling rough mate’s performance but ultimately individuals compete has removed all thought of running. This is a pity as individuals. Success or failure is largely down as my running this year had, up to this point, gone to the individual. It wasn’t because I am inherently swimmingly (if that’s possible). It would have followed self-centred that I enjoyed running. I appreciated my schedule, if I dared to have one, for I had not missed the contrast with football. I felt the two sports a single run through lethargy, as happened many times complemented one another. In one it is essential to last year. I was looking forward to getting fitter. One cultivate the team ethic; in the other it is individual cannot, however, defy the body. determination that counts. I mention these school-day experiences not because I wallow in the half-century- ago past but because I realise now that they colour my attitude to running today. It is not something that I have ever talked about. Now that I think about it, I can recall some of those summer running activities. I used to run a lap of the track in, say, 75 seconds, then jog a lap and then see how many times I could repeat it. Nobody told me to do it; nobody cared that I did it. It was entirely a personal challenge. I just wanted to see what my body could manage. Even now, I have something of that attitude. I know that, if I’m reasonably fit, I can run from the windmills by the bridleway down to the road in 14 minutes. Sometimes, I try to run it faster, again, simply as a personal challenge. I do feel a little self-conscious, but there is never anyone on the bridleway to see The bridleway up to the little bridge and the windmills.

he English language does not have a tense suitable explanations of missing runs. The last was for three T for writing about my running. It would be an days missed because of eating contaminated ice amalgamation of the past continuous, the present cream. It smelt vile, through meat leaking into it. We imperfect, and the future implausible. all, except Pamela, who took one sniff and refused it, When I write “I am” it often seems necessary were very ill. to add an “(or was)”. What was so, is no longer so, A typical entry, for 30 years ago today, is “9/58”, and may never become so again, but I don’t want to meaning 9 miles in 58 minutes. Of course, I have no concede this by writing “I was”. Of course, I am not idea now where the 9 miles were and whether it was a trying to return to the past. I am, however, hoping hard, easy, good or bad run. At least, I can sit here now that whatever I can regain of the running experience and read with some incredulity how much I ran in those will help me to provide a perspective on the nature of three sets of 13 weeks. Before my second marathon it running from a vantage point of antiquity. was: 49, 54, 57, 50, 54, 45, 66, 70, 58, 74, 79, 47 and 40 This thought was brought into sharp focus this miles (an average of 57 miles a week). And I didn’t week when I was pleased to pass 100 miles for the just accumulate the miles - I went at a fair speed, an year, that is, in the first seven weeks of the year. Once average of about 6:30 per mile. Of course, this is still upon a time I ran 100 miles in a week. To be precise, puny by the standards of top marathon runners like twice upon a time. Haile Gebrselassie, who run at least twice as far each It is odd how we runners go on about our mileages. week and much faster. Murakami, for example, considers 36 miles a week to For my third marathon I ran somewhat further in be his standard for ‘serious running’ but there is no those 13 weeks: an average of 63 miles a week, also at mention of speed. As in so many cases, length isn’t 6:30 per mile. And yet further for the fourth marathon: everything - it’s the quality that counts. 36 miles at 63, 66, 75, 76, 79, 52, 80, 100, 72, 75, 64, 72, 46 miles (an 6 minutes per mile is very different to 36 miles at 10 average of 71 miles a week). I ran the 100 miles just minutes per mile. 36 miles up and down hills is very to see what it was like. I sense that my enthusiasm for different to 36 miles around a running track. keeping a record was waning at this stage, as the entries Runners’ handbooks always advise runners to become even briefer, with the minutes missing. keep a detailed log of their running. The idea (or hope) Now, they are just numbers on the page. It is hard is that runners can analyse their logs to determine to remember exactly what running 60 or 70 miles a reasons for their success or failure and so adapt their week for month after month was like. I know it wasn’t training. Until last year, I never bothered, even when I easy. I recall that I used to say that I woke up tired and was running with commitment. I guess it seemed too went to bed tireder. obsessional to me. Perhaps if we had spreadsheets And that’s it. I kept no record of my later running, in those days I would have done so, as it is mildly until last year. I suppose I saw no point in it. motivating to see the mileage total mount up. Nowadays, I run, if I’m lucky, about a third as far as However, I do have records in an old notebook in those distant days, and much slower. My spreadsheet of my training runs in the three months before the tells me that since I started keeping the log in January second, third and fourth marathons that I ran. I must 2010 the most that I have run in any week is 35 miles, have wanted to ensure that I maintained the required which is proof that I am not up to Murakami’s standard mileages in those build-up periods. The records are of serious running. too brief to count as a log. There are only five words It is easy to see why runners get fixated on their written - “windy”, “snow” and “ice cream bug” - as mileages. They are something concrete to focus

16 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self The River Lune and fishermen’s hut (a different hut to that shown on page 10), below Lawson’s Wood. Ingleborough is in the distance. This hut is 400 yards upstream of the Waterworks Bridge. I ran here after the heavy rain of a few weeks ago, when the river was full to the brim and lapping over the green fields, which was a scary experience. It is near here that Ruth has seen one of the otters that have recently returned to the Lune. I haven’t seen one yet: they can hear my wheezing a mile off.

© Pamela Self on. They give a measure of progress and provide a This week, mileage has been the least of my challenge to improve. But it’s like keeping a log of how concerns. It is tempting, as the body begins to recover long you spend gardening: it rather misses the point. from illness, to set out to make up for lost time but, From now on, I’ll stop trying to squeeze a mention of after an eight-day layoff, much of what fitness I had mileages into this text unless there is a good reason to has evaporated. I still feel too feeble to contemplate do so (but, just in case any reader should feel bereft, anything like a run up to the trig point. I don’t have the I’ll tuck the mileages, for the week and the year, energy for any hills at all, and have therefore just run unobtrusively at the bottom left of these pages). along the riverside or the old railway line, which have There is, in any case, something irrational about the welcome virtue of being flat. focussing on mileages rather than minuteages. It I’ve settled for regularity rather than boldness. is the minuteage that is the more precise measure, I’ve run every day since Sunday, but slowly and not far. unless you use a GPS device, which is an unnecessary I consider the runs, such as they are, to be part of my extravagance for me. rehabilitation programme. I want my body to expect to A couple of weeks ago I said that I ran up to the run every day (before my bug, my running had been Caton Moor trig point and back in an hour. I don’t know rather irregular and the body had always seemed to the mileage precisely. It is irrelevant, really. The route take offence when asked to run). is an idiosyncratic one, up and down the hill, wiggling While I’ve not been paying attention, nature has about on road, track, grassy field and rough moor. I moved on a little. The dawn chorus has begun. The can estimate the effective distance better by the time it daffodils have shot up. The afternoons are brighter takes me to run it than by what the map says. In fact, I longer, enabling a run after tea-time. But it is still quiet know my runs better by the times they usually take me by the river. The flocks of a few weeks ago seem to rather than whatever distances they might be. I select have been blown away by the gales of last week. a run on the basis of how much time I want to run, not Everything, including me, is in a state of uncertainty, on how far. unsure whether the winter is in the past or the present.

ocus and endurance are not enough. They only starting place and I eagerly positioned myself at the F apply once an activity is underway. Something more front. It turned out to be the back, for the race set off in is needed to get started. For runners perhaps this is the the opposite direction. I had to weave my way through attribute of defiance, a sort of bloody-mindedness that the majority of boys who were walking and jogging, relishes overcoming whatever challenges there may with no enthusiasm for the race. be. Or maybe it’s a lack of imagination, an inability By the time the finishing line came in sight I was to perceive that the challenges should be postponed fourth. A teacher urged me on: “He’s tiring, you can for a while. catch him”. The boy ahead did indeed seem to be I used to run with a runner who always accelerated tiring, with his head lolling from side to side. So, with when he came to a small hill. He seemed to take the a ferocious sprint, I managed to pip him to take third hill as a personal affront: “this hill thinks it’s going to place. I overheard some spectators wondering why it slow me down - well, I’ll show it”. McDougall seemed mattered so much. I recall thinking that it was because determined to defy the advice that his body wasn’t I knew that the names of the first three boys were read suited to running. My attempts at running today may out at the next morning’s assembly. All that effort for be interpreted as trying to defy the effects of aging. a little bit of fame! Motivation does not always have a Similarly with the weather. Sensible people commendable derivation. regard bad weather as an excuse to stay indoors. Keen In the eight school cross-country races that I ran runners almost welcome bad weather. They defy it: I always came 2nd, 3rd or 4th. I never won - but it “rain as hard as you like, be as cold as you like, but was good enough to make me a regular in the school you won’t stop me - in fact, I’ll enjoy it even more”. cross-country team. Every year we would travel to Running, after all, is one of the few outdoor activities somewhere in Norfolk to race against the other Norfolk that need not be stopped by bad weather. Extreme schools. It seemed to be a tradition in these races for weather adds a frisson to the challenge. There was the runners to run astray. Only the local runners knew always an extra buzz in the university gym when we the course and if they weren’t in the lead nobody knew gathered to run in a storm outside. where to go. Once, I recall, we ran around the Great This attitude begins, I think, with cross-country Yarmouth horse-racing course and along the beach. runs at school. The large majority of people do not I’m not sure if we were supposed to: it certainly didn’t enjoy such runs but I rather liked the paradoxical seem much like a cross-country race. Somewhat foolhardiness of cross-country running. Cross- miraculously, the runners usually finished up where country is what you do when the sports pitches are they should, but not necessarily in the right order (as unusable because of the weather (at least, it was at my Eric Morecambe once said). school). The worse the conditions, the more cross- There was an element of this mayhem in the country made sense. The games teachers seemed University Stepping Stones race. We all knew the to think so because they took pleasure in making us course but the weather conditions were usually bad in run unnecessarily through muddy ditches and over December. In 1980 the stepping stones were far under hedges, when a convenient gate was often available. water and a safety rope across the river was provided. My very first competitive runs were not on the Even so, I was washed away. It is not often that part of a school athletics track but at cross-country. It was from race is run under water. That year I was 6th - but all the the cross-country runs that I first realised that I had sensible runners did not run. some ability at running. When the first-year cross- I did run in one adult cross-country race, in some country race was to take place we all trekked out to the kind of Lancashire league competition, in about 1981

18 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self but, frankly, I thought it too foolish. It is one thing to my running. I am never so busy that I cannot find the splash about in mud when you’re young and told to time to run. The question is simple: do I want to run or but for grown men (and women) voluntarily to submit not? Usually, I do. Even this week, I have continued to themselves to this indignity was incomprehensible to put on the wet running shoes and the mud-spattered me. Apart from that, it is mainly the really good cross- gear, to get out onto the fields again, defying these country runners who continue into adulthood and I unappealing conditions. finished much too far back in the field for my liking. On Sunday I ran up the moor to the windmills. Nowadays I have become a little soft. I rarely The cold wind blew hard against me. The low cloud run in bad weather, because, being retired, I can just prevented me seeing the fresh snow on Ward’s Stone, wait until it passes and run then. It doesn’t rain all the highest point (561 metres) of the Forest of Bowland. day very often. In the 1980s, when running had to be The bogs almost sucked my shoes off. But I am sure fitted in when it could, I ran whatever the weather. Ido that I was the only person to defeat the moor that day. sometimes come back from my runs covered in mud, To my general breathlessness and tiredness, I have from running about on the boggy moors or on the added stiffness of the thighs and shoulders, as a result flooded floodplain, but that is my choice. That makes of carrying skis up and down Raise, near Helvellyn, on all the difference. Tuesday. This was so that Ruth could ski there for the This is the hardest time of the year to run. In the first, and probably last, time this season (I have no wish cold, dark days of winter, runners don’t complain about to ski myself). the conditions. They are what you expect in winter. But Consequently, since Tuesday I have only been now, as we approach March, we begin to think that we able to plod along the riverside. I’ve had it to myself deserve some reward. We want the sun to warm us up because the fields are too muddy for all but the keenest a little on our runs. We want to discard some of the walkers and, of course, there are no runners other than layers of winter clothing. We want running to become me. a more rational activity. I don’t think that ‘run’ is the right word for my But no, the cold winds continue to blow, the rain motion. There is a lot of slipping and sloshing about. falls, and the cloud stays low on the hills. As a result, I feel like a toddler splashing in the puddles. I really the fields stay waterlogged. The only comfortable run must try to grow up. is along the sheltered railway line and back. But who wants The Lune floodplain, flooded, as is its wont. comfort? If I wanted comfort, I could stay in bed or sit reading the paper or watching day- time television. Well, maybe, perhaps, just today, I could ... Runners like to imagine that they are engaged in a perpetual battle between the attractions of idleness and the compulsion to run. Sometimes they feel virtuous in repulsing the attractions; sometimes their free will triumphs over the compulsion. However, idleness is not the only alternative to running. I have many other, more or less useful, ways to pass my time. But none is really an alternative to © Pamela Self

aybe the answer lies in spinach - the question now I can hardly keep moving. I am therefore avoiding M being “Where can I get more energy from?” slopes and continuing to jog along the railway line and Popeye used to swallow the contents of a can of spinach river bank, which, through repetition, is getting a little and his muscles were bulging instantly. At least, his uninspiring, picturesque though it may be. arm muscles were. I can’t picture his leg muscles but Perhaps I will have to accept that my body needs surely they must have been bulging too. a nap, not a half-hour run, in the afternoon. No, no, not I am struggling with my running at the moment. I yet. I will persevere. I am just temporarily (I hope) run- am doing my best, I swear. It is not that I am so overcome down from my illness of a couple of weeks ago. I just with ennui that I cannot be bothered to run. I run, or try need a little pick-me-up. Now, where’s that spinach? to, most days, but I have little energy. I am so listless I don’t mean that spinach itself is the answer. That that I am wondering if I will ever have any list again. I would be silly. Popeye was only a cartoon character. I am in that state I mentioned in Week 5, of doubting that mean that perhaps if I had a better diet then I would my body will be able to run comfortably again. My have more energy. Let’s see what the greatest athletes running seems laboured and ungainly. So much for the eat. ‘zip’ I boasted about a few weeks ago. I also said then Perhaps the Tarahumaras, the “greatest runners that I enjoyed the process of running. That was then: I of all time” (McDougall, p4), can teach me something am getting little enjoyment from running as badly as I about diet. McDougall reports the case of an exhausted am at the moment. explorer who was handed “a gourd full of murky liquid. If I didn’t know that I’d run up to the trig point He swallowed a few gulps, and was amazed to feel new just a few weeks ago then I’d scarcely believe such a energy pulsing through his veins. He got to his feet thing were possible. When I reach any sort of slope and scaled the peak like an overcaffeinated Sherpa”. Sounds just like Popeye and his spinach. They also have a “special energy food ... a few mouthfuls of which packed enough nutritional punch to let them run all day without rest”. I don’t know if the “murky liquid” is the same thing as lechuguilla (McDougall, p15). This is a homemade tequila made from cactus sap and rattlesnake corpses. After partying on lechuguilla all night, the Tarahumaras could run as far as 435 miles. Why they needed to run 435 miles I have no idea. That would take them way out of their canyon, as far as the United States border and back. (Would live rattlesnakes provide even more oomph?) I have ordered fifty crates of lechuguilla. Iam looking forward to partying all Friday night and then spending the weekends running to places like Cardiff, Middlesborough and Dundee and back. I don’t need to go to Cardiff, Middlesborough or Dundee but I will save a fortune in rail fares or petrol by running there. The River Lune from the old railway line Perhaps the “murky liquid” is iskiate, which at the Crook o’ Lune. is described as a “gooey slime” (McDougall, p43).

20 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self McDougall tried this and “within minutes, [he] felt held up as an example of how faulty policy decisions fantastic ... the low-throbbing headache [he]’d had can be made if data is not carefully checked. all morning ... had vanished”. He doesn’t say that he Actually, although the misplaced decimal point dashed up any peaks though. story is often told, no paper about spinach and iron Iskiate is made by dissolving chia seeds in water has ever been found with a misplaced decimal point. with sugar and lime. According to McDougall, “you The story was made up, apparently. So those writers couldn’t do much better than chia, at least if you were who continue to repeat it (and many do, as a Google interested in building muscle, lowering cholesterol, search will show) are themselves guilty of not carefully and reducing your risk of heart disease”. Well, checking their data. Anyway, we all know that Popeye who isn’t? I’ve ordered fifty boxes of chia, too. With wasn’t eating spinach for the iron. It was the vitamins McDougall’s assurance that “Aztec runners used to he was after: “Spinach is full of vitamin A an’ tha’s what chomp chia seeds as they went into battle”, I should be makes hoomans strong an’ helty” (Popeye, July 3rd well equipped to take on my trig point again. 1932). The Tarahumaras must eat more than chia, so I Anybody want any lechuguilla or chia? have searched McDougall’s book from cover to cover Do you know that Alan Sherman ditty “Hello to see what else is on their diet. All I could find was muddah, hello fadduh” to the tune of Ponchielli’s Dance that they live on “little more than ground corn spiced of the Hours? In it, a boy writes home to his parents up by their favourite delicacy, barbecued mouse”. I describing the woes of summer camp - rain, poison ivy, don’t need to order these because I can buy corn ptomaine poisoning, alligators, malaria, bears. And locally and I can catch mice in the garden. I wonder then the sun comes out and he ends “... that’s better ... how many mice I’ll need to make a meal. Do you think kindly disregard this letter”. it would be ok if I topped them up with the occasional I feel like that boy. The sun is shining at last. There shrew, vole or mole? is a touch of green on the hedges. The first lambs are in On reflection, perhaps I shouldn’t believe the fields. A few daffodils are out. One or two skylarks everything I read. It is said that the creator of Popeye are singing. Some of the curlews are curlewing. Yes, had him eating spinach because he thought that that’s better. There is a touch of spring in the air - but spinach had ten times more iron than it actually did sadly not in my step. (through an academic misplacing a decimal point in some paper). As a result, generations of United States 1 Shakespeare, William, Henry VIII, Act 1, Scene 4. children were given extra spinach to eat. This is often

The River Lune near where the River Wenning joins (I usually run along the left bank).

unners cannot stand still. They must always be on R the lookout for the latest advances that might add that all-important edge to their running. New running shoe technologies, dietary supplements, psychological techniques, medical treatments, and so on, must all be thoroughly investigated or the runner risks being left behind. I have found fresh inspiration this week from news of the first robot marathon. The race in Osaka was won by Robovie-PC in a time of nearly 55 hours. So, Robovie-PC ‘runs’ about 2 metres in the time that Usain Bolt runs 100 metres. Of course, these are only the first steps. We need to extrapolate from this performance to foresee the implications for human running. The race rules insisted that robots must get up themselves after a fall. Quite right, too: human racers My run up1 to the windmills this week was halted at aren’t supposed to be helped if they collapse. Support this gate when I saw four hares running around in the field teams could, however, replace robot batteries when they ran low. This is an excellent innovation. The rules beyond. In Britain the hare has declined more than any for human races do not prohibit the carrying out of other mammal except the water vole but they seem content surgical operations during a race. This, I am sure, is enough on Caton Moor. I stopped and watched them for the future. If I could replace my battery - and other several minutes. Of all the animals that I see on my runs, failing body components - I might be able to complete I feel the most affinity with the hare (if I may so presume). another marathon after all, although there may not be The others run, but usually in alarm; hares seem to run just much of the real me left by the end. because they want to. I needed no such assistance during my first These four ran around the moor aimlessly, sometimes marathon. Before it, I had, after two years of running around the lanes near the university, been cajoled alone, sometimes together, occasionally pausing to box one into taking part in a road-race. This was a momentous, another’s ears. They weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere life-changing step. To pin a number on one’s vest particular. They just liked to run. And it all seemed so and compete on the public streets was a statement of effortless, loping in graceful loops up and down the commitment that I was not sure that I wanted to make. hummocks on the moor. Just like me, or so I imagine, All road-racers then were serious: the concept of a although I don’t have any co-runners to box the ears of. ‘fun-runner’ was then unknown in Britain. Incidentally, it used to be assumed that the boxing was an Road-races were organised by local athletic clubs and contested by intense runners. My first road-race inter-male challenge but it is now thought to be initiated by was the Windermere-to-Kendal 10-mile in March 1980. female hares rebuffing the males’ advances. I will leave I thought that would at least provide a good day out you to work out any analogy to human behaviour. for the family. I came 127th out of 335 in 58 minutes. I left the hares to it and ran off in another direction. Fourth was a 19-year-old Steve Cram who, five years 1Yes, up. I have found a little more energy this week but not later, was to break the 1500 metres world record. enough to write home (or here) about. My modest performance in the Windermere-

22 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self to-Kendal race was enough for me to enter the local overall) in 2:37. marathon, the Preston-to-Morecambe, to be held in Afterwards, it seemed that I’d just run on the July. No messing about, then. It is often said, mainly others’ shoulders and then sprinted away at the end, to alarm virgin marathon runners, that at the 20-mile a tactic which is somewhat suspect among friends, point of a marathon you are only halfway, because of all if acceptable to win an Olympic medal. However, the calamities that are likely to occur after that point. looking at those 5-mile split times, I see that I ran 28½, So, on that basis, a marathon was four times further 30½, 28½, 30½, 31 minutes for each 5 miles and that than I’d raced before. Mike took 35 minutes and Tony 32 minutes for the fifth The course was from Preston, north along the A6, 5 miles. I didn’t accelerate: they slowed more than through the centre of Lancaster, and on the B5321 to me. I ran behind them for 20 miles because I didn’t Morecambe. That route could not possibly be a ‘fun know what else to do. It would have been foolishly run’. I am sure that the police would not allow it today. presumptuous of me to try to run ahead of them! They more or less ignored it then. A few weeks ago I argued that Murakami and It was, of course, a daunting prospect and I had McDougall were not marathoners (that is, one of little idea how to prepare for it, other than to run as McDougall’s two kinds of great runner) because they much as I could. I thought that I should at least join were too slow. I didn’t mean to be critical. To help put the local club. When I rang the secretary to join and their marathon times in perspective, if they had run mentioned that I’d entered the marathon he wondered their best times in the 1980 Preston-to-Morecambe if that was wise, which was hardly encouraging. I Marathon they would have finished 98th and 110th out reassured him by saying that I was ‘running with’ two of 112. 88% of the runners finished inside 3:30. And long-standing members, Tony and Mike. the Preston-to-Morecambe was by no means a top- Tony was ten years old than me and an experienced class marathon. marathon runner, always winning prizes and medals in Robovie-PC would have finished two days later. his age group. Mike was also a proper athlete with a Or, more likely, would have been squashed on the A6. smooth running style, more suited perhaps to a shorter distance and a faster pace than Tony’s short, pattering steps. I thought that the safest thing to do was to follow them, as far as I could! The only other idea I had was to try to forget that I was supposed to run 26 miles. I intended to ignore the race for 20 miles. I thought that looking at the other runners bobbing along in front of me for hours would make me dizzy, so I intended to keep my head up, look around, and take in the surroundings. I recall seeing the skyline of the Bowland hills, barely visible through the murky cloud, evolve on my right as the miles passed. Athletic clubs took great pride in organising these events. A few days after the race we were sent details of the race results, with 5-mile split times for all the runners, all carefully recorded by hand (no computer timing in those days). Studying them closely now, I see that I ran with Mike for 20 miles, always about 6 seconds behind Tony. At 20 miles, Mike began to flag. He dropped behind as we ran through the Lancaster Saturday afternoon shoppers. Beyond Lancaster, I came onto the shoulder of Tony, with the intention of The end of the 1980 Preston-to-Morecambe Marathon. The saying “Let’s go get the guy in front”. But Tony was lady with the bag was disqualified for not running the flagging a little too. So I finished first local runner (19th whole course.

strange thing happened on my Sunday run. I set Back in the 1980s, when I was game for any kind of A off intending to run up the road to the windmills running, I felt that I should join in with the local customs, and down through the hares’ playground. After 5 so I had a go. Three goes, in fact. I soon found that fell- minutes I felt so tired that I nearly stopped and walked racing was not for me. It did not suit me, physically back home, but I struggled on slowly. As I did so I or mentally. I do not have the upper-body strength realised that it must have rained heavily overnight to force my body up such steep slopes or the ankles because water was pouring off the moor. I didn’t fancy to withstand the twisting and battering provided by the morass that the hares’ playground would be, so I rough, uneven rocks. continued instead on the track (shown on page 13) that More importantly, I am not mentally tough enough runs below the Caton Moor trig point. for fell-races. It is very difficult to keep running uphill After at last reaching the highest point of the track when the thighs and lungs feel like bursting. Often, it I thought that I might as well run along the flat top to is not possible, even for the best fell-racers. The run have a view of Ingleborough. It was in cloud but Pen- becomes a hands-on-knees scramble. Downhill is y-Ghent was clear. Having come this far, I thought even worse. It is necessary to be recklessly brave to that I might as well continue to Roeburndale Road and hurtle down craggy slopes at the speeds of the best return on the other side of the windmills, rather than fell-racers. retrace my steps. After 50 minutes running I reached I like to get into a rhythm when I run, with a steady a point from which I know that, when I’m fit, I can get stride gliding over the ground (I like to imagine). This back home in 15 minutes. I thought that I might as well is just not possible in fell-racing. You have to have the try to do so then - and I did. It was a novel experience agility to adjust all the limbs as the terrain rushes by. to run much further than intended (I often run less!). The organisers of fell-races are not entirely sadistic, It was even more novel to feel better after 65 minutes as racers are not expected to run over precipitous running than after 5. cliffs, but even so, there is a real risk of accident and Caton Moor is a dull pudding of a hill, without exhaustion. It is not unknown for fell-racers to die any rocks, crags or cliffs to appeal to the energetic of exposure after becoming injured or lost in bad scrambler, but it is a different matter across the weather. Roeburndale Road. Here, on Haylot Fell, Blanch Fell and Most people, when they reach the top of a peak, are Black Fell, below Ward’s Stone, there are great jumbles glad of the chance to rest and savour the panorama that of millstone grit boulders, covered in tough heather. they have earned. Fell-racers don’t have the time for It is impossible to run smoothly over this. There are, that. They head straight back down, with not a glance however, some rough tracks for rough running and a about them. Indeed, there is no chance to appreciate few smooth ones for grouse-shooters’ vehicles (and the scenery on the way up or down: up, your head is smooth running). between your knees and up the backside of the fell- Some people enjoy racing over such terrain. The racer ahead; down, you need to keep your eyes on the ‘fell-race’ is the locally favoured form of cross-country rocks ahead. race. It involves getting up some peak, or several of And I felt sorry for the fells. They deserve more them, and down again as fast as possible. The courses respect than this. Many of them are being eroded are generally longer and always steeper than cross- away by relatively gentle walkers. A few hundred fell- country ones, and they are usually unmarked between racers do them no good at all. A YouTube video of the checkpoints, so that the fell-racer needs mountain descent from Scafell Pike during the Borrowdale fell- navigational skills as well. race shows the demolition that is caused.

24 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self My three fell-races were up Pendle, Skiddaw and (2½ miles, 1500 feet ascent) in under 19 minutes is Wansfell. I was totally unprepared for the first, Pendle. even more impressive. At the start, the racers sprinted across the field at a I feel I understand the great marathon runners. I speed that seemed unwarranted, considering the total have an idea of how they can run a marathon in 2:04. distance to be run. I soon understood why. Once onto In fact, I’d be surprised if they couldn’t. But fell-racing the fell, there was only a narrow path, where over- is a mystery to me. I can’t conceive how they do it. taking was virtually impossible. I also soon found The nearest equivalent in sport is perhaps the Tour out that my footwear was quite unsuitable for the wet, de France cyclists who can pedal non-stop up huge slippery, grassy slopes. I came a chastened 140th out mountains and then zoom down the other side. of 263. Fell-racers are an insular breed of runner. A I did rather better at Skiddaw, coming 50th out of walker might come across them and wonder what they 193, taking 74 minutes, but I did not enjoy the race at are up to, but otherwise their exploits are unknown to all. The descent was headlong scariness. Wansfell was the general public. Fell-races are never mentioned a traditional day-after-Boxing-Day outing rather than on television or in newspapers. Fell-racers like it that a serious fell-race. However, I did learn that ice and way. Recent British champions are Simon Booth, Rob snow don’t make fell-racing any more enjoyable. Jebb and Rob Hope - good solid names but not exactly It is only when you have tried and failed at household ones, are they? something that you fully appreciate those skilled at it. I The best fell-racers are clearly great runners but am in awe of the best fell-racers. The Wasdale course, they are neither kind of great runner (sprinter and up classic Lakeland peaks such as Great Gable and marathoner) identified by McDougall. Some of them Scafell Pike (21 miles, 9000 feet ascent), in 3:25! How run for longer than marathon runners but, obviously, is that possible? The races are not all endurance ones. road-racing is not their scene. And, I am content to In some ways, the straight dash up and down Wansfell admit, fell-racing is not mine.

Below: Skiddaw on April 2nd last year. The fell-race route is up to the left of the gully at the right, past the tops of Jenkin Hill and Little Man, and on to the top of Skiddaw, and back the same way.

his week I ran a new personal best (PB). I ran Closer scrutiny of my spreadsheet showed that T up to the Cragg and back in 44½ minutes, which I had run up to the Cragg only twice before since is my fastest time since records began. But hold the January 2010. It is not my favourite run. The steep champagne! My records began only last January, and road down is hard on leg muscles not used to it but at my PBs are very personal. So personal that I am sure least there is a fine view from the top - of Littledale and that all my PBs are world bests. Nobody else runs the Ward’s Stone to the east and of the Lake District hills same courses as me. over Morecambe Bay to the west. My 44½ minutes was I blame my running shorts. My long running the best of the three times: a magnificent achievement, trousers for the winter months are quite content to let I’m sure you’ll agree. I need encouragement from me merge in with the winter walkers but my shorts wherever I can find it. mean business. If I wear them, then I’ve really got The relationship between a runner and his PBs is to run. On Tuesday I woke up my shorts from their one of the most emotionally intense in sport. It creeps hibernation in the cupboard and they whisked me up on a runner. He runs a ‘fun 10k’ in 50 minutes; up and down the hill in no time. I exaggerate: in 44½ someone says “not bad”; he thinks “it was only a jog, minutes, as I’ve said. I can do better than that”; he runs another 10k in 48 minutes; and, before he knows it, he is elbowing to the front at the starting line in order to save a couple of seconds that might make all the difference to that elusive PB. There is an element of PB- chasing in all sports based on numbers. All batsmen know their highest innings; all snooker players know their biggest break; all golfers know their lowest round. Only in running does the PB become, for some people, the main motivator. Murakami writes that “Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more than anything: namely, a time they want to beat”. The trouble with chasing PBs is that they take more and more effort to achieve. After a while, as fit as you may be, it takes a fortuitous combination of ideal conditions (weather, course, competition, and Littledale and Ward’s Stone (above the barn) from the Cragg. so on) to deliver a PB.

26 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Eventually, the PB becomes, not a motivator, but It is not difficult, then, if you are a runner driven a de-motivator, as the reality of diminishing returns by PBs, to include an ‘aging factor’. It would, I imagine, sets in. Why invest three months of hard effort for a be quite motivating to show that, although you are marathon when you expect that it will show that you inevitably getter slower, you are getting slower slower have run faster in the past? than you should. Murakami says, as he realised that PBs were no For myself, I didn’t worry about PBs after the longer forthcoming, that “a sense of disappointment experience of the 1984 Great North-Western Half- set in that all my hard work wasn’t paying off”. At least Marathon. It was a very hot day. Runners were he kept running his marathons: I gave up road-racing collapsing all around with heat exhaustion. It was the in the mid-1980s after, but not because, I realised that only race I ran where the medical staff at the finish there would be no more proper PBs. leapt up to my assistance: I clearly looked exhausted Running times are rather brutal in revealing the (and I was). effects of aging. The best marathon times for different I don’t blame the organisers for the weather but ages become steadily slower after the age of 35. Well, I do blame them for arranging that a fun run, which not quite steadily, as there are fluctuations but if you set off after the half-marathon runners were on their average over a five year period the trend is clear. To way, should share the last mile or two with the racers. estimate the decline through aging we may compare, There is little worse for a runner than, when exhaustion say, the present 60-year-old best (2:36) with the world is setting in and the legs are beginning to wobble, to best 25 years ago, that is, the 2:07 of Carlos Lopez. In have to weave through prams and pantomime horses this way, we can calculate the percentage decline: spread out across the road. However, all was forgiven 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-59 60-64 65-69 70-74 75-79 when I saw my time - a PB by a good 3 minutes! My 6% 9% 13% 19% 27% 30% 38% 59% training had really paid off this time. The women’s figures are similar but distorted because A few days later a letter arrived. The organisers the modern breed of women marathon runner has not apologised for the fact that, owing to roadworks, the yet worked its way through the age groups and because course had been changed at the last moment and, on very few women ran marathons forty years ago. re-measuring, had been found to be more than half-a- These figures do not accord with those quoted mile short. I was somewhat deflated. by McDougall (p240). He says that marathon runners Then, I thought, how accurate are these course peak at 27 and that 64-year-olds run as fast as 19-year- measurements? Every race organiser knows that a olds. In fact, the world’s best times for all ages from 18 reputation as ‘a fast course’ will boost the number of to 36 are in the range 2:04 to 2:06, with Gebrselassie’s entries. If a course is short that will certainly make record set at the age of 35, and the 64-year-old best it fast. Excluding my first and last marathons, all my is 2:44. This rather disputes his argument that “we’re marathon times were within 1% of their average. I not only really good at endurance running, we’re really wonder, now, if the courses were measured to 99% good at it for a remarkably long time”. accuracy. Nowadays no subterfuge is possible because Assuming that the ordinary runner declines at rich runners are able to use GPSs to track themselves the same rate as the best runner, then a marathon PB to two decimal places. In the 1980s courses were of 3:30 would equate to an ‘age-adjusted PB’ for a 60- probably measured by a man on a bicycle. 64-year old of 4:27 (that is, 27% slower than 3:30). If Then, the seconds mattered a lot. Today, they Murakami, now 62, aimed for that then he might be less don’t matter at all. My so-called PBs now are just to disappointed. add a bit of interest. Now, I never set out to run a PB. Actually, Murakami says that he peaked in his If I find that I am going well and a glance at the watch late forties, when he should, according to the above suggests that a bit of effort might bring a good time, figures, have been 9% slower than his best. Perhaps then I might make that effort. But I just run steadily if he had run seriously earlier he would have achieved home. I don’t sprint down the street, eyeballs out, as a PB 9% faster, that is, 3:11. Then his age-adjusted PB runners say, collapsing on the doorstep. I don’t want to would be 4:03. If I were Murakami, I’d forget about this alarm the neighbours. refinement.

n his preface Murakami quotes the slogan “Pain is For this reason, I never felt elated at the end of a I inevitable. Suffering is optional”. According to marathon. The race itself was always more or less what Murakami, “the most important aspect of marathon might have been anticipated. Satisfied and relieved, running” is that “the [pain] is an unavoidable reality, yes; but surprised and elated, no. but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the Looking back, it was the whole 100 days, not the runner himself”. final day, that was the achievement. In today’s hectic There are two aspects to all sporting activities: the life we don’t often have the opportunity to commit to physical and the mental. It may suit some marathon a long-term project, involving hardship and effort, and runners to present their achievement as an entirely to see it through. In previous centuries it was the norm. mental one, as a heroic battle to overcome pain that A farmer might look at a field and decide he needed shows their bravery and fortitude. Long-distance a stone wall around it - he might work at it for an hour running should not require bravery, however. It is not each morning, building a few feet of the wall, and after an activity that has to skirt on the edge of danger, like 100 days he’d have his wall. Or his wife might want a downhill skiing, motor-bike racing or mountaineering, new rug for the bedroom, so she’d set aside an hour where a moment of inattention or incompetence can each evening to sew a few square inches. have body-shattering consequences. Marathon running is similar. You do a bit each It is possible, as with all activities, to have day, gradually building up the reserves and strength, accidents, by, for example, tripping over a kerb and to deliver a product on the final day. The product twisting an ankle, but with running they are relatively is less tangible than a wall or a rug but the sense rare and minor. Provided that there has been thorough of achievement may be similar. For me, the most preparation in the preceding months, a runner should significant outcome was the realisation that I had the not set off on a marathon expecting pain. The worst self-discipline to work at something for an extended that should be anticipated is periods of weariness or period, often at some inconvenience, to deliver the struggle that have to be overcome by resilience and best that I was capable of. determination. Of course, it may turn out worse than I am a little disillusioned that Murakami considers this but that is no reason to depress or worry oneself that long-distance running is like novel writing. I by expecting it to. would have predicted that he’d say that he welcomed A marathon should not be a battle against pain, the contrast between the repetitive commitment of and nor should any other running. Not all runners running and the spasms of creative inspiration that agree with me: Clarence DeMar, who won the Boston illuminates the work of a novelist. I hadn’t pictured a Marathon seven times between 1911 and 1928 and novelist chaining himself to his desk every morning, who therefore should have known what he was talking forcing himself to write 750 words before lunch, about, said we should “run like hell and get the agony much like a bricklayer might aim to lay 750 bricks in over with”. the morning (I know nothing about writing novels or The answer to the question “How long does it take laying bricks: 750 words or bricks in a morning may you to run a marathon?” is “About 100 days”. That’s be wildly unrealistic). I thought that it was more like assuming you are reasonably fit to start with. The final Mozart dashing off three symphonies in a month, when day is only the visible tip of the iceberg. It is the final he was in the mood. day that gets all the attention, naturally, but the previous After the 1980 Preston-to-Morecambe Marathon 99 days are the more important. An honest appraisal I knew that I was physically capable of running a of the 99 days makes the final day entirely predictable, marathon but not necessarily mentally capable. I barring any misfortune. had left all the mental stresses to my two pace-setting

28 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self friends. I had deliberately avoided thinking about of interest (unless Paula Radcliffe sits down and cries). the race for 20 miles. So I felt an obligation to run a There is a subtle ebb and flow as runners have their marathon ‘on my own’. spells of weariness and energy but this is hardly I duly entered two marathons in 1981, at apparent to either participants or spectators. I have Huddersfield and Barnsley. Both were, like the Preston avoided the word ‘boring’ because, as a participant, Marathon, organised by local running clubs for serious I didn’t find the marathons so. But for spectators a runners from clubs in the region, that is, the north of marathon must surely be boring except for those brief England. Unlike the Preston Marathon, they were out- moments when a relative or friend runs by. Perhaps it’s and-back marathons, that is, starting and finishing in the sheer uneventfulness that appeals to some people. the same place. As with the Preston Marathon, the I can remember a fair amount about some large majority of the runners (84% for the Huddersfield football matches in the 1950s (such as Norwich City 3 Marathon; I have lost the details for the Barnsley Manchester United 0) but I can remember very little Marathon) finished inside 3:30. I came 8th in 2:33 and about the Huddersfield and Barnsley Marathons. This 23rd in 2:32 in the two races but, as I indicated above, is not a failure of memory. There just isn’t much to the most important outcome was the knowledge that I remember. I recall being overtaken by an old guy had the discipline to run marathons. (about 20 years younger than I am now) who was One thing that strikes me now, although it didn’t singing to himself, which seemed rather odd at the concern me much at the time, is how uneventful time, but that’s hardly of riveting interest. marathon races are. In 90 minutes of football you I do, however, recall being aware that this was expect to be intrigued by the changing balances of probably as good as it would get, as far as marathon play, to see the tactics evolve, to see moments of skill running was concerned. Maybe with a less undulating and calamity, and to be aware of the different qualities course I could have knocked a minute or two off. and contributions of the individual players. There’s Maybe I could have got under 2:30 but that didn’t seem enough to keep people talking and arguing until the worth getting excited about when the distance itself next game. (26 miles and 385 yards) is so idiosyncratic. Maybe I In a marathon nothing much happens. Runners could have trained less to cause sufficient pain to make set off at their different speeds, a handful go into the me feel more heroic. lead, one separates off to win. There are no incidents

Right: The River Lune at the Crook o’ Lune. I have three routes to the Crook, two by the river and one along the old railway line, giving six possible loops. I could have a different run there, 4 or 5 miles, every day of the week (with a rest day). I think I would be content if that was all that I could manage, for it is a fine stretch of river. In general, though, I prefer to mix in some runs up the hills (for the views), not that I have managed much of that this week. After the positive tone of the previous two weeks, this has been a steady week of consolidation: no real problems but not much progress either.

n Monday, as I was trotting along the old railway or not to shave. Similarly, having decided to take up O line, one of man’s best friends bit my upper thigh. running, I didn’t need to decide whether or not to I thought it not unreasonable to remonstrate mildly go to the gym at 1 o’clock. Unless there was some with the owner, a smart, middle-aged lady. She replied insurmountable obstacle, such as a crucial meeting, “What can you expect if you come along here flapping I would be there. And so it went on, for month after your arms about? Piss off”. So I did, after kicking the month. If I met anyone while I was running, it was dog and strangling the lady. manifest to them what I was doing: I was on my middle- When I’m running my difficulties with fellow of-the-day run. Runner or not, known to me or not, they humans are usually more subtle. Recently I’ve become would have expected no more than a waved ‘hi’ from more aware of a new problem, which hardly seems me. possible, after so many years of running. When I began running around home it was a little In the beginning, it was straightforward. Running different. I would meet local people, perhaps people became a routine, like shaving. Having decided that I I had not seen for a while, and people who, if I were would not be bearded, I did not have to go through the out walking with Ruth, we would perhaps stop and mental anguish every morning of deciding whether chat with. Now I was running past, with a ‘hi’ but no

On Tuesday I saw my first sand-martins of the year. Their return to the Lune valley in April is always welcome because their whirling, twittering flight over the river is characteristic of the summer months. They come to nest in the tunnels they build into the steep river banks. Unfortunately, the Tuesday sand-martins had mistimed their return. The Lune was in flood. All their nests were underwater. The sand-martins, lots of them, were swooping over the turbulent river, puzzled. The river had subsided by Wednesday but no doubt their nests were somewhat soggy. The photograph shows the path to the Waterworks Bridge. The river is normally several metres lower in its bed to the right.

30 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self time for a ‘how are you?’. Maybe I looked sufficiently It isn’t only walkers that cause me such angst. One committed to my running that no offence was taken. day last summer, on the old railway line, I began to Over the years, I expect that they have all got used to catch up a burly jogger ahead. My overtaking etiquette me running by. I am as familiar a sight running along is to only do so if I am running much faster than the in my shorts as is the postman delivering letters. other runner, so that I can sail by with a brief ‘hi’. If I Today, things have changed. For one thing, I am only slightly faster then I risk being trapped like don’t have a routine. I want to decide for myself every those motorway lorries that can’t quite complete the day whether and when and where to run. I think I’m manoeuvre. I may then have to run alongside and even a rational person, capable of reaching decisions. If I say more than ‘hi’, as though I were trying to strike up decide for myself, every time that I go for a run, then a friendship. This I try to avoid, especially if the other I know that I am going because I want to, and not runner is a woman. because I am set in some robotic routine. And when, On this occasion, there was no problem, as he was some days, I decide not to run then I accept that to be so slow, but as I ran by I heard a “Hi, John”. I slowed a rational decision too. down and recognised him as one of those ‘Olympians’ Making the decision is, for me, part of the process I mentioned in Week 1, one of the original university of running. It’s not something to get worked up about. running group. He gasped “Don’t run much now”. This I take into account what else there is to do during the was apparent but what could I say? It was sad to see day, what the weather forecast is, how energetic I feel, but at least he was still trying to run. I found a side- and so on. I then conclude that, say, I will run to the path as soon as it was polite to do so. windmills at 12 o’clock. Even then, I feel free to change What can I do about this? Maybe I could avoid my mind, if, say, a blizzard starts blowing. In this way, running where my contemporaries are likely to be, I feel in control of my running, such as it is, rather than such as within a short distance of a car park. But why a slave to it. should I? It’s not my fault that they are much less fit Also, my running is more casual. I am not training than they were. For all I know, I may join them soon for anything. I am no longer able to speed past people. enough. I am running slow enough that it is not unreasonable to The trouble is, I don’t like to dwell on our fragility expect me to stop for a chat (although I am not one for and mortality. In the past when anyone asked “Have chatting and I know that if I stopped then I might have you heard about ...?” then I would anticipate good news: difficulty starting again). I probably look like Icould got a new job, moved, had twins, won the lottery, or do with a breather. So sometimes I stop but usually whatever. Nowadays, it is invariably bad news: needs a I continue with the ‘hi’ that people have become knee operation, has cancer, fell and broke her hip, and accustomed to. so on. I can’t cope with it all. It is too depressing to My new problem arises from the fact that the think about. Perhaps I run to preserve the illusion that people I meet have changed. Hardly any of my it won’t happen to me. There is, I admit, an escapist, contemporaries has been unaffected by the passage enjoy-it-while-you-can element to my running. of time. They present a sad catalogue of illnesses Fitness is relative. It is unreasonable, I know, but I and accidents. Some use walking-sticks; some are in feel a little dissatisfied to have reached a plateau with wheel-chairs; some are too unwell to venture far. For my running. I can comfortably run 5 miles or so 5 days some, the most exercise they can seek is a 50 yards a week. It fits into life almost without being noticed. struggle to a bench for a sit down. I say “I’m just going for a run” much as I do “I’m just It is awkward to run past old acquaintances in walking to the shop”. I don’t know if I could run 40 or such straits. It seems impolite not to stop and ask how 50 miles a week but I know that I don’t need to. When they are. I doubt, however, that they want to discuss I think of other people’s problems it seems greedy to their problems with me, standing there in my running even contemplate it. shorts. If I run by, or if I stop and then run off, it must I suppose I shouldn’t worry about all this too much. seem to them that I am flaunting my fitness, although, At least people don’t bite a lump out of my thigh. By heaven knows, I don’t feel that I have an abundance the way, I didn’t really strangle that lady. Or kick her of it myself. I am sure that, if I were in their position, I dog. But I will next time. would resent the unfairness of it all.

n Monday I had my first tip-out of the year. When in my fitness. When I run from home I know that ifI O Ruth drives off somewhere I sometimes jump into don’t feel as good as I hoped then I can just shorten the car in order to be tipped out en route and left to the run (and, weak-willed person that I am, I often do). run back home. When I have a tip-out there is no choice: I have got to I’m fond of tip-outs for several reasons. If a run get home somehow. If I didn’t think I could manage it, has to finish at home (as almost all do nowadays), they I wouldn’t volunteer for the tip-out. increase the area within which I can run. Normally I Also, a tip-out involves Ruth in my running. run from and back to home. So, if I can run 6 miles Running is inherently an insular activity but having then I’m limited to a circle of 3-mile radius. A tip-out a tip-out and talking about it later makes it more of a widens this to a 6-mile radius, thereby quadrupling my joint activity. running area. Another reason for liking tip-outs is that I have On Monday I was tipped out in the Quernmore always preferred runs from A to B to runs from A back to valley 3 miles the other side of the Cragg (mentioned A. It adds some, perhaps illusory, point to the exercise: in Week 12). I had to run back up the Cragg, over it I have transported myself somewhere entirely by my and down to home. Years ago I only ever used to run own effort. up to the Cragg from home in order to continue into When I want to distinguish between the two, I’ll Quernmore, but that is too far for me now. call A-A runs ‘loop-runs’ or ‘loops’ and A-B runs ‘line- A tip-out is an implicit sign that I have confidence runs’ or ‘lines’ (these lines are, of course, not straight).

Approaching the top of the Cragg from the other side.

32 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self I might use the expressions ‘loop-running’ and ‘line- old castle, built on the site of a Roman camp, was left running’ (well, it’s not as ridiculous as line-dancing, is relatively unscathed by the Jacobites, and appears it?) today much as it would have then. All the great historical runs were line-runs. The At the bottom of Green Lane, I meet Lancaster legendary first marathon was run by Pheidippides Canal and run over the magnificent aqueduct over the from Marathon to Athens (about 26 miles) to warn of Lune built in 1797. The canal was constructed to help approaching Persian ships, Pheidippides dropping get goods into and out of Lancaster, avoiding the Lune, dead at the end of it, thereby providing a role model which was too shallow to cope with the volume of trade for subsequent marathon runners (although it is now during the golden period of the port of Lancaster. doubted that it happened exactly as the legend says). Dropping down by the aqueduct I join the so- And ... actually, I can’t think of any other historical called Millennium Park. This runs along the route of runs right now but if I could I’m sure they’d be line- the old railway line that linked Lancaster with Leeds runs. from 1849 to 1966. The railways, of course, made The Preston-to-Morecambe Marathon was, canals obsolete for the transport of goods. obviously, a line-run. The Huddersfield and Barnsley This particular branch of the railway was in its Marathons were loop-runs. Most road-races are loop- turn rendered obsolete by the growth of the road runs, to avoid the problem of transporting runners system, which I can appreciate as I run next under the or their belongings from one end to the other. fine single-span bridge of the M6 motorway, the noise Subjectively, it is a much more satisfying achievement and activity of the motorway above contrasting with to run somewhere, although some may doubt that the the serenity of the old canal. attractions of Morecambe warrant running to it. Preston Next, I pass Halton, the site of a Norman motte- to Morecambe certainly looks an impressive distance and-bailey castle, one of a string of such castles up the on the map but from Barnsley to, er, somewhere, and, Lune valley. At one time, Halton, rather than Lancaster, er, back to Barnsley doesn’t sound such a big deal. was the administrative centre of the region. On the I actually have no idea where the Barnsley Marathon north bank is the site of the old Halton Mills, now a route took us. symbol of modern problems, with its new ‘townhouses’, Sometimes a line-run can be of practical use. We abandoned half-built because of the recession, and its can, for example, abandon the car on the other side ‘eco-houses’, planned but not yet built at all. of the moor for a walk home and I will run back later So, there’s 2000 years of history to reflect upon as to retrieve it. Or Ruth can take the car to a rehearsal, I run along. leaving me to run there later for the concert. Or I can Ah, I’ve thought of another great historical take the car to the garage, leave it there, run home and run, which was indeed a line-run: the famous race then back to the garage. In these ways, my running between the tortoise and the hare, reported by the is not always rather pointless loops from the house. sports correspondent Aesop over 2500 years ago. Sometimes, it plays a useful role in our day-to-day life. Many runners have taken inspiration from this race, Tip-outs, however, don’t normally have a practical with its message that slow and steady will win in the purpose, other than to enable me to run through end (although that has never been my experience). regions otherwise out of reach. The message I take from the race, however, is: do not Perhaps my favourite tip-out is one from the other have a nap in the middle of a race. This is something I side of the River Lune that provides me with a potted carefully refrained from doing, although I was tempted history of the region as well as exercise. After being on occasions. tipped out on Bottomdale Road, I run south behind Nowadays, as my running is no longer in races, Beaumont Grange along Green Lane, an ancient track the mid-run nap would be perfectly acceptable. Some that was one of the main routes into Lancaster from days I am so lacking in energy that I feel that I could the north. Nobody seems to use it now, apart from me. easily curl up into the hedgerow and have a doze. And The Jacobites would have come along this track during why not? Well, if I overslept when on a tip-out run and their 1715 raid of Lancaster. Like me, they would see was not back when Ruth returned home, she might be Lancaster Castle ahead of them, across the river. The perplexed.

Roeburndale, looking north, with Whernside to the right.

don’t have to be driven somewhere for a run (as last home, encloses all of the Lake District and Yorkshire I week): I can drive myself. I normally only do this if Dales National Parks, renowned for their rugged I feel fit enough to justify it but after several months grandeur and limestone scenery. It also includes the of running around home, I fancied a change. So on extensive peat moors of the Forest of Bowland Area of Wednesday I drove to the next valley east, Roeburndale. Outstanding Natural Beauty, with further hills of the I ran south along the old track (the old salt road) for 45 Lancashire Pennines, such as Pendle. To the north minutes, and then turned and ran back. The distance it includes the rounded hills of the Howgills and the did not matter. I was really there to enjoy the scenery. northern Pennines of Cumbria, such as Mallerstang. On the way up the dale, there are views of the All this lay on my doorstep - or within one hour of it. wild, remote, empty expanses of upper Roeburndale. So one of the purposes of my running became to On the way back, the Lake District hills and the Three explore this region. I kept fit by running around locally Peaks of the Yorkshire Dales (Whernside, Ingleborough but no longer with the intention to race along roads and Pen-y-Ghent) are arrayed ahead. The ancient with many others. I would, from time to time, take off track was used to transport salt and other commodities to run alone, as the whim took me, around the nearby over the Bowland hills. In its southern part it merges hills and dales. If need be, I could manage this within with the Roman road that ran between Ribchester a morning or afternoon - one hour there, two hour run, and Burrow. On Wednesday, there were only sheep, one hour back. skylarks, grouse and lapwing - and me. It was remote In January 1988 I started to keep a record of these enough for me to run with my top off, as I needed to, it outings. It was not a ‘running log’ as recommended for being the hottest day of the year so far. serious runners. It did not include distances or times - This kind of run is a legacy of a decision I made, they were irrelevant. It was not a pre-marathon training or, rather, of a conclusion I reached, in 1988. I realised record, like my previous records. It was simply a note then, after ten years of running around the lanes near of where I ran on my outings and of anything interesting the university and home, that my running had acquired encountered on the way. I imagined that I might like to a new purpose. I had come to appreciate that I lived read the notes in my dotage when no longer able to within some of the most attractive landscapes of run, a state that I have nearly reached. England. A circle of forty miles radius, centred on my In 1988 I made notes of 22 outings, distributed

34 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self around the region as follows: 7 in the Lake District I was not averse to some road running. In fact, I liked (Longsleddale, Scandale, High Street, Nan Bield Pass, to start with a mile or two on the road to loosen up and Winster, Coniston Old Man, Swindale); 5 in the Forest then to end with a mile or two on the road when the of Bowland (River Dunsop, Salter Fell, Fair Snape, legs were tiring. I was not following a ‘trail’, although Roeburndale, Burn Moor); 4 in the Yorkshire Dales I had no objection to doing so if it helped. Part of the (Ingleborough, Baugh Fell, Crummockdale, Scales aim was to run away from any sort of trail in order to Moor); 2 in the Howgills (Cautley Spout, Bowderdale); reach places normally inaccessible. I will admit now 4 elsewhere in the region (Bretherdale, Barbondale, that I often trespassed (this was before the access land Hutton Roof, Upper Eden valley). How I wish I could legislation of 2004). manage similar now! But I am grateful to have managed I suppose I could just continue to call them it then. ‘outings’. But that suggests trips to the sea-side and I am not sure what to call these outings. They were the like. Perhaps ‘run-outings’, or ‘run-outs’, for short, not, of course, fell-races (as I described in Week 11). I is better. But that’s the wrong way round. I didn’t run to always ran alone and while I did run energetically I was get out: I went out to run. So, I’ll settle on ‘out-runs’. in no hurry to get anywhere particular. I was allowed to From 1988, then, a main purpose of my running stop whenever I wanted, to look at anything interesting became to stay fit enough to be able to go on out-runs, or just to admire the scenery. When I reached the top or to go out-running, in order to explore the region of a hill there was no compulsion to dash straight back near where I live. Since then, I have made notes of 131 down again. On the contrary, once up there, I’d hope out-runs. to be able to run about on ‘top of the world’ for some I’m not sure if my Roeburndale run should count time. as an out-run. It was less exploratory than my out-runs ‘Fell-running’ is a possible description but to most used to be. But, heck, I can lower my standards now. people a ‘fell’ is a rugged mountain of the Lakeland Nobody is counting, except me. So, that’s 132, then. type and fell-running involves scrambling up and down such Below: Dow Crag and Coniston Old Man. On September 9th 1988 I ran from mountains. There was some of the bottom right corner, to the basin (wherein lies Goats Water) between the two. that but I much preferred running along the ridges (High Street, the Then up the Old Man, north to Brim Fell, and back behind Dow Crag, returning Helvellyn ridge, and so on) to on the Walna Scar track. On May 15th 2005 I ran roughly the other way round, running up and down the slopes. up Dow Crag to Brim Fell and back over the Old Man. Then I came to prefer the rather more gentle contours of the Dales and Howgills to the craggy Lake District fells. Maybe ‘hill- running’ is a better term - but then my outings did not necessarily involve running up and down hills. I was quite content to explore dales, valleys, lakes, indeed anything on the map that looked promising. If the clouds are low or the winds are high, then a low-level run is obviously to be preferred. I always had half-a-dozen potential routes of various sorts ready to select from. Americans use the term ‘trail- running’ for off-road running. But © Pamela Self

his diary is supposed to be focussed upon running almost coincided with my own transition from serious T but from time to time it becomes obvious that my to less-serious running. running only plays second fiddle to the rest of my I ran one marathon in 1982 (the Norfolk Marathon) life. This week it has been pushed right out of the and one in 1983 (the Windermere Marathon). The orchestra. former was a line-run, from Kelling to Norwich; the latter During the Easter holiday Martin and Sarah a loop-run, around Lake Windermere. Unlike the three said that they had decided to get married. In the earlier marathons, they were not organised by running circumstances my running didn’t seem so important. I clubs but by charitable agencies that had noticed the have only run a little this week and I haven’t given it my increasing numbers of runners and realised that they full attention. There isn’t much to say about it, so I will were a source of income for their worthy causes. The resort to my running of the distant past. Norfolk Marathon was run in aid of the Kelling Hospital I have run less this week but I notice that others Appeal and the Windermere Marathon was organised are running more, encouraged out by the fine spring by the Rotary Club. weather. I find it strange that the majority of casual The latter marathon was completed by 1407 runners go for such uninspiring runs. I rarely see runners, about ten times more than for the Preston and runners on the hilly roads up to the moor or even by Huddersfield Marathons. The different nature of the the riverside. Most of them run along the old railway runners is indicated by the fact that only 40% of them track, because, I suppose, it is flat and simple (just run finished within 3:30, compared to 88% and 84% forthe along it, turn and run back). Preston and Huddersfield Marathons. It is as though they have been told that running should be a dull activity, so they find the dullest run that they can. If they ran just a few yards off the railway track, down by the river, they might see a kingfisher, as I saw the other day. Or a sand-martin (certainly), lapwing (probably), plover (possibly), oystercatcher (perhaps) or heron (maybe). Or salmon leaping. They would, at least, have a better view, along the Lune valley. In general, though, I am glad to see other runners about because it makes my own running seem less in need of explanation. Nowadays there is nothing remarkable about the sight of runners, especially in fine weather. When I started running in 1978 it was thought to be a rather peculiar activity. The transformation of running from being a commitment of dedicated athletes to a pastime that almost everybody could take up occurred in the early 1980s in the UK (and somewhat earlier in the US). As it happens, it Waterworks Bridge below Aughton Woods.

36 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self In keeping with their less serious character, the races were only a component of the gala events of the day, which is part of the reason for running them: it gives the rest of the family something to do while runners are occupied. The Norfolk Marathon was my home county marathon and could be combined with visits to relatives. The race was through country that I knew as a boy. Not coincidentally, I knew the course would be flat, providing the opportunity for a fast time. Unfortunately, this opportunity was not realised because a gale blew directly into our faces as we ran from Kelling to Norwich. Experienced runners have mastered the skill of spitting on the run, as I discovered as I ran behind some of them, as was my custom, to find the gale showering me with phlegm. The Norfolk event was unusual in having both a marathon and a half-marathon, obviously with the aim of raising more money. We all started off together but at my halfway point the half-marathon runners peeled off to their finish. There was no way of knowing until they did so who was in which race. Maybe some runners The end of the 1982 Norfolk Marathon, in the aborted the marathon because of the gale. I suddenly courtyard of Norwich Cathedral. found myself with only a handful of runners ahead and duly finished 4th in 2:35. Human nature being what it is, serious club I was probably fitter for this marathon than for any runners began to lose interest in racing marathons, other and perhaps, without the gale, I could have run once their reputation as a superhuman elite was my fastest time. But I realised that some things (such shattered by the demonstration that almost anyone as the weather) are beyond my control and that it isn’t could run a marathon if they put their mind to it. The sensible to set out hoping for a PB. newcomers were so fixated upon the marathon that, I entered the Windermere Marathon because it to begin with, it seemed hardly to occur to them to had become our local marathon (the Preston Marathon run anything else. I suppose a 10-mile race doesn’t would be too dangerous for such multitudes of runners provide the same sense of bravado and achievement - and, in any case, would not appeal to the new breed and is less impressive to potential sponsors. of runner). It was undoubtedly the most pleasant As a serious club runner myself by that stage, I too marathon that I have run, if any marathon can be began to lose interest in marathons. Serious runners considered pleasant, with the autumn colours and the had, of course, always run races of different lengths - changing panoramas across the lake. It was, however, and could continue to do so without much interference rather too undulating for really fast times, although that from the newcomers. I began to run more such races mattered little. I came 7th, also in 2:35. myself, not least because they are less disruptive of The character of marathon running had changed. family life. Training for, say, 10-mile races, could be No longer did only serious club runners run the races. fitted into a relatively normal lifestyle. With, at that They were now far outnumbered by newcomers most time, two young children (Martin and Pamela), it was of whom had no intention of joining a running club. The hard to find the time for the hours of running necessary new runners wanted to tackle what was considered to for marathon training. I didn’t want to find it, anyway: be the ultimate running challenge, in a noncompetitive the children were more interesting and important. But fashion, possibly raising money for charity along the even second fiddlers can be serious, at least about way. their running.

n Friday I took part in an emotional ceremony. I If I thought my feet were ideal for the running O bought my last pair of running shoes. I always that I do nowadays then, rationally, I should run in my assume nowadays that they will be my last pair, anyway. feet, that is, barefoot. However, there are irrational The shop assistants probably think that I am beyond considerations. I already feel self-conscious, as a my last pair, although they are too polite to say so. 65-year-old running about showing off my legs. I don’t The young lady who came to help me immediately want the neighbours to think me completely odd, as scuttled off for help herself when I caused trouble by they would if I ran along the road barefoot. asking a question. The young man who returned gave There is a fashion, particularly in the United me a thorough eulogy of the virtues of the modern States, for running barefoot. We are biassed towards running shoe as though it were the newest electronic hoping that ‘nature is best’. The long-distance runners gadgetry the like of which an old duffer could never of the Mexican canyons run barefoot, or nearly so. In have seen before and certainly could not comprehend. the western world, we picture the best runners today, I stalled him briefly by commenting that some of the who are usually African, running about barefoot as New Balance shoes, which for the last thirty years had children. And yet none of them compete barefoot. The sold themselves as British-made, were now made in well-known barefoot champions of the past, Zola Budd Vietnam, which he had not noticed. He did, however, and Abebe Bikila, hardly support the case. The former stumble upon my Achilles heel when, towards the took to wearing shoes to protect herself from injuries. end of his peroration, he emphasised the importance The latter only ran barefoot in the 1960 Olympics of cushioning when running down steep roads. I am marathon because, as a late addition to the team, there nursing a slightly sore calf from running down from the were no shoes to fit him. He wore shoes when he won Cragg (as I had predicted might happen in Week 12) the 1964 marathon. but I didn’t admit that to him. If, however, I thought that my feet were not ideal The need for running shoes has been increasingly then I would hope that running shoes would help. It questioned recently. The debate seems to boil down is, after all, the case that many components of our to an argument about whether the human foot has bodies have evolved inadequately for modern life. evolved to be suited for running in the 21st century. For example, our eyes seem unable to cope with the The answer depends to some extent on the kind amount of reading we do nowadays. I see nothing of running you have in mind. Clearly, it would be wrong, in principle, therefore with hoping that my remarkably fortuitous if the foot was ideally suited for shoes will offer protection, support and correction for running on the kinds of surface that big city marathons any foot inadequacies. use, that is, hard roads. Runners run differently with and without running The answer also depends on your view of the shoes1. With shoes, runners tend to strike the ground conditions under which the human foot did evolve. If, with the heel. Without shoes, they tend to strike more as some believe, the foot evolved while humans were midfoot or forefoot. As a result, barefoot runners are running long distances hunting down animals then not subjected to as high an impact force. The inference perhaps it is ideal for running far over rough ground. If that some draw from this is that running shoes are it evolved for hunting over short distances or for quick more likely, not less likely, to cause injuries. This is, escape from predators then perhaps it is more attuned of course, a controversial conclusion, disputed by shoe to sprinting. These are questions for anthropologists to manufacturers who have vested commercial interests answer, but they don’t seem to be able to answer them in promoting new shoes with extra features intended at the moment. to help the runner.

38 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Because barefoot running involves a different ‘extreme fire risk’. The local news has been reporting style to running with shoes, it is not easy to switch from extensive fires on the moors just south and I was foolish one to the other, even if one were convinced by the not to foresee this closure. argument. Myself, I have always run in running shoes. But not to worry: I ran along the road, fairly empty of I prefer light shoes with thin soles, through which I traffic, through the Trough of Bowland as far as Dunsop can ‘feel’ the ground, which I understand is one of the Bridge and back (about 90 minutes). Dunsop Bridge objectives of barefoot running, that is, to strengthen claims to be the centre of gravity of Britain, which does foot muscles rather than to cause them to weaken perhaps add a point of interest to the run. In any case, through lack of use. In fact, most barefoot advocates do it was a very pleasant run, for Bowland changes little not themselves run barefoot. They run with ‘minimalist over the decades. The old boundary stone, Sykes Farm, shoes’ (mimicking the sandals of the Mexican runners) the picnic spot at Langden Brook, Smelt Mill Cottages that are supposed to correspond to barefoot running. (now a Mountain Rescue centre) and Dunsop Bridge I imagine that I would quite like the subjective itself were all much as I remembered them. feeling of being more naturally connected with the The real Bowland, however, is away from the road. environment through running barefoot, as I do at the It is up on the many acres of wilderness, millstone grit, moment only on rare runs on a beach. However, where peat bogs, crags and cloughs, with moor birds such as I usually run there are stones, rocks, thistles and nettles curlew, lapwing, grouse and especially hen harrier, for that would make me more aware of the environment which it is England’s best breeding area. Perhaps the than I would wish. It would take a hardy sole to run closure of the moor was for the best. My old running barefoot where I went to out-run on Tuesday. shoes are beginning to disintegrate as it is, rotting away I headed for the Forest of Bowland, aiming to after many miles in the winter mud. The millstone grit run from Tower Lodge, up by Tarnbrook Wyre to the and tough heather might have made them even more watershed, along the ridge to Wolfhole Crag, and back minimalist than they have already become. across Brennand Fell. This is not a route to tackle after wet weather but I anticipated that the hottest April ever 1 Lieberman, Daniel et al (2010), Foot strike patterns and recorded, with strong winds and very little rain, would collision forces in habitually barefoot versus shod have dried out the peat bogs nicely. Unfortunately, runners, Nature, 463, 531-535. they were too dry: the moor was closed because of

The trig point on Wolfhole Crag (at 527 metres) in the Forest of Bowland, with millstone grit boulders and heather. (This photograph was taken on an earlier occasion: I wouldn’t want you to think that I ignored the ‘moor closed’ signs.) This moor is home to England’s largest inland colony of lesser black- backed gulls. I was looking forward to running amidst the cacophony of 25,000 nesting gulls. I would not have felt guilty at disturbing them, as I’m sure the land-owners would prefer grouse to nest instead and, in addition, all these gulls pollute Lancaster’s water supply.

ometimes I just sit still for 90 minutes, with a break tells me (that I am too slow). Sometimes, however, it Sin the middle, doing absolutely nothing. Nobody helps to add some precision to the monitoring process. has ever asked me “What on earth do you think about I know, for example, that on an average day it takes me all that time?”. Instead I’m asked, for example, “What 13 minutes to reach the Crook o’ Lune along the old did you think of the Sibelius?” because it is assumed railway line. If I’m expecting a fast-ish run but it takes that I am thinking about the music that is being played me 14 minutes then I know that I’m more sluggish than for me. I anticipated. So, to go on to Halton Bridge, normally Long-distance runners are plagued by people another 11 minutes, might take 12, that is, 26 minutes asking “What on earth do you think about all that in total. This kind of minor mental arithmetic as I go time?”. At least that is the impression you get from along helps me to keep focussed on the running. those who write about running, who labour at length Sometimes, especially when I am trying to get to provide an answer. I suspect that they are just fit again, I time myself in order to make a note ofhow puzzled themselves, for nobody has ever asked me slowly I am running. This is in the hope that when I run that question. I will answer it anyway: I think about the same route two weeks later I can be encouraged running. If I spend a lot of time on anything then it by the evidence that I have somehow become a minute seems sensible to me to think about it. or so faster. I differ from Murakami in this respect. He says I try not to focus on any specific anticipated (p17) “... as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth problem because I have learned that this may mentioning. I just run. I run in a void”. I don’t know how exacerbate it, by causing unnatural running. It’s better, he manages that. My mind doesn’t have an off switch. I find, to try to forget it so that it merges with all the Whether I like it or not, it thinks all the time, if not as other aches and niggles that emerge. If it doesn’t then profoundly as Murakami’s. Since it insists on thinking, it is better to abort the run and jog gently back. I’d rather that it thinks about something relevant. In general - and this may be Murakami’s point Even if I could switch off my mind I’m not sure - anything becomes more of a struggle if you think why I should. Murakami himself emphasises the about the struggle. If you think only of the pain when importance of ‘focus’ - and yet he chooses not to focus in the dentist’s chair it will be more painful. If you think at all on running when actually engaged in the activity your breathing is laboured while running then it will of it. If I wished to achieve a trance-like void, there is become more laboured. If, somehow, you can focus surely a less arduous way to do so. on something else then a mile or two can pass without Perhaps I need to explain what there is to think you even being aware of it. I suppose it depends on about with running. There is an inner and outer aspect whether you think of running fundamentally as a to it. Before I set off on a run I have an expectation of penance or a pleasure. Personally, I don’t want miles what sort of run it will be. This depends on various to pass without me being aware of it. things, such as how I feel generally, how much running The outer aspect concerns my focus on the I’ve done recently, the weather conditions, what else I surroundings as I run. I always set off with some plan for the rest of the day, and so on. As I run I monitor expectations about what I might see and hear. On the how I’m running compared to my expectations. I don’t, run over Halton Bridge I will want to see the progress, of course, monitor in an overt, medical sense. It’s just a if any, on the eco-houses that are planned. If I run up general awareness of how I’m running. to the moor in February I will listen out for the first I always run with a watch. Usually I ignore it skylarks of the year and glance in the ditches for the because I know that it will only confirm what my body first frog-spawn (they are hardy frogs up there). IfI

40 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self run around the windmills I will be sure to appreciate the long-distance views of the Forest of Bowland, the Yorkshire Dales and over Morecambe Bay to the Lake District. And so on - and, of course, I will try to stay alert for anything unexpected en route. In this way I am always reminding myself how privileged I am to be able to run in such a region. As it happens, I have not managed a 90-minute run this week, unlike a couple of previous weeks. It is good to know that I am capable of it but ... I hesitate to regale you with a litany of my woes but I cannot give the full and fair picture of my running that you deserve without mentioning that I have been somewhat discommoded this week by bruises gained by falling in the beck. After a dry spell, as we’ve had, I work on the bank Bluebells in Aughton Woods. of the beck at the bottom of our garden to protect it against erosion during a very wet spell, on a rock but half (or more) submerged in the water. as we will surely have. Anyhow, somehow, I fell in. Every so often they twirl the stick above their head. Afterwards, if I tried to run I would wince at every step. This is believed to be an attempt to mesmerise fish so I kept telling myself that “pain is inevitable; suffering is that they may be scooped from the water. However, in optional” but I kept answering back “pain is optional; thirty years of careful observation I have never seen an running is not compulsory - walk instead”. angler on the Lune entrap a fish in this way or indeed Alas and alack: I am bereft, without running. The in any other way. lump on my head has subsided but a sharp pain in the Some experts believe the stick-twirling to be part side of the chest remains. I don’t think it’s a cracked rib of a mating ritual. If it is then it is sadly unsuccessful but even if it were there’s nothing I can do about it. So for the simple reason that there are no female anglers. I have taken a few gentle strolls. One day I went across As a consequence, there are no young anglers. This to the other side of the River Lune in order to see the presents a conundrum for biologists. My own theory spectacular displays of bluebells in Aughton Woods. I is that the angler is not a species in itself but merely think it was a week or two late to see them at their very a stage in the life cycle of some other species, like a best but on this walk I was pleased to see another sure chrysalis or a maggot, perhaps. sign of the change of season, the return of another of Anglers are silent and solitary. They have no the species that I keep my eye out for: the angler. I song or alarm call (unless they fall in the river). They spotted one standing in the river below the woods. communicate solely with their arms, which they stretch This strange species disappears over the winter. ahead and gradually widen. An angler’s territory is It discards its drab browny-green outer surface and claimed afresh each day but once claimed it is never semi-hibernates. Its reappearance in the spring and its breached by other anglers. The range of their territory disappearance in the autumn is, by some mechanism is determined by the size of their stick. unknown to science, remarkably punctual, always I am fond of anglers because their peculiar occurring within a day or two of the same date each behaviour makes my own seem relatively rational. year. The one I spotted was still there, in exactly the same Anglers stand for hours on the river bank with a position, when I walked back some 45 minutes later. stick to dangle a wire in the water. Sometimes they stand What on earth does an angler think about while for hours right in the river, not like a heron gracefully standing in the river for hours on end?

ur outing on Saturday to the Howgills, where we all directions, but between Rampsgill Head and Pooley O went so that Ruth could rehearse for and then play Bridge I did not see another person. That’s eight miles in the Ravenstonedale Prom, had a certain poignancy. or so of one of the most scenic ridges in England all to On the day of the Prom last year (which was in July) I myself, which is worth running for! had my longest run of recent years: this year I could Last year I was tipped out in Sedbergh to run over only go for a walk. the Howgills to Ravenstonedale. When I’m running up Last year’s run was a ‘tip-out-run’, which is a hills I try to keep running as long as I can, albeit slowly. combination, naturally, of a ‘tip-out’ (Week 15) and an Once, as a challenge to myself, I ran non-stop to the top ‘out-run’ (Week 16). In a normal tip-out I am left to run of Whernside, the highest peak of the Yorkshire Dales. back home from wherever I am tipped out. In a tip- If the intention is to keep on running then it is wise out-run I have to run, usually over some mountains, to to tackle the longest, gentlest ascent rather a direct an agreed rendez-vous point, to meet up again with frontal assault. So, I began in Kingsdale by Raven Ray, car and Ruth. These tip-out-runs don’t happen often ran along the track to Twisleton Hall, and then along because they take careful planning and require a high the West Fell ridge, climbing 480m without a pause. level of fitness on my part. When they do, however, Unfortunately, on the slopes of Winder, the hill they provide memorable runs that cannot be tackled behind Sedbergh, I soon found that I was not able to in any other way. run up it. The first few yards were too steep. I feared One tip-out-run that I recall well (on 24th July that I might have been over-ambitious in aiming to run 1990, according to my records) was along the High to Ravenstonedale, 10 miles away in a direct line (not Street ridge. I was tipped out at the Kirkstone Inn, from that a direct line is possible). Eventually, I managed a where I ran over Stony Cove Pike and Thornthwaite slow trot skirting below Winder, to join the broad and, Crag to High Street, with a detour out to Kidsty Pike for eventually, flattish, track that passes Arant Haw and on the view, and then along the ridge - excellent running to Calders. all the way - over Rampsgill Head, High Raise, Wether I had to walk again up the slopes of Calders, where Hill, Loadpot Hill, Arthur’s Pike, and down to Pooley I met a couple of walkers on their way down. “That is Bridge, where I was met by Ruth and Pamela walking The Calf, isn’t it?” they asked, waving to Calders. They up the track. They had had a leisurely drive alongside clearly thought, or hoped, that they had conquered the Ullswater. It was a hot, sunny day, with good views in highest point of the Howgills (which is The Calf) and

Winder, Arant Haw and Calders, the ridge along which I ran.

42 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self were disappointed when I said “No, The Calf is another memorable. As with marathons, the run itself is only mile further on. You can see its trig point from the top part of the achievement: it is the knowledge that one there (Calders)”. They reluctantly turned to re-climb is fit enough to contemplate even tackling such a run Calders. that gives greater satisfaction. One of the reasons that When I reached The Calf, I looked back and I I continue to try to run is the hope that I may become could see them still at Calders, gesticulating with other fit enough to have further days like the traverse of the walkers. I gave them a wave but I doubt that they ever Howgills. believed that they were not at The Calf (it is only two Unfortunately, that seems some way away right metres higher than Calders). At the trig point a small now. The most frustrating aspect of running as you group of walkers was already gathered. Normally I get older is the body’s decreasing ability to recover. pause at the highest point to have a good look around Decades ago, minor problems would evaporate in a day and perhaps have a brief word with anyone else or two but now they seem to linger forever. A couple there. But this group seemed to find me a subject of of weeks ago I mentioned my “slightly sore calf” (no amusement. Maybe the sight of an old guy puffing up relation to The Calf). I could run for 90 minutes with it to the trig point is amusing to walkers. Maybe they so it wasn’t much to worry about. were taking bets on whether I was about to peg out. I thought that a week’s rest, after my fall in the Maybe I imagined it. beck, would do the calf good. In fact, it is worse. How I left them to it and jogged off on the path to is that possible? It is as though my battle-hardened Bowderdale Head. From here, I expected to be on muscles of two weeks ago, when I was fit, protected my own. The Saturday walkers tackle the path from their ailing comrade, the sore muscle, but have relaxed Winder to the Calf but very few of them walk on the during their holiday and are now leaving it to fend for eastern slopes of Bowderdale. I had to, as I was again itself, which it is unable to do. reduced to walking, on the slopes of Yarlside. Actually, I am on the horns of a dilemma. If I run to toughen I am sure that even in my prime I would have had to up the relaxed muscles, the calf may be made worse. walk up Yarlside. It is too steep and the grassy slopes If I rest the calf, the muscles may become even more too uneven to run on. relaxed - and the calf may not recover for some time. After another scramble up Kensgriff left me feeling exhausted, I was relieved that it should be all running, and mainly downhill, from here to Ravenstonedale. I picked up the path below Randygill Top and ran on to Green Bell, where, as I reached the top, I was surprised to meet a party of walkers arriving from the northern slope. I did not linger in the cold wind. On over Knoutberry and Snowfell End and at last I could see Ravenstonedale ahead. After a wash and some food in the van, I was refreshed sufficiently to join the Ravenstonedale Prommers. I reached the van some 2 hours 20 minutes after I had been tipped out of it. As I’ve indicated, I cannot honestly say that I ran across the Howgills. There were several walking/scrambling episodes. Even so, I managed the whole distance in reasonable Bowderdale in the Howgills, showing the eastern ridge that I ran shape, which was not too bad, just a few days along. Randygill Top is the rounded peak (all peaks are rounded before my 65th birthday. in the Howgills!) to the right, with part of Yarlside to its right. The The probably increasing rarity of such slope of Yarlside is one of the ones that I could not run up. days makes them even more valued and

o run or not to run? That is the runner’s question: thousands. It showed, according to Chris Brasher, one T whether it is better to run - to maintain general of the initiators, that “the human race [is] one joyous fitness at the risk of aggravating a minor injury - or to family, working together, laughing together, achieving rest - to sacrifice general fitness in order to allow time the impossible”. for an injury to recover. The new marathon ethos was perfectly symbolised In hindsight the answer ‘to run’ is always a by the two winners of the first race, who came to the mistake, because we never apply hindsight if it turns finishing line hand-in-hand. Can you imagine the out not to be a mistake. The wrong decision here is the negotiation between the two leaders in the final main cause of all those injuries mentioned in Week 3. mile? This gesture has not been repeated in any later On the other hand, if we rested whenever there was a marathon but in 1981 it was the taking part, not the possibility of making a suspected minor injury worse winning, that mattered. then we would hardly run at all. I resisted the London Marathon until 1983. Then Whilst I am grappling with this problem, teetering we set off for a weekend in London, along with many on the tightrope of indecision, let us divert ourselves thousands of others. On the Saturday we joined the by turning for inspiration to the London Marathon, the throngs registering for the race and getting swept zenith of so many runners’ ambition and achievement. up in the media hype. Early Sunday morning I made I can postpone it no longer. my way to Greenwich. The organisers had skilfully The first London Marathon was in 1981. It is often fixed the date of the marathon to coincide with the assumed that the London Marathon caused the great change of the clocks, so the 9.30 start was really 8.30. growth in long-distance running in the 1980s. In fact, Despite this, I had ample time to enjoy the exciting it was the other way around. Nobody would have gone facilities provided on Greenwich Park: black coffee to the considerable trouble of organising a marathon stalls (to keep awake), running shoe stalls (bit late for in London if they weren’t sure that many thousands that, I thought), portable loos (well, I hope they were of people would want to run it. Participation in long- portable) and back to black coffee. distance road races was already increasing and the The London Marathon is neither a loop-run nor New York Marathon, which had started in 1970, had a line-run. It is a line-loop-line-run. You run from shown the popularity of mass-participation big city Greenwich to Tower Bridge, go on a loop through marathons. the Isle of Dogs back to Tower Bridge, and then on to The London Marathon instantly became the largest Westminster. Its odd shape helps to create the unique British marathon: indeed, for the general public it was experience of running it. the only marathon. If you said that you’d run a marathon I did, of course, expect to have plenty of company it was assumed to be the London Marathon. It was, and on this run, unlike the other marathons I’d run. I had still is, the only British marathon televised live and not, however, fully anticipated the crowds of people featured on news broadcasts. Its theme tune became lining the course, who, along with the TV helicopters known to everyone as the marathon tune (it’s actually whirring overhead, created a perpetual din. I was Ron Goodwin’s ‘The Trap’, written to accompany Oliver not used to this. Normally, on my runs, I hear only the Reed canoeing down a Canadian river). sounds of nature - the occasional sheep or skylark, The London Marathon initiated a new style of perhaps. marathon for Britain, in which members of a vast sea Most people, I suppose, find encouragement from of humanity provide mutual support as they strive the cheering crowds. Like anyone, I appreciate hearing towards a communal goal. The sight of such a mass a friend or relative shouting out a “Looking good - keep of be-numbered runners proved inspirational to it up”, which is all you hear during normal races. But

44 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self why were complete strangers shouting at me? What “You can’t stop now - you’ve only a couple of miles to were they shouting? How could I focus on my running go”. I offered her my number to finish for me. in all this noise? Why were bands playing outside the As I look at the map now I am impressed by the pubs? Why were people gathered there, pints in hand, rationality of my decision. It is much easier to reach shouting at us? Was it really encouragement they were the finish over Hungerford Bridge than it is to take the shouting? Did they know or care anything at all about long detour along Pall Mall and Birdcage Walk. running marathons or did they just like shouting at It is, however, very bad form to drop out of a race runners? just because you are fed up with it. It is considered It may not seem much to put up with but mile after an insult to the organisers and the other runners. mile of it overwhelmed me. Even the relative peace Even if, or especially if, you are not running as well as of the Isle of Dogs was disturbed every few yards by you’d like, you are expected to complete the course. some well-meaning bystander shouting “Keep going There is a special appreciation for those runners who - only twelve miles to go”, which is the last thing you persevere although in obvious discomfit. For most want to hear. I stopped. I don’t think it was fatigue from runners, dropping out is a matter of shame and regret. running. I was mentally, rather more than physically, But there we are. I ran 24 miles and then dropped exhausted. There was just too much noise. Too much out. Afterwards, it was hard to explain to people why. fuss all round. It was the opposite of what running I wasn’t even injured. I wasn’t that tired. The family, meant for me: a chance to get out into the peaceful all excited that I’d finished, eventually found me in the fields. finishing area. But I hadn’t finished: I had dropped I started running again and got back to Tower out. Bridge and the noisy spectators. I somehow caught a Everybody else seemed to relish all the hullabaloo. glimpse of Ruth and the children, and tried to indicate The cheering continued. Runners streamed over the that all was not well. As I ran along the Embankment the finishing line, triumphant. It was a little hard to accept packed crowds along the footpaths and on the bridges that I was the odd one out. I am perplexed that people were shouting and waving. A runner ahead of me ran can say that they like running because it provides an along with his arms aloft as though acknowledging the inner serenity - and then they run with thousands of acclaim of people grateful to him for having won the others in a noisy bedlam. How can Murakami achieve Third World War single-handedly. his ‘mental void’ while running in the New York “Sod it” I thought “I’ve had enough of this”. I Marathon? stopped and walked over Hungerford Bridge to the I concluded that the London Marathon was not for finish on Westminster Bridge. A woman shouted atme me. I’d leave it for those who like that sort of thing.

Littledale, from the footpath between Cragg Farm and Belhill Farm, is the kind of place where I prefer to run. The grassy ridge on the left, up to High Stephen’s Head, is a fine run; the rocky ridge on the right, up to Ward’s Stone, less so. I can be certain that there will be no other runners and no spectators. (I dare but whisper that I eventually decided to run, not rest, this week. The best that I can say is that I haven’t made matters worse but it feels as though my body is still re- assembling itself into working order.)

t 9.29 on May 13th 1984 I was standing at the For the only time in my life I ran for charity in one A starting line for the 1984 London Marathon. Or of the London Marathons, but I don’t remember which very near the starting line, as my 2:34.59 in the 1983 one. I don’t recall that my 1983 failure to finish caused Windermere Marathon had qualified me as a so-called any problem claiming the sponsorship money, so I ‘elite runner’ - by 1 second. think it must have been the 1984 one. In any case, I I had unfinished business. This time there would took no part in the money-raising effort. I agreed to be no distractions. I ignored all the hype. I ignored be sponsored (to raise money for Ruth’s beleaguered all the other runners. I ignored the crowd. I left the orchestra) provided that others would arrange and family at home. collect the donations. It is hard enough, I thought, to I was apparently spotted two or three times in the run the marathon without having the stress of signing TV broadcast. Normally, it is impossible to spot anyone up sponsors and then feeling compelled to keep on in that flood of runners but I ran apart from the rest, as running to earn all the money that is expected. far as possible. Around Cutty Sark I took a wide path, The London Marathon is now the world’s largest unlike everyone else. Along Birdcage Walk I kept annual fund raising event. It raises nearly £50m each myself separate. year, with over 75% of its runners being sponsored. Not I was totally focussed on the race. I finished, in even I can be cynical about that. If that is what runners no distress, in 2:33 in 351st place. Job done. Now I and their sponsors want to do, then it is wholly to be really would leave the London Marathon to those who commended. If it provides extra incentive for many like that sort of thing. runners to know that they will raise money to help a charity that they want to support, then that is fine too. My motivation to run has never been to raise money. In view of my own deplorable efforts in this direction, I thought I’d find out what was involved and I found a helpful website (www.frontrunnerpt.com) that laid out five principles, which I summarise here: 1. Choose your charity with care. Find a personal link with one of them. 2. Be professional. Be precise and clear about the reasons for fund-raising. 3. Be persistent but not pushy. 4. Be proactive. Raise the profile of what you are doing. Use contacts shamelessly. 5. Use email and the internet to market yourself and to Proof that I completed the 1984 London Marathon. I expect collect donations. I particularly appreciated the comment that “It is a serious the technology has improved by now but in those days a business and so you should approach sponsorship in the photographer snapped runners at the finish line and sent same way as your training, with dedication and effort”. This them a tiny photograph (which is what the above was - sorry makes me feel relieved that, in the circumstances, I didn’t for the quality), defaced in some way, in this case, with the get involved with sponsorship as I had little dedication and ‘proof’ printed over it. You could then pay a large fee for a effort to spare, after training. large photo as a memento of the occasion. I didn’t. One of the problems with raising money by running is

46 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self inflation - the rising demand for novelty. Sponsors become is ‘running’. In competitive walking they are very careful to less and less enthused by such a mundane challenge as just define ‘walking’ to ensure that nobody breaks into a run. In running a marathon. So, year-by-year, runners for charity walking, there is always one foot on the ground. If, at any become more adventurous, with outlandish costumes, time, both feet are off the ground it is running. Walkers are running backwards, playing a trombone, juggling, ... disqualified for running but runners are not disqualified for culminating (surely) in 2011 with the ludicrous ‘snail’, which walking. completed the London Marathon course in 26 days. The It matters to nobody whether Dawson ran or snail claimed the slowest marathon time ever, as if that were walked according to the letter of the law (I expect it an achievement. I don’t want to be pernickety but if you are was a lot of both). However, the difference between allowed breaks, as the snail had, then I took a whole year to walking and running matters to me, not for pedantic finish my 1983 marathon. reasons but subjectively. I am consoled a little to read that the snail raised When I go walking I wear and carry extra clothes, only a tenth of the money hoped for, suggesting that to combat all varieties of weather, and I also carry (as sponsors prefer to support an activity with some sense recommended for serious walkers) maps, compass, and some merit. But I am digressing from my brief food, drink, camera, mobile, binoculars, and plasters, because the snail clearly did not run: it inched along bandages, and so on in case of mishaps - mishaps face down on a sled, nosing its way through dog mess, that are in fact much more likely to occur when I go fag-ends, chewing gum, and so on. running, for which I discard all the above so that I may Returning to running, I am pleased to be able run unencumbered and uninhibited (well, not all my to report that the 73-year-old - whom I neglected to clothes - I am not that uninhibited). Walking is a trudge; name in Week 4, John Dawson - duly completed his ten running is a gambol. Subjectively, as I say. marathons in ten days, in aid of the Brathay Trust. After It had not occurred to me to include miles walked taking up running at 53, Dawson has completed about in my mileage figures below. If I did then it would 300 marathons since he reached the age of 65. His be boosted considerably, as I’ve walked quite a lot average time for the ten marathons was about 7 hours, recently, allowing my bruises to recover. which is a speed of 16 minutes per mile. Similarly, it did not occur to me to just walk the I don’t want to appear unappreciative of the inspiring last two miles of the 1983 London Marathon, as I could achievement of an elderly man in covering 26 miles for easily have done. I wouldn’t have needed to make the ten days in a row, but I do wonder if 16 minutes per mile 1984 expedition if I had.

On Wednesday, on my way to a meeting in Tebay, I stopped off for a walk in Barbondale. On this walk - from Barbon, below Barbon Manor, to Blindbeck Bridge, over the ridge to Bullpot Farm, to Brownthwaite Pike (with a view over the Lune valley to Kirkby Lonsdale, shown left), over Barbon Low Fell and back to Barbon - I walked over 100 million years. I crossed the Dent Fault, one of the most important geological features of the region. The fault separates the Silurian slate (430m years old) of Middleton Fell to the north from the Carboniferous limestone (330m years old) of Leck Fell to the south.

erhaps I am a running snob. I used to take inner Are there fun-swimmers in these events? Do they Pumbrage when people said “I saw you out jogging dress up in enormous shark outfits? Or wear a mock the other day”. I thought “Jogging is running slow paddle-ship? I suspect not as the organisers say that enough to be able to chat, and I don’t think you could “costumes that restrict the swimmer or potentially chat at the speed I go” but I never said it. cause any injury to other swimmers will not be On the other hand, some people object to being allowed”. called a runner1: If the London Marathon applied such a rule then “I would never have guessed that you were a the field would be halved. But the sinking of a human runner”. paddle-ship in Lake Windermere could be a serious “This is jogging, Percy, not running. Running is sport. matter. In the London Marathon it could just berth by Jogging is punishment”. the road-side. “You mean you don’t enjoy it?” The London Marathon has, over the years, come “Enjoy it? Are you kidding? I only do this for my to be dominated by fun-runners. In 1984, when I health. It makes me feel so terrible, I figure it must be completed it, 35% of the runners finished within 3:30; doing me good”. in 2011 the figure was 11%. (I am not implying that I don’t mind being called a jogger nowadays. I all slow runners are fun-runners; goodness, no, some am grateful to be even that. Nobody has ever called of them insist on having no fun at all.) me a ‘fun-runner’. I enjoy running but ‘fun’ is not the As I mentioned, the corresponding figures for the word I’d use. I don’t think that I am alone in this. I Preston-to-Morecambe and Huddersfield Marathons doubt that Murakami and McDougall, for example, were 88% and 84%. In the 1980 Preston-to-Morecambe would welcome being called fun-runners. They don’t Marathon 8 out of 9 runners ran faster than 3:30; in the call themselves fun-runners, anyway. They have more 2011 London Marathon 8 out of 9 runners ran slower commitment than the term suggests. than 3:30. The fun-runner was invented in the 1970s in the In over thirty years on the roads I have never seen a United States and was inevitably adopted in the UK. fun-runner training. At least, not with his or her regalia I am not sure that a ‘fun-run’ would exist if ‘fun’ didn’t on. Do they turn up on Greenwich Park and hurriedly rhyme with ‘run’. According to Google translate, a try on the Houses of Parliament framework that they fun-runner is in Spanish a ‘divertido-corredor’, which have knocked up overnight and say “OK, that’s fine. I doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, at least, not my can carry this for 26 miles”? I don’t know how they tongue. The French don’t even have a word. manage it sometimes. How can you wear a grizzly bear Seriously, I think that linguistic accidents do outfit for 26 miles and not collapse from dehydration? have an influence. It is interesting that many nouns Do they not feel a teensy bit patronised to be called have become verbs and vice versa. ‘Run’, ‘sprint’, fun-runners, as if those 26 miles as a grizzly bear is a ‘steeplechase’, ‘jog’, ‘trot’, for example, are all noun- walk in the park? verbs. ‘Marathon’ is only a noun. You cannot marathon. I think I dislike the term ‘fun-runner’ because But you can certainly fun-run. Anyone can. of the presumption that ordinary running is not ‘fun’. Are there ‘fun’ versions of other activities? I see How would musicians, say, feel if people began calling that there is now a Great North Swim. The first was held themselves ‘fun-musicians’, dressing up in fancy in 2008, when 2250 swimmers swam over a mile in Lake costumes, and playing, not particularly well, for money Windermere. The 2010 swim was cancelled because in town centres? I suspect that they would slightly of toxic algae, a hazard that I never encountered on the resent the implication that they themselves were not road. having ‘fun’ playing music.

48 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Overall, though, I am happy with the concept of Although I have run this year as much as I might a ‘fun-runner’ as it reassures me that there are other have hoped, it has all been rather tentative, constrained people who regard running as a source of enjoyment. by the foreboding that if I let my running off the leash I was beginning to doubt it after feeling guilty about then I would regret it. It is very different to the old my comments in Week 13 about “pain is inevitable”. days, when I could, on a whim, decide to ‘sprint’ the My sore ribs (from my fall in Week 19) have just next mile, say. Now, if I were to be so reckless, parts of about recovered. For a while, they hurt when I sneezed, me would rattle, seize up, burst, or fall off. coughed, lie on them, or breathed, not all of which I I was also mightily encouraged recently by the could avoid doing when I ran. Running with gritted comment of a local woman, who is an occasional jogger teeth, tense shoulders, and a determination to avoid and who we met while out walking. She said that my any jarring movements rather sapped my enthusiasm. running “looks effortless”. Bless her! Of course, it The cause of my difficulties was not apparent to neither is nor looks it, but her saying so cheered me anyone else. Pain itself is not visible, only the effects of up no end. pain. Short of poking me in the ribs to see if I winced, Murakami emphasises his determination to keep you’d just have to take my word for it that they hurt. on running despite all his pain and in the final sentence Medically, there is no measure of pain other than what of his book says that he’d like his epitaph to read “At the person with pain says. Least He Never Walked”. I think I’d prefer mine to be a I appreciate now that this applies to other runners more all-purpose one: “It Looked Effortless”. too. If Murakami says that “pain is inevitable”, I accept that it is, for him. Who am I to deny it? I apologise and 1 Lodge, David (1984), Small World, London: Secker & sympathise. (Whilst I am in apologetic mood, I must Warburg. also say sorry to Norwich City Football Club for my gratuitous insult on the very first page. Its magnificent achievement of two successive promotions to reach the Premiership is only just sinking in.) Perhaps pain is the standard condition for all other runners. I have no way of knowing. Runners are only too willing to talk about their problems, but I tend not to believe them. Perhaps I am exceptionally lucky. Pain has not been something that I associate with running, normally. I doubt very much that I would have the courage to run if it were. It was only to prevent my legs becoming unfit that I tried to run in recent weeks. In evolutionary terms, pain exists, I suppose, to ensure that we remove ourselves from potentially damaging situations and to allow time for the cause of pain to recover. If so, it is probably a mistake to run with pain. My excuse for doing so is that this particular pain was not caused by running and was not, I think, made worse by running. After a month of just ticking over, with no run of more than half-an-hour, I am beginning to get back into it. Indeed, on Thursday this week, as I ran by the Waterworks Bridge, I felt that I was really running, flowing, gliding, with abandon, free as the wind. Iknow Waterworks Bridge, across which I have run many times, that it was only relative to the previous painful month after it was opened to the public in the 1990s. Clougha but even so it was a feeling that I hadn’t experienced Pike is in the distance. all year.

here is one thing that I am particularly grateful coefficient of this epistle ... T to the fun-runner movement for. And that is the So, here they all are, from 19th June 1983 (Preston medals! When race-organisers began to insist that Half-Marathon) to 17th April 1993 (Coniston 14-mile). taking part was more important than winning, they As you can see, my earliest races, including the first were duty-bound to provide medals for us all, not just three marathons, didn’t go in for the frivolity of medals. the winners. There must have been a boom in the The array, as I see it before me, reveals the flow and medal-making industry in the 1980s. ebb of my road-racing career, such as it was. The I have just tipped on to my desk the contents of number of medals each year is: 1983 - 8; 1984 - 11; a small box that has lain undisturbed at the back of a 1985 - 6; 1986 - 5; 1987 - 1; 1992 - 2; 1993 - 2. Apart cupboard for nearly 20 years. Let’s see ... 39 medals. from the unaccountable little flourish in 1992 and 1993, All those years ... all those races ... all these medals. I I stopped road-racing in 1987. am overcome with pride and emotion. A lump comes I am distressed to see that the largest medal is for to my eyes and a tear to my throat. the race I’d most prefer to forget, the 1986 Windermere There are 4 round, engraved ones in neat boxes. Marathon. I don’t know why I ran it, as my enthusiasm These are old-fashioned medals, won in old-fashioned for marathons had evaporated by then. Perhaps it was times (at school). The other 35 are all shapes and sizes because I’d entered the previous two years and then and colours. Some are a little rusty, but then so am I. withdrawn and didn’t like to do so a third time: it was, Most of the medals still have their ornate ribbons, for after all, the local marathon and should be supported. hanging around my neck at the finishing line. At the start of any race, runners are nervous about Some of the medals have no identifying words, the twinges that they’ve felt in previous days. They the race-organisers being too miserly to order medals hope that they won’t cause a problem, and usually they with engravings. But now is the precise moment that, don’t. If, however, there is a weakness, then a marathon with amazing foresight, I must have anticipated all will find it. By halfway my groin was more sore thanI those years ago, because I see that on the back of each had feared it would be. By 20 miles I was hobbling. medal is a little sticker, with date, race and time details. Runners streamed past, including Tony, my pace-setter Here, for example, is the Blackpool Half-Marathon of 16th October 1983 (15th in 74:45). The memory of it is creeping back. A ferocious gale blew. Ruth and the children went for a walk along the prom and said that they nearly got blown off. I have now turned all the medals upside down and what a panorama of athletic endeavour is revealed! I am reminded of the jigsaw puzzles I used to do as a boy. When it was finished my father would turn it over and carefully number all the pieces. Thereafter it was somewhat easier to do the puzzle upside down. I may have missed the point of the activity but at least I became red-hot on the order of the numbers, which has stood me in good stead. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes I’d like to arrange the medals into chronological order, for I am sparing no effort to raise the enlightenment Pinning my number on before the Windermere Marathon.

50 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self for the Preston-to-Morecambe Marathon and still ten all in their full, dull, monotone green. Over-growing years older than me. I finished, just, in 2:54. branches and brambles brush into me as I run along I think that I had known all along that this would my paths. The grass in fields without livestock is up be my last marathon. Marathons, I had come to feel, to my hips, bringing my legs out in a swollen rash, are too big a commitment for too uncertain a reward. reddening my eyes, and blocking my nose with hay For example, after training for the 1984 Manchester fever. I run, with difficulty, gasping for air. Marathon I hurt my back a week before the race while All the spring arrivals are here and well-settled. fooling about on Martin’s BMX bike. It seemed that All, that is, except one: I haven’t heard a single cuc or months of dedicated effort, with the looming marathon koo. On the moor, the lapwings and curlews clearly dominating my (and the family’s) life, had all been have young, as they bombard me aggressively, with wasted. In fact, of course, I should have just been fearsome screeches of alarm, if I should accidentally grateful for the months of good running. run near them. This is a little counter-productive: if they So that was it, as far as marathons were concerned. kept quiet I would not know the young were there. Seven completed (one in pain) and one aborted two If the curlew young are some distance away, the miles short. I never experienced the notorious ‘wall’. adults position themselves between me and the young. This physiological barrier, which is due to the body Therefore, if I see a curlew or two standing furtively exhausting its glycogen supply, halts many runners in a field, I look beyond them to spot the implausibly after the 20-mile mark. It causes overwhelming body cute mottled chicks. These, of course, do not have the fatigue and fuzzy thinking. That was not my condition remarkable bill of their parents but an ordinary one at Windermere: I had an injury. I’m not sure about the that will grow by degrees. 1983 London Marathon: if anything, my neat escape over The lapwings have taken on some of the dignity of Hungerford Bridge showed rather unfuzzy thinking. parenthood. The acrobatic displays of the spring birds, The 1986 Windermere Marathon was an interesting rising, tumbling, somersaulting over their territory, are experience but not one that I needed to repeat. Since no longer necessary. then, I’ve treated (potential) injuries with respect. My Likewise, my winter running dormancy burst into an guideline is to try to run for x minutes only if I know enthusiastic spring and has now settled into a summer that I can run for x-10 minutes. maturity. I must try to avoid the decay of autumn. So I am building up slowly again after my recent troubles. Whilst my attention has been inward-looking, Late news: The snail (Week 22) has been sacked by the outside world has moved on. Spring seems its charity, Action for Kids, for (it is said) not raising suddenly to be over. The trees, which were in different enough money, which, much as I disliked the snail, stages of fresh verdancy the last time I looked, are now seems rather uncharitable.

The end of the Windermere Marathon. The River Lune at the Crook o’Lune.

s a road-race a race? I was never sure. many others as possible. There is no embarrassment I A running race is the most elemental contest or stigma in striving your utmost to win: that is what you there is. It is one of the first contests we learn, as a are supposed to do. toddler: “Race you to that tree”. The adult version is At 65, there is no need to compete in road-races. much the same. I was not given a list of rules or told There is nothing left to prove. It is unseemly for a to wear special equipment for my first road-race. 65-year-old to try to summon up a sort-of-sprint in Even boxers have rules (the Queensberry Rules) and order to overtake some other runner at the tape. At compulsory equipment (boxing gloves). least, I think so. In a road-race you are side-by-side with your In middle age (say, 40) it is less clear-cut, except opponent. You can sense his strengths and weaknesses. at the extremes - at the front and the back of the race. It is your power and will-power against his. There At the front, there are prizes, medals and reputations is a direct comparison, moment-to-moment, with at stake. Serious competition is in order. Indeed, it your opponent. In other races, such as cycling and is expected, especially by the race organisers and swimming, the equipment and/or medium lessen this the spectators. At the back, it makes little difference sense of personal conflict. whether you come 290th or 291st out of 300. Runners In some sports, such as tennis, the conflict is who sprint at the end as though it does just make a face-to-face. The personal comparison is indirect, spectacle of themselves. by means of some scoring system. In other sports, But in the middle of a road-race? It didn’t matter such as skiing, competitors perform at different times, much to me whether I came 48th or 49th. On balance, lessening further the direct competitive element. And I’d rather be 48th, of course, because of the miniscule of course team sports, by definition, eschew personal increase in the sense of personal satisfaction. But I had conflict altogether. nothing against the 49th runner. In fact, I’d prefer not A road-race is a public event. It takes place on to know who he was. I was never comfortable racing public roads. All this personal conflict is played out against friends and it seemed unsporting to overtake in full view of the public, if they are interested. The them in the later stages of a race. only similar public event is the cycling road-race but Because of my natural diffidence and because cyclists are at least unrecognisable in their helmets I always felt myself a novice road-racer I tended to and at the speed they whizz by. All other sporting start races further back in the pack than I might have events take place in special arenas. expected to finish. This meant that I was usually This public view of personal conflict mattered to overtaking other runners rather than vice-versa. I a sensitive soul like me. I had no wish to display my found the races less stressful that way, as it can be apparently competitive nature in public. Umberto Eco1 dispiriting to have other runners coming past you all wrote that “Races improve the race, contests develop the time. I tried not to notice who I was overtaking. and control the competitive spirit, they reduce innate They were just anonymous runners who I was using to aggression to a system”. I resent the implication that help me towards a good time and a higher finishing I am innately aggressive and I will punch anyone who position. says that I am. I am, however, soothed to realise that It being twenty years or so since I have taken part my participation in road-races helped to improve the in a road-race, I have almost forgotten that unpleasant human race. tension that overcomes the body in the hours and It is more straightforward when you are young minutes before a race. No doubt, it is a natural and (say, 15) and when you are old (say, 65). At 15, the essential part of the preparation but it is one that I am whole point of a race is to win, or, failing that, to beat as content to forego nowadays.

52 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Given my ambivalence about the competitive down. I found it impossible to resist the example they element of road-racing, an obvious question is: Why set and began to make more of an effort, leaving my did I take part in them? The honest answer is, I think, French friend behind, I am ashamed to say. the same as the reason why I (re)started running: I seem to be constitutionally incapable of running because others did so. The talk in the gym was often a race and not racing. But was I really racing? I was about races coming up or just completed. As I became ‘competing’ against myself, to run as well as possible, fitter and faster and the “Why don’t you ...?” questions not against the others. And yet I seemed to need the became more frequent, I could see less reason not to others to spur me to run as well as possible. join in with the others. Perhaps this attitude is not specific to running: Perhaps Umberto Eco was making a deeper maybe in any competitive context I will compete. If point: that competitiveness, even aggression, is in our I were given boxing gloves and pushed into a ring genes and needs to be channelled or controlled. In perhaps I would be unable to resist trying to pummel certain contexts perhaps it will always come to the the other guy to a pulp. So, in fairness to the other guy, fore. In all but two of the races that I ran I tried to run I avoid boxing rings. And as I don’t particularly want to as well as I could at that time, which to an observer race, I now avoid road-races. is indistinguishable from being as competitive as It wasn’t only races that caused me problems: possible against the other runners. I had elements of the same feelings during training In the two exceptions I tried to not run seriously runs with friends. There was always an undercurrent of but failed. One was a 5-mile race at Morecambe, which comparison if not exactly competition. They would be I was treating as the middle part of a long training run. aware of how well you were running, as you would be I ran from Heysham (where we had gone for Martin to of them. I felt, as the years went by, that I didn’t really use the BMX track) to Morecambe for the race, and after want this inter-runner subliminal rivalry. it I ran home. However, during the race itself I could So I arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that I not restrain myself, especially when other runners who stopped running races, or even running with others, knew me wondered why I wasn’t trying. because I am too competitive. I cannot run in those The other occasion was at the Ingleborough fell- contexts without being competitive - and I no longer race. A French visitor was bewildered by the concept wanted competition. But perhaps it’s not a paradox. of a fell-race, so we persuaded him to take part in one. For Murakami it’s the other way around: he says he’s not We set off sedately enough but it is an odd feature of competitive and yet he carried on running his races. many fell-races, where you run up a hill and straight down again, that as you are labouring up you suddenly 1 Eco, Umberto (1987), Travels in Hyperreality, London: find the leading runners sweeping by you on their way Picador (p161).

I was going to fill up this space with a bright photograph Footballers, swimmers, boxers, cyclists do not but instead I’ll confess that I haven’t run much this expect their bodies to be up to the job by their 30s week. No excuses: I just haven’t felt like it. or 40s. Why should runners be any different? My Perhaps all this thought of races and competition body seems unable to sustain a reasonable amount of exhausted me. Or depressed me, by reminding me how running for long. It must be at its limits for it to keep past it I have become. Who am I trying to kid? Didn’t relapsing so often. I really give up road-racing just because I was getting I have been feeling generally tired and queasy. slower? It is hard to be motivated to run slower. By non-running standards I am fine but it doesn’t take Who am I trying to kid, by running now? I have much to make running, hard enough at the best of been endeavouring for 18 months now to reach a level times, seem not worth the effort. The whole business of fitness that I am happy with, but whenever I approach seems pointless. I feel a fraud putting on my running it some problem crops up to set me back. The weeks gear as if I were a proper athlete. If I am to run, I need are slipping by and it is frustrating that I have not this to run properly, not dodder along. year reached even the modest fitness levels I briefly I think I need to consider in detail the complex managed last year. psychology of motivation but I seem to be running out of

cricket or golf one could fill chapters galore on the rules, techniques and equipment. There are few rules for running. There is little to say about techniques and equipment either, unless, like McDougall, you are campaigning against running shoes. Perhaps it is the simplicity itself that prompts deep meditation. The most inspirational and quasi-spiritual writer on running was George Sheehan, who is said to have been the first over-50 to run a 5-minute mile. His book Running and Being was a best-seller in 1978. He wrote that “When I run, I am a hunter, and the prey is my self, my own truth”. Likewise, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow1 said “I don’t like running - no man does - but I like what is in the running - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know”. Sorry, I have cheated there. Marlow actually said ‘work’ where I’ve put ‘running’. But you can say the same thing about anything onerous. The notion that running is a search for your inner An ex-tree near Aughton, symbolising my physical and self is a beguiling one. It is especially popular with mental state at the beginning of the week. champion runners, who like what they find there. For ordinary runners, it is probable that what the search fter last week’s wobble, I have almost regained my reveals is not what is hoped for. Any failure to run as A equilibrium. I’ve been reading some wise words often, as far, or as fast as you think you should must, on on the interplay between running and life. this basis, be attributed to your inner weaknesses. I noticed that those who write about running fairly The renowned runner Oprah Winfrey said that soon begin to search for its deeper significance. It’s “Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because as though even running enthusiasts think that running you get out of it what you put into it”. If you replace is somewhat inexplicable and that underlying it ‘running’ with ‘swimming’ or ‘gardening’ or ‘painting’ there must be something profoundly philosophical, doesn’t the same apply? In general, don’t rewards anthropological, psychological and metaphysical. reflect effort? Their first step is to draw analogies between Murakami, at least, agrees (p83) that running is running and other aspects of life. For example, when a metaphor: “Exerting yourself to the fullest within discussing competition in road-races (as I did last your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, week), a real running-writer would go on to elaborate and a metaphor for life”. Or, as the great runner similarities with competition in business, work, love, David Bedford (former world 10k record holder and and so on - and would then argue, ipso facto, that a good organiser of the London Marathon) put it, “Running is way to learn valuable life lessons, about perseverance, a lot like life. Only 10% of it is exciting. 90% of it is failure, planning, determination, and so on, is to run. slog and drudge”. If I thought that my life was 90% It would be good to be able to learn so much from slog and drudge I think I’d sort my life out, not waste such a simple activity as running. In a book about time running.

54 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self If you consider life to be full of desolation, sin that needed to be absolved. wretchedness and despair then running may be just This week I have, of my own free will, run care-free what you need, as it was for one of Garrison Keillor’s and rather far, for me. Having cleared my mind of the characters2: “Despite the bum foot, I kept running four duty to run, I felt more like running. This mental clarity miles per day. I love the misery of running. I love the coincided with a new sense of physical well-being. For misery of feeling I should run more, hundreds of miles, the first time this year I am running without the fear and do it on my knees”. that my legs are on the verge of breakdown. Of course, Running, however, is not like life or a metaphor for they may break down at any moment but the point is it. It is a part of life (my life, anyway). It is not somehow that I am not fearing it. separate or external to life. If you think that running is I have also added some variety to my running. On to escape from life’s problems or that it is to be carried Monday, when it was very hot during the day, I had a out in a mental ‘void’ then you might well conclude that run at sunset, that is, at around 10 o’clock. It always running is not part of ‘real life’. But, for me, running is seems slightly decadent to slip into pyjamas after integrated with the rest of life. It is a part of that life, a the post-run shower. On Thursday I had a tip-out at small part, maybe, but an important one. Nether Kellet, on the other side of the river, to run back For some people running is clearly an essential through Aughton and over the Waterworks Bridge. part of their life. The author Joyce Carol Oates3 wrote Normally, running from home, by the time I reach a that “On days when I can’t run, I don’t feel ‘myself’; and bridge it is time to begin turning back. It is good to whoever the ‘self’ is I feel, I don’t like [her] nearly so run in rarely visited territory that is not far from home. much as the other”. There are fine views across the river to Ingleborough, The answer for people like Oates is obvious: run Caton Moor and Ward’s Stone. The run took me past every day. There is a breed of runner who feels a the two trees shown. compulsion to do exactly that - the ‘streak runner’ (not to be confused with the ‘streaker’, who has a different 1 Conrad, Joseph (1902), Heart of Darkness. compulsion). The record is held by Ron Hill, former 2 Keillor, Garrison (1985), Lake Wobegon Days, New world 10 mile record holder, who is said to have run York: Viking Penguin. every day since 1964. There is even an association to 3 Oates, Joyce Carol (July 18, 1999), To Invigorate Literary join, if you are American, the United States Running Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet, New York Times. Streak Association, Inc., with nearly 400 members. When running is taken to such extremes, it is necessary to be precise. According to the USRSA’s website, in a running streak one has “to run at least one continuous mile within each calendar day under one’s own body power. Running cannot occur through the use of canes, crutches or banisters, or reliance on pools or aquatic devices to create artificial buoyancy”. Now we know what a ‘run’ is. It’s not far (just one mile) and it’s as slow as you like. Hill’s Wikipedia page says that he used crutches to hobble a mile after bunion surgery. I trust that the USRSA has disqualified him, although he is British and probably doesn’t count. The US record-holder, Mark Covert, started in 1968, over 15,000 days ago. If he stopped tomorrow, I’d have to run every day until 2054 to beat his record (I’ll then be 109). Assuming I start tomorrow. Looking from this angle, I gain a clearer perspective on my own running. I run free - free of routine, of obligation, of commitment. At least, I thought so, but I see that I ‘confessed’ last week, as if not running were a A tree by the River Lune below Aughton Woods.

I apologise for disappearing for two weeks. I hope even more so now, with the few completed houses that you weren’t concerned. I thought it wisest not to surrounded by boarded-up half-built constructions, announce to the world, or a small subset of it, that we abandoned when the builders went bust. would be away from home for a couple of weeks. I am running as comfortably - not as far or as fast, because I’m not that fit, but as comfortably - as I’ve y renewed enthusiasm for running continued up been able to do for a year. I am reluctant to pause in M to Thursday when it had to be put on hold whilst my running but, halfway through the year, it’s perhaps we went off for a holiday in Ireland. a good time for a mental break. Before then I managed a few good runs, revisiting Running and holidays do not really go together for places I haven’t seen for several months. On Sunday, me although I see, from stumbling across them on the I ran the Claughton Quarry loop, which used to be a web, that there are such things as ‘running holidays’. standard run but has fallen out of favour because there It is possible to go to somewhere like Costa Blanca is too much running along a road (the A683) that has or Lanzarote and spend a whole week running with become busier. Once up to the quarry there are good like-minded individuals - and talking, thinking and views to Ingleborough, to the Lake District hills, and dreaming about running. What a prospect! over Morecambe Bay. Unfortunately, the quarry itself For me, a holiday is usually a holiday from running has closed recently, after over a hundred years of too. There are different things to do on holiday. If I operation, because of the falling demand for bricks. do take the running gear it often stays unused until I On Wednesday I ran to Halton Bridge where I remember that I have it and think I’d better run once in saw another sign of the problems within the building order to justify bringing it. industry - the unfinished ‘townhouses’ by the river. An exception to this was the holidays, many years This development always seemed out of place. It looks ago, in the Cairngorms. It was Ruth’s parents’ custom

The River Lune from Halton Bridge, looking west to the M6 bridge in the distance. I have not run across Halton Bridge so often recently because a bridge on the way to it has been closed for ‘safety reasons’. This necessitates a detour on the road. It is only a short one but it changes the character of the run. If it takes as long to repair the bridge as it did the adjacent similar one a few years ago then it is liable to be out of action for many months. This run also takes me past the site of the proposed eco-houses but I can see no sign of any work on them yet.

56 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self to hire a large lodge at Kincraig, near Aviemore, as highlands, there was no doubt who was the intruder: a base for a skiing week or two, it being one of their me. The deer were in their domain. They did not missions in life to introduce the joys of skiing to as expect to see me there, and reasonably so, because I many relations and friends as possible. It was also an ran miles away from any human habitation. opportunity to assess the mettle, calibre and fortitude I retain more of the general impression than the of those relations and friends as they confronted the detail of those runs. Most of the time I must have formidable challenge of skiing in Scotland. pottered about near Kincraig but I do recall three very The rituals tested the strongest character. It was long routes, which perhaps I ran more than once. essential to get up to the slopes as early as possible in One was west from Kincraig along tracks past the morning, or even earlier. Therefore, breakfast ran Coire Dhugain to the River Dulnain, north along the with military precision. The evening before, the troops river, and back along a track past Alvie Lodge. Apart had all been organised to prepare for the following days from the tracks themselves and the occasional bothy, skiing, making packed lunches, working out schedules, there was no evidence of humanity throughout the 15 and maintaining the equipment. Fair enough: if you’re miles or so. It was silent wilderness, empty apart from going skiing, it’s better to do it properly. the deer, as far as I could see. The first couple of times I went the parents-in-law Another run was south along Glen Feshie. I ran weren’t yet parents-in-law. I had no choice, therefore, along the glen to the edge of my map and then ran but to demonstrate my merit by joining in with all this back, a good 15 miles again. There were several lodges earnest endeavour. I could not ski at all but that didn’t along the glen but I don’t recall seeing any people. matter. In fact, that was a good thing, because I was a Some of the track was through woodland but otherwise candidate for indoctrination. there were fine views of the glen. On the way backI After a few years, however, there were two young cut across wilderness to Baileguish and Inveruglass. children to indoctrinate instead. They were more The third run was the grandest of all tip-outs. I promising material than me. Children like sliding was deposited at the Cairngorm ski-lift car-park to run about on snow. They have more flexibility and less fear. back to Kincraig. At least the skiers could see that I I, however, did not enjoy skiing for the main reason that was really running and not idling my time away, heaven I was no good at it. It is an activity for flaunting your forbid. I made my way through the forests above expertise. If you haven’t any, it is rather less fun. Apart Loch Morlich, across Rothiemurchus, crossing the Allt from the skiing itself, I found all the associated palaver Druidh from Lairig Ghru, around the picturesque Loch and paraphernalia tedious and unenjoyable. an Eilein, and on to Kincraig. Despite the vast distance, I knew a much simpler way of enjoying myself in I was back long before the skiers and could bask in the Scottish highlands. And so, with the excuse that I a few hours peace before being engulfed by skiers was in serious training for some marathon, I opted out anxious to prepare for the following day’s expedition. of the skiing. The parents-in-laws didn’t mind: they This rather idyllic arrangement was spoiled had already found me a puzzle, through not playing one year when the mother-in-law was inconsiderate a musical instrument, not going to church, not being enough to break her leg and require some care interested in how cars work, and so on. I am sure that while abandoned at the lodge by the other skiers. I they could not conceive how I could prefer to run rather tried to persuade her to join me on my runs but she than to ski but I doubt that they were surprised. was reluctant. If only I had known then of Murakami’s Those runs in Scotland are some of my most slogan: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”. treasured running memories. They had a different The Ireland holiday was also an exception to my character to my runs in the Lake District and Yorkshire general practice of not running on holidays. Before we Dales. The latter are sometimes described as wild went, whenever we said to anyone that we were going regions but they are tame in comparison to the Scottish to Ireland, they immediately mentioned the rain. So, I highlands. If I come across a deer locally then it feels thought, if it rains that much, I’ll take the running gear: as though the deer is intruding into the human domain. running is one thing that I can do in the rain. What I The land may be cultivated, the moors may be tended didn’t take on holiday was a means of continuing this for grouse, there may be people living nearby and diary, so I have a couple of weeks to catch up with, if a deer is not what you expect to see. In the Scottish you’ll bear with me.

n order to re-synchronise this diary, to make the I chapter number also the week-of-the-year number, I need to include a couple of chapters on our Irish holiday. I am reluctant to do this because if I eulogise about the sandy beaches, rugged cliffs, fuchsia hedges and white hills of Donegal then readers may beseech me to travel to more exotic locations and write more travelogues. That wouldn’t do at all because we are committed to a running diary. We can’t change tack in the middle. That would be like training for a marathon for a couple of months and then taking up ten-pin bowling instead. It would leave a sense of failure and a stain on our character that would linger forever. Instead, we must persist with this diary to see From Slieve Donard to the Brandy Pad and Hare’s Gap. what unknown adventures lie ahead. Whatever they are, I’m sure they’ll be as engrossing as what has gone On this walk we met the Mourne Wall, a substantial before. The best runs are the ones for which you don’t construction of 1904-1922. Some guidebooks say that it know what’s around the next bend. However, since marks the watershed of the reservoirs built then. But a rest and relaxation are an essential part of the running study of the map shows that it doesn’t. And why would experience, let’s indulge in an Irish interlude. a watershed need a wall? Those same books claim it to Our camper-van tour of Ulster included visits be unique, and I can believe them. to four pairs of friends but I didn’t ask permission to We then drove west through Armagh and name them here, so I won’t - but their hospitality and Fermanagh, crossing in and out of the Republic without generosity was much appreciated, especially the loan being aware of it, apart from the miles and kilometres of a cottage for our time in Donegal. interchanging. Beyond the town of Donegal we walked We drove through Belfast to the young (50m year up the Cliffs of Bunglass for the awe-inspiring view of old) granite Mourne Mountains, where we walked up Slieve League dropping 600m into the Atlantic. Slieve Donard without intending to. We were not sure of our walking fitness, so we set out with a ‘let’s walk there and see how we feel’ attitude. In this mood, setting off from Meelmore Lodge, we passed through the Hare’s Gap, walked along the Brandy Pad (an old smuggler’s route) to a spot within sight of Slieve Donard for lunch. As we sat there we could see many walkers toiling up its slope, almost all of them having approached from the shorter eastern side. We realised that our visit coincided with a holiday weekend associated with the Battle of the Boyne - and, we learned, the first good weekend weather for a while. The highest mountain (850m) in Northern Ireland beckoned irresistibly. The view was clear but not sufficiently so to see Scotland, England or Wales as is possible on the best days. Slieve League from the Cliffs of Bunglass.

58 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self We retreated and settled for a drive around the rugged coastline of northwest Donegal, battered by Atlantic gales in winter. By late afternoon the rain had eased. The low cloud and patchy sunlight enabled us to appreciate why many artists find inspiration in this bleak landscape dotted with white cottages in fields divided by walls of large round stones. It was however a little depressing to see tourist blight encroaching into what are now the resorts of Bunbeg and Derrybeg. For example, the bay of Bunbeg is dominated by a large white hotel out of all sympathy with its surroundings. In a way, it is impressive that smart modern houses, presumably holiday homes, are Ballyness Bay from the Donegal cottage. reclaiming so much unpromising bog-land but it does mean that the landscapes are no longer pristine. Even From the cottage near Gortahork we had a fine the higher bogs, some of the largest blanket bogs in view over Ballyness Bay, with its shades of blue ever- Europe, are not safe from humans, who scalp off the changing with the tides and the clouds. On Wednesday, layer of peat. while Ruth went for a ride on the sands of Sheep Haven On Friday it was raining more heavily as we set off to I ran, in hot weather and accompanied by a cloud of Dunfanaghy to ride and run again, further this time, around flies, around Horn Head peninsula. After lunch we then Horn Head. It was a very different experience to Wednesday’s drove to the head of the peninsula to leave our bikes, run! With some intrepidity I confronted the rain and wind. drove back to the foot, walked around the magnificent I could barely see the sea beyond the cliff edges. Muckish, cliff edges to the head, with its 150m sheer cliffs, and a few miles south, was invisible. But at least there were no then cycled back. I was quite exhausted by all these flies this time. forms of motion. At the furthermost point I met a lorry that had Nonetheless, the following morning we set out become wedged in the narrow lane. As I squeezed to climb Errigal, the highest mountain (752m) of past, the lorry-driver shouted “Are you local?” with Donegal, a distinctive pyramid of white quartzite scree. that rising tone that anticipates a “No” because no Unfortunately, as Errigal came into view we saw that its local would be silly enough to run in such conditions. top was shrouded in cloud. We switched to Muckish Later, on reflection, I think it more likely that he was (670m) but when we arrived there it too had acquired hoping for a local to help him out of the predicament cloud on top. Optimistically, we set off but halfway up into which his satnav had probably led him. For all I met the cloud coming down. It turned to rain. know, he’s still there.

Marble Arch, on the way to Horn Head. The west Donegal coast from near Bloody Foreland.

n Saturday it rained. Again. All day, except for a Perhaps they are wealthy too. In deference to the O few brief pauses when it clearly did not intend to locals, especially those of Machaire Ui Robhartaigh, I’ll stop. Our appreciation of the cloud effects dimmed. now use Gaelic place-names whilst in Dún na nGall. Now the sky varied only from dark grey to light grey. We had more soft weather on Sunday. An Earagail We cycled to Magheroarty for an invigorating and An Mhucais were again shrouded in cloudy drizzle. walk along the Dooey Peninsula, a two-mile sand bar We saw the sun three times for a total of 4½ minutes. that almost encloses Ballyness Bay. Amongst the dunes For a suitably sombre experience we visited we came across a group of artists setting up a sculpture Caisleán Ghleann Bheatha (Glenveagh Castle). It is trail for a late-evening exhibition. “A pity the weather really just a large house with a castellated façade, built isn’t better for you” we said to a man who smiled and after the estate owner summarily evicted 244 farming replied “This is as good as it gets - soft weather”. tenants in 1861 in order to create a hunting forest. For He had a point. It wasn’t raining hard. It was like nearly a century, the society élite came banqueting, living in a gentle cloud, quite pleasurable if you didn’t deer-shooting, and promenading through the ornate mind being a little damp. We were beginning to run gardens overlooking Loch Beagh. I doubt that they out of clothes that were not a little damp. wasted time contemplating the fate of the 244. We retreated to the pub to dry out but there was The Glenveagh Visitor Centre reminded me again no fire - and no food. There was, however, a crowd of of my ignorance of Ulster history. In Belfast we had people shouting at a large screen. We had stumbled driven through areas with familiar names and seen upon some strange ritual, involving an alien language memorials to those who died in the recent conflicts, and a peculiar activity. Actually, of course, the language my attention to which had become numbed by (Gaelic) and activity (Gaelic football) are not alien or powerlessness and incomprehension. The background peculiar to the locals. to it all was vague to me, shamefully for an Englishman, It is patronising to assume, as I did, that the influx as the English were the cause of much of it. of tourists and ‘modern development’ will sweep away While, for example, I had heard of the Battle of the the local culture. Perhaps all the smart new houses Boyne (Cath na Bóinne), a pivotal event in European, were not for wealthy in-comers. All these locals must not just Irish, history, I could not say a sentence about live somewhere and I had seen no hovels for them. it. Regarding Dún na nGall I had not even heard of

The end of the Dooey Peninsula, Horn Head dimly ahead. Ghleann Bheatha with Loch Beagh.

the Flight of the Earls, the Plantation, and the Sheep were deluded into travelling large distances for little Wars. My understanding is still too shallow for me to benefit to themselves? I dare hardly say it but you demonstrate it here but my respect for those for whom can learn more, at much less cost, about the Giant’s it is all part of their personal history is deeper. Causeway in ten minutes on the web, through youtube At the pub in An Fál Carrach we found a larger videos and many documents, than by visiting it. crowd shouting even louder at a large screen. There Perhaps this will not be the case when the new was also a christening party going on (we were given £18.5m “world class visitor facilities” are completed. some cake). The baby was as unaware as we were Nobody can complain of the problems of modern life that Donegal were winning the Ulster Gaelic Football when so many resources are spent to enable tourists to Championship for the first time since 1992. traipse dutifully about the world and when it’s only 150 On Monday we saw the sun for 4½ minutes less years since the people of Donegal were being turfed than the day before. The low cloud, mist, drizzle and out of their homes shortly after surviving the Potato rain was all too familiar, as we began our journey back Famine by eating seaweed. east. We stopped off at Droim na Creige, peering into I did not run at all this week in Ireland. It didn’t the gloom to discern the shape of Cionn Dhún Damh seem to fit in. We had plenty of the promised rain butI across Loch Súilí. didn’t feel in the mood to run about in it. Since getting On Tuesday we drove through rain to the Giant’s back home I’ve had a couple of gentle runs. Causeway where the sun at last shone, if only briefly and During the holiday I had a chance to reflect on too late to lift the depression that had settled over me. what I hoped to achieve from my running in the rest of The Causeway was curiously underwhelming. Perhaps 2011. I said at the beginning that it would be unwise, it is too familiar, from the countless photographs and at my age, to set myself targets. I have returned from films of it already seen. holiday another year older but I am now more inclined My knowledge of its geology was not increased to think of targets. I have been carefully recording my at all by visiting it. Any guidebook will include a brief running now for 18 months and I have a better idea of explanation that the polygonal columns were caused what is feasible, barring major problems. 60m years ago when molten basalt cooled rapidly. I could set rather arbitrary targets, such as 40 Perhaps that’s all a non-geologist can be expected to or even 50 miles in a week or 1000 miles in the year, understand. but mileages in themselves matter little to me. What Hundreds of visitors of many nationalities were I’d really like to achieve is a sustained level of fitness clambering over the rocks and up the paths. Why do that enables me to manage half-a-dozen out-runs, as we feel the need to visit such sites in such numbers? in the old days: two-hour runs exploring some new Will there come a time when we will look back at the pathways within nearby dales and hills. If that seems present ‘tourist period’ and consider it an emperor’s rather imprecise to you, I’ll try to be more specific next clothes phenomenon, in which vast numbers of people week.

unners! Are you short of vim? Do you find it hard [If I may just interrupt myself here. This is the R to get out on the road? Do you wonder what the point at which I say “if you don’t want to know point of it all is? If so, I have the answer for you - my the score look away now, or skip a paragraph”. patented, copyrighted, trade-marked Fitnessometer. I have included this formula to demonstrate See the reward for every run! See the penalty for every that my Fitnessometer is at the forefront of run missed! No longer will you have no reason to run! technological sophistication.] It is daily question for all runners: Why should I ... weighted average (WA), calculated as follows:

run today? Why not leave the run until tomorrow? If, WA1 = 0.95 x WA0 + 0.05 x R1

like me, you are not committed to a training regime, where WA1 is today’s weighted average, WA0 is

the day-to-day incentive may be lacking. The reasons yesterday’s weighted average and R1 is today’s run. So usually given for running concern long-term benefits: if my previous weighted average mileage is 2 and I run improve health, raise money, relieve stress, increase 6 miles then it becomes 2.2. There’s a similar formula self-esteem, and so on. These benefits are not for the weighted average minuteage. necessarily lost if you just miss today’s run. And, of If I don’t run then the averages will drop by 5% and course, you can argue the same thing tomorrow. my fitness figure will drop accordingly. This captures It is up to each runner to find ways to get himself the sad fact that fitness is not like money in the bank. If out running. Murakami (p178) describes how he lured left unattended it does not accumulate interest. On the himself out onto the road by anticipating seeing the contrary, it fades away. smiling face of a “very attractive young woman” who, I add in some credit for my ‘walking fitness’, based for several years, ran towards and past him. He says on a similar calculation. If I’m not able to run but go for that he was too shy to speak to her - and a good thing a walk instead then I feel I deserve some credit for that, too because young women need courage as it is to run although obviously less than if I’d run. If I were ever to without being pestered by middle-aged oglers. cycle or swim instead then I would add them in too. I have never had that particular inspiration. At My mileages are not as measured on the ground. the moment, one method that suits me, being a person It is 2½ miles to the Roeburndale Road cattle grid who likes playing with numbers, is to refer to my but I am slower running there than I am running 2½ Fitnessometer, which, as the name suggests, calculates miles along the old railway track. The cattle grid is my fitness. Right now I am 61% fit. 230 metres up the hill. I am faster running down the How does my Fitnessometer work? I thought you’d 2½ miles but not by as much as I am slower uphill. I never ask. It goes like this: therefore add in a compensating ‘altitude factor’. First, I imagine how well I could run if I were as fit I also have an ‘aging factor’. I reckon that I have as possible (100% fit) - say, 7 miles in 49 minutes every about 10,000 days to go, at which point my fitness day. This is in my imagination, I stress. If I actually will be 0%. So, I’m losing, on average, 1/10000 of my average 2 miles in 16 minutes every day, then my fitness fitness every day, simply through getting older. That is some function of (2/7) and (7/8), the latter fraction hardly seems fair, so I multiply my calculated fitness being the ratio of the average speeds. The function is by √(10000/(10000-n)) where n is the number of days actually a weighted product of those fractions raised to since I set the Fitnessometer off. That should do it. some power tuned to provide a figure that seems about An important characteristic of my Fitnessometer right. For 2 miles in 16 minutes it yields 44%. is that the credit from a particular run is not fixed: it I don’t average, over, say, seven days because that depends on how fit I already am. If I am averaging generates too much fluctuation in the fitness figure. I 2 miles in 16 minutes (44%) and I run 6 miles in 50 use, or rather my spreadsheet uses, a ... minutes then the averages become 2.2 miles and

62 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self 17.7 minutes (46%). If, however, by some miracle, the fitness level of 75%, according to my Fitnessometer? averages are 6 miles and 50 minutes (81%) then the I’m game, if you are. We do risk asking too much of my same run would leave the fitness level unchanged (but aging body and collapsing in an ignominious heap. I if I didn’t run it would drop to 79%). am, of course, not interested in 75% per se: it’s just that The outcome is that if I have a lengthy lay-off, as I 75% fit means that I can do the running I want to. am prone to do, and my fitness drops to, say, 30% then, What does 75% mean in practice? It requires as I begin to run again, it rises rapidly, which is just the weighted averages of 4 miles in 28 minutes (too fast encouragement I need. If I should become supremely for me, I fear!), 5 miles in 42 minutes or 6 miles in 55 fit, the Fitnessometer inspires me to keep fit. I also use minutes (conceivable). The highest weighted average it to provide private medium-term goals such as ‘get mileage that I have managed so far is 4.3. 60% fit before the Christmas break’. It is less stressful My Fitnessometer will, I’m sure, revolutionise than a goal such as ‘run the Windermere Marathon in sports science and enable the serious runner to get 3:40’. really serious. In the meantime, I need to get back to My fitness, as assessed by my Fitnessometer, since the business of running. My legs, I am relieved to find, January 1st 2010 is shown below. You can’t argue with are still in good working order after their holiday. I that! The subjective feeling that I expressed earlier, have eased them back into regular running, with five that whenever I approach fitness I have a problem that runs of 40 minutes or so. sets me back, is supported by the graph. My longest In my absence, my riverside paths have been period of sustained fitness (above 65%, say) has been transformed. Now, as I run along, I can imagine myself the two months from Week 9 to 18 this year. In the first in the foothills of the Himalayas amongst swathes half of last year my running was repeatedly brought of sweet-smelling, head-high, purple-pink blossom to a halt. In the second half I never really got running - that of the Himalayan balsam, also known as the consistently at all. The consoling thing, however, is that ‘policeman’s helmet’ and ‘kiss-me-in-the-mountains’, none of my problems were running injuries. names that lead my imagination even further astray. I am therefore encouraged to hope that if I can steer In reality, the balsam, pretty as it looks, is an invasive clear of trouble, by avoiding falling in the beck and weed, swamping indigenous plants and making river- similar mishaps, then I may be able to drive my fitness banks vulnerable to erosion. I could pause on my runs up to unprecedented levels. So, rather than trundle on to pull them up before they disperse their seeds but if somewhat aimlessly for the rest of the year, shall we I did I would, as there are so many of them, never reach set a specific objective - say, to reach and sustain a my running Everest (of 75%).

sore calf cold fall in wood holiday fall off ladder fall on ice bug fall in beck holiday 80 70 60 50 40 Fitness 30 20 10 0

6 2 8 4 0 6 2 8 4 0 6 2 8 1 1 2 3 3 4 4 5 6 6 7 7 Week

t last I have managed to pin down a cause of my For me, however, the benefit is more mental than A discombobulation this year: I have been having a physical. If you run conservatively, as I do nowadays, rest day before I’ve done any running to rest from. the body could probably run every day if you asked it Because January 1st 2011 was a Saturday I have to. But I welcome a day off because otherwise running this year considered my running week to be Saturday- becomes a stale routine. After the day off (or longer, if Friday. In the past I always had a Monday-Sunday necessary) one returns to running mentally refreshed running week. The usual pattern was to fit runs into and keen to get on the road again. the working week, have no run on Saturday, and then There have been many studies of the benefits of a long run on Sunday. Saturday was a ‘family day’ and rest and recovery in a running programme. The overall although there is now less family around to appreciate conclusion seems to be that well-trained athletes can it Saturday has remained a day without running. So this miss several days of running without losing endurance year I have begun my running week by not running, and that if they reduce the amount, but not the intensity, which is surprisingly disconcerting. of running then their fitness is not affected. This, The role of rest, relaxation and recovery in running however, is not my experience, perhaps because I am is a complex topic. It seems that my recent holiday has not a ‘well-trained athlete’. I find that my fitness soon revitalised my enthusiasm for running, as my holidays withers away if I do not run. In general, though, periods usually do. of recovery are recommended, not because we are like In fact, I had become revitalised just before computers, which need to be recovered after failure, the holiday and was a little concerned that it would but in order to prevent failure and enable progress. intrude upon my running. In general, though, nobody A few paragraphs back I said ‘occasional rest (except streak runners (Week 26)) denies the need for period’. How occasional does a day off have to be to the occasional rest period from running. All running count as a ‘rest day’? I have looked back into my 1980s guides insist upon them. The question is: why? records (mentioned in Week 7) and I find that in those The following, from the runnersguide.com 39 weeks I had 37 days with no running - about one website, is typical: “These rest days are critical rest day a week. It would, of course, be remarkably because ... the repetitive nature of running results in fortunate and practically convenient if the ideal amount pounding on the joints of the ankles, knees and hips of rest corresponded to the normal week. with each and every stride ... Without this rest the joints Nowadays, I feel I need more rest days. It is not may regularly be sore or inflamed ... [and] the runner because I am running so hard that I am damaging so is at risk for injuries and issues which are commonly many muscle fibres that they need longer to recover: associated with overtraining. For example shin splints it is because the fibres are less good at recovering. At and stress fractures are very common overuse injuries least, that is my subjective impression. which typically occur when a runner is ... not allowing So, my ‘standard week’ this year has included regular rest days for recovery”. two days without running, usually the Saturday and In other words, the rest period helps to avoid all Wednesday. Perhaps, if I can get to 75% on the those injuries that McDougall warned us about (Week Fitnessometer I won’t need two rest days; or conversely, 3). and perhaps more likely, if I am to reach 75% I won’t be There is, however, a more positive reason for able to take two rest days. advocating rest periods - that is, that we improve when A ‘rest day’ is in any case a misnomer. As Einstein we are resting not when we are running. When we run showed, it is impossible for any body to be at absolute we break down muscle fibres; when we rest the fibres rest. All coaches are adamant that runners should not repair and strengthen. just do nothing. The important point is that rest days

64 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self are for physical and mental recovery. This can perhaps Nothing moved apart from me, and I didn’t move so fast be aided by some other activity, such as walking, either. Sweat poured off me. The clouds blanketed the swimming, cycling or digging the garden. heat, only occasionally parting to reveal the sun. So, where does this leave me in my quest for 75% It was very peaceful, running along quiet lanes fitness? At the moment, my body is comfortable with past idyllic-sounding homesteads such as Summer 40-minute runs. I need, I think, to change the 3-day House Head, Meeting House Farm, Hawthornthwaite 40-40-40-minute runs to 60-30-30 minute runs and and Well Brook. It is hard to imagine it ever being then gradually to increase the 60-minutes. I need to different. But it was on May 23rd 1984, when an distinguish between ‘long’ and ‘short’ runs and use explosion killed 16 people. The ‘Lancaster Conjunctive the former to build endurance. Coaches distinguish Use Scheme’, intended to transfer water from the Lune between ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ runs. For me, it is a mistake to the Wyre, was considered of such importance that to set out expecting an ‘easy’ run. I soon realise that it had been opened by the Queen in 1980. The pipe there is no such thing for me now. exploded because of a build-up of methane while Perhaps I can dream of evolving to 90-30-40-minute being visited by a group from St Michael’s-on-Wyre, a runs and dispensing with one of my days off. That village affected by the scheme. would get the mileage up to the required levels. But Such events put my concerns into perspective. It first things first. This week I have managed two doesn’t matter much but I will change my Saturdays. 60-minute runs, one a mini-out-run around Abbeystead My new-found commitment is incompatible with in the Forest of Bowland. starting the running week without running. I’ll move I was relieved that it was ‘mini’, as it was a murky, my rest day(s) towards the end of the week instead. muggy day, so oppressive that the cows and sheep had But I won’t be dogmatic about it. All running should be given up all thought of motion. There was no breeze. a variable response to the body’s feedback.

Looking over Abbeystead from Hawthornthwaite Fell. © Pamela Self

recent report on otters in the region has shown Moor trig point for the first time since February, seeing A that their return to the Lune and Roeburn valleys, nobody, as usual - and, as expected, seeing no otters, on either side of Caton Moor, is now well-established. as they are largely nocturnal in England. As always, Moreover, there is a “multitude of otter runs going over I paused to admire the long-distance view of the the watershed” on the moor. It seems that the otters Yorkshire Three Peaks, the Howgills and the Lakes. come up and over the moor, especially in spring, to The trig point was unchanged. The proposal for feed on frogs and newts. It is possible that they have windmills to engulf it has been rejected locally but holts within the now-abandoned Claughton Quarry. has now gone, on appeal, to higher authorities, who The presence of the otter, a predator at the top of may overrule the rejection in the national interest, if the food chain, is an important indicator of the health of not in the interests of otters, hares, skylarks, lapwings, the rivers and moor. As mentioned earlier, the brown spiders, and a runner. hare also flourishes on the moor, as do the skylark and I came to appreciate the fragile robustness of lapwing, whose numbers have in 30 years dropped nature even more on Tuesday when we went for a walk by up to 90% in England. I understand that there are in Smardale in search of the Scotch Argus butterfly. rare spiders on the moor too although I haven’t paused The weather forecast for the rest of the week was bad to investigate. It is a privilege to share the moor with so I graciously forewent running on what promised to such endangered species. Caton Moor is, to most eyes, be the one good day of the week. empty of interest, which is why so few people go there, The Scotch Argus is seen for a short period in which, in turn, is why the wildlife goes there. August in only two places in England. It was not hard to As a runner, I do not feel endangered on the moor find. There were large numbers of them, almost black but I am certainly rare. On Sunday I ran up to the Caton in flight and, when they alight, with orange bands and

Smardalegill Viaduct (left), where there were ‘swarms’ of Scotch Argus butterflies (above).

66 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self ringed spots. The mystery (to me, at least) is why there event was partly a social gathering. At Lancaster we should be so many here and none elsewhere. saw the same people every day. The forecasters were correct. It was rainy and Still, it was interesting to discover that, in the windy for the rest of week, with the River Lune flooding. right circumstances, most runners will compete. Is With considerable fortitude I maintained my running competitiveness an innate biological trait? Are some momentum with some wet runs. My 75% target, even individuals naturally more competitive than others? though it is meaningful only to myself, does at least Is one’s degree of competitiveness independent of provide an incentive, which in the old days came partly context? Is competition necessary for progress? from the road races. These are profound questions that have been Before I leave forever the topic of road-racing and debated, to no agreed conclusion, by psychologists, competitiveness - which caused me such vexation a philosophers, biologists and anthropologists. In few weeks ago - I’d like to mention an experiment I a general sense, competition seems central to our carried out in the late-1980s. At the time I thought of it society, being the basis for capitalism. It also plays more as a divertissement, intended to add some light a fundamental role in evolution, as reflected in the relief to the increasingly routine lunch-time run. ‘survival of the fittest’ slogan, although this does not, of On the first Wednesday of each month runners course, mean the most fit in the athletic sense, but the could take part in the Conder Handicap, a 5-mile race, most fit to the environment. with runners setting off at different times, calculated However, the central role of competition is from their previous runs in the Handicap. If the challenged by studies of other societies where handicaps were perfect then all the runners would, if collaboration rather than competition is more they ran to form, finish equal first. appreciated by the culture. It is perhaps significant The effect, of course, was to give all of us, who that the Latin origin of the word ‘compete’ indicates previously would have said that we didn’t care about that it meant ‘to seek together’. winning, as much chance of winning as anyone. Did we As far as running is concerned, the competitive care about winning now that we had the chance to do element is more subtle than is often assumed. If you so? Well, yes. Sometimes half-a-dozen runners would watch children run then you will see that they naturally be neck-and-neck down the home straight - a novel compete, to get somewhere first. It is the obvious experience for us all. impulse, otherwise they wouldn’t be running at all. However, those runners more used to winning (or, However, once it is clear that they will not get there at least, used to running competitively) largely ignored first, they may indicate that it doesn’t matter anyway. the Handicap. Not, I think, because they minded being Moreover, the winner may indicate that winning doesn’t ‘beaten’ by slower runners but because they did not matter much to him or her either. want to run in such a competitive fashion against their Overt competitiveness is somewhat frowned upon friends in such a frivolous event. The weekend races in our society. It is fine to win but one should not make were for competition but the midweek runs were for it too obvious that one wants to win. It is undignified training and relative relaxation. and a little demeaning to the losers. Also, if there is As organiser, I felt obliged to run but I was usually little chance of winning it is only sensible to indicate starting last (because all the good runners didn’t run) that winning does not matter. and endeavouring to overtake slower runners. It might All I can say is that the Conder Handicappers have seemed that I’d set up the event precisely in strived to win and were pleased to win when they did. order to overtake people, which wasn’t a comfortable However, the blatant ranking of the runners, with its position. So after a year or so I stopped organising it. explicit challenge to catch the supposedly slower guy I had borrowed the idea of the Handicap from the ahead, was too tasteless for most, who just wanted a Open University, where they held a successful similar relaxing run in the lanes and fields. In this context at event. The reason that the Lancaster version failed least, competition was not for them. was that its gym had a different sociology. At the OU Since the ‘com’ of ‘compete’ means ‘together’ and I academic staff do not need to be on campus much, haven’t run with or against anyone for many years (and because there are no students there to teach. Therefore, do not intend to in the future), I can now safely, and with OU runners rarely saw one another. Their monthly relief, forget all about competition.

hen we went on our butterfly hunt last week with emotions. Endorphin is short for ‘endogeneous W we met a couple of friends who, when the topic morphine’, that is, a morphine-like substance that turned to running, said “Our daughter runs every originates within the body. Endorphins are released morning: it’s an addiction, isn’t it?” as though there by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in were nothing more to say on the subject. I feel obliged response to various activities and produce analgesia to investigate this theory thoroughly in the hope that (an inability to feel pain) and a feeling of well-being. there is nothing more to write on it either. The suggestion, then, is that runners may become I’ve found a ‘running addiction self-help test’1. addicted to their own endorphins. The activities that I have to mark 20 statements on a scale from 1 to 10 are listed as generating endorphins are: exercise, to indicate the extent to which it applies to me and excitement, pain, consumption of spicy food, love and my running. If I score over 160 then I am “running orgasm. Even if I restricted myself to exercise for my addiction personified”. endorphins (and why would anyone?), I don’t think So, here goes: “If a shirt doesn’t boast a race logo, that it has been demonstrated that running is the most it isn’t one I want to wear.” Um ... I think I’ll mark that as effective method for producing them. It is also unclear 0. The statement seems preposterous. The only shirt whether it is essential to run for 2 hours to generate with a race logo that I can recall wearing was a fine one them. If I ran for 1 hour twice a day would I be safe given as a prize for the Heversham 10-mile (a race I ran from endorphin addiction? twice and on both occasions the runners ran the wrong Maybe, but in that case I might be thought to way, which may be why I won a prize). have the second form of addiction, a psychological I need to take this more seriously. Addiction of any dependency. What are the signs of such a dependency? kind is not something to be flippant about. I need some According to Michael Sachs1, they are: fatigue, inability precision but, inevitably perhaps, there is no universally to concentrate, an overemphasis on running quantity, agreed upon definition of addiction. This2 one will missing appointments, running with injuries, adopting perhaps suffice: “addiction [is] a process whereby a runners for friends, spending more time at the local behaviour, that can function both to produce pleasure club, subscribing to many running publications, and to provide escape from internal discomfort, is watching running movies, buying more running shoes employed in a pattern characterized by recurrent and clothes, searching for longer and more distant failure to control the behaviour and continuation of the races, spending more time and money on training and behaviour despite significant negative consequences”. trips, and steering every conversation back to running. This highlights the two key features: the lack of control I am greatly relieved that writing a running diary is not and the negative consequences. on the list. Addiction is usually considered to be of two Tarquin Cooper concedes that many ultra-runners forms, one concerned with the use of psychoactive have addictive personalities4. Some have taken up substances, such as alcohol and heroin, and the other running precisely to escape from other addictions. with a psychological dependency on certain activities, However, not many runners accept that they have an such as gambling and shopping, although some addiction, because they do not acknowledge any experts prefer not to regard the latter as an addiction. negative consequences, which, according to the As far as running is concerned, any addiction would definition, a genuine addiction has. Cooper quotes a seem to belong to the second form. runner who had run 619 marathons in 15 years: “I’m However, recently3 it has been found that after a somebody that needs exercise. I don’t intend ever to 2-hour run runners had produced endorphins that had stop. But I’m not addicted to running. I’ve just made it attached themselves to parts of the brain associated a part of my life. And it’s a positive thing”.

68 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self If it is possible to be addicted to running, is there not proved that I can do without running. I think I need any ‘cure’? Nobody seems to have much to say about to go back to that test. this. Obviously, one must run less and reduce all the Here’s another statement for me to mark on a scale associated factors that Sachs lists. And then there are of 1 to 10: “It exhibits their inbred weakness if people liable to be ‘withdrawal symptoms’, some physical, don’t want to hear my step-by-step re-creations of races some psychological: muscle twitching, bloatedness, I’ve run”. Well, of course you want to hear them. You headaches, sluggishness, tension, depression, anxiety, don’t? Oh. Anyway, I would never attribute anything to guilt, restlessness and irritability. someone’s ‘inbred weakness’. So that’s another 0. Do I suffer from running addiction, in the medical Here’s a couple more statements that are so sense? I have been running, on and off, for over 50 ridiculous that I’d give them 0: “All my friends are years. When I am off, for a day, a month, or years, I may runners and I wouldn’t consider befriending a non- have some withdrawal symptoms. It depends why I am runner” and “A string of running days must remain off. When, for example, I go on a holiday and leave unbroken”. The most I can score now is 160. That the running gear behind (as I usually do) I have no would make me “leaning towards running addiction; difficulty at all in forgetting about running. In general, beware”. I am not sure if the ‘beware’ is directed if I had not anticipated running in a certain period then towards me or you. there is no problem for me in not doing so. However, if I am off (through having flu, say) when I 1 Sachs, Michael L. (1998), Too Much of a Good Thing?, expected to be on, then, yes, I would be depressed and Marathon & Beyond. irritable. I would feel the same way if I had planned to 2 Goodman, Aviel (2006), Addiction: Definition and go for a drive and the car had failed to start. It seems Implications, British Journal of Addiction, 85, 11, to me a normal reaction, not the sign of an addiction. 1403-1408. And, yes, I would feel guilty if I were off when then is no 3 Boecker, Henning et al (2008), The Runner’s High: good reason that I am not on. The guilt, however, is not Opioidergic Mechanisms in the Human Brain, directly to do with running: it is because of a failure to Cerebral cortex, 18 (11), 2523. meet one’s commitments (to oneself, in this case). 4 Cooper, Tarquin (2009), Confessions of a running I am still running, so clearly all my off periods addict, Daily Telegraph, August 24th. have ended with me returning to my ‘addiction’. I have

Looking towards Ingleborough, up the Lune valley, from Halton Park on the other side of the river. I ran through Halton Park on Wednesday after being tipped-out at Netherby, near Gressingham. I began by running in the opposite direction, towards the Redwell Inn, and returned through Swarthdale and Addington. This was the second of two one-hour-plus runs this week. I dare hardly believe how comfortably (touch wood) I’m progressing towards our target.

unners sometimes succumb to the distressing Instead, in the absence of Ruth, I devised a new R neurosis of gumpitis. They are most vulnerable form of tip-out: I drove myself out, ran back home, and, when their running seems to have reached a plateau later, took a bus to retrieve the car. I drove, in fact, to - when they are as fit and as fast as they are ever likely Arkholme in order to run back along the Lune Valley to be. Then they dream instead of running further, and Ramble footpath. I imagined a serene, silent, solitary further still. There is only one symptom of gumpitis: a saunter along the soothing river bank, communing with pathological compulsion to run and run and run. the river-birds, and enjoying sweeping views across to I have reached that plateau and recognise the the Yorkshire Dales and Bowland hills. impending symptom. I will resist it. I am as fit as I can In fact, for much of the way overgrowths of plausibly hope to be. I can comfortably run 30 or more Himalayan balsam concealed not only the path but miles a week at a reasonable pace. I am perpetually also brambles, nettles, tree roots and mud pools. pleasantly exhausted but yet bursting with energy. Running is enough of a struggle nowadays for me not Nowadays, I always feel keen to get out running. to appreciate it being made even more so. But I can’t say that running is getting any easier Beyond the Loyn Bridge at Hornby running was in or that I am getting any faster. I don’t think my body is more open fields - but fields occupied by livestock that physically capable of moving faster than it is now. At took unwonted interest in my progress. Approaching least not without more commitment than I’m prepared exhaustion, I reached a gate beyond Aughton that to give - to run twice a day perhaps or to include ‘speed informed me “bull in field”. How I was supposed to sessions’ into my training. That degree of seriousness respond to such a blunt fact I don’t know. I was on a would begin to dominant my life more than I need. public footpath and if I couldn’t reach Waterworks I feel, however, that I could run further if I tried. I Bridge ahead I would have had to detour for many can run for 60 minutes. I expect that I could increase miles. In the event, the bull seemed as tired as I was. this to 90 or 120 minutes. But I need to be clear why. Running further just for the sake of it is the first sign of gumpitis. I only need a quantity of running sufficient to enable the quality of running that I hope for. This week, while Ruth was away in the Lake District on a music course-cum-holiday, I thought about following her and running up a nearby peak such as Great Dodd (857m) or Blencathra (868m). I then thought better of it. I must not be carried away with my fitness. I may imagine my legs to be as tough as teak but Lake District peaks would use different muscles than my gentle local hills. They would, I suspect, complain for a week if I forced them up and down Blencathra. The Loyn Bridge at Hornby.

70 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self So, as long as I keep a sense of proportion with my (navigator), Richard (pacer), Paul and me (donkeys, running I should avoid the worst effects of gumpitis. carrying everything that could conceivably be The disease is named after the American philosopher needed), and, of course, Charles. Forrest Gump, whose case notes record him saying “For It was a nightmare. The rain was torrential. A gale no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So howled. It was pitch black. It was cold - cold enough I ran to the end of the road. And when I got there, I for gloves on a July night. It seemed never-ending. For thought maybe I’d run to the end of town ... [and then] hours, we saw no light at all apart from our own head- maybe I’d just run across Greenbow County ... [and lamps. We struggled up to several piles of stones, on then] across the great state of Alabama ... [and then] I Seat Sandal, Fairfield, Dollywaggon Pike, Nethermost ran clear to the ocean ... [and then] I figured ... I might Pike, Helvellyn, Low Man, White Side, Raise, Stybarrow as well just turn back, keep right on going”. Gump’s Dodd, Watson’s Dodd, Great Dodd, Clough Head: 12 of mortifying story has been turned into an educational Charles’s 42. It took us 5 hours and 43 minutes to get video, intended to help potential sufferers. to Threlkeld. The only way to cure gumpitis is to encourage Now, if you know the Helvellyn ridge, you may and assist the afflicted to run and run and then, when be thinking “I can walk it in that”. And maybe you they have run enough, to force them to run some more. could, although probably not in a tempest in the dark. This usually returns the sufferer to his senses and often We did not really run. We walked up all the hills. We builds an immunisation against further attacks. Sadly, shuffled along the levels and down the slopes. We however, sometimes the disease is made even worse. barely broke into a trot at all. But that was what the There is nothing to be done in this case. schedule expected. We did, in fact, take just 2 minutes The fleeting thought of Great Dodd reminded meof longer than the schedule suggested - a tribute to our the only other occasion I have run up it. In 1988, Charles, navigator Ken, as we could hardly see more than a yard a member of the university running group, announced, in front of us. to my surprise at least, that he would attempt the Bob We delivered a bedraggled Charles to his team Graham Round. Charles was a 3-hour marathon runner in Threlkeld. He had another 4½ hours to go, and, yes, but the Round is an order of magnitude harder than a he made it. I left them to it and returned to Dunmail marathon. It involves an expedition of about 64 miles Raise, with dawn breaking and cappuccino-coloured over 42 Lakeland peaks, with a total ascent of over 8000 cascades gushing down all the gullies. metres (nearly the height of Everest), the whole thing What possesses us to take on these self-imposed to be completed within 24 hours. It is named after Bob challenges? Who would want to ‘run’ for 12 hours, reach Graham, a fell-runner who in 1932 set the then record a state of exhaustion, and then ‘run’ on for another 12 of 42 Lakeland peaks in 24 hours. hours? Who in their right mind would want to struggle I volunteered to join Charles’s 20-person support along the Helvellyn ridge in those conditions? It was team. I waited, with others, in the gathering gloom certainly an experience and I’m grateful to Charles on Dunmail Raise for Charles and his co-runners to for that, but it did not stimulate any thoughts of doing appear and descend Steel Fell. Then, like the pit team the whole Bob Graham Round myself. I don’t mind in a Grand Prix, we leapt into action: we fed him, we scrambling up one mountain, or even a small number watered him, we changed his clothes, we massaged of them, if they’re huddled together, but not 42 of them. him, we encouraged him. The one thing we didn’t A day and night of struggling up and down mountains, do was ask him how he felt, because we knew that he no, thank you. had bonked (that is, become completely and utterly Maybe Charles felt the same immediately knackered) on the aptly-named Ill Crag and had afterwards, but I expect that he looks back on it now as expressed a firm resolve to end this mindless torture one of the achievements of his life. as soon as possible. Gump, by the way, ran for 3 years, 2 months, 14 We pushed him back on to his feet to begin the days, and 16 hours - without, it appears, any support trudge up Seat Sandal. By this stage, he had been on team at all. He then stopped and proclaimed to the the go for a little over 13 hours, so we didn’t hurry accumulated multitude of disciples that he was tired him. There were five of us on the night shift, charged and that it was time to go home. And you can’t say with getting Charles over Helvellyn to Threlkeld: Ken fairer than that.

nce you start ultra-running where do you stop? Some Western runners quote the kaihogyo as a O For ne-plus-ultra-running you might attempt to source of inspiration but I have pity, not admiration, for pass the kaihogyo at the Buddhist temple of Mount Hiei the kaihogyo trainees. Are they troubled individuals to in Japan. This requires you to: embark on such a programme? Is it a form of suicide? • complete a seven-year training programme of Sure, some individuals survive, but then they often do physical and mental challenges; in other attempted suicides. It is seven years when • go for seven days without food, water or sleep (it they could have been doing something useful or at used to be ten days but too many trainees died); least more enjoyable. Is there any evidence that it • complete ten periods of 100 days of running at generates religious wisdom? least 20 miles every day, including one 100-day If I were a revered religious leader in about period of over 50 miles every day; 1100 (when the kaihogyo started) then I could have • complete each run wearing flimsy sandals, pronounced “Water is divine. To reach God you must eating only a daily bowl of noodles, and carrying swim the English Channel every day for 100 days. If a rope and knife, so that you may kill yourself if you should fail you must allow your body to sink under you should fail. the water”. No doubt, some of my devoted followers Why would you want to do this? Because it is a path to would tackle it. A very few would succeed. None spiritual enlightenment, why else? It is apparently not would be enlightened. a well-trodden path, for only 46 men (no women are The kaihogyo is about endurance. It tells us allowed on Mount Hiei) have passed the test in the last nothing about running. Its spirit seems, however, to four centuries. The number who have dropped out or be part of the mentality of some ultra-runners. There dropped dead seems not to be recorded. is a belief, or hope, that beyond the limits of human Nowadays successful candidates become media endurance there is a promised land of serenity, insight, celebrities rather than meditative monks. In a TV wisdom and enlightenment. interview1 in 2004 the latest to pass said “The training Murakami seemed to reach this promised land has taught me that everyone and everything is equal. after running a mere 47 miles. After 34 miles his “leg Everything that is alive is equal”. Another opined “The muscles tightened up like a piece of old, hard rubber”. message I wish to convey is please live each day as if it The next 13 miles were “excruciating ... my whole body is your entire life. If you start something today, finish it was rebelling ... different parts of my body, one after today”. Which is a rather odd philosophy for someone another, began to hurt ... they screamed, complained, who did not finish for seven years. yelled in distress”. He struggled through those 13 I don’t know about you but I was hoping for more miles of “sheer torment” partly by repeating a mantra signs of spiritual enlightenment after their seven years “I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t of travail. With due modesty, I think I could manage need to feel a thing”. more profundity after five minutes of contemplation. Hold on a moment. Let’s leave Murakami in agony How about: “Live each day to make tomorrow better”. for a while. Is this really why we run? Murakami has Feel free to adopt it as your motto. already told us he runs in a mental void. Now we are The human body is capable of some remarkable to be a physical non-entity too. Do we run to deny our feats of endurance, often in the name of religion. humanity? My mantra is, if anything, the opposite: “I Ramadan and Lent are less severe examples of self- am human. I’m not a piece of machinery. I need to feel denial to deepen one’s faith. However, the veneer of everything”. religion makes it almost impossible to criticise activities We have all seen film of runners collapsing towards such as the kaihogyo. Almost, but not completely. the end of a marathon, physically unable to put one leg

72 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self in front of the other, mentally disoriented. Is it simply My best-of-the-year 34-mile week, taking me (at a matter of will-power? If they persevered, would one point in the week) to an unprecedented 75% on the running eventually become easier? Is there always a Fitnessometer, pales into insignificance. But is Satie’s promised land beyond the pain barrier? I don’t know, 19-hour Vexations better than Beethoven’s 70-minute because I’ve never pushed the pain barrier that hard, 9th Symphony? Actually, Vexations is a 1½-minute but I doubt it. The only thing I’d expect to find beyond piece repeated 840 times: like running around an the pain barrier is more pain, or worse. In fact, seeing athletic track 840 times. Perhaps Sorabji’s 4-hour Opus the state of runners at the pain barrier, I wouldn’t trust clavicembalisticum is a more genuine music ultra- anything they say about what is beyond it. marathon. Perhaps its title reflects its absurdity. Where were we? Ah, Murakami, at 47 miles. At As it happens, my longest run this week was a which point he “passed through” and all he “had to shade over 70 minutes although I wouldn’t presume do was go with the flow”. He had “been transformed to compare it to Beethoven’s 9th. I was tipped-out on into a being on auto-pilot” and “physical pain had all the A6 near Warton to run back past the Borwick Lakes but vanished ... everything was working just fine”. He fishery, through Over Kellet to Nether Kellet, past the comments that “running had entered the realm of the (seemingly inactive) limestone quarries, and on to the metaphysical”. Crook o’Lune and home. The run is gently uphill until Well, bully for Murakami. I do, however, resent the at the final crest, near Laverack Hall and Green Lane, implication that this is what runners should aim for: to oh, ode to joy, a breathtaking panorama is revealed, run so far that you may become “a piece of machinery” with Lancaster and Morecambe Bay over to the right, and “on auto-pilot”. McDougall’s awe of the super- the Ward’s Stone ridge ahead, glimpses of the Yorkshire heroes of ultra-running carries the same message: that Dales peaks up the valley to the left, and, down below, ordinary runners should strive to run in their wake, nestled serenely below the Caton Moor windmills, the despite, or perhaps because of, the exhaustion and green fields of my home terrain. I am possibly biassed pain that will be felt. but there can be no finer view in England, especially Of course, some extraordinary athletes are when it means that a long run is nearly over. mentally and physiologically suited to running very long distances. That does not mean that we should all 1 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (September 14, follow them. There are extreme versions of almost all 2004), Japan - Marathon Monks, on-line transcript. activities. You might as well argue, for example, that because some sailors sail around the world all sailors should try to. Or that because some divers can dive to a depth of 20 metres all divers should try to. McDougall’s argument, however, is that very-long-distance running is not extreme, it is natural. It is in our genes to run very long distances, because that is what, according to him, we did when hunting down prey on the African plains: “Running was the superpower that made us human - a superpower that all humans possess” (p239). However, the few modern persistence hunters run up to five hours, not twelve or more. They are careful not to run to exhaustion: they would become prey themselves if they did. Green Lane, with Ward’s Stone and Clougha Pike ahead.

missed my long Sunday run this week. My left knee guides); they practise ascetic denial (they train, they I asked for a day off. The rest of me took a day off in suffer pain); they express gratitude to God at the endof sympathy. long race (“Thank God that’s over”). But I am not sure A few weeks ago my knee had buckled when I that the metaphor can be taken any further for running stood up from a chair. Since then the knee had been than it can for, say, fishing. happier running than standing. On Sunday, however, Those, however, who believe that it can will the knee had seized up a little. But I’m not complaining, welcome the birth in 2009 of a new world religion, after six full weeks of trouble-free running. Runnism (see www.runnism.com). Runnism worships Sunday morning has always seemed the natural physical well-being and derives from the peace of time for the ‘long run’, the cornerstone of the week’s mind instilled by long-distance running. running, because after it I feel justified in passing the Just as Christianity has its ten commandments, rest of the day in idleness. That, apart from the long so Runnism has its ‘seven steps’: live life to the fullest; run, is what Sundays are for. So, rather paradoxically, value long-term health; understand well-being doesn’t Sunday is my psychological rest day. Saturday may be come without sacrifice; ... No, I can’t continue. It must a ‘rest day’ in the sense that I don’t normally run then be a spoof, although it is often hard to tell on the web. but usually Saturday is hectic (at least, it was when the However, a spoof only works if there is something to children were around) and far from a rest. make a spoof of. I used to run great loops from the house: to Hornby, It depends, of course, how you define ‘religion’. over Loyn Bridge and back on the other side of the Its normal sense involves some belief in a supernatural river to the Crook o’Lune; or to Hornby, south to Haylot divinity, and there is nothing supernatural with my Farm and around Caton Moor - roughly half-marathon running. If, more abstractly, religion is regarded as distance. Sometimes I would combine the two (about some means towards peace and enlightenment, then, 18 miles). As I circled around the hills new panoramas perhaps, for some runners, running plays that role. of distant peaks opened up. Nowadays I am content When questioned whether he regarded running with smaller loops on my Sunday runs, around the as a religion George Sheehan (who was mentioned in windmills or to Claughton quarry. Week 26) replied that “Running is ... a monastery - a On my Sunday morning runs I pass people on retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a their way to or from church, but less so than I used to, place for psychological and spiritual renewal”. because I try to avoid them. There is no by-law against Far be it from to imply that runners should not running on a Sunday morning but in a small village commune with God as they run, if they wish. If you are there might as well be. I can sense their frowns as I religiously inclined then I imagine that you would so run past in my shorts, while they stride along in their wish, as you would in all your other activities. No doubt Sunday best, as they have done for centuries. it is better for you to think about God while running As I pass them I sometimes wonder whether what than it is for me to think about running while in church. I am doing is a form of worship, of thanksgiving for My question is whether running makes you more health and for the natural world. But I soon pull myself religious or spiritual than you might otherwise be. together. I am not religious (clearly, as otherwise I McDougall addresses this question indirectly, by would be going to church) but if I were I would expect attributing a philosophy to the coach Joe Vigil, which, more from religion than I have found in running. since it is described in approving terms, I assume is Some runners like to develop the metaphor of close to McDougall’s own philosophy. Vigil believed running as religion. Runners congregate for training that “you had to become a strong person before and for a race; they have their bibles (revered running you could become a strong runner”. This required

“building [the] soul as much as [the] strength”. He champion, enshrined as an Outstanding American in felt “there was some kind of connection between the the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. capacity to love and the capacity to love running”. Nelson Mandela did indeed enjoy long-distance It is an appealing idea that only strong, soulful, running, although for 27 years he could run no distance loving people can become good runners, and that at all, except on the spot. He said that running taught good runners become strong, soulful, loving people. him that training counted more than intrinsic ability. McDougall names (p99) three individuals to support He was also a keen boxer and was voted into the World his case: Emil Zatopek, Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Boxing Hall of Fame - but for knocking out apartheid, Mandela. not really for his boxing. Emil Zatopek was, of course, a great runner, Who can possibly say whether Lincoln and winning three gold medals at the 1952 Olympics. I am Mandela’s status as great men is any way attributable sure he was a great man, too. I wonder if all Olympics to their running? Nobody - but I am prepared to give marathon winners were or are great people. Perhaps an opinion. No, it isn’t. Even so, it is certainly uplifting so, for you clearly need strong personalities to win to feel, as I plod through the mud on a cold wet Sunday Olympics marathons. morning, that I am developing my soul, my spirit and I am not sure of the running credentials of Lincoln my love and well as my fitness. and Mandela, although they are certainly worthy Yes, the knee seems a little better. Thank you for people to have on your side. They are described asking. by McDougall as being included in “the pantheon of dedicated runners”. Abraham Lincoln’s running 1 This may be a misprint for ‘running scared’. Who record is lost in the mists of time but he was a wrestling knows?

hat passes for summer has passed. Not once Then there were the logistics to worry about. The W this year have I been able to use the excuse day before I had to leave a set of clothes in the office that it is too hot to run. Not once has a forecast of high to change into. I am relieved that I never had to spend temperatures induced me to run in the early morning, the working day in my running shorts. If it rained on before the sun has set to work. the way in, I’d have to wear wet gear for the run back. Perhaps that is a blessing. My body is not attuned If the weather turned bad for the return run, I’d have to to energetic activity first thing in the morning. It needs put up with it. a couple of hours to get prepared for running. But I One thing I remember about the early morning used, in the 1980s, to be able to get up and out before run of long ago is that you must fully commit to it the 8 o’clock. Some days I must have been on the roads in night before. It is not possible (for me, anyway) to lie the frost and the dark. in a snug bed in the morning and persuade yourself to Published marathon training programmes tend to get up and run. It’s like setting an early alarm to catch assume that we are all professional athletes and will a train: you must just get up and get on with it. Your legs have no problem finding time for a long run every day. must be on the road before your brain realises what The only way that I could get the mileage up to the you’re up to. required 60 miles or so a week was by including runs In retrospect, I quite enjoyed those early morning to and from work. runs although they were hard work at the time. The This was not as straightforward as it may sound. quiet lanes were a pleasure to run along. Nobody, It meant being on the narrow lanes before the traffic surely, could have a better view on their way to work (mainly university staff, who do not start work early) than the one I had across the Quernmore valley to and in the evening running the ‘long way’ back over Clougha Pike. It was good to feel that the running was the Cragg to avoid the traffic (mainly university staff, being put to some purpose, to save petrol. I could who stop work early). I’d count that as 17 miles. feel smug that I’d already had a long run by the time colleagues turned up for work. And I never once was so slow running in that I bumped into myself running back. As my enthusiasm for marathons decreased, so did the runs to and from work. In any case, my services became required as a chauffeur to get the children to school in Lancaster. Work began to involve more travel, to project meetings and conferences, many of them overseas. This plays havoc with any training schedule. The travel itself was debilitating enough and I never slept well or adjusted to any time change before it was time to return. So I was always too tired to run properly when away from home. Even so, I usually took my running My path under the Crook o‘Lune bridge, under water again. gear. Often it would stay unpacked. If

76 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self I did run, it was a problem to know where to run. If I Also, there is something virtuous about the early wanted to run for, say, 40 minutes, I’d run in a random morning run. While others are lazily starting their direction for 20 minutes and then turn and run back. days, you are already out in the fields. It brings a rosy I remember running in Taiwan and being gawped glow to feel that you have completed a five-mile run at by children who had clearly never seen an alien while others have struggled to do anything. running along their streets. It was much too steamy These, then, are the advantages of early morning to run, anyway, so I retreated to a few laps around the running. Persuaded? No? Me neither. In the 1980s I ran university running track. early in the mornings because I had decided to train Gradually, as a career develops, the demands and for marathons. Today, I have no such commitment. I expectations of work make it harder to find the time don’t need to force myself to run early in the morning. and motivation to run. When working with others, I will, therefore, reserve the early morning run it requires determination and a thick skin to excuse as a special ‘treat’. Something, perhaps, for when hot yourself, as though you have urgent business to attend weather is forecast to break into storms later in the to, and then be seen running along the road. And day. That, however, is unlikely to happen this year now academics are supposed to take work home (theses to that the wild, wet storms of autumn are already tearing read, lectures to prepare, and so on): it doesn’t create a leaves from the trees before they have had the chance good impression to run home with nothing. to turn brown. One of the advantages of running in retirement is I made the most of the one fine day of the week that you can run at whatever time of day suits you best. (Thursday) by having a tip-out in Bolton-le-Sands and I have no need, obviously, to fit in with the demands of running back along the canal and old railway line. work. But is it an advantage? Nowadays, it is easy to Despite having said that I’m not much concerned put off running, aware that I will always be able to find about mileages, I thought that I’d make an effort to time later in the day. So, if it’s drizzling in the morning run 36 miles this week as, who knows?, it may be my I might postpone the run until it stops. Then the drizzle last chance to do so. As you may recall (Week 7), turns to a downpour and I don’t get out at all. the significance of 36 miles is that it is Murakami’s Perhaps I need to remind myself of the advantages threshold for ‘serious running’. of an early morning run. For one thing, it gets it over It is perhaps twenty years since I last ran along this with: not that you have some penance to pay and you bit of canal and I had quite forgotten what a pleasant might as well suffer the ordeal as soon as possible but run it is. Not exciting in any way but as peaceful as that once you have your run under your belt whatever possible, apart from about fifty people taking their happens in the rest of the day you will have done your dogs for an early (for me to be running) walk. I met running. There might, for example, be thunder and nobody walking without a dog, no anglers, no runners, lightning in the evening, but you won’t mind. one cyclist, and a few people pottering in their canal There is often something special about early barges. On the canal were many ducks, which I must mornings. The skies are a deep blue. The sun has learn to distinguish, and about a score of swans. barely risen, leaving a refreshing coolness in the air. The canal towpath has the considerable virtue of There is a stillness, because the thermals have not yet being flat. The Lancaster Canal was built to follow the been stirred into action. Sometimes a mist settles in contour - it is, in fact, the longest stretch (41 miles) of the valley. In terms of the climate, then, in the summer canal in England without locks. As a result, its path early mornings are the best time to run. The evenings is gently curving, providing a view one minute over may be cool but there is often a dusty mugginess in the Morecambe Bay to the Lake District hills, the next air at the fag-end of a sweaty day. towards the Ashton Memorial in Lancaster. In the early morning there are few people and little From the canal, I dropped down steps to the old traffic about. The wildlife is in its natural element. The railway line, which is not only flat but straight. The birds, hares, rabbits, deer may be active at this time track was again a haven of peace, although I could hear because they too know that a siesta may be required the traffic of the real world around me. later. If you run in order to commune with nature or to So I have done some ‘serious running’ this week. engage in private reflection then early morning is the I expect that I will revert to my normal ‘light running’ best time. soon enough.

oe Henderson has been writing about running for Nowadays, running from home, I can set off up the Jover fifty years, including a weekly column since hill or down the hill. There are three routes up the hill: 1982, an achievement that I am well able to appreciate. two lanes and one track. There are four routes down the He has the experience and opportunity to reflect upon hill: one up river, one over the river across the bridge, a lifetime’s running. When he writes1 that his “most two down river (one along the old railway track, one by memorable days are all race days” and that memories the river). That gives me seven starting routes. of ‘everyday runs’ “so easily and often won are short- In any one week I may not set off in the same lived” you have to respect that. direction more than once. It is not a rigorous rule I can only say that my memories are different. Of that I consciously apply. It’s just that each day I think course, I remember something of events such as the “OK, where haven’t I run recently?” and I set off in that London Marathon but of the scores of ordinary races direction. After a while each of those basic directions that I ran I remember little. If I’d won a few, as perhaps branch out to provide various further options. In all, Henderson did, I might remember them better. I must have a score or more ‘standard’ routes, all of However, the contrast with a road-race is not an which are loops, so that I could run them either way. ‘everyday run’. The runs along High Street (Week 20) Not only do I run different routes but I vary the and from the Cairngorm ski-lift to Kincraig (Week 27) time of day that I run them. I don’t want to see the same were not everyday runs. Those runs provide memories people walking the same dogs in the same place every and have value in and of themselves, without needing day. A run up to the windmills in the morning with the to be considered as training for some race. sun ahead rising over Ward’s Stone is very different to Murakami finds comfort in running the same a run in the evening, with the sun behind setting over routes over and over again, for years on end, it seems. Morecambe Bay. He even becomes fond of the people he sees regularly Even after all these years, novel incidents occur en route, although he doesn’t know who they are. He to keep me interested. For example, I was recently runs the same races repeatedly. At the time of writing stopped, while running by the river, by two youths with his book he had run 7 Boston Marathons and 25 a spade and two beagles. They asked me if knew where marathons in all even though he says (p68) that “it’s all there were rabbits. As it happens, I know that there just a repeat of what came before”. are rabbits galore in the fields right next to where they I have tried hard to ensure that my running over had parked their car. Rabbits are not foolish enough to the decades has retained my interest. For me, variety live on a floodplain although some youths seem foolish is the spice of running. I said before that I prefer to enough to expect them to. I vaguely directed them continue doing something I’m competent at rather into the wide meander, where they could pass many than trying something new. I do not, however, like to fruitless hours. continue to do it in exactly the same way, forever. The A couple of weeks ago I came across a group of awareness that I have run road-races in the past, along, boys apparently on a map-reading exercise. They had of course, with my increasing decrepitude, makes it been deposited at the Cragg with the task of reaching certain that I will not attempt them again. the car park south in Quernmore. I found them, lost, When I was running road-races I never ran the near Crossgill, north of the Cragg. same race more than twice. Twice seemed sufficient My tip-outs also add variety. There are several to provide all that I would gain from that particular places where I can be tipped out, each of which experience. I looked for somewhere different to race, provides a number of routes home. In recent weeks I because part of the enjoyment of racing was to visit have been tipped out at various points of the compass different places. and different distances from home.

78 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Of course, my out-running was (and is, perhaps) very much intended to provided variety. I have several hundred mountains and hills within my forty-mile radius circle, each with several ways up them. There are hundreds of dales and valleys to explore as well. I have never repeated, and will never need to repeat, an out-run. Every single one of them provides me with a unique experience. This week I went for an out-run in Wensleydale. Somehow I had never before seen the largest natural lake in Yorkshire, Semer Water. It may be the largest but it is not large. It is less than a kilometre across. I began in Bainbridge, a typical Dales village, with a wide village green, complete with stocks for miscreants (no longer in use, I believe). The River Bain is said to be the shortest river in England, only 2¾ Semer Water and Addleborough, from the steep lane. miles long. Because of all the recent rain, I avoided the footpaths by the river and ran, accompanied by goldfinches, on the road above Semer Water to Stalling Busk, a quiet cul-de-sac. A rough track dropped down to a ford that is a problem for walkers who don’t want to get their boots wet. I don’t mind getting my running shoes wet, as indeed I did as the ford was far underwater. At Marsett cows wandered freely around the bridge and over a sort of village green. I ran on the other side of Semer Water to Countersett and then up a steep lane to reach Cam High Road, a track on the line of the Roman road that continued to a camp just east of Bainbridge. It took me about 90 minutes and did not exhaust me enough to discourage me from attempting more out-running, weather permitting. Cam High Road to Bainbridge. Running memories are not memories of running. That is, they are not memories of the activity of running, because the activity varies so little that any instance of it is not particularly memorable. Running memories are of the context of running. For Henderson, the context that interests him most is the road-race. For a while, it was for me too. But I no longer see running as a self-contained activity. It is part of a wider experience. I use my running to see what is happening nearby and to learn about and appreciate the environment within which I run. Anyone who has an ‘everyday run’ along the Cam High Road without imagining Roman soldiers marching along is missing half the fun.

1 Henderson, Joe (2004), Marathon Training, Champaign, Illinois: Human Kinetics. Wensleydale near Hawes, from near Cam High Road.

ontinuing my ceaseless endeavour to unravel the after a disappointing marathon by Murakami. I have C enigma of running, I have investigated the 1979 no idea if Murakami has children: it is of no account, as film Running, which, as its title indicates, provides a far as his running is concerned. definitive study of the phenomenon. This, it seems to me, is unduly harsh on the family. The Michael Douglas character is a loser and It is taking the loneliness of the long-distance runner quitter because of a chronic fear of failure. But he runs. too far. As I have said, I prefer to run alone and when He runs to work in a suit and tie (I never thought of that). running a marathon you are pretty much on your own, However, his family does not understand. The children mentally if not physically. However, I doubt that I would ask “Why does he do that? He’s embarrassing”. The run at all without the support of the family - not in the wife can only reply “It makes him feel good”. explicit sense of coming to cheer at the road-side but He eventually focusses on running the Olympics in the sense that the family accepts and appreciates marathon, as you do. The wife cannot cope with all that this is something that I like to do and that I need his training and his neglect of the family. He says “For to find time to do. No more and no less than weeach the first time in my life I’m doing what I want”. They accept and appreciate that each of us has our own separate. He deliberately comes fourth in the trial in interests to pursue. order to avoid selection but an injury to another runner Ruth has never suggested that I should not run. means he has to run anyway. So ... actually, I’ll leave There has never been an implicit “you’re not going you to work out the rest of the plot. I am more interested running now are you, when there’s [insert a long list of in the notion that serious running is incompatible with jobs] to do?” On the contrary, in fact. If I say “I don’t family life. feel much like running today” she’s more likely to say Running is inherently an individual activity. There “Why not a gentle one down to the river? You might see is a lot of “I” in the books of McDougall and Murakami a kingfisher”. There is just a subjective understanding - and in this diary, too. If running is a journey of self- that it will probably do me good. discovery that’s only to be expected, I suppose. In a reciprocal way, I like to think that I’ve never I may have missed it but I didn’t see any indication been less than encouraging to Ruth’s riding (or in McDougall’s book that he is a family man until the anything else that she gets involved in), although I acknowledgements on page 286. He seems able to run do, of course, take every opportunity to point out that about and trip into the canyons of Mexico without the riding is much more expensive than running. Without distraction or support of his family. Runners, writers, this mutual support, we might not have continued medical experts and coaches all feature in the fable running and riding while collecting our pensions. but the family are irrelevant, which is at least consistent When the children were young (when I was road- with the opinion that “the secret to happiness is right racing in the 1980s) they were often taken along for an at your feet”. outing, which I don’t believe was too much of a chore. Murakami says (p21) that he “just can’t picture I’d say “How about coming to Southport tomorrow - someone liking [him] on a personal level”. So we nice beach, I believe”. To them, no doubt, the race was imagine him to be a loner, as runners are assumed to the least important part of the day. be. However, he has already said (p16) that he has a I did not run the same races over and over. I’d wife. Can he not picture her liking him on a personal pick ones that could be combined with a family day- level? She pops up again (p32) but only to say “All out. Without thinking too hard now, I can recall family right”. Murakami explains: “I thought I’d change my day-outs, with a race for me an incidental activity lifestyle entirely, so we moved out to Narashino”. She in the middle, to Ambleside, Barnsley, Bentham, reappears (p149) to ask “What in the world happened?” Blackpool, Carnforth, Clitheroe, Coniston, Dent,

80 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Fleetwood, Heversham, Huddersfield, Ingleton, Keswick, Kirkby Lonsdale, London, Lytham St Annes, Morecambe, Preston, Southport and Windermere. As the children grew up and developed their own interests, occasionally - not often - they (the interests, that is) could be combined with my running. For example, in 1990, when Martin was keen on radio-controlled gliding, we went to Parlick, a cone-shaped hill known for its air-currents whichever way the wind was blowing. I left him there, happily gliding for an hour or two, while I went for a run through Fiendsdale and Bleadale. I don’t want to make too much of this. The running day-outs were only a part - a small part - of what we did as a family. My running was an oasis of calm within the whirlwind of the others’ activities but running was not something from which the rest of the family was excluded. It Glider over Parlick. © Pamela Self was and is just part of our life. When I began out-running the children were more as though it wasn’t there. It isn’t now. I’m very sorry or less independent but even so I couldn’t have done it about that. I didn’t foresee it at all. The bullocks were without the family’s acceptance or even encouragement not panicking. In fact, they seemed to be enjoying the that I disappear for half a day or more. Now that I am exercise. We weren’t running fast by any means. It just retired there is even more encouragement for me to shows what momentum a herd of bullocks has. disappear out of the house. I stopped at the gate for a few minutes wondering This week, inspired by last week’s Cam High Road, what to do. I could only retreat. If I had gone on I might I tackled a Roman road nearer to home. As mentioned in have driven the bullocks through the next fence and on Week 16, the track (the old salt road) over the Bowland into Roeburndale, miles from where they should be. I fells merges with the Roman road to Ribchester in its returned to Slaidburn, more exhausted than I have felt southern part. I had run up to the old county boundary all year. gate from the north but never from the south. So I Later in the week the temperatures rose to record set off from Slaidburn to run to the boundary gate or highs for late September. The swallows have already for 60 minutes (whichever happened first) and then left, having given up on our summer, but no swallows turn back. In the event, I ‘only’ ran 55 minutes before don’t make a winter. I tried to make good use of the turning back, because of an unfortunate incident. weather but I have felt quite drained after the Slaidburn I ran in peace, for the track is far from any road run. Perhaps my body is beginning to say ‘enough’. or houses, as far as the gate on Croasdale Fell at the ... highest point (416m) of the track, a mile short of the So, what do you think happens in Running? No, boundary gate. For the last few hundred yards I was he doesn’t win the Olympics marathon. That would be preceded by a dozen Belties that insisted on jogging too simple. He goes into the lead - but then falls and along the track ahead of me rather than diverting onto injures himself. He lies in agony for some time. Long the vast moor available to them. Belties are Belted after all the other runners have finished and the medal Galloway cattle, black with a distinctive white belt, a ceremony has concluded, he experiences a revelation, tough breed that can survive on the wild moors. rises and staggers, in pain, in the dark, through traffic, As we approached the gate, with a wire fence to a crescendo of adulation, to the finishing line, into both sides, I assumed that they would then turn aside. the arms of his wife, to gain the acclaim of the nation Instead they went straight through the wire fence and the respect of his children.

unning around the fields, hills, fells and valleys as not uncommon to encounter stray cows and even R I do nowadays makes me feel more at one with the bulls on the road. It is even less uncommon to find local fauna. Too at one sometimes. stray sheep. Cows on the road tend to ignore me but I am still distraught that my encounter with the sheep will run on ahead. Generally, we think of sheep Belties last week led to the demolition of the wire fence. following behind but a worse problem is when they I wasn’t running where I oughtn’t. It was open access persist on running ahead (like my Belties). Sometimes land. I didn’t really alarm the cattle. They seemed if I were to continue running I’d chase the sheep into content, as I was, before they ran through the fence. the next village, maybe miles away. So I usually hop Normally, if I see cattle ahead I will detour so as not to over a fence or wall to leave them be. Even within their disturb them but on this occasion I didn’t fancy leaving fields, sheep can be a danger. I was once butted in my track for the boggy moors, to which the Belties are the chest by one which hadn’t heard me approach and so much better suited than me. leapt, startled, into my path. I now shout a warning to The reaction of cattle to my running is them. (I try to make sure humans know I’m coming too: unpredictable. Usually, they just look at me, puzzled. they are a very nervous breed.) Sometimes, one may break into a trot. Then another The most excitable farm animal is the horse. The may join it. Before you know it, a stampede may be sight of a runner is liable to set it galloping around its underway. I am never convinced that cattle know paddock. A pack of runners, as in a road-race, may where they’re running when they run. I am sure that drive it to a frenzy. It has been known for a horse to the Belties did not ‘want’ to run through the fence. escape from its field in its eagerness to join the race. The herd on Croasdale Fell was prevented by This, of course, can be dangerous for both runners and cattle grids from reaching public roads. It is, however, horse. On the other hand, I have found the fell ponies that roam freely in the Howgills and Shap Fells perfectly docile (at least, so far). I have met many varieties of farm animal that has escaped from its farm: chicken, peacock, goose, goat, pig (although that was while walking, not running). Some farmers use electric wires to keep their stock in but that, too, is a danger to runners. I have run into three such wires and when you are running at speed you stay in contact with that shocking wire for what seems a very long time. All the wires were across public footpaths, without warning. As well as being electrocuted, butted and harassed by ferocious animals, I am often under aerial A Lune valley sheep. © Pamela Self assault. Lapwings and curlews

82 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self are the most aggressive, at least, during the breeding Some dog owners can only stop their dogs chasing season, when they will swirl above with the most runners by grabbing them tightly (the dogs, that is). blood-curdling calls. I have had buzzard circling close They expect me to thank them, as I run by, for all the overhead, as if deciding if I were prey. trouble they’ve gone to on my behalf, caused by their Grouse wait until you nearly step upon them own incompetence. More usually, the dogs are left to before bursting out. Snipe scare the wits out of you by run free. It always seems to come as a surprise to the darting out of the grass at your feet and zig-zagging owners, but not to me, when they bound into my path. away. Other game-birds are bred in profusion at the I particularly like what owners say to their dogs, local halls - Littledale Hall, Halton Green, Claughton in a show of remonstration. The most recent effort Hall - and, especially in autumn, provide alarming was “That’s not on, is it?”. I like to imagine the dogs company when they bluster out from cover. If only carrying out a semantic analysis to determine the deep they’d evolved to stay where they were - they’d not be significance of such utterances. Sometimes the owners shot then. speak to me rather than their dogs. The other day I was I noticed that this year Claughton Hall specialised smilingly told “She always does that” as compensation in red-legged or French partridges. These birds are, for having my leg gnawed off. as the second name suggests, not native. In fact, it is Nothing so untoward has occurred in this week’s only in recent decades that they have begun to breed running. It has been too grey, wet and windy to tackle in northern England. Now, thanks to Claughton Hall, an out-run, or even a tip-out. However, I have, with the local moors are liable to be full of them. commendable determination, continued to run around Red-legged partridges are dainty, trusting birds. locally and I feel that I am beginning to disprove my They are reluctant to fly. If they are being bred to be comment of Week 34 that my running is getting no shot then I don’t think that they would provide much of easier and no faster. a challenge. Indeed, they are so friendly that I could Now, when I set out for a relaxing run I find that I probably grab a brace as I ran past. The halls do not can complete it, with ease, in a time that would have breed snipe, perhaps because they are too difficult for required a lung-bursting effort a few months ago. And the average paying sniper to shoot. on Tuesday when I ran what I call the Hawes House The native hunters, such as they are, ignore me. In loop - a loop that I run fairly often - I sailed round in fact, I’ve never seen a fox locally. When I mentioned under 39 minutes. I had never beaten 40 minutes this to the Littledale gamekeeper he said “No, because before (since the beginning of 2010, that is). I feel that I kill them all”. The most he’s killed in one year is there is yet more life in the old legs still! 27, apparently. If he didn’t kill them, there would be no lapwing, curlew and, more importantly, grouse, P.S. On my Sunday run this week a car drew up pheasant and partridge - for people to pay to shoot. ahead of me. In it was Charles, of the Bob Graham I do see stoat occasionally, including two white Round (Week 34), whom I had not seen for many years. ones (ermine), which are becoming rare in our milder He said that he no longer runs after “a combination of winters. Once when a stoat hid in a stone wall I the marathons, Morris dancing, fell-running, and the stopped to see if I could spot him. After a few seconds Bob Graham” led to two knee operations. I reckon it he popped his head out of a crack, we stared at one must have been entirely due to the Morris dancing. another for a while, and then he went back in. He P.P.S. The appeal against the Caton Moor windmill repeated this half-a-dozen times. He then made a very rejection (Week 32) has been withdrawn. So, no more aggressive squeak and I recalled that I’d read that he’s windmills, for a while, at least. a bloodthirsty killer. So I ran off. P.P.P.S. I hope you don’t mind but I have decided to However, all these hazards pale into insignificance change the title of this document from “Rusty Running”. compared to the runner’s bête noire - the pet dog, which The rustiness of my running no longer seems its most is the only animal that runs towards me rather than relevant characteristic, so I’ve relegated it to the sub- away. Farm dogs are generally no problem, although title. Ten weeks of 30 miles or more has given me a one sheepdog did bite me on the buttock. Everybody well-oiled smoothness beyond my anticipation! It’s who parks at the Crook o’Lune for a walk has to have a now “Fifty Weeks Running” (I plan to stop two weeks dog, or several. It’s compulsory, I believe. early, for Christmas).

his week has been very muckish, an adjective I am not interested in running marathons any more T that entered our vocabulary during our time in but I can manage more than the mile that Sloan asks Donegal. Standing at the cottage door we could either about. In any case, I cannot find figures for the mile see the mountain of Muckish or it was too muckish - it is not raced so much any more. Let’s consider the (drizzly, with low cloud) to see it. 10k (6.2 miles) instead. Old runners may be able to It’s been perpetually gloomy, with the windmills plod on forever but the 10k, while not exactly a sprint, lost in cloud. Lancaster weather station recorded 1.7 requires a bit more leg speed. hours of sun in the whole week. Some people say The decline for the men’s best 10km times is: that they like autumn but for me it can be the most 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-59 60-64 65-69 70-74 75-79 dismal time of the year, with everything in a state of 7% 11% 15% 18% 25% 28% 36% 49% decay, winding down for winter. Mouldy leaves lie These figures are similar to those I gave for the everywhere. Strange fungi sprout on the lawn. And, marathon (Week 12). The decline for the 10k is a little most depressingly, all my paths across the fields have steeper than for the marathon up to 55 and then less so. become muddy, as they will remain until April. We might now hazard an answer to Sloan’s question, It is hard to be motivated to run on such dull days. but first let’s consider whether the various factors that I don’t mind light rain but I like to see the hills when I constitute aging are likely to affect our mile times more run - or, better, to run on the hills, but there is no point in or less than they do our marathon and 10k times. cloud. I cannot justify taking the car to go out-running The science of aging is complex and the signs in these conditions and, lacking inspiration, I have run of aging manifold. Some superficial changes (such along the old railway line more often than I’d like. as wrinkles and balding) do not affect our running. I noticed that they have recently put up a sign at Neither do some profound changes (such as loss of the Lune Aqueduct saying “Caton 3”. Just for the heck memory). The main changes that seem relevant are of it, I thought I’d give myself a ‘time trial’. a loss of muscle, balance, reaction time and flexibility, Over the year I have become intrigued by the a hardening of the arteries, and a weakening of question of how well a fit 65-now-66-year-old might be the bones. Energy fades away, like the tidal waters expected to be able to run. If I have an unrealistic view receding over Morecambe Bay, imperceptible over of the possible then I can hardly assess the actual. I a short time period but manifest over a longer one. might get disappointed at failing to reach optimistic Unlike the tidal waters, it will never return. goals or elated at surpassing pessimistic ones. Although these changes cannot be prevented, they In the spirit of inquiry, I turned to Jim Sloan’s may be mitigated. At all events, if they are the cause of Staying Fit Over Fifty1 where I found the following: “if the decline in marathon and 10k times, then they will you can run a 6-minute mile in your thirties ... what surely cause a similar decline in mile times. Possibly will be your mile time when you’re 65? ... Well, ... you more so, since at any instant mile-runners are closer to should be able to run that mile in ...”. their physical limits than long-distance runners. What figure do you think he gives? So I predict that the world best mile time for a Earlier (Week 12) I commented on Murakami’s 65-year-old male is about 30% slower than the world disappointment that, as he entered his fifties, his record of 35 years ago (3:49.4), that is, about 4:58. And marathon times began to worsen and on McDougall’s my answer to Sloan’s question is ... 7:48. claim that 64-year-olds can run marathons as fast The answer that Sloan gives is ... 6:27. 6:27! Where as 19-year-olds. I pointed out that the men’s best have I gone wrong? marathon time for a 65-year-old was about 30% slower My table above is for an ‘imaginary best runner’. than the best marathon times of 30 years ago. However, it is not the same individual producing these

84 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self The Lune Aqueduct carrying the Lancaster Canal over the River Lune. world bests. The 60-69-year-old record holders are not intention of running a 10k race but if I did I’d rather be the same runners as those who held the 30-39-year-old hoping for 43:20 than for 36:00. records 30 years ago. Clearly, the former have declined Why do authors like McDougall and Sloan insist less than 30% and the latter more. Perhaps I should that old runners don’t need to get much slower? I focus on the former, since I’m interested in what is frankly find it absurd to suggest that a runner who runs possible in theory. Unfortunately, it is hard to calculate a mile in 6:00 in their prime should be able to run it in their decline since some were not even running 30 6:27 at the age of 65. There may be an example of such years ago. For example, Yoshihisa Hosaka, who set the a runner, but not many, I bet. 60-year-old marathon record, started running at 36. Of course, McDougall and Sloan have a narrative Also, I assumed that if my ‘imaginary best runner’ to support. They need to suggest that, if we do things declined at 30% then so would an ordinary runner. right - that is, in the way that they suggest - we need not Perhaps ordinary runners decline less fast - after all, get much slower. I fear, however, that they are carried they have a lower standard to decline from. Sloan’s away with their runner’s ego. Runners like to think that 6-minute miler has declined just 7% in 30 years. they will run fast and, failing that, that they will run far Perhaps I am wrong to focus on percentage and, failing that, that they will not get slower. Runners, declines. Maybe all runners decline the same amount however, are not super-human. We age. We slow down. each year. If so, then, according to Sloan, that amount We should accept it. would be about 1 second per mile. So, how did I get on in my ‘time trial’? Well, I ran - Where does all this leave me? Given that I could without competition (obviously), no adrenaline, just an run 10k in 33:20 in the 1980s how fast might I hope to ordinary run - from the Crook o’Lune at Caton to the run 10k now? If I have declined at 1 second per mile Lune Aqueduct and back in 37 minutes. I deduce that each year (or 7%) then my predicted time is about the Crook o’Lune is not what the sign-makers mean by 36:00. The world best 10k time for a 66-year-old is ‘Caton’! I don’t believe I can run 6 miles in 37 minutes. 35:59. I just need to get fit and I’ll be challenging world However, taking my ruler to the map - as I should have bests. I find this a trifle hard to believe. done before - I find that it is a good 5 miles. And that’s I’ll return to the number I first thought of, 30%. good enough for me. This predicts 43:20 or so, that is, about 7 minutes per mile. That feels more like it. It happens to correspond 1 Sloan, Jim (1999), Staying Fit Over Fifty, Seattle: The to the 100% I built into my Fitnessometer. I have no Mountaineers.

n July (Week 29) I set myself a seemingly optimistic countryside that I was running through; to provide a I target - to sustain a level of 75% on the Fitnessometer, sense of achievement; as part of a ‘family event’. a level that would enable me to go out-running. Having In short, we decided to take a week’s holiday luckily avoided accidents and illnesses in the last few during which I would run across England (and in the months I am fit enough to out-run but the weather midday break Ruth would ride at a nearby stable). We recently has not been fit enough to allow it (at least, on hired a camper van and made our way, me on foot, Ruth the days that I have had the car to be able to out-run). in the van, from Flamborough Head, passing Helmsley, This week we’ve had cold winds and heavy showers, Bedale, Reeth, Tebay and Ambleside, to St Bees Head. with the first frosts of the season. We did not follow Wainwright’s off-road coast-to-coast Still, I have managed to reach Murakami’s 36-mile route because we liked planning our own routes, we standard for ‘serious running’ again. Of course, it is an were happy with quiet country lanes, we didn’t want arbitrary standard but 36 miles happens to remind me other pedestrians cluttering our path, and anyway his of my own most serious running, although we didn’t route is too short. It is an unsatisfying 192 miles: our think of it as such at the time. route was a round 200 miles. In 1993 I had a mild attack of gumpitis. I had no I ran 36 miles for 5 days and 20 miles on the 6th wish to run for 12 hours or more, pushing myself beyond day. The 36 miles were run in four shifts: 9 miles before the limits of exhaustion and pain. Instead I tackled a and after a coffee break and 9 miles before and after long run with the characteristics that I had come to a tea break, with a long break in the middle of the day. prefer. I ran: alone; where I wanted to; adapting the Each shift was 90 minutes. It was, at first, a novelty to route as I wished; along road, lane, track and footpath run as slowly as 10 minutes per mile. as necessary; in a series of tip-out-runs; to see the As we did not know where exactly would be a good place to meet, we agreed in advance a lower and upper bound, at about 8 and 10 miles. Ruth would park somewhere between the two bounds. I would begin looking for her at the lower bound. If I did not see her, I’d wait at the upper bound, assuming Ruth had been delayed a little. It worked smoothly, apart from once, when we had varied the routine a little in order to meet up with friends for lunch (and a ride for Ruth) and had mis-agreed the nature of the stop in Muker. The run itself was not particularly stressful. Of course, I was a bit stiff for the first steps in the morning but it soon wore off. It was only when we reached the rainy Lake District and I had to run on rocky, slippery tracks (such as the Garburn Pass) that my knees began to object. A little agony wasn’t going to stop me then though. We enjoyed the week and have fond memories of it. I remember, for example, at the end of the second day, reaching the crest of the Hambleton Hills and getting the first view of the hills of the Yorkshire Dales Setting off at Flamborough Head. some 30 miles ahead over the plain and thinking,

86 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self by tomorrow evening, I will have run there. Also: 50th year. After the coast-to-coast, we realised that, paddling at Flamborough; running on a very narrow after the first week, it would become an obsessional footpath through a field of wheat above my head; a slog, with little enjoyment. Sweaty, smelly running Helmsley man saying “nice day for a run”; a view of gear would become increasingly unpleasant travel Rievaulx Abbey; Ruth reconnoitring the Swale crossing companions. It would rain. I would exhaust my stock of at Maunby; the first curlews near Leyburn; an army dry clothes. I would not be able to guarantee my legs sergeant at Wathgill Camp shouting “get those knees would survive, making it hard to book riding stables up”; drizzle in Swaledale; downpour by the Howgills; ahead. The routine would become just that, a routine. Charlie (the bull) keeping us awake at Beckside JoGLE is hackneyed. John o’Groats and Land’s Farm; heavy rain to Troutbeck and Ambleside; sun End are tawdry places that one may be relieved but breaking on Wrynose; running non-stop up Wrynose, surely never pleased to arrive at. In between, much of as a challenge; camping ‘wild’ in Dunnerdale; cloud on the route would be far less appealing than Yorkshire Hardknott; paddling at St Bees. and Cumbria. We have completed our unique, private Overall, we gained a different appreciation of the crossing, and we are content with that. nature of England. We avoided busy roads, of course, This week a BBC TV programme Origins of Us said, and also the desolate high hills. We mainly used quiet without equivocation, that our bodies evolved for long- lanes and tracks, passing through innumerable villages distance running. Three special features of our bodies and hamlets, most of them off the tourist routes. There were adduced as proof. Interestingly, the human foot was a timeless charm with a peaceful air of activity. We was not one of them (see Week 18). They were: the saw nothing of the ‘industrial north’. It was an England nuchal ligament that keeps our head steady as we run; that is normally unseen and yet one that perhaps the buttocks’ gluteus maximus that helps prevent over- captures its character best. rotation of the torso; and sweat glands that enabled us There is, of course, a sense of satisfaction in to keep cool while running under the African sun. running across one’s own country but it is more than It would ease my quest to discover the whys of that. It provides an intangible feeling of ‘ownership’. running if long-distance running were natural for the I am familiar with every step along the way across it. human body. I remain sceptical, but perhaps I should Indeed, I think I can picture it all still. My country, I not be so satisfied with my 36 miles a week (although feel, is within my physical and mental compass. 36 miles a day is a shade too far now). I feel much the same now about all the hills and valleys within my 40-mile radius circle. I have run up and along nearly all of them. Mention any of them and I can picture instantly what it is like there. They are ‘my’ hills and valleys. Perhaps I know them in a way that nobody else does. Without this feeling I would not have had the effrontery to write a guide to the local region (http://www.drakkar.co.uk/landofthelune.html). However, enjoyable as the coast-to-coast expedition was, afterwards we had no wish to repeat or lengthen the experience. One week was about right. Beyond that, the logistics, never mind the running, become more difficult. I was fairly confident beforehand that I could run 200 miles in 6 days. I had done the preparatory runs. I should say, we had, because we’d had a 36 mile trial run around the Forest of Bowland, following the planned timings, including a ride for Ruth in the middle. But another 200 miles in the next week? - I doubt it. Before our coast-to-coast run, we had vague ideas of a John o’Groats to Land’s End expedition to mark my The end (St Bees Head) is in sight.

in the fields at the age of 66. They would never have run or jogged when they were middle-aged, let alone when they were old. In fact, my father at 66 had only one more year to live. After working in the same factory for 50 years (with an interlude for World War II) he was pensioned off for ill- health at 62. He therefore had no retirement to speak of. When I retired at the end of 2001 at 56 and people asked me, as they tended to do, what I planned to do with all my newly- acquired free time, I said that I would go running on the hills. This was partly to convince Dow Crag and Coniston Old Man. myself, if not them, that I wasn’t completely past it. But I did, in his week we’ve had a short break near Coniston fact, go running on the hills and I am still at it, after a T in the Lake District, which gave me the mental and fashion, ten years later. physical rest from running that I needed. I have, however, since I started my out-running in When I reach a relatively high level of running 1988 had a couple of long fallow periods, as indicated fitness I am tempted to run day after day for fearof by the number of out-runs that I have recorded each losing that fitness. Then I risk it becoming like running year: 1988 - 22; 1989 - 18; 1990 - 13; 1991 - 14; 1992 - 6; on a treadmill, a commitment devoid of all interest and 2002 - 17; 2003 - 14; 2004 - 14; 2005 - 9; 2010 - 4. In novelty. I do my best to avoid this but I have to admit 1993 I must have focussed all my efforts on the coast- that a degree of staleness had crept in recently. to-coast run but from 1994 to 2001 I did not run much Physically, also, although I had continued to run 30 at all. or more miles a week, I was beginning to feel weary, I am not sure now whether to put this down to a lack with one or two specific problems, such as a soreness of enthusiasm or a lack of energy or a change in my in the calves. work situation, or to a combination of the three. In 1995 I should, from time to time, pause and reflect on I moved to the University of Leeds, directing a research two simple facts: lab there. At least, my work moved there; we still lived I am 66; I can run for an hour. here near Lancaster. This meant extra travelling, which I need then to contemplate the multitude of ways in reduced the time available for running. which the latter could be made impossible. And then Running did not fit in, either at home or at work. to appreciate what a minor miracle it is that not a single With only an extended weekend at home, it didn’t seem one of them is preventing me from running. right to spend some of it running away. With going to It is inconceivable that my father, or anyone else all the trouble of driving to Leeds, it didn’t seem right that I knew of his generation, would have gone running not to devote myself to work when I was there.

88 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self To be fair, I was quite content to focus on the work in to stop every 100 yards or so at the end of another Leeds and to forget about running. It was a productive row of terraces to avoid being flattened by traffic. I time for the lab, with many research projects, most of could pound around the park of Woodhouse Moor them involving overseas collaboration, and a score or but that soon became boring. I found only one more of international research students. I was happy usable route: an old footpath that had miraculously to work a 12-hour day when in Leeds. In the evenings, survived, weaving past the back gardens of houses in there was, for me, away from home, little else to do but Headingley, Meanwood and Adel to eventually reach work. Like many people, I imagine, I came to think the countryside beyond. that I couldn’t stop work for something as trivial as So I would run, gradually a little further, along running. this path and back. By the time I was able to take the It is easy to get carried away with the apparent opportunity to escape from Leeds University I could importance of work. Crucial meetings; decision- run a few miles, at no great speed, and was ready to makers to cultivate; important ‘political’ discussions; tackle those hills, as promised. papers and reports to write; research students to talk As I look now at the details of the 2002 runs, I see an to. How could I possibly waste time running? understandable tentativeness in them. There is not the There was also plenty of overseas travel, which boldness of my 1980s runs. There were, for example, most academics (but not me) relish. It can turn your only two Lake District out-runs, and those were up the head to be invited to, say, Taiwan and be treated like modest peaks of Carrock Fell and Wansfell. Most runs royalty. I remember on one occasion flying to Taiwan were gentle, if long, valley runs. I preferred running by economy-class and the conference organisers without the scrambles of my earlier expeditions. saying that they had budgeted for me to fly first-class - Subconsciously, then, I had accepted that in the and promptly handing me the difference in cash (about autumn of my years it was too exhausting to run, or £1000). Ruth brought a healthy sense of perspective even to contemplate running, up the likes of Coniston when she came to Taiwan: she asked the hotel for Old Man. a smaller room than the huge one that we had been Despite what I said a couple of weeks ago, autumn given, a request that rather flummoxed them. is not such a dismal time - if the sun is shining. In the By 2000, however, all was not going smoothly with summer the sun has only uniformly green leaves to the lab. I have no wish to re-live that period but, in brief, play with. Now, while the leaves are turning, it can there was an unsolvable problem: we could not stay frolic with all the colours of the rainbow, or at least the within the department where we were administratively outer half of it. based but the department could not let us leave. The incentive to work all hours on an unsolvable problem waned. In the past I had never regarded running as an escape from problems. Generally, I ran most when I was most content with life. When I was not feeling so good about life, I didn’t feel like running either. But in Leeds, for want of anything better to do, I took to running in the evenings (it was better than turning to alcohol). This presented another unsolvable problem: where in Leeds is it worth running? In every direction that I ran I had Rainbow in the Lune valley. © Pamela Self

he weather has again thwarted my hope to go end result is gentle slopes and long ridges, with just a T out-running. Now that it is November perhaps I veneer of grass. should not expect otherwise. However, although I am The Howgills (or at least the southern half) are more than content running around home, I feel a little part of the Yorkshire Dales but perhaps they shouldn’t nostalgic for the tops of the mountains. be because, as everyone knows, the Dales are mainly Locally I run on the flat asphalt of roads and tracks composed of limestone. A geological fault runs and on the alluvium and glacial till of gently undulating between the Howgills and the Dales proper. The hills. But on the mountain-tops a range of all-weather limestone is 100 million years younger than the Silurian running surfaces would be available to me. slate and is therefore less smooth (according to my These surfaces can be classified under six broad naive theory of geology). headings: slate, limestone, millstone grit, granite, tuff There is only one thing I need to remember and peat. The first three are sedimentary rocks and when running on limestone: don’t. Limestone forms so should be flat but usually aren’t. The next two are ‘pavements’ but not like the pavements by the road igneous and are never flat. The last isn’t rock at all. It’s side. Rainwater slowly dissolves limestone and so plant debris that has accumulated on rock. corrugates the surface and chops it up into blocks Of these, peat, when in its ideal state, is the best to separated by deep gullies. If my leg were to slip into run on. When it is dried out in the summer it provides a a gully I might have to leave it there. There are also flat, springy surface that one cannot fail to glide across. pot holes. If I slipped into one of those I might have to Unfortunately, it is very rarely dried out or flat. It is leave my whole self there. usually a squelchy, boggy morass. I can run across the In limestone regions, the safest procedure is to peat, provided I don’t hang about, as it does not form run on paths next to the limestone. A reconnaissance quagmires that swallow any runner foolish enough to force of walkers and sheep has already investigated set foot upon them. At least, I had always found it so these paths for us. If I do manage to run to the top of but recently there was a report of a walker found dead a Dales peak without calamity I will be rewarded with after becoming stuck in a Bowland bog. a different kind of bedrock, millstone grit. Being on For some reason, peat erodes in patches. So, peat top, the millstone grit is younger than limestone and mounds rear up, surrounded by dark, boggy pools. therefore even less smooth. When running on such a surface most of the time is There isn’t much millstone grit on the top of the spent clambering up and down the mounds. Also, Dales peaks but there are whole mountains of it south because peat is such rich soil, plants grow in it, even in the Forest of Bowland, from which the Yorkshire Dales on mountain tops. Heather tears my shoes to pieces are separated by another set of geological faults. and requires me to goose-step across the moor. Moor- Most of the millstone grit is covered by peat, which grass grows in large clumps, which it is impossible to is a relief, unpleasant though the peat may be, because run comfortably on or around. where the grit is exposed, on Bowland Knotts or below Peat can be a few inches or several metres thick. Clougha Pike, for example, it forms great piles of huge The thicker it is the more metric it becomes. If it is boulders that it is quite impossible to run over. Even no inches at all then I’m running on bedrock. Within when the millstone grit forms small piles of less huge my region, the Silurian slate of the Howgills provides boulders, it is liable to turn an ankle, if it’s as feeble as the gentlest running surface. It is the oldest of the mine, especially if the boulders are concealed under sedimentary rocks here and therefore has had the heather, as they usually are. longest time to become smooth. That may not be the My igneous rocks are all in the Lake District. geological reason but it’s good enough for me. The Whole books can be written on the geology of the Lake

District but not by me. Suffice to say that Lake District In Week 11 I described my surprise at being able, rocks are rocky. As far as a runner is concerned, it despite feeling tired, to run around the windmills in 65 doesn’t really matter because all the natural paths minutes. This week I ran around them, without raising have been worn away by walkers and been replaced much of a sweat, in under 60 minutes. And I knew in by those stony step-ways that you find in municipal advance that I would be able to. parks. They are useless for running on. I could therefore concentrate on the excellent I have almost convinced myself that it is for the views, on a breezy day, with occasional rain clouds best that the weather has prevented me running on sweeping in front of the sun and then moving on to such dangerous terrain. reveal the autumn colours of the hills. As I ran up Caton Actually, I have never injured myself running on Moor, I could see far along the Lune valley beyond the hills. In the Lake District it isn’t compulsory to run Sedbergh to the Howgills, with patches of sunlight up the toughest mountains. There are many magnificent playing on its rounded hills. Most unusually on Caton ridges to run along, if I can but get up there, and some Moor, I came across a single walker, sheltering by a parts, such as the Dodds and the back of Skiddaw, are wall having a drink from a flask. relatively smooth. There are also plenty of fine valleys. As I ran over the crest of Caton Moor, a wide To appreciate a mountain it is often better to be beside panorama opened out over Roeburndale. The hills of it than on top of it. the Yorkshire Dales, including, beyond Ingleton, the It isn’t essential to run over the millstone grit three peaks of Whernside, Ingleborough and Pen-y- boulders either. There are a growing number of tracks, Ghent, were arrayed before me. for the grouse-shooters, which provide easy access to Swinging south, I could see the old salt road track the higher points, now that it is all open access land. that goes over the Bowland hills and then the Ward’s And the best thing about limestone regions is Stone ridge (photos in Week 36). Morecambe Bay that, because the water runs through the limestone, the then came into view, with Blackpool Tower just about paths are much drier than elsewhere. There are a great visible. To the right the hills of the Lake District (photo many ancient tracks and pathways that criss-cross the in week 2) were on this occasion obscured by the dark moors, even if they don’t go to the very tops. rain clouds scudding across them. So I will continue to hope that I can get back onto Far ahead of me, over the fields, swirled large these natural running surfaces but in the meantime I flocks of what I presume to be starlings. They eddied am savouring the recently re-acquired fitness that is and billowed like smoke, limbering up (because it was enabling me to make the most of my local runs. Unlike mid-day and still autumn) for the remarkable winter most of the past two years, I am no longer in trepidation displays when enormous clouds of starlings gather at that some part of my body is on the verge of collapse. nightfall to roost. It makes a world of difference to be able to run for an It is a lucky person who has a better 60-minute run hour, with comfort, not worrying about the running, from his own door-step. Perhaps it is not so essential to and therefore to be able to enjoy the surroundings. go out-running after all.

y pining for the mountain-tops - precipitated by running up some and walking the rest, and I could be M an unaccustomed fitness that has encouraged a accompanied on the walks by others if they wished to so far unconsummated desire to tackle the bold out- join my extended birthday celebration. running of fondly remembered days of yesteryear - has Before Bowness, I had completed 24 peaks, 16 overlooked the fact that I had resolved a few years ago by running up (in six separate runs, up High Street, to no longer risk life and limb by running on craggy Coniston Old Man, Pillar, Caudale Moor, High Raise mountains. I had concluded in 2005, after a tumble on and Skiddaw). Even before the tumble, I was finding Bowfell, that it would be unwise for my out-running to that running the Lake District paths was less enjoyable be quite so adventurous as in the past. than I had envisaged. I was softer and the paths were Near the summit of Bowfell I tripped myself up and, harder. There was little smooth running, much less than with that instantaneous slow-motion that characterises I remembered from twenty years ago. Many paths had accidents, somersaulted gracefully over a few rocks. become badly eroded. Some of the runs - for example, My hip hit the rocks with sufficient force to cut my belt the one over Haycock, Scoat Fell, Steeple, Pillar and in half. The rocks didn’t stop there: they cut a gash in Red Pike, in the rain, seeing nobody else at all - were, my hip too. on reflection, somewhat foolhardy. I was alone, on a walk, not a run, at the time. I still wanted to feel that I was able to run on the Naturally, I was prompted to think of the possible fells. It’s pleasing, in a way, to sweep past heavily consequences if a similar accident had befallen me cagouled walkers, hearing comments such as “Oh, while I had been running. that’s not fair”, as I did on Kidsty Pike from a woman It is not possible to control a fall. I could as easily struggling up. But, as they say, all good things must have gashed my head as my hip. Or broken an ankle. come to an end. If I were running I would have had few clothes on, no My final high Lake District run was a tip-out-run, food, no water. I could have been miles from anyone when Ruth and a friend wanted to see the ospreys at and anywhere. The prospect didn’t bear thinking Bassenthwaite. I was deposited near the lake and left about, but I was obliged to think about it now that I to run up Ullock Pike to Skiddaw and Little Man, over knew how easily accidents can happen. I took it as a Mungrisdale Common to Blencathra, and then down to warning and resolved not to take risks. High Row near Threlkeld, where, 165 minutes later, I Fell-running becomes difficult with age not was gathered up, rather exhausted. because of the loss of speed and stamina but because This terrain is, at least, not a rough scramble like of the loss of agility, coordination and reaction time. most Lake District peaks. It was a good run to finish on. It doesn’t matter that running is less fast and less After a week’s recovery from my Bowfell wounds, I duly far. It does matter if you trip over rocks. The days completed the other 36 peaks by walking up them. of gambolling like a chamois over mountain rocks This week, after a couple of bright days with frosty are gone. I can no longer run downhill with carefree mornings - which I made good use of with long runs in abandon; I have to pick my way carefully through the Littledale and Quernmore - the dull, damp, drab, dreary rocks. days returned again to end any thought of running on At the time of my tumble I was in the middle of the high tops. another of those self-imposed, age-defying challenges, I have complained recently about the weather but an attempt to complete ‘60 in 60 by 60’. The idea was I should say that this is only from the point of view of to get to the top of the highest 60 peaks in the Lake out-running. It has, in fact, been remarkably mild for District in the 60 days before my 60th birthday. I October and November. This, however, is because we didn’t specify how I would get to the tops. I pictured have been mainly blanketed in cloud, bringing grey,

92 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self damp days. As a result, we have had few frosts and entranced by a farm vehicle with the registration even fewer autumn mists. number of A1 MOO. The weather has behaved oddly all year. The real I eventually reached the long flood protection winter came in December and early January. After bank at Bank End with grey views across the expanse of that, there was virtually no snow or frost. April had a salt marshes. Fleetwood was just about visible across hot spell. The real summer hardly seemed to happen the bay but Blackpool Tower was lost in the murk. I ran at all. Then, in late September, we had a relative heat- past hundreds of deserted caravans. I cannot imagine wave which led to record October temperatures. And what holidaymakers do here, even when the sun is so far there is little sign of the hard winter that some shining. There is no beach, only mud. They could forecasters have predicted. watch the birds, of which there are a great many, but I On Tuesday, which is my traditional day for out- doubt that there are enough ornithologists in the whole running, I accepted the restrictions imposed by the of England to fill all these caravans. weather and went for a run around the Thurnham Some buildings here are of Permian red sandstone, peninsula, never reaching 20m above sea level. the youngest (at 250m years old) of local rocks. So was I set off from Conder Green intending to run first the 12th century Cockersand Abbey, the few remains along the Glasson branch of the Lancaster Canal, but of which forlornly overlook Morecambe Bay. The the towpath was closed for dredging the canal. This Lake District hills were not visible, although Heysham inauspicious start was in keeping with the atmosphere. Power Station could be seen looming ahead. And so on It was so murky that the Bowland hills, barely five miles through Glasson Dock back to Conder Green. away, could not be seen. It was a gloomy outing but one entirely appropriate I retreated to run instead along the lanes and to the weather and the situation. Thurnham Moss tracks across Thurnham Moss. This former huge bog is in its natural element on such a day. The monks has been drained into innumerable ditches to create of Cockersand Abbey came to seek solitude and to rich farming land but, for the visitor, there is little to escape from the attractions of ‘normal life’. There are see but miles of flat fields. It was so dull that I was few attractions, or distractions, on Thurnham Moss.

Below: The Lune valley, looking towards Leck Fell and Gragareth.

t had to happen. My left knee (last mentioned in would be a miracle for a boy to win the Boston Marathon. I Week 36) hurts, particularly when running uphill. So he sets out to. Run Fatboy Run (2007, UK) has the The kneecap needs oiling. Or a rest. Generally, I feel lead character aiming to run in the London Marathon like I’m approaching the end of a long-haul flight, with after 3 weeks training in order to regain the love of a little fuel left, one engine mal-functioning, but with the woman he had previously deserted at the altar. runway in sight. I hope to glide smoothly down. In some films the characters spend most of the time While resting the knee I’ve looked at some films running but not explicitly as runners. In Dangan Runner about running1. To see a thing clearly it sometimes helps (1996, Japan) three men chase each other around Tokyo to look at it from a different angle. I’m investigating all day for reasons that become unimportant. In Run how running is portrayed in our culture, in feature Lola Run (1998, Germany) Lola runs around frenetically films for the general population (not in documentaries in order to get money to save her fiancé. for runners). I’m interested in their answers to three The most implausible, but apparently based on a general questions about running. Firstly: true story, reason to run is that in The Loneliest Runner Why does a person start running? (1984, US). A bed-wetting boy runs home from school The story-line of a film usually requires some crisis in order to remove the sheets that his mother has hung to cause someone to take up running. Often it is a out to dry before his schoolmates can see them. midlife crisis. In Second Wind (1976, US) a successful In most of the films, once a person starts running, businessman gets tired of life and runs to test himself. he or she discovers a special gift for running that In Marathon (1980, US), a man who has everything enables them to win fame and fortune - or to lose begins running in order to be with a beautiful young weight. The story of the runner’s development is not female runner (well, he has almost everything). A usually the focus of the film, although it is in Challenge similar young female attracts a retired judge to begin the Wind (1990, US). jogging in Joggers Park (2003, India). In An Autumn Once we have a runner - and some films, such Marathon (1979, USSR) a professor begins jogging to as Marathon Man (1976, US), begin with the running escape from students and a nagging wife. What about character already a runner - the film may then address women? They start running in order to lose weight, of my second question: course (She How She Runs (1978, US)). What are the characteristics of running? In other films a person may lead a life of such woe In Marathon Man, the most well-known of the films and despair that running becomes their only means of mentioned here, the fact that our hero runs marathons escape. In Kicking Bird (2004, US) the lead character is not crucial to the convoluted plot although it comes in is always getting beaten up, so the “only thing left to handy in several chase scenes. Perhaps it’s to establish do” is to run. In The Jericho Mile (1979, US) a long- context: the notorious dental torture is mere child’s term prisoner takes up running to free himself of the play compared to the agonies of marathon running. tensions of his hopeless life. In The Long Run (2000, Often, the running is to define the runner as a SA) an illegal refugee considers that the only way to rebellious outsider. Or insider in the case of The avoid deportation is to win a 54-mile marathon. In The Jericho Mile. Here, his running is part of an attempt Runner (1984, Iran) a boy finds that he just has to run to deny himself all the comforts of civilization and to far and fast to survive his life of poverty, eventually punish himself for his crime. running for the blissful relief of it. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962, Sometimes there is a specific reason that someone UK) begins with “Running has always been a big starts to run. In Saint Ralph (2004, Canada) a boy hears thing in our family, especially running away from the that only a miracle can save his ill mother and that it police”. As in The Jericho Mile, the lead character runs

94 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self whilst in prison for release from his troubles. Running Runner (2001, Canada) is based upon an Inuit legend is a metaphor for both his alienation and his freedom. in which the fast runner of the title escapes death by But it is alliteration rather than narrative that links long- running naked across ice. distance running with loneliness. In The Naked Prey (1966, US) a hunter on an African Dangan Runner also sees running as a metaphor, safari is stripped by angry tribesmen, given a start and as a search for meaning in life. The three runners, chased down for four days. On the surface, it is a tale all losers heretofore, run so far that they forget their of a civilized intelligent white man overcoming a herd dreary lives and the false values of society and then of black savages, despite their superior knowledge of run to exhaustion for the sheer pleasure of doing so. the terrain. Underneath perhaps it is an allegory of the Not many films focus on the joys, if any, of running. mental battle all humans fight. Anyway, it all ends in a See How She Runs takes us through the exhilarating yet mutual salute. painful experiences of training for a marathon. On the More general themes are explored in some Edge (1985, US) tries to depict the adventure of trail films. In Challenge the Wind the trainer, who is the running, as contrasted with track or road running, as runner’s grandfather, gives lessons about the nature well as something of the spiritual side of running. of competition in life. In Joggers Park the relationship Saint Ralph, in which the boy is coached by a between the retired judge and his young female priest, also flirts with the relationship between running running friend provides a context to look at issues of and religion. The boy eventually comes to face what social reputation and family honour. might be thought of as a paradox of faith. Of course, many of the films are concerned Other films relate running to more general directly with the ‘success’ or otherwise of the runner problems. Running, as we saw (Week 39), considers as a runner. Sometimes, however, it is someone else the conflict between an obsessive activity (running) (often a coach, who is usually a dubious character) who and career and family, as does Second Wind. Go for is more bothered about success. In the two prison- Gold (1984, US) has a champion runner agonising over based films, The Jericho Mile and The Loneliness of the the choice between fame (running) and happiness Long-Distance Runner, the prison authorities think that (not running). a successful runner would reflect well on the prison Some films stray so far from the normal that they itself. Of course, our rebellious runners have no such become fantasies. For example, The World’s Greatest motivation. In the latter film, the runner defiantly and Athlete (1973, US) extracts a Tarzan-like super-runner contemptuously refuses to win the race. from the wilds of Africa (shades of the Tarahumaras). Usually the runner achieves ‘success’, however He even brings a pet tiger with him (even more implausible it might seem - for example, the loser-cum- fantastical, as there are no tigers in Africa). winner of Running. This success often overcomes even I am inclined not to consider all those films in greater barriers than normal. In The Jericho Mile the which the runner seems to be a clichéd caricature of an prisoner is not allowed to run in the Olympics because actual runner. The Games (1970, UK) has four of them, he refuses to express redemption for his crime - so he including a barefoot aborigine who chased kangaroos beats the Olympic winner’s time within the prison yard. in the bush (a pastiche of Abele Bikila perhaps). In On the Edge the runner, who is racing despite being Now for the last question: unfairly banned some twenty years earlier, has to avoid What are the benefits from running? being dragged from the course by irate officials. A great many films have a character ‘on the run’. Some What conclusions can be drawn from all this? of our films take this literally - our runners run to Perhaps that, since films are made not about the escape. For example, in Raw Courage (1985, US) three ordinary and mundane but about the unusual and runners on a 72-mile desert charity run are chased by dramatic, I can safely eliminate all the above factors a group of survivalist militia (in vehicles!). Perhaps this from my consideration of my own ordinary running. is meant to be a parody of ultra-running. Similarly, in The Ice Runner (1992, US) the hero escapes from Russia 1 To be precise, I’ve looked at the reviews of some films by running 39 miles across ice to the USA. about running. I don’t have the time to watch them or Perhaps reflecting a recurrent nightmare, some of indeed the will-power, for judging by the reviews most these escaping runners run naked. Atanarjuat: the Fast are not classics of cinematography.

n Sunday, on a recuperative run easing my knee usually plague me, I eventually got fit enough to be O back into action, I was rewarded with another sight able to go out-running (as hoped in Week 29) but the of a kingfisher. Kingfishers are not more numerous in cloudy weather largely prevented it. At least I can late autumn but they are more visible. The low sun begin next year confident that I am capable of it. illuminates its startling turquoise as it skims across The attraction of out-running is partly the degree the Lune, and, with the trees almost bare, it remains of adventure that is added to the running. Henderson conspicuous as it perches on the other side. (Week 38) is right to the extent that there is a limit to We particularly appreciate those few birds, such the excitement that I can add to my ‘everyday runs’. Of as the kingfisher and dipper, that stay with us over course, out-running does not have the exhilaration of the winter, struggling to survive from the sometimes some adrenalin-fuelled activities, especially now that I frozen river. We are similarly fond of winter garden am sworn to limit risks (Week 45), but nonetheless the birds, such as the robin and wren - although sometimes unexpected tends to happen on out-runs. there is a price to pay. When I am planning to run in unknown territory I Last week we watched for fifteen minutes whilst rely on the map to judge its run-ability. It is, however, a sparrowhawk used as a dinner table the stump of a not always possible to judge even from the best map holly tree that was sawn down in the summer. From ten what the conditions will be like on the ground. On yards away we studied at our leisure this fine bird, after Hutton Roof I became entangled in gorse bushes; in coming to terms with it doing what nature intended. Gisburn Forest I spent ages battling through the brash I have accepted that sights such as the kingfisher of felled trees; on Hoddlesden Moss near Blackburn I are the most that will enliven my runs for the rest of the sank; at Eel Tarn in Eskdale I ran too far into the water year. There is not time to develop sufficient trust in my and got stuck (I know: I was tired). knee to venture far afield. Still, I am more than content The trouble with these escapades is that they with the running that I have managed this year. Thanks can be time-consuming and exhausting, and that can partly to avoiding the autumn colds and coughs that compound problems. Several of my recorded out-runs

The River Lune, where the kingfisher flew across.

96 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self have a ‘very tired’ comment, almost always because off like a snipe, leaving the young lady on the grass. I the terrain has been hard work. For example, on an could only say ‘sorry’ and move quickly on. Whenever I evening run on Wild Boar Fell I decided to leave the see a car parked ahead where cars would not normally standard ridge path to investigate the western slopes be, I run past with my eyes closed. around Tarn Mire. A mire it was. The sun was setting I have been stopped many times on my runs by by the time I extricated myself. walkers needing help to know where they are. This I also notice in my records many ‘saw nobody’ always seems strange, as they are the ones with the comments. Often I would be on the tops of hills before map (they can’t see mine, if I have one, tucked inside any walkers, even for popular promenades such as my shorts). I suppose they assume I’m local. Ingleborough and Fairfield. Usually I saw nobody I was, in fact, local when once stopped on Caton because I was running where nobody went. This has Moor by two men puzzled by their guide book. I knew its benefits but if I did have a problem then I might be exactly where to direct them but I was intrigued by unable to share it for a very long time. how they had become lost on such a simple moor. I too In serious fell-races you are not allowed to compete was puzzled by their booklet, until I noticed the page unless you have a proper survival kit. I ran, and still numbers indicated a gap of four pages. The middle run, with only a map (sometimes). Fell-racers compete sheet had not been stapled in. The description that whatever the conditions: I only out-run in reasonable they were following merged in neatly with that of a weather. I never run in cloud, for example. I see no different walk that should have been four pages on. point in it. I would see nothing, and I run to see. Greatly relieved that they were not as incompetent as I cannot, however, predict the weather. Sometimes it seemed, they strode off for the Fenwick Arms. when I arrive somewhere it has different weather to I have never got lost myself while out-running, what I left at home. I always have a low-level alternative although I did once go the wrong way on purpose. I in mind in case a hill is in unexpected cloud. Even had run up Ingleborough from Horton and completed so, I am often caught out by weather changes. I have the celebratory circuit of the summit plateau, before sheltered from hail-storms behind cairns; I have met setting off on the downward path. Within five yards I’d unanticipated snow-drifts; I have been chilled by gales; realised that I’d taken the wrong path, heading towards I have (many times) been drenched. Ingleton instead of Gaping Gill. It was just a lapse I have been delayed - if not endangered - by a of concentration, for I knew the summit well enough. motley set of incidents. At least I am no longer liable to However, pride or embarrassment prevented me from be shot by grouse-shooters. Now that the Open Access returning back up past walkers I’d just pranced by. I law is in force they close the moor when they shoot, thought, in that instant, that I might as well detour along which they can do for 30 days a year (which I don’t the Old Road, through Clapham and over Thieves Moss begrudge, as I can now go legally on the moor for the to Sulber Nick. A big mistake! other 335 days). Before, when I was trespassing, they This was in November 2002, when I was still could have shot me ‘by mistake’. Even so, it can be relishing the new freedom of retirement. However, I frustrating to arrive and find the moor closed. had not yet convinced myself that this out-running I have been stopped by the police, but I couldn’t would last and I was still using kit that had lain unused help them in their enquiries. I have acted as an in the garage for ten years. By Crina Bottom the sole emergency service myself, by running to ask the of one of my shoes began flapping loose. I ran along neighbours of a woman walker who had fallen and like those circus clowns, always tripping over their bloodied her face to go and collect her. I have locked own feet. After about ten miles of this, I reached Sulber myself out of my car, by somehow closing the car boot Nick, where the mud finally sucked the whole sole off. with the key inside before I’d tucked it into an inner By now it was getting cold and dark. I should have pocket of my shorts. I had to run to the nearest garage taken the other shoe off and run barefoot, but I was too to beg for help. exhausted to care. I walked the last two miles. There is one rather delicate complication to my But I wouldn’t want you to run away with the idea out-running. I am not alone in seeking out-of-the-way that I am totally irresponsible in my out-running. I places. Couples do so too. I once almost ran over one leave a map on my desk indicating where I might run, pair. The young man leapt up, startled, and dashed as a hint to the search party.

mplicit in the previous pages is an aspect of my them. The basic problem was that not all members I running that perhaps should be made explicit, as in of the group wanted to run at the same speed, which this aspect at least I seem to differ from other runners: meant that you hung about waiting for slower runners I have tried to capitalise on the fact that running is a or struggled to keep up with faster ones. part of life where I can decide for myself what to do Also, it was hard to reconcile a serious training run entirely independently of the opinions of others. with a social event. Once, I remember, I only had time It might seem that academic research, which I was for a 15-minute run, so I had decided upon a relative paid to do, comes close to this: just decide on a topic sprint. A friend asked to join me, although I warned and get researching. It is, however, rarely so simple. him that I was in a hurry. As I sprinted away, he soon You need to persuade decision-makers to provide dropped off: that wasn’t the kind of run he had in mind. finance for equipment and staff, and to convince It is a sad state of affairs when a commitment to train employers that the project fits in with their objectives overcomes the courtesies of friendship. So, over the and doesn’t carry any unreasonable costs. Often, you years, I came to prefer running alone, even to the have partners (academics at other universities or extent of going to the gym at odd times of the day. industrial collaborators) and you have to take account Most runners will say that they are by nature a of their, probably conflicting, agendas. If the proposal loner. I am not convinced. There are many activities is approved, you need to cooperate with colleagues - such as composing music, doing sudokus, making an who, again, have their own objectives and goals. omelette - which are best done alone but I doubt that That is how it should be and no doubt it is much the their practitioners necessarily consider themselves same with most employment. Research is improved if loners. I suspect that some runners come, like me, it is carried out within a cooperative team, with ideas to prefer running alone mainly because of the extra knocked into shape and differing talents coordinated. freedom and independence that it provides. I enjoyed it, on the whole. I prefer to run alone, but not because I naturally Similarly with family life. You cannot reasonably prefer to be alone. It has been argued1 that a decide where the family will go on holiday or how degree of solitude is essential to promote thought to decorate the kitchen without discussion and and imagination. Nonetheless, a loner is, almost by agreement. Even deciding what to do on a day-to-day definition, something of a social outcast. Runners are basis involves a certain amount of negotiation. And, of not, on the whole, considered the most sociable of course, it is all more enjoyable that way. humans. I’m not, anyway, at least when I’m running. Running, especially my so-called out-running, is I appreciate that many runners run to escape the different. It is entirely up to me where and how fast stresses of ‘everyday life’. The last thing they seem I run. Nobody else minds where I run. Often nobody to want is to have to make yet more decisions about knows that I am running. And while I’m running it is up where and how fast to run: they just jog a standard to me if I should choose to change the planned route. route around the park, say. My ‘independent decision- I have particularly come to value the opportunity that making’, while valued by me, has no impact on anyone running provides of an hour or two of independent else. It is casual and stress-free. The statistics in this decision-making. document might imply that I would carry out some Running during the university lunch-hours did not detailed analysis to decide what to do. Actually, I am have this character. It was usually a social event, with a quite sloppy by current standards of technology-based group of us deciding, after an informal negotiation, that running blogs, where mileages, times, even calories, we’d, say, run along the canal to Conder Green. While are recorded to two decimal places. No, I just decide I enjoyed the runs, I was not entirely comfortable with on the fly, as I feel.

98 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Baugh Fell is the hill on the right. Rawthey Bridge is at the bottom middle. I ran on the right slope of the valley ahead (Uldale), where the waterfalls and limestone gorge are tucked in, and then up the ridge that eventually becomes the horizon. The return route was, eventually, more or less down the right edge of the photo.

Road-races and fell-races are on specified routes. I remembered reading that Taythes Gill had some You must, like sheep, follow the others. I did (once) impressive exposed rock formations where the Dent try orienteering, where you work out your own route Fault cuts across the moor so I swung west from West between specified points but it was in a way worse Baugh Fell Tarn to have a look at them. because at those points you must then stop and hunt In general, then, I study the map and do some for the thimble that someone has hidden there. I prefer preparatory reading, so that I have an idea of what to just run. I don’t like my running being dictated by there is to see. I have a provisional route in mind, but I others. adapt it on the run, as needs be. In my prime, I’d expect The adaptable nature of out-running is perhaps to be out for a couple of hours or so, and I’d shorten or best conveyed by an example. Let’s take an old run at lengthen the route as necessary. random: one up Baugh Fell. Baugh Fell was at that time My decision-making at the moment is not on so unknown to me, although the guide-books warned that epic a scale. Locally, my runs have something of this it was a rather rough, boggy hill. provisional, adaptive character in that I usually set off I set off from Rawthey Bridge along Uldale. To see with a vague intention in mind which then evolves in the waterfalls promised on the map I had to scramble response to the situation, that is, to how I feel or what away from the path, which was, of course, allowed. I see. Along the limestone gorge of Dockholmes and up Right now, my main decision concerns whether Rawthey Gill the path gradually disappeared and, as it to run at all, what with a sore knee, a bit of a sniffle, became difficult to run comfortably there, I cut up onto the decreasing temperatures, and an evaporating the ridge of northern Baugh Fell. There were still a few motivation. At least, if I decide not to run then I know snow drifts on top to be avoided. that it is 100% my own decision. My notes say that the top provided an excellent view of the Howgills and was completely silent, apart 1 Storr, Anthony (1989), Solitude: A Return to the Self, from skylarks and low-flying jets. On the way down New York: HarperCollins.

Left: Hawthorn trees in the Lune valley. The first snow of winter has fallen - another reason not to run. Actually, I like running on snow, provided the snow is not on ice or frozen ruts (as it usually is).

The second chapter places ultra-running in the footsteps of the explorer Scott and the mountaineer Mallory, who died as a result of their self-imposed challenges. As with Murakami and McDougall, the narrative climax of Why We Run is a long description of a very long race. In brief: after 15 hours running, he began to feel that he “was living at the absolute extremity of [his] own being”; after 16 hours, he was starting to meander as he began to hallucinate; after 17 hours, he “could not breathe, could not move, © Pamela Self was too weak to talk or think”. He vomited and collapsed. He had completed 85 miles, just ime to return to the question I started with (Why?). over half-way. T I have come across a book by Robin Harvie entitled It did not end there. It took months to recover and Why We Run1 that will surely answer my question. then, because he had quit, he felt obliged to tackle the As we did with Murakami and McDougall all Spartathlon again: he “would have to take it on, silently, those weeks ago, we should first consider what sort simply for the sake of running itself”. of runner Harvie is that qualifies him to speak for we So, what has Harvie learned that enables him runners. He ran his first marathon in 2000 at 23 and to entitle his book “Why We Run”? He concludes then ran many more. Finding it difficult to improve on (p278) “As you may have guessed, there is no neat his then best time (3:30, about the same as Murakami answer. There is no point at which we stop. We just and McDougall), he began to wonder if he could run keep returning, giving ourselves over to these huge further instead. In due course he entered the 2009 distances, because this is what we do”. Spartathlon, a 152-mile race from Athens to Sparta. No, this is what Harvie does: it is not what I do So, like Murakami and McDougall, with their 100 (or most other runners, in my experience). I can km and 50 mile races, he became an ordinary runner understand the desire to rectify a failure (I felt it after who runs extra-ordinary distances. In training for the my first London Marathon) but I have never had the Spartathlon, he ran an average of 120 miles a week for slightest wish to attempt to run the Spartathlon. If it is a year. He had to determine his priorities carefully a choice between ultra-running and “the longing for because, as he says (p66), “I was newly married. There home” then I prefer the latter. were other distractions”. It would be foolishly pretentious of me to compare The first chapter concludes (p38) that “To become my running with the endeavours of Scott and Mallory a true long-distance runner, our first duty to ourselves but Harvie wants to explore the limits to his tolerance is to negate that longing [for home] absolutely”. of hardship and pain. He writes (p72) “nothing can

100 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self compensate for the terrible burning that creeps that it is only the self-justificatory tomes of such through your skin and into your bones when you obsessive runners that made me raise the ‘Why do I reach the limits of your capacity. Wherever the pain run?’ question in the first place. It was not something originates, eventually it occupies every muscle and that concerned me much before. sinew. And every runner knows the feeling”. In that respect, my running is no different to Ruth’s Well, I don’t know the feeling. I guess that makes music-playing. She spends more hours on rehearsals, me not a runner. What have I been up to for the last 50 practice, and concerts than I do running. She doesn’t years? I thought the idea was to train to try to extend agonise over why she plays music. If, however, she my capacities and then to run close to but within them, decided to practise for 3 hours a day in order to play to avoid pain and collapse. Paganini’s Caprice No 24 nonstop for a whole day then There is a pattern here. Some ordinary runners perhaps she would ask why (I know I would). like to feel special (“I wanted to see whether I could Clearly, there are many reasons that I run. Some take on something that no one I knew had ever done” of them, I suspect, are the same reasons that Ruth plays (p66)); so they run extra-ordinary distances; they music, but analogies are risky so I won’t pursue them. consider themselves extra-ordinary runners; they feel Moreover, the reasons to run change, year by year. The a need to explain their extra-ordinariness; but their main reasons why I ran in 1960 are not those why I ran explanations do not apply to the ordinary runner. in 1980 or those why I run now. What did Harvie hope to achieve, mentally rather None of them leads inexorably to the ultra-running than physically, by running the Spartathlon? He writes that Harvie, Murakami and McDougall describe. Some (p272): “I thought that I could ... finally [be] at peace people will find such books inspirational; others will with myself, that I could calmly return to my sedentary despair at the thought that their running must inevitably existence a wiser, better person - for ever” and (p269) evolve towards races of 50 miles or more. that “once I had achieved that state of self-obliteration, The common theme of the books is pain: avoiding it would remain with me permanently, lifting me above it, suffering it, seeking it. There is little sense ofthe the grubby banalities of everyday life”. Unfortunately, aesthetic pleasure to be gained from the natural a few months after the run, “the silt of everyday life process of running, even short distances, within the returned” and “this was how I had perceived the world natural world. If the focus is on the naturalness of before the race, and I did not like what I saw”. running, it needs no explanation. Harvie is not alone in hoping that running will The essence of ultra-running is its attempt to provide an escape from the problems of everyday life. drive the body to its limits, to achieve a state of “self- For example, Jimmy Carter (former US President) said obliteration”, in the hope that the obliterated person “Everyone who has run knows that its most important may be restored as a better one. This state can be value is in removing tension and allowing a release achieved in many ways other than by running. from whatever other cares the day may bring”. It is a commonplace comment nowadays that Unlike Harvie and Carter, I don’t speak for anyone can run a marathon if they want to. It is not everyone. I have from time to time commented upon essential to do so to benefit from running but it is, I why I run but I haven’t (I think) generalised to a ‘we’. suppose, one of life’s experiences to enjoy, if possible. Myself, I have never run in order to gain release from When I realised that I had reached my peak as a my cares. Thankfully, my cares have never been so marathon runner the thought never occurred to me to serious that I need to run away from them. race yet further. I have only twice in my life run for more If anything, the opposite is the case. My running is than three hours (that stormy night on Helvellyn and an expression of my joie de vivre, such as it is. The more that day my shoe fell apart on Ingleborough). I have joie I have, the more I like to run. I don’t run to become never hallucinated, vomited or collapsed as a result of at peace with myself: I am at peace with myself already running. Even without these exquisite pleasures, I have (or as nearly so as anyone can reasonably hope). I don’t managed somehow to derive decades of enjoyment see everyday life as consisting of “grubby banalities”, and achievement from my running. as Harvie seems to. Now that I reflect on books such as those of 1 Harvie, Robin (2011), Why We Run: A Story of Obsession, Murakami and McDougall and now Harvie, I realise London: John Murray.

t is a little galling to find, after a year of trying to wilderness of the Ward’s Stone ridge is ahead of us, I elucidate whether there is more - or is it less? - to with the sun barely above its skyline. running than Murakami and McDougall describe, that the definitive analysis of Harvie’s Why We Run agrees with them, only more so. The purpose, apparently, is to run to exhaustion in events like the Spartathlon. Harvie concludes that the profound meaning of the running experience is “beyond language itself. The truly creative act often starts where language ends” (p239). Truly creative act? Running? After 17 hours toil towards collapse, Harvie may need to believe running to be a “truly creative act” but I wouldn’t use the phrase to describe my own running. It seems to be beyond Harvie’s language, at least, to unravel the meaning of running because he includes over a hundred quotations from renowned We rejoin the road to drop down to the bridge running philosophers from Aristotle to Sir Francis over Artle Beck. Here, we could take the steep road Younghusband via Camus, Goethe, Homer, Jung, Marx, up the Cragg to enjoy the view over Morecambe Bay Russell, Wilde, Woodsworth and many others. Perhaps but today let’s take the more direct route, along the the reason that he finds it difficult to articulate this track above Sweet Beck. This is normally a peaceful profundity is that running is, in fact, not profound. meadow but today telephone engineers are at work, I am inclined instead to accept his conclusion that repairing masts damaged in the recent gales. We cross running speaks for itself. In that case, perhaps you’d two cattle grids and run up towards Belhill Farm, where like to join me on a run: not too far, as I’m not as fit as I work continues on converting barns into cottages. It is was, but far enough - the Belhill loop, about an hour or almost a hamlet now, in splendid isolation. so. I have only recently devised this run, which I have We turn left taking the track to Field Head. Here become fond of because there are changes of view there’s a fine view across to the Caton Moor windmills, and running surface every few hundred yards. silhouetted on the dark moor against magnificent We are basically running up the hill but we begin winter clouds. by running downhill. My body finds it hard to set off immediately uphill, so I run a short distance downhill, to loosen up. Then we can tackle the steep gradient of Littledale Road. As we pass Sarney’s Wood on the left the Ward’s Stone ridge far ahead comes into view. Now it is a more gentle rise along the road, as we try to relax into a rhythm of running. After about 12 minutes running we leave the road to run on the old track that was the way to Crossgill. An ancient cross used to stand at the top but it disappeared a couple of centuries ago. Its base can still be seen by a gate. As we reach the top of the track the panoramic

102 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self And in the opposite direction, there’s an equally Here we may pause to admire, behind us, the fine view to Ward’s Stone, although we may be sunlight playing on the green fields where we were disappointed to see that all the recent snow has melted running 15 minutes ago. away. With the eye-watering cold winds bringing dark clouds scudding over, it may soon be re-whitened.

As we crest the top of the hill we can relax in the thought that it’s (nearly) all downhill from here. We can Field Head is as far as the track goes but we don’t see over Lancaster and Morecambe to Morecambe Bay run to the farm - instead we cut left across the field to above which great winter storm clouds can be seen an inconspicuous step stile over a wall. We drop down heading for the Lake District (not us, I hope). through a wood, where it is always boggy with slippery tree roots (take care), across a footbridge over Foxdale Beck in a delightful, dark dell. We emerge at Littledale Hall, now a haven for recovering drug-addicts. It was built in the 1840s after a split between the church and government. We pass the chapel (now a barn) associated with the hall as we run west above the hall. We continue along a pleasant path below a conifer plantation.

As we turn to run down Roeburndale Road, the bay and the Lake District peaks lie directly ahead of us. A few of the snowy tops are picked out by the sun’s searchlight but today it is hard to identify them as their neighbours are in or below cloud. As we approach Bluebell Wood (as we call it), we turn right across the field, with a final glance up to our old friends, the windmills, dropping down to a ford (wet feet, sorry) through Tarn Brook in a fine wood where At the end of the path we reach a road where, as deer may be seen. Across another field we reach the we have been running now for about 40 minutes, we bridleway and Blackberry Lane (as we call it), down may feel tired enough to want to take the direct route which we coast home. home through Crossgill. But, no, we have all of the So, we have made it to the end, weary but content. Christmas holiday to recover, so we gird our tired loins Thank you for your company. to continue on the steep lane up to Hawes House. And now it is time for Christmas ...

Crook o’Lune

a regular tip-out point

the old railway track

Lancaster Canal (Lune Aqueduct)

where the dog bit me

another tip-out point

Lancaster

Scale: the grid lines mark 1 km squares.

104

to Clougha Pike to Kirkby Lonsdale

to Bentham, Clapham

another tip-out point

the windmills (there are actually eight of them)

my trig point

to the old salt road

Copyright © Ordnance Survey. The Ordnance Survey maps have been an essential and invaluable companion before and on my running expeditions. If this acknowledgment of their excellence is considered insufficient to allow the use of this map here, I expect someone from the Ordnance Survey will tell me so. I would be very happy to donate to the Ordnance Survey a fraction of the income from this free publication. If this map should suddenly disappear it will be because I have been told to remove it.

105 to Clougha Pike to Ward’s Stone INDEX

1 mile 84 Caton 4 Eco, Umberto 52-53 Harvie, Robin 100-102 10k 84-85 Caton Moor 11-13, 22, 24, 55, electric wires 82 Hawes House 83 ‘60 in 60 by 60’ challenge 92 66, 74-75, 83, 91, 97, 102 endorphins 68 Helvellyn 71, 101 Abbeystead 65 Caton Moor trig point 12-13, endurance 10-11, 18, 72-73 hen harriers 39 addiction 68-69 17, 24, 66 England, crossing 86-87 Henderson, Joe 78-79, 96 Aesop 33 cattle 81-82 Errigal 59-60 Heversham 10-mile 68 aging 27, 84-85, 88, 92 charity, raising money for evolution, and running 38, High Street 42, 92 aging factor 27, 62 46-47 73, 87 Hill, Ron 55 altitude factor 62 chia 21 exhaustion 45, 100-101 hill-running 35 anglers 41 Claughton Beck 9, 11 Fairfield 97 Himalayan balsam 63, 70 Arkholme 70 Claughton Hall 83 family, and running 80-81 holidays, and running 56-59 athletic clubs 22-23 Claughton Quarry 56, 66, 74 fell-racing 24-25, 35 Hope, Rob 25 Aughton 54 Clougha Pike 49, 73, 76, 90 fell-running 35, 71, 92 Hosaka, Yoshihisa 85 Aughton Woods 9, 36, 41 coast-to-coast run 86-87 films, about running 94-95 Howgills 34-35, 42-43, 90-91 Bainbridge 79 Cockersand Abbey 93 fitness 62-63 Huddersfield Marathon 29, Barbon 47 competition, competitiveness Fitnessometer 62-63, 73, 33, 36, 48 barefoot running 38-39 14-15, 52-54, 67 85-86 illness 15 barnacle geese 7 Conder Handicap 67 Flamborough Head 86 Ingleborough 10-11, 17, 24, Barnsley Marathon 29, 33 Coniston 14-mile 50 focus 10-11, 18, 40 34-35, 53, 55-56, 69, 91, Bassenthwaite 92 Coniston Old Man 6-7, 35, Forest of Bowland 19, 34-35, 97, 101 Baugh Fell 99 88-89, 92 39, 41, 65, 81, 87, 90-91 Ingleton 91 Bedford, David 54 Conrad, Joseph 54-55 foxes 83 injury 8-9, 41, 43-44, 50-51, Belhill 102 Cooper, Tarquin 68-69 fun-runner 22, 48-50 64, 92 Belties 81-82 Covert, Mark 55 fund raising 46-47 iskiate 20-21 Bikila, Abebe 38, 95 Cragg 26, 32, 38, 76 Gaelic football 60-61 Isle of Man 6 Black Combe 6 Cram, Steve 22 Gebrselassie, Haile 10-11, Jebb, Rob 25 Blackpool Half-Marathon 50 Croasdale Fell 81-82 16, 27 jogging 48 Blackpool Tower 91 Crook o’ Lune 20, 29, 40, 51, Giant’s Causeway 61 JoGLE 87 Blencathra 92 74, 76, 85 Glasson Dock 93 Jurek, Scott 13 bluebells 41 cross-country 18-19, 24 Glenveagh 60 kaihogyo 72 Bob Graham Round 71, 83 curlews 11, 21, 51 gluteus maximus 87 Keillor, Garrison 55 Boecker, Henning 69 Dawson, John 47 Goodman, Aviel 69 kingfisher 36, 96 Bolt, Usain 10, 22 decision-making 98-99 granite 90 Lake District 6, 13, 26, 34-35, Bolton-le-Sands 77 DeMar, Clarence 28 Great Gable 25 41, 56, 70-71, 86-88, 90-93 Booth, Simon 25 Dent Fault 47, 99 Great North Swim 48 Lake Windermere 48 Boston Marathon 28 dependency 68 Great North-Western Half- Lancaster 33, 73 Bowfell 92 diet 20-21 Marathon 27 Lancaster 77 Bowland Knotts 90 dipper 96 greylag geese 7 Lancaster Canal 33, 77, Brasher, Chris 44 dogs 30-31, 83 grouse 34 85, 93 Brookhouse 4 Donegal 58-61 Gump, Forrest 71 Lancaster University 5, 67 Budd, Zola 38 Douglas, Michael 80 gumpitis 70-71, 86 Langdale Pikes 7 Cairngorms 56-57 Dow Crag 7, 35, 88 Halton 4, 33 lapwings 11, 34, 51, 66 Calf, The 42-43 dropping out 45 Halton Bridge 40, 56 lechuguilla 20-21 Cam High Road 79 Dunsop Bridge 39 Halton Park 69 Leeds 88-89 Carrock Fell 89 early running 76-77 hard runs 65 lesser black-backed gulls Carter, Jimmy 101 easy runs 65 hares 22, 66 39

106 Fifty Weeks Running (2011), Drakkar Press, Copyright © 2011 John Self Lieberman, Daniel 39 49, 53-54, 57, 62, 72-73, 73, 87 Tarahumara Indians 6, 20-21, light running 77 77-78, 80, 84, 86, 100-102 running, definition 10-11, 47 38-39, 95 limestone 90-91 ne-plus-ultra-running 72 Running, film 80-81, 95 Tarn Beck 4 Lincoln, Abraham 75 Nether Kellet 55 running holidays 56 team sports 14-15 lines, line-running 32-33, New York Marathon 44-45 running shoes 38-39 The Loneliness of the Long- 36, 44 Norfolk Marathon 36-37 running streak 55 Distance Runner, film Littledale 26, 45, 83, 92 nuchal ligament 87 Runnism 74 94-95 Littledale Hall 103 Oates, Joyce Carol 55 Sachs, Michael 68-69 Three Peaks 34, 66, 91 Lodge, David 49 obsession 101 sand-martins 30 Thurnham 93 logs 16 old salt road 34, 81, 91 Scafell Pike 24-25 time trial 84-85 London Marathon 44-48, orienteering 99 school running 14-15 tip-out 32-33, 42, 57, 73, 51, 100 ospreys 92 Scotch Argus butterfly 66-67 77-78 loner 98 otters 17, 66 Scott, Robert Falcon 100 tip-out-run 42-43, 86, 92 loops, loop-running 32-33, out-run, out-running 34-35, Sedbergh 42, 91 tortoise and hare 33 36, 44 42, 79, 81, 86, 88-93, 96-99 self-obliteration 101 trail-running 35, 95 Lopez, Carlos 27 pain 28-29, 41, 49-51, 72-73, Semer Water 79 ultra-running 11, 13, 68-69, Loyn Bridge 70, 74 100 serious running 16, 77, 86 71-73, 86-87, 100-101 Lune, River and valley 4, 6-7, Parlick 81 Shakespeare, William 21 USRSA 55 10-11, 17, 19-21, 29-30, peat 90 Sheehan, George 54, 74 Vigil, Joe 74 33, 41, 51, 55-56, 66-67, Pen-y-Ghent 24, 34, 91 sheep 82 walking 47 69, 82, 85, 89, 91, 96, 100 Pendle 25, 34 Sherman, Alan 21 wall, the 51 Lune Aqueduct 33, 84-85 personal bests 12, 26-27 Skiddaw 25, 91-92 Wansfell 25, 89 Mallory, George 100 Pheidippides 33 skiing 57 Ward’s Stone 19, 24, 26, 45, Mandela, Nelson 75 Pillar 92 skylarks 21, 34, 66 55, 73, 75, 91, 102-103 Marathon 33 Popeye 20-21 Slaidburn 81 Waterworks Bridge 4, 9, 17, marathon 16-17, 22-23, Preston Half-Marathon 50 slate 90 30, 36, 49, 55, 70 27-29, 32-33, 36-37, 44- Preston-to-Morecambe Slieve Donard 58 Wenning, River 9, 21 48, 50-51, 76, 84-85, 94, Marathon 23, 28-29, 33, Slieve League 58 Wensleydale 79 100-101 36-37, 48 Sloan, Jim 84-85 Whernside 10-11, 34, 42, 91 Marathon Man, film 94 Quernmore 32, 76, 92 Smardale 66 Wild Boar Fell 97 marathoner 11, 23 rain 60-61 Smardalegill Viaduct 66 withdrawal symptoms 69 McDougall, Christopher Ravenstonedale 42-43 snail, the 47, 51 Windermere Marathon 36- 6-13, 18, 20-21, 23, 25, 27, recovery 64-65 snipe 83 37, 46, 50-51 48, 54, 64, 73-75, 80, 84- red-legged partridge 83 sparrowhawk 96 Windermere-to-Kendal 10- 85, 100-102 religion 72, 74-75, 95 Spartathlon 100, 102 mile 22-23 medals 50 rest, rest period 64-65, 74 spinach 20-21 windmills 4, 6, 13, 15, 22, 24, memories, of running 78-79 retirement, and running spiritual enlightenment 72 66, 73, 83, 102-103 metaphor, running as a 54- 88-89 sprinter 10-11 Winfrey, Oprah 54 55, 95 road-race 22-23, 27, 37, 50- St Bees Head 86-87 Wolfhole Crag 39 mileages 16-17, 77 53, 67, 78-80 starlings 91 work, and running 76-77, millstone grit 24, 90-91 robot marathon 22 Stepping Stones race 5, 18 88-89 minimalist shoes 39 Robovie-PC 22-23 stoat 83 Yorkshire Dales 13, 34-35, Morecambe Bay 6, 26, 41, 56, Roeburndale 34-35, 66, 75, Storr, Anthony 99 41, 86-87, 90-91 73, 77, 91, 102-103 81, 91 streak runner 55, 64 Zatopek, Emil 75 Mount Hiei 72 Roeburndale Road 24 streaker 55 Mourne Mountains 58 Roman roads 79, 81 suffering 28, 41 Muckish 59-60, 84 run, definition 55 swallows 81 Murakami, Haruki 6-7, 9-14, running addiction 68-69 sweat 87 16, 23, 26-28, 40, 45, 48- running, and evolution 38, talent 10-12