Coffeeman's Running Blog

Where I run no. 3 - The Phoenix Trail

2007-05-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

There used to be a railway connection between Princes Risborough and Thame and this line carried on to Oxford decades ago.

The SUSTRANS initiative has resulted in this being converted into a countryside cycleway, providing ideal even terrain for a runner (and his dog). It is called the Phoenix Trail.

I usually pick up the trail at Towersey, for a 5 or 7 mile out and back run.

It is gun-barrel straight most of the way, although it does occasionally cross a minor road.

The level crossings have been removed of course. Perfect for speedwork, if one were so inclined.....My halfway point on the five miler is at a tempting group of seats!

There are some weird statues and signs along the way, as well as the occasional tribute to old railway signals.
No doubt they have some sort of mystical significance.

If I want I can integrate it inot a long run as there is a link to the Ridgeway path, close to Princes Risborough in a village called Horsenden.
Another area to run where the short car ride is well worth it be able to do plenty of miles without the traffic.

Where I run no. 2 - Wendover Woods

2007-05-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Jumping in the car for the 20 minute drive over to Wendover Woods is always worth the effort. When the weather is bad, there is a primeval nature to the trails and they are just about firm enough underneath to create a good surface in the wettest weather. In hot weather it can be blissfully cool under the forest canopy as well. As it is a Forestry Commission site, the trails are well marked and maintained and being near to the top of the Chiltern Hills, there are plenty of gradients to negotiate on what is basically a flint surface. No potholes of deep mud but slightly uneven most of the time.

I always tend to start over away from the main visitor centre along a path leading into the woods that allows me to let the dog off the lead straight away. This gives the benefit of a long slow incline to get warmed up for the steeper stuff ahead.

Once the trail opens out, you can see the ridge ahead and the ground begins to rise steadily. Side trails branch off all the time and once you get a feel for the place, it's possible to run loops for a couple of hours, without repeating the same piece of ground. Some of the side trails are extremely steep and can be testing in muddy conditions, but the main trails still present quite a challenge.

I've got to admit that I tend to let the dog choose his route at the crossroads and then go the other way. Al least it means I can occasionally get in front of him!

There's no way out of here without getting the heart pumping, but once near the top the views get quite spectacular, over the Chilterns to one side of the ridge and over the whole of the Vale of Aylesbury and beyond to the north.

There's even some provision for the "lightweights" who've driven up to the visitor centre on the top.......
..but Bertie and I prefer the hard and steep route to the Chilterns highest point!

It is then quite easy to find a long cruise through the trees on the way down, and you can start to forget how your thighs were burning on the way up.

And someone has been watching me run here before I think!

The home straight approaches - now for that cool drink back in the car.

Five miles in the woods reduces you to this type of state, but it's always inspiring to be running in such wonderful countryside and the dog certainly seems to enjoy it.

All work and no play....

2007-05-23T02:31:00.000-07:00

Probably the slackest month of running since I started this blog!
October 2006 doesn't count really - the circumstances were a bit different and although I was itching to get out, divorce may have followed.
And it all started so well - I signed up for the Motavation 4 mile summer series with Kidlington Road Runners and on a clear thursday evening in early May I headed off for Charlton-on-Otmoor.
I'd not raced anything this "sharp" for years and years, and with absolutely no speed training for ages and even no hill/strength ork since early Feb, I could have no real expectations of a decent time.
The race field was made up of around 400 or so local club runners, mostly competing in the keenly fought local clubs competition spread over the 5 monthly events, so I knew a "fun run" type high placing was out of the question. I love these low key club events and this one reminded me of a southern-softie version of the Ravenstonedale 10k that I ran oop north in November with James.
One big figure 8 round a sleepy Oxfordshire "moorland" village is remarkably dissimilar to one big figure 8 in the Howgill Fells, though, and this one was virtually dead flat. Surprisingly I felt fairly sharp on the night and managed to dip under 30 minutes for the 4.1 mile course. Even better the lovely missus had brought me to the race and the evening ended with pub fish 'n' chips and a couple of pints. I resolved to try to do better at the June event in Bletchingdon, but as this date approaches, I have to confess to only having run three times since.
I have to confess that this month's work demands have got on top of me. Towing a mobile coffee bar around the country to outdoor events has been supplemented by a joint venture in superior outdoor food from the Hambleden Estate and the combined demands of the two this month have sapped my desire to get out on the roads. Three big weekends on the trot have made me a little cautious.
Last night I went for a nice easy one hour run around the village and across the fields and in the glorious late spring sunshine, I realised I had been a bit daft. I miss my running and it has a way of de-clogging the body after a period of intense work. Ok - so I can't run on "show days" but I can on every other day - so get to it! Even if it's only for 30 minutes.
I joined a club finally at the start of this month, UKNETRUNNER, the country's virtual running club which numbers around 60 members and is affiliated to the Midlands AAA. I now have a club vest to compete in - a little small maybe but we'll see what can be done about that!

Where I run - no. 1 Around Lodge Hill

2007-04-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

I thought a bit of more personal information on where I run was well overdue. So I took my camera along on my 5 miler today and here are some of the results.

I love to get out and run offroad at least once a week and this also gives my dog, Bertie, a good workout too!. He is a 10 year old Cocker Spaniel and is still plenty fit enough to run up to 12 miles as my "trailblazer". He's now completely deaf so occasionally he gets to go off at tangents and only discovers his wrong turnings when he eventually decides to check that I'm behind him!

One of my favourite offroad running areas is up in the Chiltern Hills, about 6 miles from home, above the small village of Bledlow. This area of criss-crossing footpaths and bridleways is undulating and the Ridgeway path runs right through it. The land is very chalky so is relatively firm underfoot in all but the wettest weather. Parts are quite exposed and even on a hot day there is normally a pleasant breeze to keep you cool. Some of the views are stunning, particularly across Princes Risborough to Whiteleaf Cross and to the north over the Vale of Aylesbury. And there are safe places to park the car and leave a cold drink before the short drive home!

Back to blogging - now where was I?

2007-04-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

More than 3 months since I blogged - now that's disgraceful!

I was horrified to notice that my last entry was on January 18th, but as I sat here and read the last entry - wearing shorts at 9 am and looking out at another beautiful spring day - I realised how time had passed.

So this update will be in the form of bullet points to let me begin blogging again as I once again commit to some serious training.

- I kept going through January, posting my highest monthly total for about 20 years of 207 miles.
- In the first week of February we transferred enough money to Uganda to pay the secondary school fees for 125 HIV/Aids orphans for the opening term of the 2007 academic year in various schools in Iganga district.
- On February 11th I ran in the Stamford 30k. On an almost spring-like day I surprised myself by running the very undulating course in 2 hrs 32 mins 24 secs, an average pace of 8:11 miles and a predictor for a sub 3:40 marathon!
- The pleasure from this run was somewhat bitter sweet as it turned out to be the last day I saw my Mum alive, as she passed away peacefully in her sleep on February 16th. The cancer that she had contracted was far too much for a woman of 90, however tough was her constitution. Her ashes are interred next to her husband of 58 years in the roots of a Catalpa tree in Spalding St Mary & St Nicholas churchyard. This same tree was planted by my grandfather, Leonard Massey in memory of his wife, Jenny, at her passing. I miss my mum and the unconditional love she showed us all every day.
- Debbie and I flew off for 2 weeks in Costa Rica 2 days after the Stamford race and, happy with my achievement, I unconsciously decided to wind down on my running for a few weeks - not before some inspirational beachfront running and wildlife encounters in the tropics! What a beautiful country it is and with such friendly people - and great coffee!
- Since returning at the very end of February, it's been pretty much "maintenance running" for me, with no thoughts of racing. My half-baked idea of running the Rotterdam Marathon faded in the sun in Costa Rica, and (as usual) it has taken the London Marathon and a critical view of my online training diary to spur me back into action.

So I've re-committed myself to serious training even as I am writing this...

- There will be an autumn marathon this year, probably Dublin on October 29th. It will be a PB!
- As I start again properly I am 9 kgs lighter than at the same time last year and my comfortable training pace is around 40 secs per mile quicker.
- My work committments are just as heavy this year and this will disrupt attempts at really high mileage, but hopefully the base built up in the last 12 months will have a really beneficial effect.
- I will try very hard not to finish up in hospital.......

So off we go again - I'll try to get more photos up this year, particularly of the areas where I run. More later this week.

Another Marathon Gone!

2007-01-18T06:37:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm not going to be doing Seville.
The cost of flights shot up in the week before I decided I would be fit enough and I have decided to run the Stamford 30k on February 11 instead. A total budget of £400 to run a marathon wasn't part of the plan. My marathon will now be in Rotterdam on April 15 and I can run the Finchley or Ashby 20's on March 18.
My 90 year old mum has just been diagnosed with cancer of the gullet and with tests and treatment plans to be discussed I needed to engineer another opportunity to see her before leaving on holiday on Feb 13. The choice of Stamford puts me 18 miles away from Spalding where she lives.
I haven't raced since December 17 and with the Christmas period out of the way I have steadily increased my mileage. I am determined to run 200 miles or more in this mildest of Januaries and I am well on target to do this. The long runs have started feeling easier and the mid distance runs are getting faster.
Long runs do etch themselves on the memory as they give you time to think and your heightened senses seem to "absorb" the world better. I also find they feel like an expression of your individuality when you complete them alone. You are just running and running and running and the rest of the world passes by oblivious to how far you have come and how far you are going. It just seems to place you in a sort of parallel existence.
Last week I did a 15 miler midweek and a 13.5 hilly run on Sunday. This latter one was on a glorious sunny morning on the lanes through some nearby villages and hamlets immediately to the north of where I live. Although the countryside is not truly hilly, my run took me through two hilltop villages and down into the three valleys around them. Thus I got 1000 feet of climbing in and finished after 2 hours feeling pretty pleased with myself, as the pace was slightly below a sub 4 marathon.
Today's run was a real epic though. Yesterday I took a day off as my achilles tendon was showing signs of regressing to the state of soreness and stiffness that I suffered with in September. This was probably due to me "burning up" an 8 mile tempo run at 8 minute mile pace the night before! My willpower was severely tested by listening to the evolving weather forecast - damaging gale force winds and heavy rain for today! Despite the banging windows this morning, I decided "to hell with it" and decided on an off road meander along the Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal, up onto the Ridgeway path and back through Wendover Woods. There weren't many dog walkers out - and no wonder. The squally weather had brought to a climax the "thinning" of many trees that has been going on for a couple of weeks now, and all the paths were extremely muddy. Those on the steeper slopes of the Chilterns were virtual waterfalls! As I ran up out of Wendover onto the Ridgeway, the full force of the wind was whipping the bare beech and oak trees into a manic waving frenzy accompanied by a moaning and the occasional disconcerting crack. On several occasions I had to hurdle recently fallen trees and large boughs. The rain when it came was fierce and mostly horizontal, but it wasn't and eventually in the last mile the sun came out.
I love runs like these. There is a sort of highly private primeval pleasure in them. You start off clad in all your high-tech gear, relatively comfortable and after about a mile your shoes are muddy and full of water, your shorts are sodden and that waterproof is hanging lankly. 20 minutes later and you look down at your legs to see they are a salmon pink colour from the wind and rain. You have no time to think of how you are feeling as all your attention is focused on your route and where to put your feet. An hour into the run and this is all that matters, and a glow of satisfaction grows from coping with the demands being put on you by terrain and weather. I finished the last downhill mile back to my car in an almost euphoric state. Did anyone see me clap my hands and shout out "Yes, yes, yes!"? If they did they had the tact to keep themselves hidden from this middle aged loonie.
But the trees were quite scary - at one point in Wendover Woods I came across a birch that had been cleaved in two, one half still waving manically in the storm, the other half blocking the trail. I nervously looked up at the others around it as I straddled over the branch and continued on my way. How do you know which one will fall next? The hand of fate stayed away, than goodness.
I know from the runners' forum that I contribute to, Fetcheveryone, that many, indeed most, runners seem to stay on the roads or the treadmill and some even have issues with "getting shoes dirty". They are missing out. Offroad running on a foul day is as good as on a beautiful sunny day. In fact it's always fun, challenging and exhilarating in a way that running on the road can never be - not to mention a treadmill!
I think I'll hit the woods again tomorrow - or should I ration this pleasure?

Into the "Marathon Year"

2007-01-03T10:15:00.000-08:00

Well, something had to give over the holidays and it looks like it was my blogging!
...and my waistline.
...and my running -well not that much.
...and my "cross training". The pool has been not seen for a couple of weeks, but I can blame the England Cricket Team for that! Early morning / late night agony in front ot Sky TV live from down under doesn't help put you in the right frame of mind for driving out in the dark at 7 am to head off and do 40 lengths.

In my last entry I was just about to run my last race of 2006 and the fourth in 5 weekends at the Great Langdale Christmas Pudding 10k on December 17th. Well James and I ran the race and both posted PB's. Mine of 46.28 was just 15 seconds LOWER, YES LOWER! than his. Not that we are at all competitive, father and son. Of course not.

I periodically forget just how much I love the Lake District. Perhaps it's remoteness - 4 hours on the M40 / M6 is remote - and keeps it out of your mind as a place to visit for a short period of time. As a holiday destination for Mr and Mrs Coffeeman, it lacks some of the things that ensure marital peace - blue skies, calmness, dryness and warmth - so we have just not spent as much time up there as we should have. I have kept a romantic notion of the Lakeland Fells since my teenage years. (I have no interest in the lakes themselves, except as scenic foreground for the main characters). Two "team-bonding" field trips as a grammar school boy were my first real experiences of the great outdoors and I can remember a real feeling of wilderness up above Wasdale. Easter holidays 1971 I think it was.

On the saturday before our race and with our Fiat Punto packed with an absurd amount of his paraphernalia for 2 weeks christmas vac, James and I checked into a B&B in Ambleside and headed off for the start of our race in the Langdale Valley for a recce. After heavy rain for a couple of days all over the country, I was amazed to see the fells of the Langdale horseshoe topped with fresh snow. After a pint and some soup in the Sticklebarn Tavern, we needed very little mutual egging on to yomp up the waterfall path along the ghyll to Stickle Tarn. It's what "lads 'n' dads" do isn't it?

We struck lucky with the weather. It wasn't raining and we could see across the valley! As we hopped our way back down to the hotels I did begin to wonder whether it was the perfect preparation for a 10k the next day, but the view and the mild feeling of conquest was worth it!

The next morning the weather was even better and James even ran in his sunglasses. If every race in the UK had a setting like this one, well everyone might want to be a runner! The sharp odour of wet sheep in our nostrils, 500 or so runners headed off along the lane back towards Elterwater on a "Cumbrian undulating" out & back with a loop in the middle. After starting slowly we stepped up the pace and were soon running at 7:30 pace, picking off other runners all the way. James had done virtually no training, apart from heavy exercise of his pint glass arm, since the Ravenstonedale 10k and I was determined myself to run as fast as I could. At 3 miles he complained of some calf stiffness and said he would ease off a bit, so off I went (I thought) and I gritted my teeth through the tough uphill miles between 3 and 5 to finally finish near to my ultimate goal time. I intended to jog back to meet James and was just getting my breath when he clapped me on the shoulder. He'd been beaten - but not tamed!

Considering the time of year I got in some fairly good running over the holidays - and it was pretty sociable stuff - in tune with the season. Gangs of multi-generational runners cluttered up the by-roads and footpaths around some sleeping Buckinghamshire villages. The old guys complained of their niggles and aches and pains - the young guys just kept looking back occasionally to make sure they weren't handing their dads too much of a hammering. Touching really. It continued to be pretty mild, but I still managed to develop a "stiffness" in my left hamstring that pulled me up sharp on a 5 miler with James around the streets of Spalding and there's been an easing off since. Too much roadwork, not enough flexibility exercises, and some general stagnation may be to blame. It's not an injury needing treatment - yet! And I have just run 11 miles on it at marathon pace without much of an adverse reaction. My endurance feels good and a marathon 5 weeks from now should really hold no fears for me now.

I am now very much back where I was in late September, but without the acute achilles tendonitis and with some new PB's at 10k and Half Marathon that point to a sub 4 hour marathon if I have that endurance. The only way to really be confident will be to run the 2 20 mile plus runs in the next 3 weeks. Let's hope the legs hold out!

Another very good week

2006-12-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

Milestones.
I "savaged" my V50 Half Marathon PB at Bedford, taking 5 and a half minutes off the time I ran in Nottingham in September. I was chuffed to bits with that! My objective was to run at 8:15 pace to 10 miles and then see how I felt, but poor pace judgement and a general lack of self restraint saw me clock around 15:30 for the first 2 miles! Thereafter I drifted into a pace slightly slower than 8 minute miling for around 4 miles as the course undulated pleasantly. From 6 to 9 the course is pretty much uphill all the way and I had found I was pretty strong here. The quite rigorous hill sessions I have been doing in Wendover Woods on fridays have obviously started to have some effect! At 10 miles I realised that a sub 1:45 was possible if I "raced" the last 5k or so. Thankfully this was mainly downhill and I began to pick out runners ahead of me and "reel them in" gradually. I stopped my watch at 1:44:28, the last runner I passed being a "Bearbrook Jogger", a runner from the local club in Aylesbury.
Bedford Harriers need praising for this race. A really good course mainly on country lanes and enthusiastic encouraging marshals absolutely everywhere; a warm sports hall to warm up and cool down in - what more can a runner ask for?
The week ahead promised to be the most active one of my renewed training so far and on wednesday I set out for my 17 mile long run from Waitrose car park in Berkhamsted. Having tested the formula 2 weeks previously, it was again a "double out & back" on the Grand Union Canal towpath, with a pitstop for more sports drink after 11 miles. Once again I completed the run at a faster pace than was wise, a little over 9 mniute mile pace, and it began to hurt a little after 15 miles. Thankfully the "running mix" on my mp3 player kept me distracted and at the end I realised the benefits of a start / finish in a supermarket car park as I re-fuelled!
I feel that this run put my marathon bid for February for the first time in a seriously positive perspective. I finished knowing I could run quite a bit further at this pace if rested, and after all I had run a "fast" half marathon less than 72 hours before!
Confident - yes. Over-confident...perhaps!
Finally on friday I ran my longest session of hills in the woods to date - probably about 10 miles. The dog kept going, so I had to as well! So that was 3 really beneficial landmark runs in 5 days. But how I had I managed to book into a 10k race just 2 days later? Masochism of the highest order...and more on this in the next post.

Steady Progress

2006-12-09T02:41:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit late with this post....no excuses, other than being computerless for a couple of days this week. My 90 year old mum has been a bit poorly and so I made a rush 2 day visit up to Lincolnshire on "blogging day".
It gave me a chance to do a couple of runs up there in the fens, including a 10 miler on wednesday morning out along one of the river banks onto what is called Spalding Marsh. Dead flat of course, but it was windy and there is no shelter - none at all, not even a tree. As a result when I returned home my chest and stomach were slightly "wind-burnt" despite the faithful Helly Hansen Lifa Vest protection.
I never did much running up in my home town as I only started running when I worked in the city and lived in East London. There are some really good routes around Spalding, including many gun-barrel straight lanes (or droves) as we fenmen call them. On a long run, they can be monotonous but are undoubtedly good for the rhythm. The traffic is not exactly heavy either and you can literally see for miles in all directions. It certainly is the "big sky" area of the UK and is in marked contrast to the over-crowded south east.

A week before this I had run my longest run of this "training phase" so far, a near 15 mile run along the Grand Union Canal towpath between Ivinghoe, Marsworth and Tring.

My two running mates, Trev & Paul, and I ran the entire 145 mile length of the towpath, from Birmingham to London, several years ago. We have a formula for these sort of challenges - a succession of winter sundays; two cars - one left at each end of the day's leg; a flask of coffee, bananas and fig rolls left in the car at the finish. I rememeber we had a lot of fun, saw the middle of the country in a totally different light and hurdled literally thousands of fishing rods. The latest Sport England survey indicates that there are 1.8 million runners and joggers in England and less than 300,000 anglers. On the Grand Union Canal in the midlands each sunday morning these statistics look absurd - we met very, very few runners and caused anxiety to countless anglers, hyper-protective of their roach poles worth hundreds of pounds. You tend to come across them in packs and Trev coined a descriptive collective noun for groups of coarse anglers based on their attitude to the approach of a trio of runners - a "Twat" of anglers.
Thankfully my run last wednesday was virtually "twatless" and I was able to develop a pleasing rhythm, broken only by the short inclines of the locks, and a midpoint change of drink. I also recovered well from this run and on friday did my regular hilly trail run in Wendover Woods with no ill effects. I'm getting fitter.
Unfortunately, and almost unbelievably, I'm also getting fatter! My trip to hospital in early October caused the sharp loss of about 3 kg in weight - well it's grown back! I'm back to touching 86 kgs and would like this to go again before I toe the line in Seville in February. Christmas will make this hard but I now plan to up my mileage to 50 per week pretty quickly.
I'm running in the Bedford Half Marathon tomorrow and hope to lower my Nottingham time of 1:50 by about 2 minutes unless the predicted bad weather destroys all hope of a fast time and then the father-son challenge will be renewed in the Langdale Valley next sunday. Today is therefore a rest day after a good 7.5 miles in the hills yesterday. With a 17 miler scheduled for wednesday, I have a hard 10 days or so ahead. Let's hope I am as ready for it as I feel!

Rites of Passage

2006-11-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

My Dad never played any sport at competitive level. By the time my brother and I were in secondary school we had already stopped asking Dad to join our kickabout or bowl to us on the worn garden cricket pitch. This type of sport simply wasn't for him. He was a strong swimmer, a wily and patient coarse angler and he took us to see cricket at Trent Bridge Nottingham, but his interest simply wasn't there for competing with a bat or ball.

So I never reached that moment when I could "beat my Dad".

This weekend my son James and I had signed up to run in the Ravenstonedale 10k, in the Howgill fells, about 40 miles north of Lancaster where he is at university. As he has never run another road race, has started running only about 3 months ago and has yet to fill his online training diary with more than 3 sessions a week, my job was clearly to coax him around. Talk in the days before was of "getting round", "breaking the hour" and "beating my sister's time". Talk on the morning of the race was of "session last night", "hangover" and "sore head".

I had asked James to run a "tempo" of about 3 miles in the middle of the week and this showed that breaking the hour was a meagre objective for him. This allowed me to turn my thoughts in a more selfish direction - I wanted to run about 52 -53 minutes for reasons of my own and I felt I would be able to "tow" him to such a time, even if he lost touch in the last mile or so.

It is one of the great pleasures of running in the UK that races such as the Ravenstonedale 10k still exist, literally and figuratively off the beaten track of the glitzy, big city centre road races. Tucked away in the lower fells of the moorland east of Kendal, Ravenstonedale is a handful of stone houses, a babbling stream and two welcoming looking pubs. It was in one of these, The Black Swan that the race had its HQ. As we got our numbers in the bar the temptation for a quick pint was balanced by the knowledge that it would taste that much better after the race. A few more than a hundred, nearly all clad in the vests of local fell running clubs, jogged to the start. Here a short shouted description of the course followed before the lowest of low key starts,
"Off you go then! Good Luck! Watch that first bend - it's a bit slippery!"

And so off we went, still chatting about what pace we would do, James loping alongside me. He and I are around about the same height (although he would claim perhaps a centimetre of inevitable superiority perhaps), but he is wiry, skinny even, and I have a "weight advantage" of about 20 kgs on him, as well as about 31 years. I should have known what was coming!

As we began the first ascent on one of the lanes out of the village, the first mile passed in 8:10. Maybe a bit too quick, I thought, but we'll soon drop into a rhythm. At mile 2 we were at 16:30, nice and steady, and I had the impression James was sitting back a bit. "Ah, that'll be the excesses of the friday night clicking in, I thought. And it's been mostly uphill so far."

"Let's try and keep up this pace and see how we are at 4 miles", I said as we turned downhill to start back to the village. We crossed the village via a bridge over the stream and on the other side was a fairly steep section leading back out on the other side. I sensed the downhill had given us a good rhythm and we had speeded up. James was alongside now and seemed not be breathing at all deeply. As I moved into my uphill style of deliberately pumping the arms and shorter strides, I sensed him gradually pulling away, so I speeded up slightly, or at least I felt I did. He passed 2-3 older runners who had been just in front of us for the last two miles. Then the reality of the situation struck me - I had been holding him back!

At the 3 mile marker the time was 24 minutes, and, seeing James glancing over his shoulder, I waved him to go on. A moment's hesitation and off he loped, his lazy stride showing promise of plenty of scope in the future if he could apply himself.

The second half of the course was quite tough (isn't it always thus?). The wind was getting up and angry low grey cloud was starting to froth over the fells. Each of the uphills seemed a little sharper now. I began to run my own race, reeling in a couple of runners and setting sights on others. The 3 mile time had told me that, if I kept to my rhythm, kept my concentration, I would "sub 50". Some earlier research had told me that the last mile was mainly downhill, so a strong 2 miles now as what I needed. I dug in, ignoring thoughts that I hadn't run at this sort of speed consistently for years, and therefore should slow down. James gradually receded into the distance, picking off one or two runners as he went on his way.

Coming back down into the village I picked off the runner I had been eyeing up for half a mile and with the finish in sight smiled to myself - just as an unknown adversary came sprinting past me! That's the nature of this though, isn't it? But someone wearing an Ipod! That's insulting! Crossing the bridge and into the small crowd of officials and recent finishers, I stopped my watch - 49'08". Very happy indeed!

And there he was, now re-joined by his sister, Lisa, looking like he'd just been for a stroll with the dog. His time - 47'43". I knew from his expression that "beating Dad" had not been one of the scenarios either he or Lisa had envisaged. But it was one that gave me an enormous amount of satisfaction, more perhaps than any of my own running achievements of the past. But he still has a bit to do before he can claim to be "family record holder" at any of the distances - although his height and nnatural running style indicate that with regular training he will run much, much faster times than this very soon. If he wants to do the work that is!

The after-race was entirely in character with this friendly well-run event for dedicated runners. A cup of homemade vegetable soup and a roll in the back bar of the Black Swan, a beautiful well kept pint of Black Sheep bitter and a prize giving ceremony led by the Howgill Harriers committee who organised the race. We clapped politely as the winner (a local schoolboy who, like James, had the impudence to beat more experienced rivals!) and the placed aged group runners stepped forward for their prizes. Last came the male over 70 prize and up stepped a wiry fellow in thick lensed glasses. I wonder if he still breaks the hour at that age, I mused? Must check the results. When I downloaded the results on monday I was stunned, and in a way gratified, to see that this gentleman had been in fact 2 minutes "up the road" from James, rather than struggling to beat the hour! You have my total respect, sir, and like the 80 plus vet at the Herberts Hole Challenge the week before, you have given me hope for the future of my "second running career".

The rest of my running week was pleasing. The hamstring problem gradually receded into a slight twinge, only to be replaced by the vague onset of some achilles soreness. Oh, well, I knew it was coming! I put in a 11.3 mile run on the Phoenix Trail in the rain, my longest run since the hospital episode and my overall mileage got back over the 35 mile barrier again. A February marathon, perhaps temporarily, no longer looks that unrealistic, and I have signed up to the Bedford Half Marathon on December 10th as my next race.

I have had a spring in my step this week - and today set off for 14 miles along the Grand Union Canal towpath near Tring.

The next father / son exploit? We're negotiating on running the Great Langdale Christmas Pudding 10k on December 17th ahead of re-patriating the boy back down south for a xmas de-tox! I have the feeling that we will "each be running our own race" from a bit earlier.

Herbert's Hole Heroes

2006-11-21T04:55:00.000-08:00

Well we did it!

Three old git runners survived Herbert's Hole this past sunday with varying degrees of success, pride just about intact. One was complaining of a sore hamstring, one of virtually everything including gout, a headcold and a sore ankle, and the other one had no complaints, but had run for 90 minutes the day before. And that's the order we finished in really in the first race we had run together since the Flora London Marathon in 2000!

Yours truly had a good week, all in all, with the "power-swimming" helping gradually to push my sore hamstring into the back of my mind. The online purchase of a funky neoprene thigh support helped psychologically as much as physiologically, and by friday I was off into Wendover Woods for an hour and a bit offroad, hilly and wet as well. A quick 3.5 mile "burn" around the village here at a little over 8 minute mile pace on saturday morning convinced me I was again ready to race. It even had stopped raining, but not enough to convince me that the next days race would be anything less than a mud bath.

Sunday was a beautiful day, crisp and clear, with enough bite to cause me to get out the thermal undershirt as I pinned my number to my vest. After a very civilised espresso at a handily placed Cafe Nero in Chesham, we ambled with little purpose over to the start, a line of tape between 2 trees drawn across the park. I began to remember the race at that point, and earlier Paul had reminded me of the time we had run it before by unveiling his t-shirt of the 1994 version. How could it have been 12 years ago?

At 11 o'clock (not on the nail) someone pulled the tape away, and about 250 mostly middle aged club runners set off up the hill in Lowndes Park for just under 7 miles of "sun in the autumn sun". The first hill strung the field out pretty dramatically and I felt quite good, noticing that I had already "detatched" myself from Trev and Paul by the second bend.

"I'll run my own race then", I thought to myself. The grass soon gave way to some single track paths and over-taking (and being overtaken!) became impossible for a kilometre or so. The 2 km sign seemed to come up very quickly and I consciously trimmed my pace back, remembering that a weeek before I had puled a hamstring. "I do not want to finish this injured", was pretty much a constant voice in my head throughout the race and I probably got into a comfort zone on the road and flat trail sections in the middle of the race. There were one or two sharp hills in the middle but the main difficulty came from mud on the long farm track on the way back. I kept thinking - don't sprain your ankle - and thankfully I didn't.

I managed to pass a few in the last uphill stretch and finished the 10.75km ("Garminned" by Trev) in 57'32". That time put me around mid-pack. Next year I'll be quicker.

What of my two mates? Well, Trev was pretty "under-cooked". Work committments, an insidious tendon problem and a persistent head cold have kept his mileage well down and after refreshing myself I was able to cheer him down the last hill about 5 miutes back. Paul - well he was pretty much "over-cooked"! Once again he astonished us by telling us he'd run for an hour and a half the previous day with his saturday septuagenarian running partner, Alan. As a result he was pretty near the back. Thankfully he did beat the 80 year old man by about a minute. seeing this gentleman "sprint" for the line brought a cheer to everyone and gave us that sense of smugness:

"You see - running allows you to do that."

If your joints, bones and dignity survives that is....

Glory days - I did a fast five yesterday and the week climaxes with my son James and I running the Ravenstonedale 10k in Cumbria on saturday. It will be James' first foot race of any distance and I have the repsonsibility of pacing him. The whole family re-convenes in a restaurant in Lancaster on saturday evening to celebrate Debbie's birthday. Hopefully the boys will have the warm glow of athletic achievement to ease the passage of large quantities of house red down the gullet.

Now I really must get some long runs in if I'm going to marathon the spring!

Week 3 of Marathon Training. Brakes back on.

2006-11-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

I woke up this last wednesday in an extremely positive frame of mind. I'd planned my upcoming speed session; I'd logged it into my Fetcheveryone Training plan the night before so it already felt "real". On monday I'd run an extremely "steady" steady five miler and felt I was ready for some proper speedwork again - about 15 years after my last speed session.

Of course I was wrong - 2 of my 3 miles completed; a miserable average pace of 7:45 that felt like sub 6; and worst of all I'd "tweaked" my right hamstring. Well, take the positive, at least I was running fast enough to tweak a hamstring - a "proper" injury that professional athletes and footballers get. "Self Treatment" rest - ice - anti-inflammatories followed along with my habitual internet trawl of sites showing me graphically what I might have done and what I should do about it. I ignored those that indicated 2-3 weeks rest as referring to an injury that I couldn't possibly have. The very idea of it!

Thursday then became a rest day, as I was ignorant as to whether a pulled hamstring would be affected by swimming. A pretty poor excuse for not getting out of the door at 7 am, I know. It didn't actually hurt at all, and I was pretty certain that the cause was "over-striding" on a cold morning. Subsequently I've realised how inflexible I am these days and have set my mind to increasing suppleness in my legs by much stretching. The swimming will help, won't it?

On Friday I couldn't resist the temptation of going for a run and took the dog over to Bernwood Forest for a jog (or walk) of 40 minutes. I was well stretched and wore warm long shorts to counter the frosty conditions and enjoyed a leisurely run with very little discomfort. In fact, in partial defiance of those articles I had read calling for rest, I kept going for an extra 20 minutes. You can't come home until the dog is completely exhausted anyway, can you?

I wrote saturday up as a 4 mile recovery run, with the idea to be back on schedule on sunday with 11 miles offroad.

I've spent much of the past 2 weeks debating whether or not to join one of the local running clubs and cannot really come to a decision. I was a member of a club in the eighties and I have to admit that pulling on a club vest at any sort of race changes your motivation. This is especially true when running close to home and competition between local clubs is still pretty fierce in the UK. My decision and relative angst centres around the choice out of 4, with the main factors being proximity and the suitability of the club for an aging 9 minute miler who believes he can re-capture some of his former glories. On saturday runners from all the 4 clubs concerned were involved in a Chiltern League Cross Country League "mob match" at Stockwell Park, Luton.

So a park in Luton, 30 miles away, became somewhat bizarrely selected as the site of my 4 mile recovery run, with the idea being to "suss" out some of my likely future clubmates in the series of races in the afternoon. How I expected this to help influence my decision, I am not too sure, other than a vague feeling that I might be able to pick up on the clubs' ethos by watching them race! I suppose I was looking for a good spread of abilities and some people of my own age rather than just 20 something "flyers". I must be getting back into the running obsession - as I parked the car I realised that my beloved QPR were kicking off less than 2 miles away just at the start of the senior men's race!

Unfortunately the "hammy" went again less than a mile into my run, this time with a quite easy to identify wrench that stopped me in my tracks. Unlike wednesday, I stopped running immediately, wrapped up warm and strolled across to watch the running.

For anyone who has never attended a cross-country league meeting in the UK, I will give a brief description below. They are quite bizarre anachronisms in this age of big city glitzy road races, but they embody all that I love about the sport of running and none of what I am suspicious of. No fancy kit; no costumes; no-one running for "a cause"; no celebs; and very, very little commercial involvement, the fuel for the whole day being the competitors themselves and many volunteers, most of whom are current (injured?) club runners or retired competitors "giving something back".

The juniors, some as young as 11 or 12 and usually looking frozen solid, start the day and the last two races are always senior / junior womens followed by the same for men. This usually as darkness threatens and the course is at it's most churned up. The mens race was three laps each of the two loop course - around 9 km in total. The scoring system means that most of the first 200 finishers are usually really in a race, each place being valued on merit. So beating a rival clubmate by one place is as good as one of your superstars winning the race in a sprint from a member of the same club. You never know how your club stands in a race while you're in it, so the incentive is to give it everything. Even though you are middle or back of the pack, it might be your holding off of the guy wheezing down your neck that secures promotion or staves off relegation next season.

I have to say that I enjoyed my afternoon, despite the pretty chilly weather, and the disappointment of realising I was really injured. There is something wholesome about all these grown people giving of their best for absolutely no reward other than inter-club (and of course intra club!) one-upmanship. Skimpy vests and hard man / girl attitudes were pretty much the norm, much as I had remembered from the days running in the Met League 20 years ago. I hope it won't be long before I can suffer some of the same again - there were quite a few older and even some slower than me!

What of the 4 clubs? Well all were pretty well represented, with my nearest small club, Thame Runners looking surprisingly prominent considering their low membership. I think I'll be going along there - just as soon as I can actually run that is!

In the meantime, there'll be plenty of swimming for a couple of weeks.

.....although I seem to have booked myself and 2 mates into a cross country race this sunday.
It's pouring with rain now and I have no offroad shoes. I'll have to run slowly ayway, so what the hell?

Back in the groove - Week 2 of 16

2006-11-06T01:35:00.000-08:00

28.5 miles running ; 2 swimming sessions.
This was a good week for training.

We had cold crisp, sunny and calm weather for most of the second half of the week and at last it feels like the "true" autumn here in the UK. I feel strong, healthy and pretty well motivated. Apart from some calf stiffness and the knowledge that my achilles tendons are still potential problems, the body feels OK.

4 runs :
- an easy 6 on a traffic-free firm cycle path on monday.
- a 5 mile tempo run in the same place on wednesday.
- an offroad hilly 9.5 mile on friday.
- a mixed 7.5 miler on sunday morning in the company of my two long term running chronies, Paul and Trev.
2 swimming sessions of 30 minutes each on tuesday and thursday mornings.

This week is planned as very similar, but the long offroader will be 11 miles and wednesday's speed session will be 3 x a mile.

Why didn't I think of doing some swimming earlier? However stiff you may feel getting into the pool, it just seems to stretch you out and relax you and you just feel so much fresher on the next day's run. I have "discovered" that the local pool in Thame, just 3 miles away, is perfect for an early morning session. It opens at 6.30 for 2.5 hours of in-lane swimming and I was sharing it with no more than 12 others. 1000m of swimming is still a good work-out for me and I will try to get a bit better and a bit faster week by week.

My endurance seems to be pretty good, as evidenced by the ease with which I completed friday's hour and a half up on the ridgeway - both hilly and over very varied terrain. I won't really know if this impression is correct until I get my overall mileage up a bit and I do a run of more than 2 hours, but the signs are good. Hopefully "the base" is already there from the summer.

Strength / speed is a bit of another matter unfortunately. I know that running a marathon is not about speed, but now I have committed myself to a few races at various distances over the winter, I feel I must try to get my "comfort-zone" training pace down to about 8.30 miling. My body has probably totally forgotten the days when I used to bowl along comfortably at 6.30 pace, but unfortunately the brain is not that forgiving. At the very least I should be able to get under 50 minutes for 10k and get under 1h45 for the half by the end of the winter. This would only put me back where I was in 2000 after all. The wednesday runs and the races are going to be important. There's a couple of races I'm looking at in January, a 10k and a 15 mile. Targets will be set nearer the time.....

Yesterday was the New York Marathon and Eurosport gave it pretty good TV coverage. I watched more and more of it as it became obvious that the All Blacks were going to give our boys a pasting at Twickenham. This years was of particular interest to me for two reasons - Dean Karnazes and Lance Armstrong.

I became a pretty avid enthusiast of the Tour de France from 1987 onwards when the family moved to Switzerland, and I even began to supplement my running in the summer with some pretty serious lone cycling. I bought myself a decent road bike from a guy called Eric Loder, who had a small cycle shop in one of the Geneva suburbs. I remember the walls were covered with photos and trophies from his days as a tour "domestique" and a pro racer. I think he even got on the podium of a stage in the tour once. With mountains all around and feeling fairly fit, eventually the mind gets drawn to the challenge of climbing some of the passes that you see being tackled in the tour. In my case I managed the ascent to St. Cergue in the Jura, the Col de la Faucille, the ascent to La Clusaz and perhaps top of the lot, the "premier categorie" Col de la Colombiere which takes you over the mountains from the ski resort of Le Grand Bornand and down to the Arve valley at Cluses. The feeling in my legs on the last couple of miles of that climb is quite unlike anything I can remember in running, even in the last few miles of my last marathon, and over the last 6 years or so I've watched Lance Armstrong's dominance of the Tour de France with a sort of stupified, head shaking reverance. On a couple of occasions I was glued to my TV when on murderous climbs he would just look across at his rivals, stand up on his pedals and then just "dance" away from them up the climb to literally blow them away physically and psychologically. And in 1997 this man should have been dead, his body riddled with cancer.

This year Lance tackled his first marathon and he got in under 3 hours by a handful of seconds (apparently his VO2 max would indicate that he could be a 2:06 marathoner!). He had pacing from Alberto Salazar, Joan Benoit (both Olympic Gold medalists at the marathon) and Hitcham El Guerrouj, the middle distance phenomenum but nevertheless the marathon brought this super-athlete down to the level of us mere mortals. Here are some quotes from the man himself after the race:

“Even after experiencing one of the hardest days of the Tour nothing has ever left me feeling this bad,” he said at a post-race news conference. “[My shins] started to hurt in the second half, but the bigger problem the last 7 or 8 miles was the tightness in my calves and thighs. My calves really knotted up. I can barely walk right now.”

Armstrong called the race “the hardest physical thing I have ever done.” While he competed in triathlons as a teenager, Armstrong had never attempted a marathon.

“I think I bit off more than I could chew,” he said. “I never felt a point where I hit the wall; it was really a gradual progression of fatigue and soreness.”

There really is hope for all of us plodders!

But can anyone (even Lance Armstrong) ever match what Dean Karnazes has achieved over the last 50 days, when he has run 50 CONSECUTIVE marathons in each of the 50 states of the U.S.A. I chose the picture above because in it he just looks like any other runner - not wiry thin, not looking like he's especially quick, just pounding the streets of his local town. In fact if you read Dean's blog for this stupendous achievement, it's full of respect for the small band of runners who've accompanied him at every re-created race and a humility that Armstrong never had. I'll be buying the book, and the dvd and helping him raise a few quid more for his Karno Kids charity, which is the principle beneficiary of this extraordinary feat. Dean will probably raise less than the $600,000 that Armstrong has raised through the race for his cancer charity, but then Dean never had a relationship with a rock star or put one over on the French, did he?

Time to get the running shoes on and get that first 5 miler done.

A Winter of Running Coming Up!

2006-11-03T05:10:00.000-08:00

Ok so I AM BACK!

Everyone keeps telling me to "take it easy", "don't overdo it" and "you've lost too much weight".
But when did I ever listen to anyone?

I twiddled about with my running last week, doing about 16 miles in 3 runs. The friday run, a 7 miler on my favourite offroad Ridgeway near Chinnor, told me that I am probably being a bit easy on myself. But when I got down to planning my running for the winter and the preparation for my Feb 11 marathon, I did think that this friday offroad jaunt rather than a sunday morning road run would be one of the core parts of my training.

So here's what I've resolved :

1. I will run 4-5 times a week only. Hopefully this will keep the achilles tendon problems at bay.
2. I'm going to "cross-train" seriously. I did this when I lived in Switzerland with plenty of cycling and swimming and I don't remember ever being injured there. It'll be swimming mostly, always once and mostly twice a week.
3. I'm going to do quite a few races while I have my weekends free. I need to hone my competitivity and give myself an incentive to work on speed and strength as well as endurance.
4. My training week will feature a build-up of mileage over the next 12 weeks before a 2 week taper.
5. All my long runs will be offroad (2 x 16; 2 x 18; 1 x 20). I will supplement this with a half marathon in mid December and a flat 15 mile road race 3 weeks before the marathon.
6. Each week I will do one hard speed or strength session, either a tempo run, mile repeats or some gnarly long hills. All these will be on firm surfaces.

I'm taking Siberian Ginseng as a speculative boost to my immune system, Omega 3 fish oil capsules, Glucosamine / Chrondroitin combo and a "men's health" multivit/ mineral.

I feel good about my planning and have written the "shape" of a programme already, with quite a bit of built in flexibility.

I'm still posting my training and routes on runningahead.com, but have just joined another fantastic UK runners site called Fetcheveryone. I am "Coffeeman Running" on both these sites and my diaries are public.

Coffeeman makes a comeback

2006-10-24T02:19:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I was due to run the Lausanne marathon, but I went to visit my 90 year old mother instead. She had actually been worrying about MY health and needed reassurance, so the 200 mile round trip was appreciated by all.

I made the mistake of looking up all the Swiss local newspapers on the web and Swiss TV to see their coverage of the marathon. Of course - beautiful sunny day, cobalt blue skies, the alps glistening across the calm waters of Lac Leman. I'd have liked to have seen an early cold front, sleet and high winds off the Jura - fog even. At least it was a bit warm - 23 degrees by my predicted finish time - so I can just about console myself with the fact that I might have been suffering slightly more than normal had I been in the race.

Later in the day I very much got the feeling that it was time to move on from this. I got injured quite a lot in that other running career 20 years ago and once stupidly ran a 1:20 half marathon (Roding Valley, Chigwell, Essex in 1986) when I had pretty severe foot pain from about 8 miles. I was a member of the club that organised the race, so no pulling out! That turned out to be a peroneal tendon insertion strain that stopped me running for a month and for one reason or another stopped my progression to ever faster times. By the time I got back into training my life had changed and we moved to Switzerland in January 1987, and my running slipped back in the list of life's priorities.

I have been running 3 times since coming out of hospital and yesterday ran a brisk 5 miler on a familiar out-and-back road course in almost exactly the time of 3 weeks ago, the fateful last run before the plague struck. The fact that my legs feel pretty good today has led me to believe that "I am back" and can now truly begin to plan for some racing ahead, and especially a marathon.

I looked at a few marathons in the UK - there are very few in the winter - but Luton in early December comes too early (perhaps not for me, but certainly for those who had sat by my hospital bed). In any case Luton in December is not quite as attractive a prospect as Lausanne in a golden indian summer! But maybe I can find a couple of mugs to run the relay with me..... So I looked about 16 weeks ahead and straight away found Seville on Feb 11. (note to self - must learn some Spanish so I can at least handle the entry!) This is somewhat ironic as I had thought of running this race in 2005 as my running had once again threatened to get serious again in the autumn of 2004. However I managed to get a severe ankle sprain running in the Chiltern woods in the dark, whilst wearing some stupidly inappropriate cross-country studs, and this stopped me running properly for months. Hopefully I can avoid such a misadventure this time around.

So in theory I am in training again and I am just in the process of scouting around for a 16 week programme and some prep races to "make a plan". I have three pairs of reasonably new shoes that need to get some wear.

My fund-raising for the orphans in Uganda was virtually complete and I will update the blog with the pledges for the last miles. We already sent over $2900 in mid September to fund 86 children's school fees for the last term of this school year and one advantage of running in Seville in February is that it will coincide with the first week of the new school year at Busalamu Secondary School, where our "marathon children" are going to school. Maybe it was fate that decreed this should be thus. Let's hope so.

Of course the big downside of the 16 week shift of marathons is that now I get to train right through the depths of winter for my race. A test of character and motivation that I hope I'm up to. (You see, self doubt attacks from all sides when you have a real running setback.)

My next blog entry will feature my "plan".............

Life is full of surprises - not all of them good.

2006-10-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

Monday October 2nd - I had finished a successful working weekend in the Cotswolds, staying with friends and enjoying myself thoroughly. I went for a steady 5 mile run on a familar course and was pleased at keeping up a good steady clip, despite the large time on my feet of the past 10 days. My thighs were pretty sore and at work roasting coffee later in the day, I felt a bit bereft of energy, sitting on the sacks more than I usually do. In my mind I put off my 20 miler until wednesday or thursday.

Tuesday October 3rd - I woke thinking I might be about to get a cold - lethargic, thighs still aching, but no sore throat or tight chest. After virtually a full day roasting, I decided to take a day off from anything the next day - putting off my 20 miler until thursday.

Wednesday October 4th - there'll be no 20 miler this week. I spent most of the day curled up on the sofa, even watching David Cameron's speech from the Tory conference in it's entirety. I started to feel I was running a fever, and went for the paracetomols and my duvet. I was still waiting for the inevitable cold symptoms to break through, when on a trip to the toilet I noticed some pretty unsightly deep red spots coming up on my upper thighs. I showed them to Debbie in the evening and we both agreed that I should see the Doctor in the morning if I felt no better.

Thursday October 5th - after a pretty fitful night I awoke to more spots on the legs and a few appearing on the arms. The shivers and feverishness were still there and the Doctor was called. After quite a bit of head scratching and some alarm at my low blood pressure, the Doctor despatched me to Stoke Mandeville hospital around midday for blood tests.
It as around 9.30 in the evening before I was seen by a Doctor and by 10.30 I was installed on Ward 10, a high-care assessment area behind A&E, where, unbeknown to me, I was to spend the next 8 nights, under observation as my temperature rose and fell, my rash grew and then receded and a serious case of ulcerated throat and mouth visited me for the weekend of my birthday on October 8th.
I spent the first half of this time on a re-hydrating saline drip, alternating with glucose and dextrose as I couldn't eat much. I also was being pumped 4 times a day with intravenous antibiotics as a sort of prophylactic against a bacterial infection that I might or might not have. These antibiotics included penicillin, which I had assumed I had an allergy to for the last 35 years following a reaction when I had Glandular Fever in my teens. I got the agreement to get this suspended to a milder oral antibiotic on Monday 9th, when funnily enough, I pretty quickly began to start feeling better!

During my eight days in hospital the following happened as regards my running aspirations.
- I forget to re-schedule my 20 miler. Walking to the toilet was about my limit.
- I realised I wouldn't be running a marathon on October 22nd, nor anytime soon after. Getting outside would be nice.
- When the dermatologists crowded round my bed they advised me that it would not be a good idea to try to travel to Switzerland looking like I did - they would be unlikely to let me in the country. So we cancelled my 4 nights in Leukerbad, an alpine spa, wher I had decided to spend most of the week before the marathon.

I finally got released on Friday October 13th, after a last minute biopsy on my rash, as well as Hepatitis and HIV tests to add to the 3 samples of blood and 4 samples of urine I had already given.

No Doctor was able to tell me with any degree of certainty what had been wrong with me apart from an assumption of a strong immune reaction to an unspecified viral infection. However they were all very nice, very over-worked and totally unwaware of my "case history" (never hospitalised in my life, in final stages of marathon training, compulsive "want to know why" person). The nurses were all fabulous and worked under extremely trying conditions with old people who seemed to have no-one else to care for their sufferings and dementia-like mutterings. With my balloons on my bed, my smuggled-in real food and my constant desire to know my own "obs", I at least must have been different to most of their punters. By the end of 8 days I was about to start becoming a nuisance and clearly had to go. I was in danger of getting out of my speed zone** anyway.

At the time of writing this blog entry, I have been out for 5 days. I am 3.5kg lighter without running a step; I am shedding skin like a snake and I feel like I need to know the true definition of the word convalescence. Wine for some reason tastes disgusting, but I still seem able to sleep for 10 hours.

My first cup of coffee for 9 days (some Ethiopian Yirgacheffe) tasted like it was almost worth the wait.

I have been for a run, yesterday, but it wasn't very auspicious. I am planning another one sometime soon, but all around me are are advising that it is "too soon". As my thighs are again a bit sore, I may just take their advice.

I have already re-planned my fund-raising marathon, but that will be the subject of another entry.

It's been a pretty strange couple of weeks, but as someone said -

"All experiences that don't kill you are good ones to have."

or something like that............

(** In my time in Stoke Mandeville Hospital I observed that different hospital occupants moved at wildly different speeds.
- Slowest - Patients (obvious as most stay in their beds)
- Next slowest - contracted (Sodexho) cleaning staff. I have never seen anybody work this slowly and their were several of them, apparently outside any form of command structure.
- Next, but still very relaxed - contracted catering staff (again Sodexho) with their trolleys.
- Same speed, but with "big boy" radios squarking and some chat - contracted porters (again Sodexho). As unaware of the routes around their domain as a New York cabbie.
- Approaching normal office worker speed - hospital admin staff.
- Slightly faster than normal office worker speed - hospital volunteers, chaplaincy visitors and your own friends and relatives.
- Getting faster. Doctors in groups on their rounds during daytime. When you see them they stand still around you, but they talk and think quickly and when they go they move off very sharply.
- Brisk (probably already double office worker speed and a serious step up from Doctor "firms") Doctors on call. Especially rapid with curtains around beds and getting intravenous lines in.
- Lightning - most members of the nursing staff. Usually multitasking, invariably cheerful and with eyes in the back of their heads. God bless then many times over. They spend their entire days making up for others' deficiencies and the NHS would collapse without their willingness to do hundreds of jobs per day that the others, usually contracted staff, don't do.
- Speed of Light. Coffeeman heading for the exit with his "release" letter. )

Prelude to Disaster

2006-10-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

To try to give myself yet more options for running the marathon, I bought some new shoes on the Nike stand at the Windosr Half - a pair of Air Structure Triax motion control shoes.

The week beginning September 26th saw me on a pretty heavy work schedule and I knew from the outset that my number of runs would be limited to 3 unless I ran on the days when I was working at a show. In addition to this I have noticed that I always have heavy legs the day after I've been standing behind my coffee bar for 2 days.

.....and when was I going to fit in this darned 20 miler?
.....and would my achilles hold up?

Time to the marathon on October 22nd and an inevitable 10 day minimum taper were both starting to run out.

In the event I managed to squeeze in just over 30 miles on the days available to me - Monday, Thursday and Friday. This included a tiring, but at the time apparently very satisfactory 16.5 mile road run. The main encouragement came from the lack of Achilles pain I felt in my new shoes.

If I could just get in the 20 miler next week, I could then start my taper with two weekends still to go before the Lausanne race.........

Charlie meets Seb!

2006-09-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

(I wrote most of this post in the week of 26th Sep - so I thought I'd better post it!)

4 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
2 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)

Week 1 - 40.
Week 2 - 39
Week 3 - 36
Week 4 - 31
Week 5 - 19
Week 6 - 26
Week 7 - 61 (!!!!) Long run 1 - 16 miles.
Week 8 - 24
Week 9 - 50 Long run 2 - 18 miles
Week 10 - 50
Week 11 - 10
Week 12 - 40 Race 13.1
Week 13 - 5 Ooops!
Week 14 - 38 Long run 12.5 miles

6 week average 32 miles. The bare minimum!

My weight is around 85 kgs.

The achilles tendonitis remains but I am still running! I had to shelve the 20 miler and review the strategy. I am assuming that this long run will leave me with significant soreness and I will need some complete rest afterwards - so it will now be run sometime between October 2 and 4, just under 3 weeks before the race in Lausanne. This will then be my only big week before the race. It feels like I am tapering already, but I have to ensure I get to the start line before worrying about my finishing time. Hopefully I can also run a 14-16 miler still this week as well.

So much for planning....
Last week's running was fairly good really, despite being again wedged in between a pretty exhausing work schedule. The overall mileage was down on what I wanted, but my long run of 12.5 miles was quite pleasing in a bizarre way. I had intended to run no more than 7 miles, expecting achilles soreness to set in - but despite wearing my "problem" Mizuno shoes this simply didn't happen and I just kept adding loops to lengthen the distance. What wasn't too clever was not taking a drink - two de-hydrating hours took their toll by the end.

At the weekend I worked at the Windsor Half Marathon, and squeezed in an early morning 6 miler through the deer park, splashing through the dew, avoiding the deer and even cruising down the long walk and through the half marathon finish. I must run this race next year as the setting and traffic free route are just great.

Later in the day something pretty special happened. Working on our family run speciality coffee bar as part of the catering set-up we often serve the officials and marshalls once the race has got under way. On this note we made a cup of tea for the guy who started the race, one Lord Sebastian Newbold Coe, and I was able to demand he autograph one of our menus because of the influence he had on my running " career". He also dropped some change in our collection pot for the Ugandan Orphans - I always knew he was the good guy and Ovett was the bad guy. He still runs daily when he can and he looked almost as fit as he did in the eighties. I bet he could break three hours for the marathon now if he put his mind to it. He is a little more than one year younger then me.

I feel that I can finish this marathon if I am not too ambitious about the time. A sub 4 hour finish may be beyond me, but we'll let the 20 miler decide this for me - if I can do it in a comfortable 9:30 pace then maybe I can be a little more ambitious in Lausanne.

Robin Hood and his merry hills conquered! Tendons not co-operating.

2006-09-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

5 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
3 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
I ran in the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.

Check out how no. 784 finished here.

Just select "Robin Hood Marathon" and bib 784.

Do you feel my pain?

Week 1 - 40.
Week 2 - 39
Week 3 - 36
Week 4 - 31
Week 5 - 19
Week 6 - 26
Week 7 - 61 (!!!!) Long run 1 - 16 miles.
Week 8 - 24
Week 9 - 50 Long run 2 - 18 miles
Week 10 - 50
Week 11 - 10
Week 12 - 40 Race 13.1
Week 13 - 5 Ooops!

6 week average 30 miles. It looks like an early taper

My weight is around 86 kgs still.

So after an up and down week including a five mile run with both my kids (lump in throat) and lots of doubts surrounding the state of my achilles tendons, I drove up to Nottingham on a foggy September morn and conquered the Robin Hood Half. My last battle plan involved running 8:40 pace to 10 miles and then attempting to speed up to get as close to 1:50 as I could. The logic being that I could extrapolate to a sub 4 hour marathon from this.

Perhaps I did this. It's difficult to tell. My stopwatch didn't make it through mile 1! But I know that my "chip time" was 1:49:50 and I ran the last 3 (slightly downhill) miles in about 24:10. My finishing position was in the top 25% of the 6800 field. Not bad for a V50 who hasn't raced in 6 years

Positives :

I was strong on the hills
I hit my race time objectives
I enjoyed the race and the atmosphere
I finished with my strongest miles
I have my first medal for 6 years. Nice.

Negatives :

My achilles tendons got progressively more sore from 5 miles. I don't think I could finish a marathon if they behaved the same.
I nearly fell asleep on the M1 coming home, and after being cramped up in a Mazda MX5 for 2 hours, spent the next 3 hours on my feet.
I almost immediately got a cold in the days following.

The week after left me with a work schedule with practically no "running windows", and I grabbed one of the few open to me on wednesday, by running 45 minutes through thickly grassed parkland in Northamptonshire as the sun went down. This did the tendons no good at all of course. Silly arse! So the rest of the week was enforced rest, but nevertheless I spent most of it on my feet working and only by sunday could I get up without lower leg stiffness.

I ran 7 miles on the roads today and soreness in the tendon was progressive from about 40 minutes into the run. As I write this my left ankle is resting on an ice pack and I had Ibuprofen with lunch. Yum! My determination to run the "full" in Lausanne is certainly being challenged and I still want to run flat and hilly 20 milers over the next 3 weeks before tapering. The flat one should be this thursday - we'll see.

With the Lausanne course giving 2700 feet of up and down "undulation" I need in particular to seriously challenge my endurance on a long run with 2000 feet of up-and-down. That will severely test out the tendons, won't it? I've plotted a course...

Every runner I tell I have achilles tendon problems seems to pull the same face and not one has ended the conversation with the cheery words,

"You'll be OK."

So as a result I've felt duty bound to say it for them

"I'll be OK, it's under control!"

Is it hell?!

I'm going to finish off this week at the Windsor Half Marathon, one of the best organised UK halfs and wholly off public roads. But I'm not running it, merely serving the coffee! Photos to be blogged next week.

The race is being started by Seb Coe, an absolute hero of mine and an inspiration in my first running "career" in the mid eighties. I can remember vividly getting up in the middle of the night in 1984 to watch Seb retain the olympic 1500m title in Los Angeles. Watching that race again still brings a lump to the throat and sets the hairs up on the back of my neck. Coe's kick against the then world champion Steve Cram on the final bend off a searingly fast pace was as majestic and courageous a piece of running as has ever been seen in a UK vest and unfortunately only Liz McColgan and Paula Radcliffe have matched that performance since, both in the 10k to Marathon distances and neither of them at an Olympic Games. Nobody was going to beat Seb that day, although all the experts had written him off as yesterdays man by that time, due to a prolonged period of glandular illness. The fact that Seb actually set his sub 3.30 1500m PB 2 years after this final has passed largely unnoticed as by then others had lowered the world record. Seb's 800m world record set in 1981 has only been bettered by one man since in 25 years of trying with amazing progression in training techniques and athlete preparation, and this only by .6 of a second. Seb only won his first international championship at 800m in 1986 as well.

I once read an article written by his father / coach where it was claimed that one of his standard training runs was a sustained pace 10 miler in a little over 45 minutes. Heavens knows where the marathon world record would be now if Seb had turned his mind to it towards the end of his career as Haile Gebreselassie has!

The fact that this supreme Olympic runner has managed by force of will and personality to bring the games back to the UK is just further complement to his right to the status of an immortal amongst runners in the UK.

Do you think he'll let me make him a latte?

One last footnote - Dean Kanzares has now started his awesome attempt to run 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states of the USA. Check out the website of his quest and the blog also.

And I'm worried about a bit of tendonitis!

And now for the good news.

2006-09-04T04:09:00.000-07:00

We've had a good two weeks raising sponsorship for more of the young Ugandans whom we wish to fund at Busalamu Secondary School in 2007. And I have to get deep into the second half of this marathon now, tendonitis or no tendonitis. Here's the next list of mile per child sponsors.

Mile 11 is represented by Eseza Namulondo. Thanks to Myra and Trevor White for their sponsorship. Very old friends with kind hearts.

Mile 12 belongs to Rehema Nakiyemba. Great thanks to David and Viv Binding for their generous support.

Mile 13 and we are halfway there. I'll be turning around on the lakeside just past Vevey, hopefully not into a headwind! Zaidi Atuma will be sponsored by various small donations at Spire Park Horse Trials. Thanks to all.

Mile 14 is represented by Joshua Bamwesiga. James Eyre took time out from re-building the cross country fences at Highclere Castle to donate the sponsorship. Sincere thanks.

Mile 15 was sponsored by many coins dropped into the pot at Highclere Castle Norse Trials over the bank holiday weekend, thanks to Chris Farr and the commentary team for the plugs on the P.A. Paul Balikyaza will be going to Busalamu SS again next year thanks to you.

Mile 16 belongs to little 16 year old Samali Nakisoya. Thanks to the stable management crew and Ellen the Vet at Blenheim International Horse Trials this week for your kind donations which form the sponsorship of Samali's next year in school. And congratulations Ellen on completing that crazy race over the x-country course, with funds going to the Anthony Nolan Trust. I hope the sluggish dry run on friday that we did made a difference!

Mile 17 was also sponsored by donations given at Blenheim HT. I'd like in particular to thank Amy Tryon, recent WEG Eventing bronze medallist for her contribution. Jacqueline Kagweri will be going to school next year thanks to you and several others.

So as the crock continues his training there are just 9 miles still to sponsor! More good news next week I hope.

Running and Resting in my head

2006-09-04T03:29:00.000-07:00

7 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
5 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
6 days to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.

Week 1 - 40.
Week 2 - 39
Week 3 - 36
Week 4 - 31
Week 5 - 19
Week 6 - 26
Week 7 - 61 (!!!!) Long run 1 - 16 miles.
Week 8 - 24
Week 9 - 50 Long run 2 - 18 miles
Week 10 - 50
Week 11 - 10

6 week average 37 miles (must get to 40!)

My weight has crept up to 86.5 kg (down 5.6 kgs in 12 weeks)

Not good. Not good at all.....

As I write this I cannot really decide whether I am an injured runner or not. Sometimes you read trite stuff written by life coaches, sports psychologists and business school teachers about goal setting and achieving, overcoming obstacles and using your inner resources to defeat adversity. None of these wide expanses of text give you any advice about achilles tendonitis, a frustrating obstacle that the runner comes up against that cannot be dealt with by any resources that the body or mind can call upon.

As referred to in my last training report, this bout of tendonitis has crept up on me almost unnoticed. It is not surprising considering the increase in mileage that I had subjected my 50 year old body to, but nevertheless it has dealt me a heavy blow and I am now trying to engage the intellect with a strategy that gets me to the start line in Lausanne in 6 weeks from now. At that point I will know that I can probably deal with whatever that marathon has in store for me, but I have to get there first.

After two 50 mile weeks, the last two runs during which finished in some considerable discomfort, I backed off considerably last week. In fact I completed just two runs on grassland, totalling 10 miles. Mind you, it was very nice grassland - on the Duke of Marlborough's back lawn! The worrying thing is that on the first occasion I was fine for 40 minutes or so and then the soreness began to become uncomfortable, stiffening up considerably later. Two days later this began after 2o minutes. Today I am going to run again on the roads and it will be a really important test for the next 6 weeks as I lead up to the marathon.

I've decided that this will be another easy week, perhaps with some swimming, but that I will start in Nottingham unless in pain and see how I go. I will not try to run through pain though and will pull out if it really gets uncomfortable. This race is not my key objective and I must be self-controlled and remember it. Tough for me. Next monday I will have to set my Lausanne strategy up and however demanding the cross-training parts are I will have to stick to them. It will be an incredible exercise in self-discipline, but 26 children's schooling now depend on me and I owe it to the donors to deal with this setback.

The main problem apart from the occasional bouts of discomfort is that I miss the running! I had definitely re-discovered the joy and freedom of the sport after 15 years or so of being a bit of a running lightweight - allbeit an overweight lightweight! Positive thoughts flood in as the unused belt notches come into play and the daily entries get posted on the log. I had made promises to myself never to stop running again and had even begun to think of setting some more goals after Lausanne - a late winter marathon, an ultra, a mountain race, a trail challenge, even in my most delirious moments the Comrades. An overuse injury such as I now have is something of a reality shock to all this, perhaps a timely one. Slow down, Charlie - don't get carried away...but winter is on it's way now in the UK and getting out there will be harder and harder with more goals "down the road".

So next week's report will be an intersting one. I wonder - maybe I'll go to bed one night and it will have gone away by morning........

"One mile - One Child" Fund Raising - Progress Report.

2006-08-24T02:57:00.000-07:00

My marathon in Lausanne will have a noble purpose, with each mile representing a Ugandan Child whose schooling I hope to be sponsoring in 2007.

The estimated cost is £50 per child and we have now been fund-raising for around 2 weeks in this way.

It looks like I already have to get to the 10 mile mark!

Mile 1 is for Charles Tezikoma. Thanks to Sue Garner.

Mile 2 is for Fred Zilonda. Thanks to Patrick Adams.

Mile 3 is for Ruth Nalumansi. Thanks to everyone at SITS 2006.

Mile 4 is for Betty Babita. Thanks to Rachel Ashby and Paul Lucas.

Mile 5 is for Ester Nabirye. Thanks to Clive and Di Ashby.

(No photo of Ester yet, sorry.)

Mile 6 is for Catherine Bajjanga. Thanks to Steve and Lisa Whitton.

Mile 7 is for Samuel Matende. Thanks to Barry and Siobhan Kirwan.

Mile 8 is for Everline Kagoya. Thanks to everyone at Brockenhurst Park Horse Trials 2006.

Mile 9 is for Edward Buyinza. Thanks to Jess Walker.

Mile 10 is for Dennis Lubogo. Thanks to everyone at Brockenhurst Park Horse Trials 2006.

If anyone wants to sponsor an orphan child at Busalamu Secondary School as I run another mile in Lausanne, please e-mail me on : charliethecoffeeman@hotmail.com

Thanks to all who have pledged so far. I am training hard, I promise!

Ice, Ice baby! Strike the POSE!

2006-08-24T01:42:00.000-07:00

8 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
6 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
2 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.

Week 1 - 40.
Week 2 - 39
Week 3 - 36
Week 4 - 31
Week 5 - 19
Week 6 - 26
Week 7 - 61 (!!!!) Long run 1 - 16 miles.
Week 8 - 24
Week 9 - 50 Long run 2 - 18 miles

6 week average 35 miles (must get to 40!)

My weight is now 86 kg (down 6.1 kgs in 10 weeks)

I have entered the Lausanne Marathon - look - and have booked Easyjet flights there and back. Only 74 in my age group so far. It gets real now!

The fund raising for the Ugandan orphans has begun with a bang (see separate post).

That was a pretty satisfactory running week, especially as it was compressed into 5 running days and I completed my first 18 miler, my longest run since the year 2000! It was hilly and, as a two lap course, quite a good test psychologically. I could have done without the rush hour traffic which inevitably accompanied me on the busier parts. One of the problems of where I live is that is impossible to avoid a major road completely on any run of over 8 miles without resorting to multiple laps or double-backs. Oh, well, I mustn't complain, at least I'm surrounded by some quite scenic countryside.

I know seem to be able to knock off tempo runs at sub 8:30 pace and 9-10 mile runs pretty easily and am recovering exceptionally well. I am reasonable confident that the range of daily supplements that I went for around 10 weeks ago are having some sort of positive effect on me. They are:
A compound Multi-Vitamin / Mineral
A straight Glucosamine Sulphate
A Omega 3 Fish Oil capsule
Chromium Picolinate
L-carnitine
I've just added a Glucosamine / Chrondroitin combo which is a 2 per day and I will use this up to my marathon, phasing out the straight Glucosamine when the supply finishes early next week.

This feeling also probably means that my "Endurance building phase" is now done and I should start more strength based running over the next 4 weeks. Lots of hills, lots of offroad etc. - probably just in time (see below).

My Asics GT 2110 shoes now have 457 miles on them and I have just ordered some Asics Kayanos from Wiggle. The idea is to run around 200 miles in these in the next 8 weeks, mainly on the roads with my GT 2110's going to the offroad running. The Mizuno Nirvana's I bought have only got 70 miles on them, but they worry me. The wierd firm plastic spring "thingy" that runs under the heel and mid-foot gives quite a firm ride and I am pretty convinced that it is contributing to the onset of more lower leg problems. It is a motion control shoe, which I know I need, but what kind of motion is it controlling, I wonder? I've retired them for a while anyway.

My main problem in running right now (apart from keeping the button headphones of my MP3 player in as I sweat!) is the insidious encroachment of achilles tendonitis into my life. This started on my right leg and, feeling left out, the other leg has now joined in. Hence the new shoes and the title to this blog entry. I now have ice packs as a pretty much constant companion around the house, along with that minging pack of frozen peas that I found at the bottom of the freezer, unsused for over a year!!

Some things I know about this and will work to reverse :
- Increase in running , particularly on hard surfaces brings it on. So I will go to the country!
- Worn shoes and collapsed midsole cushioning can encourage it. New shoes on the way!
- The tendon naturally shortens during running. I'm stretching all day long, I promise!
- Worst of all, its a bugger to get rid of once you have it and I have a marathon to run in 8 weeks!

But there is something else I found out about while trawling the web - POSE running. I love the little videos on the PoseTech site and that evil Dr. Romanov has me brain-washed already! I tried my own version on a 9 miler last night and I can see what they mean. Basically it's a style of running that has to be learnt where footstrike takes place directly below your centre of gravity and your body axis shifts forward, using gravity as a forward propulsion force. The basic premise is that your running becomes more efficient, you stop crashing down on your heels, your times improve and you get less injuries. You feel a bit strange (and probably look it too!), but a change in biomechanics can't be a mistake for someone who seems to be flirting with overuse injuries, can it? So I am going to POSE for a while, if that's OK, and see if I can look like this on the Chiltern Hills!

I've got a 16 miler in the plan either today or tomorrow, but that may just turn into a 2 hour offroad jaunt. I have 25 miles under my shoes already this week and in theory I could get 3 more running days in to make up the other planned 25.

Next week is going to be a bit silly as I'm working at Blenheim Horse Trials, but that is a big park and I've said I'm going offroad.....

A footnote - 3 members of the family are now running regularly and it is with great enthusaism that we are planning to all run with lots of old friends in one of Europe's coolest running events in December at the Course d'Escalade in Geneva. I ran this about 5 times in the 7 years that we lived in Geneva and hurtling around the steep cobbled streets of Geneva's old town in your own age and sex limited mini-field was always a lot of fun (usually also very hair raising in the dark, rain and / or snow). I've yet to find a better excuse for gorging yourself on mulled wine and vegetable soup (there is a reason for this which can be read about here).

Thus perish the enemies of the republic!

It may just be that Coffeeman's Running Blog morphs into some team effort after Lausanne. Expect anarchy if Trev gets involved.

Training Report 10

2006-08-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

10 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
8 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
4 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.

Week 1 - 40.
Week 2 - 39
Week 3 - 36
Week 4 - 31
Week 5 - 19
Week 6 - 26
Week 7 - 61 (!!!!) Long run 1. 16 miles.
Week 8 - 24

6 week average 33 miles (must get to 40!)

My weight is now 86.5 kg (down 5.6 kgs in 8 weeks)

So I managed to put in a "big one" in week 7. Wife away; light work schedule; motivated Coffeeman! As I piled on the miles, I was amazed at the real lack of fatigue. A first hilly 16 miler in the middle of the week was followed by a 9 mile recovery run and and a strong tempo run on friday.

On saturday I "raced". Well Lisa raced and I sort of "paced" really. It's the first time Lisa has had a number pinned to her chest in a running event and although they reduced the planned 10k to an 8k run, Lisa completed in less than 48 minutes with her Dad urging her to reel in competitors in front of her throughout the last mile. Really good fun, Lisa, despite the onset of shin splints. And we have an official result! 235th and 236th out of not many more.....

Lisa's a bit better at this at the moment but it may change. Sorry Lisa!

On sunday I also ran 8.5 miles on the roads around my village here, before work realities made me hit the road with "equipment" hitched behind the truck.

So this weeks training was inevitably a lot different, especially as I was working full on every day.

But...

I had a beautiful early morning run in Windsor Great Park around Virginia Water - why aren't there hundreds doing it as it must be an idyllic spot to do your early morning run? Traffic free, green, marked trails, etc. etc

I also had a 7.5 miler in South Derbyshire overlooking the Trent, with the smell of Jersey Cows in my nostrils as other lunatics mountain biked for 24 hours in the next valley. I have to admit three runs in a week felt like rest and I was basking a bit in the available fitness. It seems like it's time to pile on the miles again this week and an 18 miler is planned in a week of 45-50. I must never forget the distance of the marathon and although bowling along at 9 minute mile pace for an hour or an hour and a half is very pleasant, it won't get me from Lausanne to Vevey and back will it? The Nottingham Half gets nearer and although I think my original 1:45 goal is unrealistic (my best Tempo run is at 8:12 pace), I do have to set a goal that predicts a sub 4 hour marathon as a confidence booster.

I am now firmly hooked into an online diary at runningahead.com and see no reason why all runners don't use it. Hopefully the software can cope with the pressure of huge numbers of users as the site will get that. The ability to set out with just a stop watch and then on memory of the route plot the exact mileage on the site whilst it integrates smoothly into a cross-referenced training diary is awesome. So far I've avoided the forums as I see 4-5 names cropping up everywhere, suggesting a small group of accolytes. A broader participation would be nice, but seeing where everyone else runs is fascinating!

My "Noble Cause"

2006-08-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

(Thanks to Steve Runner for the phrase : noble cause.)

I've run one marathon for charity. In 1998, frustrated at my inability to get into the London Marathon on the ballot for three consecutive years, I decided to take up a "Golden Bond" place and was able to raise over £3000 for the PHAB charity, supporting activity centres for disabled children.

Since Hill & Valley Coffee opened in 1999, we have fund-raised for various offbeat charitable causes in coffee producing countries. In early 2006 we finally found the cause that we want to work with on a long-term basis.

I have a particular emotional attraction to Uganda - it was where I "cut my teeth" as a coffee buyer in the 1980's and I got to know Ugandans who had lived through the turmoil of the Obote and Amin regimes in the decade before. These inherently dignified and always cheerful people seem capable of retaining their optimistic view of their future through whatever turmoil is thrown at them. It is my belief that eventually Ugandans will be able to control their own destiny and "develop" if we just give them a helping hand - not necessarily a hand out. For many reasons the country is capable of transcending the "undeveloped / poor / failed state" paradigm of much of sub-saharan Africa.

Lisa, my daughter, went to the south eastern area of Iganga to teach in a primary school for 4 months in 2002, and this brought home to me how desperate most young Ugandans were to seek education as a way out of poverty and underdevelopment. Under Yoweri Museveni as president in a form of quasi democratic beneficial parliamentary dictatorship, Uganda is less and likely to be a failed state, despite problems brewing to the north, west and even in Kenya to the east.

Equipped with some first hand knowledge of the country and its educational system, we decided, as a family, to seek a way of funding education in Uganda for specific individuals who needed help. As in many areas these days, we commenced our search by "googling" secondary school scholarship uganda and that's how we came across the wonderful young people running the Uganda Villages Project.

Five months later and with dozens of information hungry e-mails behind us, we are now actively supporting a group of orphans to get secondary schooling in Iganga district. Yes, the same region as Lisa travelled to and taught in. An auspicious coincidence.

What has all this to do with "Coffeeman Running" though?

Well we now have 26 children whose educational needs we want to cover for 2007. One child for each mile of the marathon I intend to run in Lausanne on October 22. All the children are in the same secondary school, Busalamu SS, in rural Iganga district. We have calculated £50 per child as sufficient to pay the school fees, leaving enough for a contribution to materials and exam fees as well as the all important clean white school uniforms which distinguish the children in term time.

So as my marathon training enters its last 9 weeks I am trying to raise sponsorship for these 26 young people, one by one, mile by mile. Individual sponsors are being sent a jpeg photo of the child and in most cases a pdf of a letter they have personally penned to their sponsor.

They say that running a marathon is always something of a "life enhancing" experience. On October 22nd I intend to enhance the lives of these 26 young people as the mile markers pass, hopefully with the inspiring view of the Alps on my side as I glance across the still waters of Lac Leman between Lausanne and Vevey.

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be. ~George Sheehan

Oh and that picture at the top is of Charles Tezikoma. He is 17 years old and currently in year S2 at Busalamu. He doesn't know it yet, but a very nice lady who spends weekends working hard at British Eventing Horse Trials has just paid for his education next year. Charles wishes to be a policeman and is currently top of his class. I'll be thinking of him as I run the first downhill mile down to the Parc de Denantou.

Only 25 more to go!

Training Report 9

2006-08-01T02:12:00.000-07:00

12 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
10 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
6 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.

The Regents Park Summer 10k is this coming saturday August 5th. I have entered the Nottingham Half Marathon.

Week 1 - 40.
Week 2 - 39
Week 3 - 36
Week 4 - 31
Week 5 - 19
Week 6 - 26
My weight is now 87.5 kg (down 4.6 kgs in 6 weeks)

At last, at last we are back to some "normal" English summer weather with morning temperatures in the mid teens. We have also had some rain and right now it's a bit windy.

My calf problem has not yet developed into anything serious - was just a warning probably of inflexible lower legs. I ice it after each run and sometimes in the evenings, and take some ibuprofen with my morning cocktail of supplements of "performance enhancing vitamins and supplements.

This week I am planning a BIG WEEK - and hoping to get 50 miles under my shoes for the first time in a long, long while. After 7.5 miles monday and 9 this morning, I'm aiming for a 16 mile meander through the backroads of some local villages tomorrow at 6 am. I have to confess that I'm not meeting many (any?) runners these mornings, but each time I hit a stretch of main road the early rush hour traffic is starting to really piss me off. Most of them seem either to screetch to a halt and impatiently wait for me to go past, leaving far too great a space for me or they are oblivious and virtually run you off the road. So tomorrow's course will be hilly and very rural. It brings up the problem with drink stashing - but hopefully the early morning residents of Chearsley don't search their hedges! My nine miler this morning covered part of the same ground, a few real grunting hills, and some nice views over the Chiltern Hills to the east and the Oxfordshire valleys around us to the west. I am looking forward to tomorrow already.

Next week will be a lower mileage as the work schedule looks pretty awful, but it will be the official start of my fund raising plan linked to the Lausanne Marathon. A blog entry will follow at the weekend - along with a short report on the Regents Park 10k, my daughter Lisa's debut with a number on.

In the meantime I've found a couple of really cool sites while surfing.

Endurance50.com is the official site marking ultrarunner Dean Karnazes' attempt to run 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states of he USA, beginning on September 17 in St. Charles Missouri.

Dean should be running the Lasalle Bank Chicago Marathon on the day I run in Lausanne and if he makes it it will be number 36 in the sequence. I am going to follow Dean's progress as my training stiffens up in the last 5 weeks. Hopefully it will inspire!

I've also stumbled upon what must be one of the best runners' sites anywhere on the web. Check out Running Ahead.com. It is a FREE online training schedule, compiled by a real runner and linked into google mapping software that allows you to course measure and plot. You will be able to follow my progress on here if you like. I am registered as CoffeemanRunning.

Am I training for the "marathon des sables"?

2006-07-26T12:11:00.001-07:00

13 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
11 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
7 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.
2 weeks to the Regents Park Summer 10k.

I've been a bit remiss with the blog for the past 3 weeks. My excuse is a tough work schedule, not something unexpected, but it has played a bit of havoc with my pre-written 18 week schedule.
It also seems to be over 30 degrees every day - normally I'd love being permanently in shorts and t-shirt, but it makes running long distances extra hard.
In terms of mileage here is where I am
Week 1 - 40.
Week 2 - 39
Week 3 - 36
Week 4 - 31
Week 5 - 19.
My weight is now 87.8 kg (down 4.3 kgs in 5 weeks)
Last week was pretty terrible. After a fantastic "run with a view" up Cleeve Hill above Cheltenham at the end of the hottest day of the year, I had to put running second to my work committments, finally getting out again yesterday for a seven miler and this morning for about 12.5 miles.
Unfortunately I got a sharp pain in my left calf after about 45 mins this morning and, although I finished the run mostly running slowly with occasional walk breaks, the calf is now pretty sore. I've compensated for the sorrow with a really nice glass of good South Australian Red to wash down my sampling of some Fallow deer venison eye fillet steaks. Not bad as compensation.

I have been getting worried about the persistent achilles tendonitis in my right leg this past wek or two and I decided to get some new shoes to alternate runs with my Asics 2110's. A random train transit through Reading took me to Sweatshop and I emerged 20 minutes later with a brand new pair of Mizuno Nirvanas for the knock down price of 55 quid. Maybe the slight change in biomechanics is what caused the problem.
In the middle of week 6, Im feeling a bit sorry for myself, especially as our heatwave continues in the UK, making morning running the only real alternative to getting cooked out on the tarmac. At the ripe old age of 50 my slightly overtrained legs are not quite so willing at 6.30 am as they used to be, but what can I do? I need a big mileage week as a confidence booster. Next week then ........ maybe.
The time for all my race entries is fast approaching and I even have to start thinking of flights to Switzerland in October. That means it is getting real and I must get my fund-raising on track

Marathon Training begins in Earnest

2006-07-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

16 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
14 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
10 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.
5 weeks to the Regents Park Summer 10k.

Today the first day of the third week of my 18 week marathon training schedule.
Week 1 mileage was 35.
Week 2 mileage was 37.
Weight is now 90.5 kgs (down 1.6 kgs from the start)

I've managed to keep more or less on schedule this first two weeks despite :

the World Cup.
some very un-British hot weather.
...my penchant for procrastination around any training schedule I write for myself.

In fact in the past the very act of writing a schedule has usually been an automatic stimulus for an injury or illness. This time around I'm even more or less sticking to my diet rules as well and slowly but surely I'm shedding a few hundred grams of weight without really feeling it.

The legs are starting to protest a little, particularly the onset of some nagging tendonitis in my right achilles which is particularly stiff early in the morning. Ice and anti-inflammatories have already been on the agenda twice this week.

Although it is glorious in the English countryside in June when the sun shines and my long runs in the lee of the Chiltern Hills give some wonderful pastoral vistas, running in the heat brings problems. It's pointless (nay positively dangerous) to push the pace on a long run and hydration becomes a real issue. On the hot days I've resumed an old habit of weighing myself immediately before and after a run - the assumption being that the weight difference reflects a water deficit. The results can be quite frightening. This morning I went for a steady 7 miler consisting of tow laps of our village and I drank a litre of sports dring during the 63 minutes I was out. Despite this I still "lost" 1.2 kgs and was chugging water down with the muesli 20 minutes later. In the fear that this won't be enough I also try to drink at least another 2 litres through the day. I am sure it is a good body maintenance habit, but my memory is not tuned to it fully yet.

I also know I should be running at 6 am to avoid the heat, but I'm nearly as bad at getting mobile in the morning as I am at going to be early - so plenty of adjustment to this heat will still be needed. I also hate running in the breakfast-time / rush to work / school run / late for my train period between 7.30 and 9 am. Despite apparently living in the middle of the countryside, our rural roads are full of people who care nothing for runners on their nearside and even the few trails have dog walkers in my way. My intolerance barometer rises to unjustifiable levels which make the burning sun of early afternoon seem like a decent trade-off most days. Either way I never seem to see any other runners. Where are they I wonder?

Anyway digressions aside here are some of the personal highlight from my last two weeks of running.....

Saturday 24th June - I ran my "5 steady" in a fine drizzle on a golf course in Tewkesbury at 5.30 in the morning before getting my breakfast brought on a tray. And there was a golfer on the coarse. Never tell me that runners are crazy. Never! The reason I was there was that we had a night in a hotel before working a 32 hour shift at the event we were working on. Well - I had to get the scheduled run in somehow.

Thursday 29th June - long (12.5 miler) run along the ridgeway at 2 pm in the afternoon. Good planning for once resulted in me placing water bottles at a strategic mid point on a gloriously hot day. Having seen The Who in concert in Bristol the evening before I listened to the whole of "Tommy" on my mp3 player, before slipping into the latest edition of Phedippidations. The memory of the intensely private adolescent wonder of hearing Tommy for the first time when I was 14 was acute. Then I pored through the lyrics on the album sleeve at a friend's house - this time I realised I still knew every word, note, chord and into absolutely by heart. It's amazing what the human brain decides to retain. I had to once again marvel at the sheer poetry of Pete Townshend's masterpiece as a I sweated and panted my way through the countryside. What a great idea - running to rock opera.

Friday 30th June - a "discovery out and back" of about 6 miles near Kings Sutton in Northamptonshire. One of the great joys of running is that, provided you do the minimum amount of map checking first, you can more or less run from anywhere that you can park your car in the countryside. It is so much fun to discover somewhere minding only the minimum information needed to retrace steps and the time on your stopwatch. However this time I nearly got myself into trouble as the run started with a mile of gentle downhill and then another half mile down a steep hill. It was a very, very hot late afternoon and inevitably my run ended with 15 minutes of gasping for breath, pouring with sweat and with my thighs burning as if I'd just turned into The Mall in "the London". I just got back to my car in time to hear Germany win another football match on penalties. A bit surreal.

Maybe I should actually enter one of those races at the top of this posting now - do you think?

The Serious stuff starts now!

2006-06-19T07:29:00.000-07:00

18 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
16 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
12 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.
7 weeks to the Regents Park Summer 10k.

Today is day 1 of my 18 week marathon training schedule.
Last week I managed to log 40 miles in my training diary for the first time since my training finished for the 2000 London Marathon.

I also ran my first 15 miler since 2000. This was a "double" out and back along the Ridgeway and Phoenix Trails on a hot midday. My car provided me with an intermediate drinks station, an hour and a half into my two and a half hours on the roads and trails. Steve Runner's podcast no 49 on warm weather running was a most appropriate accompaniment to the last hour a run that ended with a black toenail; chafing sores on my thighs and inevitably the pink stains of "joggers nipple" on my white running vest. I recovered better than hoped for though and I think the supplements I am taking ARE having a positive effect on recovery. More on this later on.
... and I ventured bravely onto the bathroom scales.
I am not sure which one was the most significant step in my desire to become a "proper runner" again. I think it was the scales.
92.1 kg is a pretty frightening number for someone aspiring to run significantly "sub 4" in a marathon just 18 weeks away. At my height, that gives me a bmi of just under 29 and it needs to be 25. I need to drop 11 kgs in weight, to reduce my chances of injury and improve my chances of meeting my time goals. The running will certainly take care of part of it, but I am going to have to make additional adjustments to my "lifestyle" aren't I?
I think I'll cut out five things and see where that leaves me in about 6 weeks time:
1. Alcohol and any other drink containing sugar (except sports drink on long runs)
2. Dairy products containing fat.
3. Savoury snacks, confectionary, chocolate, cakes and biscuits.
4. Bread or toast at breakfast.
5. Any bread except wholemeal.

My running seems to be going well at the moment but I am well aware that work committments are likely to be at their most disruptive for the next 12 weeks or so and I will need to be extremely disciplined to achieve my training goals. Unless I get injured I am confident that I can get in shape, but I felt like this in late 2004 before I suffered a serious ankle sprain on a run through the woods at twilight in a pair of totally unstable cross-country studs. Like many runners before me, my own stupidity may yet keep me off the start line! This is one of the reasons why I intend to set some "intermediate goals". The main one of these is to try to get as near as I can to 1:45 for the half marathon, hopefully in Nottingham on September 10th. That is 8 minute miling - a dream at the moment!

My goal is to aim for a marathon PB in Lausanne of 3:45. That is 8.35 miling. I think my cureent long runs are about a minute per mile slower than this so I am going to be trying to hurt myself for the next 18 weeks....

I looked hard at several training schedules for my marathon and most particularly at those well-proven ones from Hal Higdon, but my irregular, but at times all-consuming work schedule means that I do not have the luxury of regularity. Some weeks it will easy to run 5 or 6 times - others I will struggle to do 3 or 4. I have thus written a schedule that hinges around 3 key sessions per week.
1. A long run of at least 10 and building up to 22 miles. This will be at 15-30 secs per mile slower than my intended marathon pace, ie. around 9 minute miling.
2. A "strength" run of 5 to 9 miles, usually hill sessions; fartlek on grass or mile repetitions with efforts at faster than half marathon pace, ie. sub 8 minute miling .
3. A pace or tempo run of 5 to 10 miles at about 15 -30 secs slower than my intended half-marathon pace, ie. 8.15 to 8.40 miling.

The rest will just be "easy" running. Ha, ha, ha ha!

Training Report 5

2006-06-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

19 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
17 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
13 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.
8 weeks to the Regents Park Summer 10k.

Summer has arrived in the UK and so has the World Cup on our TV's. The sight of highly paid professional athletes wilting in the heat and struggling to hydrate is a graphic demonstration of what all we runners go through once the temperature rises. We each seem to have a tolerance level which we hope edges upwards as the summer progresses. For me it starts at about 20-22 celsius and I can eventually feel comfortable in the mid twenties. In Australia in February, I could eventually deal with 28-30 degrees. Higher I think is impossible. And for me personally there's no alternative but to defer or scale back on my running. Certainly I have to be happy at a slower pace.

This last week it has been in the mid twenties most of the time and having run 38 miles last week, Sunday to Saturday, this week I was happy with 29. Right now I'm contemplating my first run this week and it is about 28 degrees and humid - oh well. Five and a half miles mainly on grass beckons.

I've added another "target race" to the list and have persuaded Lisa, my 22 year old daughter, to run with me. Lisa has been running casually for a few months now, mainly around the roads near to her flat in West London in the evenings. I am pretty sure Lisa has the "runner mentality" - she did a great deal of long distance swimming training when she was in her early teens and interestingly she told me that she has the highest lung capacity amongst her peers. (She's a med student and they get to measure that sort of thing I guess.)
Anyway we have sent off the forms today for the Regents Park 10k race on August 5th, one of a series of saturday morning low key races there throughout the summer. The course will be familiar to me at least. I did a lot of running in the centre of London in training for my 1998 London Marathon and Regents Park provides you with a great deal of relatively flat traffic free paths to run on. There's also the possibility to run hill sessions across the street on Primrose Hill, something that serious club runners from inner London clubs used to do in groups quite frequently on weekday evenings. I once found myself on one of these sessions with a group including a couple of sub-4 milers, under the whip of a "proper" coach! I suffered as can be surmised - it was a long time ago.

I hope I can help Lisa around this one and I may just push out for the last mile, just to measure my strength. We'll see!

The longest run this last week was on the sunday. I took an isotonic drink with me as I ran a hilly 9 mile road circuit through some nearby villages and listened to a couple of podcasts on my mp3 player, both of which unfortunately annoyed me (maybe I was in the wrong mood). One was a "podsafe" music show which contained some pretty good music called Accident Hash, I'm sorry to say that C.C. Chapman's interjections annoyed the hell out of me. The other one was a runner podcast to which the same applied. Both have now received the "thumbs down" unsubscribe in itunes on my laptop. This never happens to me with Phedippidations and once again I have to thank Steve Runner for having the best "Goofy Little Podcast" I have yet found. No. 48 about "becoming a good animal" helped me through an extremely sweaty 40 minutes last thursday evening. Thanks, Steve, for finding such fascinating material and treating all your subjects and correspondents which such humility and respect. Keep up the GLP's!

I have found another good podcast which appears three times a week and although they rarely last longer than 20 minutes, 3 together can make "a run". It features a series of interviews with endurance athletes which wll take your mind away from your own struggle with your cardio-respiratory system, as you marvel at what can be achieved with true dedication. Just click on this link to Endurance Planet.

I think this is my last week of running before I go onto a proper 18 week schedule for my marathon. These five weeks of "preamble" have given me more opportunities than I thought I would get to run at weekends and I have also managed several runs of 10 miles or more, which put me ahead of where most schedules start. For this reason (and my inability to run when I work at weekends), I may have to adapt a schedule considerably. Some thought needed on this during the week - probably while watching evening world cup games.

Training Report 4

2006-06-01T06:12:00.000-07:00

21 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
29 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
15 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.

Well this was a pretty good "week" all in all. An easier work schedule decided by some pretty torrential rain meant that I could fit in a couple more runs. In seven days I managed an eight miler, a four miler, two sevens and yesterday an eleven miler - that's 37 miles! Far too much in a week on the state of my fitness, but until yesterday afternoon, I was really feeling no ill effects.

Right now I'm reaching for paper tissues every 30 seconds or so and have just succombed to some of those "night and day nurse pills". Yes - I know that a dramatic increase in mileage stuffs up the immune system and I got plenty of colds back in the eighties when I was a more "serious" runner. I have suddenly taken a much more active interest in the nutritional aspects of increased training loads and the other day re-discovered a weighty tome on my running bookshelf that I had purchased in a sports bookstore in Virginia in 1998. It is Dr Michael Colgan's book on Sports Nutrition. At the ripe old age of 50 and with several years of neglect to my running body, I thought I might need a bit of help this time around. In particular with the pounds beginning to slough off, I don't want to lose more muscle mass than I need to - so the Glucosamine Sulphate and Omega 3 Fish Oil for my joints have now been added to by a Chromium and l-Carnitine supplement and some Probiotic Multivits. Goodness knows I've never been a pill popper, but with the cold cures I've just counted 9 pills today before 2 in the afternoon! There remains considerable controversy about the value of these supplements and I have an open mind at the moment. We'll see how it goes for 6 weeks or so with this and I will try to increase the complex carbs in my diet, particularly fresh and raw fruits and vegetables. Wish me luck!

I think my comfortable training pace is now up to around 9 minute miling and although much of my running is based on guessed distances, I do run on a couple of measured courses around the village. My challenge is going to be to run long runs slower than marathon pace as I build mileage. I've glimpsed at the Hal Higdon programme I intend to start following in about 2-3 weeks tim and I see the long run each week follows the "hard" run - a cunning device to ensure lsd is just that on the long run. Long, Slow and Distant! I'll be shuffling around on dead legs I'm sure!

I can see I may have to invest in some form of exact measuring / pace indicator / hrm device before too long so I can track progress. The idea is forming in my head that I should really be aiming to better my marathon pb of 3:46 in Lausanne, even if I have to back off on the day based on conditions. In particular the altitude (about 350m) and the rolling hilly course may be something I will underestimate the effect of until the half way mark. Obviously running without injury and illness and dropping quite a lot of weight will be key to running this type of time, but my long runs are more promising at this stage than I had expected. Yesterday's 11 miler was admittedly on more or less totally flat terrain around Spalding in Lincolnshire, but it was cold and windy and I had few difficulties keeping up a good pace. The self-awareness of slipping "into the zone" after about 45 minutes was a nice sensation. No niggles, no soreness, no twinges - just the common cold flooding my system hours later!

I see the Steve Runner's podcast is on vitamins this week. No run today, but I think about an hour with the headphones in on friday afternoon would be good to clear this cold from my system, don't you?

The Phedippidations RC, this blog and my "noble cause".

2006-05-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

I think I've joined a running club......
How did that happen exactly?
What are the club colours? Where are the grainy photos with the guys in the long shorts, with the brown leather spikes on the cinder track? Do we have club records? Which cross country league do we compete in? When is "club night"? Do we have our own race?

....Yes, I know we do have our own race....it's on my birthday!

Once again I went for a 7 miler with my mp3 player carrying the latest of Steve Runner's wonderful podcasts (number 46 I think). I was just turning back into the village into the wind when Steve started to talk to me - yes directly to me. For some weeks now he has run alongside me occasionally and so have the guys who have called him up, but I thought I was hidden in the pack and hadn't been noticed.

Thanks, Steve, for mentioning this blog and my desire to run in Lausanne on October 22. But thanks most of all for publicising my "noble cause" and taking the trouble to look up the Uganda Village Project on the web via the links.

Fellow Phedip RC members who have a look at the blog via the link on Steve's site may wonder where the fund raising page is. Well, I decided that I wouldn't get the begging bowl / sponsorship form out until there were about 12 weeks to go to my marathon. The main reason is that we are pushing the fund-raising face to face through the day job and when we switch into "sponsor coffeeman-running mode" we want to do it on all fronts.

However if anyone is desperate to learn more and help "Get Ugandan Orphans through School" right now, just click on this hypertext link to our donation site at hvcoffee.com. More details can also be found on the hvcoffee blog.

Oh and I've figured out when club runs are - they are whenever you have Phedippidations in your headphones and your running shoes on!

Training Report 3

2006-05-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

22 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
20 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
16 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.

Yes there are some more goals on the list now. I hope that this blog helps me stick to them as the lack of sunday runs in my weekend work season means I can't rely on the inspiration of my two trusted running partners Paul (Stockport Shuffler) MacDowell and Trevor ('wor Trev) White. Together we ran London together twice, as well as the entire length of the Ridgeway, Grand Union Canal and Thames Path National trails.

This was another week when I missed a day's intended running, self-destructing on my plan to hit the 30 mile mark for a sunday to saturday week. But I gained one back on sunday when my weekend event got curtailed. A nice lonely road run of 6.5 miles through the surrounding villages - in Noah's Ark friendly conditions!

When I finished last week's report I was off on an intended 12 miler along the ridgeway. Well I did it, loved it, avoided the field with the bull in it and finished in pretty good shape if completely knackered. I've decided to take a half-litre sports drink along with me for the ride on my longer runs - something I didn't bother with in the past. The aim is to aid recovery and alos imitate the way I expect to run a marathon. This and the mp3 player I would have scoffed at 20 years ago. What would Alf Tupper have thought?

I am truly fortunate to have the Ridgeway and the Chiltern hills so close to where I live. Although I have to drive to a start point, the reward is miles of challenging offroad terrain (mainly rolling hills in and out of patches of woodland and pasture). It is amazingly deserted particularly on a weekday and thr trail is invariably obvious with many alternatives available. This spring it is dry though and this means the soft trails that you may expect in May after a typically wet April and March are now rutted and uneven. I found this quite tiring last wednesday and my ankles and feet certainly got a good two hour work out.

Eric Clapton at the Albert Hall was just awesome, but I have to admit to feeling my aching legs as I climb the stairs to our seats in the circle. eric looks like he keeps himself fit - do you think he's a runner?

Today's 5.5 mile mixed terrain run confirmed that the mystery thigh twinge of last night was a bit of a disappearing running injury. A whinge not a twinge!

Another week of running around work commitments beckons. Let's see if I can hit that 30 miles now?

Thanks to Steve Runner again. Your latest wonderful podcast accompanied sunday's six and a half miler in the rain. I think I'll christen that route my Phedippidations 10k Round! I don't know if the rest of us are kind hearted, but you, my friend have enough of that for most of us anyway.

Injuries, Niggles and things to ignore

2006-05-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

Ooh - that didn't feel right.
What is that twinge?
Is that just stiffnesss?
Why did that happen?
Ow - I'd better slowdown.
Is it my shoes?
Did I stretch enough / too much?

One of the most difficult things about returning to running is that you begin to remember the aches and pains. No not that constant discomfort emanating somewhere in the brain that tries to tell you to "Stop running, you're damaging me!". I mean the "mechanical" problems associated with trying to train an unwilling body into pounding out the miles without complaint.

It also gets worse as you get older, but thankfully you are better equipped with the mental skills to deal with it all.

Since re-starting a proper training regime I have had to deal with the following. My worst fears are in the brackets:

1. Pretty constant stiff calf muscles (Compartment syndrome - total rest).

2. Soreness in my decrepit, much abused left ankle joint (I know I need orthotics).

3. A sore right hip (Onset of arthritis. Hip Bursa forming?)

4. Sore left knee (First attack of runner's knee)

5. A sore left thigh muscle (Mystery injury?)

Most of these were worse on getting up the next morning and at the time of writing this I am on number 5 and wondering if I should run today. I want to but worry slightly at the onset of soreness in an area I have never had problems with before. Did I over-stretch before my steady five miler last night?

Sorting the wheat of a proper injury from the chaff of these aches and pains is a bit like trying to evesdrop on a conversation across a crowded tube carriage. Too much background noise?

So how to know when to back off...I never met a runner who said he had the balance between copping out on training and running through minor injuries cracked! It's all a bit trial and error, and almost impossible to judge if you are a beginner with no memory of when these "niggles" just disappeared at some point during a run.

I just do my usual - back off for a day or two (more doesn't do any good without treatment if it is a real injury), take some anti-inflammatory pills after the run, keep well hydrated.

This time in my marathon training I've also decided to give my aging joints a bit of help. In my training for th 1998 London I took daily Glucosamine Sulphate tablets and I've just started this again, with the addition of some Omega 3 Fish Oil tabs. Hopefully together they will help in re-building and strengthening tissue in the joints. We'll see.

One thing last night's onset of thigh soreness did tell me though. I was flirting with the idea of running a local 5k race tonight and I think this has just been shelved - a shame really, but I know then I would probably return with a "proper" injury.

Training Report 2

2006-05-17T00:33:00.000-07:00

23 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
It's been a bit of an erratic week for me as life yet again got in the way of running. Starting to train for a marathon knowing that all your weekends are fully occupied until race day might be thought to be a bit absurd, but I've managed somehow to convince myself that I can turn wednesdays and thursdays into saturdays and sundays.
We'll see how naive that looks when the mileage starts to climb in a few weeks time!
I download the Phedippidations podcast by Steve Runner every week and that gives me an hour of inspiration to keep on track. It's a perfect mixture of training tips, listeners' anecdotes and mishap stories which must strike a chord with all of us who have run, lapsed, got fat, run again, lapsed again, set goals, failed, achieved and got injured! I continually wonder exactly where I am on this journey. Could it be the start of a "second wind" of proper running?
One thing is sure, if I am going to achieve my goals, there are going to be a lot of weeks of 5 consecutive days of running followed by weekends without a run. Last weekend saw my mileage lapse a bit mostly due to a mid week rest day. Slap that wrist! I was feeling a bit jaded so I am excusing myself for the moment. Once I go onto a "proper" training programme with 18 weeks to go, I hope I can be harder on myself.
So, at the time of writing I am facing day 3 of a promised 5 consecutive days running. I am aware of a few aches and pains, notably a nagging stiffness in my left calf and a slight soreness in my right hip after each run. I hope that the years of up and down mean I can keep on the edge of progressive training whilst filtering the true warnings out my 50 year old physique's cries of wolf!
Yesterday evening I ran my first true intervals workout since I was in training for the 1998 London Marathon. It's strange how the mental attitude comes back from some hidden archive in the brain and other sessions playback in your head. I know I have to improve speed and strength. I think I already know that I will be able to finish the marathon unless I get injured, but if I can significantly raise my training pace along the way, my sub 4 hour goal will become achievable. My basic speed improved so much in my first year of serious running 20 years ago and I am fairly confident that I can also make some much more modest progress this time.
So the lunatic within headed for a hidden (and thankfully traffic free!) hill in our village with my stopwatch and bottle of lucozade sport. I ran up it's 550 - 600 metre or so length 6 times, giving myself just the jog back down to recover. It really, really hurt! Burning lungs weren't helped by the drifting smoke of a farmer's bonfire about half way up, but my brain just took this in as another obstacle to run through. The memories came flooding back - these sessions are about mental toughness, maintaining running form and energy conservation. You expect to end them exhausted and I wasn't disappointed! I gave myself a pat on the back for mental toughness and I just have the feeling that this is a sharper weapon in my running armoury than it was 20 years ago. I hope so, as the signs are that I'm going to need it.
Listening to Rocco di Luca and Bruce Springsteen's Seeger Sessions on my mp3 player was a weird juxtaposition to my grunting and pumping. I also managed to keep the head roll down in order to keep the headphones in. I wonder how Paula Radcliffe would manage that!
By the way I averaged just under 2.20 on the hills and will repeat this session bi-weekly to see how I'm doing.
Today (your wednesday - my saturday) orders me to go 12 miles or two hours on the Ridgeway.
After those hills - more hills! But I have a great reward tonight, with tickets to see Eric Clapton at The Royal Albert Hall. Now I wonder what I should load onto the mp3 player today.........

Training Report 1

2006-05-09T02:21:00.000-07:00

24 weeks to go to the Lausanne Marathon.
After some fairly regular running in the early part of the year, a good phase in Australia and a serious lapse of 2-3 weeks, I have now spent a fairly disciplined 4 weeks getting myself up to 25 miles a week plus. In the past two weeks I've made some good progress. I won't bore you with training diary type stuff. Other than:
- Did my first 10 mile plus run for about a year on friday May 5th, all offroad along the Ridgeway path between Princes Risborough and Chinnor. Plenty of hills, inspiring views, blossoms on the trees and even a "Beware of the Bull" sign on a gate as I entered the field. (My coffee blog should have that stuck at the top perhaps.) He'd never have caught me anyway......
- Last night I decided I'd better see if my ambition to run sub 4 hours in Lausanne was in any way realistic. Like most people I run on un-measured courses and only have a notional idea of my running pace from my stopwatch and the "feel" of the run. Last night I decided on a "tempo" run on a measured 7 mile out & back course on the roads and came back in under 58 minutes. I concentrated on maintaining my breathing and rhythm / running form. As it was the first time I'd done anything like this for about 5 years, I was chuffed to bits when my training diary spreadsheet flashed up 3.51 in the "marathon predictor" column. I like the 7 mile distance for this sort of run as it means you cannot go "eyeballs out" from the start otherwise the second half just won't happen, but it is quite horrific to think that I used to knock these out in 40-45 minutes!
- Having spent decades in contempt of people who run with headphones in their ears (not "proper" runners of course), I've now become surprisingly and pretty much instantly converted to running with an mp3 player. I guess most people just shuffle selections from their music collection, but I've found that podcasts are the way to go for me. The 10 miler on the ridgeway had birds singing in the background but Steve Runner was in my ears all the way. Steve's podcast of the Boston Marathon with him "blowing chunks" every 4-5 miles is one of the best bits of reality black humour I have heard in years. His crossing of the finish line brought a tear to my eyes. Another one I have found great is Ritmo Latino, just under an hour of sometimes surprising latin rhythms that supports your running rhythm perfectly. I am sure that the soundtrack now improves running form and puts off that moment in the run when inevitably you wish it would just be over.

What's the plan, Charlie?

2006-05-05T08:08:00.000-07:00

So....I am already running and, I think, my overall fitness is fairly good, but I don't want to take the start gun in a marathon if it means being out on the roads for more than 4 hours. Goodness knows, if I had kept to my running in the late eighties and nineties, I should have been able to get close to the elusive 3 hours. So more than 4 won't do!
This means that my training will have to incorporate sessions to bring back some speed to my legs, 20 years after I first found it. I'll also have to run a half marathon in 1.45 or less as a confidence booster. This is going to be hard as I probably have to work every weekend from now to the weekend before Lausanne
I used to enjoy reading about running and trawl the web regularly even now for hints on training and schedules. My problem for the last 20 years has been keeping up a regular mileage, not knowing how to plan my training. I've embarked on a few plans only to fall off the plan after a few weeks and then have to give it up due to injury, other committments or my own lack of self motivation.
This time I've decided on the Hal Higdon 18 week intermediate schedule - that would start around the third week of June. I think I'll call that H week.
The plan is then to get to around 30 miles a week with a 10-12 mile long run and a sub 9 minute mile tempo run by then.
So now it is near the end of H week minus 7!

How I got to here....

2006-05-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

I became a "jogger" in about 1982 and graduated into "running" at the East London Half Marathon on an unseasonably hot day in March 1985, posting a promising time just under 1.30.
After that I got fairly serious about my running. My job on the commodities market in the city gave me a two hour lunch break and I replaced lounging about the office and the frequent trip to the pub with a daily run from a squash club next to London Bridge. Usually this turned into a race with several friends towing me along the Thames and eventually various circuits of the Royal Parks added in.
Road race times started tumbling, but lower leg injuries soon became the bane of my runners life, mainly due to weak "footballers ankles" that I had gained playing rugby on hard surfaces in my student years.
During 1986 at the age of 30, and as a member of Woodford Green AC, I got my half marathon down below 1.18 at the St. Neots half and ran a 10 mile in less than 58 minutes on an airfield. I also was a member of a corporate team that won the Emil Zatopek challenge relay in the city two years running. As this was organised by David Bedford and based at Cannons Health Club, we felt pretty good about it at the time!
It is fair to say that my attempts to keep running since that "high" have represented a steady decline in times and running volume, with a few high spots. It didn't help that my club running career in the UK stopped dead in 1987 when I took a job in Geneva, Switzerland.
I waited until my 43rd year before running a marathon, London, in 1998 on a charity bond place.
I repeated the dose in 2000 when to my shock I actually got in on the ballot. My times of 3.46 and 3.50 are probably "good for my age" but way below the potential I showed in my early thirties. Oh well!
So this year, having not run in more than 4 competitive races in 10 years, I've decided, at the age of 50 to take on another marathon, in Lausanne on October.