Beginner’s mind is a Zen concept about approaching situations with a non-judgemental, open-minded attitude. There’s a couple of stories which begin to explain it and both involve cups of tea!
In the first teaching, a university professor who has been studying Zen teachings goes to see the Master. On arrival, he states he wishes to learn about Zen and begins to tell the Master all that he already knows. The Master listens and, after a while, suggests they drink tea.
While the professor talks, the Master begins to pour. The cup begins to fill with tea and the Master continues to pour. The professor continues to explain what he has learned about Zen and soon the cup is nearly full. The Master continues to pour as the professor continues on. The tea reaches the brim of the cup and then begins to overflow. The professor’s voice falters as the Master continues to pour and the tea spills out of the saucer onto the table. The professor stops, thinking perhaps his explanations have distracted the Master, but the pouring continues. As the tea runs off the table onto the floor, the professor is unable to stand it any longer and says “Stop, stop, can you not see the cup is full and no more will go in?”
The Master stops, looks up and replies “Like the cup, your mind is already full of what you know and there is no room left until you empty it of your ideas and preconceptions.”
What I often see among my running friends is a propensity to struggle because they have become set in their routines. Often when they return from a running break they restart with a schedule that is not much smaller than when they stopped. Or if they’re struggling to make progress, they make only small changes to the training in the hope it will create some kind of large change. Or the same injury flairs up repeatedly. All of it is not that far off Einstein’s “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. None of them seem able to take stock of the fact that what they’re doing isn’t working for them and go back to humble beginnings to build from the ground up.
In the second Zen teaching there is more tea to be drunk. Or rather, more tea to be poured into four different cups.
The first cup is upside down. When the teacher attempts to pour tea, it cannot, of course, go in the cup but instead splashes off the upturned china. This is like the student who is so blocked they cannot receive any wisdom.
The second cup is the right way up but has a hole in its base. When the tea is poured in, it immediately drains away. This is the student who says they want to learn, who listens to advice but then walks away but doesn’t implement or think any further on it. The advice has gone in one ear, out the other.
The third cup is normal but it contains a fine layer of dirt. When the tea is poured in it becomes muddy and undrinkable. This is the student who is already full of thoughts and ideas – the one who lacks beginner’s mind. They’re not receptive to new ideas, but only willing to listen to those which confirms their own preconceived beliefs and ideas.
The fourth cup represents the perfect student. It is clean, there are no cracks or holes and it is the right way up. When tea is poured in, it is retained and perfect to drink.
While experienced runners are not new students coming to a teacher to learn how to run; when they are struggling the situation they find themselves in is unfamiliar. If it were familiar, they would know how to run themselves to fitness and there would be no struggle.
Unbeknownst to them they are students approaching the master. They need to open their eyes and take stock of their situation. They need to consider all options before taking action, not just the ones they’ve become accustomed to. Just like the clean, upturned, perfectly formed cup they need an openness to learning anew and to rebuild using methods they may have forgotten from when they were younger or beginners.
Every day of your life is the first day of the rest of your life. The universe is gradual decay and entropy. You have to keep looking at it with fresh eyes and beginner’s mind to remain ahead of it.
(While these stories are often told by Zen practitioners, I have relied on Dr Joseph Parent’s versions in “Zen Golf”)
Running 10Ks, half marathons and marathons in the 1990s my attempts to race faster were limited. I’d enter a race at one or two months’ notice believing all I had to do was get fit enough to cover the distance and rely on the speed I’d built up from playing other sports and some shorter runs. I never thought about it any more deeply than that. There was no connection or systematic way to string together training sessions, and the biggest downfall was that I never trained regularly for longer than a few months. Other sports or interests would drop into my life, running would stop until the next lull gave me the impetus to enter another race and start training again.
My first systematic attempt to race faster wasn’t in running, it came on the Indoor Rower, which I wrote about in detail here, when I tried to improve my 2,000m time. I suppose because rowing isn’t something you do naturally like running, I felt I needed to research how to improve at it. My research was done, after a lunchtime at the gym, over sandwiches on my return to the office, accessing the infant “World Wide Web”. It was so young, Google wasn’t even the search engine of choice then; I used Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and a meta-engine called Dogpile. I was lucky, working in an IT department, to have a fast internet connection and a management that didn’t mind how long our lunch hours were, because they were usually off playing football, squash or at the pub on a Friday!
Another stroke of luck was to stumble across Stephen Seiler’s MAPP website. He was a university researcher with a Masters thesis about rats running on treadmills and their response to exercise. But he was also a rower interested in applying his knowledge of exercise physiology to his sport. I lapped up the information on his website and began to follow his “Waves of Change” system of building fitness by rowing hard intervals to push my body to get faster. Although this post is going to refer to rowing often, stick with it because it’s very relevant to running as you’ll come to see.
Another of my internet searches turned up an interview with Sir Steve Redgrave which left me puzzled for years afterwards. Unfortunately I’ve never been able to relocate this piece and would love to reread it, to view it with fresh eyes.
To the younger generations, I suspect Redgrave is now unknown or simply a footnote in history. But growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, watching the Olympics, he was one of Britain’s few reliable gold medal prospects. Golds were rare in those days, nowhere near the twenty-seven won in Rio. In fact, twenty-seven is how many golds Great Britain totalled in the five Olympics Redgrave participated in, and he won 18% of them! Five consecutive Olympic gold medals that began in Los Angeles (1984) in the men’s coxed fours then continued in the coxless pairs in Seoul (1988) and Barcelona (1992). In Atlanta (1996) he and Matthew Pinsent claimed Britain’s solitary gold medal and then it was onto Sydney where at age thirty-eight, Redgrave claimed his final gold as part of the coxless fours. Over a similar period, Redgrave won another nine World Championship gold medals as well as silvers and bronzes. He was undoubtedly our premier Olympian to that moment and, as the pre-eminent British rower, you can understand why I felt any advice I could glean from an interview with him would be worthwhile knowledge.
The interview appeared after he won his 5th Olympic gold medal and Redgrave talked about how, after meeting Jürgen Gröbler for the first time in 1991-92, his training changed because of it. Gröbler had moved to England when his native East Germany disintegrated with the fall of Communism and, with him, he brought knowledge from the nation’s coaching programmes. The East Germans were so dominant that, even now, thirty years after ceasing to exist, they still lead the rowing World Championship medal table with ninety-four golds to second place Italy’s eighty-five. While some of that success is explained by a state doping programme, the methods the East Germans used were also significantly different to how Redgrave was training.
From what I can glean a typical season’s training for Redgrave in the 1980s was rowing 20-40 min fast efforts two or three times each week, along with hard intervals every spring and summer throughout the racing season. Everything was geared to pushing to get faster, the runner’s equivalent of Tempo runs and Speedwork. But Gröbler had Redgrave rowing the majority of his training at very low stroke rates which felt like he was barely putting in any effort. This was as low as 14-18 strokes per minute which is significantly less than the 40-50 he might be reaching during a race. There are many runners who baulk at a similar concept of easy running because they believe you have to train fast to race fast.
Gröbler and Redgrave
Redgrave, himself, was sceptical about this method, but he was also intelligent enough to realise he needed to commit to the training if he was going to make a fair judgement of its effectiveness. The following March, after a winter of low stroke rate steady rowing, he attended the Thames “Head of the River” race which, by his own admission, he’d never done well in. Gröbler told him to start easy before turning on the power. Long story short, Redgrave won and was sold on the training. He stated that he and his crewmates followed Gröbler’s methods from then on.
So to recap, up to this point, Redgrave’s training in the 1980s, when he won Olympic golds and World Championships, had been training hard intervals each year to reach top form then dropping back over the following winter before building up again the following year. With Gröbler he did hours of slow training and gradually improved year-on-year and still won Olympic golds in the 1990s.
This was the itch I couldn’t scratch for years – how could rowing hard intervals in the 1980s lead to success but a gradual build in the 1990s also lead to gold medals? Surely there’s only one true method to success with coaches/athletes using variations on it. How could two significantly different methods be effective at winning gold medals throughout Redgrave’s career?
In subsequent years I would come across articles on running which talked about building endurance through slower training to get faster. Yet whenever I tried it, I could never get the huge benefits being promised. But the literature on endurance training was so prevalent, I felt I was missing something. I understood it was important but at the back of my mind there was always the paradox of Redgrave winning through two seemingly opposite methods.
Stephen Seiler’s MAPP website even made reference to this question on a page called “Understanding Intervals” where he posed the question “Which is better, Interval training or Steady-state training?” In it he firstly explains how doing interval work is effective at getting more work done. For example, you’ll be able to run 8x200m in a faster time than you can run a single mile. But having established interval training allows you to do more work at faster paces, he tells the story of how East German rowers were training with slow, steady rowing throughout the 1980s and winning championships. He tells of how Kenyan distance runners do vast amounts of their training at slower paces. So once again, everything pointed to the best endurance athletes doing massive amounts of steady state training to be fast. And yet whenever I tried training slow, I couldn’t get it to work for me even though all the books and articles seemed to suggest it was the route to success. Meanwhile there are numerous articles telling you of the benefits of running hills and speedwork. Very confusing to try and figure out how the two things fit together.
In the last few years, I’ve finally been able to resolve this paradox of how Redgrave was able to win two Olympics with one method and then three more with another. It turns out I wasn’t looking or thinking about what his event entailed. The typical 2,000m rowing race lasts under six minutes for an elite man, it’s the equivalent of a middle-distance running race, somewhere between the mile and 3,000m. When Roger Bannister became the first man to break four minutes for the mile he did it with twice weekly interval sessions where he ran ten laps of the athletic track during his lunch break and only totalled fifteen miles each week. Basically this is the nature of events that last under eight minutes, it’s possible to reach very good times off a relatively low volume of training and Bannister’s training is how Redgrave trained in the 1980s.
But this training is outdated, I doubt it would be possible to be a world class miler today off the low volume Bannister ran. The decade after he broke the four minute mile in 1953, Arthur Lydiard’s runners began to win the Olympics in the 800m and mile by running a hundred miles per week. This was where the East German rowers learned about the benefits of Steady State training and why Jürgen Gröbler converted Redgrave to this type of training in the 1990s.
The change in method also explains Redgrave’s success in the Head of the River race. This race lasts between 15-20 minutes and is much closer to the demands of a parkrun for faster runners. Redgrave’s previous lack of success in this race is because hard intervals are only one piece of the training required for longer events. He needed to build a base of training to support his speed, so he converted some of his speed into endurance to be able to last three times longer in the Head of the River race. That’s what Gröbler’s Steady State training gave him, more endurance.
But this still doesn’t fully answer the question of how you can win off both types of training. What I missed (or more likely wasn’t explained) about the gradual build-up method is that, as Redgrave got nearer to the championships, he would still go back to rowing hard intervals to ensure he peaked at medal time. He was essentially still winning with hard intervals but there was now no dropping back the following winter because he was building an endurance base. The big advantage of this base is it allows you to recover quicker between interval sessions and train harder during them. If Redgrave had to row through rounds of qualifying and repechages then he was better able to withstand their stresses and strains.
The middle distance events are such that they’re about finding a balance between sprint speed and longer distance endurance. You can come at it from either direction. Bannister came at the mile from the speed end and relied on his endurance to develop over the course of his running career and tempo runs. The Lydiard approach was to come at it from the endurance end and then perk things up with intervals to get enough speed into the legs for competitive racing. As I say, it’s the middle ground of events – you’d never train for sprints through endurance, you never train for the marathon through pure speedwork. You have to train at both ends of the spectrum for middle distance.
BONUS FACTS – One final bonus from my rowing reading. Redgrave mentioned he occasionally did runs along the river towpath. He stated he’d run ten miles in an hour and a half-marathon in 1hr30! Even more impressively his Sydney foursome partner James Cracknell, who is 6’4” and 15 stone, ran the 2017 London Marathon in 2hr43 at age 45. Nothing is impossible if you know how to train properly.
Simple rule: never run hard more than three times per week. Use the rest of the week for easy running and do it often to offset the effects of the hard runs. You might be able to do a fourth hard run once in a while, or if you’re still young and full of growth hormones and getting quick recovery, but as a rule, three is the maximum.
But what do I mean by “running hard”? Obviously if you go to parkrun or a race, that’s running hard. If you do an interval or speedwork session, that’s running hard. If you do some kind of tempo or marathon pace workout that’s running hard. Anything that gets you breathing hard or sweating counts as running hard. Introducing a new type of session, e.g. a long run, counts as running hard because your body isn’t accustomed to the work involved. It’ll need time to recover from that.
When Paula Radclifffe was at the peak of her marathon training she worked to a nine day cycle with one workout every three days. It’s the workouts that get you faster but you need the recovery days to allow the body to rebuild. Slot in too many hard sessions in place of easy runs and you’re making it hard for the body to adapt.
Often though, what runners think of as easy sessions actually count as ‘running hard’. If you arrive home sweating, or your breathing is raised, or don’t feel like you could do it again, then it’s probable you’ve been running hard. It’s always better to err on the side of caution and run what feels like ‘too easy’. Generally the only runners who undertrain are those who don’t train regularly.
So that’s my simple rule – maximum of three workouts each week with the rest of the week spent recovering and building a base. By all means don’t even do three each week, Paula didn’t. I’ve seen myself and other runners make decent progress off just one hard run per week. But start to understand that a hard session is anything that’s more than “too easy” and start limiting yourself.
Things are coming together at last. I’m in the final two weeks of the plan and tapering towards a couple of 800m time trials in April to see whether the training has paid off. I already know it has and it’ll be good to see it quantified in my time trial, but that’s for next month’s update!!
Although I began following Jack Daniels’ 800m training plan at the start of December, I actually consider training started back on 21st September when I went back to a steady diet of gentle runs at ten minute mile pace, subsequently introducing strides and a faster session midweek.
So really this has been six months of consistent training. I wanted to write “hard work” but apart from putting in big efforts during the twice weekly workouts, and a difficult spell around the start of February when my body was struggling to adapt, compounded by atrocious weather, I don’t believe it’s been hard work. I’ve looked forward to the training, enjoyed it and it’s not felt like a burden at all.
I realised over this past month my body has begun to feel fit and strong again. I hadn’t appreciated a lack of regular fast running over the past 3-4 years has allowed muscles to weaken. That translated in my day-to-day living as minor aches or pains walking up the stairs, or pushing with my hands to get up off the sofa. Nothing drastic, just minor little things that most people put down to the effects of ageing. In some ways they are the effects of ageing but not irreversibly as those people would have you believe. The takeaway is if you stop using it, you lose it. I actually now feel as strong and fit as I did ten years ago, and would like to believe I’m as fit as I was in my twenties although I know that’s not quantifiably true. My running still isn’t as fast it was when I started parkrunning at forty but I can see it’s getting back there and I believe it’s going to surpass that because of what I’ve learned since then.
March’s training has been focusing on what Jack calls T- and FR- pace running which stand for Tempo and Fast Rep. After adjusting for the expected improvement in fitness, these have been mile repeats at 7:12/mile and short intervals (200-600m) at 5:38/mile respectively. To put this into perspective when I began in December the Fast Reps were 44½ secs per 200m, now they’re at 42secs. Training has been going well enough that I’ve been overcooking these with some coming in at sub-40! I even managed a 37.45s effort (5:01/mile).
One of the problems I faced for T-paced sessions is ideally needing somewhere flat where I could keep pace and effort consistent. In other years, I would have gone to the beach or Poole Park, but with lockdown ongoing, as well as the possibility of sand on the prom or people out for a walk; I decided to look closer to home. The roads right outside my front door are fairly flat and quiet, but I’ve always resisted doing intervals on them for no explicable reason other than I always think of warm-up as taking me away from home. Circumstances led me to conclude this would be the best place for the training. Maximising the area available to me, I created a loop measuring 900m which had no sharp turns and only minor ups and downs. On some sessions, it meant I ended up doing a good 10+ laps of the same roads which, I suspect many people would find boring, but I hardly noticed as I was focused on my breathing, pace and sometimes trying to reach the end without completely falling apart! This ‘track’ worked well apart from, where I run in the road my early morning sessions brought me into conflict with people driving off to work.
Around mid-month, my legs began to feel strong and, the walking up the stairs with ease I talked about, came into my awareness. I could tell a step change in my fitness was about to come through and when it arrived my easy running pace improved by 20 secs/mile. It felt wonderful and that improvement then fed into the next session of T-pace running coming in at sub-7 min/mile rather than 7:10. In turn it made the fastest intervals feel a lot easier although not necessarily faster!
I’m not going to do my usual breakdown of successful / failed repeats until next month’s post but my attention was drawn to a bizarre set of times on last week’s 200s. I run these back and forth along a road which I’ve come to realise, has slight undulations to it, and these result in one direction being marginally faster than the other. The four efforts in the slower direction were 41.66 / 41.66 / 42.20 / 41.66 secs. I’m sure you can see the bizarreness of the fastest three being exactly the same time to one-hundredth of a second, it simply cannot be a coincidence. And if I then tell you the first effort on the previous session was … yes, you’ve guessed it … 41.66secs; there’s some kind of limitation going on somewhere in all of this! I’m not sure what it is, my legs were fatigued that day but in the other direction I ran 41.77 / 40.05 / 39.33 / 37.45 secs so it was possible to go faster under the right conditions. Bizarre numbers aside, it’s been a good month’s training.
I’ve got two more workouts to do in April, then the time trials begin. I’m only intending to do two mid-month but this will be weather dependent. If I feel I’ve underperformed I may slot in a third. Analysing my training times, I’m hopeful I can break 2min40 but I’ll report back whatever the fruits of my harvest are!
My Sundays orienteering were spent with my best friend, Malcolm. On a couple of occasions our friend Steve joined us but it didn’t last, I suspect Malcolm’s parents didn’t want the responsibility of all three of us. I was enough to handle as the add-on and Steve had kind of self-invited himself so he got the boot. One thing I recall is him pointing out how noisily I ran, I think his words were “sounds like a baby elephant” and in fairness he wasn’t wrong about it.
I’ve never been a quiet runner. Sometimes I’m aware of this more than at others. I noticed it on my Sunday long run a few months back as I ran up into Broadstone Broadway and my feet were slapping so loudly on the pavement that an old woman looked round and commented that she’d been expecting a herd of runners to come through!
Another morning, as I was warming up on the way to my 800m speedwork session, I was hammering down the road closing in on a slower runner. She looked round well before I reached her, I assume because she heard the commotion, so as I passed I could only think to comment “Yes. I’m a noisy one, aren’t I?”
The problem with being a noisy runner isn’t so much being embarrassed by other’s opinions (although it can be); it’s that making a loud noise implies there is a big force going straight into the pavement rather than being used to propel you along. It’s said that a group of Kenyan runners will go past with a light tappity-tap sound. Of course it would be useful to be able to see this “noise as ground force” quantified in the lab but that’s the realm of university departments which few of us have access to.
After all these years of running I’d come to the conclusion that perhaps I’m simply a noisy runner, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m doing anything wrong. But then one Sunday morning my legs were relatively fresh and I noticed I wasn’t as noisy as normal. I thought about it for the first mile or so, noticing what happened on the first incline (stayed relatively quiet) before my attention shifted to rising breathing and heart-rates.
Three miles into the run I’d reached Gravel Hill and bumped into Mike and Nigel from Poole AC. Naturally I tried to look relaxed with good posture as we passed each other. But once past, with the road empty at that early hour, I noticed I’d become noisy again. I was on a downward stretch so I wondered if that could account for the difference, Realising I was stretching forward for each step, I experimented by tilting my pelvis back slightly and the noise disappeared. I returned to the lighter tappity-tap which I’d begun the run with. I also noticed that my left glute began to ache as it became more engaged.
I tried to maintain this feeling of pelvic tilt and glute engagement through the rest of the run. By the time I reached mile eight, I started to get a pain in my core muscles to the right of my belly button but it disappeared after a minute or two. I pushed through the rest of the run concentrating on my form.
Now I should point out that what worked for me is not an instruction for others. It may be useful but it depends on what they’re already doing. When I say that I tilted my pelvis back, it may be that it was already tilted too far forward (“posterior pelvic tilt”) and needed to be tilt to get more neutral. For another runner, making an adjustment from neutral would give them an undesirable anterior pelvic tilt.
The important thing to understand is I did two things which both revolve around awareness. Firstly I was listening to how noisy and slappy my feet had become so I played around with my pelvic tilt. Doing that I was then able to find a position which reduced the noise and where I could feel more engagement of my left glute. Using awareness in this way can be a great way to improve your running. It remains to be seen how this affects my running in the longterm but I’m hoping I can get the swiftness and lightness of a gazelle rather than the baby elephant!
Something different today. Usually I write about running but I’m going to looking back to one of the first sports I played seriously – thirty years ago in 1991 – it was squash. I have no recollection of the specific moment I decided to try it or why. Working at Chase Manhattan Bank, squash was a popular sport and there were two courts onsite with a competitive league and an annual knockout cup. My boss, Jon, was one of the best players in the bank. Nigel, his boss, was also very good. As I recall, Matt, Rick, Gareth and Alan all played, as did Pete and Greg, two Aussie contractors. I think JohnnyG may have played but Benardette didn’t and neither did SteveS. I can’t imagine Bernard, Charles or SteveT playing and certainly myself and Danny, the new kids on the block, didn’t. Quiet Nigel may have played but he was so quiet, he never uttered a word in his six months of being in our department so I never found out! But when you look at it, half our department did and I suspect it’s that which led me to start playing.
If you’ve never played squash, or quite possibly in this day and age even seen it being played; I’ll give a recap. During the 70s and 80s it was very popular with every sports centre having courts and leagues. It was something of a corporate sport, played by middle class office workers, yet by the late 1990s it was dying out. Certainly that’s what happened at Chase. The league had been very popular when the bank first came to Bournemouth in 1986, but was all but gone by 1994-95ish. When I started there, you’d always hear a ball echoing around the court as you walked over to lunch, or to the onsite bar at 5:15pm. But slowly the distinctive sounds faded away and often the courts would stand empty in darkness.
Eventually as the bank’s workforce expanded, office space became a premium and the courts were converted. That’s similar to what happened to many of the local courts – Littledown Sports Centre turned their courts into part of the fitness studio, the Lanz Club in Boscombe got knocked down and rebuilt as flats, the South Dorset Squash Club on Ringwood Road is now a Co-op supermarket. When I worked at Broadstone Sports Centre there were two courts but these were converted into additional changing rooms and a soft play area when the swimming pool was built circa 2000. There are still courts around – Haymoor in Canford Heath, Ferndown Sports Centre, Two Riversmeet in Christchurch but they are few and far between. Apparently there’s a decent size league in Dorset of 400+ players but that’s next-to-nothing when you consider our local parkruns attract that many runners every Saturday.
Walking onto a squash court always had a special feel. You walked through the doorway into a cavernous white room with high, white-washed walls. At least they were originally white but now covered by hundreds of marks from squash balls. The room would echo, the lights needed to be bright and on closing the door, the handle dropped flat making for a smooth surface. If you turned round and looked up there was a balcony for spectators to look down on you. Above and behind you, people could sneak a look over and you’d never know they were watching. The cold, echoing, emptiness with just the two of you made it feel like a gladiatorial contest. The only noises were the grunt of long rallies, the squelching and braking of feet in motion and the ball ricocheting off the walls.
The ball was a small, black sphere of hollow rubber. Flexible once warm, it could reach speeds of well over 100km/hour. Some balls had a yellow dot, others a red one, each of which indicated a different speed. You’d have to agree with your opponent which ball to use – a slower one being more advanced because it didn’t bounce as much. I quickly found any decent opponent would snort contemptuously if I even considered offering up the lesser ball. Once agreed you then had to warm the damn thing up. Usually that involved hammering it repeatedly against the front wall, which was easy for people like Jon or Nigel who had the skills, but for a beginner like myself it simply displayed my ineptitude. Two or three hits then the ball would skew out of control and I’d have to scramble over and pick it up. A feeling of embarrassment towards my opponent and a shame that I was irritating or holding them when they wanted to get warm. In winter the courts would be chillingly cold which made warming the ball up even harder. There was a shortcut available though, rolling it vigorously back and forth under your shoe. Occasionally in matches the ball would split or, more likely, get lost in the rafters. When that happened you had to suspend play and warm up another ball. Another opportunity to display ineptitude.
Being the first individual sport I’d played, I now realise I felt a sense of responsibility not to show myself up with the wrong etiquette, so I’d go through the motions of warmups that I didn’t know or understand. All my routines were copied from the players I met over the following months. If someone jogged around the edges of court or up and down in the corridor then I did that. If they swished their racket and did some hip looseners or shoulder swings then I did them too. Mostly I stood there thinking “Can we just get on and play?”.
Games were, of course, preceded by the need to decide who would serve first. No flip of a coin, play for service or “Which hand is the ball in?” deciders as some sports do. The tradition of squash was to spin a racket on its head having identified a logo on each side of the racket to represent each player. One of my few moments of one-upmanship was having a racket that had “My Serve”, “Your Serve” printed on it precisely for this situation. Opponents would begin to ask whether I wanted the Slazenger logo or blank side of their racket, and I’d proudly interject and show them the “My Serve” / “Your Serve” markings. Of course there’s always one person who doesn’t get it and I recall showing this to an opponent who then said he wanted to take the “My Serve”! Didn’t seem to understand the implied ownership of my racket, my serve.
A difficulty of squash is that it’s not a sport where the ball easily goes out of bounds, it usually stays in court until it can’t be returned. Out of bounds happens if you hit it upwards enough, or aim too low at the front wall thereby hitting the bottom 18-inches of the metal “tin”, but most of the time you’re playing until one of you is unable to return the ball before it’s bounced twice. The front wall is theoretically unmissable, it’s 20 feet wide stretching up to 15 feet. You can play the ball off the side walls before or after hitting the front wall. It can rebound off the back wall if it goes deep enough. This is what begins to make squash so difficult for a beginner, it’s a game of angles and you have to be able to read the flight of the ball, predict where it’s going and get into position for your next shot.
Skilled players have an ability to keep rallies going for an average of 15-20 seconds, but as a beginner mine were often over before I’d even started. My opponent would serve, I’d lunge to volley the ball in mid-flight and misjudge it. Even then, I still had the chance to scrabble around and try to play it before the second bounce. But I rarely had the technical skill to play a good shot. Good players knew how to exploit my weaknesses. They’d play the ball off the front wall to die in the back corner. They’d play every shot in a rally to my backhand which was technically harder to co-ordinate returns from. They’d play drop shots after pushing me deeper and deeper to the back of court.
I dived in enthusiastically, playing lunchtimes and evenings – whenever I could get a court booking and find an opponent. With the games popularity, that might mean arriving at 7am for a pre-breakfast game or waiting until 2pm for a late lunch – the courts were well-used at peak times. With regular play, my understanding of the game grew gradually. I no longer lunged wildly at serves which I should have waited to bounce. I began to learn the footwork and technique for a backhand. Jon taught me how to face into the back corner so that, with a flick of the wrist I could simply sweep a shot back down the line to hit the front wall, then watch it loop back to land in the same corner where my opponent had just tried to put me under pressure. What happens as you learn to play a sport is you develop technically, tactically and mentally. Being a bad player means you physically develop your speed and strength only as quickly as you can learn to play the game well.
One of the key tactics is to control the “T” – the centre of the court – from there you can reach the rest of court easily. Every shot you play is trying to force your opponent off the “T” so you can take it over. Of course they have the same aim. If you watch good players, you’ll see there’s a dance going on as one waltzes off the “T”, the other moves onto it only to vacate it moments later and be replaced by their opponent again. As a beginner there was no such dance going on. My opponent would stand on the “T” and I would constantly be scrambling around them to reach balls at full stretch, just about able to return them. My opponent would take two or three strides from the “T” and play the ball to some corner of court where I wasn’t, leaving me to take five or six desperate lunging steps to try to get the ball while my opponent would waltz back onto the “T” comfortable in the knowledge they had the game firmly under control.
So in my early days, I wasn’t very good. I’d take a couple of steps to return a serve, I’d take a few lunging steps across court to reach a ball, my opponent would kill the rally and score a point. I only needed enough fitness for a few seconds of play. That was the way it was for the first few months.
As I improved I began to make rallies last longer. I began to win more points which made games last longer and, consequently I got fitter, which in turn helped rallies to last longer. I began to understand the angles involved. Experience told me that when a ball hit this point on the front wall, it would go over there. When it hit that particular spot, it went there. I began to be able to position myself earlier for return shots and gradually my technique improved. Mentally, my shot selection improved as I learned when to play a drop shot, when to play it deep and when it was inadvisable to play them. I started playing better opponents who in turn pushed me for longer rallies, better shots, and fewer mistakes and so on. That’s the nature of the improvement, there’s nothing radical in this if you apply yourself.
The highlight moment of my squash years was taking part in the annual tournament. Maybe I played in two, but I only remember the game where I was knocked out by Mack. An experienced player, I’d guess he was around fifty; he was lean, wily, whitehaired, a talker and he was full of gamesmanship. He’d take any ‘let’ he could, slow the game down when he was losing and find ways to take breathers after long rallies. Fitness was my greatest asset, so of course I tried to run him ragged but he’d take every second he could and every break between sets to recover. Looking back, I can’t blame him.
With my boss Jon being a good player, I’d already seen and heard about the tournament before I played in it, I probably supported him in the previous years. I reckon the tournament was played over two weeks of February, in the evenings with a straight knockout. What I remember distinctly is the hubbub associated with it. The balconies overlooking the courts would be crowded with supporters and players who’d entered, especially those still in the tournament or due to play later. And like Wimbledon fortnight or the FA Cup, as you got closer to the final, the interest level increased. If you arrived late you’d be watching over the shoulder of others or trying to squeezing into the gap at the end of the row by the wall. The support generated oohs, aahs, and rounds of applause for exciting rallies. It was nothing like playing on a lunchtime when a couple of friends might watch for five minutes to fill time before they had to return to the office.
I played Mack in, what I think would have been, the third round of the tournament. The winner of the game would then play Paul who I’d become good friends with. We often played matches and he always beat me. Always. But I was fast-improving whereas he’d been playing for some years; I felt I held something back in our friendly games and that the do-or-die nature of the knockout would give me a sharper edge. I was sure I’d beat him if I could get past Mack. And if I beat Paul then I’d probably have been in the quarterfinals.
But I had to get past Mack first. And initially that didn’t seem too hard. The matches were best of five games and I easily went two-nil up running him round court with repetitive whipping forehand shots, gradually pulling him off the ‘T’ until, I’d drive an unreturnable cross-court shot to his backhand to win the rally. It was all going to plan and then as victory closed in during the third game, I tensed up and began to make mistake after mistake.
It was a classic case of choking and Mack was wily enough to just keep popping the ball up for me to smash it into the tin or mishit. It was terrible. Not just because I was losing but because I knew the whole balcony were watching me throw the match away. I’d shown them how well I could play for two games, now I was showing them how badly I handled pressure. I could hear gasps and mutterings whenever I played a bad shot. It became obvious I was going to lose the third game and then the fourth. A friend or colleague would shout down a word of encouragement but all it did was remind me that I was playing badly and now needed some kind of external support that I hadn’t needed when I was playing well. I don’t recall the details of how I came to lose the deciding fifth game, only that I went from two-nil up to losing three-two. I think Mack went on to beat Paul in the next round, it’s not etched in my memory, as it wasn’t something I wanted to be reminded of or talk about.
I don’t recall exactly when or why I stopped playing. I first touched a volleyball in the summer of 1992 and decided I wanted to get good at it. The bank also opened an onsite gym which was a bargain at £6 per month and it began to take up my lunch times and evenings. I believe that’s how I got into running and entered my first 10K. Either there were some entry forms on the reception desk when I walked in, or someone at the gym talked me into it. It was also the winter I moved out of my parents’ home and began growing up and looking after myself. Extra time from living closer to work and a need to recreate my routines saw me move away from old friends and habits.
I’d guess the gym hastened the demise of the squash league. The guys who’d enthusiastically competed five years before were getting older and gaining more family responsibilities. Hitting their thirties and forties their knees were creaking and they knew their place in the pecking order of the league. The competitive fires were probably beginning to die down as they knew who they could beat and who they couldn’t. The gym presented an exciting new, alternative for keeping fit with no dependency on finding opponents or booking courts. It could easily be fitted in around the rest of their lives.
I’m sure I played the occasional game of squash in 1993 and 1994 but volleyball became my new all-consuming passion. I started playing basketball, going to the gym, there was circuit training in the sportshall on Wednesday lunchtime and tennis lessons on Thursdays. With so many options available, squash fell by the wayside. Just the occasional game now and then.
I’ve only played three or four times since I left Chase in 1997. Each time I played I was in a terrible state the next day. I could still read the game well enough to know where the ball was going. I had the fitness to get into position to play those shots. I didn’t have the fine motor skills to play winning shots so rallies lasted much longer than when I first played. As a beginner, my fitness built up as I got better at the game, now I’d play hard for forty minutes using squash-specific muscles that weren’t used to being used. Deep lunging stretches to reach the ball in all corners of the court. I’d walk off court dripping in sweat feeling like I’d had a good workout. The next day, I’d suffer from muscle soreness that lasted two or three days. I couldn’t take those matches easy but, with decent fitness, I paid for it in the following days.
Nowadays I see the same thing happen with runners returning from injury. Having been used to running regularly for an hour or more they jump back in with a half hour test run. Invariably it’s at a decent pace because their legs are feeling fresh. What they don’t do is go for a gentle easy run to ease back in and be sure the injury has fully healed. If they were running thirty miles per week before they get injured they come straight back running five days per week and quickly back up to that sort of mileage. Then they wonder why the get injured again.
When you come back to running after an injury, you should begin with short gentle runs – possibly as short as five minutes and ideally no more than fifteen minutes. If that’s ok you might do it again the next day but you might take a rest day for extra assurance. If nothing’s causing problems you build slowly back up from there, adding five or ten minutes until you’re sure you’re injury-free. Of course it depends on how big the injury was but for anything major, I’d aim for the better part of a month to rebuild.
Likewise when I went to circuit training after a break, I never pushed it. I took the session easy knowing I’d get a decent workout and consequently I avoided the next day soreness. But I never figured out how to achieve that graduated approach when getting back into playing squash. I don’t think it’s possible. You book a court for forty minutes, you’ve got to use the time up. And you have to give your best efforts for your opponent. All you can hope is to walk away unscathed and maybe to accept you’re going to be sore for a while.
As the pictures attest I still have my squash racket and the Hi-Tec shoes I bought all those years ago. They’ve been up in the loft ever since. I thought I’d barely used the shoes as they look so clean and the soles are hardly worn. But when I looked inside, I could see the insoles had been worn around the ball of my big toe. I spent a lot of time on my toes and driving off the forefoot to get to balls quickly. The cleanliness of the shoes is no surprise because squash courts are clean and shoes don’t get dirty like running shoes would. I was obviously into Hi-Tec as my first pair of running shoes were Hi-Tec Silver Shadows which I think I bought for £25.
Picking up my racket I’d forgotten how light it is. I cocked my wrist and gave it a couple of swishes – the old three finger hold with thumb and forefinger loose came automatically. I regripped the racket a few times myself. It was one of those tasks I’d do periodically, more because I enjoyed doing it than out of necessity. I remember Jon used to have about three grips on his racket so that it was big and fat to nestle in his hand. I also remember if you ever saw him running around a football pitch he ran with one hand open and the other as if he was holding a squash racket!
My racket was made by a company called Unsquashable and the headcover has a stylish mix of fluorescent pink and black. I rarely buy things based on looks but graphite rackets were becoming more attractive than the wooden and steel ones that preceded them and I think I bought this one because it had a larger sweet spot. Unsquashable still seem to be in existence, making rackets and I recall they were connected to Jahangir Khan, who was the best player of the 1980s.
I was definitely not the best player of the 1990s and when I look back squash was simply a sport I played regularly for a couple of years before relegating it to “once in a while” as a way to connect with new acquaintances. There’s a part of me that would love to play again just to experience hitting the forehands and backhands down the line. To stand waiting for the serve and the frustration of trying to dig a ball out of the back corner. Maybe one day the opportunity will present itself and I’ll be ready to give it another go but I’m also content to leave it in the past. Squash was what I did then and life moves on. For now, I’m far too focused on my running and coaching others to become better runners.
I have always said running is about filling in the gaps, by which I mean, there’s usually something missing from your training, stopping you from running faster which needs to be addressed. After I first ran sub-20 at parkrun, I quickly zoomed on down towards nineteen minutes and, while I was flat out on the runs, I always walked away saying “there’s a lot more to come yet”. My legs felt strong and my breathing never felt top-end laborious, so I was super-confident that breaking nineteen minutes would be easy, and yet it took almost a year before it happened.
This came back to me earlier this week during an 800m training session. I did a twenty minute warm up then I ran a 600m as fast as I could. The previous week I’d run 600m in 2:07 in 20mph wind. I’d been gasping for breath after the first minute but managed to push myself on. This week the weather was better and I clocked 2:05. It never felt as difficult as it had been on the windy day yet I ran it as fast as I could. Some kind of limitation had built up. My legs were far from aching so they weren’t tired, my heart-rate was still below 170bpm and I was barely gasping for oxygen but something unknown was limiting me. What it was doesn’t really matter to this story.
I was happy enough with what I’d done as I was on target with that effort and the rest of the session. It was as I jogged to warm down I thought about this idea of how the limitation isn’t necessarily what you expect it to be. It would be easy, and I’m sure many runners do this, to believe that because I wasn’t gasping for breath throughout, the way forward is either to, do more repeats, do them faster, give myself less recovery or some such idea.
But what I began to learn all those years ago in my early days of parkrunning is that you have to find out what is limiting you and then fill in the gap. I didn’t have the understanding then to see where the issue lay. I can spot it quicker these days Sometimes it’s about building a bigger aerobic base, other times you need more lactate clearance, maybe to improve lactate tolerance, or simply to go out and build more speed. There are many things that could be limiting you and obviously if you don’t do much running then there are lots of gaps waiting to be filled in. But once you’re training regularly and frequently, working out exactly where a limitation lies is often the toughest part.
Arriving home from a run, I unlock the back door, step into the kitchen and find myself faced by a marauding list of things to do. Life used to be so easy when I was irresponsible – I could pay the price later but these days …
I’m stood in sweaty kit that I want to get off because, well, who wants to stand in sweaty kit?
I particularly want to get my bandana off because it gets cold and damp quickly. I want to put it on the hallway radiator but I’m in the wrong part of the house and I’m wearing my shoes.
So my shoes need to be taken off (particularly if they’re muddy) but I also want to get my heart-rate monitor off.
I need to take my heart-rate monitor strap off but … if I wait a few seconds more … it’ll pop up a Heart rate recovery stat indicating how much heart-rate has dropped since I stopped running two minutes ago.
But once I’m thinking about my heart-rate and watch, I want to look at the splits from my run. I barely glance at the watch while I’m running, so arriving home is the first opportunity to get a good look at the numbers and … feel pleased or start rationalising.
I want a cup of tea. This one’s easily solved by flicking on the kettle. Unless of course, I forgot to fill it before going out and then I’m going to have to step across the kitchen in wet shoes.
Now drips of sweat are beginning to form. Previously they’ve been evaporating as I run, now I’m stationary they’re building up on me. I need to get to the towel I’ve left in the dining room but to get there I need to have taken off my shoes. Sometimes I’m still aching from the run and don’t feel ready or able to bend down and unlace my shoes. I got out of the habit of kicking my shoes off when I was about twelve. This is the downside of becoming responsible, growing up and doing things properly.
And then there’s nutrition. I should be eating something in the first few minutes after I arrive home, shouldn’t I? The first hour is the best time to reload the carbs and nutrients into the muscles. Miss that window and it impacts future workouts.
How did life get so complex? This is nothing like it used to be. Finish playing football, shake hands with the opposition then straight to the changing rooms to shower in the sports centre. Stick the sweaty kit in the backpack – maybe leave it there overnight by accident. Shower, change, walk back to the office and start sweating again. Pop to the shop and buy a bottle of Lucozade and a couple of packs of crisps to go with my sandwiches. Get back on with work.
My downstairs tasks are done. I need to get upstairs, get the sweaty kit off.
Take the heart-rate strap and put it in the bathroom sink for a quick soak. Maybe put the bandana in there too. While the sink is filling with water, I’ve just time to open up my laptop to leave my watch uploading to Garmin. Maybe also time to get the soggiest kit off.
But I also need to make sure I remember about the heart-rate strap. One afternoon, I came upstairs after sitting in the sun for hours and heard a curious noise. I couldn’t place it, it was unfamiliar. Walking into the bathroom, I discovered to my horror the tap on and the sink was full. Fortunately I’d left it filling slowly enough that the water was trickling out of the basin overflow. Phew!
The Critical Path Analysis skills from my project management days have me flitting from one task to the next. Many is the occasion when I’ve done an upstairs task and gone down to the kitchen to find a teabag stewing in the cup. In the 1-2 minute window between filling the cup and waiting for the teabag to brew, I’d thought there was enough time to ‘pop upstairs’ and do something else. But then a variation of Doorway Effect kicked in and, once elsewhere, I’d forgotten the teabag was steeping.
It’s still too soon to shower or wash if I’m sweating. Got to wait for the body to cool down and get back to a calm level. So much for the warmdown jog at the end of my run.
So while I wait, maybe I’ve got time to write some notes on my Garmin upload. Copy them to Strava – think of what to say about the session, make separate notes in my spreadsheet and training log. And that’s before I get out around to any kind of analysis or comparison to previous sessions.
Once I’ve logged into Garmin and Strava I’ll want to see how everybody else’s runs have gone, so there’s another time sink. Maybe I should nip downstairs first and get that cup of tea, grab a banana or bagel to put some immediate nutrition in. I might even risk putting on lunch but must remember to set the timer so there’s no chance of it boiling over while I’m upstairs.
If shoes are wet they need to be stuffed with newspaper and put by the radiator. That’s a job I can do while I wait for the second teabag in my fresh cup of tea to brew. All of this with no stretching or foam rolling in sight! That’s one thing never making my list.
Finally most of the jobs are done. I’ve got my cuppa, I’ve munched on a snack and it’s time to wash or shower and get some clean clothes on.
A few days ago I found a way to make it all seem easier. I stood outside my house when I arrived home. I didn’t go straight into the house but instead took a minute or two to look around and enjoy the quiet. I was able to take my headband off. Wait for the watch to ping up its recovery stat thing, take a look at the splits from my run and generally recompose myself before getting indoors. The extra minutes made all the difference and had eliminated some of the tasks I’d taken to fretting over.
It was like the days when I played football, volleyball or any other sport. We used to shake hands, walk off the pitch in a wearisome way and amble back to the changing rooms. Sometimes we would even stretch before we left the arena. But it was always much less hurried. Deliberately so.
Just don’t ask me about the days when I come home desperate for the toilet!
I’m a big believer you can train in all weathers. There’s only one thing that stops me and that’s ice, mainly because it’s too easy to get injured but anything else I’m willing to get out there. My resolve has been tested recently with a bitterly cold wind and driving rain alternating for what seems like the past month. But I suspect my body is trying to convince me to have a little break. I certainly don’t recall it being as tough this time last year.
I remember in the first winter after setting up Poole parkrun, I got in the car and its temperature gauge said -6C, or it may even have been -10. Whatever it was, by the time I arrived at the park it had risen to -2 degrees but with no wind it was a calm, still day. Not even a breeze. Wrapped up warm with thick leggings, long sleeve running top, t-shirt over it, plus obligatory hat and gloves it was a surprisingly pleasant morning run. The lack of wind chill made all the difference.
All layered up for a cold morning
At the other extreme I suffered heatstroke one summer. Or at least that’s my self-diagnosis of what happened. I’d planned a ten mile run at the beach on the prom – five miles out, five miles back. The outward leg went well but what I didn’t realise was the breeze on my back was pushing me along. It was intended as an easy-paced run and I found myself ticking along nicely at 7:45/mile but when I turned around the breeze hit me. I immediately began to find running harder. It was the height of summer so it shouldn’t have been a surprise but I’d done the same run the day before without incident. By seven miles I was slowing to nine minute miles and stopped to stand in the shade of a beach hut. Hands on knees, head down, not feeling great and my heart-rate only recovered to 115bpm – a good thirty or forty beats higher than I’d expect. I tried running the eighth mile and could barely struggle along at ten minute mile pace so eventually decided it would be safest walking the last two miles back to the car.
I’ve run in heat before without issue but the temperature registered as 26C which is higher than I’m used to. Normally I avoid running in the heat of the day, I either go early morning or in the evening. There’s no point running at the beach on a sunny day, I’ve tried it and you encounter walkers, the pushchair mafia three or four abreast, dogs on leads, as well as other exercisers running, cycling or roller-blading. It’s too crowded to have an enjoyable session and impossible to do a workout on target.
Running in snow is fine when you’re the first one out there. Sound is dampened, all is quiet and it feels fantastic. But Poole has its own microclimate so snow is a rare thing. In a lifetime of living here I can remember decent snowfalls in only six or seven winters. Most times it’s melted away within a day. I don’t think I saw a decent snowfall from 1993 to 2008; it’s that rare around here. This year the news outlets warned of the second coming of the Beast from the East hitting large parts of the country – the picture below shows the snowfall that hit us. So my snow running experience is limited and certainly never been tried in knee deep drifts.
Typical Bournemouth snowfall!
We did have two days of snowfall in March 2018 although it was barely a foot deep. The first morning was a Saturday so I ran to Poole parkrun and was highly disappointed to find it was called off even though there’d been no notice on the website when I checked at 8am. The great thing about the first day of snow is everything shuts down and no-one else goes out other than to sled, build snowmen or throw snowballs. The fresh snow is easy to run on and the council is good at getting the main roads gritted and cleared. Without traffic, the roads become the perfect track for running on. But the good times rarely last and by the second evening of our snowfall, everything was melting, turning slushy and the pavements packing down, turning to ice. Unfortunately I came a cropper only a few hundred metres from home after running five miles in the morning and five in the evening. I lost my footing and went straight down spread-eagled. I believe that may have been the cause of a groin injury that came on over the next month but I’m not sure as I was running big mileage during that period.
Rain is never fun to run in unless it’s warm rain on a hot summer’s day but that’s pretty rare. Most rain really isn’t that bad to run in. If you look out the window and it’s absolutely pelting down, just wait and it eases off within ten minutes. When it’s not pelting down, it looks worse than the reality of being out in it. Often I’ve looked out pessimistically at a rainy day before stepping out of the backdoor to find it’s not torrid at all.
A few years ago the big man-up phrase was “Skin is waterproof”, but my logic is slightly different – you’re going to get sweaty and shower when you get home so getting wet first doesn’t make much difference. Some like to wrap up with layers and rain jackets to keep from getting too wet. I take the opposite approach – the less wet kit there is clinging and weighing me down, the more enjoyable it stays. It’s easy for wet kit to become cold, uncomfortable kit. On arriving home a pair of shorts and a t-shirt can be thrown on the radiator, and it doesn’t take long to towel off dry.
I remember getting stoned one lunchtime along Baiter Park. I’d started off in bright sunshine in Poole Park but as I came round onto Whitecliff Park ominous black clouds were forming and then the rain came. My biggest concern was getting caught by lightning as I’d have nowhere to hide. But while it never struck, hail did. It only lasted five minutes but it was painful. Stinging with every hit, the wind blowing me back and the rain soaking me through. I found myself running bent over, head turned down to protect my eyes from getting haildashed. It was an occasion when I considered quitting the run but some part of me wouldn’t quit. Anyway what was I going to do? I’d still have had to get back to the car, so I might as well run back. Then just like that, the hail stopped, the rain ended and the clouds parted so I was back to blue skies and sunshine.
Windy days are my least enjoyable. At 6’2” with equivalent reach I bear the brunt of a headwind in a way smaller people will never understand. There’s too much surface area creating drag which in turn slows the pace to a crawl. But it’s the wind on cold days where the wind chill ramps up that have begun to do for me. Leaving the house with leggings, long sleeve top, gloves, hat, even a buff to try and cover up every piece of skin I’m like an Arctic explorer fearing frostbite if any part is left exposed. Captain Oates springs to mind on these days “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
I suffer with cold hands and feet, always have. I’ve even run with two pairs of gloves in the past and had my hands go numb. Feet going numb is something weird I’ve experienced on a few occasions, it’s very disconcerting not being able to feel how your foot is striking the ground. Generally I warm up once the blood gets pumping but if I forget gloves I’m in trouble. One September, I misjudged an unseasonably cold morning. An hour into my long run I’d lost half the feeling in my right hand. Two fingers, a thumb and most of the palm were numb. Returning home I could barely hold the door key and certainly didn’t have the dexterity to unlock it. I had to employ a two-handed, childlike manoeuvre with my palms pressed either side of the key to create enough pressure to turn it. Having gone through the pain of hands getting cold, I then had to endure the pain of them warming back up, tingling as the blood flowed into the constricted veins.
I recently ran at the beach during the cold spell. The wind was 20+ mph and the chill had it feeling like -4C. Sand was whipping across the prom, a danger of getting it in the eyes, and I only managed a mile before turning round. It was meant to be a recovery run so my legs weren’t at their best as it was. By the time I got back to the car, the tips of my fingers were numb, even in gloves, and the layers of clothing weren’t enough to stop me shivering sat back in the car. It reminded me of the Saturday morning two days before my run streak reached a year when it was a howling storm and pitch dark. So close to the goal I had to run but went out in shorts, t-shirt and no gloves; arriving home I was chilled to the bone. I stripped off my wet clothes, put on my dressing gown and went back to bed where it took over half an hour to warm back up.
I never used to be a big reader of weather forecasts. After all if you’ve planned to do something, you can’t control the weather, just get out there and do it. However in recent times, I’ve begun to look at what the weather will be like during the day to see if there’s a best time to run. Should I get out early at 10am, wait until midday or even the evening? Is the wind picking up or dying down as the day goes on, are the chances of rain increasing or decreasing? What is never in question is whether I’ll do a session. I don’t look at the weather forecast and use it to talk myself out of running. I only look at it to see when the best time to run might be. That’s been more applicable with pandemic lockdowns, but once we return to normal and life regains its own schedule the runs will have to be slotted in wherever the rest of life dictates. It’s just a case of making sure I wear the right kit for the conditions.
What a block of training this has been! You’ll recall from my previous update that I’ve been following an 800m plan written by Jack Daniels and in his notes he said this phase would be the most demanding. He didn’t lie. In the previous update, most of my workouts were short intervals at paces between 5:30 – 6:30/mile to get the legs used to running faster. The rest of my week was easy running to recover. It never felt too bad as my legs have always liked faster running and coped very well with it.
What I hadn’t appreciated about my fitness was … the huge gap in it. Before starting this training I did three months of easy running where the majority of it was 8-10 min/mile. My long runs for example were averaging 8:30/mile in November. Along the way I clocked a few miles close to 7:30 (but only a few) and this is where the gap opened up. I had nothing to connect me between those autumn runs, at 7:30 or slower, to the 800m speedwork at 6:30 or quicker. Bridging the gap is what this phase aimed to do as you’ll see when I explain JackD’s T-pace and I-paced running.
To begin the recap let’s rewind to mid-January and the start of this phase. The first thing was to up the paces to account for (hopefully) improved fitness coming off of the previous block of training. This meant where I’d been running 200s at 48secs they were now expected to be run in 47 secs. Faster 200m repetitions quickened up from 44 to 43s and the other short interval distances were all increased using equivalent paces to these.
The sessions focused on what JackD terms I-pace training which are longer intervals at your predicted 5K pace. These began at three mins (where I managed 700 metres) and incrementally stretched out to five minutes (1,200m). I like what he says on p.108 of his 3rd edition book about how this “adds an aerobic stress but not any faster running speeds, which would be an additional new stress for the body to deal with.” i.e. you only add one stress, not two. My I-pace has been 6:50/mile (4:15/km).
The T-pace (Threshold) running should have been around 7:20/mile but I’ve found myself running them at 7:10-15 fairly comfortably. I think my recent years of endurance training probably made this easier to achieve than expected. There was also one 40-minute run at M-pace (Marathon) which I ran at 7:45/mile but could feel myself flagging in the last 5-10 minutes. Another gap filler.
There were still lots of 200s, 300s, 400s and 600s being run at fast paces but not the 100+ efforts of last time. Once again I’ve summarised it all in a table below and you can see, while the shorter efforts were generally successful, I struggled on the longer 400s and 600s. I think this is because my legs were often still recovering from the I- and T-paced sessions which totalled well over 45km.
Target time
On target
Missed
Efforts
Fastest
200m
47s
10
–
10
(2km)
38.44s
(5:10/mile)
43s
12
2
14
(2.8km)
300m
1min05
9
–
9
(2.7km)
59.77s
(5:21/mile)
400m
1min34
6
4
10
(4km)
1:24.9
(5:42/mile)
1min26
1
4
5
(2km)
500m
1min57
1
–
1
(0.5km)
1:53.54
(6:06/mile)
600m
2min23
4
6
10
(6km)
2:17.2
(6:08/mile)
I-Pace
6min50
33
1
34
(27.7km)
T-Pace
7min20
7
–
7
(11.2km)
M-Pace
7min45
4
1
5
(8km)
Total
87
18
105
(66.9km)
Stats for those who love them!
What’s been most interesting is Sundays have alternated between doing a Long Run one week, and a workout the next. By the time I’d run warm-up, efforts, jogged recoveries and warmed down home; the Sunday workouts were close to ten miles – not far off my standard 11-12 mile Long Run. Some of the midweek workouts have also been in the 8-10 mile range.
The first couple of weeks had their usual slump as the legs got used to the new regime. There were some aches and pains occurring especially in my left knee and right calf but these disappeared about three weeks in. My body began to feel comfortable with the training but I fatigued after a heavy fourth week. I found myself sleeping more and the fifth week of training was the toughest I’ve encountered so far. Thursday of week 5 was the workout where I physically couldn’t run fast enough on a set of fast 400m efforts missing target by 2-3 seconds. Fortunately in week 6, my legs perked up and I reaped the benefits of all the training so far. In the final workout I recorded my three fastest 200m times since I started – hurrah! Arriving home my Garmin promptly corrupted the workout so it wouldn’t upload. Fortunately I’d done a cursory review of the numbers in the kitchen. Frustrating but not the end of the world.
My overall mileage stayed about the same as previously and the six weeks resulted in 45 / 45 / 42 / 45 / 41 / 46 miles. These have been achieved with 6hr10 – 40 mins running each week depending on how my other commitments allow.
Weatherwise the training was a nightmare. As a golfer I’ve always found the end of January / start of February to be the worst conditions and I usually took a month off to stay warm at home. But, as a runner, you need to be getting out as often as possible so it’s a case of wrapping up warm, wearing the right gear. This year’s weather was rather diabolical – a combination of high winds, minus-figures temperatures, almost some snow, and two weeks of heavy rain. It seemed to dominate the forecast for every scheduled workout but there were one or two nice sunny days jumping out from nowhere to give surprise relief. Even so, when you’re struggling with fatigue, it’s not encouraging to go into a session knowing high winds will be suppressing your pace. But it’s already beginning to feel like “Spring is here” with mornings getting brighter and even birds tweeting!
The next six weeks focus on T-paced work which so far I’ve found fairly easy, but it includes fast repeats out to 600m which are going to need to be run in 2:06 – the fastest I’ve run so far is 2:13. I’m not looking forward to those but let’s see what happens ..
Big Red Running 