I think it is hard to beat an interesting tree – sometimes it is the shape that speaks to me, sometimes the colours and sometimes it’s the the signs of a hard life lived. So, you can perhaps imagine my excitement when I spotted this particular tree with its strong, thick trunk and its beautifully rounded and perfectly balanced shape all thickly enveloped by deep green leaves, so full of life… and yet, running upwards through its core, emerging to thrust like inverted lightning flashes from its top (and less visible in the photograph, a withered tendril reaching downwards on the left side), the sharp, angular, stripped-bare branches, absolutely dead to the world. This is a tree that is both dead at the core and alive at heart and I have never seen its like before.
Category: Themes
Running Early
Yesterday, frustrated by my inability to fit various activities into my life and by my tendency to struggle to do anything if it involves me making a decision, I came (back) to the thought that I function much better when I remove the decision-making process entirely from the equation. The specific example was fitting running into my schedule – I have a vague plan of running three times per week, two shorter runs on weekdays (most commonly Monday/Tuesday and Thursday/Friday) and then a longer run on (usually) Saturday morning. There I was, on Monday morning, knowing that I had to fit a run in over the next couple of days but not being able to decide when I would do this. Now, for me, having to make a decision like this is always problematic because, weirdly, if I am left to my own devices and am solely reliant on my own motivation to do things, the most likely outcome is that I will do nothing. Despite WANTING to do things I rarely FEEL like doing things. I have a huge amount of internal friction, or what I am now starting to think of as ‘personal viscosity‘, that resists action. All of which left me struggling to decide, struggling to plan and generally feeling frustrated with myself (as usual).
After a short period of wallowing in some kind of self-pity I was struck by the thought that it would really be a lot better if I didn’t leave myself having to decide about things and that it would be much better to decide now that I always do X at time Y. This is basically the idea of making a decision once rather than having to make similar decisions many times over. It’s not a new idea, I’ve been in this place and had this thought plenty of times in the past and, I am sure, will re-discover it again plenty of times in the future; because I know what I’m like and it would be unrealistic to think that suddenly I will make a plan, turn it into action and everything will be sweetness and light forever after.
After this re-revelation I decided that the best way for me to remove the decision-making process from my running deliberations would simply be to run everyday, if only for a mile, first thing in the morning unless there was some other specific event occurring that prevented this. The result was a ‘plan’ to run 1 mile on Mondays, ~3 miles on Tuesdays, 1 mile on Wednesdays, ~5 miles on Thursday and 1 mile on Fridays, always starting as close to 7am as possible (immediately after waking) and before I had done anything else, including eating. Then, on Saturdays, I would do a longer run (say 90-120 minutes) starting an hour after eating some breakfast which I would do first thing. My thinking was that if I didn’t have any decisions to make there would be one less barrier to me getting out and that I would have the satisfaction of always having achieved something at the start of the day. I would win a battle with myself before embarking on the war that stretched ahead of me each day. To help myself out I would have all of my running gear set up ready to put on in the morning so that again, another monster standing in the way of action would be pre-slain.
That was Monday, today is Tuesday.
It sort of worked. Actually, that’s unfair. It DID work, just not quite as smoothly as I would have liked (or imagined). I did get out for my run – a 3 mile route around local streets that I call ‘Mostly Mannamead’. It was a little slow and I was a little creaky (I’d not run for 4 days) but the run happened. What went less well is that it took me 15-20 minutes from the time I woke to overcome my viscosity and get moving and then I slipped into one of my cracks in time on my return to the house and took ages to get myself into the shower and onwards to breakfast, some writing and then into work. It’s clear that I really need to work on my transitions.
Tomorrow being Wednesday and just a 1 mile run day should be easier. I’ll set myself up in advance – running kit out etc – and I will TRY to reduce the time it takes for me to get out of the door. On my return I’ll probably go straight into breakfast mode before I have a shower. Oddly, I have no trouble eating immediately after I run (and anyway, 1 mile is hardly a run at all) and hopefully that will mean that I’ve cooled down and am ready to shower as soon as I have finished eating. Maybe, just maybe, I can get everything to fall into place – wake, run, breakfast, shower – and be able start writing (something else that I am trying to work into my schedule on a more regular and reliable basis) by 8am.
We’ll see…
Chipping Away… towards 1000 miles
Several months ago, back in the dim and distant days of late summer, when I was running lots and nothing like as busy with work as I have been this past 12 weeks, I signed myself up for a virtual challenge of completing 1000 miles in the year. This simply involved paying out £12.95 (I think) to a company who would send me a nice shiny medal once I sent in proof that I had completed 1000 miles of running during 2020. At the time it seemed pretty easy – I was well on track and completing the mileage from my (then) current position wasn’t that big a deal.
Then I got busy with work. Really busy.
The last 12 weeks are by far my busiest period of the academic year and on top of lots of lectures, marking and general (virtual) interactions with students I’ve had the pleasure of ongoing work sorting out the timetable for February onwards – something which is usually done in the summer. So my running suffered a bit – not to the extent that I crashed out of it altogether – but enough that about 6 weeks ago I realised that if I wanted that 1000 mile medal I had better start putting on my running shoes and getting out a bit more often. Since then, I have been working on an average daily mileage of close to 3 miles and that has meant grabbing every opportunity to pound the streets that I can. No, what I mean is that it has meant me dragging myself out of the house a lot more than my naturally lazy-arsed instinct would want. But it has worked. I now find myself with 17 days to go needing to run about 2.6 miles per day and the final target is very much within reach. I think only a bad cold will scupper things now although it should be acknowledged that a bad cold is exactly what I usually get the moment that this particular term finishes (so it’s scheduled for Friday later this week…). I’ve also upped the ante by forking out for another rather nice wooden ‘medal’ which I will award myself for running at least a kilometre every day in the 24 days running up to Christmas Day itself. No pressure (well, only self-inflicted pressure I guess).
Today, I had a plan to work through to about now and then go out for a pleasant 4-5 miles but here I am writing this and putting it off. I look out of the window and it’s completely dark (at 4:50pm). I can feel that it’s cold – not freezing cold but cold enough to make the prospect of going outside not entirely pleasant. At least it is not currently raining, although there are some pretty dark clouds out there and there have been some heavy showers. So I sit here typing instead.
No, no, NO. IT WON’T DO… Stop writing, switch off the computer, get off the chair, get changed and get out there. There are miles to be run and they won’t run themselves. You just have to keep chipping away. Always.
Symmetree
I love trees. I love the way that they seem to produce all of their substance out of nothing; the way that they can hang around for ages while the world changes around them; they way that they are all so different whilst still obviously being trees; the way that they change on all kinds of timescales.
I like taking photographs of trees, particularly ones with a high degree of symmetry where the shape of one side of the tree is the same as the shape of the other side and where the trunk is nice a straight and down the middle. I don’t only like symmetrical trees but I do think I like those ones the best.
A couple of days ago I was up on Roborough Common (on the south-western edge of Dartmoor). It was my first time properly outside of Plymouth for at least 8 weeks. It was a beautiful sunny and still evening – aren’t they all at the moment? We parked up the car, set out for a stroll and there it was, was one of my favourite symmetrical trees; one that is always hard to walk past without taking a photograph. And so, of course, I did, resulting in a picture that I am particularly proud of.
This isn’t just a symmetrical tree; it’s a Symmetree…
The Best Tasting Fruit Ever… Ultramarathon Fruit
At lunchtime today I was talking about fruit to my wife and elder daughter (I have been working at home checking and approving Module Delivery Sheets – the forms that Module Leaders have to complete to request the teaching sessions and rooms that they need for the 2018-19 academic year). There was a difference of opinion about whether the satsumas that they were eating tasted ‘really nice’ or ‘a bit sour’ (for the record I had my regulation lunchtime apple and banana). This set me thinking about the best fruit I have ever tasted and brought me to the realisation that ALL of the best fruit I have tasted was (any of) the fruit that I have eaten while running ultramarathons.
When I ran the Dartmoor Discovery in June 2016 (my first ultra) I found myself absolutely, and as I then thought inexplicably, craving oranges at about the 26 mile mark, and so it was rather remarkable when I passed a supporter of the runners with her car boot open full of goodies who asked me if there was anything I wanted and, when I said ‘oranges’, grabbed a plate of orange segments and offered them to me. Those oranges were the best ever, the juice literally exploding into my taste buds as I crushed them in my mouth.
And then last year, on the Somerset Flat 50 Miler and Mendip Marauder 30 Miler I found that at pretty much every aid station I was drawn first to the fruit pieces – oranges, melon, pineapple, strawberries, water melon. My oh my, just thinking about it makes me start to salivate and feel a tingling sensation in my mouth. The strawberries at Mile 32 of the Somerset Ultra were incredible – popped in whole, crushed in my mouth, juice exploding, unforgettable.
So, for anyone who likes fruit but wants to taste really good fruit or for anyone who doesn’t like fruit and can’t see what all the fuss is about I have one piece of advice – get some fruit, chop it up into bite size chunks, stick it on a plate and go out and run 25-30 miles before sampling it. You might think this is a bit of an extreme way to get more enjoyment out of some of your ‘5 a day’ (or is it supposed to be 7 a day now, I have lost track?) but believe me, you really need to try it. Honestly.
Long Run = Very Tired!
This afternoon I completed my longest run since early September. I was aiming for 18 miles, mostly down and flat for 4 miles to Coypool then up the Plym Valley Trail for 5 miles to Leighbeer Tunnel before turning around and retracing my steps. The problem with this route is that the last 2-3 miles are uphill all the way which is exactly what you don’t want for the final section of a long run. The other issue with this run today was that in an attempt to catch the best weather (clear, reasonably warm and even a little sunny) I was setting out at 2:30pm which is not a time that I normally start a longer run. In fact, on some previous occasions when I have done this I have found I have struggled a lot. And it turned out that today fitted that pattern.
I was in pretty good shape to the halfway point, which was disappointingly a couple of tenths of a mile short of 9 miles and was expecting to find the long downhill stretch between 9 and 14 miles to be quite a lot easier and faster. It didn’t really turn out that way. I was a bit quicker than on the way up but not as much as I expected and by the time I was back at Coypool (14 miles) I was feeling pretty tired. I decided to split the last 4 miles into 4 sections and then deployed a variety of techniques to get myself through them. First, I spent a whole mile focussing only on my breath, essentially completing my mindfulness meditation practice while I ran. Then, I decided to count my steps for a mile, reaching 1900 in total. For the penultimate mile I went through the alphabet, first trying to think of a film title beginning with each letter (I succeeded apart from X – later on my wife suggested the somewhat obvious X-Men) and then the name of a classical composer (failing only on Q). That left me with just the last mile to get myself through but by then I was really, really tired and just plodded home, taking a slight shortcut such that, in the end, I completed 17.4 miles.
Tonight I feel much more tired than I hoped I would and can really feel that my legs have been working hard. I guess that is to be expected but it would be nice to be a bit further advanced in my training. The Grizzly is going to be tough next weekend…
One good thing was that I passed the 25 mile mark for the week (actually reaching 32.4 miles) so I have got that streak going again. I’ve hit this target 9 times in the 10 weeks of 2018 so far and will easily hit the target again next week assuming that I do complete The Grizzly on Sunday.
Broken Streak
Earlier this week (Tuesday) I thought I was going to ditch my target of trying to write an entry for this blog every day. I found myself wondering why I was putting myself under artificial pressure to do something which had little obvious purpose. It has turned out that I have kept going – at least for another 5 days (including this one). But it has also turned out that one of my streaks HAS now been broken. After 8 successful weeks I have not managed to run 25 miles this week. In fact I haven’t even got close.
I knew that my 25 mile per week streak was under threat right at the start of the week. On Monday, out of the blue, I quite suddenly felt achey and ill, like I was in the midst of a nasty flu-ey cold, which was odd because I wasn’t. Consequently, despite feeling much better on Tuesday I decided it would be sensible to forego the short run (4 miles) that was on my training plan for that day. Then, much of the rest of the week was taken out by the cold, windy and snowy weather that came our way from the ‘Beast from the East’ and Storm Emma. it was obvious by Thursday that I was not going to be running 18 miles on Saturday and with no miles in the bag from Wednesday or Thursday (when the bad weather led my running club to cancel its meet for the first time in the 4.5 years I have been a member). I did get out today for 4.1 miles. The snow and ice had all melted and the sun even came out so it was surprisingly warm and fairly nice conditions for running. But one 4.1 mile run does not amount to a 25 mile week, my streak has gone and so the entry in my streak page now shows:
|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|_| [0]
representing 8 weeks when the target was achieved (|*|) and a single week when it wasn’t (|_|).
I’m not beating myself up about things – breaking a streak was bound to happen at some point, and now I just need to get back to it and try again.
New Music… The Low Anthem and Glen Hansard
I listened to a couple of new musicians/bands today with somewhat mixed outcomes.
First, this morning in the I newspaper I read a review of a new album ‘The Salt Doll Went to Measure the Depths of the Sea’ by a band called The Low Anthem. It is a ‘concept album’ that follows an old folk tale about a salt doll who gradually explores the sea. Each time the doll enters the water a little more of its body melts away (the third track is called ‘Give My Body Back’ and is when the doll dips her toe in the water only to find she loses it). It got four stars in the review and sounded intriguing (I really liked the idea of the story which, basically, says that the more you explore and try to discover yourself the more you slip away – I’ve not done it justice here and ought to re-read the review and follow-up on the story itself) so I thought I should listen to it not really having any idea what sort of music it was. It was okay – soft tones, percussion, piano – not especially memorable, not unpleasant at all but not something I think I will rush back to for another listen.
Secondly, I discovered that I had previously saved an album called ‘Didn’t He Ramble’ by Glen Hansard on Spotify, presumably as something I thought I might want to listen to at some point sometime and probably on the basis of another review in the newspaper. With no idea what I was about to let myself in for I hit play and rather liked the soft, folky, lilting tones – voice and guitar – with some tracks that made me stop and take notice from a lyrical perspective (‘Winning Streak’). This album is definitely one that I will return to and I think I will also explore anything else Glen Hansard has produced.
The Run That Ran Itself
Thursday night is club night at my running club (Plymouth Musketeers) and so tonight I took myself along and joined the 10 minute/mile group on a new route (Honicknowle). At the outset the group leaders were rather concerned that they wouldn’t remember the directions but in the end everything went smoothly and we discovered that the route was a relatively un-hilly and quick one compared to most of the club routes.
Before starting the run and for the first half mile or so I felt tired and wasn’t expecting to particularly enjoy myself, but as the run unfolded I fell in with a few of the regulars and we just ticked along, chatting (mostly) about Plymouth Argyle’s recent upturn in form and football more generally. The combination of a relatively easy route, a whole bunch of runners who were completely comfortable with the pace and the good company and chit-chat on the way round meant that the run went incredibly smoothly, seemed fairly effort free and was just generally thoroughly enjoyable. When we got back to the club base I had clocked 5.4 miles at 9:41 pace so we’d got along at a decent lick and not really noticed it. It was a nice surprise.
The best way that I can describe the run, as I have titled this post, is that it was a run that ran itself. It doesn’t really get a lot better than that (well perhaps it would if it had been light so that we could actually see where we were going and then been running somewhere with good views… but that’s just being picky). I’d be quite content if all runs were a bit like this evening’s.
Back to Back Runs
This weekend, for the first time in ages (months) I have run on both Saturday and Sunday – so-called ‘back to back’ runs. This was partly because going into the weekend I was still quite well short of my 25 mile weekly target, but also because having now decided on my race events for the first half of the year I have finally settled on a training plan.
First, the race events. I have The Grizzly coming up in March, 19-20 miles of very varied off-road terrain including two lengthy stretches on shingle beaches, coastal footpaths, woody tracks with roots and stones to trip you up, lots of up (including one section on the coast path where the local mountain rescue team stand on guard in case anyone gets vertigo), lots of down, lots and lots of mud (potentially thigh deep in places) etc. Then, for April I have now finally gotten round to entering the Southampton Marathon, a race that I got my best ever marathon time in last year involving two laps including a back-and-forth run across the Itchen Bridge, a section through Southampton FC’s ground at St Mary’s and some other nice sections (although they have changed and reversed the route this year which has annoyed me a little). And then for June I have entered the 30 mile version of the Conquest of Avalon, an off-road ultramarathon in Somerset. All of which means that some proper training is needed…
Last year, when I ran a 50 mile route in May I followed a training plan from a website called ‘Ultraladies’. The plan seemed to me to be realistic and doable and, given that I got myself around a 52 mile route in under 12 hours, obviously worked. So, I am now following their 50km training plan. The key aspects of this plan are that I need to push the number of runs I do each week up to 5 (rest on Monday and Friday) and, most importantly, I need to start doing back-to-back runs on Saturday and Sunday. Everything I have read about distance training emphasises the importance of back-to-backs and so, this morning, I found myself constantly reminding myself that yes, of course I was tired, but that was the whole point and that this (the second run of the weekend) was where most of the training value comes from.
I ran 16 miles yesterday (Saturday) as per the training plan and was supposed to do 8 today but my other target of 25 miles minimum per week left me actually only needing to complete 3.4 miles. This meant that when I set out I had two numbers, 3.4 and 8, in mind and, for obvious reasons, quite a psychological pull towards the smaller one. And so I was absolutely delighted with myself when I steamed through the 3.4 mile point and just kept going. Training for long events is ALL about putting in the miles and now I am sitting here finally thinking that I am properly on my way, not just running quite a lot but running quite a lot with a purpose.
Tim O'Hare 