Running – Page 2 – Tim O'Hare

50 Again? Conquest of Avalon

A few weeks ago I had a big mental struggle trying to decide what races to run this year and whether to go long again and do another ultramarathon. I resolved this by doing nothing, abandoning the tentative plans that had been forming in my head, entering no races and just getting on with trying to run regularly.

Then, in the last few days, I have even found myself wondering whether I want to run another marathon at all or whether I might be happier sticking to half-marathons with the occasional 15-20 mile race thrown in (like The Grizzly in March or the Seaview 17 in July). But suddenly, today, after I saw a Facebook post promoting the run, I find myself strangely drawn to a race that is taking place in June called the Conquest of Avalon. The route takes in some beautiful Somerset scenery (the county of my upbringing), ends at Glastonbury and includes running up and down the famous Glastonbury Tor. There are 30 mile and 50 mile distances. Doing the 30 mile event would be the sensible thing for me to do, but out of the blue I find I am hugely drawn to the 50 mile version. The first 20 miles or so of the route, which is the part that differs from the 30 miler, look to me like the most interesting part, taking in Ham Hill and Cadbury Camp. It’d be a shame to miss out on those landmarks.

Part of the reason I am drawn to this event is that on my wall at home I have a painting that my father did in the 1950s from my parents’ then home near Castle Cary, looking west towards Glastonbury Tor (which you can see in the distance of the picture). I look at this picture every day – it beautifully shows the type of countryside that the run covers. How could I not want to run in that picture? How could anyone not want to run in THIS picture…?

Marking and Running

I spent today at home marking student courseworks from my second year Meteorology module. Regular readers of this blog (yes, I know, there’s no such thing really) might recall at least one previous post that I have written moaning about how much I hate marking and mostly I just want to say it again – I hate marking. In fact, I really, really, really detest marking. Of course the completely ironic thing about this feeling is that most of the students who produced the work that I am marking hated having to produce that work. Some of them probably really, really, really detested having to produce it. Which makes us kind of even I suppose, although it seems a bit unfair that they each only have to suffer once whereas I have to suffer as many times as there are students. Sometimes I think we should enter into a pact. I’ll not set them any work to do, they won’t have to do it, I won’t have to mark it and we’d all be happy. Sadly, of course, such a beautifully simple and elegant solution is not allowed. Marks there must be and, in truth, it is through having to do assessed pieces of work that most of the learning happens which is, after all, the whole point of studying a subject at University.

As I get older I try to see the positive side of things and so I have to ask myself what the positive side of a day spent at home marking might be. The answer is actually rather simple. On a day when I go to work I spend approximately 40 minutes getting to work in the morning and another 40 minutes getting home again at the end of the day. I have a two mile walk (usually – tomorrow it is three because I am starting at the Marine Station) which takes me between 30 and 35 minutes but there is always some time lost at either end going through doors, taking off my coat etc. All of which means that by staying at home to mark I get back 80 minutes of my time, and what can I do with 80 minutes? I can run 8 miles. Which is exactly what I did at the end of this afternoon – 8 miles down and around Mannamead (Thorn Park, Mutley Park) across Mannamead Road along Seymour Road and up and down a few hills, back across to Mutley Plain, down into Hyde Park and Central Park, past Argyle’s ground and home after a few twists and turns along the way – a route that seems to have become my go-to route over the last few weeks – 8 joyous miles in the misty, drizzly half-dark which more or less cleansed my mind of the horror that it had been through for most of the rest of the day (I exaggerate a little).

Marking and running. Without one I wouldn’t quite have had the opportunity for the other and probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much either. In the end then, it was not such a bad way to spend a day after all.

Putting Miles Into My Legs

I ran just over 1200 miles last year which obviously averages out at 100 miles per month. In fact, my miles were heavily biased towards the first five months of the year as I prepared for and completed my first 50 mile event. At the turn of the year I decided that I’d like to try to spread my effort more evenly across the year and so I started this year with the target of completing at least 100 miles each calendar month.

25 days into the year things are going well and I seem to have acquired an additional mileage target along the way. Having run 25 miles in the first two weeks of the year it occurred to me that as well as evening my miles out across the months I could also even them out across the weeks and aim for 25 miles EVERY week. Now I am sure that at some point I will fail with this challenge; I am bound to succumb to a cold or have to miss runs if I am away or something. But for as long as I can the target now is 25 miles each week and I have already achieved this for four consecutive weeks bringing up the 100 miles for January also.

My legs have felt tired this week, which surprised me a bit as 25 miles is not an exceptional mileage but when I thought about it I realised that, although my current mileage is a lot less than my peak weekly mileage last year, it is a LOT more than I managed through the autumn months of 2017. This is nicely highlighted by the plot below which shows my monthly totals for the last 12 months (so February 2017 – January 2018). January 2018’s total is not at all remarkable when compared with February, March, April and May 2017 but it is SIGNIFICANTLY up on the preceding four months and is, in fact, my highest monthly total since last May (when I ran the 50 miler).

Putting all of these miles into my legs feels really great. It is like putting petrol in the tank. To run a long way there is no substitute for putting miles in the legs (although it is obviously important to put them in in a sustainable manner and not to build up too quickly). I will probably ramp things up a bit over the next few months as I build towards the Southampton marathon in mid-April and then after that my aim will be to maintain at least my current effort. This plan might get blown out of the water by illness or injury or if I do some crazy long event again and need more rest afterwards, but for now it’s just a case of keeping things ticking along.

Running Into An Idea

After yesterday’s failed attempts to get out running, if they can even be called attempts that is, I absolutely nailed it today. I managed to leave work a little early after a day of five meetings and got myself straight out onto the streets. I seem to have adopted a new favourite route, and this was the one I followed today, a 7.2 mile loop around Mannamead, Peverell and into Central Park before heading home. It was one of those runs where everything feels really comfortable and just clicks. Very enjoyable.

But what made today’s run particularly enjoyable was that as well as feeling physically nourishing it served as a vehicle for some really creative thinking. I am not going to go into details here (yet) but for no particularly good reason and completely unexpectedly I found myself struck by an idea about some research that I could get involved with at work that, for once, grabbed my attention and filled me with an surprising amount of excitement. I spent pretty much the whole run thinking through the merits of the idea that involves me doing stuff that I am not especially good at and which would certainly put me out of my comfort zone but, nevertheless, just felt right. It was a slightly weird fusion of physical effort and mental creation which is, perhaps, the best experience that running can provide.

I got back into the house and, as I had decided while on the run, immediately sent an email to a colleague to make sure that I didn’t sit on the idea and talk myself out of following it up. And when I say ‘immediately’ I really do mean immediately – while my heart rate was still over 100bpm and the sweat dripped off my forehead. Sometimes, there really is no time like the present.

It’s Only Water And Air

This morning I got up at 7am as usual and immediately did my Tuesday morning exercise routine. I was expecting to hear rain lashing against the windows and wind howling around the house (as per forecast) but as I completed the routine I realised that there was no sound from outside and, in fact, the morning was remarkably still and dry. The thought immediately struck me that I should make the most of the better-than-expected weather and go out for a short run, even though my plan was to run when I got home from work. It seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, what with high wind and heavy showers forecast for later and, indeed, most of tomorrow. I got as far as starting to look out my running kit but then made the mistake of looking out of a window at the front of the house towards the south-west – the direction the weather almost always approaches us from. What I saw stopped me in my tracks. The sky was a solid dark grey colour and appeared to be fit to burst. I didn’t like the look of it at all and made an almost instant coward’s decision to ditch the idea of a run and go and have breakfast instead. This decision seemed to be a wise one as the sound of rain hitting the window began almost immediately.

But that rain really didn’t amount to much and only 5-10 minutes later the skies had lightened. I found myself instantly regretting my decision to take advantage of the unexpected weather window and, shortly afterwards, I trudged off to work in the dry, not too cold and with hardly a drop of rain falling. I was disappointed, and rapidly convinced myself that I had made a bad decision, that the weather would obviously be horrible later on AND tomorrow which would mean I probably wouldn’t run on either day which would then make it really hard for me to hit 25 miles this week (my informal target) since I would only run about 5 miles on Thursday night (hopefully), probably run nothing on Friday (I rarely run on Fridays), maybe run 14 or so miles on Saturday (because at the moment I can’t really run more) and then almost definitely run nothing on Sunday (there really is horrible weather forecast for Sunday at the moment)… you probably get the idea! It was disappointing and annoying – I had made the wrong decision just because of a little bit of rain and now my new running target was in tatters.

As it turns out, at the moment (it is now 4:20pm and I will head home from work at about 5pm) the sky, at least that part of it that I can see from my office window, is mostly clear. There is a layer of cloud on the eastern horizon but it doesn’t look threatening. And whilst it probably IS windier out there than it seems in here, it does feel like the 40+ mile per hour winds that were forecast haven’t come out to play. So, unless there is a nasty shock lurking out to the west (which I can’t see at the moment) or a rapid change in conditions, I ought to be able to get home and get out for a few miles without too much trauma.

That ‘wrong’ decision that I made and which disappointed me so much this morning might just turn out to have been a perfectly good decision after all.

On the other hand, I’ve just looked out again and the sky is now filled with heavy grey clouds and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it rains soon. Decisions, decisions. I suppose that my experience this morning really ought to have taught me that it is better, and simpler, to just go out and run and not give a damn about a bit of rain or a bit of wind. After all, it’s only water and air.

Introducing… Dudley Disrupter

This morning I went for a five and a half mile run before work. This meant I got into work a little later than usual but this was all part of my original plan for the week. In truth, by the time I got into work (after a two mile walk) I was 14 minutes behind schedule, but I had already sneaked a look at my email Inbox and knew that there was nothing much in there that was going to take my time. So, I was confident that I would be able to get back on track pretty much straightaway. My plan for the day followed the same structure that I had (successfully) deployed in the last couple of days, namely a short spell devoted to email first thing, a short buffer of spare time, a longer timeslot of concentrated work on a substantive project (lecture planning in this case), a break for lunch, a planned timeslot for some research reading/activity, a second session on email and miscellaneous tasks and then a two hour meeting to end the day. After two days in which I have stuck unbelievably well (for me) to this kind of plan and made real progress on the substantive tasks I had set aside time for, I felt cautiously optimistic about the day ahead.

Anyway, back to the run. As I ran, I found myself remembering some cartoons I used to watch as a little kid. What I vaguely recalled was a cartoon in which the main character (possibly Mickey Mouse) had two little imaginary characters sitting on his shoulders, on one side a little angel who tried to get Mickey (let’s assume it WAS Mickey) to make good choices and behave well and on the other side a little devil who had the singular ambition to get Mickey into trouble. I have no idea why this particular cartoon idea popped into my head when it did but as I ran along I found myself thinking that my frequent struggles to stick to plans that I have made bore a lot of resemblance to the cartoon. Instead of Mickey generally going about his business there is me, trying to keep focussed and remain productive at work, and perched on my shoulders are the two imaginary characters, the ‘good’ one telling me to stick to my plans and the ‘bad’ one doing absolutely everything in his power to disrupt them, whispering things like: ‘It won’t matter if you just take a break here, you’re tired and you will work better later on if you do’ or ‘There’s no harm in not replying to that email immediately, it won’t do any damage if you just leave it there and then notice it and think about dealing with it another twenty or thirty times…’. I could see that this bad character was just hell-bent on disrupting my best-laid plans, and for that reason I decided that he would need a name with Disrupt or Disrupter in it. First off, the name Disrupter Dave came to mind, but I have a friend called Dave at my running club and he is friendly, helpful and just a generally really nice guy so I couldn’t bring myself to adopt that name. After a bit more thought I settled on Dudley Disrupter – the character Dudley Dursley in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novel series isn’t the nicest (although he is far from the worst of course) and I liked the idea that Dudley could be shortened to Dud which is exactly what I become when Dudley Disrupter gets his way.

I suppose there must also be a ‘good’ character on my other shoulder who also ought to have a name but I don’t really find that he gets in my way very much and so I hardly notice him. Consequently, at present, I am content simply to assume his presence but leave him un-named.

I decided on my run that one of main challenges in life is to watch out for Dudley whispering in my ear and trying to pull me away from my planned path, and I wondered to what extent Dudley might show his face today…

Now, at the end of the working day (I arrived home not long ago) I am glad to report that Dudley didn’t come out to play today. For the third day in a row I stuck to my plan and for the third day in a row I got some really USEFUL work done, as opposed to just getting some work done. I don’t doubt that Dudley Disrupter will appear on my shoulder again soon, tap me on the head and try his best to steer me off course, but it feels as if, by flushing out his existence and giving him a name, I might just have stumbled on a strategy for keeping him out of harm’s way.

Thankful For A Fit And Strong Body

This morning I went for my longest run for ages (since 6th October to be precise) – an 11.4 mile loop down to and then along Plymouth’s waterfront before returning home via Devonport and Blockhouse Parks. It was a cold, crisp morning, only one or two degrees above freezing but I wrapped up well and the sun was out so I ended up feeling plenty warm enough. It was a good run. I was a bit worried that my left glute, which has been giving me a bit of jip for quite a while now would play up, what with the increased distance from most of my recent runs, but it was basically fine – a little sore but not to the extent that it held me up.

As I started on my way back from the waterfront, running up through Devonport towards the park I was passed by a man coming the other way on a mobility scooter. He was probably not too dissimilar in age to me, huge and clearly not at all fit, healthy or mobile. The thought that ran through my head as I ran along was how thankful I was that I have been able to run for the last (almost) five years and have a body that is now fit and strong and capable of propelling me along under my own steam for quite large distances and at a reasonably respectable pace (I guess that I could probably run further than a mobility scooter on a single charge and also faster, at least over a short distance). So this post is just to acknowledge this gratitude and to count my blessings in this respect.

What Am I Trying To Prove? (and who am I trying to prove it to?)

Last night I went out for a run with my running club. I nearly didn’t go – about 15 minutes before I was due to leave the heavens opened (again) and it became clear that the evening was going to be a wet one. But I told myself that I couldn’t keep not going to the running club every time a bit of water fell out of the sky. It was still raining by the time we got out for the run about 45 minutes later but the amount of water on the ground seemed out of all proportion to the time the rain had been falling. Much of the run was spent splashing through almost ankle deep puddles and/or trying to avoid them. The end result was that I found myself retreating into my own little space and musing about the difficulties I have been having trying to decide on my running plans for the year ahead.

Usually at this time of the year I have a pretty good idea of the focus for my running in the first part of the year. For example, last year I had set myself the target of a 50 mile ultramarathon in May and the year before I had set up a succession of races of steadily increasing distance ahead of the 32 mile Dartmoor Discovery event in June. This year I have been vacillating badly. I haven’t yet entered a major event and I haven’t been able to decide whether I am going to go proper long again. I had almost decided to start running the entire South West coast path over a period of about 5 years and, with this in mind, I had almost fixed on a set of race events in March, June and August that would cover almost 95 miles of it. But the snag has been that these events are all ones that are popular (so many races seem so much popular than they were even a couple of years ago) and so likely to book up quickly which has meant that I have been trying to make fast decisions on whether to enter them and having to think about associated transport, accommodation etc. And then there was the nasty issue that entering just these three key events was going to cost approximately £150 just for the race entries, a big hit in one go.

Anyway, back to last night’s run. As I ran I found myself wondering whether I really wanted to do any of these events, or rather whether I really wanted the hassle of deciding and committing to any of these events right now. Why couldn’t I just run a bit, enter an event when I felt like it (accepting that certain races would be full), and not feel the pressure of having to decide and plan the year’s running out in advance? And then my mind started to ask the killer questions… by entering and completing race events what was I trying to prove and who was I trying to prove it to? I don’t have an answer to these questions yet. In fact, I am not sure that I want to find answers to them. As I ran it struck me that maybe I should just not be bothered about setting myself a major running target in advance this year. Maybe I should just run, follow a general training plan designed to get me up to marathon plus distance by, say, May, and then, or along the way, see what takes my fancy. Perhaps an event that I thought would book up would have spare spaces after all. Perhaps I’d feel like doing a different event on the spur of the moment. Perhaps a real desire to do a particular race would take hold at some point. I decided none of it really mattered because, I realized, in the final analysis I have no need to prove anything to anyone.

I would run 1200 miles, and I would run 1200 more…

I have done a lot of running in 2017 – just over 1203 miles in fact (ignoring inaccuracies due to dodgy gps signal). A lot of those miles came in the early part of the year when I was training for my first (and so far only) 50 mile ultra-marathon in May. The monthly totals go like this: 96, 165, 154, 177, 130, 64, 96, 103, 56, 44, 69, 51. Over the year I have run 3 x 10k races (Ivybridge in May, Muddy Duck in July and Plymouth in October), the 6 Moor Miles race (6.4 miles in July), 1 x Half Marathon (Reading in March), The Grizzly (19.4 miles in March), 3 x Marathons (Taunton and Southampton in April, New Forest in September) and two ultra marathons (Somerset Flat 50 Miler in May and Mendip Marauder 30 Miler in August).

My highlights have to be the two ultra marathons, but marathon PBs at Taunton and then at Southampton when I broke the 4 hour mark for the first time are also up there along with the cheeky 10k PB I got at Ivybridge when, on the back of my distance training, I had no idea whether I could still run ‘fast’ over short distances but just went for it anyway. Here are a few pictures to commemorate some of these achievements…

Crossing the line at the Taunton Marathon.

Post-Southampton Marathon with a new sub-4 hour marathon PB in the bag!

Looking a bit ill (and certainly not feeling so good) at about 32 miles into the Somerset Flat 50 Miler – a cup of tea and a good amount of food perked me up here.

With just 5-6 miles to go of the 50 Miler at Blue Anchor – this is one of my favourite pictures of the year.

On Uphill Beach at the end of the Mendip Marauder.

What does 2018 hold? As far as specific events are concerned, I’m not entirely sure. I am booked into the Grizzly in March again and have a hotel booked ahead of the Southampton Marathon in April (or maybe the Half Marathon depending on other events). I ought to have a crack at a really good time for the marathon (3:45 ought to be in reach) but I do also want to go longer again, and once I have fixed on an event (which is proving tricky) then the training for that will dominate and influence everything else. I’d like to try to run more consistently through the year – 100 miles in each calendar month seems like a good target but to achieve this I will have to be better at getting going again after a long event than I was this year. I suspect I would also have to do a little less in the early part of the year to avoid the general, creeping fatigue that I found had kicked in by September this year and which left me doing very little through the autumn. Perhaps a good plan would be to focus on the Southampton Marathon in April, then find a 35ish mile ultra-marathon in June/early July and then find another one or two marathon plus events for the early autumn (Eden Marathon in October?). We’ll see!

Something > Nothing

Over the last couple of weeks my running has tailed off quite dramatically. I had been in a phase when, despite having no specific races in the pipeline to prepare for, I was trying to keep to a routine of three runs a week – a short one (30-40 minutes) on Tuesday evening, a slightly longer one (about one hour) at my running club on Thursday evening and then a longer one again (something like 7-10 miles) at the weekend. My overall goal was to stick with that kind of plan through December, gradually lengthening the weekend run before launching into a more intensive training plan, along the lines that I followed at the start of 2017, in January ahead of a major (ultramarathon) event in May/June. Sadly, even my modest plan for December hit the rails – I ended up prioritizing the marking I had to do a couple of times which killed off the Tuesday run and twice in a row I missed the Thursday run because it was cold or wet or I was tired, i.e. for no particularly good reason other than general self-preservation through what is probably my busiest time of year at work.

With this in mind I have been particularly pleased that, even though I have not really felt like it, I HAVE managed to get out for a run on both of the last two Saturdays. Admittedly, on each occasion my runs were shorter than my target (they were just 4.3 miles and 5 miles) BUT I am pleased that I did SOMETHING. In this context, something is definitely better than nothing – it has kept me moving and given me some sense that I am still a runner and, surprisingly, both runs felt good once I had got myself going. These two shortish runs have helped to build a running bridge over the last couple of weeks and as I approach the new year, when my training must ramp up several notches if I am going to get to where I want/need to be in the spring, it’s now time to step off that bridge and get back into things properly.