Keep on Running

For those of you who know me, it must have been almost impossible to remain oblivious to the fact that I’m training for a marathon. For those of you who don’t really know me and are casual followers of this blog or have just stumbled upon it by accident, I’ll reiterate the bottom line - I’m running a marathon. To be more specific the London Marathon, which takes place in just under three day's time.

Now, I’m not a big fan of self promotion, in fact as an attribute of a person I find it a bit of a turn off. That said, I am of course just as fallible as the next person to bursts of arrogance, boastfulness and the general ‘bigging myself up’ type of behavior I generally despise in other people. However, I try very hard to limit these outbursts to as small a number as possible, which has made this article a bit tricky. I mean, how exactly do you go about writing about a marathon; the training, the sacrifices, the unbelievable aches and pains, without kind of saying inadvertently, I’m a bit awesome? Answered simply, I’m not sure you can.  What I can do instead, in my jumbled, muddled kind of way is explain a little bit about the journey of which I have, somewhat naively, embarked upon. By the way, as a point of clarity, I don’t think I’m awesome; it just might sound like I think I do sometimes.

To start I think it would be wise to give you an overview of my physical condition at the point that I signed up for this.  I’m a twenty nine year old software geek by trade. Basically this means I sit down all day and have a chronic addiction to caffeine and sugar based food products. I also quite like E-numbers. I don’t play any sport unless it involves a beach and a beer. That said in the summer, on a good week, I sometimes muster a couple of runs, up to distances of five miles or so. I’m not a massively healthy eater; I am however a moderate to heavy drinker and an ex-smoker.  Hopefully you’ve joined up the few dots mentally and realised I’m not really a health freak. This was a fact made staggeringly obvious after the Christmas period which, as is traditional, contained far too much boozing, a little smoking and more fatty food products than you can wave a pork scratching at! Put simply, in the first week of January, the day my training was meant to commence, I was a sweaty, hung-over, borderline-alcoholic mess.

At this point it would be sensible to assume that I attacked the first week of January with as much exercise-based rigor as possible. Well sadly I didn’t. Sensibility didn’t come into play I’m ashamed to admit. Why not you may well indeed ask? Well, it kind of boils down to an administrative blunder. As with most things in my personal life, I entered my marathon application at the last minute, if you wanted to be really finicky you could even say late. The upshot being, I wasn’t guaranteed a place. In fact, it was well into the second week of the month before I was aware that I’d been given a place to run in a marathon.  At that point, the spot I’d been given was for the Brighton marathon, and as excited as I was to run the race, it was lacking the prestige of London, and well, I’m a bit vain and fickle. This further delayed my earnest start to training. Fortunately, it wasn’t too long before the organisers of the London event got in contact to notify me of some drop-outs  and thus my inclusion in my local event - I live in London, and depending on your definition of what a Londoner is, I’m a Londoner. Right, that just about sets the scene I think, about two weeks into January and not really training properly, yep that’s about right.

In the third week I began to crank things up a little bit. I needed to. I downloaded a training guide and began to stick to it. The first few days were tiresome and hard, but after a week I started to get into it. I also clamped down on fatty foods, and even invested in some spandex type running tights and some new flashy trainers. The spandex tights leave almost nothing to the imagination and every time I leave the house in them I’m genuinely terrified I may get arrested for gross indecency. Now that you’ve absorbed that truly terrifying mental image I’ll move on. At the end of the week and in keeping with my proneness to celebrating shallow victories, I bought myself an Indian and opened the first beer of the week. It was to acknowledge my first proper week of training and the first of many ten kilometer runs. Basically, it was the classy mans Saturday night in. Sadly, this is a tale of woe and as such I am obliged to inform you my takeaway special, was more than just a little bit ‘special’, and in the undesirable food poisoned kind of way.  The result was that the next eighteen hours or so were spent hugging the toilet. The one silver lining of this horrific experience was that, the bathroom was recently refurbished; and although I would rather not have slept at the base of my toilet, it was a far more pleasant experience than it would have been just a month or so before. You may wonder why this is in any way relevant, but as I gazed up at the bathroom ceiling in its newly painted glory, feeling as though I had just expelled all my insides out of every available orifice, I counted the small blessing. The next three or so days were a write-off! That evening had left me feeling like a bean bag, without its inners, a fluffy toy without its fluff, a sock without its...oh you get the picture, I was knackered, empty, spent.

Following my brush with food poisoning and the lackadaisical training to which had proceeded, I began to really apply myself. I think what prompted the general increase in effort was that I started to collect money on behalf of Macmillan Cancer Support, the charity we had decided to run for. This made everything more serious and as donations began to drip into our Just Giving page it became obvious that there would be no backing out. So to begin with I consulted a few people much more in the know than me, exercise-wise, and found out a list of do’s and don’ts. I started training regularly, pretty much quit drinking and began to eat better. I also made a note to never to visit the Indian round the corner ever again.

After a few weeks, my fitness drastically improved. I began to ramp up the miles and got a feel for my own boundaries. One thing which surprised me was actually how quickly, once I’d stopped drinking, my fitness improved. As an ex-smoker I also wondered how my lungs would react to long distance running. The answer is, they were fine. As I say general fitness, was something which came to me very quickly. What didn’t come to me very quickly were muscles. As anyone who has ever actually met me in person can vouch for, I am not a particularly muscular specimen. This is not something which has crept up on me, I’ve always been skinny, and so my lack of muscles was not a surprise in itself. However, what I didn’t account for and what was a bit of a shock was just how physically painful the entire duration of the training would be, and what a strain on those feeble lumps it would be.

I can honestly say that during the last twelve weeks almost every inch of both my legs has at one time or another has been in pain. It’s kind of strange, I ran a twenty mile training race about three weeks ago and when I finished I was panting but I didn’t feel that bad. My legs on the other hand were screaming out at me to stop, miles before I eventually did. They ached, they moaned and at one point a subtle, sinister but noticeable tremor trickled up and down my knee.  Even as I write this, almost three months after the Indian takeaway night, I am sat with a bag of peas wrapped around my left calf. It hurts just to walk to my kitchen. Thank God I have a housemate to make me tea (I have said this last sentence out loud as my current cup is beginning to get low and I have no desire for motion).  

One friend recently posed the question whether or not running a marathon is actually good for you or not. I assume she asked me this because as I cooked her dinner I was limping a bit more than she was accustomed to. I would also be lying if I said it hadn’t been a thought which had crossed my mind as well. In terms of my consumption of food and drink, I’d say yes, it’s good for you. I’m eating healthier, although a damn sight more, and drinking less than I have since I was old enough to drink. Actually that’s a lie, I’ve drank less than since I was old enough to be served alcohol. The benefits of both these things don’t need to be explained. But as someone who once glutinously drank champagne (because it was free) until he threw up, drinking less has been a real plus (don’t even get me started on all-you-can-eat buffets).

On the flip side, I do seem to be constantly dehydrated (no matter how much I drink), always tired, and as mentioned before there are some rather unnerving vibrations coming from the lower regions of my body. Head out of the gutter people, you know what I’m talking about.  Another negative consequence of the sadistic training schedule I’ve been enthralled in is that my social life has taken a beating. I’ve been very boring, in bed by ten and tired, and un-conversational hours before that.  In the beginning I tried to mix an active nightlife with running but it simply didn’t work. One good friend witnessed what ‘a few’ pints after a twenty mile run do to you. I’ll spare you the absolute details, but let’s just say it was similar to that of an undercooked Chicken Saag.  Last night I took my first ice bath in an attempt to shift a calf pain, which was, well not to state the blooming obvious, very, very cold, and unpleasant.

The negatives list is relatively large, and that’s before I have even mentioned the actual labors of running. These are often written about so I won’t bore you with more details, but in summary there’s plenty of hard work, commitment, focus and, well, running. One thing I will say, as the days stretch out into the promise of summer and the weather warms up, it’s worth bearing in mind that when I started training for this it was dark, wet and cold. One Sunday morning in particular will stick in my head for a long time. As I made my way steadily around the East London canals the force of the wind and the hail stones rattled my very soul. Okay that’s a bit dramatic, my soul remained un-rattled, but the thought “what the bloody hell am I doing this for” did pop into my head a least a few times.



As the big day approaches and I am well into the ‘tapering down phase’ (that’s apparently the word for training less), I have asked myself whether I’d put myself through this again?
The answer can only be about as ambiguous as my feelings toward the training and the impending marathon in general. After all it’s been terrible, but also strangely enjoyable. I mean who wouldn’t, if given a choice, want to be fitter and healthier than they’ve ever been in their lives? But, as a counter argument who in their right mind would want to give up their social life, quit boozing and be in pretty much constant pain? It’s a toughie.

I have few doubts that I will, as I did before, start to drink too much, but probably (and hopefully) to a lesser degree after Sunday. I even suspect that my diet will also take a turn for the worse. But, whether I take on another marathon, or not, is probably not that important. The main thing is that I will keep on running. After the last three months it would be almost impossible not to. After all, putting the aches and pains aside for one moment, there are staggeringly few times in life where I have managed to find such peace and welcome solitude as when I am out, on my own, running.