Unsung heroes: Yuki Kawauchi

It is ironic that, not so long ago, being an amateur was a pre-requisite to compete at a high level in athletics (see my review of "The Ghost Runner") and yet today, being a "citizen runner" as Yuki Kawauchi is fondly referred to, very much sets him apart from other elite runners. As far as I am aware, there are no other marathon runners with a current PB of 2:08 who have not already been snapped up by a shoe company or a professional team. To put this into context, in spite of the organizers of the Egyptian Marathon paying his travel expenses, when he missed his flight due to problems with his passport, he paid for a new ticket himself at a cost of $9,000 - or about a quarter of his yearly salary (he did go on to win, however). On the other hand, in the New York City Marathon he was given the red carpet treatment, where he finished in 11th place with a respectable 2:12:29.

Some articles refer to him as "the Japanese underdog" but I think of him as anything but an underdog; an "overdog", perhaps, yes. Other people with his level of commitment and talent are usually forced to either dedicate their lives to the pursuit of excellence or slip away into oblivion and yet Yuki seems to manage to run for fun ("After 21 Marathon runs, I can now say with confidence how fun Marathon running can be."). One can't help wondering how much he could shave off his time if he were able to focus more single-mindedly on his Marathon running with the financial support of a sponsor and the advice of a professional coach. But perhaps this is the very paradox - it is just possible that he runs such great times precisely because he doesn't have the same pressure that comes with the package and is still able to enjoy running at a high level. I've just finished reading Sage Canaday's account of "Running for the Hansons" and, while interesting, much fun it does not seem.

Another thing I love about this guy is that he is constantly challenging the status quo by doing presumably unwise things like competing at the highest level in Marathons (i.e. sub 2:11) separated by only a couple of weeks (apparently he wanted "to find out whether the common sense of the running world is really any kind of sense at all"). It is only by the actions of brave individuals like this that our understanding of the world is completely transformed and a new paradigm is established. In 2012, he ran 10 Marathons or Ultramarathons (winning 5 of them). On the other hand, his frequent racing schedule most likely scuppered his chances of making the Olympic team in 2012 and, so disgusted was he with his pedestrian time of 2:12, that he shaved his head in penance.

Lastly, there is ultimately something very satisfying in knowing you have given your all or, by proxy, watching someone laying everything on the line to win. I think the photo says it all:

In one 50K Ultra he participated in, he was wining right up until 600m(!) before the line, where he collapsed due to heat stroke. Unfortunately he is no stranger to the medical tent, having been attended to on no fewer than 7 occasions after finishing a race (or not quite finishing, as the case may be).

All this is even more surprising when you consider that he is only 26 years old. We have a lot to look forward to from this young man, I'm sure.

Unsung heroes: Charlie Spedding

You might be forgiven for not knowing who Charlie Spedding is if you are not English or, for that matter British. By the same token, you might be forgiven for not knowing who holds the English record for the Marathon, unbroken for the last 28 years. You can probably guess that I am talking about the same person.

What is interesting about Charlie Spedding, as he recounts in his autobiography "From Last to First", is that his talent almost went by undiscovered. He was the typical bespectacled boy who came last in every race until one day he decided to try. From there on in it is a pretty remarkable story of how he found himself running on the shoulder of John Treacy in the last few meters of the 1984 Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles, where he won a bronze medal. This was to be first medal in the Marathon for England in 20 years and, so far, is the last one.

Although he concedes that natural talent is an important part of the equation, his message is basically that, if you put your mind to it, you can (and should) fulfill your potential. The book is well written and an enjoyable read but one of the chapters comes across as a bit of a rant. If you look at the British all-time rankings in the Marathon today, you can see his point: there has been a dearth of progress since his day and that is supposedly with all the advantages of modern training (and funding) that top athlete's have at their disposal. I think that this view is a little one dimensional because this ignores the improvements that British athletes have made in other disciplines such as cycling and rowing coupled with (and probably related to) the relatively recent emergence of African athletes as the dominating force in distance running.

His other rant is about the recent fad of "non-competitive sports days". I have to say I agree with him on this one. Real life is one big competition and so to try to hide this from kids seems to me a great cruelty. Better that they get their first taste of disappointment by coming 4th in the egg and spoon race aged 8½ than by being fired from their first job. It reminds me a bit of what a head teacher at my son's school told me at a parent's meeting: "We don't have any bullying at this school", to which I said that even if I could believe it were true, I wouldn't want my kids to go to a bully-free school because again, in real life, bullies are everywhere.

However, I felt that the rant went a little too far when he started to criticise "fun runners" and people who ran road races in "fancy dress" saying that it was shameful for their kids to see their parents doing something badly. I tend to subscribe to the idea of doing something as well as you can if you are going to do it, but even this is open to interpretation. Am I running my races as well as I possibly can? It is certainly true that, more than from the result itself, my satisfaction is derived from knowing that I have pushed myself to the limit. On the other hand, I can always ask myself the question - had I trained harder, longer or better, could I have done any better? In any case, you cannot do absolutely everything in life to the best of your abilities by definition - you could always do one thing better by sacrificing another. So it is a tradeoff and those "fun runners" have their priorities elsewhere. At least they are doing some exercise which is definitely more healthy than doing none at all and arguably more healthy than the training regime Spedding subjected himself to (his accounts of the operations he had done to his Achilles tendons are gruesome). I would go on futher to say that those fun-runners might just make running seem more accessable to the bespectacled little boys who are currently coming in last at their school, than the elite runners who must seem completely out of their reach.

It does still beg the question why the strength in depth of talent at road races is not what it used to be. These days it seems like a sub 30 minute 10K time will give you a pretty good shot at a podium place; in many of the races Spedding competed in, you wouldn't even have finished in the top 10.

I would be interested to know what Spedding thinks of the whole mimimalist running shoe movement. As someone whose running career started before the Nike revolution and who even worked for Nike as a representative, I expect he would find it baffling. I think the jury is still out as to whether standard running shoes are better or worse for Achilles injures amongst elite runners who presumably have good running technique and are covering hundreds of kilometers a week. I can only speak from my experiment of one: my Achilles tendons have never been stronger than since I made the switch.

Where is the limit?

I first came across Josef Ajram in the same moment that I first learned of the Ironman, in a free video that came with my Power Breathe device. I've always had a small amount of curiosity to see what the latest "locura" he has come up with is - be it completing five Ironmans in 5 Hawaiian islands over 5 consecutive days (the Epic 5) or an Ultraman - but my own resistance to falling into that trap of having your goals determine you rather than the other way round made me hesitate to buy his book. The shop assistant in the tiny airport in Asturias told me that "it was very popular" and that was enough to tip the scales in favour of it being my inflight reading material for the flight back to Madrid.

The philosophy behind Josef's brand "Where's the limit?" is very simple. As he has tattooed around his neck: "I don't know where the limit is but I know where it is not". Contrary to what I imagined, neither he nor his book is all about going further, longer or harder than before but rather a way of life which I found I could relate to. In fact his book is quite unlike similar "adventure" books in the sense that it actually recounts what some people would call a failure, but which Josef absolutely refuses to label in such a defeatist way. As he puts it, to call something a failure is to stop there, wallowing in self-pity, to limit yourself. Instead it is an opportunity to learn - like my much less glamorous experience in the Lisbon Half Ironman recently - and, in this way, he shows that you can always redefine the scope so that the limits are never reached. Just because he had to pull out of his third consecutive Ironman in his bid to complete 7 in a row, it doesn't mean that he has found his limit because he can (and I'm sure will) always try again. By this token, the only real limit is our own mortality. Perhaps in Josef's case, the only limit is the space he has left on his body to tattoo his achievements.

"The limit is definitively your next challenge, be it sporting, professional or personal... Having a goal is what makes you enjoy it. If it weren't for this, time would just pass with no particular purpose. Will I manage to find my limit? I am sure that I will NOT. Finding it would mean having no objectives and having to live an existence based on inertia."

This really resonated with me. I believe that, in order to be "happy", we have to have a purpose (or several purposes) and to use every minute of our time to try to move forward in accordance with that, even if that means lying on the sofa watching a film as a rest from training or learning something new. I've not read any of the books on the subject but I suppose this is the concept behind "Mindfulness". By contrast, I sometimes think of a case study written by the neurologist, Dr Oliver Sachs, in which a man reached such a level of "enlightenment" that he would inspire people just with the inner peace that he transmitted via his beautific smile. He even started to look like Buddha: his hair fell out and he became so large that he couldn't get out of his chair without help. It turned out that he had an enormous brain tumour, the size of a golf ball, pressing on his frontal lobes. He had effectively been lobotomised. If happiness is related to the successful pursuit of goals, the answer is not to circumvent frustration and disappointment by making those goals easier to achieve. If that were the case we would end up like Dr Sach's "Buddha".

At first sight, Josef seems like an anomaly, with tattoos that would look more at home on a DJ than a broker and an equal passion for competing in ultra distance events as for playing the stock market. I actually don't find it that much of a surprising mix, only that you have to be very authentic and self assured to get away with it. The stock market and the stopwatch are both completely objective masters which you either beat or get beaten by; there is no room for interpretation or excuses and, what is most important, it is just down to you and no-one else. All my life I have also been attracted to goals that are indisputable and, for example, much preferred Maths at school to English as I knew how good (or bad) I was and didn't depend on someone else to tell me. Goals like running a Marathon are a good metaphor for real life objectives and I have no doubt that many of the values carry over. But in real life, things are much more complicated and depend on lots of people, responsibilities are diluted or confused and not everyone agrees on what the objectives are or even whether they have been met. There is a temptation to either invest only in those indisputable objectives or to try to convert fuzzy objectives into indisputable ones. This second option is clearly the best alternative but, taken to extremes, can sometimes pervert the objective too far from its original cause. I don't think Josef can be criticised for hiding from the real world because he has managed to make a very successful brand out of his way of life as well as earning a living from it. As far as I am concerned, that is what I consider his most impressive achievement.

Josef is understandably a bit prickly when it comes to people who don't know him criticising him and by effectively making a brand out of himself, he is a very easy target. He is the first to admit that he is not the best in any one thing he does but that is exactly what makes his book interesting reading. How much can we learn by reading the autobiography of some outlier: an athlete, entreprenuer or artist who has been blessed with qualities in the tails of the distribution for which we might make up the mean? Josef seems much more approachable, more human because of the mistakes which he openly admits to, his outbursts of frustration and because he chooses not to hide behind a celebrity smoke screen. But make no mistake, this is exactly what makes him an outlier in what he does in fact do best: being Josef Ajram.

Its worth looking beyond the tattoos, beyond what seems like a selfish and perhaps pointless pursuit and beyond the images of someone who makes a living from "day trading" and giving this little book a chance.

Chrissie Wellington retires (not re-tires)

If it's possible to admire Chrissie Wellington any more than we already do, I would argue that her decision to retire from Ironman competitions is a very persuasive reason to do so.

Have a read of the recent interview she gave on the Ironman website and then come back here.

It takes a lot of guts to be able to say to yourself "I've proved that I can do this; now it's time to do something else" - even more guts, I would say, than it takes to be an Ironman World Champion in the first place. I think many of us who compete in Marathons and Ironmans do so because they are alternative realities with clearly defined goals that can be objectively measured - recognizable successes that no-one can take away from us - unlike the scenarios which arise in a typical job, in which not everyone might agree as to how well we have performed. To go from this level of recognition with the structure that following the accompanying training programme must provide, to taking on a new challenge which hasn't even been completely formed yet must take a tremendous amount of courage.

It would surely be so much easier for Chrissie to keep soldiering on until someone younger or fitter eventually knocked her off her pedestal. Then she would gracefully retire in the time honoured fashion with a pat on the back and a BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, with everyone satisfied that she had given her all to the sport. But I think Chrissie knows that if she can take on and conquer the Ironman, then she can do pretty much anything she puts her mind to. Now she has a platform from which she can do many of the things she talked of doing in her autobiography, picking up from where she left off before her stint as an Ironman World Champion. It's clear to me that Chrissie has never seen the Ironman as an alternative reality but as a step forward in her own personal reality.

Another aspect is that you can be motivated by impressing other people or you can be motivated by impressing yourself which is usually a much harder thing to do because only you know what you are really capable of. Chrissie defines as her "perfect race", her victory in Kona in 2011. While others would have dwelled on the imperfection stemming from injuries sustained in her recent bike crash, this was the time she had to dig the deepest in order to win. For me, what impresses me most is her ability to avoid being drawn into that trap of always going for one more. Sports commentators are for ever thinking of records that will be broken if only a certain number of consecutive titles can be won or a particular time can be beaten, but where does it all end? She must have a tremendous strength of character to be able to say "enough is enough" when everyone around her (except, perhaps, her boyfriend) is egging her on.

I initially thought of writing that "Chrissie is the World Champion Ironman and the World Champion of Quitting While You Are Ahead" but somehow the word "quitting" doesn't sit well in the same sentence. Chrissie isn't quitting, she is starting a new challenge and I for one am interested to see what she does next. I'm sure it will be impressive and not necessarily have anything to do with swimming, running or cycling.

Thanks for following!

No, this is not the profile of one of the stages of the Tour de France. It is a graph of the number of hits my blog has been getting a month since its inception almost exactly one year ago. (By the way, the sharp drop off in November just reflects the fact that we have only just started the month.) Another milestone is that the blog has received more than 20,000 hits. So, thank you to everyone who has been following this blog, either publicly or from the sidelines. I get a big kick out of knowing that people are interested to read what I have to say because my wife and most of my friends are not. This blog has been an outlet for my obsessions much like deejaying was (will be again?) for my passion for music.

I thought this might be a good moment to link to some of my best and most popular posts over the last year, especially for those of you who are new around these parts.

Race reports
Maratón de San Sebastián 2010 - 3:07
San Silvestre Vallecana 2010
Media Maratón de Getafe 2011 - 1:23
Lisbon International Triathlon (Half Ironman) 2011 - 4:44
Ironman Brazil (Florianópilis) 2011 - 10:45
Lake Merced (San Francisco) 2011
Media Maratón de Valladolid 2011 - 1:22

Usung heroes
Graeme Obree
Chrissie Wellington
Kilian Journet
Pertti Karpinnen
Andy Holmes
Marc Herremans

Shoes
Soft Star Original Run Amoc LITE Review
The quest for the ultimate all-round minimalist running shoe
Kids and running
The Imelda Marcos of Triathlon

Running technique
Running Technique #1
Running Technique #2
Running up and down hills
Treadmill versus road: To lean or not to lean? 
Keep those knees up boy!
You gotta have rhythm
Compact arm swing

Trips
Budapest
Morocco

Miscellaneous
Epilogue (post Ironman Brazil)
I'm back with a vengeance
Tempting fate
Time management
A week during my Ironman preparation
Top triathlon iPhone apps
Home gym
Nutrition plan for Lisbon Half Ironman
Master class

Unsung Heroes: Kilian Jornet

I'd say that Spain has more than it's fair share of elite sportsmen and women, probably partly due to its great climate. Rafa Nadal, Fernando Alonso, Severiano Ballesteros (RIP), the Spanish football team, Alberto Contador, Marc Gasol even Javier Gómez, the World Champion of Olympic distance Triathlon are all household names. Not so for Kilian Jornet, so he qualifies for my unsung section.

Kilian Jornet runs Marathons. In the mountains. He is an extraordinary athlete with a VO2 Max of around 88ml/kg/min which puts him at the upper end of all the values ever registered. He's already won the Skyrunners World Series 3 times not to mention being World Champion of Ski Mountaineering twice. Skyrunning, as its name suggests, involves running races in the mountains of 30-42km with at least 2,000 meters of climb (and descent - I'm not sure what is worse), a minimum altitude of 2,000m and, in some cases, including a Vertical Kilometer (R). I imagine you have to be extremely fit, lean and dextrous (and a little bit crazy, let's face it) to be able to compete in, let alone win one of these things.

What makes Kilian a "hero" in my book, is his dedication to what he does best without compromising his principles. He could no doubt get more attention and recognition (and more sponsorship for that matter) if he came down to Earth from his Mountains and competed on level ground but he sticks to his thing all the same. He is also very young indeed - only 23 years old - so who knows what he has ahead of him. I'd like to see him getting more coverage at least in the national press - he really is one of the best athletes this country has and he is right under our noses (or really above them I should say).

Unsung hero(in)es: Chrissie Wellington

I'm not sure how much recognition Chrissie Wellington gets in the UK outside of triathlon circles (two worlds in which I no longer live) but, she does have an MBE, so at least the Queen is paying attention. As far as I am concerned, she cannot get enough recognition for her incredible achievements.

I think everyone has heard of Paula Radcliffe by now. Chrissie Wellington is the Paula Radcliffe of the triathlon world. It may be a cliché to compare one athlete to another from a different discipline, but it seems the only way to get the due respect in anything less than a lifetime. What reminded me to write something about Chrissie Wellington was reading last night that she not only won the Ironman in South Africa in record time, but her marathon leg was faster than anyone else (including the men, in case you were wondering). But this kind of result is no longer surprising now after the shockwaves that reverberated through the triathlon world in 2007 when she came from nowhere to win the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii.

At first glance her results look like an anomaly:  for example, last year, in Roth, she recorded a bike leg of 4:36:33 and a marathon of 2:48:54! I could go on, but you can find all this stuff in Wikipedia. The best article I have seen, however, is by the guys at Science of Sport who analyze whether she really is an anomaly or whether the gap between men and women in Triathlon is now where it should be as compared to other sports. All this is written in their usual style, being very careful not to detract from these amazing athletes.

What I like about Chrissie from reading her regular columns in triathlon magazines, is that she seems to have a contagious energy and healthy sense of humour. After all, she was unable to defend her crown in last year's Ironman World Championships due to illness and she has had her fair share of bike crashes and broken bones, so these two qualities will have come in handy. I'm just disappointed she didn't chose Ironman Brazil this year...

Unsung heroes: Pertti Karpinnen

Check out the legs on this guy! Bear in mind that he is over 2 metres tall (6" 7) and, when he was competing, he weighed over a 100 kilos, so he is hardly what you would call of a stocky build.

The holy grail of the rowing world is the single scull: it is just you and your boat, noone else in the crew, not even a cox to steer you (you have to steer with your foot which is connected to the rudder, looking over your shoulder from time to time). Even the mighty Steve Redgrave "only" managed to get a gold in the single scull in the Commonwealth Games. (What a wonderfully British euphemism the word "Commonwealth" is.). As you are moving much more slowly than a rowing 8, your oars spend more time in the water and technique is much more of a factor: how quickly you "catch" the water, how smoothly you accelerate without ripping through the water, how good your rhythm is, how explosively you coordinate all the muscle groups (we're going to assume that balancing the boat is not an issue!).

So how come you haven't heard of arguably the most successful single sculler of all time? He won three Olympic gold medals at three consecutive Olympics, a feat only equalled by Vyacheslav Nikolayevich Ivanov. Maybe its due to the fact that it is impossible to remember where to put the double letters in his name (unless you are Finnish, of course) which makes it is harder to find him on the internet. I read that at the age of 52 he was able to row 2000 metres on the Concept II Rowing ergometer (typically found in most gyms) in 5 minutes and 52 seconds - that means pulling at a 500m split of 1:28 for 6 minutes! Try it sometime.

Unsung heroes: Marc Herremans

I recently came across the story of Marc Herremans.

Marc Herremans came sixth in the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii in 2001. Just three months later, he was training in the Lanzarote on his bike when he slipped on a tight bend and fell onto some rocks, breaking his back. He ended up completely paralyzed from the waist down.

I am hesitant to compare my trivial ordeals with that of Marc but, in my case, when my fitness was scuppered at the age of 21 with a bout of mononucleosis, I felt cheated and I remember feeling loathe to regain what I had already rightfully earned. So I find it incredible that this guy only three months later was preparing to compete again in the Ironman World Championships, this time in a wheelchair. Eventually, in 2006, he was the first wheelchair bound athlete to complete the Ironman World Championships, although he didn't win any prize money for doing so (this seems particularly mean spirited of the organizers, I must say).

He has also set up a charity, to help other people in a similar predicament, which is called "To Walk Again". Being able to walk is something we take so for granted, I just cannot imagine the strength of character Marc Herremans - not to mention many others that he represents - must have.

Unsung heroes: Graeme Obree

Its hard to know where to start because there are so many things about Graeme Obree that make him the perfect hero - so much so, that it has not passed Hollywood by. Even so, he still deserves the "unsung" because, the chances are, that you haven't heard of him before.

Graeme Obree is your true cycling fanatic. Growing up in Scotland he competed in local time trials and supported his family with the proceeds from a humble cycle shop. He became entranced by the holy grail of competitive cycling - not the Tour de France but the hour record - which consists of cycling as far as you can in one hour. It is a record that has been held by the likes of Miguel Indurain and Eddie Merckx and is supposed to be about as close as you can get to legalised torture.

Now I am a bit of a purist when it comes to sport. For example, what I dislike about staged events like the Tour is that there are tactics, there is etiquette and prizes are given for hanging on the back wheel of someone only to sprint the last 30 seconds to be the first to cross one of the arbitrary stage finish lines. Consider the Ironman - there is no drafting allowed (the significant aerodynamical benefit of hanging on the back wheel) and no prizes for those who have the fastest bike leg and the sponsorship deals play second fiddle to the event itself.

What makes Graeme the ultimate cycling purist is not just the unquestionable brutal reality of the one hour record but the fact that he raced on a bike he built and designed himself! In fact, it is just possible that triathlon has Mr Obree to thank for the invention of the aerobars and the aero-position, but we'll come to that in a minute. Obree was in many ways the antithesis of Chris Boardman, the technical cyclist who trained with pulse meters, knew where his lactate threshold was and, more importantly, had the best bike sponsorship money could buy. This is not to detract from Boardman who was an incredible athlete but rather to put Obree's achievements in context.

In 1993, Obree booked the velodrome in Norway for 24 hours so that he could attempt his record; he failed by nearly a kilometer. Incredibly, he came back the next day just an hour before his booking ran out and went for the record a second time. Imagine the pain his muscles must have been in even before starting! And even more incredibly, this time he managed to secure the hour record!

A week later, Chris Boardman who, to be fair, had already announced his intentions of breaking the hour record some time before, stole the record from Obree. What was worse was that the UCI (Union Cyclisme Internationale) decided that Obree's riding position was "illegal". Obree had invented a peculiar riding style (see picture) in which he tucked his arms under his body, like a ski jumper, for maximum aerodynamic efficiency (and minimum comfort, no doubt). It's true that it was a fairly dangerous way of riding as Obree himself demonstrated when he lost control of the bike - but it is always better to make rules proactively before they are broken rather than reactively.

This didn't stop Obree, oh no. He invented another riding position, perhaps inspired by a film he had seen.

Da dadadada, da da da!

The UCI also banned this position and came up with some apparently arbitrary ruling based on the position of his seat. Nevertheless, Obree took back the hour record in 1994, gaining not only a sporting victory but a moral one. It seems like the UCI has learned its lesson and now states that the hour record must be completed on a bicycle similar to the one Merckx used in 1972. I have to say, I am in favour of this. Being a purist as I have said, I'd rather the winner was decided on the track and not in the laboratory or the work bench. Obree showed that, in spite of there being virtually no limits to the technology employed in the bike, even an amateur stood a chance (for the ball bearings in the bottom bracket he used some from his washing machine). However, nearly 20 years later with wind tunnel fashioned carbon fibre frames I'm not sure it would still be the case. I think that the sport of rowing has the balance right on this issue: any innovation which would price a significant part of the competition out of the market was banned. The most famous example of this is the ingenious idea of the sliding rigger with which Chris Ballieu beat Steve Redgrave to victory at Henley: instead of 100kg athletes thundering up and down the boat on sliding seats, why not allow the pivot point (rigger) to move instead? These boats still exist but are not allowed in any competition. There is also a minimum weight a boat can have thus putting a stop to the fierce search for ever lighter, stiffer (and more expensive) materials. In cycling, the rules are terribly confusing and complicated - it depends very much on the competition.

Obree not only fought his battles on the track: as a sufferer of bipolar disorder, he was prone to devastating bouts of depression. He has tried to commit suicide (thankfully with no success) at least three times. Last thing I heard is that he is writing a book on dealing with depression to follow up his excellent and thoroughly recommended autobiography "The Flying Scotsman". I also heard that he was planning to attempt the hour record again as recently as late last year. I think it is just as well that he didn't and, to me, shows me that he is winning that harder and more vital battle with himself.

On a side note, I can't help noticing how cycling and depression seem to be intimately linked. I suspect that the missing link is the word "obsession". Every year, it seems, another professional cyclist commits suicide (I've read that 3 of the 60 Tour de France winners have committed suicide which is a very abnormal proportion). Then there is Chad Gerlach, an American professional cyclist and past team mate of Lance Armstrong who has spent stints between competitions as a homeless crack addict. Although there is a big motivational difference between taking crack and human growth hormone, say, perhaps there is a reason in all this why cycling is the sport most often linked to drug offenses.

Chad Gerlach

POSTDATA: Wow, this post has suddenly become the most visited post on my blog - maybe it will go "viral", hahaha. Perhaps he is not so unsung after all and more people are singing about Obree than I realized. It could also be connected to the "news" I read recently that he has said that he is gay. First of all, I'm not really sure it is any of our business (and why is this usually described as an "open admission" as if it were something to be guilty about?). Secondly, in the context of his struggles with bipolar disorder and world level competition this can only have been an extra stress. Hats off to you Mr Obree.

Unsung heroes: Andy Holmes

There seem to be two kinds of famous people in the world: those who are famous in their lifetime and those who have to die before they are recognized. Andy Holmes falls into the second category.

I got into rowing for the simple reason that the friend of mine with whom I went jogging said that it was easier than running "because you got to sit down". It certainly was at first - the guy at bow (at the front of the boat) used to row with one hand while smoking with the other - but, one day, I was plucked out of that boat and put into another one, by virtue of my height if nothing else. I can still remember being in the cinema with my parents (how long ago was that?!) when we bumped into my coach and he told us we would be rowing on the Thames in the Fours Head of the River race, over the 4.25 mile long Oxford Cambridge Boat race. Now I think of it, it was pretty crazy for that to be our very first race (it may not seem far in running terms but the Olympic rowing distance is only 2000m)! I remember thinking all the way along the course that I would stop after just ten more strokes and then apologize to my crew mates for letting them down terribly. But then I would find it in me to do another ten strokes and another... That day we overtook the senior men's squad from the club in their nice shiny yellow plastic boat (ours was a very sturdy wooden one) and that was the turning point from which I never looked back. From then on, it became very much a part of my daily life for the next 6 years.

Steve Redgrave and Andy Holmes quickly became adolescent heroes for me. At this time they had already won gold medals at the Olympic games in 1984 but, in spite of this, rowing was still very much a minority sport, limited to being a backdrop to Henley Royal Regatta or an excuse to go to the pub by the river once a year on Boatrace day. To give him credit, Steve Redgrave had to win 5 Olympic gold medals in 5 consecutive Games to really capture the public's imagination, somewhat helped by his spontaneous remark just after bagging the 4th one, that if anyone should see him near a boat again, "they have my permission to shoot me". Andy Holmes also won no less than two of those Olympic gold medals (and a bronze one, to boot) but not many people have heard of him. Matthew Pinsent who won the other three golds with Steve Redgrave is much better known, more than anything else, because he was at the tail end of Steve's career when the sporting audience had finally woken up to this amazing achievement that was unfolding.

For me, I still think of the original pair of Steve Redgrave and Andy Holmes - teenage worship doesn't get forgotten so easily. For some reason Andy and Steve split up and went their separate ways after the second gold and Andy eventually gave up rowing. It was a great shame because he was clearly an incredibly talented oarsman - anyone who can stop a boat that Steve is rowing in from going round in circles must be. It seems so very poignant and tragic that, 17 years later, Andy should finally get back into rowing, at a more low key level only to catch a rare water borne disease (Weil's disease) and die from the infection. I was very shocked to read this when it happened a couple of months ago and found a lot of old memories getting stirred up. We were always told that, if we should get a fluey cold then we should go to the doctor and inform him that we were rowers, so that he could check for Weil's disease.

Greg is the one on the left and, yes, they are all standing on the same step of the podium

On a brighter note, while digging around on the internet to fill in some of the blanks in this post, I just noticed that Greg Searle - who last won an Olympic gold medal 18 years ago and had long since retired - is back in the running for the London 2012 Olympic team (when he will be 40)! Not only that, but he won a silver medal at the Rowing World Championships in November. This has filled me with irrational hope, that it's never too late.