Training camp in Morocco!

I've decided to join Jonathan (my coach) in Morocco for a training camp at altitude. It's in October so it should fit perfectly into my preparations for the Marathon in Valencia and it also happens to be one of those Spanish bank holidays (called a "puente" or bridge) where you get 5 days off for the price of two day's holiday. One of the star athletes that Jonathan coaches, Youness (1:03 in hallf marathon!!) is from Morocco and will give us the inside track.

I have a special place in my heart for Morocco. When I was 18 years old my rich great Aunt gave me a fantastic present: a holiday anywhere I wanted to go in the world. This is something so much grander than a holiday in any particular place and so I was reluctant to bring it down to earth by choosing my destination. My mum, on the other hand, was worried that things were getting booked up and, one day after school, I came back to find that she had made my decision for me and had booked a trip to Morocco. The irritation I felt was short lived because it was an amazing trip: I went on my own with a group of people in an army truck all over the country, sleeping in tents or, for many mild nights, directly under the stars. It was straight after the Junior World Rowing Championships in Aiguebelette, where I won a bronze medal in the coxed fours, so I was probably in the best form I have ever been in my life. I was keen to at least maintain some semblance of fitness so I remember seeking out people to go running with and I happened upon a local guy, who also had a bike he lent me. I remember setting off with him - I had my relatively flashy Nike Air trainers and he was running with some plimsolls or similar - and then being struck immediately by the inability to breathe, as if I was sucking in the air through a straw. Where we were in the Atlas mountains the air was much thinner. He was very patient and kept slowing down to let me catch up but it was quite a humbling experience!

I had an amazing holiday, getting to see all the contrasts Morocco has to offer. We would prepare food ourselves, washing the vegetables in potassium permanganate but on the last day, I threw caution to the wind and ate a salad in Jemaa al-Fnaa, the main square in Marrakesh. In those days (20 years ago) you had no idea how many flies had laid their eggs on the salad leaves, nor how many faeces they had rubbed their legs in previously. I remember that there were some foods that I was really looking forward to eating when I got back home - for some reason, polo mints were among them - but the diarrhea started more or less as soon as I walked through the front door. I've no idea what kind of awful virus I picked up but it took several months for me to be able to go back to eating normally. I started my first term at Oxford as a good bet for the Blue Boat that year and was immediately put in a coxed pair with Pete Bridge (at the time a junior gold medalist who went on to compete in the Olympic Games in Atlanta). That first (and only outing) was a disaster with Pete asking me why we were going round in circles (which is what happens if one person is pulling much harder than the other). I was told to come when I was feeling better which was some weeks later.

I've been back to Morocco twice since then. The first time was about ten years ago when we went down from Madrid all the way in a bus to spend New Year's Eve in Marrakesh. That was really something, to see how the landscape and the culture gradually changed and then not so gradually in those 30 kilometers separating Tarifa and Tangier. The second time was more recently, when the kids were about 1 and 3 years old. It was one of the best holidays we have had with the kids, they were absolutely mesmerized by the colours, the smells, the hullabaloo, and they would sleep like they never slept at home. I clearly remember having to change one of the boy's nappies in that same square where I had eaten that salad years before. He had done one of those explosive shits that had squirted all the way up his back to his neck. With the soiled baby in one hand and the soiled nappy in the other, I tried to communicate to the amused locals in my rusty french that it would be great if they could get me a plastic bag...

So I am really looking forward to going back. This time I know what to expect from running in the mountains. I won't be able to help wondering whether my anonymous running companion is still out there running somewhere.

By the way, if you are in Madrid and interested (I have nothing to gain from this) then here are the details of the training camp. It is open to anyone.

Compact arm swing

I was thinking about my arms while I was running yesterday. After having watched, "Indulgence", a film about ultrarunning featuring Anton Kupricka, I couldn't help noticing that he runs with very relaxed arms, almost hanging down by his sides.

I tried running like this for a while but it felt so unnatural. In fact it reminded me of how I hold my glass when I am in a disco, something that my wife relentlessly takes the piss out of me for. I hold my glass up against my chest, I suppose because (a) it is less likely to get knocked (although if it does spill, I'm going to get soaked) and (b) there is less distance to travel to my mouth. My wife thinks it is due to my Englishness; Spanish people, on the other hand, hold their glasses at full arm extension, down by their hips.

A compact arm swing should be more efficient because, like a pendulum, it requires less force to swing the shorter the radius. On the other hand, when standing still it is definitely more relaxing to hold your arms as the Spanish hold their drinks. I wonder whether it is better to run like Krupicka does for the sort of ulltralong distances that he covers, or whether this is just his idiosyncratic style.

A few months ago, after putting up this photo of me running in Asturias

a friend of mine compared my running style to that of the President of Spain, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, here seen jogging with the British Prime Minister, David Cameron

I have to admit, it does look weird but once you realize that the arms have to pass each other at the same height at some point however you run, you see that it is just a question of timing...

Please sir, I want some more...

I think that having done the training for the Ironman has made it much easier, both physically and mentally, to tolerate the training load of my preparations for the Marathon. That seems like an obvious thing to say but it isn't really. Doing bursts of high speed running is quite different to plodding along for hours on end, even if both are assigned the same number of TRIMPs (TRaining IMPulses, or a way to equate duration and intensity across sports). Even so, I'm doing far fewer TRIMPs a week than I was doing in the build up to the Ironman - last week I knocked out about half as many as I was doing a week during the month of April, for example. To be fair, running is a high impact activity which employs a very high percentage of muscle mass and so it would be infeasible for me to try to match workload TRIMP for TRIMP; in Triathlon training, riding gives you a break from running and swimming from riding to some extent To give you some idea, the equivalent number of kilometers a week in running (at low intensity) would be 240, which would put me up there with élite Marathon runners! In terms of time, I'm doing 8 hours of training a week compared to up to 25 for the Ironman - that's the advantage of including more high intensity work, which counts for more TRIMPs.

I'm currently in week 9

Having said all this, I told my coach that I was finding the training load quite comfortable and so he has upped the ante. He told me that the new programme is what other athletes that he trains and who have better times than me are following. He also told me not to do any funny business...

Why it's important to keep a training log

Today I received a speeding ticket with photographic evidence. It was dated the 18th of March (quite why it takes 4 months to arrive - in which time you could have racked up quite a number of them - is beyond me) so it was hard to remember who was driving that day, and it wasn't possible to make anything out from the photo of course. My wife was quite convinced that it was me driving that day and I was quite convinced that it was her. In the end there were no points only a fine to be paid so it is really only an intellectual quibbling point but I was pleased to be able to pull out my training log and prove beyond all doubt that it hadn't been me: that day I had gone to work running...

By the way, the location of the speed camera that caught her was just by the headquarters of DGT (la Dirección General de Tráfico), the very same people who issue the speeding tickets.

Tempting fate

Today my boss (strictly speaking, recently ex-boss) made a comment that got me thinking. He said that I "didn't seem to get injured anymore". Of course, I am tempting fate by writing this post, but there is always an element of luck to not getting injured anyway. On the one hand, I've been running now for nearly 4 years and it has taken at least half that time for my body to adapt to being able to run again. I think of the legs like a kinetic chain that is only as strong as its weakest link. In my case, my injuries started up at the hips and gradually worked their way down my legs, passing through the knees, the Achilles and ending up in my feet. Physical conditioning has definitely helped avoid injury - I recently stepped awkwardly while running and completely twisted my ankle, landing on the side of my foot but I kept on running and had no pain or associated problems whatsoever - but I think the real change has been in my true motivation to run.

I went through the following stages and I suspect that I am not the only one to have done this:

Anger. I was disgusted with how I had let my body become and how I had let myself get to the point of smoking a packet of fags a day. Thankfully, the results of starting to run again were surprisingly quick to materialize and this was motivation in itself but when I ran, I ran with self hatred and I ran to punish myself. If I got stressed at work I would take it out on the treadmill.

Competition. Within a few months I was keen to enter a 10k race. Once I had tasted the adrenaline of being on the start line again, I was hooked, especially when I realized that I was reasonably quick, all things considered (I think my first 10k time was 42 minutes which irritated a few of my friends who had been running for years). Even in that race I remember how fiercely competitive I was, thinking things like "I can't let someone with a haircut like that beat me". Now I was running to punish others, not just myself. The goal was then to try to beat my times every time I raced, something that can only be sustained for so long.

Boom-bust. Of course, I started to get injured and I fell into the typical pattern of ignoring pain until it became chronic and then not having the patience to fully recover after an injury before ramping up the training to the maximum, causing the whole cycle to repeat itself. All my races were "A" races - that is to say, ones in which I aimed to do a personal best performance - and so, without any kind of long term view, I would do things like sprint at the end of a half marathon in spite of having a torn hamstring. What put an authoritative stop to this madness was when I got a stress fracture in my foot and was forced to watch my leg whither away in the space of the 3 months of wearing a cast or air boot and not weight bearing. This time I took my time in building up to running again and, in some ways, getting that stress fracture was the best thing that could have happened. Now all the links in the chain were as strong as each other. Since then, I have not had another injury.... from running. (Touch wood.)

Age denial. The best way to ease back into training before I could fully bear weight was cycling. I was pretty confident on the bike because I had ridden one all through my youth. What I hadn't appreciated, though, was that when you take a fall aged nearly 40, your body doesn't just bounce back as it would a child's. A couple of broken bones and torn ligaments has made me much more cautious. By the way, I had never broken a single bone in my life before the age of 37.

Long term goal. Staking so much (time, money and effort) on the Ironman forced me to take a long term approach. I could no longer take any risks in my training or racing and had to keep my eyes on the prize.

Running for running's sake. I actually enjoy running. I love the feeling of being able to get to anywhere I want to get to. I like running fast, I like running long. I enjoy the training (well, most of it) - it's no longer just a means to an end but an end in itself. In my book, running is the ultimate sport, everything else is just an excuse.

Unless I am lying to myself as I did to some extent or other all along my journey, I think that I have come to the final stop. The question I have is whether I could have got there by a more direct route, having the character that I have, and whether I can stay there indefinitely...

Asturies

I've just come back from a relaxing week in Asturias with the kids (my wife was in Haiti). We had a couple of glorious days, one of which I took advantage of to canoe down the Sella river which, in a couple of week's time, becomes the venue for the frantic Descenso del Sella, now in it's 75th year, with thousands of competitors.

The rest of the time, it was neither cold nor hot, neither raining nor dry, ni fu ni fa. I was glad for a respite from the roasting temperatures in Madrid and this was definitely reflected in my running speed. I did my aerobic runs at almost 14km/h (on the flat), my tempo runs at 15km/h and the series (carrying an extra 3kg) at 16km/h. If I'm honest, I didn't really manage to do the series quite by the book (sometimes I didn't hit the required heart rate, other times I allowed myself too much rest). It is very difficult to find the discipline to do them properly when I am running on my own, on the road (without a running belt to force me to keep the speed up) and when I am on holiday. Never mind, I have some months to execute them to perfection between now and the Marathon in November.

I weighed myself today and was not surprised to see that I have broken the 90kg barrier (that is to say, from below). That isn't too far from what I used to weigh before I started running (again) just under 4 years ago but, according to the same scales, I am only 8% fat. Still, I'd like to get down to around 85kg or so in time for November so, as of today, it's back to counting calories and no alcohol for a few months!

The Ghost Runner

I've just finished an excellent book (being on holiday I have more time for reading) called "The Ghost Runner", by Bill Jones. You can be pretty sure that some budding Hollywood scriptwriter is already busily polishing those rough real-life edges in readiness for a big screen epic.

In some sense the antithesis to the Oxbridge steeped Charriots of Fire, it tells the story of John Tarrant, a highly gifted - and working class - runner who was prevented from competing due to being a "dirty pro" (having naively earned and owned up to earning a measly 17 pounds from boxing as a teenager) by the "toffs in suits and trilbies". The book is rather a historical account based on a reportedly terse autobiography and interviews the author conducted with people wrapped up in the events; nevertheless it makes for a gripping story indeed.

All the elements of the ludicrously hypocritical British class structure are laid bare as pompous officials (who, by the way, are amongst those who most seem to benefit financially from the sport they are suffocating) find ever more convoluted reasons why Tarrant should not be allowed to compete. Until as recently as 1981, athletics was a purely amateur affair; while today the word professional is almost synonymous with excellence, the ideals of the time were that one should compete for the love of the sport and not for financial motivation. To some extent it is possible to understand this sentiment if we remember that money was thought to have the same corrupting power as performance enhancing drugs do today. But the reality was that the ban on earnings from athletic was just a means to restrict the competition to those who were otherwise "independently wealthy". I have to say I found it hard to understand how the furiously capitalist USA could be swept up by this, at a time when they were going to war with the communist Vietnam.

The protagonist is not really someone you necessarily like or even admire - he is pig headed to the point of boring and irritating nearly everyone around him and selfish to the point of leaving his family on the border of poverty so that he may pursue his fanciful and often arbitrary ambitions. But he is certainly someone you can empathize with and, to some extent, recognize in yourself if you have ever run or become obsessed with anything, running or otherwise.

Nor was his talent so unequivocal that the injustices he endured were ever overturned. Much of the book leaves you wondering "what if" without ever being sure that things would really have turned out so differently, however just his cause. Running as a"ghost" - an unofficial entrant without a racing number - he did win numerous Marathons and Ultramarathons and even held World records in the 40 mile and 100 mile distances for a time, but he became infatuated with the elusive Comrades Marathon, a grueling 54 mile event held in South Africa. Incredibly, his ban followed him there although in Apartheid South Africa, he was no longer alone, no longer running as the only ghost runner. Until only months after his premature death, aged only 42, the Comrades Marathon was strictly "for those of the white race". I'm sure the Hollywood bloodhounds can smell a good story in Tarrant's participation as the only white runner (because everyone else was too scared or stood to lose too much) in a rebellious mixed race alternative to the Comrades, the first time blacks and whites had ever competed side by side. It seems that the nearest he ever got to happiness was in South Africa, a persona non-grata amongst personae non-grata. Unfortunately, we are left with a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been, had his performance not been so dogged by the stomach problems he suffered, which eventually mutated into the cancer which killed him.

Reading this book has definitely put things into perspective in many ways. Highly recommended.