Still Running (weakly). Issue 135

PAST – inspiration – “You’re like bloody machines,” said Colin Welland of the Leeds United team, after he had endured a training session with them for BBC documentary programme in 1972.  I don’t often write about the prima donna sport, but I hope you find this interesting.

Welland was a sportswriter, who would go on to pen the screenplay for Chariots of Fire, winning an Oscar.  Leeds had just won the FA Cup.

The documentary shows the slightly overweight Welland doing shuttle runs between posts, competing against the players, before predictably slumping to the ground and being ill.  It does demonstrate that these footballers were quite fit.

Probably the fittest footballer around that time was Colin Bell of Manchester City, nicknamed Nijinsky after the racehorse, for his stamina.  Rated as City’s greatest ever player, he won 48 caps for England, and before the 1970 World Cup, held in Mexico, the team staged an intra-squad mini-Olympics to help the players acclimatise to the heat and altitude.  Colin Bell won every event!

PRESENT – perspiration – “Tightening the toe-straps,” was a phrase that Thommo and I used to bandy about.  It is an expression pinched from the world of cycling, where, when the riders were approaching a sprint finish, they would literally tighten their toe-straps (in the days when there were such things), chuck away water bottles and any other encumbrances, to make themselves as light and streamlined as possible for the dash to the line.

Our tightening of the toe-straps was more mental than physical, more figurative than literal, as we prepared ourselves for that last couple of hundred yards, where we would attempt to “gobble, gobble” those in front of us.

I was always blessed with reasonable speed, but a sprint finish demands endurance to preserve the ability to sprint throughout the draining miles of the race, as much as the talent to run fast itself.  And I trained myself to do just that.  How?  Many of my long runs would end with a sprint; I would make the last rep of any speed session the fastest, if I could; on some tempo runs, I would kick from further out than I was comfortable with – before I was confident that my speed would last to the line.

This made these finishes very satisfying: it is great to out-sprint a few others towards the end, for that to be the overriding memory of the race.  It also means that you have the rather rewarding experience of teammates coming up to you afterwards, saying, “I couldn’t see you behind me at halfway; I thought I’d got rid of you; but then you came past me at the finish, you……...” 

FUTURE – suggestion – As 2025 morphs into 2026, you can rely on STill Running (weakly) to keep you bang up to speed with all the latest running trends and news.  For instance, I will be experimenting with the new gait pattern which is all the rage in the US at the moment: instead of boring old left, right, left, right, I will now be running left, left, right, right.  I will let you know how it goes as soon as I am out of hospital.

In addition, after some years of uncertainty, I have decided to fully embrace virtual races, and in March I will be launching my own series of these events.  Yes, just send me £68.50 and – what an innovation this is, you don’t even have to run, no Strava necessary – just imagine yourself running 26.2 miles over the course of the next month, and I’ll send you an enormous medal.

I am also very much behind the new trend for calling all distances a marathon.  So, good luck with your 5k marathon, your 10k marathon and even your half marathon marathon.  I just hope the 100 Marathon Club sees sense on this and doesn’t remain too rigid in their qualifying criteria and wisely allows any race distance – real, virtual or imagined – to count towards the 100 total.

I also think this could be extended to that selfish, exclusive bunch of oldies called the London Marathon Ever-Presents, who jealousy guard membership of their club.  I sincerely think that, if you were anywhere on the planet during the 45 Londons that have been held, then you were in some sense ‘present,’ should be accorded Ever-Present status and receive free entry into the race forevermore.  I feel sure that, as, under the current draconian rules, the Ever-Presents membership continues to dwindle, the powers-that-be and members themselves will agree that this course of action is the only way that the club can be brought kicking-and-screaming into the modern era and indeed survive.