Still Running (weakly). Issue 149

PAST – inspiration – “In 1956, she was invited to join a British Athletics training camp, organised in the build-up to the Melbourne Olympics of that year.  During the camp, she competed against and beat all of the international high jumpers.  She was 16 years old at the time.”

Mary Rand, who died on 26th March, was a prodigious talent, of whom Ann Packer said, “Mary was the most gifted athlete I ever saw.  She was as good as athletes get, there has never been anything like her since.  And I don't believe there ever will.”  Mary Peters (1972 Olympic pentathlon gold medallist) said, “She was the golden girl of her era and the most gifted athlete I ever saw.”

Rand won long jump gold, pentathlon silver and 4x100 bronze at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, whilst Packer won 800 gold and 400 silver.  Mary Rand also held the world triple jump record from 1959 to 1981, before it became an official event for women.

The only other British athlete whom I can think of, who might rival Mary Rand in terms of sheer talent, would be Steve Ovett, who once jumped clean over his school’s long jump pit.

In a style reminiscent of Rand’s crashing the 1956 high jumpers’ party, Ovett, 16, joined a 1972 Southern Counties training camp when basically still a 400 metres runner.  He jumped into the middle distance runners’ session of mile repeats and easily kept up with athletes not only many years older than him but also, unlike him, specialists at that sort of distance.

In later years, he would do things like run a 21.7 200 for his club whilst still being National Junior Cross Country champion, and win 800s and half marathons on consecutive weekends.

Going back to Mary Rand.  She was born in Wells, Somerset, and the council marked her Olympic gold by installing plaques the length of her winning jump in the market square.  I visited it last week and was moved by the floral tributes placed there, as well as the notice from the council announcing her death and what she meant to the city.

In 1964, our late Queen Elizabeth was so impressed by Rand’s performance that she had the distance chalked out on the Buckingham Palace carpet for the benefit – and to the amazement – of her young family.

RIP Mary

PRESENT – perspiration – “Aye, you walked well, lad,” said Ray Middleton to me on the evening of 7th April 1976 at the finish of my first serious race, the Surrey County 10,000 metres race walk championships.

Ray, a Belgrave Harrier and Commonwealth silver medallist from 1966, was a colleague of Mary Rand’s in the 1964 Olympic team.

I remember that 7th April 1976 was a warm Wednesday evening, and my glasses kept slipping down my nose as I pounded round 25 laps of Battersea Park track.  In the end I chucked them into the long jump pit, hoping that I could retrieve them later and that no aspiring Mary Rand would come along and land on them in the meantime. I clocked 60:46 that night - a speed that I would presently love to be able to maintain for one mile - running!

In the 50 years since that race, I have competed 1,778 times, for a total of nearly 13,000 miles, an average race distance of 7.3 miles, and an average speed of 9:27 a mile.  Highlights have obviously included running for Great Britain at 24 hours and England at 100km, completing the two Quadrathons (2-mile sea swim, 50km walk, 100-mile cycle, marathon run), becoming a Centurion (race walking 100 miles in less than 24 hours), winning 6 national medals for ultradistance running and race walking, and amassing over 100 marathons and over 700 parkruns.  Lowlights?  I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention!

Achievement is one thing of course, and satisfaction is another.  Among the most satisfying has to be my completion of the Swiss Alpine 78km in 2008, when I flirted with the cut-offs through the race, but was applauded into the hotel restaurant by fellow Brits who had completed their own races that day.

One might also point to winning the 1994 Humberside 24 hours in a personal best, managing my first sub-3 in the first London Marathon in 1981, and staying physically and mentally strong in the closing stages of the 1994 National 100km to win a three-way fight for the bronze medal.

FUTURE – suggestion – Mary Rand married American Bill Toomey in 1969.  Toomey had won the Olympic decathlon in 1968, so they did many training sessions together.

I remember reading that Bill could seldom make up his mind what running session to do, “So we always ended up doing repeat 150s,” said his wife.  Such a session would certainly feed into the couple’s fitness for their sprint events.  Indeed, Toomey held the world record for a 400 within a decathlon with his 45.68 from Mexico City, until fellow American Olympic decathlon champ Ashton Eaton beat it in 2015.

I also remember Mary complaining about the length of some of the sessions: “If we finished the evening session practising the high jump, I would often end up jumping UNDER the bar!”

What lessons can we draw from those historic workouts?  That it’s more important to do something than the detail of what you do.  That, if in doubt, you should choose a session that will work on a few different aspects of your fitness – 150s working sheer speed, speed endurance and technique.  And perhaps that, to exercise yourself to exhaustion is one way of knowing when to stop, and one way of achieving a high degree of satisfaction from the session.