Still Running (weakly). Issue 159

PAST – inspiration – You think that I’m strong.  You’re wrong.

“Large bag of chips, please,” I gasped.  “Lots of salt and vinegar.”

It was a Tuesday night in the late 80s and I was roughly halfway home – about 5 miles into my 10-mile run commute – and I just couldn’t take another step.  I had completely crashed.  No energy.  No strength.  No idea why.

But I did know that my body craved carbs and salt.  Luckily, the fish and chip shop was right there, and I went in and ordered, then gobbled it down while walking along the south London pavement.

I started running again, but two miles later, it happened again.  And again, fortuitously, a chip shop appeared like a mirage in the desert, and I repeated my order of 20 minutes earlier!

Just one of those runs.

Another time, another place.  I was waiting in the rain for the buses to take me and hundreds of other runners to the start of the 2009 Snowdonia Marathon.  It was teeming down.  We had had to leave our outer clothing in the baggage drop back at the finish.  The buses were delayed.  It was miserable.

I remember thinking, for two pins I’d turn round, go into that café (that I could see across the road, and where my then-girlfriend was ensconced) and have hot coffee and some nice food.

It’s not just me though.

I attended a London Marathon Q&A session with Rob de Castella in the early 80s.  Here was the man who had set a marathon world record at Fukuoka in 1981, won the Rotterdam and Commonwealth Marathons in 82, and the inaugural World Championship Marathon in 83. 

The audience of runners knew that he ran 10km every morning.  Asked about his schedule, he admitted that occasionally he was so tired, that he only did 8km in the mornings, instead of 10.  There were murmurs around the room: this man was human after all!

So, don’t look at a good runner like I once was – or even at a great runner like de Castella – and think that there’s something superhuman about them, that there’s an unbridgeable gap between them and you.

Work on your willpower.  Sometimes you will fail, or more accurately, your willpower will fail you.  We have all failed.  But if you can tuck away that salt and vinegar and carry on – or get on that bus, or maybe just come back tomorrow and run 10km instead of 8km – then a running life of great satisfaction can indeed be yours.

And that’ll make the celebratory fish and chips taste all the better.

PRESENT – perspiration – Last week, Ja’Kobe Tharp ran a new world record in the 110 metres hurdles of 12.75.  Over such a short distance, this took what one could call ‘a chunk’ off the previous record of Aries Merritt – 12.80 from 2012.  He would have left Colin Jackson’s record of 12.91 from 1993 almost two yards behind!

It got me thinking about athletes taking chunks off records.  I remember Dave Moorcroft taking six seconds off the 5000 record in 1982 – and Steve Ovett commenting that we had been getting used to records being beaten by hundredths of seconds or even thousandths, and here was a man running 6 seconds faster than anyone had ever managed before.

The 5000 is a good example of these vagaries, as, after Moorcroft, the record reduced slowly – Said Aouita took a hundredth off in the first instance (13:00.41 to 13:00.40) – until Haile Gebrselassie came along and slashed it down from 12:55.30 to 12:44.39 in one go in 1995.

Now supershoes and super nutrition have made chunks possible again – Sawe taking more than a minute off the marathon WR in London – and one wonders what wunderkinds like Cameron Myers and Cooper Lutkenhaus, Femke Bol and Phoebe Gill can do in the near future. 

FUTURE – suggestion – You think that I’m strong.  You’re wrong.

I was into the second half of the London to Brighton Race sometime in the 80s.  I was starting to pass people.  I had gained a very slight reputation in ultrarunning circles by this time, of being quite strong – having good endurance – able to run fast towards the end of these races.

With about 10 of the 54 miles to go, I passed another runner.  We glanced at each other and grunted words of encouragement.  Then he said something which has stayed with me over the intervening 40 years.

“I wish I had what you’ve got.”

My first reaction, right there and then on the Brighton Road, was to thank him.  And that response is no less valid for the different feelings that followed along behind it.

You could have this too, you know, mate, I thought.  It’s just willpower – first the will to do the training that has given me the endurance, and then the will to deploy it whilst in the grip of extreme fatigue towards the end of a long race.

And I wasn’t born this way.  I did not start life as the bionic six-million-dollar man you see before you now!  Far from it.  I loved running but I started my running career coming last in the school sports day 1500 metres.  So I was slow.  As for determination and positive attitude, I don’t think that that was in me from birth.  I can remember one Scout hike where I was so tired walking up this hill that I feigned injury just to get a five-minute rest lying in the grass. 

So neither the endurance nor the willpower were there to start with.

I worked on them.  I did a lot of long runs.  I made sure I finished those long runs at a decent pace.  I used to be disappointed with myself for getting tired – even at the end of those long, hard runs.  So I trained myself to run harder when I felt most tired.

Indeed, it was said of me at the time – in 1983: “Bionic Quadrathon man Till, just a week after finishing sixth in what was billed as the world's toughest event [The Quadrathon – 2-mile swim, 50km walk, 100-mile cycle, marathon run], showed absolutely incredible powers of recovery to walk virtually untroubled to Brighton [The London to Brighton Walk] in a personal best time.  Nobody does this naturally.  It takes a great deal of time, effort, dedication and guts to reach that kind of high standard of fitness.”

Indeed it does, but it is within everyone’s reach.