Still Running (weakly). Issue 92

PAST – inspiration – “Beer and enjoyment,” were what Walter George (1858-1943) claimed kept him going. Having run for just three months, and despite his training consisting entirely of his ‘100-Up’ routine (running on the spot), in 1878 he boasted to his friends that he would one day break the world mile record and run 4:12.

The amateur record was 4:24½ at the time, and the professional equivalent 4:17¼! He even predicted his splits – 59, 2:02, 3:08.

Sure enough, in a match against Scot William Cummings (1858-1919) on 23rd August 1886, George ran 58¼, 2:01¾, 3:07¾ and 4:12¾, a record that would not be surpassed for almost 30 years.

And this was at a time when it was felt that runners should practise with very long walks and very short bursts of running, that their diet should consist of beef, stale bread, and lots of port and beer, that cigarettes and cigars were very beneficial, and that they should take regular brine baths and be massaged with brandy. After a particularly cold run, one individual said, “Personally I thought internal application would be better,” and grabbed the bottle!

The things that runners did.

PRESENT – perspiration – You would think that, by now, all the secrets of running would have been discovered. But no. Debates rage on.

And the present ‘craze’ revolves around Double Threshold days. Developed by the Norwegians and popularised by the successes of Jakob I-cant-beat-the-brits-then, a DT can be something like 5x2000m at threshold in the morning, and 10x1000m in the afternoon. Threshold is a hard pace that you could just about hold for 45 minutes to an hour. The Norwegians do DTs twice a week. The objective is to run at threshold intensity for the maximum aggregate time.

Perhaps a more interesting question is what relevance this has to runners like you and me. Opinions naturally vary, but one can certainly say that we should only attempt a double-hard day of any kind once we have built up to a diet of intervals 2-3 times a week, and moderately hard runs twice a day.

The things that runners still do.

FUTURE – suggestion – The odd things runners do. A friend of mine – I won’t embarrass him by naming names – Paul Thompson – he had this knee niggle, which was getting worse. So now, every time he boils the kettle at work, he does 50 press-ups and 30 squats. (I did ask, “What about some sit-ups?”) And the knee is much better. (It’s a very quiet office!)

I never tire of the story of Dave Bedford (1973 10,000 world record) totting up his week’s mileage in the bath on a Sunday night, finding he’d only done 198, getting out of the bath and running 3 miles. Why? “Well, you can’t call 2 miles a run, can you?!”

I once got home from a testing weekend on the sand dunes of Merthyr Mawr and found I’d done 98 miles that week. I ran 2 more that night – obviously not as conscientious as Bedford.

Oh heck, right, while I’m in the confessional, I have tried raw eggs (Rocky), barefoot running (Ron Hill), Bear days (running as much as you can – Steve Prefontaine), 1,000 hops in a day when I was triple jumping (Viktor Saneyev, triple Olympic triple jump champ 1968-76) and 1,000 press-ups in a day (David Hemery).

It’s educational to note that such obsessional behaviour does not suddenly enter a runner’s life. It’s always there. Hemery himself (1968 Olympic 400H gold), as a child, read that it was impossible to count to 1,000,000. So he tried – over and over again. When his father discovered him rushing through numbers in his sleep, he wisely put a stop to that one of his son’s ambitions!

At the other end of the age scale, when Paavo Nurmi, 9-time Olympic champion (1920-28) from Finland, was asked to carry the torch into the stadium at the opening ceremony of the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, the 55-year-old went into special training so that he could run as proficiently as his countrymen were used to seeing.