I don’t think I realised how much I depended on it until I stopped. Frustration and excess energy to start with (as anyone that’s ever had a running injury knows), then anger and more frustration because running used to be the best way to deal with frustration. That vague hope and longing every time I drove past a runner in the street, and reading on other blogs how far people have come in the amount of time I’ve not been running and wondering how far I could manage should I make a miraculous recovery tomorrow.

The running world was an island and I was drifting out to sea. My first thought on a nice evening was still “good time for a run” but I’d lost the urge to lace up my trainers and go.

Unfortunately I also stopped going to archery. 3rd May was the last time I shot. It was a competition (an American round, in which I placed 3rd) and was very enjoyable despite the wind, rain and hail (I kid you not). I was in pain within the first end, and by the time the medals were about to be handed out I was in agony. I decided then that the pain outweighed the fun of it and, as I wasn’t ready to start any adapted shooting, I would take a break.

Wheelchair basketball is now the only sport I have. Now that running and archery are out of the picture I’ve started taking it a bit more seriously – it’s no longer just something to do with Ally, it’s a serious competitive sport. However, a lack of official diagnosis (or even a vague clue) as to the problem with my feet meant I was still competing as an able-bodied player, which reduced my court-time (I prefer to think it was that and not that the coach just didn’t want to put me on the team!).

Three GPs, four rhuematologists and a nerve conduction specialist later and I have a diagnosis…of sorts. I’ve been told the pain has been classified as Allodynia – pain in response to pressure – and I’m on medication generally used for peripheral neuropathy (despite no reported nerve damage). I get the impression that there’s still a lot of uncertaintly but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

The first day of starting the new medication and I couldn’t help but be overly hopeful – the last doctor I saw recommended physio to get me back into shape as soon as possible and I spent the next 2 days day dreaming of the races I could still run. (I’ll admit the Marathon des Sables briefly featured but I think even that is a bit of a stretch). It never occurred to me that maybe I should be more excited about the fact that in the near future I could walk more than 100 yards, it was all about the running. My goal of finishing a marathon before 30 was becoming attainable again.

Having been on the pills a little while and seeing no improvement, the hope-induced elation is wearing off. I’m still optimistic about running again but I’m also realistic. I hope to run again soon but for now I’m just adapting my zombie apocalype plan accordingly :-)

50/50 - Dean Karnazes

The full title of the book is ’50/50: Secrets I Learned Running 50 Marathons in 50 Days – and How You Too Can Achieve Super Endurance!’ which seems a little contradictory to some of the books’ content. Karnazes himself says how genes play a major role in the ability to run massive distances, and the science-y bit at the end backs it up. However, there is still an attempt to teach the reader something in the form of textbook style boxes. These cover anything from post-marathon tips to good marathons to run in order to qualify for Boston. Unfortunately, if you’re already a runner there isn’t a whole lot of new information here.

The rest of the book is pretty much what the title suggests. Karnazes has a plan to run in various states as part of a holiday with his family, an idea that seems to get hijacked by The North Face, who turn it into a roadshow/giant advert. It’s obviously more than that – not only an amazing feat for Karnazes but also an inspiration to the people he meets along the way (and a fundraiser for his charity). By the end, however, you do get the impression that he’d have rather just done it his way. The regimented schedule and constant PR is obviously not what he wants to do…supported by the fact that when he’s finished his last marathon he goes for a run on his own, without a map and a time limit.

The book itself is just an account of the 50 marathons, broken up every now and then with various thoughts and musings from the journey:

“Upon receiving this information, I found myself wondering why so many people like Kris are drawn to marathons and other such challenges these days. I can’t help thinking that the phenomenon is in part a largely unconscious backlash against comfort culture and the easy life. Heated seats and online shopping and robot vacuum cleaners have created a void that we’re all sensing. Our modern comforts and conveniences have accumulated to the point that they have stopped making us feel better and started making us feel worse. Some primal instinct lurking deep inside is trying to tell us that what is needed is a good, hard sweat – some struggle in our lives, some physical challenge.”

I must admit I didn’t really get on with this one as well as I did with Ultramarathon Man. Whether it was the book, the fact I was having trouble with my running as I was reading it, or a combination of the two, I found myself leaving it half way in order to read something else before coming back to it.

My Story So Far

I found myself interested from the start. While I took part in sports at school it was nothing like this and the novelty of it kept me entertained. By the time the athletics meets are described in full my attention started to wane. Unless you’re familiar with middle distance running over the last 20 years the names won’t mean much to you.

The rest of the book is basically a list of races, the desire to win the Cross Country Championship, the 5,000, 10,000 and then the marathon, and the one personal touch of meeting her husband Gary. You really get the sense that running is her whole life, but I suppose it has to be to a certain extent – being a professional athlete straight from school.

While Paula states at the start of the book that she is not giving excuses and just wants a chance to tell her story, the whole thing comes across as defensive from the start. Every race is lead by a story of the injury leading up to it and, while there is very little talk of how she prepares to races, plenty of time is spent discussing injuries that may have slowed her down.

Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to my expectations. I found sections of it a bit boring, and the not-so-straight time line had me checking and double checking which year it was supposed to be. It was OK, but not the insight I was hoping for.

My long term goal at the moment is to complete a marathon in 2011. I can’t give an accurate goal time at the moment but I’d rather it were closer to 4 hours than 5. Given the chances of getting a ballot place for London, I’ll probably apply for Brighton instead and then maybe try London another year.

Middle term (is that even a phrase?) goal is a half marathon in under 2 hours. I’m pretty sure I’m going to apply for the Great North Run next year so I have a whole 12 months to prepare! I don’t have a back up race at the moment, so if I don’t get into the GNR I’ll have to have a look around (or try to get a charity place). At the moment I can run about 12 or 13k without my legs getting too tired, and I’ve never run more than 16k, so I’ll need to work on my long runs to extend this.

Short term I have a few, more modest, goals. In May of next year I have the Bupa London 10,000 and intend to shave a couple of minutes off my 10k time. I also, rather embarrassingly, struggle to run too far without taking a walking break. Some of the time it’s because of my asthma, but some of the time I do it out of habit. I can do a 5k without walking fairly easily and so my immediate goal is to start doing 6 and 7km runs without walking, so that by May I’ll be doing 10k without walking.

So there we have it – this is what I’m aiming for!

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and it didn’t quite flow as I hoped it might, but it was still a great read. To me it felt like 6 exceptionally in-depth race reports (25% of the book is spent talking through his first Western States 100) with a few pages of rest-of-his-life information in between. Obviously the book is about running but I think it would have been more well-rounded if there had been a bit more information about what else he had done. Except for the death of his sister, which was obviously a major point in his life and had a direct influence on his running, there is little talk of the rest of his home life – whether it be sporting, family or career. A good example is the first mention of windsurfing as a hobby:

“…but I channeled most of my focus into windsurfing, winning some competitions and ending up on the cover of several magazines. I even managed to land a few sponsorshop endorsements, which helped pay the tuition bills.”

Now, to me, getting on the front of a magazine for windsurfing would warrant more than 2 sentences. The book would have been a lot longer, but at least then Karnazes wouldn’t come across like a running machine that does little else than put one foot in front of the other.

Ultramarathon Man

Not knowing how he feels the day after the race doesn’t really make the distances that he runs any less amazing. The mile by mile description of the first Western States is detailed, fascinating and inspiring. It almost makes you think “well if he can run that far then so can I” but then you remember that he ran 30 miles on his first ever training run (15 years after his last cross country race) and that it takes someone slightly different to be able to do that.

In the end, the sheer distances become incomprehensible. If someone said to me that they had run 10 miles then I would understand, as it’s a distance I’ve done myself. If someone said they’d finished 26.2 then I’d understand (and then congratulate them!) as it’s a well known and challenging distance. If someone said they’d run 199 miles without stopping then it becomes harder to fully comprehend exactly what that means. I think it’s probably something only another ultra runner would get.

Karnazes book (and his life) is an amazing testament to what the human body can do when pushed to it’s limits. It’s inspiring and motivating, and the stories from Badwater and the South Pole Marathon will make you appreciate the mild weather you live in :-)

Spirit of the Marathon

It all culminates in the marathon. 20 of the movie’s 95 minutes is taken up with the race itself, and it really tries to impress the emotional aspect of the distance on the viewer (though overdoes it slightly with the dramatic music). Not knowing the outcome of the race, I did find myself rooting for one of the elite racers at the end when it started to get particularly close :-)

All in all it was an entertaining documentary which would probably only appeal to someone interesting in running or endurance events. As I said before, I was left feeling like there could have been more to it and would have been interested to more closely compare the training strategies of the eilte and recreational runners.

Running

Amy Runs a Marathon – 26 year old Amy has already completed a half marathon with her sister and is now training for the full 26.2. The blog is fairly new with the first post in May, but Amy updates on a fairly regular basis and often includes photos.

Bumblebee Running – A handful of posts a month from a twenty-something who has just finished her first triathlon. Worth checking out just for the posts about the big day itself, which are coming in at the moment.

Marathon Mummy – Mother of 4 Rachael is training for the Virgin London Marathon next year in memory of her father. Regular, honest, and often amusing posts – I check here every morning.

Sound Mind, Sound Body – An Irish girl living in Amsterdam and working for ASICS (hence the blog name). Her goal is the New York Marathon later this year. Regular and visually evocative posts. I like reading this one because I seem to be only a few months behind the author in my training.

Warriorwoman Running Blog – A well established blog that I started reading as I started writing this one. Posts have been sporadic of late but with so many new running blogs popping up, it’s good to see how a succesful long-running blog should be kept.

Wheels on Fire – Despite Ally telling me that I needed to create a new category (when commenting that he didn’t fit into either the ‘running’ or ‘non running’ categories), this is staying here, though I must point out that Ally doesn’t run. Still in it’s infancy (first post was in May) but going strong, Ally updates every Sunday on the week’s progress as he aims for paralympic glory in the middle distance track events. We’ve also been promised some more mid-week posts in the future.

Non Running

Borderlines – Borderlines is an online fiction serial written by my friend and up-and-coming author Jasmine Aherne. I’m not really into romance or chick lit myself but I like Jasmine’s short and sweet stories. Following updates online means I only read one chapter at a time – goes well with a cuppa :-)

Chronicles of Sai – My LiveJournal blog for posting day to day rubbish. Most of it is locked though so unless you’re also on LiveJournal you won’t be able to see very much!

Life Through God’s Sunglasses – Ex housemate Claire blogs about life in general but from a Christian viewpoint. Worth checking out for her latest mission to Nepal, which she’s training for at the moment.

The Adventures of Scribbleboy – The patient zero of blogs. The first I started reading and still the most bizarre. Ex housemate Scribs blogs about anything that’s on his mind, occassionally commenting on the challenges readers set him in order to better his life. A must read.

Those Who Know Me – A reasonably new blog from Stan, somewhat inspired by Scribs in that Stan has challenges to complete. 16 posts under his belt already, though with no real theme, this is starting to form into…something!

So there we have it. These are the posts I read on a regular basis. If anyone knows of a good blog that just has to be shared then plase leave a comment! Thanks.

This is the Anglicised version. They say 'trainers' instead of 'sneakers'.

Consequently, a whole chapter of this book was a bit wasted on me. Yes, I knew that the book was going to have training plans in it when I bought it so that’s not really a problem. I was quite interested to see what they said, as I’ll probably use some sort of training plan if I ever do longer distances. As far as the other chapters go we have ‘Getting Started’, ‘Mind and Body’, ‘Fuel’, ‘The Big Day’ and ‘What’s Next?’.

The first three of the above chapters were pretty much old news to me. They reiterated a lot of the stuff I already knew, from either previous experience or picking it up from magazines, Ally or the internet. Some of the information about fuelling during marathon tapering was interesting and I’ll be going back to that as and when I need it. The ‘Mind and Body’ chapter seemed to be mostly stretches and some core strength exercises which, again, I knew. The chapter on preparaing for the day itself was predominantly common sense with suggestions like checking the start time the day before, finding out where you can park etc. The final chapter is a list of the more popular running events such as the Race for Life series, Great North Run and World Series Marathons.

Overall, this book seems to be stuck somewhere between a book for beginners and ‘how to’ for running. While it brushes over picking out technical kit and the right sort of shoes it misses out on other aspects of beginning to run. It assumes a certain amount of experience running but doesn’t get too technical. I get the impression it’s trying to speak to a wider audience (the tag line “Run your first (or fastest) 5-k, 10-k, half-marathon or marathon” makes sure that every road runner is accomodated for) when really it should have stuck to one or the other. On the plus side, it’s easy to follow and will make a good reference book for the future, but it wasn’t as useful as I was hoping it would be.

- Haruki Murakami

I was sent What I Talk About When I Talk About Running a few months ago by Matt but because of my uni work I didn’t get round to reading it until the beginning of the month. As it turns out I got through it in 3 days, it’s very short.

Classifying the book, in as much as putting it into a genre, is surprisingly hard. It’s autobiographical but only covers very select moments of his life, and then the concentration is generally on the author’s thoughts, either at the time of in retrospect, and not what actually happened. I suppose ‘memoirs’ would be a better description.

Spending my non-running time reading about running.

So what is it about? Well, running, to an extent. Murakami talks about starting to run to keep fit and his goal of running a marathon every year. However, these aren’t particularly in depth and as much time is spent talking about running as it is spent on various other topics which seem to randomly veer off at a tangent from the main narrative, consisting of anything from the unhealthiness of being an author to his LP collection. The book is set on two seperate timelines – the year or so spent writing the book, and Murakami’s adult life – though this second one isn’t always in chronological order, which makes following it slightly harder than you might anticipate.

It’s worth noting that the book has been translated from Japanese to English, but not by the author, and so sentences seem stilted and every now and then a word will appear that really doesn’t fit (probably a bit like this blog). Combined with the fact that Murakami often goes off on a tangent and it’s not the easiest flowing read.

Overall, it’s quite interesting, but reads more like a personal journal than a book about running and so I can’t help but think that the only people that would want to read it are those that know the author, or the small subset of running authors.

Check out this BBC News article from the Magazine on Friday on hyperpsychogeography (sightseeing while you run).