One person’s mountain

Today I noticed a complete difference in Nayoung who was already waiting on the kerb side outside her house this morning.

Today we were going to see whether we could run as much as possible and only have a brief walk up the hills at Goddington Park, Orpington. It has been good for me to start again just to help reaffirm that one person’s mountain is another person’s mole hill and soon we will be running them instead of a cheeky little walk once in a while.

Today we ran really well and we talked briefly about the new tether we were using which was really useful as I was worried that she seemed to be pulling it hard and did it mean she wanted me to slow down, no, it was just her putting some tension on it to get more feedback from me. It transpires that she did this when she felt a bit worried about the terrain and so I have made a mental note to talk her through those sections and to shorten the tether...all good stuff we are learning off each other.

I once again apologised for talking too much in between instructions but she is apparently OK with this. 

To the last hill, we were determined to get up it and so for no reason at all I started to sing "Girl on Fire" by Alicia Keys which we stormed but I suspect was Nayoung's way of getting me to shut up as quickly as possible!! :-)

Next week we are going to do our inaugural parkrun, Nayoung really is a Girl on Fire.

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

...the knife dropped to the kitchen floor and skittered to a halt in the centre of the room...

"Then without warning the moment froze like the pause button had been clicked on a film I was watching and I found myself standing in the Myatts Field Estate, Camberwell 24 years in the past facing a screaming man who was holding a bloodied 12 inch carving knife to my face, I could smell his acrid breath and could feel his spittle splatter my face as he ranted incoherently , I was a Police Officer and I was there to stop him...."

This was a full blown flashback to an incident I have never talked about even to my wife and friends not then, not now but it seems right to get it out here but not everything, it was not a good day for the knife man who I arrested as I could hold my own in a bar fight in those days as he fell to the floor, the blood covered knife that was in his hand skittering to a halt in the centre of the room.

This is my curse, this is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it can pull me into places with no warning. This scene has been spinning around by mind for the past 48 hours, always there just out of reach like an itch you couldn't scratch.

My distraction this evening was to go to the track and try out some reps, run 150 metres, walk 50 metres and repeat until I got to 5 km. It was a great distraction for the 30 or so minutes and I enjoyed it as I finished someone shouted at me about lane infringement, I shouted back and soon I was back thinking about that incident 24 years ago, it will go soon waiting for something to replace it in a few years time.

Some people don't like minimalist runners

Saturday has come and gone but still needs to be mentioned as a really successful training session. 

Last week I went to the British Blind Sport website to buy two new tethers, one for Nayoung and the other for myself just in case one of us forgot and for the princely sum of £6 each saw it a bargain as well as a nice donation to the cause.

Arriving at the park Nayoung and I were in a really good mood and we decided to continue our Run/Walk strategy for now so that we didn't strain ourselves. I was soon telling her about my week and we both laughed about my students and the things they got up to. Nayoung told me a gruesome tale when she broke her ankle once in Turkey and the series of events that took place. Let me just say, I was happy I had already had my breakfast. At the end of her tale I looked at my watch and found that we had been running non-stop for 5 minutes.....this was a big lesson for Nayoung who was amazed but I told her to keep talking as it took her mind off her legs complaining. We completed are run being 4 minutes faster that last week and having run a further 400 metres. I think it is beginning to work.

Why don't people like Minimalist running?

I had to laugh the other day when I received a message, not from one, but two people who thought it their place to tell me to stop running in Vibram Five Fingers, one of them even had the audacity to say:

"...get back in your old running shoes and left the fad, 8 years ago they were the rage..."sic

How little this person knows me, I have never been a lover of fads or fashions but this type of shoe is perfect for me. I also don't think they realize that I do wear other shoes when running depending on the type of run and how far. They also have to look at my record of injury, like my running style, minimal.

Sorry for finishing this blog with a sour note but I am a believer that if the shoe fits wear it and if it works for you, do it.

Happy Running

Slowly but Surely

Dearest Reader,

I will do my best not to write about every training run that I will be doing over the coming weeks but it, well, keeps my motivation up.

The past week has seen me working past my contracted hours but also lecturing on two of those evenings, so I was basically extremely tired and would have happily curled up on the sofa for a nap. I have a plan, to get picked up by a friend to go to the track....nothing like peer pressure!

The track was great as usual, everyone was doing 400 metre lap reps with a rest in between but as usual I went about doing my own thing gently jogging around lane 2 and 3 away from the guys doing speed work. I know I am going back to basics but I am overweight at the moment and it is important to get the ground work in and not do something silly to put me off.

It seems so long ago when I talked of running a 20 mile run each week or running a marathon with 20 hours notice but my first goal is to just feel happy running again and see where it rakes me.

With all my love,

Jerry

I will dance Jerry

As promised I texted Nayoung on Friday to inform her we were going start running around the park but the plan was to run for 90 seconds then walk for 60 seconds and then repeat for about 5-6 times depending how we felt.

Arriving outside her house at 8.30 am I was amazed to see Nayoung was ready and waiting on her doorstep and was already making her way to the car. This week we got a prime slot in the car park and so after a short period of getting my Guide bib on and Nayoung putting her coat in the car we were off, gently at first but soon chatting away about the route. I am really impressed with Nayoung, she is so confident and we were soon transitioning between tarmac to grass, grass to mud and mud to tarmac with hardly a break in step.

We soon passed 6 sets of run to walk so decided to take it up a notch to see if we could do another lap which we took very gently with a little bit more walk than run. By the end on the session we were quite tired but with big smiles on our faces.

On the way back home I told Nayoung that we both had some homework to do before we met either a long walk or a run. Nayoung told me " I may be able to go for a walk but I sometimes run in my house." I asked "On a treadmill?" to which I was informed that she did it on the spot.

"This week I will dance Jerry!"

Who am I to argue, a perfect cardio-vascular workout, what a great idea. 

I received a lovely email last week via England Athletics from a lady called Nayoung who is blind and asked if I would be her Guide Runner. It transpires that she lives about 2 miles from me so we exchanged a few emails and agreed to meet at Goddington Park, Orpington at the parkrun; Nayoung was very happy as was I.

It is important that as a Guide Runner for visually impaired (VI) athletes you arrange to meet at a venue where there are lots of people so that they feel safe and this worked perfectly for us today as Nayoung came with a friend who was her chaperone. After introducing ourselves to the Race Director, Peter, who I have run hundreds of miles with in the past, we dumped Nayoung's coat and stick to go off to the centre of the park. Here I explained to her that we needed to get to know each other and do some drills together. As always I had a planned session that lasted 45 minutes where we did the following:

• Right Turns
• Left Turns
• About Turns 
• Gradual turns to the left and right
• Rough trail
• Uneven trail

Nayoung was a natural, a brilliant VI runner who was happy to tell me to slow, walk or run. We learnt not to say "Sorry" if we bumped elbows, everything I needed as guide so she could get the best from her run with me.

As for myself, I had a lovely time, what with meeting old friends and actually running (Which I miss terribly) and meeting a new friend. Next week I am picking her up from her home so that we can do a slightly longer, in duration, run around the park and then progress to hopefully run a full parkrun in a few weeks

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Unbeknownst to many of my friends I have started to run again and I use that term very loosely. There are many reasons why I have started again but the main one is I secretly miss it.

My official first run was on 16th February at the track, the track is quite a good place to start as there is no pressure on you and nobody ever asks what my plan was. To be frank, it was just to be able to get around a few laps, walk when I needed and run when I wanted and I was very pleased with completing 5 km but felt dreadful.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Since then I have completed another 7 runs on the track and at roughly the same distance, I am slowly getting a bit more confident but I am finding my internal cadence clock doesn't understand that I am not as fit as I was. Let me explain, after years of training pace, going on long distance runs with a set time in mind, being able to run a set distance and finishing within seconds of the planned time it just doesn't understand about slowing the tempo down.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

God doesn't build in straight line

For a few weeks now I have been trying to get a spot in Duncan's and my diary so that I can try and return to running together again like we used to a few years back and today was one of those rare days so I dragged my sorry arse up the hill to our usual meeting point of Hangman's Corner. The agreement was to run at tempo so that we could chat  but as per usual we totally forgot about that and after about 400 metres I was panting like an old dog, I say panting, it was more like a goldfish gasping for water to fill it's gills, so we reset the clock and jogged off.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

What I like about runs with Duncan is that we can always pick up a conversation that lay unfinished from 2 weeks ago and just carry it on as though the time didn't matter. We talked of how age changes our ability to run, muscle tone, loss of speed and our changes in posture. We then blew this nonsense out of the water and reminded ourselves why we ran, the bluebells, early this year, were out and around us was a sea of blue heads popping their heads above the soil. We looked at decaying trees and quoted films "God doesn't build in straight lines" Prometheus (2012)

Our pace began to normalise to a steady pace and we did what Duncan I do best, we skipped we jumped and laughed whilst we navigated the gnarled old paths of the local woods.

With a heavy heart we returned to Hangman's Corner thinking it was time to say goodbye and the hope I could walk the rest of the way when Duncan said he would run down the hill with me, I silently swore under my breath, and joined him in the last bit, my lungs felt as though I had swallowed a litre of fluid and my throat felt it was on fire. We finally got to the path where we said our goodbyes and I looked to see if he could still see me, he didn't so I walked the rest of the way home.

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Don't Compare

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

Lao Tzu

Today was a big day for my running as it was a Sunday which is the traditional day for the "Long Run" in any training programme. You will often hear runners exclaim "Who is up for a long run?" or "I am doing a long run on Sunday, you coming?" and even "I did a long run at the weekend, boy it was hard!" The question of what exactly is a Long Run from a none runner is not often ventured as it opens up the floor for a running enthusiast to regale such stories of mud, blood, blisters and chafing normally around tea break when the non-runner is wishing they had never asked. So in fact, the long run, is an arbitrary distance that the runner sees in their training plan as the longest of the runs that week and can range from 1 to 40 miles.

Today I ventured out for my "Long Run" which was in my mind was a big ask considering I am on day three of my training plan and it was to run 5 miles (8 km). A few years ago this distance for me wasn't even considered only because I was doing such enormous distances that it was tiny in comparison . However, today was different, this was my marathon, and I had planned to run through the local woods  and then a loop of the nature reserve.

The Delightful Mrs S was very kind as she knew I didn't want to be seen by people I knew as I am a little upset by weight gain that I didn't want to be seen as a tub of lard on legs . The run wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be mainly because I mentally cut out the images of yesteryear but lived with the here and now. It was a very pleasant early Spring day today, the ground underfoot was soft but a pleasure to run on, the warm air lapping around me as I jogged along, walked the hills and ran the flats with my headphones playing a mixture of AC/DC and Tchaikovsky. 

So there we have it, a lovely spring run wearing my old faithful Vibram TrekSport a.k.a. Monkey Feet 2 and a note to myself to concentrate on the "short" stuff to get my cardiovasvular up to scratch for the next 3 weeks ready to step up and be happy with my level fitness and not others.

Like a wheezing old dog

I made a decision this week that I should start getting regular exercise again which has not been happening of late. I can blame it on so many things: Long hours at work, extra contracts lecturing, laziness or a plethora of other excuses. Mentally, I have been in a good place since my start at the Natural History Museum which is an amazing place but the demonic Black Dog is always close by but have been, with the help of my medication, managed to keep ahead of it. The medication has some side effects, for me, is a massive gain in weight and excessive tiredness with me being able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat.

This week I have had a break from lecturing on a Thursday evening and so went directly from work to the running track. Putting on my shorts I noticed they felt a little tighter than they used to and ventured out on to track-side to join the throng of other runners who were all chatting excitedly about their forthcoming marathons, training plans and injuries. I no longer get involved in these conversations as they tend to bore me as runners can be very opinionated about their own training experience and so I separated myself from the group and went about the business of running by myself.

I put on my headphones, something I have started to do when I am in groups, and ran very slowly so I could get a sense of what my body was telling me. After 1200 metres my breathing became more laboured and I started to wheeze, everything I expected, as my lungs started to clear. Taking a break at 1600 metres I chose to bring the pace down and push on but walk 100 metres every 300 metres, this seemed to do the job but I did feel that I wasn't so much as gliding through the air more barging it out of the way.

Early days but I do feel that if I stick to it my fitness will return but probably a lot slower now.

Onwards and upwards as they say.