Tom Roper's Running Training

Rigid ankles

Part one of today's Janathon effort was a swimming lesson. Alan the tutor thinks we has found the problem with my attempts at front crawl. I have rigid ankles, something most runners develop and, while these are fine for a breaststroke kick, my usual stroke, they're no good for crawl. So I'm going to do some ankle flexiblity exercises between lessons.

As for the lesson itself, I worked on my arms, particularly the weaker left arm, swimming lengths with just one arm, a float, and a second between my legs.

I do wonder about old dogs and new tricks. Taking up running again was not that much of a challenge; though I have learnt and improved since I started, the basics were still there. Learning to sail two years ago was another matter, and I cannot claim to have achieved any great competence. And though I counted myself a good, even strong, swimmer, learning a stroke I have never used before is hard.

Coming of age

It's the 21st day of Janathon, when we come of age. I marked it with another nostalgic run, up Southgate Road to Stoke Newington, to the very gates of Clissold Park. This is all familiar territory, for I lived in this area for the whole of the 1980s. Things have changed of course, but the basics are still the same.

They shall not pass: to Cable Street on day 20 of Janathon

We must be two-thirds of the way through Janathon now; for a change I went on a run to the East End, to Cable Street. This was part nostalgia, part sight-seeing. I ran out through lunch-time crowds of office workers down towards Tower Hill and, on a whim, turned off towards Cable Street. My aim was to run to the mural commemorating the famous demonstration in 1936 when the East End mobilised to stop Mosley and his British Union of Fascists marching.

Photo: History Workshop, whose article on the battle is worth reading

This mural was inspired by the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, though not completed until 1982. I had not seen it for some years, and almost feared it had been removed. Then I through St George's Gardens, past St-George-in-the-East, a Hawksmoor church, and back along the Highway, where the London Marathon goes and where I spent many a Saturday night during the printworkers' dispute, picketing Fortress Wapping.

Perhaps as a reminder of the current balance of forces, as I approached the home point, I and others were buzzed by a Chinook, delivering some  politico-military VIP to the parade ground of the Honourable Artillery Company.

As for the running, it was hard, and I went a little over five miles.

Fartlek: rus in urbe

I love fartlek. Perhaps the schoolboy that still inhabits my psyche enjoys the forbidden word 'fart'; then again I enjoy the activity, the ability to say to myself, run fast to the next cow-pat and then rest, as the mood takes me. There are twin dangers here, the danger that one might take it too easily, or be too hard on oneself. I think I err towards the latter. Here in town the landmarks are different, but on the canal I may choose to run fast from bridge to bridge, lock to lock or to the next drug addict.

I went out along the canal in bright sunshine, and threw in a circuit of Victoria Park. There were an awful lot of runners around and I begin to recognise some of the regulars now; we exchange glances and glance superciliously at some of the newer runners. "Where were they when the canal was frozen, and the birds dropped dead from the sky with the cold?' we ask one another. I must be becoming a regular, much harder to do here in the city than the country. Town runners eye each other suspiciously: the men look at me as if they are squaring up for a fight, while the women look as if they fear I will expose myself to them. By contrast, when I run on the downs, I greet every other runner with a cheery, and reciprocated, wave. We may even stop to discuss the state of the crops, when lambing might be, and that unfortunate business with the parson and the choirboy at last year's fete.

On the eighteenth day

A lunch engagement kept me from running today, so I have taken both my running rest days at the beginning of the week, leaving me with five consecutive days to come.
I did some cycling though, approximately 7 miles, and I had a good knife and fork work out, using some risotto balls, a fish cake with lemon mayonnaise, and plum and almond tart. In between I did several reps of wine-glass
lifting.

The seventeenth day

Possibly the most strenuous thing I did today was to engage in a twitter conversation with Fit Artist, JogBlog, Travelling Hopefully, Running Blog UK, Accountability and HelsieBoo about the correct pronunciation of the word scone.

Otherwise, I can claim 3.6 miles cycling.

Janathon day 16

We're over half way through Janathon, hurrah! I ran early this morning, as I had to attend a party thrown by my wife's family, postponed from before Christmas. The programme required me to enter a 10K race, but there aren't that many about in Seaford in January. Instead, I did a pretend 10k, with a mile warm-up and cool-down tacked on either end, making a decent 8.5 miles in total. Once more it was a tour of the outskirts of Seaford, in a fierce wind. At no point did I touch anything like race speed, but I think it was worthwhile.

This marks the end of the fourth week of marathon training, something of a milestone, in that my sixteen-week training programme can be thought of as four four-week chunks.

Time: 1:31:29
Distance: 8.52
Pace: 10:42

Total mileage this week: 28.77
Twelve weeks till the Brighton marathon

 

Janathon day fifteen: Boreas, Notus, Eurus and Zephyrus

To comply with marathon training requirements, as well as the swimming training this morning, I needed a run. I went out a little before dusk, under grey skies; when I returned, about twenty minutes after sunset, the only noticeable difference was that the street lights were on. I ran the South Hill, Hope Gap, Seaford Head route.  A fierce wind blew, changing quarter, so that I never seemed to have it behind me, and giving a certain frisson to the cliff-top section.

Time: 48:40
Distance: 4.20
Pace: 11:35

Day fourteen and day fifteen and half, in which our hero goes swimming

Like Byron across the Hellespont, I went swimming yesterday, thirty lengths of the Seahaven pool. The day had a theme of wetness; I went inland to a funeral, the burial in a country churchyard. Down the lanes torrents of brown water gushed through breaches in the field and the undertaker told us, as we sheltered in the lych-gate, of how in nearby churchyards on sandstone, graves dug the day before could flood overnight, causing coffins to float. The priest made reference to Genesis Chapter 2.

This morning, though there is more Janathoning to come this afternoon, I went to my first swimming lesson with Karen Pickering Swim at the Chelsea School Pool, part of the University of Brighton's Eastbourne campus. The purpose of this is to learn crawl. I've been swimming a reasonable breaststroke for fifty years, but decided that the time has come to learn a faster stroke, useful if I ever do a triathlon. It was excellent. There were four of us, so Alan the instructor could devote plenty of time to each of us. He had me practicing the leg kick with a float; I have, it seems, runners' ankles, holding them too stiffly. Then he had me holding a float between my legs and swimming crawl with my arms only, first one arm and then both, and then finally tried to get me to breathe correctly, at every third stroke. He had a look at my breaststroke too, and pointed out that I don't glide sufficiently at the point when my arms are extended forward. At the very end he made me do the first step towards a tumble turn, an underwater forward roll.

To the Balls Pond Road and giant frogs on the thirteenth day of Janathon

How odd that on the day I plan a long post on the cultural significance of the Boris Bike and change my route to avoid the canal, I should buy the London Review of Books, impatient because my subscription copy has not yet come, and find this, The Raging Peloton, by London's leading psychogeographer Iain Sinclair in which he says more or less everything there is to say about bicycles and about the canal towpath where I run at lunchtimes.

And, though it has no particular relevance to anything, I loved the review of a life of Dennis Wheatley, which quotes from one of his novels thus, 'The  last that Roger saw of them through the mist they were being drawn inexorably through knee-high water towards the again open mouth of the giant frog'.

The run to the Balls Pond Road was nostalgic. It took me past Essex Road, where the Polytechnic of North London had its School of Librarianship that I attended in 1983, past pubs and restaurants that were part of my life in the early to mid 1980s, to Camden Passage, once an area where one could imagine the border between antique-dealing and receiving stolen goods was frequently crossed, now neat and tidy, and to Angel, where the tube station was dingy and narrow. In those days one could smoke on tube trains, and being a victim of the habit, I would stand in exactly the right spot for the second or the penultimate carriage, which were the smoking carriages.

After last night's effort, I could not claim to be fast, but it was good to be out.

I also did some minor Boris-biking.

Time: 40:13
Distance: 4:07
Pace: 9:43