Tom Roper's Running Training

The Petworth 10k

 

A distant view of Petworth House across the lake in Petworth Park by J. M. W. Turner. Image from Wikimedia Commons

What could be more agreeable, as Kenneth Clark would often say, than a 10k on a fine May evening in the grounds of a stately home? Nothing, I thought, so I took myself, after a hard day's librarianing, to Petworth Park for this race faultlessly organised by the Midhurst Milers. 

 

The course is two circuits of Capability Brown's park, alternating flat stretches and ascents, and with a fine descent to the half-way point and finish. The weather was fine, a slight breeze cooling us in parts of the course. We passed lakes, the statue of the dog of Alcibiades erected to commemorate a favourite dog drowned in one of the lakes, a herd of deer who prudently fled us and flocks of geese.

A few days after Sunday's gruelling ten miler, I was pleased to find I had something left in my legs. It was hard, but I knew I had enough to keep going to the end. I finished in just over an hour, 1:00:04. I would rather have finished in under an hour, but I felt, on a hard course, that it was a respectable time.

Recovery run

After Sunday's exertions, and before Wednesday's Petworth 10K, I ran a morning run, no more than two miles, to keep my legs moving. Apart from the pleasure of being outdoors early on a warm early summer day, I enjoy these runs for the after-effects. After breakfast, showering and dressing, when at the wheel of the car on my drive to work, instead of the usual exhaustion and despondency, I feel energetic and at peace. These feelings can even last for a few hours into the working day.

I once ran regularly with a young lady who was fortunate enough to experience an extreme version of the runner's high. At the end of a run she would often exclaim, her eyes shining, 'that was better than sex'. Being a gentleman, I did not offer to help test her hypothesis. 

The Rye Ten Mile: reading Henry James while drunk

I have been comparing races to works of art recently, in the hope of finding my place in Pseuds' Corner. Today's Rye Ten Mile was not a symphony or a dance—it could only be a novel by Henry James, who lived in the town. The bewildering winding lanes were very like a Jamesian paragraph, twisting this way and that until the reader  or runner is thoroughly bewildered. At university my girlfriend chose to write her dissertation on James; whether for this, or other reasons, I have sometimes struggled to read the Master; I remember once trying to make sense of some of the more elaborate passages in The Golden Bowl while drunk. Recently, when there was a vogue for novels about James or in which James played a part, three by Colm Tóibín, David Lodge and Alan Hollingshurst appeared in the same year. I thought I might mine  this seam myself, with a work entitled Reading Henry James While Drunk. It has not yet appeared. 

As for the race, I arrived with little time to spare, thanks to a car boot sale in Icklesham whose organisers had not thought to try to manage traffic at all. Fortunately I was not the only one in this position and the organisers delayed the start for five minutes. Nevertheless, I was still agitated, and the first three miles were hard work. I settled into a more regular style after the first drinks station, though I had no idea where the route was taking me. Bright intense sunshine alternated with bosky shade, and we ran up and down, up and down. I met a man who had run the Luxembourg marathon the week before and several runners, seeing my vest, said that they would be at the Seaford Half Marathon next Sunday.

This part of the world, the Kent-Sussex border, is very pretty and I would love to live in one of the isolated houses we passed, in the middle of the woods. One sign bade us beware of wild boar, and I wonder if I might see a sow and her striped babies somewhere in the shade, or an old boar. The only old boar, I'm afraid, was me. I have long been confused by the way that the wild boar, Sus scrofa, was always referred to in my childhood reading of Asterix in French as un sanglier when, in France, it is usually un marcassin. It seems, according to Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food, that the marcassin is the younger animal, which makes better eating. 

As for the race, I finished in 1:43 32 by the gun, 1:43:25, according to the chip.

Here are the Seaford Striders' times:

Dave Dunstall 1:07:15
Clifford Evans 1:07:21
Phil Carr 1:09:59
Natasha Swan 1:13:02
Adrian Campbell 1:14:37
Colin Hannant 1:15:28
Michael Martin 1:15:42
Phil Robinson 1:16:15
Natalie McCreath 1:19:41
Geoff Gray 1:19:42
David Morden 1:40:36
Tom Roper 1:43:32

Thrift and kittiwakes

I suppose all writing about running tries to understand why the writer, or others, do run. I never come close to an answer, but successive metaphors pass through my mind. I compared my Brighton marathon to a symphony; now I think of recent runs as like practising a musical instrument. Speed sessions might be those hours and hours of scales and arpeggios; some runs are like the very first exercises I was given on the clarinet, the long sustained notes to build up the breath and embouchure, and develop a sweeter tone; some longer runs are like  playing the part from an orchestral piece on one's own, some like an sectional rehearsal with the other winds, some like a full orchestral run-through. 

I ran on a hot Tuesday evening over Seaford Head,  ground I will cover again in the Seaford half marathon in eleven days time. At the top there's a pink patch of thrift, the plant that adorned the reverse of the threepenny piece in my childhood. Such a pity we no longer have dodecagonal coins. 

I ran above the kittiwakes' nests. Alexandra Loske, editor of the Frogmore Press's Languages of Colour anthology due out at the end of the month, quoted from Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, 1814 edition: "Pearl grey resembles the backs of black headed gulls and kittiwakes".

In the footsteps of W D H Rouse

i see that I have not posted here for over a month. Lax of me I know, but I shall not describe every run since the week after the Brighton marathon. I've been building up distance again for a quartet of races, the Rye Ten Mile, the Petworth 10K, the Seaford Half Marathon and the Worthing 10K, which take place over the next three weeks.

Last Sunday, away in Cambridge, I ran eight miles, from Impington out to West Wick and Oakington and back, taking in a stretch of an old railway line along which buses now run. It was still cool and damp, but the hedges looked as only Cambridgeshire hedges do at this time of year. The famous headmaster of my old school, W.D.H Rouse, lived at Histon Manor, but I'm not sure whether it still stands. Rouse pioneered a novel method of classics teaching and, improbably, corresponded with Ezra Pound, as they discussed a possible collaboration on a translation of the Odyssey. From my childhood, I remember Histon's jam factory and the fruit fields, no longer there.