Tag: running

Exercise

The Great North Run

Chris Cannam3 Comments

Following my first attempt at competitive (well, timed anyway) running, the Marathon of the North in Sunderland in May, last weekend I ran in the Great North Run.

This was described in Wikipedia as the world’s largest half-marathon until a recent edit demoted it to second behind Göteborg. Still, it’s big. I’d heard some of the numbers, but I was still boggled by the scale of the thing, especially after the small inaugural Sunderland marathon.

I got to the starting area very early, on a coach transfer, and set out to walk from the start line back to the end of the starting pens. It took about quarter of an hour. Then when it came to start the race itself, by the time I passed the start line—having shuffled with the crowd of other runners up from my zone—the clock was already over 27 minutes!

(I didn’t understand the zoning system at all, but it’s presumably based on previous race times. I’d never run a timed race of any distance when I entered this one so I was placed quite far back.)

It was pretty much impossible to run at a constant speed in a straight line for more than a few seconds during the race, because of the crowds—right up to the finishing straight I was having to leap into gaps and up onto kerbs and verges, to avoid having to slow down and risk my legs turning to jelly before I could get started up again.

Fortunately, I’m quite keen on messing about like that.

And the weather was good: it rained.  I like that too.

I finished in one hour 47 minutes (and 50 secs) which is a bit faster than I’d expected.

All in all I was most taken by the half-marathon distance—a proper run without the slightly insane nature of a marathon. Looking forward to the Bath half in March.

Exercise

Phew!

Chris Cannam

I’m delighted to be able to say I completed the first Marathon of the North in Sunderland yesterday.

I hinted at this in my previous post, but midweek before the race I was feeling terrible—I’d had colds and aches; my last training run on Thursday was stereotypically awful, with bad cramps and a sore right knee that had me thinking evil thoughts about joint damage; and I spent much of Friday walking a bit like Dad did before his first hip operation.


So it was a great relief to find I felt better on Saturday and quite good on Sunday, to find the running painless once I got started, and actually to be able to finish the thing.

I had to stop and sit down, feeling sick and dizzy, with a few kilometres to go—but I got around in four hours and ten minutes and I’m jolly pleased with that. It seems to be considered a difficult course and my finishing time was only 53% over the winner’s, which I reckon is pretty fine.

Meanwhile, I’ve raised over four hundred quid for Shelter and I’m really pleased with that. Many thanks to everyone who has donated.

Is it good for Sunderland?

I think around 1500 people entered this event, and about 1100 finished it. The first Kielder Marathon, organised by the same people, managed a similar number of entrants despite being miles from the nearest city. The inaugural Brighton Marathon, in 2010, saw over 7000 participants, although that probably included a lot of Londoners who couldn’t get into the London marathon. This one doesn’t seem to have been all that popular.

I’m guessing that a ten-thousand-entrant marathon in your town would be pretty good for business, but one at this scale surely can’t be. There were a lot of complaints locally about road closures, and we heard that many business owners—hotels, taxis, pubs etc—felt there was a lot of local effort going into it in exchange for nothing but a big loss of custom. To put on an event like this for only 1500 runners is asking quite a lot.

But for the runners and spectators, this was a wonderful advertisement for Sunderland.

I grew up in and around Durham, but I haven’t often been to Sunderland and I’ve had an impression of it as a pleasant but rather characterless town on the river mouth. Running the marathon route has completely changed that impression for me. The route missed out most of the very visible modern commercial streets along the south bank of the Wear, instead covering streets with varied, mostly Victorian architecture, several lovely parks, long stretches of sandy coastline both north and south of the city centre—Sunderland comes across as a rather beautiful town, and this is a fantastic route for anyone who likes to look at their surroundings while they run.

For family supporters it was even better.

It’s true that watching a marathon can be pretty dull, and I’m full of gratitude to the people living along the route who had enough patience to keep cheering us on right to the end. (Early on in this event we ran past a couple of kids standing with bikes on a street corner, staring at us and saying “I can’t believe how boring this is”—I laughed at that; they were quite right.)

But for out-of-town supporters, although the sunny weather played a big part, the route here was ideal. It expanded and contracted like flower petals around a few streets in the centre, in a way that looked tricky on the map but that allowed my family to drift around the town centre, see some sights, have a coffee and still wave on their runner four times in different places on the route.

On the train back to London, we asked the kids: so, Sunderland—what did you think? They were both keen to come back. The beaches, the river and sea, the Winter Gardens cafe, the guest house with its excellent breakfast, the Roker amusements with two-penny coin-drops, the pub with the FA cup final, friendly people and nice food, being able to hang around at the Stadium of Light for the start and finish, waving at your dad while he runs: it’s a good deal for a bank holiday weekend.

I felt a bit of an awkward impostor, talking to the owner of our guest house at breakfast, in saying I hoped this event would be a big success in future years. It doesn’t seem to have been very helpful to them or their friends this year: they were right on the route and had just the one marathon-related booking (us) and a weekend of trouble.

But I do hope it’s a success. I’d like other people like me, who should perhaps know this already, to be shown what a fine town this is. I would hope that runners aren’t put off by the difficult course and will want to run it because of the interest and variety along the route. I’d like this to be a ten-thousand-runner marathon in a year or two, and I think it deserves to be.

Exercise

Tapering

Chris Cannam

Marathon training programmes, at least for inexpert runners, seem to follow a common pattern. You increase your distances gradually week by week, peaking with long runs of around three-quarters of marathon length. (Why not longer? I suppose it isn’t considered worth draining your reserves completely and risking injury.)  Then there’s a “tapering” period for the final two or three weeks, during which distances drop off again before the race day. Apparently, science indicates that this improves your ability on the day.

I’m in the last week before the marathon and, to my surprise, I’m finding this strangely difficult.

First, it’s tricky to keep focused. I know I’m supposed to be concentrating mainly on diet and general well-being during the last few weeks.  But I’ve found myself feeling as if the hard work has been done, so now I can just give up and go to seed again.

A friend who was a heavy smoker once said that starting to give up smoking was no problem: the difficult bit came after a few weeks when you caught yourself thinking “well! that was easy—now for a cigarette”. It feels a bit like that: as if the event has already been done, merely through training for it.

Meanwhile, I feel much less fit than I did a month ago. My last 30-or-so km run was pretty enjoyable, and at the time I felt I could just keep going for another 10km and be done with it. But I went down with a nasty cold straight after that, and since then I’ve been struggling. Any cough must be the onset of a terrible flu; any pain seems like a potentially disastrous injury. Back a bit sore from sleeping all wrong? Knee feeling a bit funny? Shoulder aching, possibly a recurrence of that old mousing injury? I’m never going to be able to run with that.

I’ve run about 530km during the last twelve weeks—more than a marathon’s distance a week on average—but all that training seems a very long way away.

As a consequence, and probably for the good, my expectations are now far lower than they were. I generally run at the equivalent of about a 4-hour marathon on long runs, but in training I’ve sometimes felt so comfortable I’ve started daydreaming about unexpectedly superb competitive results. Now I’m back to thinking of it as a day out in which I happen to be running about a bit: just hoping I get to the end without my legs giving out too badly.

Exercise

A Marathon

Chris Cannam

The reason for all this running—or at least for running such long distances at a time—is that I’ve entered a marathon.

It’s the inaugural Marathon of the North in Sunderland on the 5th of May. Although I’ve lived in London for years, I come from Durham and I’m much looking forward to a run in Sunderland with a route having a nice mixture of coastal and city centre roads.

Informed readers might note that I’ve just turned 40. Running my first marathon a month after my 40th birthday looks like a proper mid-life crisis activity. There’s certainly something in the mid-life bit, though hopefully not the crisis one. I’d like to have run a marathon, and I have the creeping feeling that if I don’t get around to it now I probably won’t ever, because I’m not naturally the sort of fellow who goes in for difficult errands.

At the moment I’m not planning to enter any more at this distance. Taking three hours at a time for a practice run is just too difficult to arrange. I certainly intend to keep running at shorter distances, though, and I’ll be in both the Great North Run this autumn and the 2013 Bath Half marathon—races about which I have a feeling of goodwill and lightness that can probably only be had from the knowledge that the marathon will by then be months behind me.

My marathon entry isn’t dependent on sponsorship, but I would like to raise money for Shelter and I have a JustGiving page for anyone who would like to sponsor me.

Places

Running around London

Chris Cannam

During the past few months, for very boring reasons, I’ve been spending a bit of time running relatively long distances around London.

It’s been quite a revelation. London is, as every Saint Etienne fan knows, a very big place1.

It’s hard to find the time to walk around very much of it, just because the distances are so big. I used to cycle occasionally, but everything goes by a bit quick that way and you’re liable to crash if you spend too much time looking around you. Running turns out to be a pretty good compromise. I’ve been through more interesting bits of London—many of them via canal or river routes—during these few months than I have in years.

From Chelsea Bridge

I’ve lived in London for nearly 18 years and in west London for ten, yet I’d never before seen the splendid Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park up close, been along the leafy Thames path on the south bank west from Putney, realised that Trellick Tower (below right) sits on the canal side, or had any sense of the relationship between the westbound road, rail, and canal routes from the Paddington basin. (Did you know the canal goes over the North Circular?)

I’d worked near Mile End for six years without ever having been along the Lee Navigation or seen the dramatic Bow locks—never mind peering at the near-future Olympic site.

Trellick Tower

And I’ve worked in Docklands, yet the only time I’d ever been through Wapping and joined the dots between docks and City was on 7/7, walking home across London when all the transport was out.

I even realised recently that, no matter how many times I may have passed the front of the Palace of Westminster, I’d never been along the length of the building to get any real impression of the scale of it.

I’m not completely ignorant of this place: I know my way around the City and West End well enough, I’ve spent a lot of time walking in various areas further out, I’ve lingered in the Barbican and on the South Bank and so on—which is partly why it’s been so much fun to be reminded how much even of central London I’ve still never properly seen.

1 Apparently the quote about London at the start of You’re In A Bad Way is from the film Billy Liar. I’ve seen the film since becoming familiar with the song, and I didn’t even notice the line. Hopeless, I am.