Run

I was never much of an athlete. Growing up in Yorkshire in the seventies it was virtually compulsory to play football in the winter and cricket in the summer which I did, enthusiastically at first, but with a growing realisation that I wasn’t much good at either it became more of a chore and eventually I gave up. At secondary school we tried out different sports but I wasn’t much good at those either. I did manage to represent the school in the triple jump but that was basically down to the fact that I was just about the only person in my year that could string together the hop, skip and jump in the right order. I didn’t win any medals though and my athletic career quickly fizzled out. Just about the worst sport we did at school was the cross country run. This was the nightmare of heading out along roads, across fields and through snickets in the pissing rain with the cold wind blowing right up the Pennines. I’ve no idea how far they made us run, it was probably just a couple of miles, but it seemed like an eternity. Needless to say I was pretty hopeless at it and it put me off running for many, many years.

This lack of athletic prowess meant that through my twenties and into the thirties I never really did much exercise. Eventually, after dire and almost certainly accurate warnings from Elaine about the premature fatality rate amongst couch potatoes, I joined a gym. It wasn’t much fun but in theory it got the heart pumping three times a week. I was hardly getting myself well ripped but it was better than nothing. By my late forties, however, I was getting extremely bored of the gym. Then, some nine years ago the Sport Relief charity was encouraging people to ‘Run a Mile’. I’d done a bit of running on the gym treadmill though not much. However, I thought that I could possibly manage it and one evening I asked Elaine to drop me off a mile from the gym and I would see her there. I did it and a very reluctant seed was sown.

Every year in May Troon hosts a 10k run that is very well patronised. I decided to enter. I had about three months to build myself up from that one mile jog to six and a bit miles of running. That distance seemed huge but I got there and ran the race in a time I’ve failed to match in the subsequent two or three Troon 10k races I’ve competed in. I could hardly call myself a ‘good’ runner but I was happy with what I’d achieved in a short space of time. In a fit of optimism, probably misplaced, I entered the Edinburgh Half Marathon for the following year, 2011. It was a spring event but during the preceding winter as I tried to build up the distance I did my groin some mischief and had to pull out due injury. I did, however, grab a charity place in the Royal Parks Half Marathon in London the following October. Once recovered from the injury I built up the distances I was running and come the day, just nine days before my fiftieth birthday, I felt in good nick. I completed the race in 2 hours, 4 minutes and 7 seconds. This was much better than I’d expected. I do all my training runs solo and found that being in a race situation gives extra encouragement. I put it down to the fact there’s always a lady’s shapely Lycra clad bottom in front of me to try, usually unsuccessfully, and catch up with. Either way, I thank those unsuspecting pacemakers.

That race was a rarity in that I actually enjoyed the run. It seemed to go on for ever but being part of a large event like that and passing some iconic sites in London meant it was fun. Although running was now my primary source of fitness, my gym membership ultimately lapsing, it was nearly always a chore. I persisted with it though. I was sure the Grim Reaper awaited me if I didn’t. I competed in two other half marathons. In September 2012 I ran the Great Scottish Run in Glasgow. It didn’t go well. I hadn’t prepared well for it at all and only decided to run at the last minute. I completed it in a rather pathetic time of 2 hours, 20 minutes 30 seconds but at least I did it. I hated every second. By 2015 my daughter Rebecca had taken up running, and living in Edinburgh at the time had entered the Edinburgh Marathon Festival half marathon. I thought I’d give it a go too. Thanks to a better build up I finished in a time of 2 hours 10 minutes 44 second which I was quite pleased with. It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable run though. Starting in the middle of Edinburgh the route quickly passed the foot of Arthur’s Seat and then failed to pass anywhere of interest on its way out to Musselburgh where you had to run a mile up a road to nowhere before heading back down it to the finish in a nondescript park.

Since then, however, I’ve avoided races. Partially through injury – I did my ankle on holiday three years ago and couldn’t run for eight months – and partially through laziness. It was stupid as there is nothing quite like a race to encourage you to don the trainers and get out on the road. Well, in theory anyway. Last September Rebecca moved out to Victoria in Canada and promptly entered the Vancouver Marathon, to be run on May 5th this year. She had done her first full marathon in Paris a couple of years ago and this was to be her second. As a newly retired gentleman with some time in my hands I decided to go out to support her and promptly booked a flight. A few weeks later I had the idea that maybe I could do the marathon too. I quickly scotched that idea as I didn’t want to steal her thunder (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it) but I did feel I had the time to build up to the half marathon which took place on the same day. I filled out the online application form, paid quite a few Canadian Dollars and hey presto, I was a runner in my fourth half marathon.

I had six months to get into shape. Less when you consider I spent much of my first few months of retirement travelling and forgetting to take my running shoes. In fact training started in earnest at the turn of the year. My kids had cleverly got me a Garmin GPS watch for Christmas which recorded my runs and allowed me to see just how badly I was doing. There are many websites, books, magazines and pamphlets that inform a potential runner just how to plan his of her training in the run up to a big event. I read precisely none of these and just made it up on the spot. I could run five miles, I knew that. By the end of January I was to have run six. By the time February was over I’d have run eight at least once. March would see me top ten whilst in April I would do a twelve miler at some stage. All these targets were achieved and I’d run every two or three days, never on consecutive days though. The more I did it the better my pace was which is just as well as had I run the race at the pace I had been achieving in those early days I’d probably would have been caught up by the race’s paddy wagon and get disqualified. My run strategy was not exactly the approved way either. Conventional wisdom is that you run ten miles for pace then three miles to race. Sounds good doesn’t it? No, for me it was to run five miles like a winner, eight miles like a wanker. Fast miles at the start were seconds in the bank as far as I was concerned as I was definitely going to slow up towards the end no matter what. The first time I’d do the full distance, 13.1 miles or 21.1 km, was on the day of the race itself.

The Garmin watch was a revelation. As well as recoding time and distance, it beeps every 1km to give you ‘lap’ times. Not only was I improving my times. I could see where I was improving. This was certainly encouraging and meant I could set myself targets for the race itself. The first was to simply complete the distance without stopping or walking. The next target was 2 hrs 11 mins. That meant an average pace of 10 mins/mile and early on was a realistic target. More challenging was 2 hrs 6 mins 30 secs which would take the pace to under 6 mins/km. As my training progressed keeping 1 km lap times under 6 mins became important and I was achieving it for the first eight miles (13kms) or so, not so much for any distance beyond that. Still, seconds in the bank and all that. In my sights was the 2 hrs 4 mins and 7 secs, the time I’d achieved in the first half marathon and of course a personal best. The next target was two hours. Highly unlikely but a man can dream can’t he?

I flew out to Victoria on the Wednesday before the race. A long journey and an eight hour time difference is hardly the greatest preparation but I did my best to use it to my advantage. The half marathon was due to start at 7am on the Sunday so it was early to bed and early to rise on the preceding days. I did one five mile run on the Friday as final preparation which went well enough and we set out for Vancouver that evening. On the Saturday we went to collect our race numbers in the middle of town. We then checked in to our Airbnbs near the start line in the suburban south of the city. An old fashioned diner provided us with our pre race meal and we retired for an early night.

It was a 5am alarm. A bowl of granola was consumed and, in a bit of a change to my pre-run routine, I had a shower. As a solo runner there’s not much need for showering until the run is over but in a race there’s a fair bit of hanging around with loads of other folk. I’d been informed to arrive at the start an hour before the race. I had to check in a bag of post race essentials (iPhone, wallet, spare shirt, just about my whole life at that point in time) which would be available for collection at the finish line. Having done that there was indeed a whole load of hanging around but at least I smelled nice. Fifteen minutes prior to the start I was stationed in my starting coral. On applying to participate in the race you have to give an expected finish time. I’d given a conservative 2 hrs 15 mins and was corralled with others in the 2:05-2:15 group. There was someone bellowing warm up exercises over the tannoy, duly ignored, some psycho babble, duly ignored, the Canadian National Anthem, duly ignored and not just by me, by most competitors. At 7am on the dot the starter’s gun went bang. Off went the elite runners. We went nowhere. A couple of minutes later the first coral was sent on their way, then the next coral after that. My coral was the third and it wasn’t until ten past seven that we were allowed to start. Across the line I went, starting the Garmin as I did.

The half marathon course in Vancouver starts in Queen Elizabeth Park. After a minute you leave the park and head down Cambie Street towards downtown. This is a long, straight and above all downhill road. Running downhill can be a bit if a strain on the knees but the gradient was just right for a rapid start and having fought my way to the front of our coral I fairly flew the first three or four kilometres recording ‘lap’ times ten or twenty seconds less than I’d ever managed before. On crossing the bridge into the downtown area the course flattened out and all gravitational assistance ended. There was an up and down section in Chinatown, which of course could be any part of Vancouver but is the area north of that big stadium thingy. I nearly came to grief at the bottom of the down bit where the ground fell away a bit further than I’d anticipated but I managed to stay upright by swearing quite loudly. It doesn’t always work but I feel it helps. Continuing along Beach Ave and past English Bay we entered Stanley Park at the 12km marker. Here, a couple of other up and down sections awaited us, nothing too serious but a bit painful by then, as we snaked our way around the park. Eventually, the course emerged from the tree lined boulevards of Stanley Park where they had somehow crammed in 8 km which left 1 km (1.0975 km to be precise) to go. The finish was on the straight West Pender St in the middle of town and could be seen from 700 m away which I felt was a little cruel. My regular time checks had revealed that I was going a lot faster than I had anticipated by that point. Surely that couldn’t be right? It was hardly a sprint finish but I crossed the finish line and stopped the watch. I had beaten all the targets I had set myself including the fantasy two hour one. In fact I had smashed it by over three minutes. The official time was 1 hour 56 minutes 41 seconds.

I had planned my celebration should I achieve a good time. It was to involve jumping up and down, waving my arms around and shouting exaltations with no little amount of profanity. What actually happened was I stopped running, checked my watch and thought thank goodness it’s over. It wasn’t an anti-climax, far from it, I was shocked yet delighted with time. I was just needed to collect the medal and other handouts, retrieve my goody bag and go somewhere reasonably quiet to reflect on what had just happened. And of course tell people via social media, I wasn’t going to keep it to myself for very long, this is 2019 after all. So it was that the tourists wandering round Coal Harbour by the cruise ship terminal and the seaplane base got to see me remove my sodden shirt and replace it with a dry one, then sit on the wall in the glorious sunshine (and slightly chilly breeze) informing the world via the miracle of the mobile interwebs what had just happened.

Thanks to the early start the day was still young and it soon became a case of watching Rebecca in the full marathon. She duly completed it but not without going through a lot of pain – she had picked up a virus a week previously which she hadn’t completely shaken off and suffered badly form the effects of the continuous sunshine. It was quite upsetting to see her hurting like that. By the time I flew home four days later she was only just getting over it.

What of the future? I’ll almost certainly continue running. Not because I get a kick out of it other than setting new personal bests in races, but because it is an ‘easy’ form of exercise. Easy in that you just need some kit, a decent pair of running shoes and a stopwatch and you can set off from your front door. No need to go to a specific facility, arrange an opponent or become a member of a team. I will need to set myself further challenges though as without them it is easy to think I’ll give it a miss today. I’ve done a couple of runs since returning home. Both five miles, both very slowly. It seems the body is feels it needs a bit of a rest.