I went down to train at Maiden Castle in Durham the morning after the BUCS 10,000m. Inevitably, the first person I saw asked me how it went.

‘Morning Mike. How did BUCS go?’
‘It was terrible.’
‘It wasn’t that good’ said my coach, overhearing us as he walked past.

Indeed… there was no point in pretending it had been anything other than a disaster. We’d decided that even though I’d been struggling with a virus, it was worth taking the gamble that I’d recovered in time to race. Or rather, my coach had never seemed to entertain the idea that I wouldn’t run a race I’d been targeting for a long time. He’d realised that I was going to run anyway and it that he might as well try to get me to think positively about it. I’d warmed up and run a fairly hard mile in 4.35 on the Thursday before the race and didn’t feel too bad. Apparently my coach had thought I sounded like I was breathing more heavily than I should have been, but there wasn’t much point in worrying me about that. I went down to the race thinking that perhaps the time off I’d had might actually benefit me, that the flat feeling in my legs was just nerves.

I realised pretty early on in the race that I didn’t feel right, though, and that all the positive thinking in the world wasn’t going to get me round twenty-five laps particularly fast. When you’re feeling bad and look up to see ’17’ on the lap counter you know it’s going to be a long half hour. I ended up making it round in 8th place in a race that was won in a time thirty seconds slower than I ran for 10,000m last summer, which is obviously pretty frustrating. The race was won by a guy who went into it with a PB over two and a half minutes slower than the best entrant on paper. Running is a pretty unpredictable sport – even without taking races into account, everyone who does a bit of running knows that some days you feel terrible for no logical reason and other days you feel at least nine feet tall even though you’ve been training really hard. You can have bad days but you can also – luckily – have outstanding days. Or at least that’s what you have to tell yourself when you have a total nightmare of a race.

Unfortunately some viruses just cling on longer than others, and sometimes you have to accept that you’ve got about as much chance of sweating them out by continuing to run as you have of curing indigestion by eating a second pizza. You just have to wait, and forget about racing for a while. Fortunately I’ve felt a lot better this week, and I’m back into normal training now. I’m doing the session of two flat out four mile efforts today though so that should be a good measure of whether I’m completely better or not!

The 10,000m is a distance that is rarely run on the track anymore, but one that was a staple of any serious distance runner’s summer plans in the ‘80’s. People seem more concerned with road 10km times now. From what my coach has said about when he was running, though, there was a tendency to distrust road times in favour of the inescapable objectivity of the track. He ran under 30 minutes for 10,000m with someone shouting the lap times out for him on the back straight – as long as he heard 71-point-something he knew he was alright. That takes a particular kind of stubborn relentlessness, but also a huge amount of concentration. The 10,000m seems like a good way of cultivating mental fortitude, and a good exercise in bloodymindedness. I’m planning on heading down to Highgate in June for their ‘10,000m Night of PBs’, so hopefully it will live up to its name…

Not too much to report on the training front this week unfortunately. As my coach pointed out on the phone once, saying that distance runners are constantly ‘on the edge’ is not just a marketing slogan – when you’re training hard you’re pretty susceptible to illness and injury. I picked up some sort of virus last week and wasn’t able to run at all for about five days. I’m back running tentatively now and still hope to run BUCS 10,000m next week, but haven’t done much training to write about here.

In the meantime, here’s a brief article I wrote outlining my thoughts on Mo Farah’s appearance in the London marathon for anyone who still wants something to read.

Last Sunday, Mo Farah ran half of the London Marathon in 61.34. If he’d been in a half marathon race would have put him twelfth on the British all-time list, and made him over three minutes faster than any other British runner for a half marathon this year. In normal circumstances, we don’t begrudge people making large amounts of money for doing things considerably better than everyone else. In fact, there are few professions where you can actually objectively prove that you are the best in your field. Distance running is one of the few where you can, and where you can measure your superiority in seconds (and minutes in this case), and yet Mo’s appearance in London has attracted a blizzard of ire and gibberish, both from the media and from fellow athletes. He has been labelled a “money grabber” by numerous journalists as well as by Paula Radcliffe (who lives in Monaco for tax reasons) and Michael Johnson, who once injured himself having accepted a large amount of money for racing Donovan Bailey over 150m.

Criticising Mo Farah for running half of the London Marathon is especially short sighted given the lack of scrutiny given to athletes endorsements more generally. Mo has looked awkward in interviews all week as he’s been repeatedly forced to justify his decision to run and to reassure the public that it was not about the money. When he appeared on billboards with Usain Bolt and Richard Branson in the summer, endorsing broadband, I don’t remember him being made to squirm in front of TV cameras as he explained that that wasn’t about the money, that he was merely a passionate believer in fast internet connections and that he saw appearing in an advert as a ‘learning experience’ that could afford him a greater understanding of what it felt like to wear a fake beard.

Two British Olympians – a boxer and a gymnast seemingly forgotten now that we’ve almost reached the games’ one year anniversary – still grin out from Subway windows advocating their ‘personal best’ sandwiches. Jessica Ennis received very little criticism for using her wholesome image to rehabilitate that of BP during the Olympics, whose website also read ‘in honour of BP’s deep (a Freudian slip if ever I saw one) ties to the U.S we proudly announce our sponsorship of the United States Olympic Team’. Nike managed to turn Tiger Woods’ infidelity into a marketing campaign in 2010, and waited until the last possible moment – long after there was incontrovertible evidence of his drug taking – to drop Lance Armstrong. Given the unscrupulous nature of many endorsement deals, you’d hardly have been surprised if they’d tried to make that one work out in their favour too (i’d have gone for ‘Just Get Away With It. For Over a Decade’).

Sporting careers are short, and it is usually accepted that sportsmen and women have to make their money while they can, even if it involves endorsement deals with fast food outlets and oil companies. Mo’s appearance in London – as attested to by the vast numbers of people who turned out to watch – was above all else an endorsement of running, in the city in which he grew up and in an event which supported him in his early days when there was no guarantee he would make it to the heights he has now reached. Watching Mo’s beautifully manicured stride as he clipped along with the leaders on Sunday, I was with Brendan Foster, who is generally right about these things. ‘Mo’s the double Olympic champion’ he said, ‘he can do what he wants.’ Let’s turn our attention to the kinds of endorsements – McDonald’s would be a start – that are actually likely to decrease the likelihood of us getting more kids living healthy lifestyles and playing sport. Farah is a role model, not a money grabber.

Most of the discussion about how to improve distance running standards assumes that the problem essentially comes down to training harder. From the conversations I’ve had with my coach, and from reading Charlie Spedding’s book, though, much of the difference seems to come down to focus. In an e-mail, Charlie told me ‘I think a lot of people from my generation like to say that your generation don’t train hard enough, but I really don’t know if that is true. For all I know, you might be training too hard’.

The ‘focus’ and ‘commitment’ Charlie writes about are not the same thing as ‘motivation’, which today seems to be characterised primarily by Nike adverts, ‘running playlists’ on itunes and youtube videos – that is, things that last about three minutes. The ‘focus’ Charlie refers to requires a bit more time. It means deciding what you want to do and then getting on with it. It means deciding to run twice a day, and accepting that running will become the punctuation to your day, the two bookends between which everything else fits. My flatmates used to correct me when I told them I’d meet them later because I “had to go for a run.” “You want to go for a run”, they’d say. They got bored of correcting me eventually. You don’t need music or slogans to motivate you if you accept that you’re going to go out every time you wake up and whenever you get home at the end of the day; it just happens. The ‘focus’ Charlie is talking about is different and is, I think, lacking from a lot of people’s training. As he puts it in his book, before he changed his mindset, ‘although I had an attitude that made me diligent in my training, it wasn’t the same thing as having an attitude that would make me successful in my running.’ Luckily, Charlie’s advice about focus and commitment happens to involve going to the pub.

This is an exercise anyone can do (you don’t have to be in a pub, but it helps). It makes you accountable to yourself, and it gives you something to refer back to. And it’s pretty simple. Get yourself a pad of paper and write “What do I want?”, “Why do I want it?” and “How much do I want it?” If you don’t know the answers to those questions, Charlie reckons, you’re unlikely to get the most out of yourself competitively. I’ve done my own version for this summer, but it’s not going on here. It’s one thing being accountable to yourself and quite another to make yourself accountable to eightlane message board posters! Having target races doesn’t mean that you don’t run other races, or that you don’t run the other races hard, but that you aim to really put pressure on yourself in the races where you want to get results.

I made the pilgrimage down to Sutton Coldfield this week for the national twelve stage road relays, running a pretty lonely 11th leg 48 seconds slower than my coach ran in April 1981, and identical to the second to Dougie’s time on leg nine. We’ve clearly been spending too much time running together in the meadows and, as our mate Mark puts it, ‘become physiologically the same bloke’. We were eight seconds apart at the Scottish road relays, too. I suppose it’s not a problem if we keep running the same times, but we could do with both running a bit quicker in the next few weeks. The twelve stage has more or less remained the same whilst the rest of the running landscape has changed around it – a tent city gradually appearing in the morning, with club flags competing for space around the changeover area, then runners battling for over four hours for their teams. As one of the Costorphine AC runners put it, ‘I don’t want to hear of any example of anyone being able to remember their own name within ten minutes of finishing a leg!’

Training wise this week was fairly similar again, although it should be noted that according to my coach’s diary the winter lasted even longer in 1981 than it did this year. His entry for the 24th of April is ‘5 miles alone – deep snow!’ He ran 78 miles, I ran 73. The previous week I ran 84, he ran 94. I’ve listed my last two weeks below for anyone interested.

Sunday: 11 miles including long leg at Scottish road relays.
Monday: AM 6 miles steady PM 6 miles steady.
Tuesday: AM 4.5 miles steady. PM 9 miles including 8 x 1km in under three minutes with one minute recovery.
Wednesday: 10 miles steady.
Thursday: AM 5 miles steady. PM 10 miles acceleration run. First mile in 6.30, then 10 seconds faster per mile.
Friday: AM 6 miles steady. PM 6 miles steady.
Saturday: AM 6 miles steady. PM 4.5 miles steady.
Sunday: 18 miles steady with Dougie.
Monday: AM 6 miles steady. PM 6 miles steady.
Tuesday: AM 4.5 miles steady. PM 9 miles including 5 x 1km (100 jog recovery), 1 mile hard on the track.
Wednesday: 6 miles steady. (Didn’t get out until 10pm, due to having to hand in 7,000 words of essay on Thursday!)
Thursday: AM 5 miles including 10 mins of 100m hard every 30 seconds. PM 5 miles steady.
Friday: 3 miles easy.
Saturday: 10 miles including leg in 12 stage relays.

Last week I included a few statistics which illustrate the extent to which standards have dropped, but sometimes numbers can be hard to relate to. So here’s an example of what a local road race used to look like:

This is the kind of race where you could run under thirty minutes for 10km and be nowhere. It is, as Hunter S. Thompson would have put it, a race run by men who would rather be shot out of a cannon than squeezed out of a tube. Races don’t tend to look much like this any more – try going down to your local park run if you want to see an extreme example. You just don’t get vests like the one Bernie Ford is wearing today either.

Tim Hutchings, who is in a far better position than I to comment, wrote an article in Athletics Weekly last week in which he lamented the fact that many of today’s better runners are under-raced compared with the runners in the ‘80s. I think this is partly down to a fear of being found out. A lot of people tend to only race when they’re in really good form now, rather than using races as a way of finding form. Charlie Spedding writes about not being scared to race in his book ‘From Last to First’, much of which is concerned with the mental approach to running. Rather than attempting to avoid racing people who are better than you, or being scared to compete, he advocates seeing racing better runners as an opportunity rather than something to be feared.

Sometimes you have to be a bit smart about this, though, as I found out last week. Running a 10km in an extremely windy Grangemouth, it’s probably best not to try to run away from people on a stretch into the wind, no matter how much you’re trying to change the way you approach racing. I found this out last weekend, and was beaten by two of a front group of four as a result. I gave it a decent go, and both of them should have beaten me on paper (one was second in the Scottish Cross Country this year and the other has the Commonwealth Games standard for the marathon already), but I would probably have given them a better race had I been more sensible.

Training can never really quite replicate races if you’re trying to really put out a hard effort. Running is a pretty simple sport – along with boxing it corresponds most closely to the basic ‘fight or flight’ response (some have tried to combine the two, but it is not recommended http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBxlTpkvQuk). I ran the Scottish six stage road relays yesterday, and after the first leg, when teams start to get spread out, runners are left constantly in the position of both hunter and hunted. You can’t replicate the adrenal reaction to this in training. I spent the first half of my leg chasing down the second placed runner and the second half worrying if there was anyone else chasing from behind. Given that the race was in Livingston, a new build town of underpasses, flyover bridges and tight corners between housing estates, you were never entirely certain that you weren’t about to be overtaken. My club, Costorphine, claimed the silver medal, the first time we’ve won a medal in this race, so it was a good day.

For those interested, below is the last week in March for both me and my coach, including the previous Sunday. We both raced twice, once in a relay.

My training:

Sunday: 11 miles including 3rd in Grangemouth 10km (31.03).
Monday: AM 5.5 miles steady PM 5.5 miles steady.
Tuesday: AM 4.5 miles steady PM 9.5 miles including 3km (2 laps jog), 5 x 1km (200 jog) on track with Matt Gunby. Hard work after Sunday.
Wednesday: AM 10 miles steady.
Thursday: AM 4.5 miles steady. PM 7 miles fartlek.
Friday: AM 4.5 miles steady. PM 4.5 miles steady.
Saturday: 4.5 miles easy.
Sunday: 11 miles including long leg in Scottish Road relay championships (29.29, started 3rd, finished 2nd).

Total for week up to Sunday: 72 miles.

My coach’s training:

Sunday: 14 miles inc (illegible) in Kendall Road Race – poor, 50.45
Monday: 6 miles with Barry
Tuesday: AM: 5 miles alone – tired. PM 4 miles 21.30 alone.
Wednesday: 10 miles – good.
Thursday: 10 miles.
Friday: AM 6 miles. PM 7 miles.
Saturday: 16 miles including leg at Gosforth Relays 15.24.
Sunday: AM 16 miles alone, tired. PM 4 miles OK.

Total for week up to Sunday: 78 miles.

‘Evening, Dougie. How was work?’
‘Fine. How was the library?’
‘Alright. Feeling ok from this morning?’
‘Yeah. A bit tired but fine.’
(we had, like on most mornings, already run a few miles in the meadows in the morning)
‘Lovely weather, eh?’
‘Hmm’

Around an hour later, following a session in gale force winds and a blizzard…

‘Cheers, mate, see you tomorrow. Will you be out in the morning?’
‘I’ll be out at about 7.45. See you in twelve hours…’

I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand why there aren’t more people my age trying to get to a decent level as distance runners. There must be people who travel to and from work at eight in the morning and six at night who wonder whether the two tight-clad men they see twice every day ever stop running. There are a few people left who are at least nearly as mad as the lads who were running thirty years ago, though, and I’m making an effort to run with them as much as possible. This morning I ran with Patryk, a Polish marathon runner. He definitely doesn’t lack craziness – I met him at eight and he’d been asleep for four hours and was still feeling the effects of tequila consumed in the early hours of the morning. A lot of the guys in ‘British marathon runners of the 1980’s’ write about the importance of getting on with it regardless of the circumstances. Patryk was doing a pretty good job of that, just not always in a completely straight line.

I got a mate from work to pick a year at random between 1975 and 1985 in order to test the reality of the decline in standards across the distance events. He went for 1977. Below are the times of the fifth, tenth and twentieth ranked runners over 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon. I haven’t listed the top ranked athlete, because it is irrelevant to my argument, which is about strength in depth. A lot of the comments on my first article, amongst at least fifteen versions of the same joke (‘Why were we faster in the ’80’s? Because we were a lot younger then!) were about Mo Farah. Obviously Mo is an exceptional athlete, but that is the problem – he is the exception that proves the rule. Roger Federer is an incredible tennis player, but that doesn’t make any difference to an assessment of the overall quality of Swiss tennis.

5,000m:

2012: 5th 13.22 , 10th 13.51 , 20th 14.02.
1977: 5th 13.25 , 10th 13.39 , 20th 13.49.

10,000m:

2012: 5th 28.51 , 10th 29.40 , 20th 30.12.
1977: 5th 27.55 , 10th 28.31 , 20th 28.59.

Marathon:

2012: 5th 2.16.40 , 10th 2.19.22 , 20th 2.22.29.
1977: 5th 2.16.02 . 10th 2.17.16 , 20th 2.19.10.

Last year was an Olympic year, and the Olympics were in London. You might expect that to push up performances. 1977 was just another year, but to make the top twenty in the British rankings you had to be the length of the finishing straight faster over 5,000m, a lap faster over 10,000m and about half a mile faster for a marathon.

My coach was ill for most of the equivalent week in March 1981 – he only covered 42 miles. This is probably, then, one of the few weeks where my mileage will be higher than his. I did 84 miles, detailed below for anyone interested:

Sunday: 15.5 miles in 1.38.
Monday: AM 5 miles steady PM 5 miles steady.
Tuesday: AM 5 miles steady PM 7 miles including 5 x 800m on the track with decreasing recoveries (1.15, 60, 45, 30).
Wednesday: AM 6 miles steady PM 5 miles steady.
Thursday: AM 6.5 miles including four miles hard in 20.13 PM 6.5 miles including 4 miles hard in 20.38.
Friday: AM 6 miles steady PM 6 miles steady.
Saturday: AM 5 miles steady PM 5 miles steady.

 

‘Good afternoon’

‘Right then, I think you need to get on the track tonight. Can you get on a track or is it still snowing’

‘I think I can get on a track’

‘Ok good, well here’s what you’re doing. Are you listening?’

‘Yeah.’

Conversations with my coach – those related directly to training at least – don’t tend to last much more than a minute. Less talking about running and more running. Ironically I expect he’d probably see this blog as part of the problem…

So, to the training. For the first week of March, our diaries look pretty similar. Seventy six miles each. The major difference is one that I can’t do a great deal about – I didn’t do any running with Barry Smith and Charlie Spedding. I expect I could probably keep up with them now, but in 1981 being able to do a few runs a week with established international athletes must have been quite handy. Running is an individual sport, but training in a strong group clearly has a huge impact on performance. Groups of likeminded people have led to athletic success from the Midlands in the ‘60s to Gateshead in the ‘80s and Iten today. A group of us try to co-ordinate training when we can in Edinburgh, but getting a group of a decent standard together is difficult when we all run for different clubs, are coached by different people and have different aims. For a golden period of about six weeks in the winter we managed to get a group of more than five together every Tuesday, but injuries and different priorities (we had a 3.42 1,500m runner and a 65 minute half marathon runner training together in the winter, but coming into Spring it makes less sense for people to do the same training) have meant that it’s harder to maintain a group training environment. There just isn’t the strength in depth now to have groups training for different events at a good level.

As for competition at local road races, it is even harder to find a race that has the kind of strength in depth you saw twenty or thirty years ago. Off the back of my first post I was sent a sheet of results from 1991 for a midweek 10km in Sunderland where 11 people ran under 30.51. When I ran 31.09 at the Jedburgh 10km last year I won by two and a half minutes. In the two five mile races I’ve run in the last two weekends I finished second in both in 24.47 and 24.55, in races where a total of only seven people broke 26 minutes. It seems fairly obvious that if you’re getting beaten by ten people you’re likely to work harder than if you’re getting beaten by one.

The advantage of having my coach’s diaries is that I can put things into a kind of historical perspective – I can try to compete with him instead of with the other people training in the Meadows in Edinburgh. Recently he’s had me doing a few days where I run a hard, measured four mile run in the morning and then the same route again in the evening. Apart from being a bitch psychologically, this means I can compare myself with him. Last time I did it I ran 20.16 and 20.38, but he consistently ran under 20 minutes for both runs. If I didn’t have his times to compare mine to, I’d probably have been reasonably pleased with that day’s training – it’s not very often, after all, that you do two hard runs in one day (or that it’s considered a good idea!) As it stands, though, I just want to beat his times. Knowing that the bloke down the road could do it makes it attainable.

So here’s last week’s training for those who are interested in the details. I imagine there’ll be a few more of those since my article went on letsrun.com (one of my ambitions, at least, is complete!)

Sunday 3rd: 15 miles steady (1 hour 38).

Monday 4th: 11 miles steady.

Tuesday 5th: AM 5 miles steady PM 2 mile warm up, 3 x 2 miles in 10 minutes with 5 minutes jog recovery, 1 mile warm down.

Wednesday 6th: AM 5 miles steady PM 5 miles steady.

Thursday 7th: AM 5 miles steady PM 2 miles steady, 10 mins of 100m hard every 30 seconds, 2 miles steady.

Friday 8th: AM 5 miles easy

Saturday 9th: 10 miles including 2nd in King’s Buildings 5 mile road race in 24.55.

On the 16th of January 1982, a fellow Durham City Harrier and very good friend of mine ran the Orange Bowl Marathon in Miami in 2 hours 14 minutes and 45 seconds. In 2012, that would have been good enough for fourth in the British rankings. Thirty years ago, on a Tuesday night in March, he waited with a nervous group of runners by the track in Gateshead stadium. There were twelve places available on the team for the national road relays, and, despite the fact that he was, at the time, one of Britain’s better marathon runners, he wasn’t convinced that was going to cut it for a place on the Gateshead Harriers team. The selectors had, at that time, an astonishing array of talent to pick from. Brendan Foster had medals on the world stage as well as world records to his name, Charlie Spedding would go on to win bronze in the 1984 Olympic marathon, and Dennis Coates had finished 5th in the Olympic steeplechase. And there were many others not far behind. For the record, my mate did get a place in the team – he ran the glory leg and Gateshead won by two and a half minutes.

 

In other words, he was a very good runner, and represented Great Britain on more than one occasion. But he was a lesser light amongst a group of distance runners in the north east who knew how to prepare to run fast over long distances.

 

Roll forward to the present day and the ever-declining standard of distance running in the UK, especially on the men’s side, has been discussed at great length. The answers to the problem, though, are often sought away from home, in the thin air of Iten, Kenya or in the Nike laboratories of Portland Oregon. I spent three months of last year in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, hoping that high altitude and superior coffee would be the answer (and writing a blog about my experiences here http://mikerunsawayfromhome.wordpress.com/), without it really occurring to me that the answers may have been better sought at the end of my mum’s street, where my distance running mate happens to live.

 

He has been coaching me on and off for the last seven years, and has shown admirable patience with my lack of that very same virtue. I’ve lost interest as a result of injuries on a number of occasions, spent my university summers in India, South America and China rather than on athletics tracks, and generally done a good job of displaying the lack of commitment which epitomises the shift in today’s running culture.

 

The world of running has changed a lot since its British heyday in the 70’s and 80’s. “It may be hard for anyone born after 1960 to believe,” Kenny Moore wrote, “but runners in those days were regarded as eccentric at best, subversive and dangerous at worst.” Now it seems, in Edinburgh at least, that everyone is a runner. In the running shop I work in, all kinds of people come in with variations of the same story. “For some reason, I’ve signed up to run a marathon, so I need some shoes,” they say, or “the guys in the office have talked me into running in their relay team.” For some, joining the fold as a “runner” has become a good way into office social life. Runners are respected, not mistrusted. Participation has come a long way since Kenny Moore’s time. 

 

The ever-increasing popularity of running should lead to an improvement in standards, with the widening base of the pyramid pushing up its peak. In fact, it seems to have had the opposite effect. When I’m asked by people in the shop how much running I do, I tell them I run eighty to ninety miles per week. The usual response to this is a look of pity and something along the lines of “oh, so you’re a serious runner then.” The assumption seems to be that whilst running is seen as enjoyable, at least to an extent, anyone who does an excessive amount is seen to be killing that enjoyment.

 

I have nothing against mass participation running. I agree with Haile Gebreselassie, when he says he reckons that the world would be a saner place if everyone ran every day. But the expansion of the market for running-related products, energy foods, pilates and yoga for runners seems to have distracted people from the fact that running training is a simple process. So simple, in fact, that it would appear impossible to fill a monthly magazine with new ideas on how to do it better. Nevertheless, these magazines proliferate, with cover articles like “Train less, run faster!” and “how chocolate cake can make you a better runner!” (no, these aren’t made up). A simple activity has been complicated to suit the needs of sports brands who need to find ways to make money out of a sport which really only demands a half decent pair of trainers.

 

The argument that sports scientists tend to make when you point out that the likes of Brendan Foster and Charlie Spedding achieved all that they did without nutritionists and scientific testing is that they would have been even faster if they’d done these new things too. Huge amounts of scientific data are compiled on the benefits of training at altitude and on new forms of strength and flexibility training. But those trying to apply scientific methods conveniently fail to recognise the simple objective fact that British distance runners were faster thirty years ago than they are now. A lot faster. And that is the only test that really matters.

 

The most important aspects of a distance runner’s training are patience and consistency. These things are not glamorous. They don’t fit in particularly well in today’s society. There are no quick fixes and no immediate gratification. But there is satisfaction in something done to the best of your ability and with conviction. There is solace in repeating a simple activity until it becomes smooth, efficient and, of course, faster.

 

For the next few months, I’ll be referring to my coach’s training diaries for 1981 and 1982, and writing about the experience of doing the simple things right and trying to replicate the kind of training that was done in his day. The diaries represent two years of accumulated sweat and effort on his part distilled into numbers – 9,037 miles to be precise. They are pretty short on description, with the prize for most commonly used adjective going fairly overwhelmingly to “tired”, and contain only occasional elaboration (“tired – knackered actually”). They chronicle the day-in-day-out toil of trying to run 26.2 miles at as fast a pace as possible and the conviction that anything worth doing is worth doing right.

 

And so I’m off, to publicly try to challenge the theory that my generation are doing it all wrong. I can’t deny that it’s easier for me, after all. I’m a student; my coach had a marriage, a mortgage, children and a full time job to worry about. His final words of wisdom as I walked down his driveway: “Mike, lose those diaries, and I’ll kill you.”