The Marathon - Afterwards

Just as there’s so much information about how to train for a marathon, and so much information about what will happen during a marathon, They also Know exactly what will happen to you after the marathon. What none of them mention is the most important piece of advice, which is 'stop eating cake'. No, seriously, stop eating cake. You’re not running 18 miles a week any more, you don’t need to eat a family sized cinnamon bun for breakfast, so cut it out. 

What They do say pretty much boils down to two things, that you will get a horrible stinking cold, and you will get depressed. Both of these things are written as non-negotiable. Surprisingly though, they both have a sound foundation in science. Your immune system takes one hell of a battering during a marathon. What with the dehydration, the salt imbalance, the oxygen deprivation, and the bit at 22 miles where your body runs out of carbohydrate and fat to use as fuel, so decides to use protein instead. Considering that your body’s only source of protein is muscle, it’s that bit of the race where your body decides to eat itself, a sort of self inflicted version of necrotizing fasciitis, the “bug that eats human flesh!” [™The Daily Express 2003] (As a side note I should point out that there were as many cases of necrotizing fasciitis this year as there were 10 years ago, but none of them appeared on the front of the Daily Express) {As a side side note I should also point out that one of my patients spent the worst weekend of her life after being told by a physio that she had Plantar Fasciitis – aka a heel sprain – and spent the next 48hrs thinking her foot was about to be eaten away and fall off. Latin. Used by ordinary people since 200 BC to sound cleverer than they actually are}. So, physiologically, it’s no surprise that after all that your white cells should decide that, “hey, you asked for it” and take a bit of a breather, you get slammed by whichever respiratory virus is doing the rounds. Fortunately I managed to come up with a brilliant solution to avoid this, called delegation. I out-sourced all of my post race colds to Cate Rowan, who kindly has enough for the both of us. (Thanks Cate, always appreciated, keep up the good work)

The second thing you will get is depressed. Again, the psychological sciences would concur. You’ve spent 6 months on a goal focused activity. Every wrong meal, every cold/damp/windy training morning when you want to stay in bed, every long weekend shift, every work place disaster time consuming stress inducing clean up operation, interferes with your training schedule, which They will tell you should involve Pilates classes, spinning classes and fartlek training. All of which add up to cheaper than the Divorce lawyer you’ll need if you did all of them. They all make sense, particularly fartlekking (it’s the Swedish word for what you do a lot of if you try and do sprint training after carb loading), but there’s no time for any of it. That just makes the time you do have to run even more vital, even more dominating in your mind. Then the event happens, and then it’s gone, and you have this gap, the thing that was the thing is no longer a thing. So your brain fills the void with blackness, isolation, wailing and gnashing of teeth, or so the four horsemen of the internet will have you believe. 

But you don’t actually get depressed. You don’t even get the blues. You get the Blahs. A severe case of 'I can’t be bothereds'. Life goes on, patients still get sick, the government still threatens to make you work 48hrs every weekend for free, and suddenly the marathon is 2 weeks ago, you haven’t done any exercise, you’re still eating cake, but, you just can’t be bothered. There are many suggestions to get you out of the Blahs. Runners will tell you that you must immediately sign up for your next marathon. Essentially create a new goal out of the ashes of the old goal. Considering at the end of a marathon you feel like someone has dropped a ton of bricks on you, this is the psychological equivalent of asking the same person to drop another ton of bricks on you, only this time you get to choose the colour of the brick. Fitness people will tell you to change your goal, introduce variety; swim, cycle, triathlon, hopscotch. Both these people forget that when you have a serious case of the 'can’t be bothereds' you, well, can’t be bothered. 

The picture attached is here for a reason. It’s on my running route, usually 2 miles from the end of the circuit, and when I run it it means I’m out of the wind / rain / sun/guffawing glances of passing strangers. It means I’m near the end of today’s run. But yesterday when I walked to the station I stopped, because I could, and thought it was very pretty. Getting yourself out of the Blahs is about seeing the big picture again. It’s not about not seeing the wood for the trees, it’s about not seeing your path through them. Today I saw the trees, and thought they really looked quite lovely (bonus points for anyone who just added “but I wouldn’t want to build a summer home there"). I felt no compunction to run it; cycle it; I just wanted to stop and enjoy it. So I did. I know the path is there, somewhere, I’ll take it when I find it, and when I know it’s the right one. 

Right now all I need to do is stop eating cake.

Nick

Knowledge (Post Marathon - Long Version)

22nd September 2013

So, now I know. I’m not a marathon runner

In this I may be in exalted company. Mo Farah, one of the greatest ever distance runners, has just stepped up to the marathon after destroying all opposition at 5 and 10K. However when Paula Radcliffe, our greatest ever Marathon runner, was asked about his chances, the interviewer clearly expecting fawning praise, she said “Wait and see.” The point she was making was a simple one, that just because you’re good at one distance doesn't mean that you’ll be good at another, and a marathon is an altogether different beast. Beast is a good word. And so it proved with me. I love half marathons, but any further, for me, is Too Far. I suspect Mo might do slightly better.

Looking back, with the wisdom of experience, it’s clear to see where I went wrong. I didn't do enough training, at least, not enough of the right kind of training. I put in the right number of miles, at the right times, at the right distances, but 99% of my training was on the flat. This was a deliberate choice. I have dodgy knees that don’t like going downhill, as proved on the marathon when I had to stop on a couple of downhill stretches when my left knee started locking up. The problem is that the New Forest marathon course is described as 'undulating'. I refer you to my previous comment of Hitler being not so nice, drinks being expensive, and giving birth being a bit nippy. If there’s hills on your course that people have to get off their bikes to walk up, that’s not 'undulating'. I’d done the half marathon there 3 years ago, and I’d forgotten just how bad some of those hills were, and the fact that on the marathon course there’d be twice as many of them [all together now -Duh!!!]. But it’s that catch 22. For my knees to get through 6 months of marathon training is almost as great an achievement as doing the marathon itself. But do the necessary training the course requires and you’ll kill yourself before you get there, don’t do the hills beforehand and they’ll kill you on the course. And so it proved.

The second thing I got wrong was the start. When you train you get yourself into a pattern. Arrive at your start point, stretch, walk for 5 mins, stretch, quick limber, hit start on your watch and go. I’d forgotten that starting an official race takes forever. You wander round for 40 minutes, you sit down and you start getting stiff in the cold morning air, you walk round too much you get tired. Then they march you to your time corrals [I was in the 4hr + “yes we know you’re not very quick, there’s hills and it's going to be hot today, please don’t die there’ll be the most awful publicity” corral] and you’re hemmed in for another 20 minutes. You move and stretch the best you can, but the cold cramps start, first your hip, then your knees, then your lower back. By the time the race actually begins, you’re already trying to run off the niggles that will be with you for the next 5 hours. Next time I’ll stand at the back of the corral where there’s room and stretch to my heart’s content. Lesson learned.

Then, of course, the day turned out to be a hot one. The internet had promised a cloudy, cool, overcast day for the entire race. Perfect running conditions. Which it was, until we started, then it was blue skies, hot sun, heat haze and dripping sweat which sat on you like a heavy coat. [The Internet lied to me, whatever next!] People all around the course had their heavy winter coats with them. They were using them as blankets while they sat out having a picnic. I wondered how the man stood next to me in the corral was going to get on, considering he’d only ever run 10 miles before. In March.

Despite all the above I started well. Despite the niggles in the hip, the niggles in the knees, and the throat screaming “gimme water” I was doing ok. But as the 3 climbs in miles 5 to 8 started to take their toll, and it was dawning on me just how long a day it was going to be, I started to learn that the marathon is indeed a different beast [Hitler, drinks, yada yada]. To borrow an analogy from my favourite show, when you run a half marathon you are part of the Walking Dead, a small part of a great big seething mass of [non]humanity. Moving together, focused together, same direction, same goal. At any point on the course there’ll be 10-20 people within touching distance, and another couple of hundred within sight. And as a social experiment that Solomon Asch would be proud of, you take your cues from those around you. They’re not stopping, so you don’t stop. Quid Pro Quo. When you run a marathon though, you’re one of a stringed out and strung out bunch of human survivors. The fit and the strong have long since run off, leaving you alone to fend off the beast. By the top of the hill at mile 8 I could only see ten people. By the forest trail section at mile 13 there were times, despite there being 900 runners on the course, when I could not see another person. It truly was the loneliness of the long distance runner.

At 13.1 miles, halfway, in a beautiful and anachronistically peaceful section of forest, I was exhausted but moving well. I’d done the Half in 2hrs 7 mins – a good time, and was feeling positive. And I was wrong, because it was the beginning of the end. By mile 15 and the next hill my legs were going “uh oh we’re not sure about this”, by mile 17 they were certain, and by mile 20 my race was over. I’d read about The Wall [the internet again], and had been described/predicted/promised a specific and violent moment when the race would suddenly become hard. Like a petrol engine that’s had diesel put in it, a painful, sudden, noisy, apocalyptic seizing up. This was nothing like that, it was a slow and surprisingly pain free slide into oblivion. I was more a petrol engine that someone had forgotten to put petrol in, and at 20miles I ran out. I had nothing, I felt nothing. I was gone. Empty.

That was when I hit the mental wall, and the horrible maths started. And it was horribly simple. My shoe dragging stone kicking shuffling pace had dropped to 12 mins/mile. My leg pace was unchanged but my stride was baby steps [another important lesson learned –my pace was dictated by my stride length, not how fast I was moving my legs]. My pace at walking was 15mins/mile. So if I walked to the finish from here it was only going to cost me 18 minutes. And that was my race over right there. My brain was empty, I no longer cared about time, I’d run further than I’d ever run in my entire life, and I was guaranteed to finish a marathon, something my knees and rehabbed hip had no right to achieve. Who cared if I failed to break 5hrs? 

So I started walking. I tried to run a few more times, particularly at 23 miles when I knew my boss was waiting with a camera, but every time I tried I had the indescribably strange sensation of running, then finding I was actually walking, and not being able to remember slowing down. And Solomon Asch got his full sweep of social conformity, because I wasn’t the only one stopping. Every long straight had a slow moving body ahead, every hill had an even slower body shuffling and shambling onwards. They were stopping, so you stopped too.

The crowd at the end was amazing. I had no intention of running that last half mile, but they made me, and they were right. Probably the most important lesson of the day, you've just done a marathon, possibly your only one, you've earned the right to run through the finish line. So I did, and the crowds cheered me as I started running [they went a little nuts actually]. Just for me.  There was no-one 2 minutes before or 2 minutes after me. I ran round those final bends to the most amazing noise, and wondered why I couldn't have had this second wind at 21 miles which is when the internet told me I would get it [the internet lies, I tell ya]. 

My 2 fellow docs who’d both done the half marathon were there waiting for me, and we got some group photos. Words still can’t describe how proud and shocked I am to have achieved what I did. Quite a few people didn't make it, and there were, sadly, 3 ambulances out on the course. I may not be a marathon runner, but I damn well just finished a marathon.

23rd September 2013

Addendum. Today I saw the pictures. When you run a marathon you aren’t one of the Walking Dead. You just look like one.

Nick (the Zombie on the left)

The End of the Word as We Know It

No – that is not a typo – I did mean ‘word’ and not ‘world’. Though with today’s smart phones, mini/virtual keyboards, autocorrect and text speak you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

I used to hear my dad malign the ‘current day’ education system (my current day – think somewhere back in the 70’s and early 80’s) stating that they weren’t teaching us the important things any more. ‘In my day we learned…’ Well at least we were still learning phonics, sentence structure and proper grammar. Spelling, grammar and English were ‘my thing’. I aced those subjects. Even at a very young age I was an avid reader and had little time for authors who couldn’t use language properly (the exceptions being, of course, where it was misused in context). I was also potentially a bit of a know-it-all with a bad habit of correcting everyone (oops). I prefer to view it as an early presentation of OCD.

By the time I finished high school they had thrown phonics out the window and were teaching by ‘memory’. In my early 20’s some young teens I was working with, who had been diagnosed with learning disorders, bought themselves ‘Hooked on Phonics’ and (shock-horror) their grades went up and so did their self-esteem, and already I was starting to sound like my dad.  ‘In my day we learned…’

In Grade 10 (age 15 for people in different school systems) I learned to touch-type on a manual typewriter, and then in grades 11-12 we got to move onto an electric (with a ball!). I was jealous when the year behind me got to start on electric typewriters and missed out on the manuals. By the time my youngest brother reached high school (7 years younger than me) they were using computers from the off, but I’m not sure that proper touch-typing was taught any more.  If it was, it doesn’t seem many actually used it then (or now). I’m grateful for having learned that way, and being able to type 80-110wpm is a skill I’m proud of – on an actual keyboard…

I managed to miss the computers that filled rooms and required punch cards by about 2 years, but our home computer (mostly for games and a bit of word processing) was a Commodore 64. Those of us who could touch type were able to really fly on the keyboards then. Even the two finger (or two plus a thumb) typists were able to catch up some. Then followed the real explosion – the rush of IBM’s, Mac’s and PC’s, the internet, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, shrinking physical sizes, growing storage requirements, cell phones as big as bricks, cell phones smaller than your palm, texting and now smartphones (back to bigger sizes with the smartphones).

Language itself seems to have devolved while technology has evolved. Yet again I find myself sounding like my father did at my age, criticising education, society, the young. I don’t mean to really; it’s meant more as an observation. Having moved from Canada to the UK and having become aware that the language, dialect and accent can change from county to county. city to city, or in fact even a mile down the road has broadened my thinking, experience and tolerance for different ‘forms’ of language. Canada is a country that, west of Quebec, pretty much has the same accent and dialect throughout, and while I understood the existence of regional accents/dialects (north, south, east, west) across in the US, the UK pretty much blew my mind!

However, I digress. What really prompted this post (with all of its background – note its not it’s) is that it seems we have lost the ‘art’ of the written word, and we have become very lazy with it. I blame ‘text-speak’ to begin with. Phone companies were charging for a maximum number of characters per message, so people had to cram what they wanted to say into the smallest numbers of characters. In addition, using numeric keys to write words was a pain. I ‘get’ that. I am on record (there is actual video footage where you can hear me texting in the background) as the slowest person in the world to ever send texts – and that was using predictive text. But do we really need to carry it into every day life? Cmon ppl ur gr8 enuf not 2 nd 2 do that. (Ooh, I cringed typing that). Now we have smart phones and actual Qwerty keyboards, and unlimited text plans. We could easily go back to using full words and sentences, but the text-speak has stuck.

I manage/moderate a couple of online forums and read several more, and my OCD (especially with regard to written language) kicks in on a regular basis. I have relatively successfully forced myself to accept spelling errors and grammatical errors, and bad punctuation (and just plain typos). For the most part I’m good at ignoring them (or correcting them in my head and moving on), however I draw the line at text speak. I just feel it has no place there - or even on Facebook for that matter. And reading text-speak from people my age or older is just plain weird. It’s probably just me, and I’ve probably lost most of you by now, but I promise you this is going somewhere.

Keeping in mind everything I’ve said above:  I love language, I respect grammar, sentence structure, punctuation and spelling, hate text-speak except where absolutely necessary, love typing and writing… I finally broke down and got a smartphone. In my case it was an iPhone, though the Blackberry (with actual rather than virtual keyboard) was up there for a while. I was SO grateful for a Qwerty keyboard. No more stupid numbers and hitting buttons two or three times for the letter I wanted, no more having it predict words I never intended. It was going to be GREAT (not gr8).

And now I am the bane of my own existence. For some reason (eyesight getting poor with age, fingers too clumsy, stupid virtual iPhone keyboard in general) I cannot seem to hit the right letters a good proportion of the time. I hit an ‘o’ and it becomes an ‘i’, I hit an ‘e’ and it’s an ‘r’, an 's' becomes a 'd' (I'm constantly 'do dorry'). The iPhone is great, it makes suggestions and has an autocorrect, and a lot of the time it works in my favour (I can leave out apostrophes and it will put them in – it saves me changing keyboard levels). Unfortunately it also is wrong half the time, so I now have a combination of ‘user error’ (aka me hitting the wrong keys), and iPhone interpretation (iPhone correcting words that I AM typing correctly and it thinks I don’t want, or iPhone correcting the words I misspelled into words that make no sense in the context). On a dog forum ‘I live my digs’ can probably be interpreted to mean ‘I love my dogs’ by anyone who has the same autocorrect issues with their smartphone/tablet, however in the real world no one would have a clue - or else think I was making a very pathetic attempt at being ‘cool’.

The result is that while I was bad enough editing and re-editing any posts I wrote on the forums before, I am now obsessive about it. From a regular keyboard there might be the odd typo, or I might decide to reword something for clarity (I tend to babble if you haven’t noticed). Often that would mean a couple of quick edits after typing. Not now. Now if I write from the phone I will proof it as much as I can on that little tiny screen, then I will hit send. Somewhere between hitting send and reaching the forum it becomes pure nonsense. I have had entire sentences where even I, who wrote the darn thing, cannot make out what I’ve tried to say. And now ‘I’m’ the one who’s grammar needs to be ignored, who’s typos and ‘autocorrects’ need to be interpreted, and I’m sure there are people out there thinking ‘my gosh that woman needs an education’. So now, instead of a couple of quick edits, I go back and fix and edit and resave a dozen or more times (while being thoroughly shamed by myself). And it seems I have become that which I despised.

So it’s the end of the word as I know it (and I don’t feel fine).

Wendy

ps:  For a quick laugh at my expense here's a screen grab of a text between myself and a friend where I was using the slang 'ta muchly' for 'thank you very much' (see I can actually use 'silly speak' in every day talk).  This is what the iPhone mangled it into.

pps:  Feel free to have further laughs at my expense.  While I've tried very hard to ensure there are few to no grammatical errors in this post I'm sure I've missed several.  (I did it on purpose to see if you were paying attention.  Yes I absolutely did.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)

Post Marathon - the Short Version

Turns out they were right , 26 miles is a long way!



If you want an idea of how running 26 miles messes with you head, it interferes with your ability to do basic maths. There were 10 drink stations on the marathon, each serving water in 200ml cups. Like everyone else I had 2 at each station. Then after the Finish I downed 4 more, then at the car I drank a 500ml bottle of Mountain Dew. To my marathon addled brain that means I just drank 5.3 litres of fluid. That can't be right, can it???

Nick

Not Knowing

Running your first marathon is exactly like giving birth to your first baby. You get the same length of time to prepare - 4 to 6 months. The event happens at a pre-determined time and place. It’s guaranteed to last a set amount of time - 3 to 5 hours. Three quarters of the way through someone gives you a handful of jelly babies which helps the last quarter go easier than you thought it would. And most importantly of all, after you’re done, and they’ve put the medal round your neck, your can put your feet up and decide never to lift a finger ever again.

So in summary your first marathon is exactly like the birth of your first child, but only in 2 specific ways. 

 

The first way is that you don’t know how it’s going to go. You don’t have a freakin' clue. You have a rough approximation based on shaky supposition built on a foundation of random half truths, or to use the correct terminology, a guess. A great big stinkin' shot in the dark guess. You have no expectations because you have no knowledge. No experience. No clue.  5 years, 15 pounds and 6 months of proper training ago I was capable of 3 and a half hours. Right now for that I would need a taxi. In my dreams I am capable of four hours. My 17 mile final training run put me at 4 and a half. But which way do you go? The positivity which will propel you forward, or the unrealistic irrational hope which will crush you half way round when you realise you’re heading for 5 hours and you just got lapped - by a person on crutches. I’ve done training runs where I felt after 12 miles I could have easily gone on. But hey, what about the training run where after 12 miles I thought I was dead? Again a half truth, the real truth is that I was dead, in hell, and the devil had the car parked another 3 miles away. With the wind against. The devil always has the wind against. He’s the devil. Which will tomorrow be? I just don’t know. I know I’ve trained well, my previously torn hip lasting 3 months more than it has any right to do, the knees only giving way once, the new attempted torn calf muscle repaired itself. All of which should be positive and help, but it makes it worse because all of them mean that tomorrow could be my first and last marathon. Tomorrow could be it, so hey, no pressure.

The second way your first marathon is like your first baby is that everyone has a story. There are many types of story teller. The first are your broad strokers, the ones who, lost for anything to say in the face of your obvious insanity/senility/intoxication in wanting to run a marathon, come out with “Wow, a marathon, 26 miles. That’s, like, a long way.” Thanks for that. While we’re on the topic why don’t you let me know that Hitler was a bad man, drinks in bars cost too much and giving birth might hurt a little. Then we have the Stephen Kings – the ones who delight in telling you of that friend of a friend who tried to run a marathon, ripped his knee, tripped on a curb, broke his ankle, couldn’t move and then the blood attracted a nearby shoal of piranha. They tell this story in the manner of Rafiki, the wise old sage, confident that you will listen to their wise lesson and immediately give up on the marathon and return with your friends to your true calling, the couch. And finally you have the extremists, both of the experienced and in-experienced [guessing] type. Who will tell you that giving birth/running a marathon is easy/insane, life changing/certain death, addictive/an evil once in a lifetime personal trauma forged on the shores of hell.  I get a lot of that in my role with early pregnancy counseling. The woman who told me she wasn’t worried about the birth because her sisters had told her that all of them shell them out like peas [Yes, she listened to her sisters. Does life teach us nothing? Brothers were bad enough]. And then there was the woman who had got the idea in her head, repeatedly repeated to me, that, and I quote, “I’m going to hear it when I tear, aren’t I? You don’t just feel it, you hear it. I just know I’m going to hear it. I’ve been told that”. Considering this was at 12 weeks, and she had another 28 to worry about it [and she did], this did not bode well. [For the record the second woman didn’t tear, but did describe it as horrendous. The first woman did indeed shell one out like a pea. I told her never to mention that to anyone ever again. There were other women on the planet. They might hear her]. Marathons are the same. Everyone has a tale from one end of the spectrum, confident their war story/friend’s war story/thing they read on the internet once will inspire you/motivate you/make you stop and pause/scare the enema out of you/make you run for the hills, as long as the hills aren’t 26 miles away and the wind isn’t against. Plus who wants to run uphill?? I’ve heard about the pain, the body shock, the trauma, The Wall, the exhilaration, the triumph, the success, the ability to travel the world and do marathons in different places. [I pity all those poor people who don’t do marathons and are therefore unable to travel the world.] I’ve seen the look on a patient’s face when I told him, at 70, that the surgeon’s advice was never run another marathon. I’ve seen the look on another patient’s face when I asked him if he’d enjoyed the London marathon. [Imagine I’d asked him if it was ok if I stabbed him in the eye with this cactus and then put it up on youtube]

Not knowing. Only one way to cure that

Let you all know tomorrow

 

Nick

Random Thoughts While Running...

Following on from Friday's blog entry of my run on the same airshow weekend as 2 years ago...

I am in the final stretch of training for the New Forest Marathon - my first Full Marathon.  Today I ran 17 miles in 3 hours (give or take a bit I'm ignoring), which makes a full marathon time of 4 hours 30 minutes (give or take a bit I'm ignoring).

Today's random thoughts while running included:

• 8 am would be the perfect time to run if if didn't involve getting up at 7 am

• Running along a quayside is much more fun when you're not running in and out of tourists who have a habit of stopping    For    No    Apparent    Reason.

• Normally I hate everyone when I run. The young people who run past me; the old people who run past me; the fat people who run past me; the fat dogs who run past me; and in particular the people who run past me while talking. HOW DO YOU TALK AND RUN AT THE SAME TIME??? I can't even think when I run, let alone talk. Today was different. Today as I ran across Baiter Park, a gentle harbour breeze blowing across, I was coursed at full pelt by a whippet (not one of mine), who would do several figure eights around me at 90 miles an hour, before jogging by my side and giving me a look that said "you are the worst bunny I've ever come across". Then off he'd go for a few more 90 mile an hour circuits , before appearing at my side again with a look that said "you're really not getting the hang of this are you"

• Kudos to the mum who grabbed her 4 year old and told her she couldn't just wander up to the loveable old bull mastiff and say hello

• Daggers to the same mum who continued to drag her daughter away from the loveable old mastiff like he was a devil dog, turning common sense into a fear

• Harry Redknapp (very famous football manager who lives in one of the big coastal houses I run past) was sat out at a cafe having a Sunday morning coffee, chatting away and doing photos and autographs. Seems like a genuinely nice bloke.

• The only thing better than stopping at traffic lights (while driving home afterward) and seeing the red arrows jet display team fly overhead, is stopping at traffic lights, looking through your sunroof, and seeing a Wellington bomber flanked by 2 Spitfires fly overhead

And Finally...

• You know you've lived too long / been married too long / been running too long when a beautiful woman walks towards you along the quay, skimpy skin tight outfit, carrying a flattish silver box with a birthday bow on top, and your first thought is "Mmmm. Cake!"

Nick

The Drill Sergeant is Waiting For You....

As mentioned in a previous post Nick was taken out of running for just over a year after an injury.  Prior to that he had been training for his first full marathon.  This weekend is the Bournemouth Air Festival which means figther jet displays amongst all kinds of other military displays, and LOTS of tourists for the final weekend of the summer. This reminded us of his last training run before his injury and the Facebook post that he wrote afterwards. Unfortunately he never did make that marathon.  Here's hoping he can finally do it this year!

(Originally posted on Facebook 18th August 2011)

I ran 12 miles this morning along the sea front, 6 miles there, 6 back. Unfortunately I was cold when I started and didn't realise the wind was behind me to the degree it was, so ran the first half way too fast. I got to about 8 miles and figured I could push it to 9, then it would be sensible to stop. 

Unfortunately it's currently Bournemouth Air Show, and the sea front has been turned into a carnival/stall/shopping centre. And who is waiting for me at 9 miles, just when I'm about to give up and stop? The Army, that's who. Plus the Navy stall, the Marine Commando stall, The RAF helicopter stall, the Help for Heroes stall, the Navy Cadets stall, the Royal Artillery stall, the Territorial Army stall, all in all about a 100 people, in uniform, who've served our country and risked their lives, and there's the fat bloke giving up after only nine miles.  I could cope with running past the cake stall, the doughnut stall, the candy floss stall, the baked potato stall [the smell of which stalked me for at least half a mile] the candy shop, the fish and chip stall and the freshly baked bread stall, but I am not stopping and giving up in front of an Afghan Heroes charity sign of a guy in uniform, in a wheelchair, who's a bilateral amputee. So I did what any man would do, I ran past them, confident and strong, intending to stop as soon as I was round the corner and out of view.

10 and a half miles, the corner beckons and I am safely out of sight-line and out of the embarrassment zone. I am now, unfortunately, in the beach volleyball training area. And to give the girls some credit, they were training in the rain, in uniform.

So, 12 miles completed on schedule.  If I could just put my request in now for the New Forest Marathon this September, I would like some people in uniform, preferably with a charity sign, around the 17 mile mark, and some girls playing beach volleyball at around 22 miles. Then I'll finish it no problem.

Nick