Twice this week, I had company whilst running. On Monday, I ran with my boss.
No gentle outing this, perpetually waiting for the breathless old codger to catch up, for this boss is different. Different enough to have a 2:52 marathon PB.
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Posted in 2004, the marathon journey, training
Another week, and another long run, which this time I’ve scheduled from Crawley. Theoretically it’s possible to fit the miles around ring roads and residential streets, but although that type of running can make for an enjoyable sort of fartlek, I’ve a different kind of excursion in mind today.
The route I’ve planned crosses the suburban landscapes to Three Bridges, where I leave the sixties estates to pick up a cycle track along the Worth Way. Passing Worth church, in part built by the Saxons, my run heads across the M23 Brighton motorway and into the Sussex farmland beyond.
Just four miles into my outing, and I’m standing outside a smelly cowshed with green fields all around me, questioning my sanity. Twelve miles to go, and my legs should be feeling much better than this. But somehow they don’t, and I can see a struggle looming worryingly up ahead.
The track crosses the road to Turners Hill, scene of many an office outing to the Red Lion pub, to rejoin the course of the old railway, for the Worth Way follows the course of an old branch line. Continue reading
Posted in 2004, history, Surrey and Sussex, the marathon journey
If you drop a tennis ball into the Thames at Chiswick, the tidal nature of the river means that it will take three years to reach the sea, spending all that time coursing up and down The Tideway with the ebb and flow.
So says the display in the London Aquarium, where we’re spending a cold and draughty Saturday afternoon amongst the sharks and rays from waters far more tropical than those of the Thames outside.
It’s an interesting thought, this minutia of estuary dynamics, but one which vexed Victorian Londoners greatly, once condemning them to repeated reacquaintance with all of the effluent discharged into the river from the city.
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Three months to go, exactly. Time for some real action, some solid workouts. Routine five milers and run-walking twelves just won’t cut it now, won’t get me to The Embankment in April, let alone to the finish line on The Mall.
I’m back in Stratford-upon-Avon today, the town where I grew up. Scene of my most recent marathon tableau, a grateful and joyous homecoming for the local boy.
The meticulously planned, yet widely unexpected metamorphosis from boyhood wimpishness and utter athletic indistinction to the cool, calm and rakishly collected 3:59 marathon runner.
Well, it looked good on paper, and in my dream issue of the Stratford Herald too, but reality had kicked in somewhere amongst the mists of marathon’s dreaded mile 20. “Run a dream marathon for 20 miles, and suffer like hell for the next 6.2“, as Shakespeare himself would have put it, in describing probably 90% of all the marathons that have ever been run, anywhere, by anyone and everyone, except for Paula Radcliffe.
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Posted in 2004, Shakespeare Country, the marathon journey
A January day, and my starting point for today’s 12 miler is the New Inn in Send, beside the River Wey. Our family Sunday pub-lunch is, in reality, a mere carbo-loading exercise, and this pub certainly recommended for the largest, soggiest bowl of sausage and mash in the world.
An hour later, brilliant sunshine is fading into dank drizzle as I explore a new route into town through Riverside Park. Picturesquely named, it proves to offer little more than a patch of green, sandwiched uncomfortably under electricity pylons between the tranquility of the river and the deafening A3 road traffic.
I slither around a few laps of boardwalk laid across the riverside wetlands, my lunch settling better than the weather. The skies evolve steadily through hail and finally pelting rain as twilight approaches over the aptly-named Guildford suburb of Burpham.
And then, deep in the darkness of the woods beside the river, I stumble across a line of old tank traps lurking on the steep bank behind the Spectrum Leisure Centre. This must be another part of the last line of defence south of London, dating from the Second World War, and linking up with pill boxes south of the town near Shalford and high on St Martha’s Hill.
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Posted in 2004, Guildford, history, the marathon journey
I’m running the London Marathon in 2004 for VICTA, a UK charity supporting Visually Impaired Children across the country.
It seems an appropriate charity to run for, since VICTA’s meagre annual budget, spent on specialised educational equipment for blind and partially sighted children, is raised almost entirely by runners like me.
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Posted in 2004, London, the marathon journey
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roads of stone 