Training week 16: the soft mess inside me

Squint and you’ll see St Paul’s

Closer to death than glory now. That’s a rather gloomy sentence with which to start the final taper week before Brighton Marathon on Sunday, but I couldn’t resist it, looking at the headstones in the foreground, here, and the vainglorious cranes and St Paul’s way out there in the City.

Talking of corpses, as I write this ahead of track night (my schedule says I must do four miles easy with six sets of strides), I’m still sniggering about the sentence I misheard in yoga this morning. The instructor was referring to relaxing in shavasana (corpse pose), and advising us to give into the softness inside of us. I think soft mess is more appropriate to my life.

Looking forward to the race on Sunday is keeping me going, especially after a miserable week like the past one. At this point I can fantasise abut being that few minutes faster than at Richmond last October and enjoy the brief diversion from the messy stuff of life. However that first sentence makes some sense. My last glory was 2015, with my marathon PB, which, discounting miracles, will never be repeated. And, although we 21st-century boomers have reason to believe we’ll outlast the old threescore years and ten, I’m closer to death than most out there on the marathon road. However, if I could live long and prosper in the same way as Fauja Singh, I’d be a happy old stick.

Time for a little more fortune cookie philosophy. Everyone has horrible stuff in their lives: they say that downsizing is one of the most stressful things a person can do, and I’m downsizing in many ways, decluttering my emotional life as well as my physical surroundings. I’m fortunate that I love running so much. When I’m feeling sad, a run through the parks soothes me. A hard track session shoves everything nasty out of my head. And, right now, sorting out my training and eating week ahead of a big race diverts my simmering anxiety.

I was excessively diverted last Sunday, on my final long run (10 miles), because I was trying out my new Sweaty Betty shorts, in whose side pocket I would like to be able to store my gel blocks, Kendal Mint Cake, caffeine chews and a banana on race day. Possible, why yes! Just take a look:

Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just….

It isn’t the most flattering of rig-outs, but the shorts are comfy enough. It was raining, hence the drowned rat look.

Feverish weather app checking shows that the day of the marathon will likely be wet, so it’s best to be prepared for that. Saturday’s Catford parkrun was another slow mud bath (24:44).

The eating is going quite well, except the BCCA supplement I’m taking seems to create some internal turbulence, which is worrying in the hot yoga room. I’m eating a lot of carbohydrate, including piles of vegetables. I drink the odd glass of red (recommended by many good runners of my acquaintance).

If I can keep focused on all of this taper preparation, and ignore the soft mess broiling away inside for a few more days…

Tomorrow will be four more easy miles, Thursday will be rest, Friday is carbo bang day (when you run eight minutes, then run as hard as you can for three minutes and warm down for eight. Then you eat as many carbohydrate treats as you can…). On Saturday I’ll do a couple of easy miles and volunteer at parkrun, then it’s down to the seaside, and a prayer for spring sunshine and a spring in my step.

Marathon training week 15: The Taper

This Sunday’s long slow run was a 15-miler along the river to the Thames Barrier, then back via Greenwich Park and my tree at Mountsfield Park. In these selfies, I am attempting to wear the barrier first as a hat, and secondly as epaulettes. There was quite a stiff wind coming off the water, as my hair will attest.

Half the past week was spend outside London, on a nostalgia trip with my sisters, whose company I am enjoying greatly at the moment. Perhaps we are entering our dotage and going a little soft in the head, but we still do the silly voices for the animals we grew up with (the dog, Lucy, circa 1970, for example, which I once accidentally left outside the village shop. Go easy on me, I was only eight).

Anyway, eight years before, my mother and father, the rightful owners of said dog (and many others) had left three-month-old-me outside a shop in the local market town and driven back to their farm SEVEN MILES AWAY before realising there was a child missing. So I feel absolved.

My sisters and I returned to the scene of the crime, an attractive and prosperous Surrey town called Farnham, on Wednesday. We drank coffee, admired the scenery and visited a venerable department store called Elphicks (opened in 1881, we lasted shopped there in 1981), which, I have decided, is my new favourite shop. My alter ego is a posh county woman with a leg at each corner, a long-suffering Cob and an Aga.

Just as well the real Ronnie is an urban, extinction-rebellion-supporting vegan with a social conscience (and drill-music loving neighbours) that keep her awake at night.

I usually make the most of a rural sojourn by going for a scenic trail run, but this time I was determined to take tapering seriously. I love it when I read stuff about rest and recovery being as important as your workouts. To that end, I overslept with gusto and ate as much nutritious food as I could force down my gullet.

I’d run the double on Sunday and Monday (racing a half marathon then slow running a second one within 24 hours), so was extra tired, so a couple days off running was most welcome. Thursday saw me out betimes for a pre-breakfast work out (one mile warm up, five miles at marathon pace, one mile warm down), which felt harder than it should. Rest (pilates) on Friday, then Saturday involved slithering around a horribly muddy Catford parkrun. It felt like I’d run quite fast (I definitely cut some corners, but felt that the skid-pan conditions of the mud and grass had slowed me down in some places, so the crime and the slime cancelled each other out) and indeed I was second woman…but in a very sedate time of 24:44, nowhere near the 23min 5k time I need to be capable of to run my 3:55 marathon target.

Next came my reduced Sunday mileage, as outlined above and my first taper week adds up to a mere 26 meaningful miles (because the Monday 13 was the second half of my long slow run – keep up).

I’m sleeping more, eating loads (although the chip shop chips and non-alcoholic beer on Saturday night proved an uncomfortable carbloading strategy) and sitting around a lot, albeit with frequent trips to Yoga House. I hope the newfound serenity lasts until 2 April and Brighton marathon. I have some interesting writing work to do and have decided to throw money at the downsizing problem. Seems the economy is going to hell in a handcart, what with the Credit Suisse meltdown and all the financial gurus saying it’s not going to be as bad as 2008 etc etc. It’s not a good time to have any savings anyway, given there might be a run on the banks, and we all need houses, right? (NB Ronnie Haydon did not study PPE).

Just hope the survey on the new place doesn’t send me rushing to RightMove again….

Stay calm. Taper mindfully. Look after the old body. Noli illegitimi carborundum (don’t let the bastards grind you down).

Training week 14: cantering around the Paddock

I wish I’d looked after me teeth

Or rather, I wish I had the wherewithal to produce the sort of wide, white smiles my younger club mates so effortlessly beam at the camera.

Still, this isn’t a beauty blog, it’s a running one, and I’m a grandma, after all. So well done, me, for pushing the pace a little at yesterday’s half marathon. No chance of matching the 1:43 PB I achieved in my spring chicken 50s, but yesterday’s time of 1:52 was pleasing enough. Paddock Wood half marathon is a delight, on so many levels, and yesterday’s, in pale March sunshine, was a total joy. The whole community seems to get involved in the event: you run past little children with banners and bowls of jelly babies, county types in green gumboots leaning on their five-bar gates to applaud and encourage, water stations all over the place, music, merriment and loads and loads of London’s ‘Athletic’ alcohol-free golden hopped beer. I like to think the hops came from Kent, but you don’t see so many hop fields in that county these days, and the oast-houses we pass on the route seem to be part of the generally chi-chi country living idyll the wealthier residents of the Paddock Wood enjoy.

The half-marathon had its own special place in this past week’s training, because it’s part of a last high-mileage block just before the taper. I learned from a gnarly old sub-three marathoner a few years ago that it’s a good discipline to follow a 13-mile race with a further 13 miles of long, slow run the day after. Since I learned this, I’ve incorporated it into my training. So the next morning I took myself out after breakfast for a Monday long one. A bit of a struggle, to be honest, but 13.2 was achieved, slowly. I’m now officially in taper, and my bossy Garmin will be left off my wrist for a couple of days while I recover.

The week leading up to Paddock Wood was easy going, owing to a rather too enthusiastic hot yoga session leaving me with a back in spasm. Saturday and Friday were rest days. I managed four miles on the Thursday, nothing on the Wednesday, a good track session on Tuesday (pyramid 400, 600, 800, 800, 600, 400).

This mini-taper meant a decent pace on race day, but still 30 seconds too slow for every mile. It’s always at this stage I question my body’s compatibility with the full marathon, and vow to devote myself to the half distance, which, if run fast enough, can also yield a veteran runner a Good For Age status. Time to rebrand myself Half-Marathon Gran?

Marathon training week 13: missing people

The antidote

Sea air, primroses in hedgerows, buzzards and seagulls, an eccentric man called Richard out walking while cuddling his tortoise, Zola, dipping winter-white toes in a pebbly stream under a thunderous waterfall…I’d heard Clare Balding on Radio 4 describing how the negative ions emanating from waterfalls increase levels of the mood chemical serotonin, helping to alleviate depression, relieve stress, and boost daytime energy. Anything Clare says is fine by me, so we hung around for a while at St Nectan’s Glen, not so far from Tintagel. I felt positive among the negatives.

I was visiting our old haunts around Bude with my sisters; we wanted to visit the grave of our cousin, who’d died in December 2021. We talked about how he used to tease us, and I remembered how I sulked for a whole afternoon after he’d taken the piss out of my ginger plaits and freckles. Comparing my 15-year-old self with the worn and faded woman in the autumn of her years in the photo below, I realise how unaware I was of the natural beauty of my springtime.

The morning before our arrival in Cornwall, I’d completed my 5-k-paced training run along the water near my sister’s house in Poole. It felt comfortable and I believed I was turning the corner with my insomnia and sluggishness. It certainly felt great to be under blue skies away from the cares of London, work and house moving.

Wednesday’s recovery run was a four-miler along the canal in Bude, the cleaning up of which my cousin, as the leading light of the Cornish Wildlife Trust, had masterminded. He was a very intelligent and knowledgeable man. I remember him taking us out on an evening bat walk, and pointing out the every bird and butterfly we saw. I was accompanied on this run by robins, thrushes, blackbirds and little finches of some description. I needed Tim to tell me what they were.

Thursday’s long run was a hilly one, over the cliffs to Sandymouth Cove, and up to Poughill and Stibb village, beyond which was my aunt’s family farm, now used for camping, caravanning and light industrial units.

We left Cornwall, full of pasties (vegan, in my case) and local beer, well rested (another early taper for me) and I headed on to Stamford in Lincolnshire and an old friends’ reunion. My hosts do the Rutland Water parkrun every week without fail, so I did not fail either. Except I did, committing the rookie error of failing to double knot my shoelaces. One came undone one kilometre in; the other at kilometre three. What a blithering idiot. I probably lost at least 50 seconds, and definitely lost my first VW60 spot, but still managed 24:30, so was pleased with my negative split. On my return visit I’ll beat my Rutland Water pb of 23:40.

No oil painting…

Yesterday’s Sunday long run was neither long nor particularly energetic. Margaritas and curry the night before had left me feeling slightly tender in the gut department, and, though the insomnia was much improved on my travels, it wasn’t entirely banished. I am confident, however, that I can taper further before a half-marathon race next Sunday.

Paddock Wood was the first half marathon I ever ran, back in 2008. My sister and daughter came to cheer me on. Jane (daughter) made me a little banner, as she did for my every race until she was about 11. Always my biggest little fan. she rang me this morning, while I was writing this sentence. We talked for an hour. She’s now living in Taipei and was describing her rather needy flatmate, with whom she has long discussions about Chinese literature. I worry about her: she’s mostly lived abroad over the past four years, but talking to her across oceans and time zones makes me ache and grieve about the distance between us.

Dive back into trying for a good half marathon time. Final push before the marathon on April 2, Jane’s birthday.

38 miles this week.