Instead it just kept on raining

Hillyfields mud slalom event

With every passing year, as, coincidentally, local parkruns become increasingly lake runs, Greg Lake’s gloomy Christmas lyrics chime more resonantly. Splashing through the flow this Saturday, sturdy trail shoes slowing me down even more than my slight hangover, a veil of tears streaming down my pasty face, I could only fantasise about the frosty-the-snowman conditions the greetings cards promise.

Still, this isn’t a climate-change blog. (COP 28? Dubai? WTAF). It’s all about an old woman that runs. On Saturday she saw just how decrepit she looks when caught off guard. That parkrun on Saturday marked both a low point in the training week and an absolutely nadir in my always rather delusional sense of perceived exertion.

The Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion, a way of measuring physical activity, is based on your own interpretation of how hard a run is. So the runner thinks about her heart rate, fatigue, heavy breathing and concludes, as I did, that they’re trying properly hard (and in my case, decide therefore that you’ve smashed last week’s effort). It is, self evidently, subjective. I also based my internal optimism on the view ahead of me: there were only five women, the usual fast suspects (the one in the red, above, was first woman), and the women who usually sail past had, for their own reasons, decided on a go slow. The upshot of all this was, my time, when it came through, disappointed: 26 minutes on the nose. Worst for a while.

Even worse, though, was the fact that my friend Dame, who had time to kill after after finishing first in 17 minutes, took some videos of his club mates. The one of me bent and toiling up a small slope has burned into my consciousness.

The Sunday long run saw me equally cowed by the effort of keeping up with the others over nine miles. This was even more worrying, given no-one was running at any sort of tempo, it was party pace, yet the fatigue was weighing me down. This could have been caused by a largely sleepless night, which saw me discussing Margaret Thatcher and TS Eliot with husband at 4am (luckily he was was sleepless, fretting over pending performances concerning these two). We’d also watched Berlin 1933 on the telly before bed, which was horribly disturbing and relevant.

Anyway, I’m tired. Very tired. I was tired last night on the track (the session was 10x400m, which I ploughed my way through, but I’ve lost my bounce). I’m tired today at my desk.

Osteopath Laura recommends having a blood test for thyroid function, which I’ve had before, but years ago, but if the fatigue isn’t purely down to Christmas duties and builders who are nowhere near finished ( I have son and girlfriend coming home for Christmas and a winter solstice mulled wine party for neighbours and friends, who at this rate are going to be blowing plaster dust off their mince pies and picking their way around the as yet installed lavatory and basin – currently sitting in the middle of our dining area). If the fatigue isn’t down to all of that, I’ll request another blood test before marathon training becomes too heavy.

After work tomorrow I’m going to the second carol event this week, then driving son’s car down to visit my sister by the sea. A change of scene may be the tonic I need, even if my daily mince pie quota won’t be getting any lower for a week or two.

This coming weekend I’ll be swerving parkrun, because I want my 250th to be on my home turf, Hillyfields, on 23 December. I just have to reconcile myself that this anniversary run will likely be as slow as the first one I ever ran there, back in 2012, when I was a raw, coltish 50 year old. Ho ho.

Going for bronze

Three to score

Dartford has been my happy place since joining Kent AC. It’s the scene of a pretty quick cross-country result in the glory years, when times kept tumbling and I was something of a poster girl for veteran athletes cocking a snook at Mistress Menopause (Where’s My Tartan Shopper, blogs Passim), and it made me cheerful last Saturday, too.

The Kent Veterans Cross Country race sees runners of a maturer category testing their legs around Dartford’s Central Park (rather less attractive than NYC’s version), organised into age-groups from 35 to 70. What tends to happen is that the youthful men and women in their thirties give it a swerve, and the super-fit veterans of 45 and over are down-aged into younger categories. So it was that I, aged 61, ran in the VW55 category, alongside 58-year-old Kate and Zoe, who usually runs with the VW65s. Between us, we earned enough points to claim the bronze-medal spot, which was cheering.

I was quite happy with my run. I’d rested the legs adequately the day before (and spent the evening feasting my eyes on my favourite celebrity vegan, Joaquin Phoenix, who even floats my boat in an absurd hat and portly belly as a petulant Napoleon). Catford being easily accessible on the train from Lewisham, I enjoyed a ‘soft’ morning with coffee, porridge, bananas and time enough to cast my eyes over Runners’ World and act on their top tip to add peppermint oil into my water bottle (greatly diluted, obviously.

Meeting team-mates on the train down, and all the camaraderie around warming up, fussing over footwear, cheering on the Men’s Veteran teams before our turn came, it’s all part of a great day out in the perishing cold, when the freezing air seems to scour your lungs, leaving you feeling centrally heated from the inside out, a feeling that lasts all the way into the evening and a well-deserved comfort dinner with a glass of beer.

The race was only 5k, but an event, and the following day’s Long Slow Run went ahead as normal, for about eight miles or so, and another communal breakfast with running mates. The text-book perfect marathon training weekend.

It’s quite normal for runners to begin their spring-marathon campaign when Christmas and New Year celebrations are finally tidied away and the media’s NYNY health campaigns are right up in our grills. For veterans, though, the longer you can spend stretching out the marathon training plan to fully balance hard efforts (whether that be long slow multiple miles or hard efforts on the hills and track) and the extra periods of rest, sleep and active recovery (and weight training) an older body needs, the better.

So I’m getting all my training ducks in a row before descending into the fairylit Christmas pit (which of course will include festive parkruns and long runs) and trying to keep the mulled wine consumption to a sensible level (I have a quite childish preference for mulled wine over actual wine, although possibly not in the summer).

One of those little ducks is osteopath Laura McCrave, whom I visited yesterday as part of a resolution to pace this training block sensibly. You’d have thought, that by the age of 61, and, to all intents and purposes semi retired, I’d be past the sort of haphazard marathon training I indulged in eight years ago: getting up at 5am to complete interval training, cycling 14 miles to and from work daily, taking on extra work necessitating burning the midnight oil…Reading my blog and diaries from those years I was determined, but not always happy, and my diet appallingly biscuit based.

This time my London Marathon training is going to be a kinder process. Going to an osteopath is a way of focusing on the care of my increasingly crooked spine, and, indeed the way my body hangs together.

As well as body care, my love affair with the world’s best marathon will be kindled over the coming months by some running clients, who are tackling the London for the first time and want tours over the route, with wisdom from this old timer approaching her seventh effort over the legendary course.

I’m hoping this will be the first of an unbroken run up to VW85.

Meanwhile, the week’s training:

Thursday 30 November: warmups, drills, strides and a few 400m repeats on frosty grass

Saturday 2 December: 5k cross country

Sunday 3 December: 7/8 miles LSR

Tuesday 5 December: warmups, drills and 5x600m on track.