Nemesis Acquired

Three kilometres in and I'm chasing a middle-aged woman with a spaniel on a lead.

Not gaining on her. Chasing. There's a difference, and by this point in the morning I'm well acquainted with it. The spaniel is having the time of its life. She looks like she does this every Saturday and will do it every Saturday until the end of time. My legs have started sending polite enquiries to my brain about what exactly the plan is here.

The twelve-year-old is long gone.

And Bernard is at home.

Right. Back up.

It's been a while. Longer than I meant.

Summer, mainly. Kids off school, work not letting up, MBA assignments arriving with their usual impeccable sense of timing. The sort of chaos where the writing is the first thing to slide, because it's the only thing nobody else is chasing me for.

There's also the small matter of having had very little to report. A deload block is not rich material. "This week I deliberately did less, and then did less again" is a hard sell for a thousand words, and the bonus split about the football filled that void nicely enough: a five-a-side tournament, a robot that had quietly broken itself, an actual trophy. If you read that one you've already had part of this stretch from a completely different angle. This is the other part. The bit where the training was supposed to happen.

The fortnight that mostly wasn't

Two runs. That's it. Two runs across the first two weeks of August, both 3.47km, both in the evening, both on tired legs.

The notes I sent Ted over those two weeks read like a man explaining himself to a very patient headmaster. Third of August: dog walk at lunch, didn't record it, skipping strength on your recommendation, hopefully another good night's sleep. Fifth: "Another missed performance." Wife away, daughter poorly, minimum thirty minutes walking has taken place. Ninth: fishing, family, clear fatigue still from Friday.

Fourteenth of August, after a Birmingham commute day, I sent this:

"I now remember why we had the uni blocked out like we did. Having the energy to include a run is difficult with the commute between Winsford and Birmingham taken into account. In short. I'm knackered lol"

Two hundred miles of motorway and a full day of MBA does something to the appetite for a tempo run. Who knew.

The two runs that did happen are worth a mention though, because the second one is the only genuinely encouraging thing in that first fortnight. Monday the eleventh: 22 minutes, heart rate climbing steadily from 127 to 153 across the run, no walk breaks, pure cardiac drift. The classic pattern of a man running slightly too hard and refusing to admit it.

Tuesday the twelfth, I did this instead:

"Did the twenty minutes. Genuinely aimed to keep under 140 BPM and maintain cadence. Had to walk in parts to ensure heart rate dropped to maintain sub 140 heart rate"

Walking. On purpose. To keep the number where it was supposed to be.

That's Maffetone, that is. Boring as anything and completely the point. Average heart rate came out at 138, and I finished feeling like I could have done it again. Twelve months ago I'd have called that a wasted session. Now I think it might have been the most useful twenty minutes of the fortnight.

The food diary, and its short unhappy life

I started a food diary on the sixth of August.

By food diary I mean I took a photograph of everything before I ate it. That was the system. That was the whole system.

It lasted three days.

Day one is a man with a system. Marmite on toast, the jar staged in shot like evidence. Day two has the Calpol in the background, which is the whole of that week in one photograph and saves me explaining it. Day three was sunny and involved a pub.

And then the curry ended it.

Not through lack of intent. I was completely serious about it at the time. But there is a moment, somewhere between ordering and eating, when photographing a curry stops feeling like data collection and starts feeling like a cry for help. I put the phone down. I did not pick it back up.

I might have another go in September. Watch this space.

Shell Island

Then camping. North Wales, five days, no gym, no garage, no weights.

And this is the bit I did not expect to be writing.

I went out there with a plan and, unusually, I actually did it. Two runs, plus bodyweight work to keep something ticking over. But the real story is what those runs actually were, because they're the two best runs of my month and I didn't clock it at the time.

Wednesday the nineteenth: 5.29km. Longest run I'd done in weeks. Average heart rate 134. And here's the good bit, the heart rate went down as the run went on. First kilometre, 144. Fifth kilometre, 125. Nineteen beats lower at the end than at the start.

That's the exact opposite of the eleventh of August. That's a man who has warmed up, settled in, and found a gear he can hold. On a campsite, in Wales, on legs that had done almost nothing for a fortnight.

Thursday the twentieth: 5.65km. Longer again, and this one had company.

My brother-in-law came along on a fold-up bike. He can't run, hasn't been able to for years, on account of a broken leg that's now held together with a steel bar. So the bike is his version. And 5k on a fold-up is a proper ride, so we were both working at roughly our own edge, which balanced nicely.

It also meant we talked the whole way round. That's the thing about running slowly enough to hold a conversation, you can actually hold the conversation. Average heart rate 142, pace hovering around 6:49/km, and a full chat from start to finish. Maffetone would have been delighted, though probably not about the subject matter.

It finished with an actual kick too, the last 650 metres at 6:07/km with cadence up at 88 per leg, so 176 in total. Not fast in absolute terms. But that's a body finding a bit of spare at the end of a run, and there had not been a lot of spare knocking about lately.

The day before, the two of us had done a broadly similar excursion. Same principle, same disappearing act away from the family, different destination. That one ended at the pub.

Funnily enough, the run didn't get anywhere near the same level of abuse on our return.

Who knew. Again.

Why I keep going back

There's a reason I keep going back to Shell Island, and it isn't the toilet block.

My brother and I came here as kids. That's the two of us up there, back in 1990ish. He was a tough nut, we didn't always get on, and it didn't matter. Chalk and cheese, him and me. We had each other's back.

He died a year ago. A heart attack, no warning, nothing anyone saw coming. He was 45.

I'm 43.

I don't want to make more of that than it is. I don't want to make less of it either. But when a healthy man of 45 goes without warning, and his younger brother starts getting up in the dark to run intervals in the rain, you don't need anyone to join the dots for you. Sub-20 is a number I picked because it's specific and stupid and hard. What sits underneath it isn't stupid at all.

The anniversary was the Friday. I ran the parkrun on the Saturday.

The steps

Then there's the thing I genuinely didn't appreciate until I looked at the numbers afterwards.

Shell Island is enormous and beautifully inconvenient. Getting from the tent to the toilet block and back was 500 steps. Five hundred. Every single time. Multiply that by a family, by five days, by every trip for water and food and the beach and back again.

My daily step average for August came out at 13,921. Top of the table.

I spent a fortnight thinking I'd done nothing. What I'd actually done was walk a small country and quietly rebuild a base without noticing.

Delamere

Saturday the twenty-second. Back from Wales, first parkrun in a long time, first proper test since the birthday time trial in June.

It started badly and cheaply.

There's a car park at the visitor centre. There's also a charge for that car park. I decided, in the way you do at half past eight in the morning, that I wasn't paying it. Parked further out. Walked in. Jogged a bit of it when I realised how far further out I'd actually parked.

Turns out that's 1,508 metres at an average heart rate of 138, which is a genuinely well-executed warm-up and precisely the sort of thing I'd have skipped entirely if I'd paid for the parking. Sometimes being tight is a training strategy.

Then the kid.

He was twelve, maybe. Certainly no older. And he had the confidence of a boy who has never once in his life considered the possibility of a fade. Off he went at the start like the whole thing was 800 metres long, and I let him go, and I thought, with the quiet arrogance of a forty-three-year-old man who has read some books about pacing: he'll come back to me.

He did come back to me. Around 2K I went past him. Felt tremendous. Legs still had something, splits still respectable, twelve-year-old dispatched.

In the final two kilometres he came back through and left me for dust.

I've been reading David Goggins. Can't Hurt Me, which I'd recommend to anyone chasing anything, largely because it's very good on the idea that most of your ceiling is in your head rather than your legs. Goggins has a phrase for what a person does to you when they break you like that.

He took my soul.

Twelve years old. Took it right out of me on the last stretch and didn't look back.

The honest bit though, and this is where the book only takes you so far: mind over matter is a real thing and it's also not a substitute for training. Speed and endurance still have to be earned in the actual doing of it. You can want the last two kilometres as badly as you like. If you've spent your fortnight walking rather than running, the last two kilometres will have opinions of their own.

The number

23:44 on Strava. 24:05 officially. 63rd overall, age grade 57.99%.

Splits: 4:23, 4:29, 4:47, 5:01, 5:06.

You can see the kid in those splits. You can see him arriving, and you can see me trying to hold on, and you can see the last two kilometres where holding on stopped being an option.

But here's the thing I didn't expect, and it only showed up when I put it next to June:

June: 3:52/km down to 5:32/km. A fade of one minute forty. Max heart rate 182. August: 4:23/km down to 5:06/km. A fade of forty-three seconds. Max heart rate 171.

Slower off the line. Less than half as ragged by the end. And eleven beats per minute lower at the top.

That's not nothing. That's the opposite of nothing. The engine ran out of runway, fine, but it ran out gradually rather than falling off a cliff, and it did it without redlining. Cadence came out at about 176 steps per minute, which is exactly where Romanov wants it. Technique wasn't the problem. Fitness was the problem, and fitness is a solvable problem.

24:36 in June. 23:44 in August. Fifty-two seconds, off a month I'd have described, right up until I looked at it properly, as a write-off.

Bernard stayed home

I've run Delamere forest more times than I could count. The parkrun, though, only twice before this one.

And when I am out there, I'm not running the 5k route anyway. We just go wherever we fancy, which somehow always ends up involving an unintended sprint up the Old Pale. Which is, and I say this with affection, the only thing in this bit of Cheshire that could generously be described as a peak. Notoriously flat, this county. We've located its one hill and we race up it every time, apparently by accident.

The twice is mostly logistics rather than principle. Nine o'clock on a Saturday morning has never particularly suited me or the family diary, and there's the small matter of choosing between a fifteen to twenty minute drive out there or simply running from my own front door. Unless I'm meeting Gilbo, the doorstep wins nine times out of ten.

So: 2019, 23:29. March 2022, 20:30 official and tenth overall, 20:15 on Strava, and the best I've ever run on either clock.

Both of those were with Bernard on the lead.

He's a brown cockapoo, he's ten now, and he is an outstanding running partner in the sense that he pulls like a train and considers every squirrel a personal insult. Perfectly legal at parkrun. Also, if we're being honest with each other, an assist. That 20:30 has a dog in it.

So this one was solo. First time at Delamere without him. The slowest of the three on paper and the only one that's entirely mine.

He wasn't thrilled about being left behind. He'd have been less thrilled about the last two kilometres, mind.

Next

Nantwich, the twentieth of September. Sprint triathlon, and the only date properly on the board.

Sub-20 isn't off though, and I want to be clear about that because the training plan and the actual plan have been telling slightly different stories. As far as Ted is concerned, sub-20 is parked so the block can point at one thing. As far as I'm concerned it's still very much live. I'll be having a proper go at it either as part of the triathlon itself or in the week before it. Haven't decided which yet.

What Delamere told me is where I'm starting from. 3:45 off sub-20, on a body that paces better and recovers better and fades less than it did eight weeks ago, off the back of a month that was mostly walking.

The gap isn't in the legs' ability to hold a shape. The gap is in the miles.

Which is boring, and fixable, and now has a deadline.

And somewhere out there is a twelve-year-old who has no idea he's become a recurring character.