Don't Stop Me Now

by Vassos Alexander

  Undulating? Nobody had mentioned anything about undulating. Still – I was injury-free, my training all but completed, an expert was forecasting a fast time on a course he knows – I could approach my taper with confidence.

  I even printed out a cut-out-and-wear wristband from the Roadrunner website telling me how fast I should run each lap if I wanted to finish in 2:50. I chickened out of wearing it at the last minute, thinking it might look a little pathetic amongst all the Garmins. I was, I believed, in even better shape than I had been the previous autumn when my training times suggested I was about to run a sub-3 Bournemouth marathon. I pulled out the day before the race when my baby daughter went into hospital. She came out the following Friday, and the morning after that I annihilated my 5k PB – a combination, I think, of an extra week’s taper, and a monumental release of tension.

  But on the evening before the Kent Roadrunner, the idea that I wouldn’t coax my marathon PB into starting with a 2 was preposterous. Only two minutes and 12 seconds to shave off, and I felt at least 15 minutes faster than I ever had before. I was nervous, but excited. The perfect combination.

  Nothing on the morning of the race suggested it wasn’t going to go well, and the first few laps were magical. But then I mysteriously felt myself slowing down. Each lap was increasingly sluggish, and though I was still on course to break three hours at half way, I knew I didn’t have it in me. For a long moment, perhaps a minute or so, I considered allowing my inner eight-year-old to take control and petulantly stop running altogether. If I’m not going to break three hours, I may as well give up!

  But that’s hardly the point of this running lark, is it? If marathons teach you anything – and they do – then lesson one is surely not to give up when the going gets tough. Marathon 101: just keep going. So instead of scowling my way to the finish line, I decided to enjoy the day for what it was. Which was a celebration of marathon running all the way round the track. The advantage of a multi-circuit event is you get to chat to the same people in the crowd (hello, Tracey, with the big bowl of giant Jelly Babies) every time you run past them, and the supporters get to see lots of their loved ones (and thank you Katie’s mum and dad for letting me leave those gels on your table).

  In the same lap as I fell out of love with running (wasted months of training, what’s the point?!), I fell back in love with it twice over. The event felt like a full-fat parkrun – all that positivity, all that exertion and all that determination, eight and a half times over (distance-wise, at any rate). So in a sense I was pleased to have struggled, because it reminded me that running is about so much more than race times.

  Plus, I was overlooking a somewhat basic error I’d made in the days leading up to the race. I may not have gone to the pub, but I did accidentally overtrain. I went to a treadmill to make sure I ran 5km at exactly race pace and no quicker. But I ended up knocking out an hour-long, 15km thrash on a 3.5% incline. My reasoning, which is faulty at the best of times and completely mangled whilst exercising, had gone something like: this feels too slow, perhaps I should push the pace so it seems easier on race day, yes I’ll do that but also, I should increase the incline so it replicates the difficulty of running outdoors and why don’t I push that up to double what it needs to be, so again it feels easier on Saturday, and why don’t I triple the distance too, just because... Honestly, I’ve done dozens of these things, yet the way I went about this marathon, you’d think I was a complete novice. Rory certainly thought so, as his texts kept coming.

  RC: Yikes. That’s disappointing as the course is OK for times. Did you set off too quickly?

  VA: Not really. Just nothing in legs.

  RC: Did you carbo load? Gels?

  VA: Yep. Yep.

  RC: And the week before you took it easy?

  VA: I may have overdone it on the treadmill on Wednesday as calves were sore Thursday and Friday.

  RC: Instead of the three easy miles in your plan?

  VA: Ah.

  RC: You know it’s dangerous for you to think. All that training gets wasted otherwise. Just follow Uncle Rory’s plan as he knows best.

  ‘Uncle Rory’ went on to suggest I entered another marathon a fortnight later, taper properly, and see what I could achieve. Only I was busy for the next three weekends, and after that it was getting dangerously close to the 100km Race to the Stones and I didn’t want to risk picking up a niggle. I’d meant to run the magnificent Giants Head marathon too, but a last-minute, un-turn-downable job offer put paid to that. So I decided to put things right where I’d got things wrong. Back on the treadmill in the gym. A 2% incline this time to compensate for lack of wind resistance, set speed at 14.5kph (9mph), and run 26.2 miles. And it was ridiculously straightforward. I know it doesn’t count as an official marathon PB, but I also know, finally, finally, that it really doesn’t matter. I needn’t have worried for all those years about the 2 mins 12 seconds.

  As I realised my sub-three ambition (which I later repeated outside), I understood that while it’s important to have goals, it’s equally important not to let them dominate to such an extent that you stop enjoying your running.

  Although having said that, I’m pretty sure I could go quicker...

  Richard Nerurkar MBE

  British marathon runner and Olympian. Won the 1993 World Cup marathon and Hamburg marathon. Finished 5th in the 1996 Olympic marathon in Atlanta. Author of the invaluable training aid Marathon Running: From Beginner to Elite.

  I started running competitively at school when I was nine years old. It started in the sports lesson – there was just a race around the park across the road from the school I went to. It was one lap around the park and I won it. I think I broke the record. It was those early days of running at school which made me realise that this was something I liked doing and was good at.

  From the start I enjoyed that feeling you get when you’re running, that feeling of being fit and being able to exercise in a way that you can take pleasure in, that isn’t a struggle. I still love that, along with the feeling running gives you afterwards. I also like the direct competitive side of it (though I’m now no longer competing really, so I’m more competitive with myself; that’s great too). In years gone by I relished the challenge to be as good as I could possibly be, and to compete against other people.

  My favourite runs were probably the ones we used to do in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa. We lived there for ten years and my wife and I still go back frequently. I can think of countless places where I’ve run all over the world, and even though some of them are simply amazing, there was something very, very special – and there continues to be something very, very special – about running in the early morning hours in the forests of Addis Ababa. In some ways running doesn’t get much better than that.

  The way I read it, the boom in running happened in the early 1980s and then plateaued for about ten years until about the mid-90s. At that time, certainly in Britain due to the success of the London Marathon, mass participation running really took off. That was partly driven by the charities too, seeing that it was a great opportunity to raise funds and that runners wanted to run for good causes.

  Of course all of that was superb and I think it’s great that running continues to thrive as a sport. I’m amazed that it’s still a boom sport really, but delighted by it too. Running is clearly not a fad that has come and gone. It’s something that is still hugely popular, both in Britain and across the world. It still remains an incredibly accessible sport – it’s very cheap and it’s something that everyone can do at almost any stage in life. I’m now in my fifties and I see people who take up the sport in their forties and fifties and they never look back. I think that’s wonderful.

  24

  Bryan Adams, Run To You

  ‘Outlaw’ Ironman Triathlon, Mile 24

  I’m close enough to the finish to sense that I’m going to enjoy it when I get there. But I’m in way too much pain to enjoy it yet. My knee remains in agony every time I land on it, while my calf is sti
ll shrieking in protest too. Just three miles to go, but it feels like an awfully long way. I tell myself that it’s the same distance as I run most Saturday mornings with the kids, and try to remember my daughter’s first parkrun, back when running was a real struggle for her.

  It’s tough when you’re a kid; your sense of time hasn’t fully developed so all the bad stuff, like double maths or your first 5k, seems it will go on, like forever! I try to put myself in her (then) eight-year-old shoes and imagine how she must have felt. She was out of breath, and her ankle hurt, and she got a stitch, and then another. She had one brief walking break at half way, and it took a lot out of her to continue running after that. Those three miles back then would have felt like a seriously long way. And these three miles today feel like a seriously long way.

  So there you go, if nothing else, parental empathy.

  My dad never ran, but his brother – my Uncle Tony – did. He was a sprinter, and a pretty good one by all accounts. An Oxford Blue, he still holds his secondary school record for the 100 and 200 yards. It’s his son who travels round Europe with me running marathons. So I do wish Uncle Tony would stop forwarding me articles with titles like ‘Too Much Exercise May Be Harmful To Your Health’. I know we journalists love a headline, but still. They worry me. And now, having just enjoyed a late breakfast with one of the world’s leading experts in this field, those articles also slightly annoy me. Because as I’ve just discovered, they’re basically wrong.

  ‘The key thing is this…’ says Dr Greg Whyte, an Olympian turned sports physiology professor, as he reaches for the croissants. It’s Greg who trained Eddie Izzard to run 43 marathons in 51 days for Comic Relief, Greg who helped Davina McCall run, swim and cycle 500 miles from Edinburgh to London for Sport Relief, and Greg who’s also helped James Cracknell, John Bishop, Cheryl Cole, Dermot O’Leary and others complete their charity challenges and raise over £17 million in total. He also travels the world giving keynote speeches on this exact subject. He definitely knows what he’s talking about.

  ‘…As soon as you stop being sedentary and start becoming active, lots of positive things happen, and your whole health improves. You reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes; you reduce your risk of cancer, peripheral vascular disease, depression, low self-esteem. And the more you do, the better that response, the better you become.

  ‘The greatest gains are made at the early stage, as you first start exercising, and then the law of diminishing returns kicks in – you have to do more and more exercise to experience the same health gains. Beyond 150 minutes a week, which is the World Health Organisation guideline for how much exercise to do, you’ve got to work very hard indeed to get further gains.’

  However, that article from Uncle Tony suggests there must be a point where the graph starts to turn down again. So can you do so much exercise that instead of getting positive gain, you actually start to deteriorate? Or, as Greg puts it, ‘where the law of diminishing returns starts to become pathophysiologic.’ As Director of Research for the British Olympic Association for six years, he spent – and indeed still does spend – a lot of his time talking about this.

  ‘We are the best endurance animal of any species on the planet. As persistent hunters on the African plains we would chase our prey for days on end, and the one thing that differentiates us from any other species is our ability to thermo-regulate. We are truly great sweaters. Dogs don’t sweat, horses have real trouble thermo-regulating. That’s what makes us such a tremendous endurance animal. We’re built for it.

  ‘With running, it’s what’s called linear endurance. You’re repeating the same activity over and over and over again. What that does is strengthen muscles, strengthen bones and strengthen joints. So what you find is that endurance athletes are incredibly strong and stable. Running doesn’t bring on osteoarthritis. In fact you prescribe exercise when you get it. The only thing that works for the osteoarthritic patients I look after, the only thing that works, is exercise.’

  Humans being ‘built for running’ is also the mantra of the barefoot runner. The increased prevalence of running injuries, they’ll tell you, only came about with the advent of the extravagantly cushioned shoe. Back in the day, the argument goes, back before cars and bikes and even horses, back when humans had to run to get places, they did so without cushioned soles and anti-pronation support systems. Biomechanically, we’re born to run a certain way, and our running shoes are hindering that, hence all the injuries. So more and more people have decided to ditch traditional trainers and either run with minimal cushioning like the Nike Free, or in basically no footwear at all, like the Vibram FiveFingers (which is not so much a shoe as a thin rubber casing for the foot with a flexible sole and visible individual sections for the toes. It looks kooky, but also kind of cool).

  As it happens, I wholeheartedly agree with the barefoot theory but don’t have the courage to change out of my trusty Asics. Firstly, because if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. And also, I don’t want to have to spend up to a year making the transition. And make no mistake: swapping my Gel Cumulus for some FiveFingers would basically involve re-learning how to run. And that would mean another trip to Mike Antoniades from Mile Four, the founder of The Running School who helps people improve their technique to reduce the risk of injury. He has lots to say about the (both relatively new, and also of course ancient) act of barefoot running.

  ‘Remember, it’s a choice, not a technique. People like the idea of running barefoot because they believe it’s how we were meant to run. And in the summer, when they walk on the grass, it’s a great feeling because we have sensors on the bottom of our feet.

  ‘It’s correct that the huge increase in running-related injuries started with the advent of cushioned shoes. And now the manufacturers are taking a right old beating about it. But if you look at their market, and if you look at supply and demand and profitability, those companies would have considered that their biggest market was urban runners. And how do urban runners run? Heel to toe. So they simply stuck a big cushion on the back of the shoes to stop urban runners getting injured.

  ‘We know that the most efficient way of landing is on the forefoot. But if you just swap your shoes and change the way that you land without changing the rest of your technique, all you’re doing is transferring more pressure to a different point.

  ‘The other thing that people forget is that to change the way you land can sometimes take 12 months. Because you are adjusting to the new forces, transferring the stress from heel to toe to the forefoot – the calf and Achilles overwork. So a lot of people who switch get even more serious injuries. It’s definitely not for everyone, and recreational runners in particular should think twice.’

  And while they do that, back to breakfast with Greg. As he was saying, far from causing bone or joint problems, running long distances actually helps. I’ll ask him about the thorny issue of the heart in a moment, but is there anything health-related that endurance sport exacerbates?

  ‘With excessive exercise you do compromise immune function. Initially it helps though – so when you first start running, you’ll get fewer colds. But athletes who do exorbitant amounts of training do get upper respiratory tract infections more frequently. And that can evolve into what we now call Unexplained Underperformance Syndrome (UPS). Many people would put the colds and the UPS at the foot of increased physical activity, of overtraining. But we now know it’s probably nothing to do with the exercise. It’s actually more about the compound effect of other stressors in life – exams, splitting up with a girlfriend, money or job worries, that sort of thing. Life is about balance, and in this case it’s about stress and recovery. Effectively when you add these large social stressors on top of extreme training, the balance becomes lopsided and the recovery is not great enough to cope with the stress. Therefore the athlete can fall into this downward spiral of immune disruption and underperformance.’

  As he’s speaking, I both inwardly berate myself for ne
ver having heard of UPS, and then blame it for every disappointing race I’ve ever run. That time I failed to break three hours in Kent? UPS. The 10k race in Greenwich when I couldn’t get inside 40 minutes? UPS. That New Year’s Day half-marathon when I went way over an hour and a half? Actually, that was more likely to be the hangover.

  A waitress approaches and warns us breakfast service is finishing and she’ll soon need the table back for lunch. So I can’t put it off any longer, the long-term, low-level worry I was doing my best to ignore despite the best efforts of Uncle Tony. It was going to have to find a voice. Can running ultra-marathons damage the heart? The latest reports say ‘yes’; it’s what my uncle emailed me about most recently.

  Greg is definitely the man to ask.

  ‘I’ve published sixty papers on this. In almost all cases, almost all runners, including those that do the occasional marathon, there’s absolutely no evidence that it can damage the heart. As we move towards the world of the ultra-endurance nutter, there is a certain suggestion that it might be problematic in individuals who have a particular susceptibility.

  ‘But one of the guys I studied, he’d done 656 marathons and 256 ultras, he’s at one very extreme end of the spectrum. Downstream from that, for anybody else basically, the odds are pretty good. Of course it makes headlines when somebody dies during a big city marathon, but there’s always a reason. So unless you have pre-existing underlying cardiovascular disease, running is very positive and will improve the health of your heart.’

  Thanks Greg, I’ll take that. There’s a tiny risk of exacerbating a heart problem you had anyway, but an overwhelming probability that you’re doing your heart the power of good. I might just have to redirect Uncle Tony’s next email to the junk folder.