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Brain Training

I’m just back from a fabulous weekend in Cornwall for a wedding, and didn’t manage to post this while I was there due to a) the wedding, b) alcohol, and c) all the fun.

Before heading down on Friday, I squeezed in a quick 4 mile circuit of Crouch End on Thursday night. Running was just one of a long list of tasks to tick off that evening. If the ideal run is ‘free’, unbounded by time or distance pressures, then this was the opposite of that. My mind was racing over packing and remembering the bridal make-up and borrowing the video camera and buying confetti and would we get a seat on the train and what time we should leave and before my brain had started to unwind the run was over.

To make amends, and to balance all the merrymaking, we planned a 5 mile run in Cornwall on the Saturday morning from our borrowed house in Stithians. It was a glowering morning, the few splashes of sunshine chased away by swift clouds, wind bobbing the hedgerow flowers. The roads were narrow and winding and a car swerved wildly around one bend to avoid us. The greens and blues I had been expecting from the Cornish countryside were strangely leached of brightness and I couldn’t seem to fix the route map in my head firmly enough not to worry constantly about becoming lost.

We ran to a ‘lake’, which held an Ordnance Survey promise of rolling beauty, but what we found was this:

That’s me, crossing the concrete dam of the reservoir, which had turned what was probably once a charming valley into a giant grey water trough. It was a bleak sight, even in the shaft of sunlight that greeted us as we approached the shore. It might be unfair to stretch this observation into something wider, but it seemed to me, as I quaffed champagne on a deck overlooking Helford Passage later that day, that the crumbling working parts of Cornwall were bringing the manicured parts into uncomfortable relief. A drive past boarded up buildings in Redruth on the way to drink cappucinos in St Ives this morning increased my unease.

As runs go, this wasn’t free in terms of route or timing, but I can picture every corner and hill. I was free to think about the land, the houses and who might live there, the weather and the passing cars. We weren’t running fast so I wasn’t thinking about my body at all, not even my hangover. I think it was mainly an exercise for my brain.

Going the extra mile (or not)

So, it wasn’t a cold, but instead a weird fevery-virus type affair that lasted a couple of days and completely wiped me out . I went for three days without running, the most since my post- marathon recovery week in November. On Saturday morning I was still feeling shady, but decided to risk a short run in the spirit of ‘kill or cure’. As I’m not writing this from an afterlife where ghosts sit around drinking wine and blogging (imagine that), it was happily the latter.

I don’t think running is generally to be recommended as a cure for illness, but it definitely does wonders for my mental wellbeing. I am not good at being ill, by which I mean that a) I’m not ill very often, thankfully, and b) I struggle to embrace the advantages of illness. On normal days I fantasize about sitting at home or in the garden with my book, sipping cold beverages or painting my toenails while watching episodes of Monk. When I am ill I feel too guilty to switch on the TV and draw the curtains for fear that the view of the garden might prevent my headache from reaching its true potential. Illness destroys all my positivity; running restores it.

This morning no trace of illness remained and I thought, what better to aid full recovery than a 14 mile run? It’s the longest run in my training plan and I might feel like a fraud if I didn’t at least attempt it. As it was, we didn’t manage it. Mr Notajogger and I plodded around our old half-marathon route and, from about 6 miles in, the idea of tacking on the extra mile at the end began to feel more and more extravagant. I mean, what would it actually achieve? We will never know, as we stopped our watches outside Nando’s on Stroud Green Road (the traditional end of our 13 mile runs during marathon training) at 1 hour 46 minutes. I want to knock 12 minutes off that in three weeks’ time – maybe we should have done that extra mile…

New Shoes

It’s time to wear in some new trainers.

This is my fourth pair of the same: Asics GT-2150 (D). They’re a wide fitting, as regular fit ones hurt the outsides of my feet. Ten years ago, when I was training for the London marathon, I got a stress fracture in the fifth metatarsal of my right foot three weeks before the race. It was heartbreaking to have to pull out after all that training, but more so because I’d brought it on myself: I went out in new shoes for a long run without breaking them in.

Despite this bitter lesson, I’m still tempted to pop on the new trainers and dash out for a 6 mile run as soon as they arrive in the post. I always leave it too late to get new ones – my old ones should have been retired at least a month ago. I’ve been putting it off for a few reasons: they’re expensive and I’m going through too many (at 25 miles a week, the recommended 300-500 miles is only 3-5 months); Al Gore; Sweatshops; but mainly because I ran my first marathon, ten years on from the one that never was, in them.

I know they’re not magic shoes, I’ll run another marathon, and at this rate I’ll get through another 30 pairs before I’m 50, so I think I’m ready to bin the old pair and walk around for a bit in my new shoes.