I’ve always loved the feeling of exhilaration when running down the road at speed, my heart pounding like a primeval drum, and salty sweat spraying out of all my pores like a sprinkler spraying water onto a lawn in some arid country like Australia.
You wouldn’t think that there would be much to talk about when it comes to running, and yet runners have long drawn-out conversations about race times, training programs, speed training, stretching, physios, watches, heart rate monitors, shoes, upcoming events, who is running where, how they ran, and what injuries people have and how they overcame them.
I think it all gets a bit overcomplicated and clinical sometimes. People get obsessed about PBs (Personal Bests) that nobody cares about only themselves. I was guilty of that last year and totally wrecked myself in the lead up to two marathons I had entered. I pulled my calf quite badly prior to the Manchester marathon in April, and cracked my ankle in two places about a month before the Dublin marathon in October.
Many times, over the years I have tried to use training programs and ultimately decided they weren’t for me. If my program said I had to do speed training on Wednesday, I would go out and do it regardless of a sense of exhaustion or imminent injury. My training program prescribed speed training, and so I would consider it a moral failing not to do it. Inevitably, I always ended up injured.
I got into heart rate monitors at different times and now feel like they are just annoying crap that cause me to get itchy sweat rashes around my chest. The one I had recently broke around a year ago and I won’t be replacing it. When monitoring your heart rate, you either have to keep looking down at your watch to make sure you’re within the “correct” zones or you have to set an alarm to notify you when you go outside of them. And it’s just bloody annoying. Either you get a crick in your neck from looking down all the time, not to mention the increased risk of running into oncoming traffic or a wall, or you get it bleeping at you every so often like some kind of fascist dictator. Another problem with heart rate monitors is that they can often malfunction when you’re running and tell you that your heart is going like a freight train when you’re not feeling remotely under strain; they also do the opposite and tell you your heart rate is super slow when you can actually feel it pounding in your eyes, almost threatening to pop them out of their sockets with the force of the blood flow.
As for shoes, I have a lot of misgivings about them. People were running long before the modern running shoe industry took off and the prices that are charged for what are called “super shoes” are utterly absurd. I’ve bought countless pairs of shoes that I’ve ultimately ended up binning as many of them cause me pain and discomfort within minutes of putting them on and standing in them. I have banjaxed knees, have had them since my 20s, but the good thing about being a bit banjaxed in some way is that you become acutely and instantly aware when some shoe or other is going to be problematic. During the week I always wear “barefoot” shoes for day-to-day wear, walking, and light jogging. And if I feel running injuries developing, I stop wearing “normal” running shoes completely for a while, slow my pace, and exclusively only train in “barefoot” shoes until I feel I have reset myself. As per the subheading where I quoted the Native American Indian Geronimo - “I trust nothing but my own two feet”.
When I started running years ago, I used to use a cheap plastic Casio that you could buy in the pound shop. There were certain areas where I knew the distance and so I would calculate my speed by counting my laps on my fingers and doing the math later. Sometimes I would have a pebble in my hand and switch it to the other hand after every lap so that I knew the number of laps was an odd number if in my right hand, and even in my left. I’d sometimes forget how many laps I’d done and end up doing another just in case. It was a crude way of doing things, but it was grand.
I like my Garmin watch for recording my distances and data like speed and such, but I’ve given up looking at it while I’m running, it just annoys me. Far too many times I’ve got it in my head that I wanted to go a certain speed on a certain day and half killed myself trying to maintain that speed. Aside from anything else, it’s annoying and probably slows a runner down when they keep looking down to watch their speed. Nowadays, literally as of this year, I like to run as fast or slow as I feel able for from one moment to the next. If I start to feel too out of breath or if I feel a muscle twinge, I slow down. If I feel strong, I run like a leopard. I listen to my body rather than driving myself crackers thinking about how fast my heart is going or having some preconceived idea of how fast I should be running.
At the end of my morning run today (18kms) my watch notified me that I had set two new personal records; fastest 10k, and fastest 5k. I won’t mention my speeds because it doesn’t matter to anyone but me, but I was pretty pleased with myself, since I’m actually a whole two stone heavier than when I set my previous records about 10 years ago and, at 44, I’m not getting any younger. Elated, I air punched and shouted at the top of my lungs, “WHO’S YOUR DADDY?” A couple of women going by with small children were startled and looked at me like I was a crazy person. But I reassured them that, “Eh, sorry, I was only talking to myself”. I’m not sure if they were reassured or not, but I was too jacked on runner’s high to worry about it too much anyways.