Myths

As featured in Like The Wind magazine - Issue #31

The inclusivity of our pastime is perhaps it’s greatest lure. Within reason it can be performed pretty much anywhere, and although suitable equipment can be beneficial, in a literal sense you can still physically engage in the activity without any specific attire. From a participation, rather than competitive, perspective it requires very little technical ability and, with few exceptions, anyone can lace up their trainers and ‘give it a go’.

Yet running’s greatest strength, and it’s recent rampant growth in popularity, brings with it a flaw seemingly not as abundantly present in other sports - the gross deluge of misinformation, or as I shall refer to them, myths.

Kicking off proceedings is an oldie but a goodie - “it’s such a cheap sport, all you need is a pair of trainers”. This is accurate to a miniscule extent, and perhaps only applicable to those running once a month, in perfectly consistent weather conditions, and boasting bionic limbs that never require any kind of physio-based intervention whatsoever. At the very opposite end of this particular deception is the insistence, usually from a party seeking financial benefit, that you NEED more obscure, outlandish gear and gadgets that could ever be necessary, nor worn at the same time, unless of course you’re embarking on a Polar/Sahara expedition, not your local parkrun.   

We won’t even touch upon the “it’s bad for your knees” legend, given the stark absence of  any conclusive medical research, and the source of the declaration commonly being the opinion of those who have, funnily enough, never actually attempted the venture themselves.

Social Media is a prime culprit for the avalanche of misinformation, those “oh so hilarious” articles - “You know you’re a runner when….”, which may actually be more harmful than humorous, and other clickbait atrocities such as “This beginner ran EVERY DAY FOR A MONTH AND THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED. No, he didn’t “get ripped”, he got injured, lost interest, and is probably disheartened not to ever run again.

Yet the greatest myth of all, the pinnacle of deceit, must surely be the often-cited adage “in running, you get out what you put in”.  This claim, commonly seen as pure and profound, I’m afraid to inform, is just absolute nonsense. 

Don’t get me wrong, the message is well intentioned, if the necessary graft and pursuit isn’t undertaken then the desired level of conditioning simply won’t be reached, one cannot miraculously become an elite athlete without the fundamental workload and strive to reach such a level. But even with the necessary work, success isn't guaranteed. There are countless other internal and external aspects that must work favourably to achieve even something even remotely near what is deserved.

I’ve been running for a decade, following the familiar path of sporting discovery in adult life after years of booze and general unwise nutritional and lifestyle choices. I’ve always enjoyed football, and continue to do so in a spectating capacity, but was a distinctly hopeless player despite best efforts. I enjoyed relative success in a short period after taking up running and blitherey assumed I must have possessed some form of untapped, phenomenal natural talent. Within weeks I’d knocked 10 minutes from my 10K time and was naively certain to be destined for greater things, I was headed for the big time. What a moron.

Of course, the margin and rate of progress wouldn’t sustain the same speed and as time went on, development slowed, or stalled altogether, and plateaus were hit. Breakthroughs of minutes were down to seconds, and more often than not, I’d find myself going backwards. I soon learnt that every step out of the door wouldn’t end with a personal best, but it took a few years before I became familiar with the incessant sentiment of injustice and a wanting for fulfillment and gratification. Nowadays, with experience, it’s just a resigned acceptance that hard work is very rarely rewarded with the dividends so richly deserved, but still there remains a frustration of battles lost. There’s been plenty of occasions, countless even, but some are more memorable than others.

I’d prepared diligently for the 2013 Paris Marathon only to suffer with shin-splints on the day of the race, hampering me to an extent but I was still able to achieve the objective of a Good For Age time for the following year’s London Marathon. That was until a few weeks later, when without warning they changed the qualifying criteria, rendering my effort utterly futile. I spent the succeeding 12 months preparing for the Milan Marathon, where I’d reached a level of conditioning that provoked a perfectly plausible assault on Sub3, only for raceday to bring with it stomach cramps, 26c temperatures and a performance well below my capabilities.

A common indignation features in the shorter distances too; our local parkrun is pancake flat and potentially fast but also notoriously exposed to the elements, the slightest hint of wind likely to decimate any hope of running a time accurately reflective of your ability. It takes place on a racecourse service track and the bookies would offer long odds of a day when concurrently the clouds were still, the temperature cool, and the athlete in the shape to exploit. Unfortunately the miles, the hours and the efforts rarely produce what is deserved. Did I deserve to trip over the timing mats at the end of a disastrous Bradford 10K and slam my forehead into the concrete?

Yet such injustices pale into insignificance to the saga which began with my running of the Rotterdam Marathon several years ago. Having undertaken what I considered, at the time, to be my best block of marathon training to date - never missing a session despite the abhorrent Winter, and ‘Beast From The East’, of 2018, we arrived in Holland full of optimism. 

Unfortunately, perfect preparation wasn’t rewarded with perfect execution, as the elements decided to completely bypass Spring and I found myself running in temperatures from -4c to 22c in the matter of just a handful of days. Despite my adoration for warmer climates in every endeavour of life barring running, I struggled in the heat and missed my objective finishing time by minutes. 

Seeking redemption and a remedy to my bruised ego, I agreed to pace a friend at the London Marathon just two weeks later, her goal pace 45 minutes behind mine deeming it seemingly unburdensome. Yet like my own ill-fated endeavour a fortnight prior, her attempt was sabotaged by the meteorologic conditions - the miles from Greenwich to the Mall shrouded in merciless, unrelenting radiation. 

I’d fallen short of the goal in Rotterdam, as had my comrade in London, and to twist the dagger even further, I’d unknowingly sustained an injury during the disastrous double. What I first feared to be a minor niggle manifested into an ailment of much greater proportions - 18 months on the sidelines, my running lifeline revoked, finally concluding in invasive surgery.

Get out what you put in? I’m dumbfounded how a decade of graft, the last seven months of which specific, concluded with my deserving of an injury that decimated not only my ability to run, but also perform basic physical tasks, for a year and a half. There’s greater injustices in the world of course, folk experiencing unwarranted hardships far more unjust than my own, but the sheer kick-in-the-face aspect of the entire ordeal was somewhat remarkable. 

It’s a common theme in my convoluted relationship with running - my athletic performances (a laughable term given the infrequency in which those efforts have been deemed a ‘success’) are nowhere near what I believe they should be given the degree of commitment and investment in training and the lifestyle aspects around it. I would have hoped the past decade of perpetual grind would have reaped the reward of running faster but I appear to possess no natural athletic ability whatsoever. Poor genetics, a vast physiological ineptitude, an inadequacy to improve, I’m unsure. Or perhaps this perception of hardship is a common universal sentiment and I just need to pull my head out of my backside.

The methods and schemes have varied, each for a sufficiently prolonged period to achieve accurate assessment - more miles, less miles, greater intensity, easier efforts. Bigger volume, simplicity and balance has yielded the most favourable results so far, but even those are less than satisfactory. I’ve friends who, despite substantially lesser training investment, are considerably faster than I am. I look at them with conflicting sentiments of adoration and envy. The bastards. Likewise, there appears to have been an unprecedented plethora of huge breakthrough performances the last few months - “Little old me? Oh I only started running last year and now I’m going to the Olympics”.  Again, bastards.

It’s borderline embarrassing - the perceived notion of how others think of me - “look at all the effort he puts in but he’s still garbage”. In reality, I very much doubt any of my peers actually think this way, not because I am in fact, amazing, but rather that no-one else gives enough of a shit to care about, or even notice, my obsessive little hobby.

Finally over the injury (a recipient of a ‘bilateral groin reconstruction’) I’d eventually got back up and running and established a much-sought routine, enjoying months of consistency, subsequently back to my best but during a pandemic. No racing and no chance to capitalize on relatively-heightened fitness. Like many others my goal marathon was cancelled and so a specific training block essentially doubled in length. I progressed through, managing to avoid injury, and was poised to strike and finally take down years-old PBs when racing resumed in the Spring. 

My PBs at the shorter distances suggest a capability of running a marathon around 30 minutes faster than my best, but if my absence of a natural aptitude in running itself isn’t staggering enough, my relative incompetence at 26.2 is off the scale. 18 months of consistency, sixty long runs, over a hundred sessions at race pace, balanced with (very) slow recovery runs. I had every right to be confident of success.

Restrictions eased and races finally began to pop back up, yet numerous efforts at 5 and 10Ks were all heavily influenced by external conditions - 40mph headwinds and mediocre organisation (a 5K race measuring 3.8km) as well as two occasions when I just didn’t have a great day. But the shorter stuff could wait, for it was the Marathon where I would avenge the years of injury-plagued misfortune that had preceded it. Berlin, a magnificent city with a fast course and home to no fewer than 11 World Records, would provide the stage for what I believed would be the triumphant comeback, the renaissance. I was the hero in my own head and would reclaim my rightful place as a ‘slightly above the average bloke on the street’ hobby jogger. I’d finally reach the summit once more.

Fate, the weather, and the German government had different ideas.

A change in entry restrictions meant my daughter, who would accompany us on the trip, would be required to quarantine for five days upon arrival. Reluctant to fly a toddler abroad only to have her imprisoned in a hotel room for the duration of the trip, and with a distinct absence of childcare options, we decided the trip would be made solo. 

In training there are those days, some to a greater extent than others, where things don’t really tick - aches and pains, nothing moves freely, no natural flow to proceedings and for no discernible reason every step is taken in burden. This presents somewhat of a problem when it necessitates 40,000 of them to get through the morning.

It was one of those days. Today of all days, and it just wasn’t happening. 

I’d trained to an extent that my modest goal should still have been achievable regardless of my feeling contemptible, but it was 18c by 9am and I should have conceded defeat within the first ten minutes - my long-standing inability to perform in the slightest hint of raised climate, coupled with it being a ‘bad day’, saw the pace difficult to sustain from the off. A pace I’d previously held comfortably, for prolonged periods of time, on countless occasions, was now sickeningly elusive, at a time when I was supposedly well-rested, and finally had the platform to express my hard-fought fitness.

Standing on the bundesstraße prior to the start, the sun bearing down on the shoulders of the amassed 24,000, I made the first of two egotistical mistakes. I was already near-positive of a painful, fruitless venture, but figured I had to give it my best given the distance, expense, and sheer hassle of getting there. I was never NOT going to run, but should have just trotted round, not over-exerted and enjoyed the experience, leaving me unscathed with the potential of a second attempt on a (colder) day somewhere closer to home. My inability to recover quickly from previous marathons, several months passing before being back to the fettle of pre-race, should have been enough to make the call for me, to decide not to debilitate myself with nothing to show for it.

I kept up the facade for around sixteen miles, knowing full well the imminancy of an implosion. It was then the second mistake was made. I should have just stepped off the course and called it a day, I’d surprisingly mastered the Metro system and my bib permitted free travel so getting back to the hotel wasn’t an issue. But ‘quitting’ is seen as going against the common narrative isn’t it? There’s no motivational meme with the slogan “Never give up…..unless it’s the sensible thing to do and you should get over yourself”.

A DNF would be a failure, a humiliation. But when failing to meet the time-objective is actually worse than the prospect of failing to go the distance, then perhaps it would have been the wiser choice. No, instead I’d soldier on, albeit at a more conserative pace, but the damage was already done, the gasket was blown and I’d already plummeted from the cliff. The slower pace wasn’t one of choice, it was the only choice - an agonising shuffle, a death march. We’ve all been there, though I imagine I’ve been more so than most.

It hurt. More emotionally than physically. It wasn't my first deathmarch, though previous tribulations were of my doing - over-ambitious pacing, one such example - this time it seemed I wasn’t to blame, but that knowledge did little to soften the blow.

How could it, despite all the perfect preparation that preceded, go so badly? I sat licking my wounds on the lawn of  the Reichstag Building, alone and brutally bitter, surrounded by the incredibly irritating jubilation of fellow participants, their successful efforts toasted with gleeful whoops whilst embracing their loved ones. On the (very few) occasions I’d run a successful marathon, was my elation as infuriating to the less-satisfied around me?

On my slow, wretched retreat to the hotel I grunted expletives under my breath at the American tourists who exclaimed “congrats man” in recognition of the medal I’d refused to wear and carried in my hand. I knew I was being unreasonable, jealous, childish, a sore-loser. I contemplated the bigger picture of my good fortune - my health, my family, but I was so submerged in my own self-absorbed sorrow I couldn’t see past the end of my nose.

It’s nothing more than a glorified hobby, one at which I’m just not very good at. But surely any undertaking in which one invests such a degree of effort, emotion, expense and energy is destined to provoke indignation when it doesn’t follow the desired path? I’d travelled across the continent during a pandemic and was heading home with absolutely nothing to show for it. I felt like an idiot - guest of honour at the Pity Party. Attendees: One.

Get out what you put in? Bollocks.

There have, however, been good days, and when the hard times are so prevalent for so long, the successes are all the sweeter. It took five years and six attempts before I managed to run under three hours for the marathon, in torrential rain at the 2015 Boston Marathon, it was almost serendipitous that the numerous failed attempts would eventually bear fruition at the world’s most prestigious footrace. Thousands have gone faster, but after years of setback and strife, the realization was utterly euphoric. 

Two years later I found myself the victor at the Walt Disney World Wine & Dine 5K in Florida, beating 7,000 others to mass fanfare, a ticker-tape finish line, and a healthy prize purse. For once lady luck was on my side as several leaner, younger competitors (who appeared much faster than I) didn’t have the foresight to jostle their way into the first corral, stuck behind the masses, leaving me to run away with the victory in a time that wouldn’t even get me in the top ten at my aforementioned local parkrun.

I was in the right place at the right time, and was certainly under no illusions otherwise, but gleefully accepted that good fortune had, for once, fallen in my favour.

So maybe the saying should be “you get out what you put in, but that's the absolute very best case scenario you can possibly hope for”. But that doesn't really have the same ring to it does it?

Or perhaps I’ve completely misunderstood the proverb and what you “get out of it” isn’t necessarily as clear-cut, as simplistic, as it seems. Perhaps my conception that the rewards of a decades endeavour would come in a time format are somewhat ill-presumed, and that the real bounty for the perpetual persistence and pursuit has actually been thoroughly adequate. 

Having spent 30+ years seemingly being one step behind everyone else, at everything, it’s nice to finally have a field in which I excel over others, even if it’s only through their absence of trying. That’s certainly not a boast, if those people had chosen the same path they’d likely possess a far greater competence, but we all have our strengths, be they natural or hard-earned. 

Just by getting out of the door on a morning, be it for a short trot or a long slog, the day has begun on a positive note, the simple act of being outdoors being of huge benefit to my spirit and wellbeing. Building endurance has allowed me to run, comfortably, for hours, to discover places I’d never have found otherwise, to explore corners inaccessible by means other than by foot. On a practical level, running affords me time to imagine, to ponder and to conjure up the basis for writing pieces like the one you’re reading right now. My Groom’s speech was concocted purely whilst on the run, and my mental mathematics has seen considerable improvement too - constant calculations of pace and miles providing benefit to a subject at which I was so woefully mediocre at school. 

It’s given me health, a more positive body image and a self confidence of which I’d always previously been devoid. Lazing for hours in the pub with friends was always a beloved pastime, one which I still enjoy albeit on a far less frequent basis, but it’s not even comparable to the elation of chasing the 4am Spring sunrise on the country roads, not a soul around, disconnected, miles from home. 

I’m not perfect, I’m ridiculously far from it. I get most things wrong and have a penchant for bad decisions, but through running I’m a better version of myself - in body, mind and character, and as a parent, husband, son and friend. The lessons the sport has bestowed on me are transferable into every aspect of life - hard work might not always give you what you deserve, but it’ll provide you the best possible chance should the opportunity arise. 

It’s not a spectacular or unique characteristic, it’s just common human decency to pursue your goals. We owe it to ourselves.

Whilst I’m physically able, I’ll always run. The benefits, both the conspicuous and concealed, yield far greater authority than the numerous defeats and setbacks, the occasions when things don’t work out quite as planned. The years will pass, my limbs will grow old and my best times will be behind me, the mere vague possibility of a new PB a long passed hope, a distant memory fondly reminisced in a halcyonic daze. 

Until then however, I’ll keep chasing that summit.