★ The Long Haul
by Ian Hocking
A few days back, my girlfriend mentioned that friends of ours would be popping over on the Sunday after one of them had completed the Canterbury half marathon.
If my ancestors hadn’t selfishly lost the genes that make ears prick up, my lugs would have swivelled girlfriendwards.
I posted the following to my Facebook account: “I’m thinking of just turning up to the Canterbury half marathon and doing it. Who’s with me!?”
Nobody replied.
(Not strictly true. The friend who was coming round on the Sunday commented that he was concerned about my knee.)
My training strategy, I believe, was unique: absolutely no running whatsoever.
My girlfriend told me it would be two hours of pain. She was wrong. It was two hours, thirty-four minutes and forty-six seconds of pain.
(Imagine the sound of a man tamping down the tobacco in his pipe, striking a match, and settling back in his chair.)
It occurs to me that running a marathon (let’s lose the adjective ‘half’; it’s so pessimistic) is a lot like writing. You do the same thing over and over again for a long time and, if you use a Mac laptop like me, you get a burning sensation in your legs.
That’ll do.
Phew.
When I worked at Runner’s World magazine, we spoke to a lady who had started running marathons in her 60s, having been an occasional jogger up to then. When the opportunity came to run the London Marathon for charity, she wasn’t quite sure whether she could do it, but she knew she could run round a big lake near her house. She looked at a map, and worked out that the perimeter of the lake was about a mile. So she went out and did that 26 times without stopping. Then she went home and sent off her application.
Brilliant! Kudos to people who can just run the same course x number of times, too; it can get ferociously boring.