The saga begins…..
I’ve previously mentioned how important it has been to me to keep a written record of my running over the years. Commencing in March 1981, in the early days, it was helpful to keep track of the training sessions and techniques, and to see what was getting results. After a while though, recording some notes in the training diary became almost as natural a part of the process as the run itself. Although much of it is pretty humdrum and not worth repeating, these volumes have become the story of my running life – some of it simply statistical, but much of it containing contemporary detail, which by dipping back into them from time to time, has enabled me to compile the story of my running life that goes far beyond being just a list of training sessions and races. I’ll post selected bits from my story in a regular serial form under the title “since ’81” (although you should be warned – I have packed less drama into 45 years of running than the scriptwriters of Emmerdale pack into 45 minutes of their soap) Here goes:
I’ve always loved running, even as a child.
It must have started with the once a year sports day at Capel primary school, where I remember taking part in the obstacle race and sack race, and probably something like a 40 yard sprint. Short sprint races would also have been a feature in the annual village fete in Five Oak Green where I grew up. I don’t know if I ever won the races, but I know I had a competitive streak that made me want to win. When I first ran on an athletics track in the first year at secondary school, I guess that without realising it, I was taking the first steps on a love affair with the sport that continues to this day. Ability had little to do with my attraction to the game, since I’ve never achieved anything above the standard of “club runner”, but maybe it’s just the nature of the competition in running and athletics that appeals to me. As an individual competitor you are entirely responsible for the amount of work you put into your training, and it often follows that the more work you put in, the better results you get out. That maxim holds true whether you are a potential Olympic athlete, or a 5 hours London Marathon jogger. So it’s no use whining when you have a bad race. Everyone has an off day from time to time, but if you are lucky enough to avoid injury and illness but still don’t get the results you believe you should be getting, then the chances are that you just aren’t working as hard as you need to. There’s no-one else to blame !
My arrival at secondary school, and introduction to a 400 metres running track in 1968 coincided almost exactly with the emergence onto the world athletics stage of a phenomenon called Dave Bedford. In the early days of my discovering that I quite liked running round the track, I was able to watch “Sportsnight with Colman” on the T.V., which sometimes would cover athletics meetings featuring this wild looking young athlete who would take on the best athletes in the world and often leave them trailing in his wake, either by setting off at a reckless pace from the gun, or sometimes with a change of pace early in a race that made top rate long distance runners look very average indeed. His lack of a super fast finish meant that he never won an Olympic medal, despite holding world records. Very much a product of the ‘60’s, his mass of long black curly hair and drooping “Zapata” moustache, he became an iconic figure of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and is probably singlehandedly responsible for getting me hooked on long distance running ( and possibly an early influence on my hairstyle ). His high mileage training was the stuff of legend, and almost certainly led to the injuries which cut his career short. He later re-emerged to public prominence some years later as the race director of the London Marathon.
It’s perhaps a little bit surprising that I wasn’t put off of cross country running at a very early stage though, since when running in a trial race to decide who would represent the school, I was chased by a dog which lunged at me, ripping the backside out of my shorts and taking a bit of flesh with it ! Since I was leading the race though, I had no intention of letting that stop me and carried on to finish first, securing my place in the team. The next stop was the doctors surgery and an anti-tetanus jab ! It is probably that encounter that determined the tactic that I adopted for many years when threatened by a dog: attack – “bite first, ask questions later”. I take a much more relaxed approach nowadays !
More next time…..
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