Last Sunday afternoon came with an all too familiar feeling.
Throbbing headache, aching all over, inability to move, severe drowsiness,
massive euphoria, sense of achievement…
Hold on, those last two don’t sound anything like a
hangover.
Last Sunday was different, if only for the getting up at
6.30am part. This is not normal. The only times I have ever seen 6.30am on a
Sunday were when travelling to an airport or when in a very different time
zone.
Last Sunday was the culmination of months of blood, sweat
and tunes – The Nike+ London Half marathon. With over 200 miles, 30 hours and
25,000 calories logged since April, Sunday saw the final push – 13.1 miles.
Throughout my training, a good day would see me take about
9mins 15secs to run a mile; a bad day would see the times edge closer to 10. I
had set out on my training aiming for a 2 hour half marathon (almost bang on 9
mins per mile).
Sadly a 2 week binge sampling the culinary wares of our
heavy-set transatlantic neighbours (For the record, Philly Cheesesteak does
exactly as it says on the tin and tastes even better than you imagine) was slap
bang in the middle of my ramp up to race fitness. This trip kindly bestowed
upon me about half a stone of gut and undid any kind of cardiac conditioning I
had achieved over the previous months.
I scaled back my goal to 2 hours 10mins (but to be honest,
if I’d gone over 2 hours 5 I would have been disappointed) and made my way to
the O2 in my fetching purple T-shirt.
A couple of hours later I removed my sunglasses from my
sweaty face, lifted my sweaty arm and took a look at my sweaty wrist. 1 hour,
45 minutes. Jesus. Teabagging. Christ.
So explains the Euphoria and sense of achievement on an
otherwise agonising Sunday afternoon.
After the good old H2O / ibuprofen cocktail cured my
headache I tried to rationalise why I had destroyed my target and all my
training runs. My run tracker app showed me the half marathon was not only my
fastest (and only) ½ marathon, but also my quickest 10k, 5k and 1 mile. I came
up with a few explanations:
(1) Carbs – I will probably be writing about this
another time but I am currently following a “slow carb” diet and have been
running with minimal carb intake during my training. A few days before the race
I started nailing more pasta than an Italian porn remake of American Pie and
during the race I sunk more blue liquid (Powerade) than I used to during a
night a Park End (VK Blue).
However, I was only off carbs for the last couple of weeks
of my training, so this doesn’t explain (all of) it.
(2) I run like I drive – Anyone who has ever been in
a car will me will understand my driving mantra. Irrespective of quality of car
(big up the L reg Fiesta), accelerate, move into fast lane, arrive at
destination. I do not feel like I am making progress unless I am overtaking
something. Turns out I run like I drive – weaving crazily between sweaty bodies
like a queue jumper in McDonalds.
(3) Lycra – I’m just going to come out and admit
this. I have always been a fan of lycra (when combined with the appropriate
female form). I would just like to take this opportunity to thank the inventor
of lycra running leggings. Combine this penchant with my ADHD attention span
and the “run like I drive” observation above and you have the optimal running
strategy:
(1)
Find appropriate combination of lyrca and bottom
approximately 100m ahead
(2)
Overtake other racers until “slipstreaming”
chosen target
(3)
Get bored
(4)
Return to step 1 and repeat for 13.1 miles
Sadly, none of this explains how I had the energy to run
faster and further than I have before. However, one thing does:
(5) Competitive Pressure – I am inherently lazy. You
know that. I know that. Minimum effort, maximum result has always been my
mantra. I am also pretty competitive, but only in short bursts and only when it
does not contradict my 80:20 beliefs.
I stepped into the pen (the “1 hour 40 to 2 hour” pen as I
had put “2 hours” on my target time), skulked to the back and then looked
around:
“Fatty. Fatty. Old dude. Fatty. Guy dressed as giant foam
tap. Fatty. If you can do sub 2 hours, so can I”
About 40 mins in – when I usually have a little walk:
“Knackered. Just a little walk”
“No. Only fatties walking. Keep going”
“Oooooh – Angel’s With Snipers by InMe, what a tune!”
“What was I just thinking about? Lycra ahead!”
And so on until the end.
So, like I said – “Eurphoria, sense of achievement” followed.
Unfortunately this had all vanished by Monday and had been replaced by
invective, for once pointed directly at my own lethargy…
If I am capable of running that quickly, why hadn’t I
trained at that pace and then run even quicker on the day?
More importantly, in general, is my laziness actually
holding me back from achieving a lot more?
I thought about this across other areas of life and found
myself dwelling on a few nagging doubts and questions:
- If I look back at my career choice after university, maybe I should have more actively scoured the milk round rather than taking a job offered to me after my internship, ending up in a bank, hedge fund or PE and taking home the mega-bucks. Why did I take the easy option?
- If I look back at the work I do in the two weeks running up to a deadline, both the quantity and quality of this work puts the pre-ceding months of low incentive churning to shame. How much could I achieve if I did this all the time?
- If I look back at my house move, if I had chased earlier and more tenaciously then maybe I could have fixed it before it went wrong. Why didn’t I chase this harder?
But you know what, all in all I wouldn’t change a thing.
As much as I thrive on pressure, deadlines and a challenge;
I love kicking back, relaxing and reflecting just as much. All batteries eventually
need recharging - whether they have been drained by years of keeping a wristwatch
ticking or by a couple of seconds of tazering a younger brother (and you and I
both know which is more fun).
A slightly eccentric friend once described life as a sine
wave. I agree, and for me it’s all about the amplitude. Frequent (ish) bursts
of effort (interspaced with the requisite Xbox days) directed at as wide a variety
of things as possible (holidays, ranting, banter, drinking, working, dancing,
driving, running and wedding) are the way forward and if I miss out on a few
things during the recharge days, so be it. After all, it’s these recharge troughs
that put quite how awesome the peaks are into perspective.
From now on, I will not worry about what passes me by or
what I could have achieved when I’m recharging. I’ve come to the conclusion that
all the fun is in the sequence of short, sharp, sprints. It’s just strange that
it took running a half-marathon to realise this…
