Chest, Arms and 7 miles

The day begun with Trevor beasting me in the gym with a killer chest and arms session.

This is a pretty tough workout; kettle-bells, chest-press, flys, incline press to pre-exhaust the chest and then a torrent of bicep exercise to complete the pain. By the time I get to the last few sets of curls it is definitely a question of gritting my teeth and trying to visualise my arms exploding. When I drop the bar for the final time every fibre in my arms hurts and I often feel an incredible calmness come over me. It is then time to go home, down a protein shake and try to recover. A few hours later I am still shaking and my arms still feel useless.

Later, after another round of supplements, energy bars and fluids it was out for a gentle seven mile run around town. I have to say that under the guidance of Trevor the runs are getting easier and I took a little bit of satisfaction in getting home in record time. Once home it was time for more supplements, stretches and a long hot shower. It seems that all I do is eat, train, wash sweaty gym kit and plan my next run but I am amusing myself with guessing what will need replacing first – my running shoes or my washing machine.

-Philip

More sprints

It’s Friday morning and it’s raining.

Trevor and I are out in Bicester, standing on a street corner, looking slightly sinister, and I am getting some good advice.

‘Nice and steady….400m…fast as you can…repeat ten times…’

And I think….’I want to be in bed…’

I hate running sprints. I loath it. I find it so difficult and yet it is an incredibly important part of my training. So I grit my teeth, try to calm my breathing and off we go….

1min 38…

I want to puke. I want to cry. One minutes rest and then we run.

1 min 37…

And it goes on, with various degrees of pain until we have done ten reps and then it’s back to the gym for a leg workout which at least I can enjoy. Later, at home, nursing a protein shake, I reflect on the sprints. There is no sense of achievement here; there is no sense of anything beyond pain. I don’t come home, shower and feel good. I feel sore, tired and slightly denuded and know that in six month’s time I will still hate this part of training and probably won’t have progressed too far. It’s all rather soul destroying and no one ever brags about a particularly good sprint workout the way they would about a long run or a heavy weights session.

However, I have faith in Trevor and his methods and so three times a week I am out doing my sprints. I don’t claim to enjoy them but I do take immense satisfaction of ticking them off my training plan and look forward to when we get back from Siberia and I never have to do them again.

-Philip

Go running, get lost...

This post is dedicated to anyone who has ever woken up with the larks on a Sunday morning, thrown on some shorts and gone running just pleased to be alive….and then got horribly lost.

Just before seven I was up and running nicely along the banks of the River Rhine. It was a wondrous day and I felt truly blessed to be alive. My legs felt good, my lungs were working well and the sun was burning mist off the river in a most portentous manner. I felt like I had wandered into a Joseph Conrad story.

I had planned to run for about 45 minutes, then head back to my friend’s house, before showering and heading out for the day. However, after 45 minutes I was feeling so content and so into the run that I wanted to go further. Up ahead was the magnificent bridge of Arnhem which is currently closed to traffic. This bridge has always fascinated me, not least because of the huge number of brave, young English men who lost their life here in Operation Market Garden, and the opportunity to run across it on a beautiful summer morning was simply too much.

To be fair I did stop half way over the river and offer a silent prayer to those brave young men and to take in the view of the beautiful river slowly snaking its way down to Germany. It was a peaceful moment, a moment stolen from a busy life, and for once there was no one there to push me, demand I run faster or control my breathing and so I could really reflect on the day and how I felt.

I should have turned around at this point and run back but the day was too beautiful so I decided to push on to see my children – I guess that this would be a pleasant 12km run and would make the perfect start to their day.

The run into their little town was one of the best – it was flat, fast and pretty. Occasionally I came across people hanging their duvets out of the window, or cheery locals out walking their dogs, and I greeted them with one of my many stock Dutch expressions, such as, ‘my dog is a dachshund’, ‘there is a windmill in Utrecht’ and my personal favourite, ‘where is the bust stop…’ I didn’t tarry long enough to hear their replies but I am sure that they were equally cordial. Dutch folk normally are…

I reached the outskirts of the village in record time. It has been a stoater of a run and I was really happy to have had such calming time as well as adding a few miles to my weekly tally. From the edge of the village to my children’s house is exactly two kilometres and so I thought: in twelve minutes I will be there and our day can begin…

Almost an hour later, when I was still running in circles, and lamenting the fact that the only people up and about at such an ungodly hour on a Sunday neither spoke English or had any sense of direction at all, I was getting pretty despondent. I had run past the same church three times and each time it was on a different corner. My feet were getting sore and I was running out of songs to sing. It was pretty desperate. However, after taking a few deep breaths and using the tried and trusted triangulation method I have developed in various other countries where I have been lost (ask three people and follow the directions from the least mad) I finally limped into my children’s street.

When they finally came down to breakfast, an hour later, they were quite surprised to see me lying on the back lawn doing my stretches. My elder son even went as far as cocking an eyebrow in my direction when I told him I had run all the way but secretly I think that he was rather proud of me…and what more does any parent ask for?

-Philip

Sprints

I hate Mondays.

So, don't get me wrong, I am not getting all Boomtown Rats on you, but Monday is sprint training day and I hate sprint training.
I can take the long runs (turn off brain, one foot in front of another), the weights session (turn off brain, pose in mirror, pump some iron occasionally) and the kettlebell sessions (swing, swing, feel sick) but the sprints are killing me.

According to my extensive reading on the subject (both magazine articles) 400m is not a proper sprint distance but more of a dash. However, it is the least pleasant part of the training and I would rather do more or less anything than sprints, such as sell my kids into slavery, compile a
financial report or even cut the grass.
So on Mondays I am either on the treadmill (which is very, very naughty) or out in Ambrosden running 10 x 400m sprints. I have even marked a couple of trees so that I can accurately gauge my distance. This training, I believe, is meant to shock my body into, well, something or other and it
seems to work as the sprints are killing me. I am running an average 1 minute 47s for the sprints and a good three hours shaking afterwards. I am appalled to read that this is 59 seconds behind the world record.

As this is a new activity for me I am yet to see any benefits in speed and stamina but as with most training things I suspect that it will get worse before it gets better and then one day I will leap out of bed on Monday and realise that sprints are just horrific. But until that day comes I reserve the right to be in a bad mood on Monday morning.

-Philip

Introduction

Let’s get this out in the open to start with:

I am not an athlete.

I like sitting on the sofa, listening to Jazz FM, drinking red stripe and occasionally walking to the kitchen for another pack of jaffa cakes.

Up until recently I considered running for a bus too challenging and regularly missing flights from Heathrow as I was too lazy to make my way to the gate at anything less than a pleasant amble.

So, why Siberia?

When my father passed away last year my family and I were lucky enough to be able to nurse him through his last days so that he died peacefully and calmly at home. As a family we pulled together and were able to make those last few days special, calm and, importantly, dignified. Later, I came to realise how important this is and through my own readings became aware of the excellent work Ian Rennie does on a daily basis. One half marathon and a cheque for eight hundred quid later I felt my running days were over. I had paid my own final respects to my father and hopefully changed a few lives too with my modest fund raising efforts. The day after I handed over the cheque to Ian Rennie I received an email thanking me for my support and asking: what are you going to be next?

And I thought: maybe a few beers and a side order of pork pies…

I wasn’t interested in running a marathon, not least because I felt that the training would be too intense, but because everyone and his dog runs marathons. The gym is always full of happy, healthy looking folk who are training for London, Brighton or even New York. Every dinner party I go to eventually turns around to the merits of Boston (apparently flat and fast) over New York (a run through all five boroughs) and how Snowdon is a great run on a wet afternoon.

In his own way my dad was a remarkable man (well, he did a pretty good job of educating me and keeping me out of too much trouble) and Ian Rennie does remarkable work so whatever I did next had to be, in itself, remarkable.

And, of course, I wanted to have the ultimate dinner party anecdote (aside from the one about me driving across North Korea…)

And so when my wife came home from work one day and found me sitting on the sofa with an atlas on my knee and three cans of Red Stripe the better and I announced that I was going to undertake a marathon across a frozen lake in Siberia for charity, she rolled her eyes and mouthed the words: mid-life crisis at me before retreating to the kitchen in mock horror.

Getting Trevor on board was less challenging as during the training for my half marathon I had promised that on pain of death I would never run a marathon and so he was already expecting me to change my mind:

‘Trevor, do you want to run a marathon in Siberia and raise a shed load of cash for Ian Rennie?’

‘Err…let me ask the wife….. ’

Who, apparently, threw her hands in the air and said: ‘He is having a mid life crisis…’

Our aims are pretty simple: We are going to raise as close as possible £10k for Ian Rennie. If I have to drag myself (or more likely have Trevor drag me) across Lake Baikal on my knees I will finish the race.

As we get closer to race day we will have a number of ways in which you can support us but for now it is time to sit back, thank the lord that you probably don’t make overly ambitious promises, and enjoy the next few months as I blog about my training and the long, winding road to fitness.

-Philip