Wednesday

After my workout (shoulder and back) I took my protein shake and went and sat on the beach.

After working out I always feel serene and somewhat detached from the world but today, under the hot Israeli sun, I felt a deep sense of calmness. It was a moment tinged, also, with sadness, as it was on this beach that I received the call from my mum that my dad was very ill and I needed to get home immediately. I thought back to those days; days when everything seemed to unravel and when my only outlet was running. I thought about the my first gentle jogs around the village where my parents lived, the way I ran myself into the ground on my birthday, my first 10km and all the things that will lead me to Siberia. In my own view of the world it seems almost poetic that something that begun on a beach under a scorching sun should come to completion on a frozen lake in Russia. I sat on the beach until the sun set and soft music begun to drift from the many bars along the sea-front and for the first time in ages I didn’t think about my next workout or how far I had to run this weekend. It was, just for a few moments, perfect.

-Philip

Too hot...

I tried to go for a run on the beach in Tel Aviv Last night.

However, after about a mile I realised that despite the heat I wasn’t sweating and that I had started to feel most unwell. It was hardly surprising that I felt unwell as even late in the afternoon the temperature was 35C and people were merrily cooking eggs on the pavement.

After plenty of water and shade I felt recovered enough to hit the gym for my chest work out. I have trained in all kinds of strange places – huge empty hangers in the US, a spa somewhere in deepest Romania where the ex-president was said to take his daily ablutions and even on the beach in Rio but training in Israel is a whole different thing.

Firstly everyone struts around with the utmost attitude. If you put a weight down for a rest between sets someone will swipe it, people regularly come and stand in front of you so that you can see if you are doing the perfect lat raises and no one puts anything back after they have finished using it. The first time I trained in this gym I found it all disturbing but yesterday really annoyed me.

I was doing incline dumbbell press with a decent size pair of dumbbells. Halfway through my set two guys stood purposely in front of me so that I could not see how deep I was pressing, a woman tried to drape her towel over the back of my bench (whilst I was lifting) and then to add insult to injury a little old Jewish guy, complete with skull cap tried to swipe my weights when I dropped them between sets.

He must have been about 70 years old, about 100lbs wet and probably spent every weekend having little kids kick sand in his face at the beach. However, this did not stop him trying to run off with my two 30kg dumbbells.

What followed could have been nasty. I snarled at him, thinking: what on earth are you doing – you can barely lift these….he snarled back and obviously cursed me in Hebrew. I squared up to him and puffed out my chest (which certainly seems to be acceptable in this part of the world) and then he dropped the weights (on my toe) and, after making an obscene gesture, walked to the weight rack, selected a pair of 50kg dumbbells, and then stood right in front of me and banged out set after set of concentration curls.

It was at this stage that I gave up, grabbed my towel and a protein shake and retired to the poolside to lick my wounded ego.

-Philip

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