On 16 January 1982, a fellow Durham City Harrier and very good friend of mine ran the Orange Bowl Marathon in Miami in 2 hours, 14 minutes and 45 seconds. In 2012, that would have been good enough to make him fourth in the British rankings. But in those days, it wasn’t so simple. Brendan Foster had medals on the world stage as well as world records to his name, Charlie Spedding would go on to win bronze in the 1984 Olympic marathon, and Dennis Coates had finished fifth in the Olympic steeplechase. Despite my friend’s talent, he had no guarantee of getting one of 12 places in the national road relays; he was a lesser light amongst a group of distance runners in the north-east.
Roll forward to the present day and the ever-declining standard of distance running in the UK, especially on the men’s side, is discussed at great length. The answers to the problem, though, are often sought away from home, in the thin air of Iten, Kenya or in the Nike laboratories of Portland, Oregon. I spent three months of last year in Addis Ababa hoping that high altitude and superior coffee would be the answer (and writing a blog about my experiences), without it really occurring to me that the answers may have been better sought at the end of my mum’s street, where my distance-running mate happens to live.
He has been coaching me on and off for the last seven years, and has shown admirable patience with my lack of that very same virtue. I’ve lost interest more than once as a result of injuries, and spent my university summers in India, South America and China rather than on athletics tracks.
The world of running has changed a lot since its British heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. “It may be hard for anyone born after 1960 to believe,” Kenny Moore wrote, “but runners in those days were regarded as eccentric at best, subversive and dangerous at worst.” Now it seems, in Edinburgh at least, that everyone is a runner. In the running shop I work in, all kinds of people come in with variations of the same story. “For some reason, I’ve signed up to run a marathon, so I need some shoes,” they say, or, “The guys in the office have talked me into running in their relay team.” For some, joining the fold as a “runner” has become a good way into office social life. Runners are respected, not mistrusted. Participation has come a long way since Kenny Moore’s time.
The ever-increasing popularity of running should lead to an improvement in standards, with the widening base of the pyramid pushing up its peak. But, in fact, it seems to have had the opposite effect.
I have nothing against mass-participation running. I agree with Haile Gebrselassie, when he says he reckons that the world would be a better place if everyone ran every day. But the expansion of the market for running-related products, energy foods, pilates and yoga for runners seems to have distracted people from the fact that running training is actually a simple process. A simple activity has been complicated to suit the needs of sports brands that need to find ways to make money out of a sport which really only demands a half-decent pair of trainers.
The argument that sports scientists tend to make when you point out that the likes of Foster and Spedding achieved all that they did without nutritionists and scientific testing is that they would have been even faster if they’d had access to those things too. A huge amount of scientific data is available on the benefits of training at altitude and on new forms of strength and flexibility training. But the simple fact is this: British distance runners were faster 30 years ago than they are now. A lot faster. The most important aspects of a distance runner’s training are patience and consistency. These things are not glamorous. They don’t fit in particularly well in today’s society. There is no quick fix and no immediate gratification. But there is satisfaction in something done to the best of your ability and with conviction. There is solace in repeating a simple activity until it becomes smooth, efficient and, of course, faster.
So, for the next few months, I’ll be referring to my coach’s training diaries for 1981 and 1982, and writing about the experience of doing the simple things right – and trying to replicate the kind of training that was done in his day. The diaries represent two years of accumulated sweat and effort on his part distilled into numbers – 9,037 miles to be precise. They are pretty short on description, with the prize for most commonly used adjective going fairly overwhelmingly to “tired”, and contain only occasional elaboration (“tired – knackered actually”). They chronicle the day-in, day-out toil of trying to run 26.2 miles at as fast a pace as possible and the conviction that anything worth doing is worth doing right.
And so I’m off, to try to challenge the theory that my generation are doing it all wrong. I can’t deny that it’s easier for me, after all. I’m a student; in his day, my coach had a marriage, a mortgage, children and a full-time job to worry about.
His final words of wisdom as I walked down his driveway? “Mike, lose those diaries, and I’ll kill you.”
You can follow Mike’s progress at acceptableintheighties.wordpress.com
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