run, forest, run!
In many facets of life, beer has a lot to answer for. For me personally, an over-indulgence in the amber nectar has accounted for most of my long-distance escapades. However, you’d be forgiven for thinking that once ‘signed-up’ a life of sober abstinence and training then takes over in attempt to get through the task in some semblance of reasonable shape. And of course you’d be wrong.
The night before my first marathon you’d have found me in a night-club in Stratford. The evening before the Kindrochit Quadrathlon saw me and my erstwhile team partner in such a slurring state that we forgot to surrender our phones to the safety team and consequently, had to swim across Loch Tay’s six-degree water with them concealed about our person! Needless to say, neither ever worked properly again. Mind, neither did the phones. ’24 Mountains in 24 Hours’ saw us holed-up in the bar of Honister Youth Hostel just a couple of hours before the 3.00am start. And what exactly where we expected to do in Godforsaken Workington until midnight before kicking-off our non-stop ‘Coast to Coast Triathlon’?
Therefore, it may come as a surprise, that having not run a step in many years I’ve just signed-up to run Wokingham’s half-marathon, and I’m completely stone-cold sober. The culprit this time around is Chris McDougall. I’ve just re-read his thrilling ‘Born to Run’ account of the hidden tribe of Tarahumara runners and the greatest ultra-race the world has never seen and there was one fact that whetted my appetite for one final foray. McDougall recounts a long-term analysis by a Doctor Bramble of the relative ages and finishing times of New York Marathon runners. What he found was that starting at age nineteen, runners get faster every year until they hit their peak at twenty-seven. And then he asks a question which had my cursor hovering-over the ‘enter now’ button: how old are you when you’re back to running the same speed as you did in the dim & distant past? In other words, how quickly do we lose it?
So, it takes eight years until you run your best time at age twenty-seven. If you get slower at the same rate you became faster, then you’d be back at your nineteen-year-old time by age thirty-six: eight years on the up and eight years on the wane. Now obviously by posing this question there’s a twist to the answer. Runners and sportsmen all refer to ‘putting the miles in the bank’ and holding a level of endurance long after they hang-up their spikes, so what’s the likely age? Forty? Forty-five? No way, Jose. Get this, the answer is sixty-four. Incredibly, it takes forty-five years for a reasonable runner to run the same times he did when he was just 19. There’s something remarkable about us humans in that we’re good at endurance running and good at keeping it for an enduring length of time. It would appear that we don’t stop running because we get old but we get old because we stop running!
Now, my particular downsides are I didn’t start running until I was on the wrong side of forty let alone nineteen and I’ve never displayed anything that could’ve been mistaken for a turn-of-pace. I’m the proverbial diesel as opposed to a peaky two-stroke. My last Half was in 2010 and it was ground out in painful 1.30.10, a PB dontchaknow. With exactly three months to go to the starting-pistol, and with zero miles in the bank, it’s going to be interesting to see if I get anywhere close to this but one thing’s for certain: I suspect it’ll be competed in the usual spirit of beer and belligerence.
