Race to the Stones 2019

At the start line for Day 2 of Race to the Stones

The Race to the Stones course is much more uneven than I had imagined, in just about every possible way. My trail running in Swinley Forest and daily wobble-board exercises took me a long way, but not quite as far as I would have liked, in terms of how much actual running I achieved. By the time I'd reached marathon distance (42.4 km) I was pretty much in full walk mode. In total I probably walked about 10km out of the 50.

You had a mix of grassy trails eroded into multiple levels of path of various widths and heights, hard chalky/clayey mud roads that had dried into multiple ruts, and only one quite small section of actual road, just before the biggest hill on the course. In the forward direction, there was very little even ground, most of the time being spent on an uphill or a downhill (and sometimes the gradient and narrowness of the path could be a bit extreme).

My memories of this race will be: the early start and drive up from Wantage to an almost empty (5 other runners starting off at 5:28 am) venue; the incredible beauty of the landscapes surrounding the course; running for the first 3-4 hours pretty much completely on my own to listen to the birds, smell the earth and vegetation/flowers, and only occasionally hear the footfalls of someone overtaking me. 

The 4 checkpoints I passed in my morning of running (I finished in just under 5hours 30mins) came and went in incredibly rapid succession. I messaged my wife Diane as I approached each one, and barely stopped (I didn't stop at the first, and it was still so early there was no-one there anyway). My total intake from those stops was: 4 bananas, 1 gel, and 2 bottle refills (once orange drink and once water).

After the fourth pit-stop it became a different race for me, not only because I started encountering a lot walkers who had been going all night, but also because I was now also mostly walking myself. My left leg from hip to knee started announcing its pain/presence. I wouldn't go as far as to say injury, but had I really pushed myself it probably would have ended up that way.

I finished uninjured in part because I forced myself to listen to my body (like that Kenyan marathon runner Finn tried to get to run ultras in his Ultra-Runners book). I mentally went over what I'd learned from my running reading, mostly thinking about Finn's The Rise of the Ultra-Runners and Hutchinson's Endure. Finn talks about the 'pain cave', and I had a little pain cave talk with myself, saying "you can go there if and when it hits". Well, this was naive of me. In short, there's no pain cave, only pain, especially towards the end.

At the finish line

I did not find myself bounding down hills after 45km because I'd turned off (I hadn't) what the central governor in my brain was telling me (the theory expounded by both Hutchinson and Finn). In retrospect I'll train a bit differently, and do more long runs on hilly trails. There will be a next time, because I'm signing up for next year, both days. I decided that as I was nudging towards the start line this morning.  

Forest Five

This is my second 'official' run with my new club, the Bracknell Forest Runners (BFR). My first was a 5k handicap a few weeks ago, and that had been the first time I'd ever run a timed 5k.

Both went well. The previous 5k had been a PB by definition because it was a first.

The Forest Five, which I ran last night, was also a PB. This came only two days after my final run last weekend with my old running club at Endure24.



Here I am in my new club running shirt, having just completed the race and the run back home.  Here's how it went:

We all met at The Lookout, which is where I've also started three previous Sunday runs with the BFRs, usually doing the 8:30 or 9 min/mile options with some seasoned BFR trail runners.  Last night was a bit of a different feeling because members of several different clubs were present, this being a proper race.  I'd guess at least a couple of hundred people were there to race.

GPS ankle bracelets strapped on, and numbers pinned, we walked out into the forest, along those 'little' hills that characterised the end of the handicap race I mentioned above, hitting the start line at the crest of maybe the third one.

Just a small intimate gathering of runners chatting very socially, this was a really relaxing way to start a race. My previous experience with similar sized races had been my Surrey League XC competitions the previous year, in which (as I explained to another BFR Forest Five racer at the Start Line with me) the mood had been much more aggressive and pushy.

This is a really nice change for me and I anticipated a very chilled out race start, regardless of how things might go later. They set up the GPS tracking strips beneath the start line and within minutes I heard the countdown start. The more competitive runners moved forward and lined up.

We surged en masse along the forest road and after the first mile I started passing people.  This continued for me all the way to the finish line.  I was passed once, right at the very end.  Here's a Strava map of my race:



The tracks we ran along were quite varied, and as it had just rained about an hour previously, there was a nice sloppy feeling underfoot to make just that bit much more fun. I passed people along narrow single-track strips, smacking the broom and the pine with my arms and face just to get a little extra 'scrub' from the forest.  It's like I was communing with it.

It never felt forced, and this felt like my easiest PB ever.  I think having done a near (but much more challenging) PB at Endure must have helped.

We came down a long sandy section, and another long gravelly one, and then we hit the final downhill stride, and I started on a sub-6 mile pace down to the end.  It felt like flying.  I passed that one guy, and then he passed me, and then it was all over.

My medal flashed passed and I grabbed as I rapidly decelerated.  A goodie bag, a banana, and a fun chat about my upcoming Race to the Stones (with an outside racer who is doing the Tower in the same series) ensued.

I started my watch again after a little walk, and ran home to show my wife my new medal.

Endure 24 2019

[Note: Since signing up for Endure 2019 back in the autumn of 2018 we've moved to Bracknell permanently and I now run with Bracknell Forest Runners. In my next race, Race to the Stones, and in subsequent races, I'll be sporting the BFR running shirt/logo.]

***

I ate a lot, I ran a lot, I slept very little.

It was Endure 24 again, and I was composing stories in my head to keep myself awake at 2am. The faint coals of a neglected fire pulsed and glowed in the empty ring of camp chairs.  I pulled myself out of my tent where I had been nestled, fully clothed in hoodie, running gear, trousers and jacket under my sleeping bag and extra blanket.  A thin rain was just starting to spit.  My fifth run was coming up.

Unzipping the tent fly my legs trembled and I stumbled to get up to standing position. An unshakeable stiffness, my left calf and ankle making themselves known, my right hamstring announcing its presence, but none of it anything like an oncoming injury.  Just the evidence of the four runs that had come before.  I'd done each of them in under 40 minutes, with a round 1 time of 34:59.

But this second upcoming night run would be interesting.  I had a moonset and a pre-sunrise to accompany, and sounds of the very first birds waking followed me round the hills, the mud, the Rock & Roll cabin, past the Red Bull refreshment stand, up Heartbreak Hill, across the glow in the dark roots and fairy spirals, down the slippery hill and around.

At the end of each 5 mile lap is a handover spot where you give a small plastic wristband to your team-mate for them to continue accumulating laps for your team. It doesn't stop: there's always a member of your team running.  This year, with a 5-man (I now run with Bracknell Forest Runners, but signed up for the race back in 2018 when I still lived in Egham, see the note at the start of this post) team we managed 35 laps averaging 42 minutes each.

Walking into camp just after 4am I placed a long inflatable tiger outside the next-plus-one runner's tent door and quite audibly announced that I had returned and that his delivery was ready for his own handoff in about 35 minutes.

My second night run, and my fifth lap overall, took me 52 minutes, a big jump from my previous set of under 40s.  The hour nap I'd had had done something to my legs, making them stiff and leaden.

The sunrise came, not brightly, but with a hint of a beam now and then.  I caught rain showers through both of my final two runs, but it rained very little when I was at camp.  The sensation of running through the forest, with water streaming across your body, ensconced in a stream of fellow runners, with mud splatting the backs of your legs and gravel crunching around corners and through hills is pretty amazing.

Once you get your head of steam it's hard to stop.  I even started walking up the hills, getting a little more feedback from the runners in my immediate vicinity.  There is a serendipity, an element of chance to the aspect of with whom you'll find yourself running at any given moment.  A glance, a sign, a slight movement left or right gives acknowledgement of the other's presence, that you're giving way, or that you want to push through.

That's what characterised my first four rounds, was passing pretty much every single person on my horizon. It was an empowering feeling, smashing the speed barrier, whooshing down hills without holding back, only being passed a total of four times in four laps.

Then the final three, being passed in turn by at least as many as I passed, seeing that urgency amassed in all those competitive bodies hoping their own team will move up in the rankings.

We finished twelfth overall, out of 52 teams (see http://www.chipresults.co.uk/live24/index.aspx?cat=3M&eventId=30 ). This despite my own sense of dragging at the end. Maybe it was the two bacon/egg rolls; tub of yogurt; massive hamburger; tuna/pasta salad; half-liter of kefir; four Lucozades; and countless other small bits of food that contributed to the later sluggishness: I actually gained weight by the end of the weekend. In this respect I think it's quite different from running a marathon: you have loads of time to eat and recuperate.

But mentally, in some ways it's much harder than a marathon because you have time to stop and think, to get down, to question yourself and not want to do it.  This is what makes doing more than five laps a tiny bit 'ultra'. And it's why, in my opinion, walking can be much more part of the equation in a good performance than in a marathon (though of course walking in a marathon is perfectly fine too).  It's just that in an ultra you kind of have to factor in a bit of walking, even if it's just a small amount.

It's done for another year. How soon we forget the pain, the boredom, the indigestion.  How vividly the people, the camaraderie, the sun and moon did (and still do) shine.

Brighton Marathon 2019

I did only two very long training sessions to prepare for Brighton. One was a 16 mile walk (4 hours) and the other a 30 km run-walk that included 3min30sec runs with 30sec recoveries (x45). I did an early 1/2 marathon training run in February after which I was too injured to run for three weeks; and another one in early April after I'd recovered (and after those longer training runs mentioned above). Overall, I had only two weeks above 30 miles during the 3 months of training prior to April 14, 2019.

The struggle this time was to get to the start line, but when I did get there I was only slightly undertrained (it had been an intense season, Surrey League XC to be sure so I was still fit); was, crucially, uninjured; and I was very well rested and confident. This much I have learned about training and marathons to arrive in this state, at the Brighton start line in 2019.

At 9:20am I sidled up the Yellow holding pen to the front near the big screen and loudspeakers. I bobbed my head to Queen along with images of Wayne & Garth as the emcee very successfully got the increasing numbers of arriving runner very thoroughly pumped up on a cold Brighton morning.

In the Red pen (3:30-4hrs) next to us (here in the 4-4:30hrs pen), I saw one of the pacers I'd met the day before in the event village, and with whom I'd had a brief discussion about what to wear for the race (thin long sleeve shirt and shorts) but, to my chagrin, he was in a faster lane than the one I'd signed up for.  I watched as the 4hr pacers (there were four of them) bobbed away ahead out of sight, the Red pen having been let go about ten minutes before us.  Still, I figured I could catch them without subjecting my marathon to a disastrous "too fast" start.

I managed to catch them 5 miles or so later, once we'd wound around the city centre for a while and come out on the long grassy/beachy section on the coastal part just to the east of town. From here I stuck fast to the pacers until the final five miles.  And it felt like a race because of the constant jockeying for position, the pylons, the slowing runners emerging ahead of us who, when sighting the red 4hr pacer balloon might briefly rally but then slow, holding the steady-pacers back if they didn't push past.  

The field was crowded for its entirety, with a constant cluster of paced runners hanging out behind those red balloons. For a while that big red ball was bouncing off my head in the constant and shifting wind off the coast, a wind that funnelled up the city sections through which we threaded our paths on the western segments in the latter half of the race.

I kept my pace steady from 5 to 21 miles, constant as clockwork, not even thinking about the act, about what my feet were doing through that whole long middle section.  I was on auto-pilot, taking in the sights, and enjoying the ride my feet and legs were giving me, almost like they belonged to someone else, to a machine that was pushing me around of its own accord.

The final five miles were hard, but not as hard as you might think. I turned the final corner, and saw three of my fellow-paced running companions (as I'd come to think of these strangers, now oddly familiar, running beside me) up ahead of the red balloons, and I decided to follow them, to pick up the pace.  About a half dozen of us broke ranks and surged forward, each on our own individual initiative and accord, into the very cool and not insignificant buffeting headwind of the home stretch along Brighton beach. It was, as our pacer had said just moments before (he was otherwise not chatty) "the shortest way home".

We surged again significantly into that wind, way down below sub-9min/mile pace, onward to the finish line, the absolutely manic cheering spectators helping dispel fatigue on the final push. 

Here's what worked  so well overall for me to achieve a time with which I'm very happy (3:54:35, a PB):

1 I actually used a mantra along the home stretch: "fatigue is a state of mind", was what I said to myself over and over running towards the dual beacons of the Brighton i360 tower and the pier. It helped a lot.

2 I held my achieved mile/km count in mind as a positive, and never allowed myself to dwell on the time remaining. So, after 15km I thought of that number; after 20miles I held that in mind (not the amount remaining). After the start of the race, I always had less than a marathon to actually run -- this made a big psychological difference.

3 The temperature was a big factor, and what I wore in relation to it. I almost wore pocketless running tights, but switched on the morning. I know now that I would've been hotter and less well-organised had I gone with those. The gloves I wore I only took off after 15 miles, and probably should've put them back on again in the last five but didn't. I was comfortably cool the whole way around, never feeling any extreme of hot or cold. It was ideal.

4 Nutrition is a factor I handled really well. I started getting low blood sugar right away, in the first mile, and drank a whole bottle of Lucozade in the first five miles just to keep the tingling out of my fingers. I'd had a relatively small breakfast of four oatmeal packets with nuts in  the hotel room along with a pre-race granola bar. I staved off hypoglycaemia by eating almost constantly the whole way round: in total, 2 Lucozade; 9 jelly babies; 1 Stoats granola bar; 1 Trek granola bar; 1 Zero get provided by the race; and for hydration I also took advantage of water and/or energy drink stations at least 5 times. I came around the final cold bend on the beach energised in my core and in my legs.

"Fatigue is a state of mind" indeed. Thinking/saying this, visualising, eating, and staying positive, all these things, and the great companionship of my running club (Runnymede Runners), my wife Diane, and the cheering crowds of Brighton itself, got me around to the finish line.

Self-tracking and Science Fiction

"'The data becomes a "prosthetic of feeling," something to help us sense our bodies or the world around us. These senses can become uncannily reliable.' @ginasue ([Neff and Nafus,] 2016, page 75). I use a Garmin watch but rarely look at it during a run. My body takes over from the watch quickly now"

"As my senses become uncannily reliable I find, also, that I can start to depend upon the reliability of the uncanny as well...subtle hallucinations in the landscape & ghosts of past runs/ruins"

(@gwilymeades tweets, February 15th and 19th, 2019, respectively)

My twitter profile picture

I've been using my GPS watch, and its function of being able to map and track my running, as a way of generating science-fictional and uncanny outcomes.  Aside from the fact that I do occasionally experience very brief hallucinations when I'm on an especially long run, this might seem a bit of a stretch. It seemed that way to me too, for a time.

I've since come around, and am now a firm believer in the power of GPS to produce what Suvin might have called 'cognitive estrangement'.  I did a bit of a 'lit. review' in the area just to see what titles I could come up with related to the search term "science fiction and running". The top hit was Walker's End of the World Running Club, which has a (possibly apocryphal) tweet-review by Stephen King.

Actually, it is interesting that King is, himself, a dedicated walker/runner, but it's not entirely clear if that has affected King's fiction beyond possibly making it more consistent or somehow more clearly motivated.

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King of course tells the true story of how he was struck and almost killed by a vehicle while he was out on one of his long walks; about his ideas around writing-as-telepathy (an idea that clearly, for King, has a firm grounding in belief aided by evidence from his own strong sense and ability in the power of writing to communicate); and his (pretty clearly not-apocryphal) observation that he does not remember writing Cujo on account of excessive alcohol- and cocaine-ingestion during the writing process.

Aside from being related clearly to my previous post "On Running Addiction," these observations on King's own senses of the uncanny in walking/running/writing, there's a parallel between the ways in which both SF and running 're-wire' the brains of its participants. Suvin, a Marxist, realized the revolutionary potential of this fact, in relation to science fiction (and not, of course, running).

But actually I think you can take any activity, performed obsessively, and find claims in relation to improvement of mental health. Take knitting, for example.  There are whole books dedicated to how the physical, repetitive, activity related to knitting, and the counting of rows and knots, 're-wires' the brain of the knitter to improve their sense of health and well-being.  (I am also a knitter, by the way).

But I think Suvin was really onto something and, philosophically at least, he gathered a good deal of academic and 'cognitive' evidence to back up his claims around the transformative power of SF. Technology has the power, after all, to structurally re-classify our senses of (well-)being. It can change whole orders of social spatiality with implications for class and senses of empowerment.

The era of self-tracking, evidenced by the rise of fitbits, watches (e.g. Garmin or Apple), and mobile apps that track our every movement, footstep, and trace, is taking us, in the digital age, well-beyond what earlier 'technologies' were able to do, and not necessarily in a good way.

I am part of a class of 'elite' that can not only afford a Garmin watch, but I also have so much extra time and energy, that I freely burn a great deal of 'extra-curricular' energy beyond what the necessaries of what my job entails.  I don't stack bricks for a living, I stack ideas, and beyond communicating those ideas to large lecture halls, my job mostly involves sitting at a desk.

Cognitively, then, I am part of a class that is privileged enough to be able to experience cognitive estrangement to the point of hallucination.  Reading science fiction often has the same effect.  It makes me see the world in such a radically different way that there is an order of magnitude of difference (at least) between the way I saw the world yesterday before reading, for example, Solaris, and the way I now see the world having experienced that deeply unsettling work.

Lem's work was the starting point, the fundamental turning or Archimedean punctum, around which much of Suvin's discussion of science fiction revolved. He went as far as to argue that the novum of Solaris represents a kind of zero-degree, or absolute-zero, starting point for the genre, the literary equivalent of 0 degrees Kelvin or absolute zero. In other words, the innovation of Solaris is so fundamental to, and so fundamentally changed, the genre that everything thereafter could not help but be in some way defined by it.

We are in a somewhat similar situation with both King (as writers) and with the 'Garmin' watch (here standing in for all self-tracking GPS-watches). Our activity is so fundamentally different after the introduction of the key innovation that there is no going back.

With surveillance capitalism this is a scary fact. I am positing here that one way of resisting 'capture' by corporations that benefit in both an Orwellian and a more liquid sense from the free-harvest of our individual and collective data-exhaust is through the use of counter-mapping and more subjective auto-carto-ethnographic (self-mapping-writing) techniques.

By this I mean mapping ourselves across the expected and inscribed boundaries of power through the transgression of that expectation and boundedness.  I want to promote unbounded senses of estrangement through the production of spatial hybridities and mobilities that are enabled by seemingly obsessive-addictive activities as running and science fiction (and why not, knitting!).

This is not (just) a justification for my continued use of Strava, cross-linked to other social media platforms like twitter, facebook, and instagram. If it's about self-promotion, then self-promote outside of your comfort zone, into the event-horizons of the unknown.

There were several weeks in a row where I was writing a science fiction story while a ran. I was structuring the story loosely upon Markson's book Wittgenstein's Mistress, imagining myself to be the last person on earth as I made my way north towards Datchet Bridge along the Thames.  The quality of light and burnt-autumn vegetation spiked into my imagination, and I invented new terms, new species of being in my head.  It is a meditation on solitude, mental health, and language.

It is also a meditation on moving through to new phases of experimentation, on being constantly on the move, both physically and cognivitely, and of finding new kinds of productive estrangement in that fact.

References:

Neff, Gina and Nafus, Dawn. 2016. Self-Tracking. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.

On running addiction

Running addiction means that even though I'm injured I feel compelled to push myself to run. The injury itself is a result of overtraining, one symptom of running addiction. Running addiction is not itself, however, an injury (like runner's knee, from which I currently suffer). It is a state of mind.

What is it like to be addicted to running (subjectively speaking)? Running is obviously doing something for me and, whatever that something is, I want more of it. More fitness, more PBs, more positive feedback, more miles, more Strava maps...these are all great things.

But I also want more: endorphins, seratonin, endo-cannabinoids, and whatever other kind of chemical constituents of the runner's high I can lay my hands on.

There are internal and external motivating factors as well. Why do I run? Internally, it makes me happy. The running is itself the goal, not the time or the distance. It is the running no matter the weather, rain or shine, no matter who is with me, alone or in a group. It's all fine.

Actually, the social group runs have really been motivating because they're often surprising. For example I'll learn things about people and what makes them run, their backgrounds, where they're from.

Another thing that has been happening lately is I'll surprise myself by running with people who are a lot faster than me. The surprise comes when I actually keep up with them for a considerable period of time. You reset your sense of possibility to a higher level when that happens. And you really get the runner's high then too (like a hit of all those brain chemicals all at once, buoyed up in a sea of sociality).

External motivating factors are the PBs and the numbers, how fast I ran and for how long. Strava enables a lot of the externality of running, of the goal-driven, social media side of it. Strava is unique for a site of its type, not at all like twitter or instagram because it is based on achievement. Everyone who posts has achieved something, great or small, it really doesn't matter.

Strava feeds the addiction, but so do medals, and times, and gear. I love getting a new pair of trainers knowing that if I run a lot a new pair is closer to being mine. I recently purchased an all-weather waterproof running jacket, rationalising that it's winter, and that I'd had a bad run a few weeks back in wind and driving rain. In this way 'want' becomes 'need' the more you run.

But there's something more to it, and I can't quite put my finger on it.

Why did I run 58 miles two weeks ago? Why have I signed up for four marathons in the space of just over one year? Why do I run to the point of injury?

Part of the answer is selfishness. But this is not the whole answer. I am selfish about running, sometimes. I run when perhaps I don't always need to, to make the time mine. It is inviolable time, no matter what happens. And then sometimes, too, when I'm injured, only then do I feel like I've earned a rest.

It's caught up in trying to prove that I'm working hard enough, and this is clearly related to other aspects of my life. The fact that I run has a tangible, and often a very positive, effect upon my career and sense of confidence outside the actual run.

Running has a knock-on effect into other aspects of life. It drives an energy wedge into things, and dispels hesitation, low self-esteem, and other confidence-destroying things. If you can smash your PBs in running, you can smash them in your job, your relationships, and in your relationships with time (and space) and money too.

After all, running is essentially free. There are very few startup fees, and only small barriers to entry. And you can build up both your body and your gear over a span of years. It doesn't have to happen all at once.

Conclusion: I'm addicted, but (mostly) in a good way. I'll keep monitoring myself, and reflecting on when I'm running for the right reasons or, conversely, when I'm pushing myself too hard.

For the time being (and for the foreseeable future), however, I'm really enjoying my addiction.

On injury and writing

What's the connection between injury and writing?

Here's a little backstory: Yesterday, at the Surrey Men's League race at Epsom Downs, I fell down on my right knee (and then all the way down) while taking a hard right turn about a quarter of the way through the race. It was muddy and slippery, and I was wearing road shoes, and I took that turn WAY too fast. I already had a niggle in that knee too (probably a mix of ITB and runner's knee).

That race yesterday was a victory, despite the price I paid in injury. It was my fastest pace so far, at 7:16 per mile over 4.9 miles, beating my previous 7:18 pace at Croydon, for a Surrey Men's League race. A PB of sorts if you will, even if the uneven, rough, technical terrain held me to my third best 5k time. It was a great day, guts and glory, mud, blood, etc. The Epsom Downs site is beautiful, and the mixture of sun/rain with bursts of light and thunder booming through the cloud-curtains and bulbous rain cumulus was quite spectacular. This, with excellent moral support from fellow runners and the crowds.

(here's a link to the run on Strava)

The long and the short of it, though, is: I'm injured. Now, this is not as depressing as when you find yourself injured for the very first time. Now you know your running career is not over. But you also know, once you're ready to actually admit that you're injured, is that you have to give yourself enough time to recover. This is easier said than done, especially if you're just a little bit addicted to running like I am.

What's the best way through this impasse? How do you force yourself to give yourself enough time? By which I mean, absolutely not running for two weeks or more so that you can achieve a full recovery? My strategy is twofold. I cross-train and I read/write. This blog post is a case in point. The fact that I'm writing it means I'm coming to terms with my injury, that I'm NOT running, and therefore that I'm getting just that little bit better.

You have to keep this going somehow. Last time I was injured, after the Endure24 race in Reading, I started using my bicycle a lot. Two things about the bicycle: you have to ride a LOT and HARD to get anywhere near the return that you do from running (like 20 miles minimum). The second thing is that if I do in fact ride a lot and hard, I find that bicycling gives me hemorrhoids. I'd rather run a marathon with full-bore ITB than sit for one single hour on my ass with a hemorrhoid. They're horrible.

I do yoga and pilates with weights for strength and mobility. This never fails me, and I know for certain that I will always have this practice to fall back on. The other thing I know I will always have is reading, and reading always precedes writing. Both (well, all three, yoga, reading, and writing) are an excellent way to spend time while you're injured.

Here's a list of what I've been reading, and what I'm planning on reading (through injury and beyond):

1 Stephen King, On Writing
This book is very straightforward to read, and it is full of excellent advice. The brilliant thing about it is that it is told as a story, making it compulsively readable, a lot like King's novels. It packs in much of the standard advice about how to write but in a way that makes you feel like you are being swept along in an adventure. You come out of it wanting to write, and there's a harrowing personal story of injury as an appendix. An absolute must-read.

2 Timothy Noakes, Lore of Running
I've mentioned this book a couple of times in the past when I was part way through it. The truth is, this is many books in one. It is the foundation of knowledge for runners, even if it can be improved upon in each of its parts elsewhere, the base of evidence utilised here, and the breadth of knowledge produced is truly astounding. I have found that this book re-pays a close reading of its details, especially around running strategy at different distances, on how individual elite runners have approached training, on how this is applicable for everyday and amateur runners; how not to overtrain; what to do when you do overtrain; the psychology of running addiction and injury; how to avoid becoming a selfish runner; stretches, grids, medical advice, the lowdown on de-hydration v hyponatremia, etc etc etc. There is so much in here to assimilate, it is beyond what one might call a runner's bible. It is a runner's garage, toolbox, and clinic, all in one.

3 Adharanand Finn, The Way of the Runner
I read this first, before the seemingly more popular Running With the Kenyans, because it really really intrigued me. First, I just wanted to know what IS the way of the runner, and once I got sucked in, I found myself just fascinated by the levels of support Japanese corporate and popular culture find themselves willing to provide (even if the running itself is often very grim and repetitive, this just increases the fascination for me). Finn is an excellent writer, very straightforward, to the point that you find his book ending all too soon. He also makes it compelling despite multiple failures to connect with his Japanese hosts, and I know first-hand from my own experiences doing ethnographic fieldwork how hard it can be to keep moving forward when things fall down like this. It is inspiring at multiple levels, and worth multiple reads.

4 Richard Askwith, Today We Die a Little: Zatopek, Olympic Legend to Cold War Hero
This book seems to occur in two parts. First we have the part where Zatopek is young and training hard. Zatopek seems to have invented the idea that speed-training is the most important aspect of training for ANY length of race. He took this philosophy to extremes, in terms of the number and speed of repetitions he undertook to run, doing the standard 400 and 800m segments at a variety of speeds, but most crucially, at absolute TOP speed. He broke all the shorter distance records very quickly, but then he won the Olympic Gold Medal in the very first marathon he ever ran. It was the speed-work that did it. The second part of the book is about his decline. As Noakes has noted (see above), hard years of training over a runner's lifetime can take their toll at the end of that life. Zatopek's wife, a javelin-throwing Olympic medallist, for example, looked ten years younger than him in her final decade, and they were born on the same day.

5 Scott Jurek, Eat & Run
This book will get you thinking about ultras, if not just in theory, then in practice too. One of the first things you notice is that it is a VEGAN cookbook, and that Jurek, one of the top ultra-running racers of all time has this amazingly healthy diet that is like rocket fuel to his running. He also references a great deal of other literature, and subscribes to Noakes's 'central governor' theory, whereby it is the brain that controls how fast and how far we can run. Training resets that central governor to higher levels allowing for greater and greater levels of performance. Having a healthy and well-thought-through diet doesn't hurt at all either. Find inspiration and fortitude in this memoir of a life in running.

6 Chris McDougall, Born to Run
This is the one that started me on my reading about running journey. It will get you thinking about why we run, and why we run in the ways that we do, with good dollops of history, anthropology, and riveting descriptions of and stories about real races run, mostly of the 'ultra' type, with star appearances by some of the top runners in the world, but almost always, here, in quite obscure locations in both the US and Mexico. This is the story of the world's greatest runners, and about what they eat (beans and corn), and what they wear on their feet. Read it!

Next on my reading pile:
-Adharanand Finn, Running with the Kenyans (can't wait to read it)
-Christopher McDougall, Natural Born Heroes
-Anna McNuff, The Pants of Perspective (A woman who runs 3,000 miles across New Zealand)
-Adrian J Walker, The End of the World Running Club (science fiction about running).

Conclusion: I have lots to do to keep me busy while I'm recovering from that injury!