'The egotism of a healthy body' & its opposite - injury thoughts

'He ran the course and as he ran he grew.
And smelt his fragrance in the field. Already,
Running he knew the most he ever knew.The egotism of a healthy body'
(Innocence by Thom Gunn)

So there's been a bit of a fuss about Strava's famous heatmap showing people's movements across the globe, including on occasions secret military bases. But for some of us Strava tells another dark story right now -  a black hole of non-activity.

Yes, it's injury time. As I mentioned before, the latter half of 2017 saw me running through a sore achilles and getting progressively slower. So my New Year resolution of seeing a physio (at Back on Track in Catford) has been achieved - with the advice that I should STOP running for at least a few weeks. I've withdrawn from the inaugural London Big Half, despite having a good for age time, and will be missing some of the highlights of the year for me - the closing races of the cross country season including the English National Cross Country Champs at Parliament Hill. 

If running is part of your identity, not running threatens your very sense of self. It's what you do, it's what a lot of your friends do too. Whatever crap is going on in your life, at work or whatever, when you're running something clicks into place - yes, 'The egotism of a healthy body'. So when the body doesn't feel so healthy, the ego takes a bit of a kicking too...

Partly this pain is a case of memento mori - everybody will slow down and eventually stop, in the long run our body, our plans, maybe even our Strava profile will turn to dust or its digital equivalent - so walk (or better, run) in the light while there is light.

But we don't have to beat ourselves up and imagine that each enforced break on our journey is the end. Injury is a sign of our mortality but it does not signify weakness or some kind of failing. Most running related injuries are 'overuse' injuries, the result of pushing our bodies to their limit. The only sure way of avoiding them is to stay on the sofa.

There are very few athletes who haven't had to deal with injuries - it's part of the territory. As Alistair Brownlee explains: 'there is a trade off between the intensity of your training and the odds of you getting injured. Put simply, the harder and more intense your training, the greater the strain you are putting on your body… I could train a bit less, and I’d get less injured, but I wouldn’t be as good. Or I could train as much as I do, take the risk of being injured and be the best I can.… here’s the thing: I’d rather be as good as I can be and maybe have a shorter career through injury, than never know, or cruise. It’s always been about how good I can be. How hard can I push it? How much training can I do, how fast does that make me? I’d prefer to have three or four cracking years of winning stuff than have 10 years of being average' (Swim, Bike, Run: Our Triathlon Story).

Of course  most of us aren't 'winning stuff',  let alone Olympic golds, but we all have our goals and standards and pushing towards them entails running along the edge between optimum training intensity and overdoing it. Unfortunately we generally only know we've crossed over from one to the other when it hurts too much to go on.

I have been greatly inspired by the recovery from injury of some much more talented runners than me in my own club, Kent AC. In the past few weeks Alex Yee, badly injured coming off his bike in triathlon a year ago, won the BUCS cross country champs; John Gilbert won the Southern Cross Country Champs having had a tough year or two; and Alison Thomson was in the top ten parkun times in the UK having been unable to manage a jog this time last year.

Russell Bentley is back running up hills and mountains after slicing his leg open on a rock in a mountain race only last October. He too had his moments of 'experiencing self-doubt. Sense of perspective goes out the window... I can now understand why all those other running bloggers don’t want to blog about it. Your self-worth is questioned, you don’t think anyone will be interested in anything you have to say'. Another Kent AC blogger, Lawerence Avery, was out of action for several months with a stress fracture. As well as obsessively cross training,  'Being injured also made me think about how I might stay part of sport once I’m either too crocked or too old to compete, or what else I could do now alongside competing. I’ve been an obsessive reader about the sport and training methods ever since I started running, so making the leap into coaching was an obvious one'.  Lawrence has taken the England Athletics Coaching Assistant qualification and started coaching others in the club, but he's not done running yet. Good to see him back in action in Surrey League last week, which I went along to watch and cheer rather than run. The course was so narrow in parts that following the action meant running part of the course,at which point I wished I had joined in - but realistically I would have been hobbling by the end of the first lap.

I don't expect to ever be in anything approaching the same form as these guys, even for my age, but it's great to see people getting back to where they were before, or even better, after injury.  I've put on hold any running goals for now, other than getting my parkrun volunteer t-shirt,  while trying to keep fit in the gym and hoping for recovery in time for the summer.

(yes I am aware that the Thom Gunn poem is actually about a youth who grows up to be a nazi soldier - the egotism of a healthy body can end up in some very dark places!)

Greenwich Park Temple of Running

The 37th London Marathon starts this Sunday from Blackheath and the top of the adjoining Greenwich Park, winding its way via Woolwich to run back through Greenwich next to the bottom of the park - all 40,000 of us. 

If you're looking for a bit of inspiration for your run look no further than a site in Greenwich Park itself. Other than a slight mound there's not much to see, but there is helpful sign to tell you what you're looking at: the site of what is now believed to be a Romano-Celtic temple, first discovered in 1902 and re-excavated by archaeologists for Channel 4's Time Team programme in 2000.

So what's all this got to do with running? Well for a start, there's a fragment of a statue found there which is believed to be the arm of the Goddess Diana. It is possible therefore that the temple was dedicated to Diana, the Goddess of the moon, woodlands and the hunt.  Sometimes referred to as 'fleet footed Diana' she was often described as running through the forest with her animals. 

Greenwich Diana fragment

Roman statute of Diana at Versailles
(Roman author Ovid also refers to her as the 'high skirted huntress' on account of her practical running attire)

Like many runners, Diana liked to bathe her feet after a hard day's exertion, a scene featuring in many paintings over the centuries including Titian's 'Diana and Actaeon' (above). In the Roman writer Ovid's version of this legend, this takes place at a pool  where 'the woodland goddess, weary from the hunt, would bathe her virgin limbs' accompanied by her nymphs. Actaeon, also out hunting in the woods, spies the naked Diana and in punishment she turns him into a stag who is chased and killed by his own hounds. Poor Actaeon doesn't realize at first that he has been transformed and he 'took off, marveling at how fast he was running. But when he saw his face and horns in a pool, he tried to say 'Oh no' but no words came' (Stanley Lombardo's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses)

I guess the lesson for runners here is if you find yourself running faster than expected, especially at the start of a marathon, you might regret it!

If  Diana fleet of foot is not enough to get you running, another object found in Greenwich Park  depicts a female figure holding a shield, which the information board states is likely to represent the Roman goddess Victory, probably better known to runners as her Greek equivalent - Nike.

Yes, Greenwich Park is a veritable temple of running and on Sunday thousands of devotees will be celebrating there.

The Lark in the Morning - running over Blow's Downs in Dunstable

'In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken sun, 

O'er which clouds are bright'ning, 

Thou dost float and run; 

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun'

(To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

I went for a run last week at Blow's Downs nature reserve, a hilltop unimproved chalk grassland 'site of special scientific interest' overlooking Dunstable in Bedfordshire. I say overlooking but on this particular morning there was nothing to be seen in all directions but fog, making superfluous the sign at the top pointing out other landmark hills which are normally visible including Luton's Warden Hill (which I wrote about here previously).

If the town was invisible there was the odd trace of nearby urban reality as a reminder, like the carving on this fallen tree...

Blow's Down, at the northern end of the Chiltern Hills, is known for its wildlife with its information board mentioning ring ousels, redstarts and wheatears. I had hoped that I might see something interesting – the day before I had watched a red kite circling over nearby down Dunstable Downs. On this morning though the birds too were hidden in the mist.

But I could still hear their songs - one in particular as a skylark floated overhead uttering its 'silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, in chirrup, whistle, slur and shake' (George Meredith, The Lark Ascending, 1881). Yes the skylark is the poet's favourite bird, and maybe every runner too aspires to 'float and run... like an unbodied joy' as Shelley puts it.  Though while running in limited visibility on uneven ground the runner must not lose themselves too much in ethereal thoughts - there is a steep quarry on the hill, and last year a dog walker broke his leg falling down the slope. 'The lark in the morning she rises from her nest', but s/he never loses sight of the ground.

'Alas! my journey, rugged and uneven,

Through prickly moors or dusty ways must wind;

But hearing thee, or others of thy kind,

As full of gladness and as free of heaven,

I, with my fate contented, will plod on,

And hope for higher raptures, when life’s day is done'

(To a Skylark by William Wordsworth)

The Luton - Dunstable busway runs along the bottom of the downs, a bus only route with a track alongside it that is great for runners and cyclists.

My Strava route of Downs plus busway run

(The Lark in the Morning is of course an Irish folk song, I used to be part of a folk music session that performed it every Sunday afternoon in a pub near Elephant and Castle back in the 1990s)

Running on Screen (10): Stick Man's Christmas Running Adventure

I've done plenty of running over Christmas, including parkruns at Hilly Fields on Christmas Day and at Peckham Rye on Boxing Day (incidentally there's a good article in today's Independent about parkrun, which features Hilly Fields and mentions my friend, chief cheerleader and Kent AC runner John Barron. See How parkrun became a global phenomenon: The free activity that has changed millions of people's lives by Genevieve Roberts).

Obviously there's more to Christmas than running - there's eating, drinking and watching TV to do too! Not too much athletics on TV at the moment, but there was one excellent running programme on British TV. I refer of course to the film version of Julia Donaldson and Axel Sheffler's children's book, Stick Man.

Truly a cautionary tale for runners everywhere, it starts:

'Stick Man lives in the family tree 

With his Stick Lady Love and their stick children three.

One day he wakes early and goes for a jog

Stick man, oh stick man, beware of the dog'

You see Stick Man and family are sentient beings just like you and I, but out in the world they get mistaken for mere lengths of wood. Stick Man suffers the indignity of a dog playing with him, a swan building her nest with him, being thrown into the river as a pooh stick and put on a fire. Worse still the narrator seems to think he is just jogging, when actually it was a threshold run. Will he ever make it back to the family tree? Thankfully (SPOILER ALERT) Santa comes to the rescue. But he could have saved his family a lot of grief if he'd taken his mobile phone with him when he left for a run.

Previously in the Running on Screen series:

Run Lola Run and running Berlin

Walford Half Marathon (Eastenders)

Race Strategy in The (US) Office
Top of the Lake and The Fall
The Running Man (1987)
Muybridge's Runner, 1887

The Casual Vacancy

From Darkness

London Spy

The Running Stitch - running as landscape embroidery? (Robert Macfarlane)

I am really enjoying Robert Macfarlane's 'The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot' (2012), with its evocative descriptions of walks and other journeys, as well as reflections on the act of following a path.

One thing he dwells upon is the relationship between writing and walking (and by implication running too), both of which trace lines and consist of a kind of up/down motion while moving forward:

'As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream' (p.105 in the Penguin edition).

Of course he is not referring here to the kind of stitch you get in your side when running, but the running stitch in embroidery worked by the needle going in and out of the fabric just like my runner's feet going in and out of the mud in cross country this week. I am quite taken with the notion of running as a kind of landscape embroidery, stitching lines across the earth. On tarmac or track these mostly leave no trace, but in muddier conditions the running stitch is a visible line.

Haunts of the Black Masseur

'Haunts of the Black Masseur: the Swimmer as Hero' (1992) is a cultural/literary history of swimming by Charles Sprawson. Its main focus is on writers as swimmers, from the classical period onwards.

For the Romantic poets and those influenced by them, swimming was an embrace of the sublime. Byron considered swimming across the Hellespont in 1810 to be one of his life's greatest achievements, and Edgar Allen Poe was similarly proud of having once swum up the James river against the current. Sprawson compares the Romantic delight in swimming with their fondness for opium,  offering 'self-encapsulation in an isolated world, a morbid self-admiration, an absorption in fantasy':

'The passion for bathing really began with the Romantic generation and 'swim' was a word that particularly appealed to poets… The word suggests a state of suspension, a trance-like condition . .. Like the opium addicts of the nineteenth century analysed by Alathea Hayter, these swimmers felt themselves to be pariahs, elect outcasts, insulated from their fellow men. They too often  experienced through their swims the classic constituents of an opium dream: "the feeling of blissful buoyancy, the extension of time, contrasts of temperature, the bliss of the outcast."  .. Swimming, like opium, can cause a sense of detachment from ordinary life. Memories, especially those of childhood, can be evoked with startling strength and in vivid and precise detail'.

There was also a sexual element - Paul Valery referred to swimming as 'fornication avec l'onde' and wrote: 'I discover and recognise myself when I return to this universal element. My body becomes the direct instrument of my mind, the author of its ideas. To plunge into water, to move one's whole body, from head to toe, in its wild and graceful beauty; to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love'.

Sprawson provides some useful social history too, reminding us that while there may always have been people who swam, swimming as a sport with its own dedicated spaces is a more recent development. The rise  in  popular swimming in Britain was linked with the fashion for bathing at sea resorts from late 18th century, with the first organised races seemingly organised in the 1830s. The first indoor public pools to be built in Britain since Roman times were likewise built in the 19th century.

Styles of swimming have also changed over time. The breaststroke was dominant in English swimming in the first half of the 19th century and Sprawson tells us that  'Frogs were kept in tubs by the sides of pools as a means of instruction'.  The later rise of overarm swimming was influenced by Native American swimming styles, through the medium of such swimmers as Flying Gull and Tobacco who raced the English swimming champion Kenworthy in 1845 'and amazed Londoners with their over-arm windmill stroke'.