Running London: all 12 South London Boroughs Completed!

I got given the 'Runners's Guide to London' by Hayden Shearman for Christmas, with its promise of  '300 pages, over 120 runs, 100s of photos, 100-odd maps, trails, parks, canals, pathways, athletics tracks, indoor tracks, races, clubs, history, interviews with local legends ... everything RUNNING and LONDON is in this book'.

It's a well-designed book, with full colour photos and maps on every page. But for me the test for a London book is whether its coverage extends to all parts the city, not just the usual tourist areas covered by various types of guide books. In particular, the South East London area where I live is often overlooked in 'London' books other than a brief mention of Greenwich. I'm glad to say that the 'Runners Guide to London' scores very postively on this score, with a decent South East section matching those for all other parts of London, each of which includes a mixture of recommended running hot spots (such as parks, hillls and woods) with longer routes. For South East London for instance the latter includes The Green Chain and The Waterlink Way from Sydenham to Deptford Creek. There is a also a section on the capital's greatest route of all - The Thames Path.  I  recommend this book whether you are a runner living in London, or you're just visiting and want to explore the city on foot - get a copy here.

Run Every Borough Challenge

One idea in the book is the 'Run Every Borough Challenge'. London is divided into 33 local government areas - 32 boroughs plus the City of London. The challenge is simply to 'Find somewhere beautiful  to run in every borough in London', in the process maybe exploring parts of the city that even the born and bred Londoner might not be familiar with.

I quickly worked out that I had run in 16 of the 33 boroughs, including 10 of 12 located south of the River Thames. So today I decided to complete the southern part of the challenge by running in the London Boroughs of Sutton and Kingston.

In the former I went for a four mile run along the River Wandle trail, starting out in Beddington Park.

A bridge over the River Wandle in Beddington Park

In the park, the river feeds a large pond and is also diverted into a narrow stream with some picturesque bridges.

Beddington Park

 I followed the river up as far as the wildfowl-rich Waddon ponds and then headed back.

Waddon Ponds

Afterwards I headed on to Malden in Kingston, where I ran  for a bit along another London river, the Hogsmill. The run was a little disappointing, mainly because what looked on the map like a good route along the river was actually interrupted by the impossible to cross A3 road. Eventually I found a subway but I spent much of the run on suburban streets trying to find a way to the river, and the section I ran had a muddy/slippery path.  But I did my four miles on the streets of Kingston borough, so that's another one on the list. 

The Hogsmill River in Elmbridge Meadows (behind Elmbridge Avenue).

So here's my progress in the Run Every Borough Challenge so far (runs completed in each borough in brackets):

South of the River-

Lambeth  (Streatham Common cross country, Clapham Common 10k, Brockwell Park)

Southwark  (Southwark parkrun, Peckham Rye parkrun, Dulwich parkrun, Burgess parkrun)

Bromley  (Crystal Palace parkrun, start of Assembly League race in Beckenham, Kent Vets XC at Sparrows Den)

Lewisham  (Hilly Fields parkrun, Ladywell track etc)

Wandsworth (Battersea Park Assembly League race)

Greenwich  (Greenwich Peninsula Assembly League race, start of London Marathon)

Croydon (Croydon Half, Farthing Downs cross country)

Richmond (Richmond Park 10k, Surrey League cross country, Bushy parkrun)

Bexley (Sidcup 10 mile)

Merton (Mitcham Common cross country, Wimbledon Common cross country)

Kingston (Hogsmill river)

Sutton (Wandle river run)

North of the River -

City of London  (City of London Mile, London Marathon)

City of Westminster (London Marathon finish, Regents Park 10k)

Tower Hamlets  (Victoria Park Assembly League race)

Hackney (Hackney Marshes 5k)

Newham (ran to Olympic Stadium during canal runs)

Camden (Parliament Hill cross country)

Still to do (all North of the River):

Kensington and Chelsea

Hammersmith and Fulham

Islington

Brent

Ealing

Hounslow

Havering

Barking and Dagenham

Redbridge

Waltham Forest

Haringey

Enfield

Barnet

Harrow

Hillingdon

Clearly going to have to get out to the far east and west across the river. Luckily there's a good google map showing all the boundaries, not to mention some good destinations in The Runners Guide to London.

Running Books: The Ghost Runner - John Tarrant (1932-1975)

'The Ghost Runner: the Tragedy of the Man they Couldn't Stop' by Bill Jones (Mainstream Publishing, 2011) is the story of English runner John Tarrant.  Fundamentally it is the rather sad tale of a talented and (obsessively) committed long distance runner failing to achieve his potential, at least partly because of class, power and bureaucracy. But it is also about a refusal to submit to other people's rules and to keep on running - whatever the cost.

Tarrant, born in Camberwell in 1932, had a tough childhood marked by the death of his mother from TB and years in a brutal children's home during the Second World War. A spell as a teenage boxer in Derbyshire brought little success and a total of £17 prize money - but under the strict rules on amateurism enforced by the Amateur Athletics Association this was enough to prevent him taking part in any mainstream athletics events. These pernicious rules not only banned runners like Tarrant who had earned pocket money in unrelated events as a young person, but also enforced a boycott of people like him by other athletes. Athletes could lose their amateur status if they were found to have taken part in any competition with somebody who wasn't  an ameteur.

Banned from officially taking part in races, Tarrant started turning up anyway and running without a race number.  Gate crashing events like the 1956 Liverpool marathon and the following year's Doncaster-to-Sheffield Marathon led to him being nick-named 'The Ghost Runner' by the press. Official results left out his name -  the AAA didn't recognise him as a runner - but his cause generated lots of supportive publicity.

John Tarrant running without a number

After a couple of years the AAA appeared to back down and allowed him to run in its events - but his hopes of an international career were dashed when they later announced that he was still banned from taking part in events outside of the UK under IAAF rules. Taking up ultra-distance running, John Tarrant set world records at 40 miles (in 1966) and at 100 miles in 1969, running 400 laps of a track at Walton-on-Thames. Tarrant won the Exeter-to-Plymouth 44-mile-race five years in a row from 1965 to 1969, as well as the London-to-Brighton 54-mile race in 1967 and 1968 (running for Salford Harriers). He had expected that winning the latter would lead to him being sponsored to take part in the Comrades Marathon in South Africa,as had happened to previous winners), a 56-mile road race, but the IAAF ban excluded him from this. Tarrant resumed his ghost runner tactics and turned up anyway to run this 56-mile race between Pietermaritzburg and Durban in 1968. He came 4th but once again was expunged from the official record.

Taking part in this event had unexpected consequences. On the day he wasn't the only unofficial runner - there were several black and Indian runners who ran but who were also denied recognition - this was a Whites Only race at the height of Apartheid in South Africa.  Under the Separate Amenities Act, it was illegal for black and white athletes to even share changing rooms and other facilities.

A Natal Runners Association had been formed in the late 1960s to fight the racist exclusion of black athletes from the Comrades race. In 1970 they decided to put on a non-segregated 50 mile race of their own, and to make it a genuinely multi-racial event they needed to attract white runners. In the 1970 Comrades Marathon, 'scores of white runners had worn black armbands in support of the black athletes competing alongside them as numberless ghosts' (Jones), but only one white runner was prepared to actually run in the non-segregated Goldtop race in 1970 - John Tarrant, who finished first that year and the following year.

Tarrant continued running until his death from late-diagnosed cancer in 1975 at the age of 42.

Tarrant (left) after winning the 1968 London to Brighton run, with runner-up T.R.Baker
(see pathe news reel of this race)