National Cross Country 2016 at Donington Park

An extremely belated report on the Nationals....

This year's English National Cross Country Championships were held at Donington Park on 27 February, and a big group of us from Kent AC travelled up by train from London St Pancras to Derby (the nearest station) to take part.

 The course was bounded by the motor racing track on one side and East Midlands airport on the other, so between the sounds of fast cars and faster airplanes there was plenty of speedy inspiration for the runners as they accelerated from the start across a downward sloping field. 

 

The start of the senior women's race



 The next part of the course was pleasant enough, with nothing more hazardous than turnip roots to worry about underfoot and a great downhill charge along the edge of said turnip field followed by a hairpin bend.

Conditions were dry and if the next section was uphill it was on a grassy slope with a fine view of Donington Hall - a grand 18th century building that has served variously as a camp for prisoners of war (1914-18) and Hungarian refugees (after the Second World War).

Aldershot's Ellis Cross on his way to victory in the Junior Men's race and with more on his mind than 18th century architecture

 

I'd run this far on the warm up so had no real concerns as I approached the next section, sure there would be more hills but none of the wet, swampy mud familiar from Parliament Hill Fields last year (or indeed this year at the Southern XC champs). But oh...  Leicestershire had its own kind of killer mud waiting for the cocky runners on the second half of the lap. Not ankle deep in water maybe, but a thick sticky mud that was soul destroying over the three laps of the men's race. The course was officially 12k long, but my garmin showed another 700m as like many others I tried to run around rather than through some of the heaviest patches.  

 

I was one of 1730 runners from more than 300 clubs taking part in the men's senior race, which was won by Aldershot's Jonny Hay. Morpeth Harriers won the men's team trophy.  Hay's club mate Lily Partridge won the women's championships for the second year running (and she can run), with Aldershot, Farnham and District AC also winning the women's team competition.

 

Kent AC had a pretty good day out - coming 10th in the men's competition and 17th in the women's.  As for me, my 1424th position was nothing to write home about, but last year I was 1745th! OK it was a larger field in London in 2015, but even accounting for that I finished in the 83rd percentile rather than the 87th... I'll take it.

Castle Donington is known for its music festivals as well as its racing, and while the national cross country champs is not exactly Monsters of Rock there was, as always at these big races,  something of the carnivalesque with tents, flags and food stalls. Highgate Harriers even had a little sound system in their marquee, from which I heard Jagwar Ma's Uncertainty drifting across as I warmed up.  Its chorus of  'How can you, how can you look so gloomy?' would have found a ready answer: just look at these muddy hills.

 

 

 

 

(photos by me except the downhill hairpin - found it on facebook and can't remember where, let me know if you took it and I will credit accordingly)

Running with bluebells and other fat burning adventures

I have been doing some very slow running recently, experimenting with running at 'fat burning threshold' using  Phil Maffetone's '180 formula' to calculate optimal heart rate to promote the body's use of fat for fuel. Basically having established this heart rate you use a heart rate monitor and try and keep within it. If your heart rate exceeds this threshold you're supposed to slow down to bring it back down.  Painfully slow, I ended up on something like 12 minute miles. Not totally convinced of the benefits, but interesting running to heart rate rather than the clock.

One advantage is that you have plenty of time to admire the scenery, which at this time means bluebells. Bluebells in Dulwich Wood, which I took in during a run that also included Belair Park and Dulwich Park:

Dulwich Wood bluebells

Bluebells in Nunhead Cemetery (see previous post on running there):

Of the thousands of graves there only a handful have bluebells growing on them, one of life's mysteries... must be something to do with the bluebell fairies!

One of the numerous flower fairies painted by Cicely Mary Baker
- she lived in Croydon incidentally so maybe this is also a South London bluebell!

Bluebells in Kent, in Scathes Wood at Ightam Mote near Sevenoaks (OK I was actually walking there rather than running).

Running on Screen (14): The A Word, Undercover and How to Stay Young

Lots of running in current BBC series...

 

The A Word

 

The A Word is an excellent drama about the impact of a child's ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) diagnosis on his family. His grandfather, played by sometime Dr Who Christopher Eccleston, is a fell runner seen charging up and down the hills of the Lake District - and berating a fellow runner for going 'hill soft' from spending too long in London. Eccleston is pretty fit in real life, I believe he's run the London Marathon at least four times.

 

 

Undercover

 

Undercover stars Adrian Lester as an ex-undercover policeman who ended up marrying the woman he was spying on. Complicated... He seems to be getting his headspace through triathlon training - episode one had him practicing transitions in the back yard, and taking an early morning swim at Parliament Hill Lido at a time when it just happened to be empty. In Episode Two he goes for a run up to the Alexandra Palace in north London.

 

 

 

How to Stay Young

 

How to Stay Young, as the title suggests, is a documentary series about the science of ageing. Some interesting stuff in the first episode - e.g. exercise is good for you, but maybe dancing might be better than going to the gym. Anyway there's a scene of presenter Dr Chris van Tulleken going for a run in a cemetery - and it looks very like my local Nunhead Cemetery (see previous post on running there)

 

 

 

Previously in the Running on Screen series:

 

 

Running to David Bowie - Frances Ha/Mauvais Sang

Stick Man's Christmas Running Adventure

Run Lola Run and running Berlin

Walford Half Marathon (Eastenders)

A Running Row in Eastenders

Race Strategy in The (US) Office

Top of the Lake and The Fall
China Crisis - Wishful Thinking
The Running Man (1987)
Muybridge's Runner, 1887

The Casual Vacancy

From Darkness

London Spy

In search of the River Clyde

So you turn up somewhere new, and the first thing you do is look on a map to find a good run. And hey it looks like one of the great rivers of the world is really close so that's sorted. But then you try and find it and it's not quite so simple...

Last week I was in Glasgow staying for the first time at the Glasgow East/Black Bear Premier Inn, close to the Daldowie crematorium where I was attending a family funeral. On Google Maps the mighty River Clyde was shown just a short distance away - central to Glasgow's history as the home of its shipbuilding industry and on whose banks my father once worked as an apprentice at the Alexander Stephens shipyard. My idea of a perfect place to run, but the roads had other ideas. A lot of hotels like this are built for obvious reasons close to major roads, in this case handily located at the junction of the M73 and M74 motorways, not to mention the busy A721. And getting to the river from the hotel meant negotiating these pedestrian-tormenting highways.

My first effort, involving running across Motorway slip roads, got me as far as the North Calder Water, a smaller river  that flows into the Clyde at Daldowie. Every route through to the Clyde itself seemed to be blocked by a motorway, a fence or a quarry.

The North Calder Water at Daldowie

The next day I did find a way through, for the sake of any runners staying there in future, here's a short description of the route: come down from hotel to the main road (A721) and turn left. Follow main road as it passes under the M73, go past a small roundabout, and then take the first road to the right - Blantyre Farm Road. Keep on this road as it passes over the M74 and then sweeps round to the right to a bridge over the Clyde.




The River Clyde from Blantyre Farm Road bridge, looking East.

On the far side of the bridge over the river you can clamber down a steep bank on the right. Take care - if you lose your footing you may crash into a barbed wire fence at the bottom, though there is a stile to get you over the fence.

Then you can run right next to the river along an uneven but runnable sandy path. How far you can go depends on how high the river is- I was able to keep going for about half a mile, so the whole run from hotel to end of path along Clyde and back was about 3.7 miles (see run on strava). If I'd had more time to explore I might have found a way through to run further along the river. It's a great stretch of the river here, as it heads from the countryside into the city.

River Clyde

Bishops Loch, Easterhouse

I was in Glasgow for the funeral of my Auntie, Jessie Campbell Mitchell (1933-2016). She died recently in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and I was glad that I got to visit her there a few weeks ago. Like my dad, she was born on Islay, and as the Minister mentioned in the service (at St. Andrews Church, Bailleston) she didn't speak English until she started school as my grandparents spoke Gaelic at home. Moving to Glasgow, she worked at the United Biscuits factory and then later at Wills cigarette factory - I remember once going to some kind of works sports day for children at one of these places, not sure if I did any running though, think it was sack races and the like!

On family holidays we would invariably stay with her in Glasgow on our way to Islay. She lived in Easterhouse, and later in Bailleston. The former I remember as being quite grey, but on returning last week I realized just how close it is to the countryside (and some of the greyer tenement blocks have now been demolished). There are several small lochs nearby which we would sometimes walk round, but I didn't remember them being so near to what was one of the city's biggest housing estates.

Me and my son went for a wander last week at Bishop Loch, overlooked by the old Gartloch Hospital buildings and surrounded by marshland.  With a bit of running I did find a pathway through the woods down to the loch side.

Bishop Loch, Easterhouse

Marshland at Bishop Loch

Auntie Jessie with me and my wedding

Morrissey - List of the Lost: 'the future is a time when you will only watch'

I still think that The Smiths were one of the greatest bands of all times (I saw them four times), and last year their lead singer/lyricist wrote a novel about running. What's not to like? Except that 'List of the Lost' by Morrissey (Penguin, 2015) received pretty much universally terrible reviews, and knowing that even his musical solo output has been decidely patchy I have put off reading it until now. 

And no it isn't very good. It's the tale of four young Boston athletes, 'America's most sovereignly feared college relay team' but that is a device for the over-intrusive narrator to sing of the joys of a band of brothers at their physical peak before what he sees as the inevitable disappointments of adult relationships and ageing.
  

So as they prepare to run their half-mile relay (or in metric terms 4 x 200m), Morrissey reflects that 'Their success depends upon the communal goal, the spring in eight legs, the combined methodology of four minds, and the maintained perfection of four physical frames; four wheels of the one machine... there is a job to be done - a job almost as old as reading, one which fades faster than it blooms, batting away the decline that rots in life, a decline that must always win'. 

 There is a coach who is simply one of the 'belligerent ghouls, run Manchester schools' (The Smiths, Headmaster Ritual), transplanted to New England. He berates the young athletes 'we search in life for that one race that sums everything. Well keep searching. As they lower your cold-meat body into the ground, keep searching still... Historians of track and field need watch you no longer'.  

Devices that work fine in song lines - alliteration, internal rhymes etc. - sound strained and tortuous in long archaic sentences. And the plot - well without wishing to spoil it, the young athletes are spared the compromises of getting old thanks to a series of deaths with a supernatural twist. But surely Morrissey, who was a schoolboy athlete himself (see my previous post on this) must have some perceptive observation to offer on the world of running? 

Well, this was the best I could find: 'Somewhere alone within the hole of the soul it is known that the page is already turning, and the future is a time when you will only watch. Fully present in today, you will make the most of yourself as you dig deep to bring out whatever will save you'.

The cover star is American athlete Early Young, running a relay for Abilene Christian College, Texas. Young won a 4 x 400m gold medal for USA in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Running on Screen (13): A running row in Eastenders

Sonia and Tina are having relationship problems on BBC soap Eastenders. Well, in true Walford style Sonia's ex is struggling to look after the newborn baby that he wrongly believes he has fathered etc etc. But there's more - Sonia is just doing too much running! Last Thursday's episode (18 February 2016) starts with this sulky exchange:

Tina: 'Not running then?'

Sonia: 'No, not till later'

T: 'If it's not work, it's training'.

S: 'Come on, don't be like that, Kush says I'm going to be able to do 3k in under 20 minutes by next week'

T: 'You might as well be talking German'

S: 'Why don't we do something together this afternoon, come on it'll be fun'.

'Ok, as long as it doesn't involve running'.

In a bid to smooth the waters, Tina gets a secondhand exercise bike, telling Sonia:

'I got that because I thought maybe you could train at home instead of being out all the time'.

Eastenders prides itself on its well researched storylines, but would Sonia, training for the Walford Half Marathon, really have simpered 'You got that for me?'

Surely Sonia would actually have said: 'A bike? Haven't you read Pfitzinger & Douglas 'Advanced Marathoning'? 'To get a similar workout to running requires about three times as long on a bike. Because cycling is highly repetitive and uses a limited range of motion, it presents a danger of shortening your stride'. I mean what were you thinking?'

Previously in the Running on Screen series:

Running to David Bowie - Frances Ha/Mauvais Sang

Stick Man's Christmas Running Adventure

Run Lola Run and running Berlin

Walford Half Marathon (Eastenders)

Race Strategy in The (US) Office

Top of the Lake and The Fall
China Crisis - Wishful Thinking
The Running Man (1987)
Muybridge's Runner, 1887

The Casual Vacancy

From Darkness

London Spy

Surrey League XC finale at Wimbledon Common

'Once upon a time the Wombles went to live on - or rather under - Wimbledon Common in South-west London. There may be other Womble families in different parts of the world - in fact there are - but the Wombles like to keep to themselves, so once they've made a move and built themselves a comfortable waterproof burrow they tend to stay where they are...

off went Tomsk, running across the golf course with his arms tucked into his sides and his head well back, just like a four minute miler. He vanished over the skyline' 

(The Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford, 1968)

start of the men's senior race - winner Alex Yee already in front (photo from I Was or Am a Runner on facebook)

So that was this year's Surrey League cross country champs... The last race of the 2015-16 season, for the Division One men at least, took place on Wimbledon Common on Saturday. Kent AC (my club) won the match and, for the 4th year in a row, the League- headed on the day by Team GB Under-20 International Alex Yee, with club colleague John Gilbert  in 2nd place. Paskar Owor came 3rd, making him the leading runner across the season. He will be sadly missed from Division One next year as his club, Belgrave Harriers, were relegated to division two by a one point margin. Hercules Wimbledon were second place on the day and in the League overall.

The men's League includes 37 clubs across four divisions, and the women's League is also going from strength to strength. Their final match at Richmond Common had 382 runners from 38 clubs in the combined Division One/Division Two race. Steph McCall (South London Harriers) won by a 47 second margin in a field that also included the second fastest UK women's marathon runner of all time - Mara Yamauchi, running for Thames Hare and Hounds. Clapham Chasers won Division One, and of course I was delighted that Kent AC won Division Two and promotion to the top flight (full results and tables at Surrey League website)

The start of the junior race on Wimbledon Common

'Look, look, look,' shouted Bungo, running down a slope and turning to glance over his shoulder at his own prints. 'Look, look, look' called Alderney, and she put down her her head and went head over heels, leaving a funny bumpy track behind' (The Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford)

Wimbledon Common - one of the birth places of cross country club running - has a number of different courses, Saturday's taking place over the one associated with Hercules Wimbledon. These trails across the common are of  course invisible in between races, but a few markers and a handful of marshals are all it takes to demarcate the route.

Conditions on Saturday were cold with light rain, spikes were essential on some of the muddier sections on the lower slopes, but uncomfortable on the harder gravelly tracks nearer the top of the hill. There is a track across the Common called Gravelly Ride and that says it all. All of this is a function of the geology of what is officially designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest on account of its varied natural habitats: 'The high plateau in the east and north of the site has a capping of glacial gravels overlying Claygate Beds and London Clay which are exposed on the western slope of the Common. The acidic soils, and poor drainage of the plateau give rise to a mosaic of wet heath and unimproved acidic grassland. Semi-natural broadleaved woodland covers the deeper, clay soils of the western slope...Several streams rise at the boundary of the gravels and clays' (Natural England). So if your spikes were crunching on the gravel, blame the ice age.

There were three narrow stream crossings (one with bridge) and a tree trunk to leap, not to mention a post which one of the Kent runners (Owen Hind) crashed into at high speed.

Into the woods - yellow Hercules Wimbledon flags mark the course

'In spite of all their training on Wimbledon Common, he and Orinoco were not nearly as fit and tough as the members of the Clan, who could scamper up and down the mountains all night without getting tired' (The Wandering Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford, 1970)

I finished towards the back end and it was a bit lonely back there wiith many of my fellow slower runners either injured or absent. Still I was pleased to have shaken off some of my sluggish recent form, and in fact my time was two minutes faster than when I ran the same course in the South of Thames XC last season.

It's really only through running that I've become familiar with Wimbledon Common in the last couple of years- this year three of the four Surrey League Division One races for men were held there. Prior to that the Common for me was simply the legendary location of the Wombles stories, the furry recyclers of my childhood. Children's author Elisabeth Beresford conceived of the Wombles while walking on the Common.  No Wombles were spotted on Saturday, though they have popped up at the Wimbledon Half Marathon in the past.

Wimbledon Common Half Marathon 2014 (photo from Runners Forum)

See also:

Surrey League at Mitcham Common 2016

Surrey League final match 2015 - Richmond

Surrey League on Streatham Common 2015

Surrey League - Farthing Downs 2014

South of the Thames XC at Wimbledon 2014

Wimbledon Common, Blackheath and the origins of cross country