Hi. I see you're new here. That's cool. To find out what this site is about, please read this page. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. It's free, you won't receive any spam from me (like, ever), but more importantly: you'll never miss a single word. Thanks for visiting!
“I always loved running…it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.” - Jesse Owens
“A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.” - Abraham Lincoln
“If you set a goal for yourself and are able to achieve it, you have won your race. Your goal can be to come in first, to improve your performance, or just finish the race - it’s up to you.” - Dave Scott
“The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” - Dr. Seuss
“Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must. Just never give up.” - Dean Karnazes
(This is a follow-on article to my post - 28 Days Later - How To Make Or Break A Habit In Four Weeks.)
Update: Since writing this post, I have started a new blog that follows my attempts to run every single day for one year. To learn more, please visit iRun365.com.
Will Smith, whether you like him or not (and I do), it’s fair to say he’s made a reasonable success of his life.
And what does he attribute this to?
Running, and reading.
The things that Smith says in this video clip have strongly resonated with me. Indeed, it’s an approach to life that I have long suspected is not without considerable merit.
I mean, reading - that’s a given. How can you possibly learn anything about life, about your own life, if you don’t read? And I don’t mean novels (although they absolutely have their place) - I mean proper books. Cold, hard print. The kind of tomes that really make you think.
You should be reading all the time. Every single day. And while you should always read intelligently, you should always be reading, too. And that includes that beautiful resource we call the Internet.
And running?
Running makes you feel like you’re alive.
Back in the day - 1995, 1996, when I was about twenty-five years of age - I used to run.
A lot.
See, I was really into the idea of doing an Ironman back then; specifically, the big one - Hawaii. Triathlon was really starting to get popular on an amateur level, pretty much around the world - new events were launched all the time, and some of the bigger ones (Hawaii, Roth, Canada) drew a field of a couple of thousand and a crowd of maybe fifty times that.
This, and the three disciplines involved in the sport - swimming, biking and running (or: swim/bike/run) - really appealed.
However, while I’ve always been a ‘sporty’ person (i.e., a jock), I’d never had any interest in distance running. Back at school, there are always one or two kids who seem to really love the cross-country run. I hated it. I did everything I possibly could not to do it - even cheating by sneaking off into the wood, taking a short-cut and finishing off strong somewhere near the middle of the pack. After all, winning that way would have just been plain wrong.
Furthermore, I was a mediocre swimmer and while I knew I could ride a bike, I had no idea how far.
The Ironman distance is one of sport’s ultimate tests. A 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride and 26.2 mile run - a full marathon - all back-to-back, will test even the hardiest of men (and women). Newbies to the sport of triathlon are expected to prove themselves before taking on such a challenge. Beginners are expected to attempt ‘sprint’ triathlons first - these vary, but typically feature a swim of 750m, maybe a 12-mile bike ride finished off with a 3-4 mile run.
From here, you progress to the Olympic distance events - so called because this is the format they use in the actual Games - which is a 1.5km swim, a 40km bike run and a 10km run.
After that, there’s half-Iromans - now officially known as 70.3s - which are exactly as they sound (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride, 13.1 half-marathon) and only when you’ve done one or two of these should you even consider moving up to the full distance.
So, I trained.
And I trained some more.
In fact, I trained a heck of a lot. As my running, swimming and biking began to improve, my thinking became increasingly fancy and whimsical. I didn’t need to bother with those sprint distance events, I told myself - they’re for real beginners. I’m way past that. I’m intermediate, at least. (Isn’t everybody?)
Pretty soon, I thought, I’d be like a pro.
I trained harder. Even the Olympic distance sounded a bit lame now. Why bother with that, when you could do a half-Ironman? It didn’t really matter that my longest-ever run up to that point had been about 8 miles.
More training. Really focused now. I wore a heart-rate monitor, consumed gel packs, ate a nutritious, energy-packed diet, and even had a subscription to Triathlete - the works.
There’s a quite well-respected half-marathon in my hometown every spring and to test myself I ran that - alone, as this was late-summer - and completed it in one hour and forty-five minutes.
I was ready.
Well, almost. A little while later my admittedly foolhardy dream came to a literal crashing end when I was riding my bike to work and the driver of a car decided to ignore the two-wheeled machine directly in front of them in favour of zooming out of a T-junction. I was thrown across the road and extremely lucky not to be pulverised by the oncoming vehicles on the other side. My bike, meantime, was near-totalled.
The driver - a lady - was very apologetic, and a week or so later she’d paid for my bike to be rebuilt. However, I was still quite shaken by the incident - I was unfortunate enough to be involved in a very serious car accident when I was seven, and I think some of the mental scarring that resulted from that had been opened back up - and, being absolutely honest, rapidly lost all interest in getting on a bicycle ever again. And as you really do need one of those to complete even the shortest of triathlons, my ambitions there quickly began to fade, too.
And so this ‘triathlete’ retired from the sport without ever having even started a triathlon.
Instead, I turned my attentions to the gym, bodybuilding and strength-lifting, and life, as it often does, moved on.
I’ve had some success at the gym. I’ve made myself big and strong (and mean-looking), and there’s something about feeling powerful that is of enormous appeal. Naturally, being and looking like that was also of some use when I started work as a licensed doorman. Looking and feeling strong feeds an addiction. When you feel that way, the idea that you’d ever want to give it up seems like complete madness.
That, however, is what I did.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere within the confines of this blog - and I promise that a full article on this (and my recent diet/weight loss) is coming up soon - between December 2007 and March of this year I lost a total of 41 pounds in weight. I dropped from a lifetime peak of 218 pounds to 177 pounds in 13 weeks.
How did I do it? I’ll save the real detail for the article (it’s coming, it’s coming), but in a nutshell I worked my ass off in the gym 5-6 times each week with a winning combination of gruelling high-intensity upper-body workouts and miles and miles of hill-walking on the treadmill. This wasn’t the low repetitions, heavy-as-I-possibly-could bodybuilding of before - this was functional lifting.
I got into pretty decent shape. Not the uber-shape I was hoping for - no six-pack abdominals for me yet, alas (but I’ll get there) - but more than enough for everybody to notice and for me to feel pretty darn good about what I’d accomplished. I mean, it’s to the point now where I look so different to how I did even six months ago that the people I worked with last year don’t even recognise me when we pass in the street. Well, that, or I was really, really disliked.
And then about two or three weeks ago, I decided I wanted more. Once again, my whims and fancies turned back to the idea of triathlon.
Specifically, the realisation that I desperately wanted to actually finish one.
It’s well over a decade since I first entertained thoughts of this kind of thing. I like to think I’m a little bit wiser now. While I still have a deep yearning to, one day, compete in the Hawaii Ironman - and ‘compete’ is the right word, as it’s probably the only world championship in history where the weekend warriors line up against the top pros - this time, I’m going to do this the right way. I’m going to apply some good old-fashioned intelligence.
So, you’re probably thinking: that’s great, but where does 28 Days Later fit into all this?
Here’s where: on Monday of this week, I started running again.
For twenty-eight days, my goal is run a minimum of 20 minutes each day. This first week, I’m planning to do exactly twenty minutes, and then I’ll stop. Next week - which starts at day eight - I’ll raise this a couple of minutes or so, and do the same on week there, and then week four. I may throw in one or two longer runs along the way.
But the goal is twenty minutes each day, twenty-eight days in a row. Three days down, twenty-five to go.
If I can accomplish this, I’m going to allow myself the luxury of planning ahead. But instead of being all stupid about it and immediately assuming I can skip all the shorter triathlons and go straight to 70.3 distance (or more), I’m going to use my brain this time. I’ll start running in one or two of the shorter road races and if I feel okay about this, I’ll slowly move myself up.
I’d like to have one or two triathlons in the bag by this time next year.
I’d like to have an Ironman in the bag by 2010.
I’d really like to be amongst the starting line-up in Hawaii by 2012.
But, most of all, I just want to start - and finish - one triathlon.
Ps. To keep myself keen and mean, I’ll post periodic updates on my exciting return to the world of running every few days or so.
Recent Comments