Lakeland 100: the easy bit

That's the easy bit done. This summer I entered the Lakeland 50, which was by some measure the toughest run I've ever done. Today I put my name down for the Lakeland 100, which is actually 103 miles and reckoned to be more than twice as hard. I now have over nine months to prepare/regret my decision. Last year's winner, Stuart Mills, reckons that 'the key to performance is simple, remain positive, do not let any negative thoughts develop'. He clearly hasn't been watching the Conservative Party conference.

Bog hopping across Britain

Back in London after successfully completing the six-day, 156-mile TransBritain ultra, amazingly feeling stronger and getting faster as the race went on. I even managed to come joint first in each of the final two stages, so I'm delighted with that.

I also discovered on getting back home that I got third place in my age group in the Regent's Park 10k summer series, for which I win £15, free entry to the next series (worth £60) and a medal! So there must be life in the old bones yet.

Lee Chamberlain, who won the TransBritain and is going for the John O'Groats to Land's End running record at the beginning of November, has done a report of the event. That's his photo (above) of me and Steve Keywood, who came second, lost in a bog on the last day.

I'm still raising sponsorship for Teach Africa and Cystic Fibrosis Trust. Thanks to everyone who has donated already - and you can do so here if you want:

Teach Africa and Cystic Fibrosis Trust

Not much faster than walking

I've done a flat 50-mile run before (along the Thames) and I've done a fair few hilly 50-mile and over walks. But I've never attempted a hilly 50-mile run. So this weekend, as part of training for the TransBritain Ultra in September, I did the Lakeland 50, which is the little brother of the Lakeland 100 event, which boasts (if that is the right word) a 75% drop out rate among enrants.

The 50 misses out the highest Lakeland peaks but it still manages 12,000-plus feet of ascent, or 'four Sca Fells' as a fellow competitor put it. And every bone in my body can now confirm it.

Still, I managed to finish in 13 hours 48 minutes and 46 seconds, despite falling badly before the first checkpoint and going badly astray on the the fells after the last one. 'Not much faster than your walking pace,' according to my daughter. Yeah, thanks Rachel. Next time I'm taking you along.

A run for your money

Okay Steve, you do a bit of running, they said. So how do you fancy running across Britain with us this September? Six marathons in six days - 156 miles, give or take the odd detour - starting at Robert the Bruce's cave in Scotland and finishing at Ruthin Castle in north Wales? We'll take in the Lake District and the highest peaks in England along the way to keep it interesting. We'll provide the meals, and we'll even carry your tent for you - as long as you carry the rest of your gear yourself

Tell me more, I said. Like can I retire if it gets too hard?

Of course you can, they said. As long as you don't mind letting down those schoolgirls in the biggest slum in Nairobi, the ones whose education you'll be running to raise money for. Kids who know the real meaning of words like 'tough' and 'challenge' - and half of whom, statistically, won't see their 25th birthday.

How could I say no? There's more about the charity here: http://www.teach-africa.org/

I'll post more about the TransBritain Six-Day Ultra and me as the event approaches. In the meantime, please help get my fundraising off to a flying start by donating now.

Thanks.

Rome: one run is not enough

To Rome to run the marathon, mark the equinox and see some of those sights that I already know so well from the history, art and politics books. The city stinks of dog shit, there’s more graffiti than you can shake a can at and the Aventine, where the urban poor have congregated since antiquity, has a third world-like population of rough sleepers. The posters for the end-of-month regional elections here declare that ‘real communists don’t vote for the Partito Democratico’, the main, centre-left opposition to Berlusconi.

But Rome is everything you could ever want of the eternal city. It’s like walking around the stage set of European history, from the platform on which Julius Caesar’s body was cremated 2,064 years and one week ago today to Mussolini’s Via dei Fori Imperiali near the Colosseum, where the marathon began and finished.

The whole 26.2-mile (or 46.165-kilometre) route is as much like a massive tourist trail as a competitive road race. We even take in the narrow cobbled streets past the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps, as well as St Peter’s Square on the day that the Pope stands accused of turning a blind eye to child abuse. At one point a man running in front of me stops, looks around and starts taking photos. Another runner asks someone in the crowd to take a picture of her posing in front of a statue. It’s worth the entry fee just to experience the streets of Rome reclaimed by human feet from usually ever present motor car

This year’s Rome marathon was dedicated to Abebe Bikila, the two-time Olympic marathon gold medallist from Ethiopia who ran – and won – the 1960 race here barefoot. It was a deliberately strong anti-racist statement from the marathon organisers in a city where many of those rough sleepers on the Aventine are African refugees and asylum seekers who have been on the receiving end of a resurgence in far-right political sympathies over the past few years.

Spring in the air

Thirty miles in two days, all of them run in cold, sleety, driving rain. I ran 17 yesterday in full fell running gear and still felt uncomfortably cold on the ridge above Berhamsted, where I was participating in one of the Gede Valley Harriers' London Marathon training runs (five quid to enter, tea and cake at the finish and some of the coldest, wettest, most seriously appreciated marshals in the country). I've rarely experienced lowland weather quite like that, and the stretch of the canal towpath where the puddles merged seemlessly with the canal itself was something else.

Today's a bright, sunny, blue-skied morning in London, though. The birds know that spring is about to burst upon us, and you get the feeling that as soon as the temperature rises a little it's going to arrive like a sprinter, not an old-boned, feeling-the-cold crock of a distance runner like me.

Vertical rush

One man went past me wearing what looked like ski boots and I heard a rumour that the fastest finisher had got to the top in 3 mins 53 secs. If so, that's not far short of four steps or 30-odd inches a second.

Still I was pleased to get to the top of Tower 42, the former NatWest Building in the City, for Shelter's Vertical Rush event before breakfast this morning in 8 mins 52 secs. That meant I missed my friend Fiona's offer to double my sponsorship if I did it inside eight minutes, but she cheated by having me shift heavy boxes of magazines around north London to tire me out yesterday.

I've never been that high in London before, except in a plane, and the view from the 42nd-floor champagne bar (minus the champagne, alas) is certainly worth seeing. It's no longer the highest point in the City of London, however, as I discovered looking out of its windows. The adjacent Heron Tower (pictured), still under construction, has a few steel girders going higher still, and when it's finished it will be 100 or so feet taller than Tower 42.

You can sponsor me for doing Vertical Rush and the London Marathon in aid of Shelter here.

Out of the comfort zone

Every so often in life it's good to do things outside your comfort zone. Today I signed up for something that is so far outside mine that I'm announcing it here to make sure that I don't try to sneak out of it later.

I've decided to do this year's Trans-Britain Ultra event in September. It’s a six-day, six-stage ultra race starting near Gretna Green and finishing in Ruthin, Wales, via Cumbia and North Yorkshire, covering 156 miles and five (or is it six?) peaks along the way.

I feel exhausted just typing the details. Oh, and did I mention that you carry all your gear (apart from a tent) on your back?

I’ll be doing it to raise money for a charity, Teach Africa, which works with teenage girls from the slums of Nairobi. The race organiser, Steve Adams, set it up in 2005 and I have a personal interest in supporting it because I lived in east Africa for a time during 2002-2003.

I also have a personal interest in another charity that I’m doing a double challenge for over the next couple of months. I was homeless for a time when I was younger and became very actively involved in squatting and other housing campaigns. I went on to work in short-life housing for a few years and edited the housing charity Shelter’s magazine Roof for a short time at the beginning of my career as a journalist and writer.

This Thursday (25 February) I'm doing the first leg of a double sponsorship challenge for Shelter. Vertical Rush involves running up 42 floors, 900-odd stairs, to the top of the highest building in the City of London. Two months later I’m using my oh-so-precious London Marathon place, held over from last year when I had to pull out due to injury, as the second leg of the challenge.

You can support my Shelter fundraising here. More about Teach Africa later.

Size isn't everything

He was half my size and a quarter my age but he was a damn good pacemaker, even if it was only a 5k run in the park.

I beat him on the sprint finish, though - still got it in me, you see ...

Oh yes, and I came first (of three) in my age category.

The Thames trotted

It’s downhill all the way from the Prince of Wales pub in Iffley to the bandstand on the green at Henley. Got to be, hasn’t it, or the Thames couldn’t flow so fiercely over the weirs on its way between the two.

One thing that running teaches you is that there’s no such thing as flat. Even a millpond must have its hills hidden somewhere. And there’s no such thing as downhill all the way either, outside a Tory government.

The Thames path (or national trail, to give it its due) saves its hills on this stretch of the river until you’ve already passed the 30-mile mark, when it takes you up the valley sides between Goring and Whitchurch. It rises to all of, oh, 62 metres, which wouldn’t even get you halfway up the London Eye but feels like you’re taking the staircase to the top of Canary Wharf (twice) when you’ve already been running for about six hours to get there.

Starting a 50-mile run from a pub, with a roaring open fire and a selection of fine ales, and finishing at a bandstand, with snow on the roof and ice on the floor, seems arse about tit when you think about it. But, my, did it feel good to get there. Ten and a half hours, just under, and I didn’t go over on the snow and ice once.

A Thames Trot

I’ve just received an email to tell me that tomorrow’s ‘Thames Trot’ is on, despite the weather. The name is the organiser’s idea of a joke, since it’s a 50-mile event along the river from Oxford to Henley. It’s my longest-ever run (though I’ve done 100km as a walk) and every bone, muscle and tendon in my body has started hurting since the moment they heard that it is happening.

Suddenly I feel sick to the stomach and don’t know whether to go equipped with ice axe and crampons or kneepads and skates. I must say that even ignoring the distance, the idea of running on ice is about as appealing as swimming in treacle. And I’ve got to drive to the Prince of Wales pub in Iffley for the start in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

Earlier this week a friend sent me a link to a BBC news report in which:

‘Margaret Morrissey, of the Parents Outloud campaign group, said the decision to keep thousands of schools shut for a second day sent the wrong signals to children.

She added: “We are giving children the message that when things get difficult you should just stay at home and have fun.”’

‘What’s wrong with staying home and having fun when things get difficult?’ my friend asked.

I reckon that by this time tomorrow nothing could appeal to me more.

Media storm on the mountains

It’s not often that my favourite sport (okay, after football, but that doesn’t really count) leads the news headlines for most of the weekend. But I must admit that live accounts of several thousand fell runners swept away by floods in the Lake District, with anything up to 1,700 of them unaccounted for overnight, did make a change from the non-story of Oleg the Oligarch. (Politicians like spending time with the rich and powerful, and sometimes they try to tap them for money? You don’t say!)

Most of the early reports about the Original Mountain Marathon on Saturday talked about 2,000 ‘charity runners’ being trapped on the mountains after reckless organisers had ignored advice to call off the event – as though this was some sort of fun run in which participants dressed as Batman had been led into mortal danger by over-enthusiastic fundraisers from the local playgroup. The reality was that both the numbers and the risks were exaggerated, the main problems were caused by flooding in the valleys closing roads and cutting off the race HQ. Most of the participants described as ‘missing’ were only aware that they had been at the centre of a media frenzy when they cam back down from the hills again the next morning.

The weather may have been a bit extreme, but the OMM is an extreme sport. It consists of navigating your own route around a course that involves an overnight camp. Entrants are screened, you’re only allowed to do it in pairs and you’re required to carry full survival kit and rations for 36 hours. Batman wouldn’t get in, no matter what charity he was seeking sponsorship for.

Of course, there is risk involved. But you train and prepare for it and as far as I know the OMM’s safety record is impeccable. No one was actually ‘lost’ on the mountains over the weekend. Everyone who camped out overnight – as they had expected (and gone equipped) to do – returned safely on the Sunday. There are more casualties in the Lake District on an average calm, summer’s weekend (not that there have been many of them this summer), when thousands of far less well-prepared walkers head into the hills, than there have ever been on an OMM event.

My extreme sports participation at the weekend was limited to a muddy ‘multi-mile marathon’ circuit around the Weald Country Park in Essex – and a trip to Barking. (‘Do you know anywhere worth visiting round here?’ ‘Have you tried the industrial estate round the corner?’ ‘Are you taking the piss?’ ‘Well you started it.’)

Arthur Smith was on the same bill as the Imagined Village (folk fusion that is as inspiring ideologically as it is musically in its sense of a multicultural modern Englishness tied in to its traditional roots). He told a story of taking a health and safety inspector to do a risk assessment of the Pamplona Bull Run for a TV programme. The OMM organisers actually have to do a risk assessment. From now on it should include a paragraph about dealing with disaster-chasing news organisations that haven’t a clue about what they’re supposed to be reporting on.

Never lend me your Rolex

When I was a kid I used to have a problem wearing watches. Apart from insisting on wearing them on the inside of the right-hand wrist (a five-year-old’s assertion of individualist identity that I’ve stuck with to the present day, with inconvenient consequences at the keyboard), sooner or later they’d stop working. An adult who knew about these things (people did in those days: they still made them) told me it was something to do with the electro-magnetic field around my body.

That was the best possible explanation I could have hoped for – short of being the adopted son of parents from the planet Krypton. Wind-up watches didn’t work on me because I had an invisible force surrounding me that stopped them ticking.

I’m still not entirely sure whether it was me that was being wound up, but I’ve long since fallen out of love with electro-magnetism. Part of the reason for going a little quiet on the blog recently (apart from spending a fair chunk of the time fell running in the Lake District, avoiding coming last in my category in the Northern Veterans 10-mile road championship and taking my grandson, aged one on Monday, up his first Wainwright – Loughrigg, 211th out of 214 in height order; he slept through most of it) has been a kind of reverse Midas touch, whereby everything electronic I come into contact with stops operating.

The car, computer and even the kettle have all given up the ghost in quick succession – so quick that I’ve almost convinced myself that my electro-magnetic field has gone into overdrive again. Losing your computer hard drive when you’re 300 miles from anything resembling a back up is bad enough, but have you ever tried to organise an auto-electronics spare parts delivery when you’re halfway along Striding Edge? Not helped by the fact that while there are scores, probably hundreds, of companies with variations on the name ‘Ford Electronics’, hardly any of them appear to be a) in this country or b) in the business of electronics for Ford cars.

What shall I wear for the London marathon?

My entry has been accepted for the 2009 London marathon, 26 years after I first tried to get a place (one year for each mile – there’s symmetry for you). I’d become so accustomed to failure in the annual ballot for Britain’s biggest road race/fun run (delete as applicable) that I didn’t open the blue shrink-wrapped notification missive until a couple of days after it arrived. And now, having done so, my reaction has shifted almost unblinkingly from ‘Wow, at last!’ to ‘Oh shit, now I’ve got to run it!’ to ‘Bugger, that’s really messed up my plans for next April!’

The thing is that I’ve already booked myself in for a race that I’ve been harbouring fantasies of winning on the day before the marathon. Well, maybe not winning, but, you know, doing quite well in. With 30,000 runners otherwise engaged in their pre-London preparations, there’s clearly no better time to go for gold than against the greatly-narrowed field that will turn out for the Clandon Park 10k near Guildford on 25 April. Now the day will have to be taken up with sorting out what I’m going to wear on a 26-mile jaunt around London instead. After waiting more than a quarter of a century for the opportunity it has to be something special. Any suggestions?

Up in the downs

I have spent the weekend avoiding the ‘Family Man’ and ‘Action Super Hero’ soubriqets from friends, family and casual running acquaintances after my daughter’s portrayal of me as some sort of fitness sadist in the Guardian on Saturday. I was doorstepped for a while by Fleet Street flashers when John Major sued the New Statesman and me for libel back in 1993; and I was put under photo surveillance by police long-lensmen once when the Special Branch confused a direct-action trespass I was involved in organising at Windsor Castle with a plot to kidnap the queen. But I’ve never been followed around on a sporting event before by a professional photographer as I was for the Guardian piece. I’m just glad she wasn’t there to capture me writhing around with cramp at the end of today’s 20-mile trail challenge at Dunstable. Gorgeous day, but there's an awful lot of up in those downs ...

Photo: Lisa Carpenter

Family challenge

Well we didn’t come last. My daughter is writing about our first team venture into the world of triathlon trail challenge events today for the ‘Family Challenge’ slot in this weekend’s Guardian. So I’ll say no more about it here for now. Except that three family members (her boyfriend being the third) squashed together in one sack for a ‘special challenge’ at the end of five hours of running, cycling and kayaking is about as close as I ever want us to get. There are times when your personal space really should be protected.

In case you were wondering ...

The absence of posts is because I’m currently wending my way through a grand tour of England (and, from tonight, Wales) in the wet. I’ve rain-tested the water-resistant qualities of just about every fabric known to man, been soaked to the skin so many times that my skin has started to dissolve and just wrung out my socks in readiness for a weekend of long-distance trail events.

Last weekend, the river Kent in full spate forced those of us competing in the CancerCare Cross Bay half marathon to turn back half way across Morecambe Bay (which meant subjecting ourselves to a five-mile sand-whipping as we ran back against the wind). Other highlights of my summer include performing one-man mountain rescue missions – of myself, among others – on the Scafell summit, and eating my way single-handedly through an entire barrel of the most disgustingly, sickeningly, sugary selection of sweets ever to have been consumed in one sitting. An achievement of truly Olympian proportions: watch out Wales, I will not leave without a medal.

Flog me with nettles

It’s a jungle out there. A wet summer has brought with it an explosion of growth and a plague of mosquitoes. Many more warm winters and malaria won’t be far behind.

Forget about biting insects for the time being, though. Global warming’s current seasonal aberration is eight-feet high nettles. I had to run through a field of the things yesterday as part of the 14th Fairlands Valley Challenge. The nettles aren’t meant to be part of the challenge, any more than the tree-like brambles that have grown up among them, trying to entangle and trip you, like some flesh-tearing triffids. It’s a trail marathon, not a rainforest survival test, and it’s in Hertfordshire, not the Congo.

I’ve never seen nettles like these in such size and number. I’ve heard tell of New Zealand’s Urtica ferox, 'ongaonga' to the locals, a tree nettle said to grow to five metres in height and capable of killing a fully-grown man with a single glance. But these fat-fruited, heavy-headed, hirsute stingers near Stevenage (can a nettle be hirsute? You wouldn’t ask if you’d seen them) were something new to me. And definitely not what you need at the 20-mile mark.

There is, apparently, a practice called urtication – flogging with nettles – which sounds very handy as a form of S&M gameplay, but is also supposed to be a longstanding folk-remedy for rheumatism. It’s based on the principle that by inducing wholesale inflammation of the skin you can provide short-term relief from rheumatic pain – presumably because the nettle stings hurt even more than the rheumatism.

This is the 'Stop your crying or I'll give you something to really cry about' theory of pain relief. There's nothing like breaking both elbows to take your mind off spraining your wrist. (Believe me, I've done it.) And there's nothing like running through a field of eight-feet high nettles to take your mind off the tiredness in your legs. It works for all of, oh, at least as long as it takes you to get out of the field.

A friend tells me that St Benedict, of Benedictine Order fame, used to strip off his clothes and roll about in nettles as a cure for ‘impure thoughts’. But I don’t suppose he was running a marathon at the time.

Running the Silk Road

'Statistically, you live one minute longer for every minute you spend running,’ says one of the characters in Yellow Earth Theatre’s Running the Silk Road (Barbican, 24-28 June). There are at least two ways of taking that: one, that if you could keep running forever you’d have discovered the secret of eternal life; and two, that it’s hardly worth bothering to go through all the pain of running if all it does is to extend your life by the time you spent suffering.

Of course, as anyone can testify who has progressed beyond the pain of physical exercise, there is a reward that goes beyond the simple expedient of keeping fit and prolonging active life, as the dog food adverts used to put it. (Do they still make that claim for Pal? Do they still make Pal?)

It’s called self-transcendence if you want to get all zen and spiritual about it, and there are specific self-transcendence races organised by the Sri Chinmoy Athletic Club in London, Cardiff, Bristol, Oxford and many other places in the UK as well as by the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team worldwide. These range in distance from one mile to 3,100 miles (yes, that’s a three, a one and two noughts). Running the Silk Road is based on the idea that one man and three of his friends have of doing a 5,000-mile charity run to Beijing, arriving in time for the 2008 Olympics. Sri Chinmoy and his acolytes, at least, would not have found the premise of the play outlandish.

I got my fastest-ever time in a 10k race (just over 38 minutes, in case you’re wondering) in a Sri Chinmoy event in Battersea Park back in the days when Mr Chinmoy was still running and Margaret Thatcher was on the throne. Chinmoy didn’t take up the sport until he was 47 (in 1978), but once he did he kept on transcending. So you can run a marathon? How about trying two? You can run 100 miles? How about 700? 1,000? 1,300? 3,100? You can run four hours non-stop? How about a day? Seven days? Ten days? The marathon team that bears his name organises ultra events at all these distances and lengths of time.

Neither age nor injury stopped Sri Chinmoy. When a dodgy knee curtailed his running at the end of the 1980s, he took up weightlifting instead. In September 2005, a year before his death aged 76, he lifted the bodybuilding legend Bill Pearl and world champion strongman Hugo Girard at an international bodybuilding event.

It’s probably a bit late to be thinking of running the Silk Road to Beijing in time for the opening ceremony on 8 August. But there’s a ten-mile self transcendence run in Battersea Park in a fortnight’s time if anyone fancies it.

Shakespeare and football

I’m knackered. I’ve done a 5k-5mile-10k series of races over the weekend and I’ve got football this evening. I’ve been limited to one glass of champagne to celebrate my sort-of niece Lizzie getting a 2.1 in English Literature (‘sort of’ because she’s my daughter’s mother’s brother’s daughter, if you follow the connection, but there was never any marriage there to formalise the relationship). I could really do with a spliff right now but I know it would set back my recovery from injury out of all proportion to the pleasure I’d get out of it. And football has turned into a strange enough experience of late anyway without the assistance of some Class B psychoactive pumping through my capillaries.

One game I played in last week finished off with a punch-up between two players that only just stopped short of the kind of scenes that followed the Poland v Germany and Croatia v Turkey games in Euro 2008. Then I learnt that one of my team-mates, Andy Havill, who appeared with Kylie Minogue in last year’s Dr Who Christmas Special, is currently performing in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe Theatre - a pathetic excuse for his missing out on this summer's football fixtures, if you ask me. The Daily Telegraph review says his ‘chisel-faced Ford is a sublimely comic study of obsessive jealousy and tortured masochism’ – a description that also tells you something about how he plays football.

As if that isn’t enough Shakespeare for one football story, Stephen Boxer, who is one of our Sunday evening football regulars, has just quit as Dr Joe Fenton in the daytime BBC soap Doctors and got himself the role of Petruchio in Conall Morrison’s production of The Taming of the Shrew at Stratford. I don’t know whether I should be practising my free kicks or learning my lines.

As for Euro 2008, my politically-correct guide to who to support, which for a brief spell appeared to be following the actual results, turned all-too-quickly into a ready-reference guide to who was going out of the competition. I found myself in the strange and unfamiliar position of supporting Germany by the halfway stage of their quarter final against Portugal (something to do with the Pinochet apologist, gay hater, Chelsea incumbent Scolari, I suppose, but it still didn’t feel right). Tonight, I hardly dare say that it’s got to be Spain but it really does have to be Anyone But Italy, doesn’t it?

Photo: Andy Harvill and wig. Would you play football with this man?