Monk Quixote

There are posters float­ing — well, not lit­er­ally float­ing, that would be some impres­sive piece of poster tech­nol­ogy, and not just pis­spoor attempts to get me to whiten my teeth while study­ing for an MBA and watch­ing The Trans­porter IX — this time it’s a Ley­land Daf) — around the tube net­work adver­tis­ing _that_ Murakami book as a kind of tie-in to FLM. Which made me think about what I thought about when I think about run­ning while I’m run­ning. If you fol­low. I mean, you can fol­low with­out run­ning, or at least not run­ning with me. But as the things I’m about to describe are in the past, you’d strug­gle. Although if you could invent the kind of tech­nol­ogy that makes posters float I dare say you could travel back in time to this morn­ing and join me on a cold and rainy Thames Path.

But I digress. This is a post about cop­ing strate­gies. Most of us on the site will have sto­ries of how we per­suade our bod­ies to push itself fur­ther or harder than we’d really like. I thought I’d share some of mine.

*1 Pre­tend you’re still asleep and this is all some kind of dream. Make sure you are not in the vecin­ity of excitable dogs, Peck­ham or tooled-up ram­blers for this one. Nar­row paths are also best avoided unless you want to end up in the net­tles or dive into six inches of Thames from 20 ft up. Unless that’s your thing. In which case, knock your­self out. Lit­er­ally, prob­a­bly.
*2 Lis­ten to Under­world. If there is one piece of advice I could share with the entire run­ning fra­ter­nity it is that King of Snake is pos­si­bly the best run­ning tune in exis­tence. Admit­tedly, you will have to refrain from throw­ing ‘shapes’ while you run, or throw­ing your arms in the air like you just don’t care. You also have the pay-off chuckle at the end of the song of the Japan­ese man hirar­i­ously not speak­ing Engr­ish proper. Although Mr Murakami would dis­ap­prove. Sake. Velly strong.
NB Method 2 will not work in races where iPods are banned. Solu­tion — drink sake and sing all the way round.
*3 Race the mad peo­ple on the river. By which I do not mean Helga, or Mad Mark Mor­ri­gan or Cap­tain Beelze­bub, who like to sit on the bench near the Band­stand and cackle at you. I mean those poor unfor­tu­nate souls who think that pro­pelling them­selves back­wards in a fibre­glass shell while on a dirty body of water is in any way, shape or form fun. I found myself rac­ing a sin­gle sculler today. And I pwned him. Totally. My reward was a ladies cox­less four. If I were religi­ious, I would hope that lady angels all crewed. Or at the very least had bunches and wore wellies. Phwoar. Ok. TMI.
*4 Wig­gle your toes. This amused me for a good half mile. I had never tried wig­gling my toes while run­ning before, and was some­what sur­prised to find that I could. I mean, I can’t be sure, as I couldn’t phys­i­cally see my toes wig­gling, but they felt like they were wig­gling and this is the kind of stal­wart neo-Grecian think­ing that made this coun­try great.
*5 Talk to your injuries. I’ve waxed lyri­cal about this in the past. Pre­tend­ing that you are a school teacher and your blis­ter / patella / stitch / back spasm are all naughty school chil­dren is strangely com­fort­ing and occa­sion­ally effec­tive. He’s not a twisted ankle, he’s just a very naughty joint. (And we’re back to the mad peo­ple).
*6 This was a new one on me. My iPod had shuf­fled off into some kind of ‘well if you’re not going to recharge me then I’m not going to play’ kind of teenage bol­locks tantrum, so I was left to entirely my own devices. So I won­dered which bit of the armed forces rep­re­sented each bit of my body:
In my case
* legs are def­i­nitely Marines. They don’t give a fep. Point them and off they go. Even when they’re told to stop they some­times keep going for the sake of it. This quite often leads to casu­al­ties in the toe­sies pla­toon.
* lungs. Easy — they’re the RAF. They kind of remain aloof to all the effort until it’s too late and occa­sion­ally go awol to have fun with some pollen.
* stom­ach is the intel­li­gence unit. Occa­sion­ally use­ful but fre­quently feeds (no pun) you duff infor­ma­tion and leads to all sorts of com­pli­ca­tions.
* heart. Scot­tish Engi­neers. Smooth as a buck­side banjo until you need more power and it starts whing­ing about sequel rights.
* arms. Prob­a­bly a march­ing band of some sort. Of no use while run­ning other than dec­o­ra­tion. Let’s face it, if we could strap our Garmins to a head mount and run with it in front of us Gobi would prob­a­bly cut them off to save weight.
* head. The top brass. Often entirely obliv­i­ous to what’s going on in the trenches or think­ing about ladies fours when they should be cal­cu­lat­ing mile splits and plan­ning energy gels.

And last, but not least. S has already shared her ‘Get in rhythym, stay in rhythym’ mantra. Well. Frankly that’s too com­pli­cated. I would sug­gested mere mor­tals start with a sim­ple ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 1 , 2, 3, 4′ bel­lowed at the top of your lungs.

And remem­ber, FLM is a race. You need to demor­alise your neme­sis. Con­fuse them by occa­sion­ally shout­ing ‘1, 2, 4, 8′ or even bet­ter, ‘1, 2, hate your socks Hendo’. But do it in rhythym.

There. My cop­ing strate­gies for long runs. Hope they help. Good luck with your var­i­ous runs tomorrow.