Snow Days

What with all the snow I haven't really been able to do much training. I had a lingering cold from new year, and as soon as that was beginning to clear up, the snow hit. I did try and go out for a run last Friday, but the cold hit my lungs like a gold brick and I ended up in bed, coughing up horror for the rest of the day. I didn't get very far either, because my trainers don't have much grip - although I did make it to the top of the hill, just by the golf course. The view was brilliant, so I went up again, just for a walk, on Sunday.

My new phone has a camera on it that is not exactly anything special, but it does have a setting for taking panoramic shots where it combines six images, and its pretty good. Anyway, here are some nice pictures from the snow over Brighton, taken from up on Hollingbury Golf Course. They are suitably bleak.

13 Autumns

I'm writing this in Polruan, in South Cornwall after being in London over Christmas, [although I couldn't get any internet access while I was there anyway, so I've had to wait til I'm back in Brighton to post it anyway...]. I had grand plans for my running in London but of course they didn't go anywhere because my ability to live up to my grand plans is very much in question. One of my plans was to run on most of the available days, but I only ended up running one time on Boxing Day, having got back from my sister's. I had also planned on doing somewhere along the lines of 8 miles by following a route to where I went to school and back. In the end, the snow still hadn't melted properly and there were too many icy patches in the days before Christmas, and the day that I would have run that route – being Christmas Eve – I spent instead chiselling a hole in a door to fit a new lock at my mum's place. In addition to this, and in my defence, I did do the walk back from Dulwich (i.e. half of my proposed run) at half midnight or so on the night of the 23rd/24th having had a lift back from Balham, and I was pretty tired by the time I got back.

What I did manage to do, on Boxing Day, was a 40 minute run around Brockley and its environs, the land of my adolescence and as such a very special placed populated by the imaginings of a febrile mind overstocked on Hammer Horror films, Cradle of Filth and White Wolf games, which is to say: surely unrecognisable from the state of my mind currently, oh yes.

Starting from my mum's I ran out and pretty much directly towards Brockley Rise, missing Brockley Cross because there's nothing exciting there except a lumber yard and some dodgy traffic that I didn't feel like contending with. The first landmark I reached was the video shop that I used to go to, which is now apparently a betting shop. This made me sad, as the place was great for a number of reasons, but I can't claim that I'm a great supporter of video shops anymore so I'm not going to complain.

When I lived there however, it was a great shop, so let me list the reasons I loved it. First, there was the anime section that they had before it was cool to have an anime section. It wasn't massive, but it was there, and it had Dominion Tank Police, which is a great series. Second, they used to rent films to me quite a long time before I should have been able to rent them. In one of my least clever acts, and with all the tact and forethought for which the adolescent mind is famed, when I was 16 or 17 and looking for a job, I stupidly applied there. They gave my CV straight back to me and basically told me that they would pretend that I had never given it to them in the first place. I left feeling very foolish. Thirdly, I had one of my first crushes on a woman who worked there. In a classic manoeuvre I only actually developed the crush after she (sort of) asked my cousin out because he was wearing a pentacle and it turned out she was a Wiccan, except that he wasn't and wasn't that interested anyway. I then read up on Wicca, but never got to put my knowledge to any use because I was a spotty teenager and that automatically (and quite rightly) ruled me out as a potential suitor.

However, even after I no longer had a crush on her, the idea that there was a coven of witches active in Brockley made me quite happy and became part of my personal pantheon of the supernatural in South East London.

After leaving behind the no-longer-video-shop the next thing to pass was Ladywell cemetery, which I ran around the perimeter of as my way of heading back homewards. Going through Ladywell cemetery was my official coming-home-from-school shortcut-through-the-graveyard (if you've watched any Buffy, or probably any horror films at all you'll know what I mean), except that I had to get off the first bus two stops late and not get the second bus for it to be in any way a shortcut which again shows the interesting contortions of the mind of the teenage goth when in search of darkness.

Up from the cemetery the route then took in the main event, the nexus of my imaginary world – Hilly Fields (a field on a hill, in case you were wondering, with a pretty good view over London) This is where I used to come up walking whenever I wanted to get out of the house, and as far as I was concerned was the hub of spiritual activity in South London. I reckoned there was a pack of werewolves up there, the aforementioned coven of witches and a number of ley lines crossing as well for good measure. (There was a vampire living in a church just down the hill – I passed it later in my run – but he was barred from the hill by the power of the witches, natch.)

Hilly Fields is amazing for another reason, quite beyond the contents of my own mind. It turns out that I'm not the only one with bizarre ideas about the paranormal supremacy of Brockley, as the local residents group had their own ideas. For the Millenium celebrations, they decided that what we needed was our very own stone circle. So one got commissioned and built – God knows who paid for it, it must have taken a hell of a lot bake sales (they probably did tell us in the article in Brocsoc News about it, but I don't remember that bit). It's epic; apparently it can be used a sundial if you stand in the correct spot but the thing that I always noticed was that the two tall stones line up perfectly with the old Citibank building in Lewisham. If you go there on a Saturday people use the stones to play football. I love Lewisham. Anyway, I ran past that too – I tried to take a photo but it was too dark. And then I ran down the hill back to my Mum's for pasta and Wallander on the telly. All in all it was a rather paltry 3 miles. Oh dear.

I have been running in Polruan and I shall report more on that soon.

Fire Above, Ice Below

I was planning on running every day this week except for Friday, which is my work Christmas dinner followed by a trip to Lewes for continued work drinking - I will probably walk over the hill to Lewes from Glyndebourne though, which does count as exercise. I didn't get out today though, as I ended up having to stay late and I have still got rather a lot to sort out at home this evening too. However, I did do the same full route of just under 4 miles on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday - even in the snow on Wednesday. In fact, it was much colder Tuesday, although that may have something to do with the extra gloves and hat I wore Yesterday. On Tuesday I totally thought I was getting frostbite for the first 10-15 minutes, until the blood started pumping into my hands at which point I got chilblains instead.

So this is the route that I have been running, except that I haven't been running it from A to B, I've been running it from my house to my house, and in fact the gap between A and B has been lengthened into this:

The best thing about the last few days is that I have finally got my own, working mp3 player. I had to upgrade my phone and so I got one which could do the job as well, and it was free to boot. It's also good because it means that I have my phone on me while running in case anything ever does go wrong. At the moment it only has space for about 10 songs, but I've ordered a memory expansion so that should sort me out properly. AS it is, I've been able to notice a few things about good music to run with. I've found that longer songs work much better than really short and fast punk music, because it doesn't encourage me too run to fast and thus run out of steam and at the same time, by the time each song is finished I've run much further, so it feels less arduous. 

Best of all so far has been Iron Maiden and Agalloch - for a combination of steady rhythms and long songs. I'm tempted to try even more doom, Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride for instance, although I'm worried that the longer tracks by those bands might actually be too slow. Power metal is also pretty good, I had Sonata Arctica's Deathaura on my playlist yesterday which was pretty awesome, but the cheese factor might become problematic. I was disappointed that sticking on Faster by the Manics didn't make me go any faster, or maybe that was the problem, because I ran out of steam by the end of it. I shall experiment further - I intend to push up to an 8 mile run while I'm in London, and hopefully my memory card will have arrived in time to keep me entertained while I do it.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Sorry that I haven't posted anything for the last week and a half or so, but I had a bit of a downer weekend the weekend before last. On the Saturday I picked up Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, which was all very good and prompted me to listen to lots of Iron Maiden, which I was very happy with. Then on Sunday I went for a run around Moulsecomb Wild Park, and actually a bit further than I had been going which was great until about halfway round when my knee started to seize up and I ended up walking most of the way back and then couldn't really do anything the rest of the week.

One of the ways that I motivate myself to do things that are difficult or that are excess to my absolute basic requirements of survival is to go so far into them that the only way to get back is to keep on going. This works fine except when you get yourself stranded somewhere because of it. Also, in retrospect, TLotLDR was probably not the best thing to read. It's brilliant, but the ending did not chime well with my injury the next day, at least in terms of keeping me motivated about keeping going and all since I spent the whole time feeling this growing discomfort, slowing down and just thinking that that's the end of it. Especially after my ipod conked out only a little before my knee did. The fact is, with the exception of the awesome and surprisingly faithful Rime of the Ancient Mariner, most Iron Maiden songs based on the classics of literature are not always completely, er... accurate to the story, so I should have guessed that my preconceptions might have been slightly out.

This week has been a lot better. I've sorted out a longer route for the evenings, and it's mostly fine, with more pavement and less grassy hill. However, it does still go up on the hill for a bit (if I want to) and yesterday that may not have been the best idea, what with the heavy mist and all. I was too excited by the fact that I had working music, having borrowed my girlfriend's ipod, and I ended up falling down a rabbit hole. The bad news is that I didn't end up in wonderland. The good news is that I didn't break my leg either. I'm going to be a bit more careful from now on.

To play out this post, I shall leave you with this awesome Japanese Maiden covers band doing Loneliness, seeing as they hardly ever seem to play it live now. Top quality.

DMs

I did actually attempt a run in my 8-hole boots, when I knew I was doing the marathon but before I picked up the trainers. It was ill advised. However, I did win on one aspect - a seven year old girl who I passed buying ice cream said that she liked my shoes.

These are not good for running in.

Rainy Sundays and The buying of equipment pts 1 & 2

I still maintain that playing Prince of Persia for two hours in my pyjamas counts as training. I mean, he does loads of running around and jumping between rooftops and stuff and it was raining. That said, I did make it out for about half an hour, in a slight detour that dumped me at the bottom of the steep end of the valley, just by Moulsecoomb station, so I ended up just walking back up that, just as it started to rain again. It was annoying, because I had planned to repeat and improve on my run from last Sunday but what with the rain and a general lack of motivation that I've been suffering from all week (not just on the running front - I haven't had the desire to do anything much) it didn't really happen. I know that it'll pass, and I just have to wait for my energy to come back a bit, but even that knowledge doesn't always help when you're in the middle of it.

What I did manage to do this weekend was make it to the army surplus store at Preston Circus to buy some t-shirts and vests to train in. Paul Bruton's is seriously the best army surplus store I think I've come across, beating even the one at Greenwich Market that I used to go to as a teenager. I had meant to head there when I got first started training but I left my debit card on my desk at home and didn't realise until I was already at London road. What followed was a fairly miserable trudge into town, ending up at Sports Soccer staring at huge and unintelligible piles of trainers and racks of identical but slightly different tracksuit trousers. I bought a pair of Puma's in the end - as much as I might want to even I realise that I cant do proper running in my DMs.

Wales

I'm back from Wales, then, where I didn't run along Portmeirion beach. This was to be expected, as it was cold, starting to rain and I had to drive back to the cottage we were staying in.

The Smell of Rain- Looking down on Portmerion Beach.

I did try and run every day though, in the area around the cottage - which was basically about half a mile of hill and nowhere else to go. I swear I got less fit over the course of the week as well, as the first day I did it not easily, but at least without feeling like collapsing. By Friday I could hardly make it up at all, but it must have been worth it. On Sunday (after driving back to Brighton through the sort of storms you normally only get in Horror films about malevolent fogs) I managed to run a good four miles or so without stopping to walk. Success!

The view from the hill which I ran up almost every morning.