How (not) to organise a marathon

In last week's lengthy account of some of the tribulations I'd suffered in participating in an 'Ultra-Marathon' event in south-west China last month, I mentioned that I had a further rant brewing in me about this. And here it is.

I had been assured by the folks in Beijing co-ordinating registration for the event that it was a "very well organized event". Their bullishness was overstated, of course: what they meant was "very good, for China" - which is to say, a bit of a dog's breakfast.

Now, credit where it's due. The organization relating to the actual running of the races did go pretty smoothly: the courses were well marked out, huge numbers of beaming locals were rallied to provide support, and the race-bag pick-up at the finish lines worked well.

The less positive points, though, would be.... well, EVERYTHING else.

Amongst the points you might like to try to address next time, dear organisers....

1)  Provide as much advance information as possible.

This is a perennial vice in China. I'm sure most of the salient details of this event - the dates, the courses, the accommodation arrangements - must have been finalised weeks or even months ahead; but nobody saw fit to pass any of this on to the participants. I hold Beijing's Heyrobics group, who were working as agents to recruit foreign participants for the event, partly culpable here as well. They were pretty hopeless at passing on promptly even what pitifully little information the organisers had deigned to give them. I had, for example, been led to believe that the event was to be centred around Guizhou's provincial capital of Guiyang. I had therefore planned to travel to the prettier and more touristy city of Kaili in the east of the province under my own steam after the event. I only found out the day before I flew down there that in fact the event was centred around Kaili, and thus had to change my hotel bookings to arrange some time in Guiyang instead. Lack of information about the locations and hotels to be used had scuppered the hopes a few friends of mine had had about possibly coming down to support me during the weekend. And none of the participants from Beijing had been told that the final day's race was based in Zhenyuan, another 2 hours or more east of Kaili, and at least 5 hours away from Guiyang airport - a fact which made it severely impractical to try to join the event for the last day only, as many had been encouraged to do. (Several people, in fact, came within an ace of missing their flights home. My pal Ruby only made hers - with minutes to spare - because she had eventually managed to browbeat her minibus driver into taking her straight to the airport rather than making drops in Guiyang city centre first.) And so on.

2) Provide maps and diagrams of the courses

The only maps we were given were squiggly lines on a blank white background. The few features marked were in Chinese only (no English or even symbols for drinks stations and so on), and far too small for anyone to read anyway. No place names or geographical features were indicated. And no larger scale map was provided to let us know which part of the province we were in, where we were in relation to the major cities of Guiyang (where we'd flown in) or Kaili (where we'd stayed prior to the opening race). In such mountainous terrain, a diagrammatic representation of the hills to be covered is pretty useful, too. A few of the other runners claimed to have seen such a thing, but perhaps, as independent competitors, they'd been able to request additional information directly from the organisers. There was nothing of the sort in the official information pack for the race. And the Heyrobics gang had refused to provide any contact information for the event organisers. On the first day, a German runner told me (perhaps on the basis of what he remembered from running the event in a previous year; apparently, there had been numerous changes to the courses this time) that the first race ended in a very severe hill-climb. I reined myself in over the last several kilometres, trying to save my strength for this cruel finish; but it turned out that the last few kilometres weren't too hilly at all. On the second day, however, the rumour had been that the course was almost completely flat - but we discovered that it ended in a brutally steep 3km hill. This sort of thing matters to runners! Provide a goddamned diagram of the elevations, please.

3) Provide clear information about the race arrangements

The runner's information pack was clear as mud. In fact, much of what little information it did contain was WRONG, so I pretty soon disregarded it altogether. In particular, NOTHING was done to publicise where the race bag drop-off or the assembly point for each race was. There had been diagrams in the runner's guidebook, but these were - again - completely unlabelled, and bore no obvious relationship to features we could actually see on the ground. The assembly points were all fairly nearby the hotels where we were staying; but not so nearby as to be easy to see or easy to find. On Day 2, several people missed the race altogether because the assembly point was quite a long way away, and was not visible from the hotel; and because many of the volunteer helpers were mistakenly directing people that they had to get on a bus - which was in fact supposed to be taking injured runners directly to the finish, twenty miles away. On Day 3, many people ran without being officially 'logged in' to the race start, because they had gathered at what appeared to be the obvious assembly point on a plaza next to the starting line - unaware that on this day, the official assembly point was actually half a mile away inside the hotel.

4) Don't spring a 'health check' requirement on participants at the last minute (though doing nothing to publicize it, or enforce it... and making vague statements to the effect that it can be ignored at the individual runner's discretion)

I refer, of course, to the ludicrous blood pressure checks about which I moaned at length last week - and which I spectacularly failed, though I went ahead and took part in the races anyway.

5) Sort out a better system for transferring bags between hotels

We had to stay in a different hotel for each of the three stages of the event. This is, of course, severely non-ideal: you really don't want to be dealing with the hassle of packing your luggage and clearing your room and checking out of a hotel in the last few minutes before you're due to run a marathon (it's not good for the blood pressure!); nor do you want to be cooped up on a bus for two or three hours heading to a new location immediately after you've finished running. But, if this is unavoidable, at the very least, the organisers need to make the transfers run as smoothly as possible. Now, in fact, we kept the same coaches throughout the event; and the coaches all travelled together in convoy between locations, so everyone left at the same time (which was a bit rough on the faster runners, who had to wait around for hours while we slowcoaches huffed and puffed our way to the finish). There was therefore no reason why we could not each have been assigned a numbered place on a numbered bus, to be used throughout the event; and why we could not then have put our luggage ourselves in the luggage bays on our personal bus; and why we could not have put more valuable or fragile items (computers, cameras, wallets, etc.) in bags on our seats, trusting our driver to ensure that the bus would remain locked until our return at the end of the day's race. No reason, except that this is China, and nobody will ever go for a simple and sensible option if they can do something half-assed, unnecessary and inadequate instead - like throw everybody's bags on to the backs of flat-bed trucks, and then have an unseemly scramble to recover them each day on arrival at the new hotel. (My inability to find anyone who was willing to undertake the safe-keeping of my laptop for me almost prevented me from taking part in the races altogether.)

6)  Make yourselves known to the participants

Only one member of the organising committee made a public announcement during the whole five days I was down there. He didn't introduce himself by name. And he disappeared immediately afterwards, never to be seen again. Few of the senior organisers were visible at all; none of them made any attempt to communicate - formally or informally - with the race participants. No public notices were displayed or announcements made, in Chinese or English, during the event. Hence, nobody had any idea what was going on - ever. Business as usual, in China.

7) Brief your volunteers about what's going on

There were large numbers of volunteers, and they were very nice - oh so cheerful and eager to please. There were rather too many of them, really. I think they quite comfortably outnumbered the competitors - the old 'Infinite Number of Monkeys' approach so beloved in China: why bother to plan a solution to something, when you can just keep throwing more bodies at the problem? This meant, of course, that it was almost impossible to find someone you'd spoken to about a problem previously; your would-be saviour would just merge into the crowd again, and, as like as not, never been seen again. And not many of the volunteers had sufficient initiative even to offer an empty promise to try to solve your problem; most of them just frankly admitted that they didn't have a clue. I felt sorry for them. They wanted to do their best to be helpful, but no-one had told them anything. They each seemed to have a very limited scope of responsibility - such that, for example, at the end of a race, the girls handing out towels could not tell you where to get water, and the girls handing out water could not tell you where to get a towel, and neither group had any idea where there was a toilet. Most of the volunteers based in the hotels seemed to have been charged with trying to help with accommodation problems only, and had been told NOTHING about the race arrangements; so, they were generally unable to answer even the most elementary questions asked of them - like "Where is the race bag collection point?" or "What time do the buses leave?" or "Where does today's race start?"

8)  Make the most of your English speakers

This is an event that aspires to an international profile, and is so desperate to attract more foreign competitors that it actually pays weekend fun runners like me to take part! And yet it does bugger-all to look after its foreign competitors. Only one of the main organisers and very few of the volunteer helpers spoke any English at all. Since just about all of the foreigners taking part - a few Germans, Russians, and Kenyans, as well as the expected Yanks and Brits - spoke some English, but, in most cases, little or no Chinese (and even those who could speak some were struggling; the local accent/dialect down there is pretty weird), it is kind of a high priority to find at least a few people who speak decent English (just a few; until all the fun runners arrived for the last day, there were only a couple of dozen or so foreign participants; it wouldn't have been that hard to find one dedicated minder for every 5 or 6 of us). The situation was better - not great, but not hopeless - at the first location in Kaili, quite a big city with a lot of university students; the subsequent two locations out in the sticks could barely muster any English speakers at all. Given the importance of communication in English, would it be so hard to bus some of those university students from Kaili out to the other venues as well? And why can't you give your best English speakers a little more responsibility, and brief them clearly about what's going on? I found a guy at the final location who spoke excellent English. He was actually part of the media liaison team, but he offered to try and help me find a way to get a late-arriving friend all the way from Guiyang to Zhenyyuan. Alas, he had been told that the airport pick-up service from Guiyang had only been operated for those participating in all three days of the event, and had thus been discontinued on Wednesday. This would have been most unwelcome news to my friend arriving on Saturday evening - but, luckily, it turned out to be complete bollocks.

9)  Don't change the parameters of the race at the last-minute

The second day's race had been advertised in the runner's guidebook as being 35km. We were told at the 'technical briefing' on the evening of Day 0 (which comparatively few people attended, because nothing had been done to advertise it) that this had been reduced to 32km. In fact, it had been increased to 38km. 38-and-a-bit km. However, the time allowed was reduced - without any announcement having been made to this effect - from 4'30" to a niggardly 4 hrs. Many people who narrowly missed the new, less generous cutoff point were denied an official classification for the entire event (something which didn't bother me, but rankled with the more serious competitors in the field quite a bit). I think the time allowed for the first day's full marathon might have been reduced as well: the cutoff had been advertised as 5'30", but the race clock already seemed to have been dismantled when I finished just on the 5-hour mark.

10)  Do measure the goddamned courses - and mark the distances - accurately

I believe the organisers may have calculated the distances using a flat map, not taking into account the effects of hills. As I recounted a week or so ago, I was pretty damned sure - having walked that part of the route on the previous day - that the first "5km" of the first race was perhaps as much as 30% long. People with GPS height and distance tracking gizmos on their smartphones reckoned the course overall was certainly between 1.5 and 2km longer than the regular marathon distance it was supposed to be. The last day's race was supposed to be a half-marathon, 21km. At the last minute, it was extended to "22km"; the guys with the smartphones said it was closer to 24km. There were a few eccentricities with the distance marker boards as well: there were a few stretches where there were no markers for 2 or 3km (this tends to cause the poor runner a lot of unnecessary anxiety, when he's got used to seeing a reminder of his progress consistently every kilometre along the way); and there was one point in the later stages of the short last race where a "1km" interval between boards was in fact very nearly 2km.

11)  Don't f*** with people in the finishing stretch

A regular marathon is only supposed to be 195m more than 42km. On the first day's race, the finishing line was at least 450 or 500m beyond the 42km marker (which was, in any event, something over 43km from the start!), and the course was so twisty that you couldn't see where it was until you were almost on top of it. There was a similar deal on the final day, only worse: the course just went on and on and on, after the final kilometre marker. And then one of those big red inflatable arches that they use to mark the finish of a race finally hove into view. But it was a dummy - not the finish at all. WHY??  People yelled at us to keep running for a few hundred more metres. Another red arch came in sight and I sprinted for it - but guess what, it was a SECOND dummy. The real finishing line was yet another 200 or 300m further on; but, of course, by this point, we no longer had complete confidence that this really was the finish. I had had enough by that point: I refused to 'finish' the race, walking in along the sidewalk behind the crowds. Misleading course markings and false finishes are a big no-no.

12)  If you're going to have souvenirs of the event, let them not be crappy and worthless

We were given free race shorts and shirts. Disgusting design, poor quality manufacture - and ridiculously small (the largest size they had was ostensibly XXXXL; usually a Chinese XXXL is fine for me, equating to an XL back home - but this "XXXXL" was surely no more than an M, I couldn't get it on over my head!). Large numbers of them were abandoned in waste baskets in the hotels. That's not good for spreading awareness of your event and boosting participation in future years.

A Baker's Dozen Postscript: Don't steal your star attraction's passport. One of the professional athletes from Kenya who'd been brought in to give the appearance of this being a serious international competition had had his passport confiscated by the organisers for the whole time he was in the country. No clear reason had been given for this; I heard his minder spinning him some bullshit story about how they'd needed it to buy an air ticket home for him. He had been promised that it would be returned to him when we left Zhenyuan the day after the final race. It wasn't. And it seemed that nobody knew quite where it was. The minder made some anguished phone calls, and eventually announced that someone in Guiyang had it, and would come to the airport to return it to the athlete - an hour or so before his flight was due to leave. He was a lovely guy, very sweet-natured and laidback; but he was starting to get a mite pissed off about this unfolding clusterfuck. I suspect even his super-athlete's blood pressure was getting a little elevated. I was staying in Guiyang for a few days rather than flying straight back out myself, so I don't know if he was able to make his flight that day. I do hope so.

Another one by The Dunst?

No, I'm not referring to the latest movie release featuring the lovely and talented Kirsten Dunst; it's just a silly pun (principally for the benefit of my friend JES, who has a weakness for this kind of frivolity). I have previously used an even better - or worse - variation on this theme. So, this is all I could come up with on this occasion - sorry.

What I wish to say is that I have - once again - found myself forced to abandon a cherished plan in relation to my running: I fear I will not now be taking part in the Xiamen Marathon at the beginning of January - something I have been gearing myself up for since the summer.

My impulsive decision to take part in an 'ultra-marathon' event in Guizhou last month (three races on successive days, totalling nearly 105km) overtaxed my aging and still not-terribly-fit body, and has fatally disrupted my training schedule. I picked up so many bothersome aches and strains from that, most notably a nasty inflammation of the Achilles tendon in my left heel, that I've been forced to rest for the three weeks since. Heavy pollution and/or extreme cold weather in Beijing recently have made it pretty much impossible for me to run outside anyway, even if I had been healthy. So, I'm not in any kind of shape to attempt another marathon within the next month; and, if the weather here continues to be this severe, my fitness is likely to decline even further, rather than improve. Rats!

However, I can perhaps take some consolation from my recent discovery that this Xiamen event is one of the biggest races in China - with a field this year of perhaps as many as 70,000 or 80,000 runners. That's CRAZY - twice as many as Beijing, which is already plenty overcrowded enough to be a total pain-in-the-arse. I had thought it was a relatively small race. I do not like crowds. With that many competitors, the organization is certainly going to be chaotic (I wouldn't trust them to have a reliable system for checking in race-day bags with food and warm clothes to pick up at the finish line, for example). And you'll be spending probably the first hour at least fighting your way through the mob, elbowing slow-moving runners aside to try to find some clear road. It will be a complete bloody nightmare. I am happier giving that a miss, thank you.

I'm still quite tempted to head down there for a holiday, though - and maybe run some of the course on my own at another time.

Blood pressure

Amongst the many vexations I suffered as a result of the chaotic administration of the ultra-marathon event I took part in three weeks back (a longer post is brewing!) was the fact that the organisers sprung on us at the last minute (which is to say, it had not been mentioned at all in what little advance information about the event had been made available) that there was to be a compulsory blood pressure check before each of the races, and that failure to pass this would result in exclusion from participation.

Now, I only found out about this because I had some other urgent questions I wanted to raise at the 'technical briefing' (which had itself scarcely been publicized) on the eve of the race. There were no notices put up about these health checks, and only a couple of fleeting, unexplained references in the runner's information packs. Many competitors might have remained completely unaware of them. And it would have been quite easy to inadvertently bypass - or deliberately avoid - the doctors and nurses conducting the checks, since this was happening in the lobbies of the various hotels where we were being lodged - and it wasn't absolutely necessary to go through the lobbies (certainly not in the third and final hotel, where my room was in a separate annexe, a couple of hundred yards away from the main lobby; and even in single building hotels, I tend to use the stairs rather than the lifts, for exercise, and to leave via the fire exit to avoid possible crowds in the reception area). Moreover, the few references in the information pack actually gave incorrect times/locations for the checks - so, I think we might be entirely forgiven for having skipped them. And, as I discovered, there seemed to be no effective enforcement in place. There were no checks as to whether someone had taken the BP test or not, no system for excluding people who hadn't from starting, not even any subsequent follow-up if they realised later that people had run without having been given the all-clear to do so (I took part without completing the check on all three days, and not a word was said about it).

I might possibly have been denied an official finishing classification for having failed to complete the check (big deal!). And it would have been entirely reasonable to exclude me from the organisers' health insurance coverage if I'd become ill during a race. But I really don't think anybody was keeping any effective record of the test results at all.

One of the other runners at the technical briefing, a super-keen amateur from Hong Kong who'd evidently run lots of ultras before, and taken part in this event two or three times previously, objected that in past years the doctors had tried to exclude some runners for having a blood pressure that was supposedly too low, and he asked for reassurance that this wouldn't happen this time. The organisers' spokesman (the only member of the entire organising committee, it seemed, who spoke any English; but he didn't introduce himself by name, and was never seen again after this meeting) didn't give a very clear response, but he seemed to indicate that the health checks would be "more of a guideline", and that nobody would actually be excluded from taking part if they were confident they were healthy.

It was such a woolly answer that I didn't take much comfort from this. And I was anxious that I was likely to fail the test. Heck, the anxiety about possibly failing the test - the anxiety about having to take a test - was raising my blood pressure considerably. And I'm not super-healthy, not at all a natural athlete. I felt quite intimidated by the rest of the field: even the other amateurs taking part in this event - at least, on the first two days; a bunch of fun runners showed up for the final much shorter race on Sunday morning - seemed to be very serious runners who'd done heaps of marathons and ultra-marathons before. I was one of only four or five who were over forty; and the only one who wasn't whippet-thin.

What's more, I'd come down two days ahead of the first race, and... the concussed bee stupidity of the organisers had just got a bit too much for me. I'd arrived in quite a happy and relaxed mood, but after 48 hours of confrontation with this relentless incompetence, my blood was boiling. I knew there was no danger that my blood pressure was going to be too low. Oh no, it was going to be TOO HIGH. There was no doubt about it.

But still, my innate respect for following the rules bade me try to pass the test, on the first two days of the competition.

The first time I attempted it, I was recorded at 150/100 - which is, admittedly, quite bothersomely high; but not quite in instant heart attack territory. Given the amount of hassles I'd gone through in the previous few minutes, I was quite pleasantly surprised that it was that low. I'm quite sure it must have been at least 10 points higher just a few moments before, and that I'd managed to bring it down quite substantially by a sheer effort of will. So, the doctors told me I'd failed - but I could come back and try again in 10 minutes. Since I was now anxious and angry about the prospect of being excluded from the race on medical grounds (after having travelled 1,000 miles and shelled out a lot of money to get there), and since there was less than 40 minutes to go before the start of the race, and I still hadn't found anyone to take care of my computer (long story), nor had I been able to discover where the dropoff point for race-day bags or the assembly point for the race itself were (despite having asked everyone in sight at least 10 times: NOBODY knew!).... the chances of my blood pressure going down seemed pretty slim. I did try one more time, about 5 mins later; and this time I was apparently 140/100 (which leads me to suspect that the medical staff just weren't very good at using the equipment; I'm quite sure my pressure at this point must have been the same or higher). I didn't think this would be over any reasonable 'danger threshold', but they seemed to think it was, and were still trying to stop me taking part. Eventually they proffered a piece of paper, which I assumed was some kind of waiver of responsibilty if I died, but they weren't able to explain it to me, and..... well, just as I was about to sign it to get them off my back, another little crisis started unfolding, and I went away to deal with that and entirely forgot about signing their damn waiver (if that's what it was).

The following morning, I was in a similar zone - 140/95. Although it was damned hard to get them to tell you what your reading was; and even harder to find out what the 'pass' threshold was. I eventually divined that it was 140/90 - although I might have been misled about that. I suspect it might have been 130/90, which is typically given as the threshold definition of 'pre-hypertension' in medical books.

Now, to me, excluding someone for having a blood pressure which is not ideally healthy, but well within the normal parameters of the general population, seems unduly harsh. Oh sure, we'd all like to be down around 120/80, but how many of us ever are? I doubt if very many people would register that level after an even averagely stressful week at work. Certainly not many middle-aged men.

I doubt if my blood pressure is ever much better than 130/90, not when I'm up and active. I don't recall ever recording a reading lower than that, anyway (but the mere fact of being tested probably bumps it up a few notches; I do not like doctors). And a big race unleashes a huge jolt of adrenalin into your system: half an hour or an hour before the race, I'm pumped. My blood pressure is going to be elevated by at least 10%, if not 15-20%, I should think.

In summary, it is INSANE to seek to exclude runners from an event like this because their blood pressure is slightly higher than normal. It is INSANE to conduct such tests less than an hour before the start of the race. It is INSANE not to the tell people what the parameters of the test are. And it is deeply ANNOYING and STUPID not to let people know about something like this well in advance. It is also completely bloody POINTLESS if no record of the checks is being kept, and half the competitors are ignoring them anyway. This is the kind of thing, I'm afraid, that only seems to happen in China. And it is apt to RAISE YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE.

A few days later, I had the chance to get my blood pressure measured again by a young nurse who was offering free health checks on the street. Removed from the stress of the incompetent event management, I was back down to my 'normal' 130/90.

By the by, Blood Pressure is the title of one of Damon Runyon's classic humorous accounts of New York's gangster low life during the Roaring Twenties, one of the first of these that I read. I discover it's now available online - here.

A runner's excuses

Well, I've just completed my first full marathon in 6 or 7 years. I should be feeling pretty chuffed with myself. And I am, but... well, my time was just awful, EMBARRASSING. 5 hours - WTF? I could walk the distance in 6-and-a-half. This was feeble; very, very disappointing.

Amongst my excuses...

It was a 'long' course

A marathon is only supposed to be 195m more than 42km, but... this one went on for a long, long way after the 42km board. I wondered if perhaps the organisers had become confused with the Imperial measurement of the distance - 26 miles, 385 yards - but even that couldn't account for this agonisingly protracted finishing stretch: I'd guess it must have been over 500m. Moreover, several competitors who had clever GPS applications on their smartphones recorded the overall distance at well over 1.5km longer than it should have been. I rather suspect the organisers had measured the course on a flat map, not taking into account the effect of the numerous hills. And, oh my god....

It was a VERY hilly course

A German runner with one of those of GPS gizmos told me that he'd clocked ascents totalling over 500m - yup, an extra third of a mile vertically upwards. That's a hell of a tough race! Even Lezan Kipkosgei Kimutai, the amiable Kenyan who won all three stages of this 'Ultra' event very comfortably (and who looks not much more than half his forty years!), took nearly 15 minutes longer than his personal best. Most competitors, I would think, were taking at least 25-30 minutes longer. Still, I ought to be able to run a marathon in less than 4'30". Except that....

I hadn't trained enough

I'd only been training in earnest for barely a couple of months, and had been focusing my efforts on preparing for the Xiamen Marathon - which was 8 weeks later. The opportunity to take part in this event came up at very short notice, and I was really killing myself for a week or two to try get in shape to attempt it.

You really can't train for hills like that in Beijing

As I've observed before, the centre of Beijing is pancake-flat. You've got to go quite a long way out into the countryside to get in any decent practice running on serious gradients.

I may have overdone things slightly in my final preparations

I wasn't confident in my ability to last this distance, having not attempted it for several years; and having, until recently, struggled to complete even a half-marathon distance. So, I forced myself to do a full-distance dress-rehearsal around the Houhai/Qianhai lakes in Beijing (well, pretty near full-distance; getting on for 40km, I reckon) only 10 days beforehand - and that hurt, a lot. Psychologically, it gave me the boost I needed; but physically, I think I wasn't fully recovered from it.

And I wasn't able to 'taper' properly

Most long-distance runners recommend winding down your training in the last two or three weeks before a big race. You shouldn't stop altogether, but you usually do only a few light runs in the last week or so. I had to stop altogether - because of an unseasonal freeze and snowfall in Beijing the weekend before the race that made it impossible to go outside.

I had perhaps been dieting too severely

I'd managed to drop 20lbs (9kg) in less than two months. I have been careful to try to maintain good basic nutrition during this, but shedding that much weight takes it out of you - I think it has compromised my stamina a bit.

I haven't recovered my bounciness of gait yet

The weight loss hasn't yet brought much improvement to my pace. In my head, I still feel like the fat man I was a few months ago, and I'm just not picking my feet up very well, not really stretching out my stride.

I don't like my new shoes

This is a terrible thing for a runner to confess. When you buy a new pair of shoes, you're expecting them to be a central part of your life for the next couple of years, at least; you're expecting to be inside them almost daily, for hours at a time. It's a big deal. This is a closer intimacy and a more enduring commitment than I have ever experienced with a woman. I've been a Nike man for... nearly 30 years now. I have experimented with Reebok and Adidas and New Balance, but these dalliances have only served to reassure me I am well-and-truly wedded to the swoosh. But bloody Nike seem to have come up with a major redesign of their insoles. They always used to have removable, customisable arch-support inserts; but now - that's gone? I have very high insteps, and I really need all the arch support I can get. These latest shoes are in general very comfortable - no problems with blisters or runner's toenail - but they make me feel flat-footed. And I fear this is at least partly responsible for my attenuated stride, and my extreme susceptibility to calf muscle and Achilles tendon strains. I may have to investigate the Reebok option again.

I was ill

When I arrived at the first race location - the small, touristy city of Kaili, in the eastern portion of Guizhou province - it was smothered in low cloud and fog, and the damp air was thick with construction dust and other pollutants: it was the kind of foul brown fug, the off the scale of Air Pollution Index toxicity that we so often  suffer in Beijing, but which we naively hope more rural districts to be free of. After one evening's exposure to this, the glands in my throat swelled up like tennis balls. I'm not sure if it was an allergy or a cold or a response to airborne toxins, or a combination of these. But I had a sore throat and a mild fever and a nose streaming with snot throughout the three days of the event. If I'd been at home, I would have just cowered under the duvet feeling sorry for myself until the symptoms receded. But taking part in something like this gives you a huge shot of adrenalin, which enables you to overcome - or at any rate ignore - such physical infirmities.

I got my pacing all wrong

It's always a problem with big races. I am essentially a solitary runner: I don't adapt well to being surrounded by other runners. And much as I try to discipline myself, I can never completely resist the temptation to race against people - particularly in the opening few kilometres, when the field is so densely packed and there are so many people getting in your way (in China, security is non-existent, so you invariably get hordes of local people crashing the start, and trying to run along with you for the first few kilometres). Seeing people ahead of you who are obviously much slower than you - old people, short people, untrained runners, people with injuries - is annoying; you want to get them behind you as soon as you can. But if they've somehow picked up 20m or 30m on you before you pass the starting line... well, overhauling them is a gruelling and painful challenge - and it wears you out. Or, it would - if you weren't so absurdly adrenalised at the start of the race. And because of this surplus of adrenalin, however much you try to rein yourself in and to run well within yourself so that you'll be able to maintain the same sort of pace consistently through to the end, you always find yourself going quite a bit faster than you normally would. And that's not good. I know this danger, I should do more to guard against it; but I'm inexperienced, out of practice, haven't done anything like this for a long time. 

And my start in this marathon was just ridiculous: I reached the 5km mark in under 26 minutes. And I'm pretty damned sure - since I had covered most of this route in my walking explorations of the city centre over the previous two days, and since I have a pretty accurate inbuilt sense of distance anyway - that this was wildly mismeasured: I reckon it must have been closer to 6km at the very least, maybe more like 6.5km. Even if it really was only 5km, that's nearly as quick a pace as I've ever managed to maintain over a 10km race, and nearly 10% faster than I've previously run a marathon. If it was more like 6km, that's around a 3-hour-marathon pace, at least 20% better than I was capable of even in my prime. And there were some very steep hills in this section as well! Yep, I scared myself with that opening sprint: I deliberately pulled back to a gentle plod for a few kilometres to try to preserve my stamina - but I knew I was going to be completely gutted well before the end.

I was gutted well before the end

Those hills just got ridiculous. In the first half of the race, there were four or five fairly long uphill drags. In the second half, as we got out into the picturesque countryside of Qiandongnan, the hills were mostly very short - few more than 500m, many only 50m or so - but they kept coming, one after another. It was impossible - and dispiriting - to keep count: there must have been 20 or 30 of the bloody things. My stamina was flagging badly during the last quarter of the race. And then I began to feel the worrying twinges of an old knee injury, so I began to walk the uphill stretches over the last 7 or 8km. Until then, I had been on course to finish in about 4'20".

Fate - and the organisers - were messing with me over the final kilometre or two

Because this three-day event is evidently conceived primarily as a tourist promotion exercise by the Guizhou government, each race has to end in some touristy hotspot. On this first day, it was a heavily reconstructed 'model village' of the Miao minority people - hilly, and with cobbled streets: NOT what you want for the closing stages of a marathon. What's more, there were no signs to let us know where we were going or how long was left (over the last kilometre or so, it's nice to have distance markers every 100 or 200m, to reassure you that you're nearly finished), and the road was so winding that we couldn't finally see the finishing line until it was just a couple of hundred metres away. Trying to pace yourself over the closing stretch in conditions of such uncertainty is... not nice. Moreover, the organisers hadn't been able to do anything to clear the streets, so we were having to weave through gaggles of tourists... and the occasional motor vehicle. Then I paused briefly to check on the status of a young Brit who was limping home with a bad injury. And while I was doing that, I got overtaken by a China Post delivery van - which almost completely blocked the narrow streets; and followed the route of the race all the way to the end, at a crawl; and belched huge clouds of choking blue smoke into my face. Thank you, God. I was able to squeeze by it before long - but I gripe that it may have made the difference between me finishing a few seconds inside and a few seconds outside 5 hours.

I didn't find out exactly how long I'd taken, because the organisers had already dismantled the official race clock. [I heard a rumour that they'd decided - without, of course, telling anyone - to reduce the time allowed for this first race from 5 hrs to a niggardly 4hrs 30mins. They did chop back the allowance for the next day's race from the advertised 4hrs 30mins to only 4hrs - although it was 90% of the full distance, with a vicious 3km hill at the end. This kind of arbitrary change to the parameters of the competition is particularly rough on people who finish within the advertised time limit but outside the new reduced limit, and are thus denied an official classification in the event. I don't give a rat's ass about that, I was just taking part for my own enjoyment. But a lot of people were pretty disgruntled about it. A further post is brewing on the legion failures of organisation surrounding this event.]

So, anyway, damn - 5 hours??!! I have my excuses, but that really is a pretty piss-poor showing. I ought to be capable of doing a marathon inside 4 hours, goddammit! At least, I was 7 or 8 years ago, when I was really training seriously. And I'm going to get back to that level again - or die in the attempt!

Perhaps 4'30" might be a more realistic target to set myself for Xiamen, though....

Haiku for the week

Repeating cycles

Sometimes reassure, refresh;

Sometimes wear you down.

I finally managed a full practice marathon at the start of this week, 8 laps around the nearby lakes.

Well, I finished - that's something. Especially considering I've been suffering badly with allergies recently, so my breathing wasn't as easy as I would wish. And, amazingly, I didn't feel too awful the next day - although I would not have liked to have attempted another long run. But at least I didn't injure myself. And my pace - at least, at first - was pretty good, not too far short of what I was running 5 or 6 years ago: just inside 2 hours for the half-distance. But man, the second half was much slower; and I hit 'the wall' bad at around 18 miles. It was a real struggle to get to the end after that.

Still, quite a promising result, all in all. I'm still 5 weeks away from the marathon I had planned to run in Shanghai (but am now boycotting), and 9 weeks away from the one I still hope to run in Xiamen (if they ever get their act together about registrations!); so, I still have time to build up strength and stamina some more, get myself more fully prepared.

Ah, but.... I just rashly entered myself in a race next week. That.... that is going to be PAINFUL. Wish me luck.

Not making it easy

One of my major goals for my last few months in China was to run a marathon again - my fourth, and almost certainly last.

Unfortunately.... the Beijing Marathon, as far as I can discover online, is still in limbo - its traditional mid-October date kicked into touch at the last moment by the government's insane anxieties about the upcoming leadership handover. (I'd been thinking of attempting the half-distance as a warm-up, and to keep a few friends company; but it is a ridiculously overpriced event, hideously overcrowded, and a VERY dull course. Its indefinite postponement - probably now cancellation - is really no great loss.)

The Shanghai Marathon, due to take place on December 2nd this year (by which time I might just about be in shape to give the full distance a go), is likewise a bit up-in-the-air - although organisers are insisting that it will still go ahead on the scheduled date. But a month ago, during the height of the Senkaku Islands hullabaloo, local government officials abruptly intervened - in the middle of one of the organisers' press conferences! - to announce that event could not go ahead this year as the Toray Cup. Toray, the name sponsor of the race for the past 16 years, is a Japanese chemical company, you see. Even if the race does now take place, which must be somewhat in doubt, I trust all right-thinking people will boycott it in protest at the Shanghai government's appalling pettiness over this matter.

Which leaves only the Xiamen Marathon at the beginning of January (a godawful time to hold a race, in the middle of the Western - and, increasingly also Chinese - festivities!). Xiamen is pretty far south, so the weather should be pleasantly mild even in the depths of winter. And it is supposedly a very pleasant route: flat, and almost entirely along the coast roads of this island city in Fujian province. I have been wanting to attempt this race for at least 7 or 8 years; but, until recently, it was impossible to register for it remotely - online, or even by mail; you had to go all the way to Xiamen to sign up for the race!

And, well, here we are barely 11 weeks from race day, and the official website is STILL saying that registrations aren't open yet. Oiveh!

I fear I'm going to be stuck doing 8 laps of my local lake; a self-adminstered marathon the only way to test my aging body's powers of endurance one last time.

The hell of stairs

Another thing I noticed while on holiday this summer was that I have lost the ability to cope with stairs.

In Beijing, I have always lived in apartment buildings, and have always used the stairs. But having to walk up five or six flights of steps to get home, while a decent dose of exercise, pales into insignificance beside having a split-floor living space. I rarely leave my apartment more than once or twice a day. If you live in a house or a two-floor apartment, you are going up and down stairs - even if only a single flight of them - dozens of times every day.

Moreover, Chinese stairs seem to have fairly shallow risers. I currently have 16 steps to a storey of barely 9ft. My old apartment had 19 steps - a double-flight! - to a storey of less than 10ft.

I suppose this works out to only a bit over 6" per step. I would guess that most steps in the UK or America are more like 8" or so high. It makes a big difference!

I find my creaky old knees just can't cope with going down a long flight of steps with tall risers these days. Particularly when my legs are extra stiff from a too-long run! And particularly when - as seemed to be the case in every house I stayed in this summer - the stairs have very narrow treads (less wide than they are tall!!), and are of bare wood (worn to perilous slipperiness), and tilt forwards slightly, and wind through sharp right-angled turns. I tell you, I would do my damnedest to limit my visits to the upstairs bathroom in these houses. And the experience made me feel like a very decrepit old man.

I fear my lack of experience with steps is another reason why I have lost so much resilience and flexibility in my calves (and strength in my knees and thighs) in recent years. Hence, I am trying to find silly little pretexts to go up and down the stairs in my building more often, cultivating unnecessary habits to increase the amount of this kind of exercise I am getting. One of my favourites is that every time I take a bag of rubbish out to the recycling bins in the courtyard, I force myself to climb to the top of my building's fire stairwell first. That's 15 storeys. And, since I only have very small rubbish bags at the moment, this is now pretty much a daily ritual.

I also have a pair of uncommonly steep Chinese steps (nearly 10") leading to my balcony, so I'm starting to do step exercises on those every day.

I don't know how much this will help my running. But I do hope that the next time I stay in a house, I won't view having to use the stairs with such trepidation.

The hell of hills

Trying to run during my long break from China this summer (three-and-a-half months away - oh, bliss!), I got frustrated at how easily I exhausted my reserves of stamina... and at how easily I seemed to strain the muscles in the back of my calves.

Then it occurred to me: the sudden unexpected onset of exhaustion and the niggling pains in the back of my leg would both ambush me as I neared the end of a long hill-climb. Not so surprising, really! But the thing is, Beijing is pancake-flat; I hadn't really taken on a proper hill since the last time I was back in the UK three years earlier.

In Oxford this summer, I was living just off the Abingdon Road, to the south of the city centre; and it was a gentle but steady climb all the way into town, becoming abruptly quite a severe climb just beyond Folly Bridge as one approaches Christ Church (I was usually only covering the first few yards of this, up to the entrance of Christ Church Meadow, but it is a much steeper incline than any I have regularly run in China). The month I spent in the States, in Alexandria, VA., I was starting out my run with an even more challenging climb, a mile or so of solid uphill as I headed east towards the river (and then several more lesser hills to negotiate in the last third of the 9 or 10-mile run I was usually attempting).

It is shocking to realise how far I've lost my capacity for hill-running, since in my younger days all the routes I ran were ferociously hilly: the one I ran most often in the last year or two before I came to China, in the countryside just outside Monmouth where my Mum lived, was a brutal succession of short but steep hills. And the 4-and-a-half mile circuit I ran while doing my teacher training in Durham was ALL hills (I suppose some of them must have been downhill; but I can only remember the long, painful uphill sections!).

But now, NOW I find myself struggling even with the mild gradients Beijing has to offer. There is a moderately steep stretch on the north-west side of Houhai lake (not hellishly steep, and only a few hundred yards long) which regularly punches me in the solar plexus. And has me getting paranoid about my calf muscles.

I need to do more flexibility exercises, I know I do. 

Or maybe find a proper hill to run again...

When I get back up to being able to run 25 or 30km, I want to have a crack at running Xiangshan - a small mountain park on the north-west outskirts of Beijing. Goals and objectives!

Hitting a wall

It looks like I have come up a little short of the first weight loss goal I set for myself a couple of weeks ago. I had aimed to be at - or, hopefully, at least a smidge below - 92kg (roughly the weight I was when I last attempted a full marathon six or seven years ago). Alas, I am stuck at around 94kg (93.5kg at absolutely the most flattering measurement I can procure from my bothersomely inconsistent scales; not sure quite what the problem is with that - wildly uneven Chinese flooring?!).

Now, this might not seem so bad. I have lost at least 3kg, possibly 3.5kg in only two weeks. The thing is, I'd lost a similar amount over the previous three weeks just through severe dieting - but without doing a great deal of heavy exercise, and while still drinking, at least on occasions, quite a lot of beer. Once I gave up beer completely, ramped up my dieting another notch, and began running 12-15km every day, I thought I'd be able to lose weight much faster. And I did, for a short while: I got at least 75% of that weight off in only three or four days. But since then - NOTHING. For 11 or 12 days my weight has been rock steady at just below 95kg. I've only finally made a small dent in that again today - by going for a very long run in rather humid conditions; hence, it's probably just water-loss, and will go right back on.

Now, admittedly, I'd had to take a rest from running during that time, because of a calf strain. But I have tried to compensate with doing more exercise of other kinds (lunges, sit-ups, press-ups, light weight work; stair-climbing; and LOTS of walking). And I've been eating like a sparrow. And NOT DRINKING.

But my metabolism, it seems, has had enough. However much energy I might burn off when I'm out of the house or exercising, the rest of the time my body seems to lapse into a state akin to cryogenic suspension. I sleep, I read, I watch TV, I work on the computer; and it seems I do not burn off one single calorie while I'm doing any of this.

At least now I seem to have shaken off the muscle injury, so I should be able to get back into a full programme of running. And I'm trying to make my other exercise more plentiful and more regular (conditioning myself to get up from the computer at least once an hour and do 20 reps of something or other).

But my BIG GOAL (getting back down to 88kg - the weight I was when I came to China a decade ago - before my birthday in two weeks' time) is obviously out of reach. And even that would supposedly still be borderline "overweight" in the view of those unrealistic health fascists who tout the Body Mass Index as the ultimate touchstone of well-being.

I am going to continue to make efforts to get down closer to that weight. But it is beginning to look ominously as though 95kg (+/- 1kg or so) has become my 'natural weight'; I fear it is going to be all but impossible to get much below that, or to sustain that new level if I do. Particularly if I start drinking beer again - which I had hoped to do after my birthday. Bummer.

Middle age - I DO NOT like it!

Haiku for the week

Before the crowds come

Light on water, wind in trees

Early morning run

Oh, it's lovely when it works. But this week I have been sidelined with yet another calf muscle tweak. I have happy memories of many great dawn Houhai runs in the past; and hopes of some yet to come.

Goals and objectives

I should, round about now, be returning from my first training run of full half-marathon distance.

Since Sunday is the traditional day for the Beijing Marathon (if it goes ahead this year; the country's political insecurities seem to be threatening to cause a cancellation), and for most other international marathons, I am intending to make Sunday my 'Big Run' day - forcing myself each week substantially beyond the distance I've so far achieved, and trying to replicate the race-day situation (i.e., getting up early, ready to start the run by 8am). I have, in fact, already run close to the half-marathon two or three times, and had hoped to push for the full distance for the first time last weekend; but I'm still having some stamina issues, so decided to wait another week. Hopefully, 21km won't be too much of a stretch for me now. Despite suffering a bad cold this week, I've still forced myself to run a couple of times, and I feel my confidence and pacing are slowly coming back to me. I'm managing to sustain a pace of nearly 10kph now, and I'm hopeful I can achieve a 10%-15% improvement on that over the next few months.

Whether or not I attain that increase in speed is almost entirely dependent on whether I manage to lose weight. I am alarmed, disgusted by how portly I have become in the last few years. Since I'm tall and have quite a broad frame, I don't think I'm yet in the zone of being considered 'clinically obese', but I'm uncomfortably close to the threshold of that category now: officially, in medical terms, 'overweight'; and, for someone who's been moderately lean and athletic for most of his life, I feel like a fat bastard.

I reached 80kg during my final growth spurt when I was in the 6th Form, but my weight then remained remarkably stable for a long time. Despite prodigious consumption of beer and kebabs during my student days, my youthful metabolism was more than capable of burning it all off (and I suppose I was doing quite a lot of exercise in those days; I began distance running back then, to get in shape for the Army reserve unit I had impetuously joined). My weight in kilograms might have crept up into the low 80s by the end of my undergraduate career, but that was mostly a gain in muscle rather than fat. And my weight continued uncannily stable for several more years - with only a few derangements. 

At the beginning of my second year as a schoolteacher, I tore up the cartilage in my right knee rather badly (playing football in the gym with the kids), and wasn't able to do any exercise at all for several months (even walking was a bit of a trial for a time). During that period, my weight quickly ballooned above 95kg. However, I gave up drinking for the summer term (I had been rather over-indulging in the cheap - and very fattening - lager we had on tap in the Masters' Common Room), which helped to reverse that trend; and when I was able to begin running again in the autumn, the weight fell off, and I was soon back down to within a kilo or two of what I'd been before.

My teaching career was abruptly ended a couple of years later by a violent - and mysterious - dose of food poisoning, which nearly killed me and had me laid up in hospital for three weeks. During the onset of that illness, in the space of just a week or so, my weight plummeted to 75kg - the lightest I'd been since I was about 10 years old! However, a big chunk of that weight loss was probably just dehydration; I'd recovered a lot of it by the time I left hospital, and within a month or two I was back to my 'normal' weight of 82-83kg.

During my backpacking year a couple of years later, my weight also fell dramatically - particularly during my last few months in America, when I had basically run out of money and was subsisting on a starvation diet. When I got back to the UK, I was again not much above 75kg - but this time I was lean and wiry, rather than ravaged by dehydration and muscle wastage. That's the fittest I've ever been in my life. However, despite continuing to live fairly frugally and to run 10 or 12km almost every day, my weight soon bounced back to 80-something kg; that seems to be my 'natural weight' - or, it was then.

I've always been mildly bothered by a propensity to gain weight quite easily in the short-term; noticing myself put on a kilo or so whenever I've gone through a few days of particularly heavy beer consumption, and to add 2 or 3 kilos each winter as protection against cold weather. However, when I was a young man, I found it fairly easy to lose that weight again. Since I moved to Beijing ten years ago, it's become much harder. Now, a few days of heavy drinking can bloat me by 2kg, or more; the 'winter coat' gets thicker year by year - 4kg or 5kg, or even 6kg; and it takes a few months of determined effort to get that weight off again. In fact, I haven't been able to get it all off: my weight has begun to creep up insidiously year by year, as, despite my best efforts, I only manage to shed two-thirds or half of the weight I've piled on over the winter. I don't think this is anything particularly to do with the environment of Beijing (although many expats point a finger of blame at the fattiness of stir-fried food - or the cheapness and ubiquity of the local beer!), just a matter of metabolic slowdown as I hit middle age. In fact, I think I'd started to notice it in my last couple of years in England; the turning point probably occurred some time in my early-to-mid-thirties. 

Things have got particularly bad in the last few years, though. I don't know if I should blame further metabolic changes or a more sedentary lifestyle or a shift to drinking a lot of premium lager or a drastic reduction in my running due to a succession of persistent injuries, but... in the last three winters my seasonal blob-out has amounted to 6kg or 7kg, and I've struggled to get any of that weight off again. A couple of times early this year my weight briefly peaked at around 105kg, a full 10kg more than it had been barely two years earlier.

I'd managed to shed a few kilograms of that before I quit Beijing in May. And I thought that, having mostly lived fairly healthily and done quite a lot of running, I would have shed quite a bit more during my extended summer holiday. But it seems that a few big beer sessions here and there had done their damage, and I was still a bit above 100kg when I came back here a month ago. I had briefly got down below 97kg, maybe closer to 96kg, a couple of weeks back - but that was perhaps partly dehydration after a long run in hot weather. Whatever - a few big nights out quickly set me back a few kilos again. Now I've given up beer for the coming month, and am committed to a more intensive programme of exercise, I feel I can achieve a substantial weight reduction. I seem to have been managing to lose 1kg or so per week quite easily, even when I was still drinking beer; so, I figure if I ramp up the amount of exercise I'm doing, and maybe throw in a bit of fasting, I should be able to drop 1.5-2kg, perhaps even 2.5kg per week.

At present, I am just over 97kg. By the end of the National Holiday Week (8th October), I aim to be 92kg - the weight I was when I last ran a marathon, six years or so ago. By my birthday (20th October), I aim to be 88kg - an even more psychologically significant milestone for me, since this is the weight I was just before I came to China. 

If I can achieve these goals, I may push on a bit further with my dieting (and avoidance of beer!) to see if I can get down below 85kg. And if I can manage that, I'll try to see how much lower I can push it. I don't think I can reasonably, or safely, expect to get back down to 80kg. There are certain fat deposits that obstinately refuse to shift at this time of life; and my bones have got bigger since I was a teenager; heck, my liver has got bigger! But if I could get back to around 83 or 84kg, the weight I was in my mid-twenties, I would be very, very happy. This is MY MISSION for the next few months.

"A man needs goals and objectives to give his life meaning."

Haiku for the week

Time equals distance,

Weight equals time. Road seems longer

For the fat runner.

I am - slowly, hesitantly, painfully - getting back into an almost-daily jogging habit. But I am finding it difficult to 'zone out' for extended periods as I used to be able to do, to run without fretting about the energy expended or the distance left to cover. I am so overweight at the moment that I am made acutely aware of distance. Even stretches of my regular route that used to seem negligible, mere hundreds of yards, now appear rather daunting; the longer sections batter my spirit with their endlessness. Familiar pieces of road actually look longer to my eyes now; and it is depressing, strength-sapping.

It is going to be mighty hard to wrap my head around the idea of undertaking a marathon again.

But such is my ambition. I'm just going to need to shed 10 or 12kg first.

Froog mad-dogging it again

Gosh, it was nearly four years ago that I first attempted to post this classic Noel Coward song, to accompany a description of the masochism of trying to run during the hottest part of the day.

Today, having been busy with some e-mailing and such during the morning, I didn't set out from my Del Ray holiday headquarters on my run down to, and along, the Potomac until exactly 12pm. Venturing out at noon, in such a hot country, is asking for trouble!

Luckily, the weather is relatively cool today. But the humidity down by the river hits you like a brick wall, and has almost invariably been halting me in my tracks over the past couple of weeks, sucking all the energy out of me, reducing me almost instantly to a long restorative spell of walking. 

It's probably a little unrealistic of me to be attempting an 8 or 9-mile run when I am around 20lbs overweight. But I feel that, if I slow down enough, I ought to be able to manage it - to keep going at a very modest plod for 80 minutes or so. Alas, it seems not. I seem to have lost the 'forever pace', the speed where I am sufficiently within my capacity for exertion that I can keep going and going and going - indefinitely, if necessary (I have most often tended to use this slower-than-usual pace when exploring new routes, and am uncertain how long it's going to take me to get back to my point of origin).

It is dispiriting to be reminded that I have been "woefully out of shape" and struggling with my running for at least four years now. I am starting to worry not just that I have run my last marathon, but that I may soon have to accept that I can't run any more at all. Boo.

Well, I will try to raise my spirits with this sublime celebration of the Englishman abroad from Mr Coward. (I hope I am not going to be a jinx again: the previous clip I posted was pulled only a couple of months later.)

There are good versions of this also by Colin Baldy and The Muppets, but the original is still the best.

Chinese pedestrians, please take note

(And bicyclists too, of course. And drivers as well, come to that - though they never take any notice of anything!)

Runners do not have brakes.

Even if you're only plodding along at a modest 6 or 7 mph, it's almost impossible to stop or slow down significantly in less than 4 or 5 strides. Changes of direction, even quite small ones, are also next to impossible - particularly if your knee cartilages are shot, as mine are.

I know it is 'the Chinese way' to studiously ignore everything and everyone around you, and to just assume that others will notice you and take necessary evasive action. That might work surprisingly well most of the time with the types of traffic you're used to encountering on the streets of Beijing. I'm afraid it doesn't work with runners. We are not able to do much in the way of taking evasive action, even if we desired to.

No, if you step into my path one yard in front of me when I'm running.... you are going to GET HIT. I'm sorry - but there's nothing I can do about it.

Haiku for the week

In a marathon, 

Every yard of the last mile

Feels like a full mile.

And that's rather how my workload has been starting to feel this week: classes last night, this afternoon, and then on Monday lunchtime, and then..... nothing. But gawd, this week has been one hell of a slog.

Fancy running into you again

Of course, when we say that in English, we don't mean it literally. Not usually.

I wonder why we do say it? Is it suggestive of the hurried pace of modern life, implying that our haste to get things done and to get from one place to another makes it seem as if we are running rather than walking?

Or is it, I wonder, a metaphor that has bled through from the world of industrialisation? Does it imply something of steadiness or relentlessness, of orderliness or predictability, as in a mechanised process? Things may run smoothly or not so smoothly for us, and we may be running on time or late. Is this the same way in which unexpected chance encounters (usually welcome ones) are described as running into someone?

Well, I don't know.


But, alas, in China, the phrase becomes all too often literally appropriate.

I've been getting back into a regular jogging habit lately. And it is just about impossible to jog in this country without running into people.

The Chinese pedestrian moves exceptionally slowly. And erratically. And without any obvious logic.

I have complained of this before (for instance, here and here). I can't help feeling that it is a kind of wilful blindness, a perverse refusal to pay any attention to the world around them, or to give any consideration to the convenience or safety of others (or themselves!).

If you are standing, stock still, in the middle of a sidewalk which is crowded with people moving briskly in both directions past you, and you suddenly, for no reason, take a large step backwards and sideways without looking over your shoulder...... well, then you shouldn't be surprised if the big sweaty laowai approaching rapidly from behind you shoulder-charges you out of the way. [It happened to me three times this morning.]

Rediscovering virtue

After nearly three months of unrelenting slovenliness (less abrasive self-critics might term it "resting an injury"), I have finally got back into a regular running habit these last few days.

I am slow, oh so slow. My legs are stiff. And I am involuntarily breaking down into a walk every 15 or 20 minutes (worrying: serious stamina issues!). But, on the whole, it's feeling pretty good.

This morning, I managed to head out early, only a little after 7am - when my usual figure-8 circuit around the Houhai/Qianhai lakes is mercifully uncrowded. Well, there are still quite significant gaggles of people: city maintenance workers doing their early chores, local residents having breakfast on the street, children on their way to school, etc. But NO tourists. Bliss. I must try to start doing this every day again.

I feel a little calmer, a little saner already. I don't know how I've survived without this for so long.

A Marathoner no more?

Yesterday was the deadline for registrations for this year's Beijing Marathon.  I was full of good intentions of trying to get myself signed up for it (even though I had a bunch of work chores to take care of), but....  Well, I just didn't find the time.   Cold feet yet again, I'm afraid.  Since picking up a bad knee injury on the Great Wall Marathon nearly three-and-a-half years ago, I have suffered a succession of minor but persistent injuries as well as a number of more general health problems which have inhibited me from getting back into a regular training habit.  And, as a result, I've put on a lot of weight: I'm nearly a stone (6kg, if you must have it in metric terms) heavier than I was when I tried "running the Wall". Over the past three years I suppose I must have been forced to abandon plans to compete in at least 6 or 7 marathons here in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, The Great Wall.  I am pathetic.   I did quite a bit of running during my summer holiday, but was bothered by a nameless metabolic (or existential) ailment which has been mysteriously sapping my strength and my will for some months now.  Since I got back to Beijing 4 weeks ago, I have dismally failed to get back into a daily jogging habit; I have in fact managed only 4 or 5 - fairly short - runs in all that time.  So, I just don't think I'd be able to get in shape for the full-distance event, which is now just one month away.  And I rather fear I may have to go and see a doctor to try and find out what it is that's making me feel so bloody feeble all the time.   I've never been what you'd call a natural athlete, and, after such a long run of injuries and ill health, I'm beginning to think that I may have run my last marathon. Now that I am entering my middle forties - with the stoutening of girth which seems inevitably to accompany this stage of life - my body no longer seems to be capable of putting forth the effort, or enduring the physical pounding, that long-distance running requires.   Damn.  I'm going to miss it.  It has been a big part of my life.     Then again, maybe my bloody-mindedness may yet get the better of me.  I hate to admit defeat, ever.  The Beijing organisers may still be accepting "late registrations" for a while longer (at an elevated fee, but that's more of an annoyance than a fatally offputting price barrier).  If I can get in a few good - painless - runs in the next week (and/or rustle up some more work, which would help to make the dratted registration fee seem a less irresponsible expenditure), then I may... just may give it a go after all.   Watch this space.