CELEB SPOT

Written by Phil Cairns

How do people write daily newspaper columns? Coming up with something to write fortnightly for these blog posts makes me feel entirely bereft of imagination! Fortunately, there were a couple of things of note this fortnight. Including an actual celeb sighting on my long run at the weekend. More on that later. 

Training is still going ok. Apart from some mildly painful hard, callusy bits of skin on the inside of both big toes, I’m injury and niggle-free. I’m enjoying the mileage more than I thought could be possible over the winter months. And I’m also enjoying going to more club sessions than I normally would at this time of year, particularly Tuesday’s Osterley track sessions. It’s making me feel very grateful for the Eagles community and the coaches who give their time to run these sessions.

I had my first inkling of those track sessions starting to pay off last week, when I decided to run to Battersea Park Run, partly as my nephew lives in the area and is a regular, so it was a good excuse to have breakfast with him. It was my first time at Battersea Park Run, and I have a mixed relationship with the Park. I love running there, always enjoy the Summer League fixture. But I also got my 10k PB there at a RunThrough event which turned out to be a short course, which stung somewhat. 

I’d seen the high numbers attending (1000+ every week apart from their debut and the Christmas events) so was expecting mad congestion. But because the paths are so wide, it thins out pretty quickly. Even if you start too far back (as I invariably manage to), you don’t stay boxed in for long. I managed 22’33, which was my quickest in a while. (Smug feeling didn’t last long as my Clapham Chaser nephew managed a PB of 16’49). Hard recommend for those that haven’t been yet. Looking forward to returning. And with a few more track sessions under my belt, I should definitely be able to make up that 6 minutes to beat my nephew next time, right?

At the risk of my blog posts acquiring a theme of bodily excretions, I also overheard the following conversation from a guy behind me on the way to the start:

“Have I ever told you my London Marathon story? I was running along, and suddenly felt this warm patch on my back. I turned round and some f**ker was pissing up my back!”

WHAT?!

Where? Why? How? What did you say/do? Is pissing on a fellow runner grounds for disqualification? So many questions! All of which I was too gobsmacked to ask.

This weekend just gone I did my longest run of this training cycle so far – 18 miles. I’ve run along the canal as far as Regents Park a few times, but I figured I’d extend that route and carry on through Camden and up to Kings Cross, before dropping down into Bloomsbury, across to Fitzrovia, then around Hyde Park before heading back through Notting Hill, Holland Park and Shepherds Bush. Really enjoyed it. I was worried about congestion around Camden Market, but actually it was the next, narrower stretch up to Kings Cross that was trickier. Perhaps it was quieter than usual because of the rain. I noticed another Eagle, Jack Spencer, posted on Babs’ weekly Run Corner post that he’d continued all the way along to the Olympic Park. Food for thought for my next long run.

Anyway, it was on this run along the canal that I spotted my celebrity in the wild. Boaty McBoatface. (This is definitely him, right?)

PIGS IN THE PARK!!

Written by Phil Cairns

I imagine interest in the minutiae of my training is going to be limited, so I’m approaching these blog posts with an eye on anything unusual I notice while running, that might make for a vaguely entertaining thing to write about. If anyone is interested in my training, a) please get out more, and b) I’ll sandwich some stuff about how training is going between a couple of more random observations.

Firstly… PIGS IN THE PARK!!

I had a gap in the middle of my workday last Wednesday, so went for a lunchtime run around Gunnersbury Park, and was very surprised to bump into these two porkers! When did they arrive?

This got me thinking about unusual animal appearances on runs. Seeing deer in Richmond Park isn’t exactly unusual, but it can still be pretty unexpected / scary when you round a corner of one of the trailier sections and find one smack bang in the middle of the path blocking your way.

Not running related, but I was quite thrown when I was cycling to work last year and a kamikaze squirrel charged across the road and straight into my back wheel, bouncing off the spokes before continuing seemingly undeterred on its way. (When I got into work, I relayed this story to the receptionist, a more intrepid cyclist than me, who told me about the time she was bike camping in Canada and got chased by a moose. I felt a bit crushed).

But one of my most indelible Eagles images was on a Wednesday night club run seeing Yvonne Linney, who’d been running a little ahead of me, walk back into Maytrees Rest Garden carrying a gorgeous beast of a cat. It transpired her cat had gone missing a few weeks earlier and she’d run into it, casually roaming around by the bridge over the railway line. Quite a moving reunion for a Wednesday night club run!

Anyway, training. It’s going ok, thanks. I’m up to 4 runs and 30-35 miles a week, which I won’t go much higher than. Small beer for the P&D aficionados I realise, but I’ve learned that I’m more likely to avoid injury and/or utterly lose any enjoyment in the whole enterprise if I stick to that sort of mileage. I don’t follow a plan as such, but 30-40 miles p/w spread over 4 runs – 1 long, 1 tempo, 1 recovery and 1 track/intervals/hills session – is usually enough to get me to the start line injury-free and enthusiastic. The main objective for me over the next two months will be to increase the distance of the long runs and the speed of the tempo runs.

My longest run so far was 16 miles, to and from Osterley Park Run. I enjoy breaking up long runs like this as it can get me to Park Runs I haven’t tried before, and it feels like you’re getting three workouts in one – a long run, a quicker 5k, and then a more fatigued run home for stamina-building.

I queued up to get my barcode scanned by a guy who’d run it then jumped onto scanning duty. Fair to say he hadn’t quite recovered yet. As I got to him, he asked me to hold on a sec, picked up one of his gloves off the floor, and blew his streaming nose very wholeheartedly into his glove. And this wasn’t even like a soft, absorbent or wicking running glove, this was like a structured ski mitt, that I imagine was just going to hold the contents of his nose for the foreseeable. 

“It’s what gloves were made for, right?” he said as he scanned my barcode.

“NO!!” screamed every fibre of my being as I nodded and grinned.

I know, I know, all hail the volunteers, etc… But c’mon, dude. Gross!

Fundamentally, a wimp

Written by Phil Cairns

Happy ballot winners photobombed by social sec!

“You got a ballot place!!”

I had an inkling this was going to happen.

It’s been a long road getting here. 13 unsuccessful attempts at the London Marathon ballot, plus a handful of similarly fruitless entries into the Eagles club ballot. I’d begun to think London Marathon wasn’t destined to happen for me. But as soon as I realised I had a clash and wasn’t going to be able to make the Eagles Christmas party to be present for the draw, I thought, ‘Well of course this will be the year my name gets pulled out.’

So when Liz Ainsworth’s excitable WhatsApp message arrived, it prompted a wry smile. Followed by a massive, excitable grin. Maybe even a fist pump. FINALLY!!! 

But hot on the heels of my initial elation arrived a little chill of trepidation, as I contemplated what this actually meant.

London will be my eighth marathon. See if you can spot the pattern: Dublin - Loch Ness - Marine Corps Marathon (Washington DC) - San Sebastian – Berlin – Florence – Yorkshire.

Got it yet?

That’s right. They’re all autumn marathons.

This didn’t happen by design. I signed up for some of these because they were places I wanted to visit; some because I liked the look of the race; and some because other Eagles were going and I thought it would be a fun weekend away.

But at a certain point, I became conscious a pattern had emerged and reflected on why. The answer was pretty clear:

Fundamentally, I am a massive wimp.

I’m a fair-weather runner. I like training over the warmer summer months for a nice, cool autumn marathon.

It’s the reason this Eagle goes into semi-hibernation over the winter, opting for runs that start and finish at my front door, rather than travelling to club runs and waiting around in the cold till they start. It’s the reason I only tend to grace the early season cross-country fixtures, when it’s still possible to get a tan on Wormwood Scrubs. And it’s the reason I’ve never entered a spring marathon.

This strategy hasn’t always been plain sailing. Berlin in 2018 was a challenge, the earliest of the autumn marathons I’ve raced, and off the back of that crazy heatwave summer when temperatures barely dipped below 30° in July and August while I was attempting the hard yards of training. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Berlin is the only marathon I’ve truly hit the wall in, walking stretches of mile 25. The difficulty of training in such balmy temps meant I perhaps went into it undercooked).

But for the most part, summer training for autumn marathons has served me well, and my only motivation for changing that was the thought of finally ticking off my hometown marathon.

Nonetheless I woke up on December 9th, the Monday morning after the Christmas party, feeling a tingle of excitement. After not running a marathon in 2024 as I’d been focusing on other life stuff, and having just emerged from a heavy cold which prevented any running for three weeks, I felt excited to get going. 

BBC 6 Music breakfast show was on as I was having my morning coffee, and they were soliciting contributions to their regular People’s Pinboard feature, where listeners can send in titbits of news - new jobs, marriages, babies, new enterprises of any description – to be read out and celebrated on air. ‘What better way to thank the Eagles and announce the commencement of training?’ I thought, and fired off a WhatsApp message host Nick Grimshaw duly read out:

“Hi to Phil, and congratulations to Phil in Acton as well, who just won a ballot place in the 2025 London Marathon in my running club Ealing Eagles Christmas party this weekend. So today is day 1 of marathon training. Wish me luck!

“Good luck, Phil, you can do it if anyone can,” Grimshaw exhorted, before adding: “Perfect timing to start marathon training, 3 degrees or whatever it is.”

Well, exactly.