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!