This is just a note to say thank you. I have never told you how much you mean to me. Until now. I did not want you at first. All those years ago, when I first saw you – in the flesh, not just in those glossy pictures on the web that I couldn’t stop…
Category: Comment
A lesson for us all
There is something instinctive in human nature for the amateur to celebrate the professional. Radcliffe. Rudisha. Kimetto. We watch in awe as the extraordinary achieve the extraordinary. But there is something more extraordinary than this: the ordinary achieving the extraordinary. That is not to say that Colin Dear is ordinary. Ordinary humans do not run…
Lessons learnt about running in London
After five years of living in London, I am escaping to Edinburgh in July. Escape is the apt verb. I imagine I’ve run around 10,000 miles in just about every London borough. This is what I have learned. The perception of danger is greater than the reality And this makes me sad. Rarely have I felt…
The art of the buggy runner
I am seconds away from finishing my first London Marathon. I am 18. I have discovered the ambiguity of walls. I am suffering, limping to the finish line. Suddenly, a grey streak passes my right shoulder. I am being overtaken by a Womble. I have no energy to respond. I watch the Womble charge into…
Falling back in love with running in London
London and I have fallen out of love. I run along the River Thames, up to Buckingham Palace, through Richmond Park, around the Serpentine and over Tower Bridge. So what, I shrug. It was just a run. Another run. Miles – nothing more. I have been here too long; I am blinded to the supposed…
The daddy of all compromises: trying to be a father and a runner
The essence of Nick Hornby’s biographical Fever Pitch is that Arsenal is the author’s constant in life. Amid the flux of education, work and relationships, happiness, sadness and indifference, Arsenal and football remain resilient to the vagaries of life. Come what may, for Hornby, it is Arsenal yesterday, Arsenal today and Arsenal tomorrow. The love…
The unpredictable art of running blogging
I have been blogging for some years. I was a writer and journalist first. My original purpose was to support the publication of my first book, Heights of Madness, and my second and third books thereafter. Over time, heightsofmadness.com graduated into a running blog – a blog that last week pleasingly surpassed 50,000 visits. Writing…
A sprain in the ankle
A stop-start 2013 has stopped again. I have sprained the right ankle of a troublesome right leg. A physiotherapist delivered the verdict. He looked at me in horror when I told him I would probably be running if I was not seeing him – 72 hours after the twist. It is a second degree sprain,…
Wild swimming in the River Findhorn
There is a place where the River Findhorn and the Davoch Burn meet, a wild place where soldiers of Scottish legend once battled. Here the churning gorge of Randolph ‘s Leap is a whisper on the breeze. A beach of shingle drops sharply into the confluence. I am ankle-deep. A step. Now thigh-deep. The water…
DIY physiotherapy for the fed-up and injured
I have struggled with injury since completing the Vanguard Way in mid-June. My succumbing to injury was all the more frustrating as I recall thinking on the final miles of 68 what a relief it was to be ‘intact’. Tired and fading, but intact. Or not, as it turned out. A ball of tightness gathered…
Stretching is bad for your health
I dabbled with proper mountain running when I lived in Scotland. Ben Nevis, Paps of Jura, Goatfell, Loch Lochy. That sort of thing. One of my strongest memories of this period was the Slioch hill race, a 12-mile dash up and down a Munro and its top. It is brutal: two to three (or four)…
Heights of Madness 