My fastest twenty-mile race was back at the beginning of March 2023. I did it in 3:45:35 and if I had carried on that day to run a full marathon there (it was an option) I would have finally achieved my goal of getting a sub five-hour marathon.
It was seven loops of a motor racing track that could have been soul-destroying but turned out to be ideal for me. After the first loop, I knew that there were two short, steep inclines along the way, so I decided to walk for fifteen seconds up each of them (as a mental count rather than an exact science as I didn’t have a wizzy-woo watch then). I ran the rest of the loop, and I got into a rhythm of doing that for every subsequent loop. Not only was my overall time about fifteen minutes quicker than anything I’d ever done before, but I was not completely beat up by the end, and I had the mental and physical energy to keep going.
Jeff Galloway, who died this week at the age of eighty, created the run-walk-run method. He turned it into structured science so that instead of it being seen as a failure to walk, many people were able to go further, for longer and, very often faster than they had ever managed. On top of that, they recovered more quickly.
Walking is still often seen as a bit of fail, and I’m guilty of having that mindset myself sometimes, but that tends to be when I have only begun to walk when I’m tired. If, like in my example above, I had been more systematic and worked out walking intervals from the outset, it would just be part of the run, and the walking would actually help me. I still haven’t replicated that morning in March because that loop system created a discipline that I don’t normally have, but I wanted to just take a moment to remember the man who has transformed the idea of running so that more people can get out there and succeed, and continue to run, as he did, for longer in life.
Walking was definitely in order when I went fell-running yesterday with many members of the club in order to celebrate our very own Jeff’s seventieth birthday. He was out scampering along with the sixteen-kilometre group while I began a tad later with the eleven-km group. We all met at (kind of) the same time at the top of Moel Arthur and ran down to the White Horse pub in Cilcain village for a top lunch and drinks (courtesy of our Jeff).
It was amazing. Not only did the sun push the mizzle out of the park as we were going up, giving us tremendous views, but I felt a teeny-weeny bit more able to tackle the up hills, at least those that weren’t prohibitively steep. It is early days yet, but I think a month of consistently getting my weights done twice a week, and getting the miles in, is beginning to show.
Now to keep that consistency going into March.
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