Slowly plodding on

Our preparations for travelling to Kenya seem to be hovering in suspended animation just now – I’m waiting to hear back about flights, a place to stay, training camps, running kit and about 100 other things. I feel like I’m stuck in The Waiting Place from Dr Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go.

Meanwhile, I’m slowly but surely increasing my training. A few weeks ago I went running with Exeter’s other running club, the Exeter Harriers. The track was buzzing with activity when I arrived, with lines of youngsters drilling up and down the straights doing sprints, hurdles, throwing javelins. We were the oldest group, trotting slowly around the track for our warm up like a herd of cows in a field full of rabbits.

By the time we were ready to start the serious running, the rabbits had all bolted, leaving the track clear for the big beasts. The floodlights came on like stage lights. The session was 6 laps without a break, each lap faster than the one before. We even had a coach, with a stopwatch and everything. Maurice is an old-style athletics man. No messing. And he seemed to get a sadistic pleasure from telling us how hard we had to run.

We followed the six laps with eight 300m sprints, by the end of which, as I wobbled helplessly down the home straight for the last time, my legs had become a strange mixture of bricks and jelly.

I ran the two laps warm-down on my own, said goodbye and promised to come back for the next session in two weeks.

After that I did a 10-mile run in London and then a seven-mile run around the Devon lanes. I had to stop three times on the last run, out of pure exhaustion. My body felt as though it was giving up on me. I’d always just assumed that the harder I trained, the fitter and faster I’d get. But walking along the lane in Devon, my hands on my hips, with miles still to run, I started to doubt it. What if I’d already reached my plateau? What if any more training would only injure me, or make me too tired to run?

Runner’s World released a book a few years back called Run Less, Run Faster, which claims that reducing your training to just three high quality runs a week is better than running endless miles every week. It’s a nice idea and unsurprisingly the book sold well.

The Kenyans, however, generally take a different approach, running miles and miles and miles on top of their high quality runs, and so if I’m going to even attempt to keep up with them, my body will to need to get used to running more frequently.

Still, I also have to listen to my aching legs, so I did my next run at a gentle pace. Then two days ago I headed out on a hard ten-mile jaunt. This time, somehow, my legs felt fine and I kept a good pace going the whole way. Was it just a good day, or has my body started to adapt to more training? With a half-marathon coming up in two weeks, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Meanwhile, the other big issue preoccupying us right now is injections. Most people will simply go to the doctor, ask what they need and then happily offer up their arm as a pin cushion. Unfortunately, we never take the easy route. Do these injections work? What are the side effects? How will they affect the immune system? How likely are you to catch the disease in question? Once you start asking these questions, rather than simply transferring all responsibility for your health over to the doctor, you realise that it’s far from a cut and dry issue. As yet, we haven’t made a decision on what we’re going to do, but we’ll have to make one soon.

For now, it’s just another piece of the project waiting to be resolved.