Waltzing through Heathrow

Whatever the Lewa marathon throws at me at the end of my six months in Kenya, it is hard to imagine it being more challenging than the journey to get out here.

On the Saturday before we left, a tonne of snow fell across England bringing the country to a standstill. We thanked our lucky stars we weren’t flying until Monday.

Come Sunday night, however, all flights from Heathrow were still being cancelled. I went to bed hopeful after hearing that no further snow was forecast and that Heathrow was expecting to be fully operational the next day.

At about 4 o’clock in the morning, my youngest daughter, Uma, came in to my bedroom wanting to do a wee. I stumbled sleepily out of bed, picked up her and then stopped. Outside the window it was snowing a blizzard. The cars, our carriages to the airport, had disappeared under two silent mounds of white. I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep.

At 8am it was still coming down. The road was buried under two feet of fresh snow. We weren’t going anywhere. We wouldn’t even get the cars out of the drive. I tried ringing the airline but the number was constantly engaged. Sitting in the kitchen, endlessly hitting redial, as my children talked excitedly about being on the aeroplane, after all we had done to get to this point, was heartbreaking.

“Let’s just go,” said Marietta. It meant dragging my parents and Marietta’s mum, Betty, who were all giving us lifts, as well as the three children, on a perilous, if not impossible, journey up to Heathrow airport, to sit with 500,000 other demented people wondering how to go about rebooking a flight when the airlines wouldn’t even answer the phone.

There were stories in the press of late-night drunken fights as families tried to sleep on the terminal floor. On Radio 4, Simon Calder said: “It’s grim. But it will only get grimmer.”

It felt as though the whole project was unravelling. All those plans, all that excitement, being slowly buried by the gentle, beautiful snow that just wouldn’t stop.

But my Dad, game for the challenge, was out clearing the drive. Marietta was packing up the last bits and pieces. We had to go. We had a flight to Kenya booked that night. It had cost me £4,000. We couldn’t afford not to try.

The drive to Heathrow was intense. Abandoned lorries littered the carriageways like dead cows in an icy drought; the endless, ominous whiteness lay over everything, contemptuous of our efforts. The radio talked of Heathrow being so full of flightless passengers that police were stopping people entering the terminal buildings. Would they even let us in?

The children were coping amazingly well with all the glum faces and the talk of impending catastrophe, eating Marmite sandwiches and describing to me in intricate detail the way cars fit on a car transporter. I nodded blankly. “Amazing,” I said.

Eventually, despite the slippery roads, we made it to Heathrow. We walked in past long cues of tired people leaning on overloaded trolleys. Marietta went up to the first desk she could find and asked the man if he knew where we could check in. “I’ll check you in now,” he said. Just like that. Ten minutes later we were waving goodbye and waltzing through an almost empty security check into the departure lounge.

It was still not certain whether the flight was going to leave, but it was not listed as cancelled on the board, unlike many others. So we found an empty row of seats by a big window and hunkered down to wait. The hours went by and the flight kept being delayed, but still not cancelled. The uncertainty was sending an aching craziness though my veins. I paced back and forth, occasionally kicking a chair, or gently knocking my knuckles together. To add to our problems, Uma came down with a fever and fell asleep. Lila, the eldest, after some reading and running around, settled down to watch Peppa Pig on the internet.

Little Ossian, meanwhile, was having the time of his life. He drove his toy cars along the endless rows of empty seats. Then he climbed on the seats. He looked out of the window at all the trucks whizzing by with their flashing orange lights. He ran up and down the moving floor. He was in heaven.

Eventually his fun was ended when they finally called our flight. I could feel the tension easing from my limbs as the plane finally, after endless taxiing, lifted off into the sky. Marietta looked at me. We had done it. Somehow, we had actually done it.

That, of course, was just the beginning of our adventure.

'That's a lovely forefoot style you've got there'

It's now three weeks since I started "barefoot running" - which is running "barefoot style" in "barefoot shoes". Yes, I know, it doesn't make much sense, but if you read my earlier post, hopefully you'll know what I'm talking about.

So, with less than two weeks to go until I touch down in Kenya, how is it going? Today I managed to run two miles and my legs are only mildly aching afterwards. That might not sound great, but it was what I was told to expect. I'm using different muscles and so my legs need time to readjust. Meanwhile, my waist is expanding and I'm obviously losing fitness.

But it's not all bad. A few months ago, before I started with all this barefoot (in shoes) malarky, I went into a running shop to buy some new trainers. I was with a friend who runs, by all accounts, considerably slower than me. The shop assistant got both of us to run on the treadmill and filmed us on his souped-up computer-aided gait analysis machine. He told me that I needed extra support, cushioning and stability because my knees were collapsing in on each stride (pronation, they call it). It was a fairly damning analysis.

My friend got on and jogged for a few seconds before the shop assistant told him he had a perfect running style. Ouch.

Yesterday, I went to a different running shop to buy some racing flats - it's what the Kenyans run in, I'm told. I was nervous about the shop assistants getting me on their treadmill and then telling me I couldn't buy racing flats as I needed more support padding etc etc blardy blah.

I picked out the pair I wanted - the flattest shoes with the least support - and asked if they had them in my size. "Do you pronate?" the man asked me. "Er ... I don't know," I said, wary of lying outright in case he could tell just by the way I walked or something that I did. But it was the wrong answer.

"Hop up on the treadmill and we'll take a look," he said. I considered bolting for the door, but decided against it. Instead I obediently put on my trainers and clambered aboard the treadmill. I wasn't sure if my "barefoot style" was up to a public examination by a gait expert. Would I look completely mad if I tried it? If I didn't, though, he'd tell me I couldn't buy the trainers. I had to give it a go.

The machine whirred slowly into action. Lead with your chest, I told myself. Legs like a unicycle. It started to get faster. Pad, pad, pad. He was crouching down trying to look under my feet. I tried to look casual, like this was my natural running style, not something I was working hard to maintain. He was checking me out from the side now. After about 30 seconds, I hit the stop button and the machine came to a halt.

"You're lucky," he said. "You have a lovely forefoot style. It's the most efficient way to run."

I stepped off the machine and tried to look surprised by the good news. Of course, it had nothing to do with luck. In only three weeks I had gone from having a calamitous style to having a "lovely style". True, I could only maintain it for two miles, but progress was definitely being made.

The experiment continues ...

Struggling around the Drogo 10

Struggling up the last few steps. Photograph: Jiva Finn

About half a mile from the end of the Drogo 10 on Sunday I saw my brother and my daughter standing among the trees cheering me on - my brother grinning and taking a picture of me with his camera. I'd just climbed up one side of the beautiful Teign Valley, a half-mile accent so steep I had to walk most of it. I was running along a rare stretch of flat, looking out across Dartmoor, when the race stewards directed me right and up another short, sharp incline. My legs turned to sand. I could hardly move them, even to walk. My daughter, who is four, looked very concerned.

This was not my kind of race. Too many steep hills. Up one of them, a man in his mid-60s - I'd guess - edged passed me wearing a pair of Nike Free - Nike's barefoot-style trainers. I suddenly felt like I was wearing bricks, especially as my trail running shoes are too big for me and were caked in mud.

I ended up trundling across the finish line in 65th position. In a local race in Devon. What hope does that give me when, in just a few weeks, I turn up at the fastest village on earth?

Bare necessities: how I was introduced to the dark arts of barefoot running

Tonight I ran like a Kenyan. Barefoot. On a treadmill in a boxing gym in West Hampstead.

I was given a lesson in the art of barefoot running by one of its leading proponents, biomechanic expert Lee Saxby. First off he filmed me running normally on a treadmill in my trainers. Then he told me to take off my trainers and he filmed me again. I instantly and automatically, without thinking, started to run with a forefoot strike - meaning that rather than landing on my heel first, as I did in trainers, I started landing on my forefoot first.

This is the fundamental difference between the two styles of running. By landing on your heel, the full impact of your body weight is concentrated on one spot, which, Lee says, not only causes injuries, but slows you down. In effect you're braking with every step.

But it's not only about the forefoot strike. Lee told me to keep my head up, lead with my chest, and pull my legs through, as though I was on a unicycle. If that wasn't enough to think about, he started a metronome going at a rapid-fire tack tack tack. I had to match it stride for tack. Then he played the film back to me.

It was quite shocking to watch. With my trainers on I looked like an overweight office worker out for a slow jog. (Admittedly, that's perhaps what I was, but it wasn't how I envisaged I looked when I was running.) With the shoes off it looked a bit better, but after Lee's lesson I looked like a proper runner. "You look like a Kenyan running," he says, though that may have been pushing it.

The thing is, though, this is how Kenyans (and Ethiopians) run. It's because they all grow up running barefoot. Running shoes encourage you, with all their padding, to land heel first, so we in the west get into bad habits right from the start. Running barefoot, however, forces you to run in a different way.

I know, from already mentioning it to a few people, that the most common reaction to talk of barefoot running is "what about glass/dirty streets/stones etc?" But running barefoot is more about a running style than not actually wearing any shoes. The top Kenyans all wear trainers to compete. Lee says this is because they don't want to be worrying about treading on stones and hurting their feet if they're trying to win races. But they don't wear heavily padded, stability trainers like we do. They wear racing flats. Racing shoes are super lightweight and have minimal padding, pretty much like specialised barefoot running shoes.

This was all very exciting. Had I stumbled on the Kenyan secret, here in this small boxing gym, as the trains rattled in and out of London outside the windows. Lee definitely seemed to think it was at least a factor in why they were so good at running. He had the air of a man confident in his theory, willing to answer any question you cared to throw at him. He was even confident enough to occasionally say he didn't know.

Unfortunately, though, it takes time and concentrated effort to learn the barefoot style well enough that it begins to feel natural. I had hoped I could combine barefoot running with my usual style, to hedge my bets and to not lose any fitness. "It's all or nothing," says Lee. "Your mind will slip into the style it's most used to. If you're running heel first most of the time, your body will do that automatically." I'm going to be in Kenya in a month. Is that enough time to learn? "Yeah, that should be fine," he says.

So what do I do?

Firstly he advises I only run a mile at a time - either barefoot or in special barefoot trainers. Once I can do that without having sore legs the next day, I can start upping the distance by 10% each run. He says the most important thing to focus on is the quick tempo leg movement and he recommends I get some sort of clip-on metronome to help me.

It's radical, but I decide to try it. If the Kenyans run like this, then I have to really. It's exciting, though. It did feel great running like that, my legs zipping through under me, my body straight, head up, the aspect, at least, of a real runner. The only thing is having to concentrate on style so much. That feels odd. But hopefully it will soon feel natural. We'll see.

Liftoff - then back to earth

That's it, I've booked our flights to Kenya. Liftoff is December 20. We'll be spending Christmas in tents in the Lewa nature reserve.

I thought booking the tickets was going to be an exciting moment, but instead it was pretty stressful. It was a few nights ago. Marietta wasn't feeling well and had gone to bed early, so I was sitting alone in the dark in the kitchen, my face peering into the computer screen as numbers added together like some frenzied multiplying machine until they were up to £4,000. The digits were losing all meaning. Was that a lot? Then I had to fill out hundreds of details for five people. Long passport numbers that seemed too small to see. Then the site crashed. Back to the beginning, start again. And once I finally clicked BUY, it wasn't clear if I'd actually bought them. I got a "transaction successful" message, but also an error message telling me to call the airline. It was after midnight. I went to bed grumpy.

Nonetheless, flights booked - I checked the next day, it was all fine - it was back to running. Except I've got a little tweak behind my knee. Hopefully nothing serious. I've been reading Christopher McDougall's bestselling book Born To Run. He claims most injuries are actually caused by running shoes. He makes a pretty good case for it too, in his gung-ho American way. Those damn shoes make you land like some goddam clown on those ol' heels, when you were always supposed to land on your soles, like god intended. McDougall is revered by the barefoot running movement, which is getting stronger by the day. Most of them don't actually run barefoot, but in shoes that offer some minimal cushioning and support. Even Nike do a pair now, which shows how big the movement has become.

I tried it out, running sans shoes, this afternoon. I ran to Regent's Park in my lunchbreak, took my shoes off and then ran around some football pitches. It was too short a test to be conclusive, but I found my running style instantly changed to a shorter, faster stride pattern. This is supposed to be good, according to the barefoot runners. I felt like a runner from the 1960s - when of course shoes had less support. Did people get injured less then? I don't know.

It was quite nice, however, putting my trainers back on afterwards. They felt warm and soft like pillows. Heavy pillows.

Over the hill and far away

Last week I was pondering whether, after running four consecutive half marathons in 1 hr 30 mins, I had reached my running peak. I was now 36, struggling around training runs, and just didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. How did I honestly expect to train in Kenya with the greatest runners in the world? Who was I kidding? With all this in mind, yesterday morning I lined up in the Autumn sunshine at the start of the Dartmoor Vale half marathon.

Worried about my fitness, and mindful that I had set off too fast in all those four previous half marathons, I held back at the beginning, sitting behind two men going at what seemed like a nice pace. They kept chatting to each other and both seemed a lot more comfortable than I felt, but once we hit the first big hill, at about 3 miles, I went passed them.

Normally I hate hills. My legs start aching and a steady stream of people begin overtaking me. Old men with bandy legs, short, hardy women with hunched shoulders, even dog walkers who happen to be traversing the same stretch of road. But yesterday, for some reason, I felt fine. Nobody passed me. I didn't even feel the urge to look back and see where they were. The hill went on and on for miles, but I just kept plugging away.

At the top there was a drinks station. I grabbed a cup of water but nearly choked trying to drink it. It was a stupid place to be handing out water, I decided, chucking my cup towards one of the bins. It went straight in.

From that point on the course seemed to be a gradual downhill back to where we started. I used the slope to pick up the pace and was soon overtaking struggling runners. Even when we got back to sea level, I still felt strong. The mile markers, which usually seem to take forever to appear, especially at the end of a half marathon, where popping up quicker than I expected each time.

I sprinted across the line in 11th place and 1 hr 26 mins and 54 secs. A big PB. I wasn't quite past it yet, after all.

While I was out racing around the lanes of south Devon, Jophie, my sister-in-law, and her husband Alistair, were in Iten in Kenya, looking for a house for us. Although they didn't find one, they said the area was one of the most beautiful places they had ever been. I spoke to Jophie on the phone after my race:

"I've picked up the number of someone called brother Colm," she said. "I think he's a priest, but I'm told he might be able to find you somewhere to stay."

"Brother Colm? Oh my god."

"You know him?"

Brother Colm is a living legend, one of the men most responsible for Kenya's running success, as far as I can tell, and currently the coach of David Rudisha, the 800m world record holder and, after Usain Bolt, probably the biggest thing in athletics right now.

She offered to sell me his phone number for £20.

"Done," I said.

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.