St Anton and fame

No running this week - skiing again. I decided to repeat last year’s trick of emailing everyone I know and seeing who wanted to come along, so we ended up with 29 of us (and four poor randoms) in the Chalet Regina, under the care of the lovely Dee, who did a really great job of looking after us.

There was plenty of snow - if anything, too much! A few of us had luckily booked a guide (the lovely Martina from Piste to Powder) for the Tuesday and Thursday and we ended up in ridiculous amounts of powder on both days. Despite some of the most enjoyable skiing of my life and a lot of other fun too, there’s no disguising that a holiday like this is not in any way healthy and I now need to sleep for a very long time. After that, I need to get back running again, as www.mapmyrun.com has just informed me I have only done 25 miles this month, although I have admittedly climbed some stairs and skied down some mountains.

In other news, the Guardian Online published my write-up of the Vertical Rush event a couple of weeks ago! Impressive (until you hear that I know someone who works there, which might have helped). Still, at least it might mean that someone ends up reading this blog – they included a link to it at the end. We’ll see...

Vertical Rush

Highlights:

1. Finishing.
2. Overtaking the person who started first in my heat about half way up, Sky TV's Gladiator "Tempest". She is hotter in real life.
3. £900 for Shelter.

Lowlights:

1. Too many people - I started way back in my group and they got in the way, so I only finished in 7:38, 169th out of 593. How the winner did it in 4:22 I really don't know.
2. How I felt at the top - legs were fine but my lungs were burning.

Same again next year, but I'll try harder.

Trail running in Pembrokshire

I managed to persuade my friends Al and Rob to enter a "half marathon" run earlier in the year. After a 5 hour drive down to Broad Haven on Friday afternoon and a quiet evening eating pasta in our rented apartment, we found ourselves at the start of what turned out to be a 14.8 mile race. To be fair, the organisers do warn that distances are only approximate but I think we were all a little concerned that the extra 1.7 miles might be a step too far. I was certainly a little concerned - this was to be my first ever trail run, I haven't run that far since my marathon in 2006 and the forecast in the previous week had always suggested a lot of wind whilst varying between pouring rain and cloudy conditions.

In the end, the weather was beautiful if a little blowy. The start was hilarious - after a 50 yards, we reached a staircase onto the cliffs that was only scalable in single file, leaving a trail of runners stretching out into the distance in front of us (they're visible at the top of the cliff in the photo on the right).

Both Al and Rob had professed to be "unfit" before the race, although there was little evidence of this as Rob hared off into the distance after we'd been running around 15 minutes. At this point, we'd been running quite hard and constantly climbing or descending as the path meandered along the coast so I slowed down, ran at my own pace (conveniently similar to Al's) and really enjoyed the beautiful scenery.


After 8 miles, the path turned inland and we left the stunning views for the run back, which was a bit of a shame. By then, though, my thoughts were much more on putting one foot in front of the other and getting round the course in one piece - the extra distance and uneven ground meant that it was much harder than standard half-marathon on the road. In the end, the beaches of Little Haven emerged back into view and the final little downhill run took me back down to the finish line in 2.11, with which I was enormously pleased. The run was followed up with a decent amount of beer, a nice cawl in the very pleasant Swan Inn (where we particularly enjoyed the influx - at around 5pm - of a dozen chunky local lads all without their shirts on) and, by 9.15pm, I'd passed out in bed.

A couple of thank yous: to Al for driving us down, and to all those who thought they were going to enjoy a nice Saturday morning walk along the coast only to be confronted by hundreds of sweaty people haring it along the paths. Sorry!

Rehersal

My first special training event will be next week's jaunt in aid of homelessness charity Shelter. Known as 'Vertical Rush', it will involve climbing London's second-tallest building, Tower 42 (the old NatWest Tower).

I remember reading an article about tower running a few months back and thinking "wow, that sounds cool". A couple of weeks ago, I saw a poster in Bank tube advertising Vertical Rush and wanted to get involved. I then re-read the original article after registering and present selected quotations here:

"Tower runners all talk of one universally shared experience - the pain"
"After my first race, I puked in a garbage can. Everyone high-fived me"
"Tower runners love to relate stories of elite marathon runners who assume they'll cruise to the top, only to drop out in a crumpled heap on the 43rd floor"

Luckily, Tower 42 is only 42 floors high and I'm not an elite marathon runner, so the last comment definitely won't apply to me. Nevertheless, the write-up worried me enough to take the organiser's suggestion of training a little. So, at lunchtime today, I found myself climbing the the Monument (right), which happens to be about three minutes from my office. Built between 1671 and 1677 to commemorate the Great Fire of London, the viewing platform is 311 steps up, 160 feet above the ground. This makes it a quarter of the height of Tower 42 (although with one third of the steps - clearly they had short legs in the 17th Century) - so a good training run rather than anything directly comparable to next Thursday's event.

Bugger me, it hurt. The first half was OK. The second half left me gasping for breath, with my thighs and calves burning. The real event will be exceptionally unpleasant. The only vaguely good thing was managing to get this snap from the top - Tower 42 is the very tall building in the centre of the pic.

Finally, I'd like to give a big thank you to Dos Hermanos and the Guild of Fine Food, which organises the Great Taste Awards, for my dinner tonight. The former are a couple of well-known food bloggers, who organised a fantastic dinner a couple of weeks ago at Vinoteca - my second meal there, but easily as good as my first visit (the mutton pie was awesome). At the dinner, in exceptionally uncharacteristic style, I won a hamper that was organised by the latter.

Having now munched my way through a load of the "3-star gold winners", I can confirm that the wild boar salami from the Real Boar Company is awesomely piggy and genuinely complex, Products From Spain's manchego is really excellent given I don't normally find it that particular cheese especially exciting, Hi-T's fudge rocks (it won the 'fudge, plain, including vanilla' category after all) and CoCouture's Irish Whisky Truffles were worthy winners of the 'dark truffles with alcohol' class. The reason I'm writing about this now is that my dinner is one of Harvies Pies steak pies. They have made me a happy man...

I met a bunch of great guys at the dinner, mainly food bloggers (links to their sites are on the right of this page). I felt a little humbled in their presence, given my readership averages (I think) in the mid-to-low single-digits, whereas theirs is in the hundreds or thousands. In some ways I'd like to write a food blog of my own. On the other hand, somehow food seems so integral to my life that it seems a bit odd to want to write about it as though it is something noteworthy, rather than it being a sine qua non. I can't contemplate life without being able to eat well; this blog only exists because I still think of running as somehow alien to me, given my still-'sturdy' build.

Animals I / social animals

I kinda started the blog in order to add some interest to my runs. I now find myself trying a little to spice up the blog with a semi-permanent theme/riff, which will be: London's animals. Not actual animals, mind - just its permanent (or semi-permanent) fauna. I've observed a lot of these in the last few weeks whilst running around the place and they should make for good sport. They tend to be rather unusual creatures - often carnivorous, rarely native to these shores and sometimes not even real. To get us kicked off, let's move from the sublime (the WWI Royal Air Force memorial, completed in 1923):


to the rather more prosaic:


On a different note, following this article in the Guardian recently about how runners rarely acknowledge each other, I tried an experiment. It was a genuinely beautiful sunny day today, and I felt no difficulty in summoning up a cheery smile and "good morning" for all the runners that I passed. Given that I went on a 10 mile run (West along the North Bank of the Thames to Battersea, then back along the South), there were plenty of people to greet.

It rapidly became apparent that the running community is indeed miserable. After the first few people, I learned that the best hope of a response was to make eye contact around 20 yards before passing the next runner, followed by a nod of the head (15 yards) and then finally the aforementioned "morning" (3-5 yards). Even this resulted in maybe only a 15% acknowledgement rate (and half of those were women who looked at me like I was some kind of molester).

I think the bottom line is this. Many runners listen to MP3 players and thus don't greet anyone at all. Many women are afraid that interacting with strangers is an open invitation for abuse. Greeting runners is a bit arbitrary anyway - why only say hi to them whilst ignoring every other pedestrian that one passes? And finally, I suspect that many runners don't enjoy their pastime very much and do it for reasons of virtue rather than enjoyment - they simply aren't in the mood for interaction. All of which is a shame. I am minded to continue in my efforts to greet people from now on, despite their lack of enthusiasm, in a one-man effort to... dunno... something, anyway.

Ski touring

No running for the last week, because I've been off learning to walk uphill on skis on a course with the International School of Mountaineering, based in Leysin. Unfortunately, we were severely restricted by some appalling weather, which left us with a huge amount of snow but also a great deal of wind, whiteness, avalanche risk etc.

After a couple of days of learning the ropes, including an ascent of Pic Chaussy, the supposed highlight of the week - a couple of days in the Great St Bernard Hospice, where some monks invented the brandy-carrying dogs - turned into a bit of a nightmare. We skinned up in horrible conditions and hung around for a pleasant night in the Hospice. On setting off the next morning, we triggered a mini-avalanche within 10 yards of the front door, decided discretion was the better part of valour and we just set off back down the mountain again. Through the Combe des Morts - the "Valley of Death" - so called because of its avalanche risk. Great.

Luckily, like my recent visit to Chamonix, this trip was saved by the last day - a climb of the Gros Châtillon. The weather was a bit less severe (the summit is only at 1,840m versus the Hospice at 2,470m) but there wasn't much of a view beyond our immediate surroundings. Luckily these were the most incredible snow-laden trees - it was pretty spectacular.



The ski down, through the ~18" of recent snowfall, was good enough to make up for the previous couple of days.


Am I now a fan of ski touring? I enjoyed lots of things about it - the tranquility (particularly when compared to a traditional ski resort), the sense of achievement on climbing a hill, the sense that one should try to ski down as well as possible and not "waste" any of the ascent, the freedom to roam wherever you want rather than being constrained by lifts and the aerobic element, just to name a few things. If I lived somewhere snowy, I think I'd happily tour a lot - it's like going for a good mountain walk, with the added bonus of skiing down at the end. However, for me, with only a week or two of skiing per year, I think my time on the slopes is too precious to spend it walking up them as well as caning it down. Having said that, I'm sure I'll be back for a proper hut-to-hut tour at some point in the not too distant future - the West Oberland Haute Route, also run by ISM and involving "superb north-facing (powder) slopes giving about 1000m of descent each day, and beautiful backdrops of huge limestone cliffs and the peaks of the Swiss Valais" sounds pretty cool!

Finally, a big "thank you" to Terry, who taught and guided us last week and generally kept us out of trouble, and thanks also to those on the course who were, for the most part, an entertaining bunch.

Hampstead Heath

The last few days have been full of firsts, including my first visit to London's only Kyrgyz restaurant (to my knowledge) and the purchase of my first proper trail shoes. This gave me the opportunity and incentive to run off my samsi, lagman and plov on Hampstead Heath today.

One of the reasons that I like running in London is that, having grown up here, many places have very old memories for me. For example, my slight fear of dogs was clearly down to our family's habit of going for a walk on the Heath every Sunday morning prior to lunch until I was in my teens. Here, I was regularly attacked by hounds that were, for the most part, bigger than I was. Even today, I found my way barred by an Old English Sheepdog, who refused to let me past.

Going to the Heath has some great advantages over my usual routes. This was my first real off-road running and the first on anything like hilly terrain - central London is actually pretty flat. On the other hand, it's a bit of a probe having to commute to your run - the Heath is a bit far for me to run to, then around, then back again. Apologies to those on the tube on the way home who had to put up with a somewhat feral-smelling man.

Speaking of memories, the view from Parliament Hill (above) was as cool as I could remember (maybe better, now that Canary Wharf is in existence and viewable) and it was good to see my and my brother's tree from all those years ago still standing there. Check it out - perfectly designed for climbing:

I eat rubbish

Many of my pics seem to be scenes on the Thames. This is partly because a lot of my runs involve travelling along the river, in order to have a bit of scenery to look at and to avoid traffic (the same reason I'm keen on the Regent's Canal and London's parks). Yesterday saw me take in all of the above - along the North bank to Westminster, then up through St James' Park, Green Park, Hyde Park, Regent's Park and then back along the canal. As I hit the Thames south of St Paul's, I saw this craft and couldn't help taking the picture to the right - somehow it seemed fitting in so many ways. 40 tonnes of rubbish is a lot - possibly even more than I could manage though...

NYC

Amidst the excitement of a 5-day marketing trip to Boston, New York, Denver, Kansas City and Chicago, there was a little bit of time for a run. This took me up 5th Avenue to Central Park, past a huge ice rink and the Guggenheim, to the reservoir and then back home again. I looked like a bit of a loser taking my snaps ("night scenery" mode involves me standing stationary for about 20 seconds desperately trying not to jog the camera), but a couple of good ones came out and no one laughed at or mugged me...

Snow

I took the opportunity to make a slight detour on yesterday's run down to Battersea to pass by a building opposite my company's old office. Some cursory googling has revealed that it was designed by Whinney, Son and Austen Hall for Credit Lyonnais and, when it was finished in 1977, was the first building in the world to be entirely clad in glass-fibre-reinforced cement. I just think it looks cool.

Further on, I came across the last remaining evidence of last week's snow falls, that were so successful in stopping public transport everywhere.

Off to the States for 5 days now with work - I'll be taking my trainers and camera in case I'm able to fit in a run...

Cranes and African hunting dogs

So there I was, thinking: "these building sites look quite cool, I'm going to use those on the blog this week". The sheer number of cranes in London, particularly the City, has always fascinated me. Even before the recent economic "wobble", it always seemed a bit weird that we'd need quite that much office space. Now, it just looks ridiculous. I particularly like the second one, of the Old Street roundabout with the Lloyds building and a tiny bit of Gherkin pointing up above the new development (the Bézier apartments - "curves in all the right places" apparently)...

Anyway, I continued along my Regent's Canal run full of further thoughts:
"It's not that embarrassing wearing tights [see first ever post] to run in, apart from those bits around Camden Lock and Islington where people can actually see you";
"It's nice to get back on a run after a two-week layoff";
"I look forward to my lunch of Jerusalem artichoke soup and the after-effects, which should coincide neatly with Super Bowl 43 (let's hope Kurt Warner can give it a go)"
"It's amazing how carrying a camera makes you notice things when running - things you'd probably miss otherwise"...

At which point - how right I was - I spotted these fellas behind one of the fences at London Zoo. Pretty cool guys, trotting along here and there. Now, admittedly the sign at the back says "giraffes" but I'm pretty sure they're not. My best guess is that they're African hunting dogs, seeing as the London Zoo website seems to admit to them owning some of them. Apparently they "mostly hunt medium-sized antelope". Even better, "the preferred species [varies] according to the most abundant prey species in the area". I wonder what they subsist on in London. Pigeons and children?

Kocen at 3,275m

Didn't run this weekend due to my company's ski weekend in Chamonix. Amongst the lunacy, some exercise was done in place of running and this morning's skiing involved some of the best, lightest powder I've ever seen, thankfully making up for Thursday and Friday's weather-restricted efforts. The pic to the left was at the top of the Grand Montets just before we ignored the "do not enter" barrier and had one of the most glee-inducing skis of my life.

Quickie

I only had a little time to spare on Sunday morning, as I had to trek out to Oxshott to see my friend Dom, who I was taking to see Jimmy Carr in the evening with another friend Nick. Dom's had the shitty misfortune to have a stroke and getting around is on the tricky side for him, but we had a good night. I always feel guilty at not seeing Dom often enough and it was great to get him out and about. He retains his ability to combine an incredibly acerbic wit with an amazing disarming boyish charm and is one of the best people I know, though obviously life can be understandably trying for him post-stroke. He's definitely going to be one of the beneficiaries of MdS sponsorship when the time comes...

Anyway - the pic of Sunday's quick 8-miler is this building (left) just to the West of the Tate Modern, as seen from the wobbly bridge. Nothing as grand as a cathedral, but I find it quite striking - it reminds me so much of Brueghel's "Tower of Babel" (right) every time I see it.

Pretentious, moi? Hopefully there won't be too many posts like this one. Not sure I could keep up this kind of highbrow effort all year...

Frozen London

Having spent the latter portions of last night in the York and Albany trying to decide whether my favorite cocktail was a Sazerac, an Old Fashioned or some kind of modified Negroni, I wasn't in much of a mood to run this morning. However, I only had a limited time before I had to head off for a great lunch with Gus, Ali and 3-week-old Jess, so I had to get my skates on...

The Regent's Canal was looking especially cool, still frozen although this probably won't last much longer. I really love running along the canal. It's like you're no longer in London - the view above really doesn't look like you're in Zone 1. I wish I'd known about the canal when I was training for the marathon three years ago, rather than running endless laps of Regent's Park. And I also enjoyed the prancing dog at the top of Primrose Hill (below), with the amazing skyline behind. Worth clicking on for the full image I reckon.

I got a few other good shots but I think I'm going to save some of the views for later in the year - I don't want to run out of interesting things to post.

Finally, I discussed this blog with my friend Refik last night and apparently blogs are neither required to be neither interesting nor relevant (if anything, the opposite is true), so I'm going to open up access to it for everyone. I bet the world can't wait.

The first (money) shot

I've already got the feeling that it's going to be hard to take enough good snaps to keep this blog really interesting, but I did manage to take a few on a cold and hazy night on Thursday. It was a quick run along the South Bank of the Thames to Westminster Bridge and back along the North. I stopped for pics quite a few times and must have looked pretty odd to the passers-by - a jogger in shorts, probably steaming a bit with sweat, stopping occasionally and taking photos of London. It proved tough to hold the camera steady for long enough to get decent shots given that it was night-time, but I did manage this one after running across the Wobbly Bridge to get to the Tate Modern.

There were about 10x as many runners out as usual, presumably because of resolutions for 2009. Poor guys, to have started just as the weather turned properly nippy...

Bumped into Julia M when I was about 5 mins from home and had a quick chat - nice to see her!

Wow what is this "blogging" thing?

2009. And I now have a blog. Not late to the party at all.

This idea has been spawned from a variety of thoughts of mine, mainly the desire to chronicle the time between now and the Marathon des Sables in March/April 2010. It's partly a product of a run I went on at the weekend, when the Regent's Canal was frozen and beautiful, and the crisp January view from the top of Primrose Hill was pretty cool. And also my long-standing desire (hopefully to be fulfilled soon) to get round to taking a photo of the East of St Paul's cathedral before a new building goes up in the way. Finally, I thought it would be a way to keep me entertained on the multiple training runs etc that I'm going to have to undertake this year - I'll take my camera, and try to get a photo each time. Or something. We'll see how it works out, and whether I end up making the site public rather than just being my diary...

To get things off to an undoubtedly unpleasant start, a slight cheat of a pic of me from the Bedford half-marathon - cheating because it was in December 08. Good fun - 1h34m was better than I expected and 5m faster than my only other half-marathon a whole decade ago. Thanks to Al W and Han M for the idea of running it, and to my sister for the early full Xmas lunch afterwards.

Enough for now. Hopefully the next post will feature my first "action shot".