Don't Stop Me Now

by Vassos Alexander

  And then you’ve got the volunteers, parkrunners all of them, sometimes injured but usually not. They’re there lending a hand because they know the system relies on people giving up the odd Saturday morning to help set up, marshal, keep time, applaud, run to a certain pace, bring up the rear or post the results online. Volunteering once every ten runs is the unofficial rule of thumb, but you’d be surprised by how many people do much more. It’s fabulous.

  Tom Williams is managing director of parkrun, and has overseen its extraordinary explosion in popularity since he first got involved in 2007. I’ve never met him in person, but he’s remarkably engaging when you speak to him via Skype and within a few minutes it feels like I’ve known him for years. I ask him how he first got involved.

  ‘Long story, but I was working in a gym and got a job at Leeds University as a lecturer in sport and exercise science. I became aware of parkrun through an advert in Runners’ World, and at that stage there were only three of them, all in London. There was Bushy parkrun, the original one founded by Paul Sinton-Hewitt in 2004 and called Bushy Park Time Trial at the time, as well as Wimbledon and Banstead. And when I saw that ad, I thought what an amazing idea. I’d love to do something like that in Leeds, not for my own running, but just because I thought it would be a wonderful community project.’

  However, the big question for Tom was how. He struggled to get his head round the concept of people volunteering every week. At that stage, it was simply impossible to imagine. When he mentioned setting up a Leeds parkrun to his wife, she thought he was joking. Volunteers every week? She exclaimed. Not a chance!

  But then everything seemed to fall into place when he was invited to a big university meeting.

  ‘I was representing the sports science department, and heard how the physical activity department, the non-academic side, wanted to engage the students with the community around volunteering and sport. I just thought – bingo!

  ‘So I simply wrote the delivery of Leeds (now Woodhouse Moor) parkrun into the sports science degree at Leeds University. And at the stroke of my pen, we instantly had 140 volunteers! The idea was to engage the university students, who mostly came from affluent backgrounds, with a much less privileged local community. And it would also allow them to gain practical experience of the life-changing benefits of physical activity, in this case through running. They could learn as much as they liked in a lab, but until they saw someone lose five stone before their eyes, and gain confidence, make new friends and get fitter, they’d never genuinely understand it. That was seven and a half years ago and it’s still going strong.’

  Except that ‘going strong’ is a colossal understatement in this instance. By mid-2015 more than seven million individual parkruns had been completed by three quarters of a million different runners at 50 thousand separate events across 600 locations in over a dozen countries. At many venues there are also junior parkruns, 2km on a Sunday morning for kids aged 4–14. There are Christmas Day parkruns, New Year’s Day parkruns, Easter parkruns, fancy dress parkruns, anniversary parkruns. Complete 10, 50, 100 or 250 of them, and they make a real fuss of you and give you a special T-shirt with the relevant number on the back. For free. Sometimes, you also get a cake.

  Tom Williams

  Managing Director of parkrun UK, and co-presenter (with Martin Yelling) of the excellent running podcast Marathon Talk. A very decent runner in his own right, having once (just about) run a mile in under five minutes.

  I hated running at school. There seemed to be very little concept that you could get better at something. You were just as good as you were. So because I came last, or nearly last, in the one-mile run we once did in the freezing cold in our pants, I was always seen as not being very good at running and that was it.

  Fast forward a number of years, and I was a 25-year-old student at university. A complete non-runner, I was much more sociable than sporty. But then our next-door neighbour’s four-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia. I’d always had this vague bucket-list thing of doing the London Marathon. Not as a serious runner, as a charity runner – sign up, get round, tick the box, never do it again. And basically, that’s what I did. I gave up drinking for three months, I signed up to raise money for leukaemia and lymphoma research, ran it in 3:53 and never thought I’d run again.

  In fact three years went by before I ran another step. I’d been round the world as a backpacker and had got really out of shape. My now wife Helen was a friend at the time and an experienced marathon runner. She told me I was overweight and unfit and took me for a run in Leeds from the local gym.

  I think we covered about a mile in 11 or 12 minutes – and that was it, I was done! I was in pieces, and had to walk back to the gym with my tail between my legs. Fair to say it took me a while to get my running legs.

  For my Marathon Talk podcast, I recently spent several months training specifically to see how quickly I could run a mile, and came in at five minutes dead (though the guy timing it is a notoriously slow button-presser). So I’ve become a decent enough runner, but these days I get infinitely more satisfaction seeing the person who never would have exercised take part in a parkrun and struggle round in 40 minutes, compared with the guy who can turn up on a Saturday morning and smash out a sub-14 minute 5k.

  In fact there’s a young man called Amir from the local community in Leeds. He was 12 years old when he showed up in the early days having seen us out of his bedroom window. I don’t know if he’d ever done any exercise before. But six years later I was immensely proud to present him with his 250 T-shirt. So if you think about it, 250 Saturday mornings doing 5k runs, it means his entire youth, all of his teenage years, were punctuated by parkrun.

  17

  Tom Petty, Runnin’ Down a Dream

  ‘Outlaw’ Ironman Triathlon, Mile 17

  Utter bliss! It’s nice but naughty of course, and even now, somewhere in the back of my mind, I know it’s wrong. But I don’t care. Having a hat feels fantastic!

  Technically I may even be guilty of theft, but again I don’t care. It’s amazing how a simple item of headwear can alter my mood and lift the general gloom. For the first time all day, after hours of steady deterioration, my situation has improved a little. It’s a small thing, but noticeable. The shade from the hat is making me a tiny bit more comfortable than I was before. That’s all: a tiny bit more comfortable. But it’s enough to give me a significant mental boost.

  And although I feel better, I know I must look even odder: the only competitor not wearing bespoke triathlon gear (apart from the bloke in an all-in-one bodysuit, but that’s his thing – I’m just inept) is now topping off his ill-fitting running outfit with a tatty old cricket hat. But as I say, I simply don’t care – neither about how I look, nor about having conceivably committed a minor crime.

  The miles-to-go column has ticked down into single figures, I’m close to reaching the lake where I’ll see my family again and where I’ve decided I’ll make a definitive call about whether to stop or carry on, and under this hat, my physiological system is minutely less stressed than it was a moment ago. Put simply, I’m a bit less hot.

  It’s like being two sets down at Wimbledon, and a break behind in the third, when suddenly, from nowhere, you break back. Still a bad situation, still critical, but not quite as terrible as it had been.

  Oh, and speaking of tennis, I wonder how Andy Murray’s getting on...

  How hard, I wonder, can 12 minutes on a treadmill possibly be?

  I’ve come to a gym in West London for what I initially thought was to be a quick chat with the renowned running coach Rory Coleman, but turns out to be a training session. I’ve been put in touch with him ahead of an off-road ultra-marathon I’ve entered, and first up, he tells me he wants to test my fitness. This prospect initially sounds horrendous, but I’m relieved to learn that it involves nothing more strenuous than running on a treadmill, with no incline, for 12 minutes. Nothing to worry about, he reassures, just 12 minutes.

  I’ll
take care of all the controls, so all you have to do is run.

  Five minutes in, and I’m still able to continue chatting. I do have mild alarm bells ringing in the back of my mind, something to do with Rory’s expectant demeanour, but there are only seven minutes remaining for goodness’ sake. Seven minutes. I can take anything for seven minutes.

  A minute later, halfway through this fitness test, I’m no longer able to talk easily – but I’m still content enough as I gallop along. This feels a little like the time I went to the GP complaining of heart pain, and was sent to Charing Cross Hospital for an ECG, an exercise tolerance test to determine or rule out the presence of coronary problems. On that occasion, wired up to several monitors, I had barely broken sweat on the treadmill when the staff decided enough was enough and turned it off – just when it was starting to get interesting. It turns out I was having stomach acid reflux, not a heart attack, and the ECG people had non-hypochondriacs in their waiting room. But here in Acton there are six minutes to go and I’m feeling fine. Bring it on Rory.

  Rory brings it on. He turns up the speed dramatically, and watches with interest as I disintegrate.

  Minute 7: Horrible, I’m running too fast, there’s no way I can sustain this speed. But I can no longer speak to convey this information, and I’m beginning to realise what those alarm bells were all about.

  Minute 8: Please... slower... please... I gasp, taking large lungfuls of air between each word. Rory tells me that grimacing and looking down aren’t helping, and that I should relax and look up. And I think Oh shut up! He also promises to help me out when I reach 10 minutes. Those are his exact words: I’ll help you out at 10 minutes. It’s not much, but I greedily hang on to that promise.

  Minute 9: I’m now properly struggling, my face is contorted into a mask of pain and it takes every last ounce of effort to watch those seconds tick by slowly, excruciatingly, until at last they reach 9:57... 9:58... 9:59... 10:00. Finally! He’s finally going to help me out...

  Minute 10: Rory makes the treadmill go faster. Faster! There you go, he says. It’s a mark of how much I’m struggling that what comes out of my mouth, inasmuch as I’m able to speak coherently at all, is a volley of expletives and abuse. I rarely swear. And I never swear in front of someone I don’t know well. As for insulting someone who’s a bit of a legend – well that’s completely off the radar. But as he turns up the speed towards 20kph, I give Rory the full double barrels. There’s not a chance I’m going to make it through this minute, and then the next, and another after that, at this insane pace. I’m about to hit the Stop button myself when Rory senses the rebellion and slows the treadmill infinitesimally. I somehow continue. I’m hating this.

  Minute 11: A furious battle is going on inside my head. On the one hand, my self-preservation instinct is demanding that I put a stop to this absurdity. I know that I’m not able to sustain this level of effort for more than a few more seconds. I urgently want to press the kindly-looking red button in front of me. But on the other hand, it’s embarrassing to give up and I’d be ashamed of myself if I did. Oh what to do, what to do? Please let this end...

  Minute 12: Probably safe to call this one of the longest minutes of my life – and the longest outside of a hospital housing one of my children. I can’t honestly tell you much about it. I vaguely remember it starting, and mentally taking a small amount of consolation from the fact I had less than 60 seconds remaining. And I think Rory probably did some speed control-juggling to keep me going. And I definitely remember giving up the ghost half a second early and lunging for the mercy of the red button. And then, almost as bad, the long moments hanging off the machine, gulping, gasping, heaving, wheezing, desperately trying to recover. I had been broken, utterly broken. In 12 minutes.

  I’m soon to discover that what I’ve just been put through is called a VO2 max test. It measures fitness through pushing your body to its absolute limit and measuring oxygen consumption. Elite athletes are occasionally subjected to these tests, but not often. Having said that, Olympic rowing champion James Cracknell has, I’m told, done over fifty. I honestly don’t understand how. The first time you don’t know what’s coming and simply react. But after that, how do you persuade your brain to allow you to return to the well and dig as deep again when every instinct is telling you not to? That, I suppose, is what separates the athletes from the amateurs, the men from the boys, the Cracknells from the Alexanders.

  Rory does some calculations to bring up the results, which for a 40-year-old ex-smoker are surprisingly good: 64.05, elite cyclist level. Delighted with that. The drawback comes as he extrapolates from the numbers – it seems I’ve been universally underperforming. Apparently I should be able to run 5k in 15:38, 10k in 32:37 and a marathon in two and a half hours. Not a chance in hell, of course, but interesting to know.

  And anyway, no time to dwell on these revelations, as the fitness test continues. Rory goes on to suggest upper body and core-strengthening exercises before introducing me to what he calls his ‘Treadmill Power Hour’. It seems to be a cross between a tempo run and an interval session, and designed to increase speed stamina. Like the name suggests, it’s an hour on the treadmill – but split into twelve chunks of five minutes. Each segment consists of four minutes’ running a little too fast for comfort (in my case 15kph with a 2% incline), followed by a really quick minute (17.5kph). Repeat times 12. That means you recover from each of the dozen near-sprints at around marathon race pace – and that means it hurts.

  When I first started doing it, I was surprised at how deep I had to dig simply to complete the hour. Occasionally I had to stop and slam the big red button after 50 minutes. And afterwards, it would take my calves three days to stop aching. Once, I completed a Power Hour at the end of a punchy six days involving three very long runs and two attempts to break my work–home record, and managed to overtrain myself sick.

  But then again, that cold came after my first 100-mile training week and did feel a little like a snotty rite of passage. First time you suffer from a repetitive strain injury when you start running? Especially if that injury is Runner’s Knee? Same sort of thing – it hurts, but strangely makes you feel like you belong. Like you’ve joined the gang, and a very happy, sweaty gang at that. This cold made me feel like I’d joined some kind of elite running gang, even happier, even sweatier... and currently a bit bunged up.

  What it also did was reinforce an idea that had been reborn the moment Rory read out those numbers after my VO2 max test. A marathon in two and a half hours, you say? Well, even if that was so optimistic as to be verging on the delusional, it did remind me that my quest to run sub-three had fallen two minutes and 12 seconds short of being able to be described as successful, but might just be worth revisiting. I’d abandoned the whole enterprise a couple of years earlier when I found myself failing to enjoy my races, especially the longer ones. The marathons themselves had become miserable. Everything was so orientated towards that one goal that I’d lost sight of why I was running in the first place – similar to when I became too wrapped up in all the high-tech gizmos, but with a sharper edge.

  It all reached an unhappy climax when I found myself slightly behind target time as I passed half way in a marathon, and essentially gave up and sulked my way to the finish. I also realised that there was no real difference between someone who could run 3:02:11 and someone who managed 2:59:59. Unless you’re looking to win marathons, a couple of minutes barely matters. Toilet breaks last longer. And going the other way, 3:04:23 and 3:02:11 feel practically identical.

  But it was my holy grail, a marathon finishing time starting with a two, and it took me a while before I realised it was making my hobby a touch joyless. So I ditched the stopwatch, began trail running, and never once regretted my decision to give up trying to shave 132 seconds off my road marathon time.

  Until now. Perhaps that marathon monster was stirring once more.

  Helen Skelton-Myler

  TV presenter on everything from Blue Peter to Countryfile
to the London Marathon Highlights Show (whilst simultaneously running the race). She’s also completed several incredible challenges for Sport Relief, including a gruelling Namibian ultra-marathon.

  The first event I ever did was the Great North Run in 2005. My cousins and I had seen it on TV, we thought it looked like fun, and we just thought we should have a go. I was just really impressed at the atmosphere; it always looked really good on telly. So I said, ‘I’m just going to give this a whirl and see how it goes.’

  The longest I ran in training was about seven miles. And my Great North Run itself wasn’t quick. I think it was 2:37, or 2:39, but I just loved it. The atmosphere and the environment, and it’s very humbling isn’t it, because you’re running along next to people who are running for their parents and children. The best bit is when you get to South Shields and there are old ladies with bags of boiled sweets calling, ‘Come on, pet, you can do it.’ And it really does make a difference, because when people look you in the eye and say, ‘Come on, you can do it,’ then you think, ‘Yeah, okay, I don’t want to let you down. Yeah, I’ll have a go.’

  The next day I could hardly walk, but I was so proud of the fact that I was limping, because everyone was asking why, and I could say, ‘Well, actually, I did the Great North Run yesterday.’ It gave me a real appreciation of the fact that absolutely anybody can take these things on. People sometimes say to me, ‘Oh, I can’t do that! I’m not the right shape, or age.’ I remember looking around at the start line and thinking, ‘He’s massive, and she’s old...’ Honestly, when you go to one of those events, there is no typical body. Unless you’re at the front, with the elite runners, obviously!

  But I never did much running again until I signed up to do an ultra-marathon when I was on Blue Peter in 2008. 78 miles in 24 hours. At the time I wasn’t really running at all. I had never done a marathon, but I think that was good, because I didn’t realise how hard it would be to do three.