2008, when I was at my fittest, was the year of my running triumphs. I’ve won three races, all of them in that year. My first win was probably the greatest. It was a fun run in Epping to raise money for Rhys Daniels, a girl who died of a rare degenerative disease called Batten’s.
I’d just won the world championship. All my wins came around that time when I was at my fittest.
My second victory was a handicapped race at Orion running club. Everybody was handicapped so the slowest runners went off first and the fastest last. So, say, somebody runs five miles in 45 minutes and I run it in 27 minutes, she would start off 18 minutes before me. The idea is that everyone comes in roughly together. I was one of the last to go off, and I thought I’d never catch the two in front of me. I ended up winning that race, which was a great feeling, and I won a cream cake or bacon sarnie, something like that!
The third race wasn’t a pure run – it was an assault course called Lactic Rush, devised by my personal trainer Tracey, and about eighty people took part. It was a criss-cross course with loads of obstacles, so you could see the others as you were running. One of the fellas shouted out to his mate, ‘You can’t let a snooker player beat you.’ And I thought, right, I’ll have you for that! He was just winding me up, and it worked. It made me more determined. He was an army bloke and was good over the assault course – up mud hills, through streams, over tyres, so I just watched how he got over it and copied him. I stayed behind him, conserved a bit of energy, and watched how he went through the assaults. Then over the last mile his shoe came off and I went boom! As soon as I got in front, he died. I won it by more than a minute in the end, which was a lot considering we ran the first six miles together and it was a seven-mile assault course. That made the Brentwood Gazette, which gave me a buzz. I won £100 of vouchers. Result.
Soon after that I went on a running holiday to France with the Telford mob – Chris who runs 10 kilometres in 28 minutes, his brother-in-law Mark who runs the marathon in two hours twenty, his wife and Mark’s sister Amanda who runs 10 kilometres in 35 minutes. There were a few others with us from Telford – slower than Chris and his family, but decent nevertheless.
The trip didn’t start off well. We got to the ferry at Portsmouth and I realised I’d forgotten my passport. I had to get a courier to bring it, and that delayed the trip by ten hours. The others went off except for Chris and his dad Terry, which worked out great because I could just talk about running to them. I had them all to myself, but I felt really guilty because I thought these people are going to have the right hump with me now and think I’m a nightmare. But actually they were lovely about it.
We got to France, and I was a bit nervous because the guys are obviously proper athletes. It was probably how an amateur would feel playing me at snooker – fuck me, I’m in trouble here. But they didn’t make me feel like that at all; they were so encouraging.
Terry told us the idea behind the holiday. ‘We’re gonna get PBs,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna get a PB,’ he said looking at me. ‘She’s going to get a PB, Chris won’t get a PB but he’s going to win the race, and Mark’s going to do a good time in the half marathon.’
Mark, who is a top man, said he wasn’t going to do the half marathon because he wasn’t fit enough, but he was going to pace me round the 10 kilometres. ‘You will be getting a PB tomorrow,’ he said, like he was stating a fact.
We got to Caen in the north-west of France, booked into our little hotel for £18 a night. Next day, me, Mark and Chris went for a jog, just to keep our legs turning over. I thought fuck me this is going to be fast, but it wasn’t. It was a leisurely jog, and this is when I discovered that top athletes were happy going out running 7-8 minute miles, and not going flat out all the time. I studied the way they trained and raced, the same way I studied snooker players.
We had breakfast together, enjoyed each other’s company. Amanda beat 3,000 people to win the 5 kilometres for women in 15 minutes on the Thursday night. Then we had the 10 kilometres, half marathon and marathon to come.
So Mark paced me round and said just stick in with me. At 5 kilometres I was gone. ‘I can’t do this,’ I said to Mark, ‘it’s killing me.’
‘Up on your toes,’ he said. ‘Chest up, chest up, up on your toes, and keep on the balls of your feet.’
‘I can’t, Mark, I’m fucked.’
‘You’re doing well,’ he said. ‘Chest up.’
Every time I slowed down he went ‘tuck in behind me, tuck in behind me’. So I just tried to hang on.
When we got to four miles I started to overtake some runners. I thought fucking hell, we’re picking a few off here. It gave me confidence. He said, ‘You’re doing well, you’ve got another mile and a half to go.’
‘I’m fucked, Mark, I can’t keep going.’
‘No you can. You can.’
I had a mile to go and I was thinking I must be running a good time.
‘You’re on for your PB,’ Mark kept saying. ‘You’re on for your PB.’
My PB was 35 minutes 50, so anything under that was great.
‘You’ve got half a mile,’ Mark said. ‘Keep going, keep going.’ I knew I wasn’t going to stop by then. I thought I’ve come this far. I’d learnt that you can run in a lot of discomfort. We got to the last 400 metres and Mark went, ‘Right, go! If you’ve got anything left, go!’ And I sprinted like a lunatic and got over the line in 34.50. I couldn’t believe it.
Chris had come in at 30 minutes. I sat on the side, and said, ‘How d’you do, Chris?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I won it. And you beat your PB.’
Then Terry, Chris’s dad, came over and said, ‘See, I told you, you got your PB. You got your PB!’ He was ecstatic. I caned my PB; beat it by a minute – five forty miling, good running.
I was made up. My family life was a mess, but I was so happy just then with my running friends in France. We had pizzas, watched the World Cup and I thought I’m around beautiful people, I’ve just got my PB, I’m a running bore, I’ve won the World Championship, I’m staying in an £18-a-night hotel, no one’s drinking, no one’s taking drugs, I ain’t got to worry what I’m eating because it’s just burning off, I thought I’ve cracked it, I’ve got the recipe for life.
The next day we got up and they said we’re going to the beach. It sounded great, but you knew there’d always be a run involved along the way. So we got there and Chris said, ‘Right, I’m just going for a little jog with Amanda, d’you want come?’ and Mark said, ‘Yeah, great,’ and I joined them. Mark and I ended up doing a five-mile run at a lovely pace along the beach, just shorts, no top, no trainers, and we were flying. We must have been six-minute miling along the beach, and I didn’t even feel tired. I felt as if I could do this for ever. I’d worked hard to get to this level of fitness, but it was worth all the effort – life doesn’t get any better than this. It was the happiest I’ve ever been.
15
RONNIE’S HANDY
RUNNING HINTS
‘24 minutes, 3 and a half miles, easy felt good, nice rhythm, trying to kick my legs back at my bum and stand tall.’
Break those distances down
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some good trainers over the years and people who give you good advice. The easy thing to think is you’ve got to run loads and loads and loads to get faster and fitter. In fact, to run fast you simply have to run fast, and to do that you have to break it down into minisegments and interval work. The idea with interval work is that you run a lot faster than you normally would, but not to the point where your technique is suffering. But you can run 400 metres faster than you can run a mile so you break that mile down into four reps of 400 metres, so you do 4 x 400 metres off a two-minute recovery. In other words, you have a two-minute gap between every 400 metres. The advantage of the recovery is that you can run each 400 metres faster than if you ran one continuous mile flat out.
Listen to your body
You also need to listen to your body. A cliché, but
true. I would often go out and get injured because I was overtraining, pushing myself too much, trying to get too fit too fast. If you’ve got that mentality, you’ll end up knackered and unable to train so it becomes a vicious circle. The best advice I ever got was from Chris Davies’s dad, Terry, in Telford. He trained a lot of the good runners up there. I’d train the first day, then a second, and the third day I’d go running and I’d have to stop. I went to have a massage and my calves were so tight, but I didn’t realise it was my calves till I had the massage. So after I broke my foot I phoned Terry up and said: ‘Look, I’m really out of shape because I haven’t trained for seven months. I’m struggling, carrying a lot of weight.’ He said: ‘Look, just do twenty minutes every other day for the first five or six weeks.’ So I did that: I was able to run with no injuries and after four weeks I found myself getting faster and faster, not having to stop as much. In short, I was listening to my body; not overdoing it. I was enjoying each run I went on because my muscles weren’t killing me. It’s hard to listen to your body when you’re obsessive! But if you get too enthusiastic, you’re just going to end up on the runners’ scrapheap. As I write, I’m being sensible. Not as fit as I have been, but doing nicely enough. Getting there slowly. Every other day I do my nice little four-mile loop because that’s all my body can take at the moment. To push it further would be silly. Once I get three or four months’ training under my belt I’ll push it a bit further.
Run tall
There’s lots of advice you can give on posture etc., but then again there are so many exceptions to the rule I’m not sure how worthwhile that advice is. For example, I watched Paula Rad-cliffe run and her head bobbed like a crazed chicken’s – hardly classic – but she was winning all her races. So I thought, I’m going to try that, and it worked for me because it stopped me thinking about having sore legs. I was just focusing on bobbing my head about. But you tell any coach that and he’ll laugh you off the track.
Coaches will tell you that to run well you’ve got to feel that you’re running tall. When you’re not fit you slouch and sit on your hips and your stride gets shorter. A lot of the time I used to sit on my hips and shuffle along because a lot of the runners I ran with were long-distance runners and they shuffled along on a shorter stride. To increase your stride you’ve got to do a lot of drills – get your knees up high. It’s hard to change your natural stride pattern, though. People tend to have a naturally long or short one, and sometimes you just have to go with what you’ve got. But the fitter you get, the stronger you get; the less you sit on your hips, the better the rhythm you’ll have. When I wasn’t fit and I was tired, I had a tendency to run out of energy; then my shoulders would slacken and I’d sit on my hips and shuffle along. But when I was fit I always felt I was pushing the top half of my body through, and that makes you feel you’re having a good run. And if you feel you’re having a good run that tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Run on the balls of your feet
The best runners run on the balls of their feet because it’s quicker, whereas if you go heel-toe, heel-toe you’re doing more work for the same distance. If you go toe toe, toe-toe, you’re going to have energy and be quicker, but it’s hard to run on your toes. When I’m running well I feel my feet are hitting the ground quicker, but I’m still not running on the balls of my feet.
Give those fry-ups a miss
My ideal diet would be a slice of toast before I run, then porridge for breakfast when I get back. Then I’d have tuna salad at lunch and fish with boiled or jacket potatoes for dinner and natural or Greek yoghurt with a banana and a bit of honey. When I’m not training I fall back into the bad roasties and fry-ups habit, but when I’m training I just can’t do it. I used to run a food diary as well as the running diary. As I say, I’m obsessive. If I was tempted to eat something bad, the diary would stop me because I knew I’d have to write it down at the end of the night.
16
MAD MOMENTS
‘Felt sluggish, don’t enjoy easy run, weekend mileage 25 miles.’
I have my moments. My mad moments. Unplanned and, until now, unexplained. I’m probably as famous for doing daft things as I am for my snooker. But my mad moments haven’t come unprompted. Yes, there was a reason why I walked out in the middle of the Stephen Hendry match in the UK Championship; there was a reason why I put a cloth over my face when I played Mark King. There was even a reason why I gave myself the world’s worst skinhead in the middle of a match. It’s time to fess up.
Walking out on Stephen Hendry
It could have happened in any of the previous half-dozen matches. It was 2006 and I was playing in the Premier League, against Steve Davis in the semis and Jimmy White in the final. Jo and I were going through a terrible time, and my head was completely up my arse. I didn’t want to be at the tournaments. My brain wasn’t right. I wasn’t happy.
I played Davis, was 3-1 up, and missed a ball and went to shake his hand because I just wanted to walk out. And as I did, I said to myself: ‘What are you doing? You can’t do that!’ I was 3-1 up! It was the Premier League, the tournament before the UK Championship, which was in York. So I just about stopped short of shaking his hand and sat back down again. My mind, though, was, shake his hand, get out of here, you’ve had enough. But I held back and went back to my chair.
I pulled myself together, won the match and got through to the final against Jimmy White. I was 4-0 up, had barely missed a ball, I was potting really well and then, boom! I missed a ball, he cleared up, and it went 4-1. In the next frame I missed another ball and I did the same thing – I went up to shake his hand.
I thought, Jesus, that’s twice on the trot. I didn’t do it, but the thought that I’d wanted to do it was worrying enough. I was in such a mess because of the state of my home life that I couldn’t face being there. I felt like the loneliest man in the world. I didn’t really know what I wanted. I didn’t want to be at the tournaments, but nor did I want to be at home because I was so miserable there. I suppose the bottom line was that I wanted a happy home life.
Lily was just a few months old at the time. She was absolutely gorgeous, adorable, but even her presence couldn’t help improve things between me and Jo. Before Lily was born we argued like most couples do, but we always got through it. Then, as soon as Lily was born, things took a dive. If we hadn’t had Lily I would have just left at that point. But I felt this overwhelming guilt and sadness. I was determined not to mess up as a dad as I had done with Taylor, my first daughter.
So as I went to shake Jimmy’s hand, again I thought: ‘What the fuck are you doing? You can’t do that. You’re 4-1 up, then 4-2 up, you’re going to win the tournament, what are you doing, you nutter?’ So I got through the match, won the tournament, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t be the last of it. And it wasn’t.
A pattern was developing. I’d almost walked out twice, and then I was at York for the UK Championship and I’d won two rounds before playing Stephen Hendry. But in both matches I’d felt the same – I wanted to walk out. I managed to hold back, though. Then I was up against Hendry. I was playing terribly, couldn’t pot a ball, played a bad shot, went into the reds, 4-1 down in the quarter-finals, he was playing well, and I thought, fuck this, I’m out of here – I’m going straight out and I’m going to have a night of it.
It was about 4 p.m., and I was thinking, I’ve got a couple of my jockey mates up here, they like a good booze-up. I’m going to get smashed tonight, absolutely wasted. Even though I was still running well, I didn’t feel good in myself. It’s funny: to the outside world I looked in great nick – healthy, trim, fit. Everybody was saying, you’re looking well, but I was in pieces. I wasn’t eating my way out of depression, but I was running my way out of my depression. But even the running didn’t always do the trick. And now I just wanted out.
It was the first to nine, so Hendry still needed another five frames to win. We weren’t even at the halfway mark, but I simply didn’t want to be there. I turned r
ound, shook the ref’s hand, shook Hendry’s hand, said: ‘Good luck, Steve’, and walked out. Since then I’ve seen Stephen Hendry’s reaction on YouTube, and he just didn’t know what to do with himself – did he stay there or walk out? – and he was saying: ‘Well, what do we do now, Jan?’ to the referee, Jan Verhaas. And Jan was: ‘Well, I suppose it’s game over because he’s conceded.’
A few people in the crowd shouted: ‘Come on, Ronnie! You can’t do that!’ and I thought, well, I can do what I like really. Why can’t I do that? Not surprisingly, everybody started talking about my mental issues and unstable mind.
Nobody could believe what I’d done. Least of all Stephen. He was quite gracious about it at the time. He must have realised there was something really screwy with my head for me to do that. ‘I didn’t have an inkling anything was wrong,’ he said after I’d walked. ‘He seemed in good form beforehand and we were chatting backstage. Ronnie’s obviously got his reasons and I’m not going to criticise him. He just said he had had enough and wished me good luck for the rest of the tournament. Only he knows what he feels inside. I can’t criticise someone else for that, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s just bizarre.’
I issued a statement apologising for my behaviour. ‘I wish I could have played a better game today, but I had a bad day at the office,’ I said. ‘Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a perfectionist when it comes to my game, and today I got so annoyed with myself that I lost my patience and walked away from a game that, with hindsight, I should have continued. I’m sorry I didn’t stick around to sharpen him up for his semi-final. I’m also really sorry to let down the fans who came to see me play – it wasn’t my intention to disappoint them, and for that I am truly apologetic. At this present moment in time I am feeling disappointed with myself and am hurt and numb, but I am a fighter and I will be back on my feet fighting stronger and harder than ever very soon.’
Running: The Autobiography Page 19