You've got to start somewhere. Hi. I'm new here. I'm having a look around the space, hoping that I can remember how I got here, hoping that when it comes to logging in again, I will be able to find my way. I must remember to leave some crumbs as I go, and hope the birds don't peck them.
This is to be the story of preparing to run the LAMM mountain marathon, six months from now, somewhere in the northern parts of Scotland. It will be a story about training, for sure, but I will have to tell you some stories about what happened before, before what is happening now makes any sense.
For starters, the picture is me, enjoying a highly non-standard half marathon recovery routine. The place is the Teng Ge desert, north of Zhongwei, in Ningxia Province, PRC. The race occurred half way through the 2004 edition of Les Foulees de la Soie. I didn't actually finish that half marathon. I was ignominiously scooped into the sweeper van. But the honour of leading the dragon dance was a delight no placement could have brought.
Foulees de la Soie of that era was an eleven stage race held in half a dozen cities scattered along the course of the Silk Road. I went as a walker, with my husband, in 2001, when I could walk only with the help of a pair of sticks. Recovering the ability to walk, the aim of repeating Les Foulees de la Soie as a runner became an obsession; a really useful obsession. The return from sticks to running was a sequence of progress and regression that cycled the spirits: one day I could run, the next I couldn't walk without the sticks. The neighbours were puzzled to see me thus; so was I. The only constant was the obsession to run Les Foulees, a daily whispering imperative, ever the more insistent on days when I was back on sticks.
I got there in 2004. You will almost certainly here more about it. Since then, lots has happened. I have run a total of five marathons, if you count one unofficial one that I measured out along the banks of my home river. I've got back to work. And I've kept on running. I have made a number of stringed instruments. And I've kept on running. I've spent almost every summer since 2004 in China, working with the mathematics department at a university in Shandong Province. And I've kept on running. I've studied the language. And I keep on running.
The running is both the goal and the therapy that allows me to reach the goal. Leave home, out the door with reluctant legs grumbling at each step. It might be a mile or five, and if I'm lucky the magic moment will come when whatever is locked releases and my feet come alive again. And if I'm unlucky, the magic moment may not happen at all, that outing, but there is the consolation of knowing that it's one or three or five miles banked, and muscles still strong against the day when it does all come alive again.
It is essential to have a goal to set against all the tough locked leg miles, just as the 2004 Foulees shone as lodestar through desperate moments in the return to running. This year it is the LAMM, 11-12 June, the D course. Those hills, somewhere up in the north of Scotland. I will lift mine eyes up unto those hills. That'll do for now.
Today: 40 minutes run with the dog on leash. She doesn't like it much, but she's really a very good training partner. Suffering with foot problems at the moment. Massage man suggested that trying to run London Marathon in April would jeopardise running LAMM in June. So we don't run London in April. We can live with that. More important, we can run with that.
Now to do the homework: s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g.
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