Vegetable Love

 

Holkham Woods - North Norfolk

The Christmas season of excess is here. Not much work. Lots of chance to get the sleeps in.  More opportunity to think about your diet and more time to put a bit of structure into the weekly runs.

Yes, this is the perfect opportunity now to get a bit more focused, get the shoes on and out the door as much as possible. Reeling yourself in from overdoing it should be the only concern. In such ideal conditions it should be possible that Christmas really is the season of excess for all the right reasons.

But of course it is not. The weather is bad, the in-laws are round and the hangover bites. It is far more easy to push all those good intentions back, and front load them into the New Year under the resolution banner. 

With a degree of foresight and bitter experience, I anticipated how this festive luxury of time and opportunity could be easily squandered. When my local running club meet on the 7^th of January for the inaugural 5k time trial of 2014, it is then that the mince pies will be counted. Imagining how everyone else will float away from the start line, whilst I am left feeling like I’m wading through leftover gravy has helped motivate me to stay off the turkey and get out on the trails this last week. More on this in a moment.

With regard to the turkey, it has had a complete reprieve this year. Becoming vegetarian last summer during a bike trip to Slovenia has presented a new challenge this Christmas. Maintaining a plant based diet when every animal is being wrapped, stuffed, glazed or roasted inside or around every other is a challenge when family members present them with love, and then consternation when you decline. This is the point, however, when any right on leaf munching blogger would extol the virtues of a vegetarian lifestyle and relate how they filled their self-righteous boots with nuts, and pulses and tofu at every Christmas lunch and dinner and felt all the better for it. I am committed to reducing my carbon footprint by not eating animals. But I still have a lot to learn about the variety of vegetable products that could supplement the place on my plate once occupied by meat in order to make this transition an entirely full-filling one.   

In an attempt to put this right I have been reading my Christmas present from my sister Olivia: ‘Eat and Run’ by Scott Jurek.  It is, in part, an autobiographical account of his rise to legendary status as the seven time winner of the Western States 100mile Ultra marathon. Running alongside this physical journey, however, is what Jurek presents as the equally important nutritional one.

Eating with deliberateness the food that your body wants and needs to perform in the way that you in turn desire is presented as a symbiotic relationship. I thought that the recipes at the start of each chapter would be a quirky starter to the main event. But Scott Jurek’s insistence on the role nutrition has taken at every stage of his career success is, well, food for thought. I will be adding agave, chia and spirulina to my own cooking vocabulary and cupboard in the New Year. Here’s to being a better vegetarian in 2014.

And so back to the holiday miles. The rest in the build-up to the holidays paid off. After a long but wonderful weekend with my friends Jonny and Sophie in North Wales to celebrate their marriage and a run on the Anglesey beaches with my old friend Sally Wrigley, I got in a really decent seven day effort. From my parent’s home in Orpington, Kent one day, I hotfooted it south. I wanted to run a section of the North Downs Way as a Guy Landon from Team Bath is competing in the North Downs 100 in the summer of the New Year and it is the closet long distance footpath to my childhood home. It was the day after the storm in the South East and after a few miles I skirted round the woods of Biggin Hill Airport. I looked up intermittently to see whether the great swaying boughs that had been threatened by the building weather system when I passed through this way two days ago had made it through the ensuing onlsaught. Vaulting trees that lay across the path interrupted this, but equally gave answer. OS map in hand I cherry picked the footpaths beyond which led me further south, away from towns, and through wet fields where the smells of soil and disturbed underground creatures puffed up from my passing there. Softly billowing hills and valleys neatly punctuated by rustic stiles and occasional copses made for a meandering course that eventually led out to the startlingly, almost precipitous by comparison, North Downs ridge. With the M25 burbling along a few hundred feet below, the North Downs Way makes a rather bold, almost self-conscious claim as a long distance foot path, in comparison with the remoteness and silence to be found on largely unbordered, unbridled routs such as the Penine Way. But for all its southern brashness and its droning soundtrack, I felt connected to it. For it is hometurf.

As startlingly as it begins, I peel away from the NDW after a few miles to begin my journey back towards South East London. I eat two marmalade sandwiches that I lay out on my chosen picnic table of a trig point outside Kelston village. From here I enter a churchyard and then, just as I turn north-east through a field gate, a cloud simultaneously drifts and my shadow of deep winter sun is thrown out infront of me; bobbing exploratively down the long verdant ridge that stretches out below. The pace is gentle and the return leg passes in that way that only the experience of the unfamiliar can allow, when your mind is absorbed by details of the new as I navigate through virgin woods and previously untrodden paths. I choose to follow unfamiliar tracks for as long as possible (no matter if they lead me meandering) until even the most innocuous mulch bedded trail is snuffed out and I pick up concrete for the remaining 2 or 3 miles to the front door.

I travelled to the Norfolk Broads on the Friday and finished the week off with a 23mile journey out along the Branacaster Coast to Wells by way of sanddunes and marshland and deep rich pine forests where too the recent rain still helped  leech smells of sap and salt more strongly than ever.  I totted up a P.B. 73+mile week; the majority of which had been run off road. Not bad I thought for the Christmas week of excess. Not having the stresses of work to tire me out before I even opened the door was a contributing factor. But mainly it was the newness of the routes that I ran and also the company of the people I ran some of the miles with that had made it happen. Here’s  to new trails and old running companions in 2014.

 

 

 

Zzzmas

Rest. A dirty word for some sporty types. At best it has overtones of burnout and lethargy. At worst, just down right laziness. ‘Rest is for the weak. Sleep when you are dead.’ Such sentiments can lead us guiltily into our next session.  And perhaps to the next one. And even to the one after that.  But what if you really are just tired. And what if all you really need to improve is quite the opposite of what you are giving your body? Sometimes the answer might just be simple. Rest.

I am increasingly becoming one of those people who like to keep track of things. I have begun a basic week-by-week chart in the kitchen where I plot totals of the running I have been doing. Black is for steady jogging. Red is for speedwork. Blue is for any extras such as core training or an exercise class and green is for cycling miles. At the end of each week I tot it all up with a cup of tea and see where it has all got me. If I was an intelligent chap it would now show measured but steady progress in both miles covered and elevation tackled. But because I am not, it isn’t. Instead it is a jumbled affair of decent efforts one week followed by tiredness and ‘work getting in the way another.’ This is then followed by a let’s-try-and-make-up-for-last-week’s-low-mileage- week the following one. Repeat this cycle for a few weeks and unsurprisingly the special white colour code manifests itself with a vengeance…

Right now I’m making rest, the top training priority. With the two week Christmas break just two days away and the gentle return to the good life and no alarm clocks now imminent, it would be a real shame to arrive at this point entirely depleted both in mind and body. I have been feeling off for the last two weeks and have cut short, or cut out entirely, lots of runs. Reluctantly I could have forced myself out of the door and up a hill and dialled into ‘soldier on regardless mode.’ But there’s plenty of time to get fitter and a few runs missed won’t send me spiralling down into the never get off the couch category: despite what any dispassionate training schedule might have me believe.

Quite the opposite actually. I hope to run a lot next year. Tomorrow is the first day to register for the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc series of ultra-distance trail events and I will be putting my name in the hat. I would hope to get up to 80-100mile training weeks in the build-up to this and run lots of beautiful trails and get in many gruelling sessions. But you certainly can’t embark on a week of training like this without the right levels of psyche. And getting yourself all burnt out, and fed up, and forcing yourself out the door when your body and your mind are asking you to just chill your beans and wash your socks for the evening –well, that’s not going to get you anywhere. Right now I’d much rather just run the clock down to Friday and feel rested; ready to enjoy some cool winter runs in the frost with no alarm clocks or tiredness in the legs. And so when I do finally open the front door again, it will be with daylight and excitement and rested legs stretching out well into the New Year.