unironedman

There had been a sniff of a Dublin Marathon race ticket earlier in the year. It never materialised. A quick five-minute session on the pop-psychologist’s chair would have unearthed a certain indifference to the whole running thing anyway. This would have led to many more sessions on the couch, but we really don’t have time for that now. Suffice to say, I somewhat lost the grá for running this year.

(Grá is the Irish word for love, and because there is a fada over the a, this vowel is elongated, so the word is pronounced ‘graw’. I now realise, of course, that most of you don’t know what a fada is (pronounced ‘fodda’), so we are going down a little bit of a rabbit hole here – or poll coinín – so I think I had best stop digging. It’s an accent, and most serious languages have them. Just not English 😉 )

A quick glance over the old Garmin Connect always tells a story. There had been a slow enough start to the year, but then we had an enforced three month hiatus (we did? ed.), and it took a while to build back some fitness in order to tackle the Slieve Bloom Way.

As Summer progressed into Autumn, I found I was getting in one long run a week rather than several shorter ones, and this is not really on any training plan you are likely to find anywhere. I was still tipping away at the gym and mostly getting in three sessions a week. This I found to be beneficial in terms of leg strength and recovery, but overall, my running form and fitness was circling the drain.

[An aside: my gym programme is fairly standard stuff: one leg day, typically on a Monday for now, with one ‘push’ day on Wednesday and one ‘pull’ day on Friday. Push in this context means to focus on your upper body muscle groups that push weights away from your body. These include the obvious ones like bench press, triceps dips, push ups and dumbbell raises, etc. Pull is just the opposite, so dead lifts, dumbbell rows, cable machines and lat pulldowns. I am trying to add in a little more core stuff as well, as the only really obvious thing as far as I can see (apart from the kettlebell swings on a Monday) are the Ab Tower Pike Lifts. They are as fun as they sound, and I actually enjoy them. In gym terms, I am a lightweight, and happy to admit it. The other day, I was deadlifting my extremely impressive 50 kilos (and that includes the bar), and the guy beside me was doing 140. Just putting on those six 20 kilo weights and taking them off again would have been a decent workout for me. Funnily enough, he had taken some of my 20 kilo weights to create this massive feat, and as he returned them to my weight rack, I said ‘ah, I was looking for those!’. Who said the gym can’t be hilarious?

And in all other routines (sets? exercises?) I am equally modest. The only one I find I can do beyond the norm is the Leg Extension Machine thing; this is the one you sit in and lift stacks of weights by extending your legs (who woulda thunk it!). The max weight on these is 200lbs or about 90 kilos, and I generally do four sets of this weight. I guess all that running gives you reasonable quads, and above-average smugness…!]

And so, back to the marathon. It’s a Bank Holiday Monday, and I am not shuffling around the house like a crippled octogenarian, which would be a fairly standard post-race ritual. The only group who fear stairs more than Daleks are those that have just run over 26 miles. Instead, my brother and I clocked up our own mini-marathon yesterday, chasing Leah around Dublin city. Leah is my niece and is a fabulous runner. She prefers tracks and trails to the roads, and whilst distance is no issue for her, it was her first official road marathon. And I was delighted she picked Dublin.

So Rob and I headed into town and made our way to the Phoenix Park around the 4 mile mark. We were ahead of ourselves, time-wise, and caught the very first wheelchair participant, and then the elites. Then the first big wave arrived and passed, and we gazed at the tracker app to see her progress. I am not 100% sure how they work, but I suspect it’s a mix of timing mats and estimated pace. In other words, they are not terribly accurate. Whilst we were looking at our phones she flew past, and we just about saw her in time to shout her name. We then ran across past the Zoo and cut out a long loop and hoped to see her again, but at this early stage of the race, the numbers of bobbing heads are such that you become mesmerised and part of your brain seems to freeze over. I also missed Gary too. This spectator lark was proving tricky.

We scooted across the Liffey towards Islandbridge which is about 11 miles in, so we had plenty of time to see her again, but once more, we relied too heavily on the tracker and nearly missed her. We caught her before she slipped past and roared on our encouragement but she didn’t hear us over the crowd. Damn.

We then had a decision about our next move, and provisionally we thought about heading out to Milltown, at the 20 mile mark. We hadn’t really thought out how we might do this, and as we walked into the city centre, we figured there were so many road closures and so few buses or taxis that we initially decided to cut our losses and stay in town and see her at the finish. But then Rob decided we should get the Luas tram (another bit of Irish for ya! This one means speed). That part was easy, from St. Stephen’s Green, and we were out at Milltown in jig time. And the marathon route is literally a hundred yards or so down a ramp from the station.

But it was clear after a minute or two that we had just missed her! Darn it! So we waited for Gary instead, and gave him a hearty cheer as he went past. Then we went back up to the platform to get back into town to try and catch Leah at the finish. Alas, the first two trams that arrived were packed, so we skipped across the lines and caught the next Luas up the line in the other direction and were able to sneak onto the city-bound tram. But the clock was ticking, and Leah was flying, and she beat us to the finish line in a fantastic time of 3.23.

We met up in a packed bar and had some food and a pint, and then I headed back home on the bus in the worsening weather. Thankfully, most were home and dry before the rain arrived, but I know Gary’s Dad was out on the course for over seven hours, and would have been well soaked and chilled to the bone at the end, finishing with 7.11 and change. Credit to him, though. Gary finished in 4.07:34; a time I know he has bettered on several occasions, but he was happy to get around the course. And worth mentioning that he dragged me out the day before the marathon to do Lucan parkrun, and he was well under 25 minutes, which is not your average prep for the big one.

He has also signed up for the Connemara Ultra next April, so that is our focus now. Well, as he said himself, Dublin Marathon was a sort of prep for the Donadea 50k in February, which is really just more prep for Connemara. This is the way the running mind works 🙂

This gives us both about six months to start clocking up some mileage. That is going to be tricky for me if the new job pans out, as it’s shift work. It’s emergency call taking and the shifts tend to be 12 hours long, and chop and change between days and nights, so I expect a lot of turbulence over the coming months. It will make set exercise routines impossible, and that will be tricky to negotiate, as routines by their very nature require you to be systematic. Ho hum. Work takes priority.

In other news, the world lurches along like a drunken psychopath, so I am going to just casually gloss over all that horrific chaos, if that’s alright with you. I am not immune; far from it. I already ingest far too much as it is, so consider this a safe space, so to speak.

Happy training, out there. Or copyediting. Or rebuilding walls. Whatever you’re into. 😉

And now for some dogs and funnies. And funny dogs…