unironedman

IN WHICH WE COMPLETE THE FIRST WEEK OF (UNOFFICIAL) TRAINING FOR THE 5K ATTEMPT WITH TWO VERY DIFFERENT RUNS OF SIMILAR DISTANCE, AND GO THERE AND BACK AGAIN AS CUPIDSTOWN DRAWS BACK HER BOW…

Another busy week at work, and with the dark evenings, it’s still (psychologically) tricky to convince the body to get out there and get stuck into not just a running programme, but a home gym programme too. Monday evening was supposed to be a legs session in the workshop/gym, and I immediately ran into problems with a twinge in the knee which led to the leg session switching over to an upper body session.

Tuesday was possibly worse. I ran out of time, so the dog walk was commandeered into a quick run around the dog park. I can now confidently report that the inner circumference of said dog park is 0.4km and I managed 5 laps for a grand total of 2kms. The hounds had never seen me run around in circles before, and certainly not in the dog park in the dark, and everytime I reached the gate, they assumed it was time to go home, so joined me at the exit, only for me to puff on by for another lap. Not an auspicious start really. Not that it’s a start, per se, but I figured this whole 5k attempt should start somewhere. This is the base training phase, and all I am trying to do is get back into the routine of regular running with at least three and hopefully four or more runs per week. Plus a couple of kettlebells sessions thrown in to keep the core in shape. (As someone helpfully pointed out, ’round’ is a shape…).

Wednesday is a rest day, currently, as I rehearse in the evening. On Thursday, I enjoyed a little more success with a tempo run. Now, full disclosure: I decided after the fact to call it a tempo run, and this is not the way one should do business. I managed 8.5km through the park and around Lucan village, including the whore of a hill at Laraghcon, and back through the park again in just under 46 minutes, at a pace of 5:24. It’s on the slower end of ‘tempo’ if we’re being ruthlessly honest, but it’s progress of a sort.

Friday’s kettlebells session didn’t happen, other than a few hurried push-ups, so we’ll move swiftly along, shall we? Saturday morning, and I had taken Gary’s advice and decided to get a benchmark parkrun in to see what sort of time I could manage for a 5k. Griffeen is Gary’s home patch, even though it must be 8 or so miles from his house in Maynooth. It’s bang on 5k too, which is handy if you’re trying to rate your effort. Flat enough course, albeit with a metal bridge that must be crossed four times, and one very sharp turn that must be taken twice.

I finished in 21:46, which sort of puts me firmly in the middle of the spectrum; one end of of which says ‘hey buddy, that’s not too bad given how little pace running you’ve been doing, or indeed, any running at all!’ and ‘holy fuck, that’s not great for a lad who’s hoping to get in under 20 minutes at some stage this year… have you really thought this through at all, at all?’

[And on that score, my graphic designer/branding brain has been itching to take the mickey out of the Nike Breaking2 project. As you recall, this featured the legendary Eliud Kipchoge (and a certain pair of famous running shoes) and was their first attempt to beat the seemingly impossible two hour mark for the marathon, way back on 2017. I have a pair of super shoes now. I just need to add a zero onto the end, and I have Breaking20. But I think I’ll give tempting fate a miss this year; I seem to have annoyed some demi-god out there in the pantheon. Well, if not annoyed, perhaps just accidently stood on their toe at a party, or spilled their mead. I may not have been flogging myself at parkrun, but that’s a sizeable chunk of time to find. And as we discussed in a previous post, you can find the larger chunks at the top, but it’s the finer slices when you get closer to the bone that are the trickiest.]

Still, it’s a benchmark, as Gary would remind me, and that was the point. Get a sense of where we’re at. Gary himself is post-op (a small procedure on his foot last week) but being a member of the ‘I’m a nutty runner’ club (as we all are), he still insisted on completing parkrun too, and then just for fun, we headed out on Sunday morning to tackle Kildare’s highest peak.

Now, at 379 metres, it would be fair to say that ‘highest peak’ could be overstating things a little. But neither of us had ever visited this particular spot, so it seemed churlish not to pop by and say hello. It’s only a short spin away. Gary picked me up about 8am, and by half-past, we had parked up at the small village of Kilteel. There is a road that takes you 500 metres away from the forest track that leads to the summit (again, ‘summit’ is not really the word here!) but we figured a one kilometre loop for a morning’s work would be a shamefully poor return, so gave ourselves about three kilometres to reach the top, which equated to about 180 metres of elevation all told, and a round trip of 6 kms.

The weather was kind. Very cold, but fresh and clear. There was a short dip down from the car park, but the rest of it was a relentless climb up a quiet country road until we reached the entrance to the small forest at the top of the hill. There were large piles of freshly-felled lumber on each side of the muddy path, and the pine aroma was glorious. Of course, what do we put on the top of our highest county peak? A telecoms mast, of course. And tucked away behind it, just over the fence, is the trig point. Dutifully, we touched the sacred concrete and made our way back to the car, noting as we descended that there was a vista through the pine plantation very reminiscent of Rat Jaw in the Barkley Marathons. Not that either of us will see Rat Jaw in the flesh in our lifetimes. Well, certainly not during the race, anyway.

On the road back to Kilteel, you can see plenty of evidence that points to this location’s strategic importance during the heady times of the Anglo-Normans in the 12th century and beyond, including the remains of a tower house. You wouldn’t think it now, but in those days, the Normans controlled a large part of the east coast comprising of pretty much all that is County Dublin today, plus parts of other surrounding counties. It was known as The Pale (from the Latin for fence), and it is a subject worthy of books, let alone a blog post. More here, for the curious. Leixlip, where I sit and type this, was once on the border of this region controlled by the Anglo-Normans, and then the English Crown. Leixlip Castle was part of this fortified ‘shire’ boundary. And Kilteel was also the first line of defence against the marauding families of O’Byrnes and O’Tooles from the Wicklow Mountains.

For indeed, when you reach the top of Cupidstown Hill, you have two very distinct vistas. To the west, primarily, stretches the Plains of Kildare and on into the midlands. The morning had promised dense fog, but had disappointed. However, across the flat expanse of Leinster, skeins of mist hung on in the pockets like discarded Hallowe’en decorations. The Hill of Allen especially stood out with its base shrouded in fog, reminding me that many moons ago (Iron Age and beyond), before we starting draining and ‘improving’ land, some of these hill features were indeed islands set within bogs, fens and swampy land. We know this from both topographical studies, and toponymy (the study of place names).

To the east and south loom the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains. Indeed, Cupidstown is a foothill in this range. You sense the parents calling to their wayward offspring to return to the fold. Unlikely. But this hill’s presence in our county has elevated (really? ed.) Kildare into number 28th place in a list of 32 highest points per county. Without it, I fear we would have been bottom of the list. Of course, one gets notions when you start to read through such a thing, and it turns out I have visited several of them already, without knowing it. I plan to reach a few more this year with Gary, but again, not as any form of challenge. I just feel I should at least, for example, climb the highest mountain in the land, plus the highest in my own province of Leinster (which, it turns out, are number one and two on the list). For the curious, Cupidstown is not explained, even by the normally erudite and thorough website on such matters: logainm.ie

It may be a variant on a name, or perhaps something to do with coppicing, which seems unlikely. All I can say with certainty is that the climb up to the top is stiffer than either of us expected, and put some manners on us. Cupid: 1, Runners: 0.

We went on to Kill for some breakfast, which was a lovely way to finish the adventure. (Kill is a village, from the Irish for church, in case you thought we were hunting sheep on the hillside…).

And so endeth the first week of the training programme that isn’t a training programme. But tús maith, leath na hoibre, as we might say. Or ‘a good start is half the work’.

(To add to the Wisdom of Solomon and the Sayings of Confucius, I proudly present the Inane Ramblings of Unironedman. Well, before the editor jumps with an Oh FFS!, I can safely predict that this new column will appear about once a year, if that. But it came to me this week when I was buying something online. It wasn’t the manner of the purchase, but rather the items I was buying. They were guitar effects pedals. Nothing radically strange about that. I am a guitarist, and I play in a band. I don’t strictly-speaking need these things, but they will be nice to have. And whilst money is always tight around these parts, it was still no great issue to buy them, not least with a generous Christmas bonus from work on hand, plus some gig money stashed away in a drawer. And it got me to thinking (as they say) about how mind-blowingly exciting this would have been at the age of twenty, for example, when I hadn’t a pot to piss in. And whilst the excitement levels this week may not have matched those of a young Mr. Kenny, I am still quite giddy at the thought of having more gizmos at my feet for live work. All of which made me think how important it is never to lose the buzz of doing something you love, even if you wait nearly forty years to get there.)