I'm not certain that anybody looks at blogs these days, and maybe especially not blogs as infrequent and inept as this one. Never mind that.
So, scrolling down will reveal that I have decided to undertake a long run to raise some cash for a friend of mine who has motor neuron disease. I have been emailing running product companies up and down the country - and some on the continent - in the hope that they might offer some support for a good cause.
One such company that replied offered me a discount on their product, which is better than a poke in the eye with a big stick. Mountain Fuel is a company based in Cumbria that have developed a range of 'naturally balanced nutritional supplements' that claim to not need to be taken with water. Their 'hydrogel' combines carbs, electrolytes, and water to to produce a sports gel that is easy on your stomach.
I bought a discounted Sports Jelly Taster pack and tried it out this weekend. I used two of the sachets on an eleven mile run in the peak district and compared the two - 'Sports Jelly +' which is vegan, gluten free and contains 30 grams of carbs, electrolytes, and 50 grams of caffeine, and the 'lemon and lime sports jelly' which is 20 grams of carbs and electrolytes.
Being a historian, I'm not best placed to comment on the nutritional science behind the labels. The extent of my understanding is that when I am running distances, I need to take on my body weight in kilo's as carbohydrates in grams for each hour that I run. But beyond that, I'm just trying to get by...
I preferred the flavour of the 'sports jelly +' over the lemon and lime - the latter was just too sharp for my taste buds - but, more importantly, these little sachets made the difference to my running when I needed it most. Unlike the sickly sugary taste of something like SIS Go Energy, the Mountain Fuel sachets were pleasant to use, went down easily, and felt like they were delivered directly to my muscles. This gave me the more than adequate and immediate lift that I needed without any stomach issues like cramping.
This was really impressive. As I am trialling different kinds of food intake for my running of the West Highland Way in October, 2024, I also had some peanut butter and jam sandwiches on this run.
That was a different story altogether.
People have been very generous in donating to 'Run the Highland Way for Chris' and the current total rests at £450, just shy of my £500 target. That is fantastic. I have also had some responses from the companies that I have approached, and I will bring some reviews of that stuff, as and when.
I found out recently that my friend Chris Burton has received a diagnosis for Motor Neuron Disease (MND). Chris is a respected and well-loved activist in my hometown music scene and has been for thirty years, easily. We go back to the late 1980s. If I had not met Chris, I may never have played music or met the people who made up the music scene I was a part of for a few years back then. He was crucial in the building of our 24/7 rehearsal and gig space AKA ‘The Fridge,’ a weekend haunt of many of our mutual friends. He has also been active in the national scene and has many friends up and down the country. If I tried to list the bands he has been in and projects he has worked with, I am sure I would miss a few.
Like everybody who knows Chris, news of the diagnosis has hit hard, and I know that the disease has already led to major challenges to his daily life. It has made his work as a graphic designer and musician impossible. I was told about this in January and Chris has had to make some significant adjustments. He now uses a wheelchair for mobility and has had to move into adapted accommodation. Even in this short time, his quality of life has been diminished.
MND is a cruel disease that shortens the lives of all sorts of people regardless. Thankfully, it is rare, but there is no cure. While the disease affects the body, it tends to leave the senses intact. This is why it is so important that everything be done to help Chris get the things that he needs – some of those things include Eye Gaze tracking technology, a condition-specific wheelchair and a wheelchair accessible vehicle. Sian, his partner, has been fundraising and it is heartening to see just how generous his friends and the scene have been. The fundraising is close to the £10,000 they hoped for.
So, I also want to do something to raise some cash. I don’t want to look back in five years’ time and think that I didn’t do anything to help Chris at a critical time. I have hit on a foolhardy idea that I think is achievable. I am going to ‘Run the Highland Way for Chris.’ It is a national trail that links Glasgow to Fort William. People have been doing it as a race for years now. In fact, it is one of the longest established ultra races in the world. The West Highland Way runs through some of Scotland’s most iconic and scenic landscapes, over a couple of hills and alongside Loch Lomond. Some of the ground is a challenge but it is nothing compared to the challenge of living with MND.
Of course, I have never run a hundred miles before - which is good because the Highland Way is shorter than that, at 95 miles. I am hoping that I can do it in under 35 hours. If I can do it in 30 hours, that would be something. I have a small support team who will meet me at several points along the Way with food, hugs, changes of socks and fresh Body Glide. It will mean running through the night and on into the next night, in whatever weather the Highlands throw at me. I am training to do this in the first weekend of October, so at least the midges will be gone, and the wind will be in my favour.
So, if you can see your way to donating, we will see what we can do to help a friend.
Richard
Askwith's popularising first book 'Feet in The Clouds' was my introduction to
the venerable history of fell running. I read that book - and then I read it
again - and so cemented my compulsion with what Mike Cudahy called "the magic
and the joy" of running off road, in the hills and out in what passes for
a wilderness in the UK.
Despite
this, my attempts at running in the hills were not as Askwith described.
If anything, my running life reflected my personal life at the time, which was
frequently a life of failure and collapse.
His book
filled my mind with the names of runners that I tried and failed to emulate - Bland, Naylor, Helene Diamantides, Stuart, Holmes to name a few. Names from the
sports past too, like Bill's Teasdale and Smith, and George Brass. Somewhere in
the online fell running communities web presence, I read a name that didn't
need an introduction - Boff Whalley.
Chumbawamba, back when they were better different
Oh, I exclaimed at the time.
I'd
managed to avoid hearing any Chumbawamba music since getting
into punk in late 1986. Y'now, 'Picture's Of Starving Children...' and 'Never
Mind the Ballots', but had managed to have my mind cast fully into doubt by my
copy of "English Rebel Songs", on 10" vinyl, which I can just
about appreciate today, listening to it now as I type.
But back
then, in the days of newcastle brown, the Brewery Tap and thrash at the Talbot Hotel? Get away! If it didn't sound like Doom it wasn't getting played.
I did go
and see them a few years later. I went to Wolverhampton in the back of a hunt sabs van
in 1993. Did they play with Gunshot? To be honest, I was paying more attention to The Girl in the van I’d fancied since a bizarre incident at school with
some hair gel behind the library, some ten years earlier.
I recall
getting a ‘ticking off’ for reading Threat By Example at the nightclub after
the gig - by this time it was obvious that The Girl was more interested in my friend - by someone I'd swear was Alice Nutterfor years afterwards.
Probably
wasn't though.
And then
of course, they had their hit record in the hopeful year of 1997, and we all
shouted sell out! once again, as some in the wider punk scene had been doing
for a few years already.
It’s not exactly revelatory, twenty years later,
to say that there was more to it than 'band makes famous/retires to island in
the sun', and no amount of cash to anti capitalist organisations – Indymedia,
for instance, or groups monitoring the worst practices of corporations - could
atone for the heresy of the act in the eyes of the holier-than-thou or those
with no skin in the game. Where would punk rock be without a little seppuku or pedantic moralising, I ask from my vantage point on Mount Hindsight. Who knows.
It's a post-modern, post-structuralist world, twenty years later - does anyone
care anymore?
So it was
strangely satisfying to read Richard Askwith endorse Boff's book, which
suggests that ‘Run Wild’, written in 2012, is “inspiring, wise,
entertaining, moving, readable and incredibly timely.”
Preamble upon introduction upon preamble later, here's an interview I've done with Boff
- fell runner, actor, writer. Ex- of anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba,
currently of Commoners Choir, and many other things you can read about at his website
Enjoy the
interview.
Me: Supposedly, there is a difference
between a ‘runner’and ‘a jogger’. I suppose there is some truth to that. When
did you first consider yourself a runner (and maybe you don’t?), and did you
notice a transition from jogging to a more structured form of exercise?
Boff: It’s
not about speed, is it? It’s how you define yourself, or something. Is it “I’m
taking this seriously now...”. Or maybe it’s when you stop wearing the trainers
you wear to the pub and buy some proper running shoes. I think I jogged for
some months when I decided to run a marathon in the early 1980s. Then I think
as soon as I started to run off-road in the late 1980s I was running, not
jogging – mainly because the person who introduced me to fell running wouldn’t
have tolerated jogging.
Me: Do
you actively train, or do you just cover miles, letting the ground dictate your
pace? Have you set goals for this year, and do you have an off-season?
Where is
the most interesting place you have run? Or is that unimportant to you and why?
Boff: Yes
I actively train but within that I’m really just enjoying myself, sometimes I
run hard and sometimes I just take it easy. What I’ve stopped doing as I’ve got
older is the proper speed-training, track training, etc. I still do hill reps,
but just when I fancy it. And fast-and-slows, occasionally I’ll break into a
few of those!
I don’t
have any goals for the year other than to keep enjoying my running.
The most
interesting place I’ve run is a really hard question to answer – there are so
many beautiful places, even within Yorkshire – I love the landscape with bits
of ruined industrialisation, I love the history of the Calder Valley
(Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge), its poets and weather and rebels and radicals in
the past. I love the big Scottish mountains, the really rough rocky climbs. I
love the Lake District... running alone in the moonlight up near Fairfield in
the snow. I love the rough descent off Burnsall fell, jumping the wall into the
bottom fields. I love runs with other people that are just long conversations
with paths and miles rolling by. Sometimes I go for long runs with my partner
Casey and we just basically natter for a couple of hours whilst roaming around
the Yorkshire Dales, getting muddy and stopping occasionally to look at a map
or cross a river.
Me: Have
you ever decided to skip a gig or other event because of running?
Boff:My
old running friend Geoff Reid once told me you should never watch a sport when
you could be playing a sport. I feel guilty about this sometimes if I skip a
good run or race to go to the football match! I’ve missed lots of gigs because
of fell racing though. When I was running competitively for Pudsey &
Bramley I would sacrifice almost anything to travel and race with the team in
the Lakes, Scotland, Wales etc.
Me and
Danbert, who was also in the band and also ran the fells, once missed a couple
of rehearsal days in the USA at the beginning of a tour of the West coast of
America so we could run the Ben Nevis race. It was a crucial championship
decider and we desperately wanted to do it. The rest of the band were very
accommodating. We ran the Ben, jumped in a car and drove like mad to Manchester
airport for the flight. By the time we got to San Francisco my legs had
practically locked, I remember hobbling down the plane steps, backwards.
Me: I
hated sport after the age of eleven, and when I discovered punk I realized
others did too and I wasn’t the only punching bag in school. I was a punk
weirdo, nobodies easy target and proud of it. That anti sport empathy sat
really well with me for about 15 years before I turned old and needed to sort
my health out. Running is seen as a solo undertaking, unless you compete, or
run with a club, and in fact some of us enjoy the solitude of cross-country
running more than anything else. Punk on the other hand claims to be a
community. So, if punx hate sports and love the scene, why do we run? What
draws us away from excessive substance use and late nights?
Gary Devine
Boff: Well
I totally understand what you mean but I’m not like that – I’ve always loved
sport. Within the band we were always doing bits of sport here and there and
always watched it. I had this conversation with Ian McKaye, who was in Leeds
doing some recording with Henry Rollins. We were making an album at the time
called ‘101 Songs About Sport’. Maybe around 1987 or 1988. We’d heard that
Napalm Death were doing a 100-song album so we decided to do an album with 101
songs. All about sport. We had lots of guest vocalists and players and writers.
Mekons, Dick Lucas, The Ex etc. Anyway we met up with Ian and asked him if he
would write a lyric for the album. He point-blank refused, saying that where he
came from it was jocks v punks, the sporty men at college hated the artists,
you had to choose sides early on; so he hated sport, saw it only as something
macho and competitive. Fair enough. But I reckon there’s an incredible match
between punk and fell running, in the sense of wildness and escaping boundaries
and finding your own way. In the sense of being adventurous and wanting to find
out about the world. When I first started fell running it was through seeing a
Leeds punk (Gary Devine) at gigs, once notoriously scrapping with riot police
at a Conflict gig, then the next day running up hills wearing tights and
studded shoes. The two things made sense together, and still do to me. Do you
remember the Alf Tupper character in Victor comic? He’s very punk. I have him
tattooed on my arm. His aim in life is to beat the toffs at running. Punk can
be a very personal, solitary thing too, it’s not all about community – there’s
the solitary outsider part of every punk’s make-up, isn’t there? Wanting to be
different.
Boff: I
don’t know what my local punk scene would be, but I feel that punk informs
everything I do. I run a choir and our slogan is ‘Putting the Oi in Choir’.
Most of what I do, for theatre and music and bringing up kids and shopping etc
is informed by punk; the sense of questioning everything and not getting
boring. Or being bored. I still try to think about all that corporate stuff in
terms of my running, but I’m not very loud about it. I won’t buy or wear Nike
etc, I have shoes made by Walsh in Bolton, I really don’t like the branding of
fell and trail running and I love how running can be a very low-cost sport, not
very equipment-based. It makes me laugh seeing all the gadgets that you can get
for running when really all you need are a pair of shoes and a rain jacket. I
remember asking another fell runner when I first started, “what do I need to
buy for a race?” and he said, “a bumbag and a Mars bar.” I got involved with
the Pudsey & Bramley club when they had an unspoken ethos of scruffy
belligerence and this was reflected in the tatty vests!
Me: Do
you keep a running diary to complement your training? Have you ever logged the
miles on your running shoes?
Boff: I’ve
never kept a running diary or logged running miles. When I first started I
wrote down race results but after about a couple of years I realised that the
times were pretty irrelevant, it all depended on weather and underfoot
conditions etc so I stopped doing it. I admire people who are keen
enough to do all that, I’m just basically disorganised.
Me: Do
you listen to music when you run or do you prefer the flow of sensation that
seems to remove the need for constant sensory input from less natural sources?
I find I can’t hold too many ideas in my mind, but maybe that’s because the
terrain I run on is generally rough. Maybe it’s different if you run on smooth
surfaces?
Boff: I
never listen to music when I run. I love the idea (especially in today’s
non-stop digital age) of being out of the house, in a forest or on a moor, no
screens or bleeps or electronics. Stopping and looking around and realising
that it’s just me and the earth. Feeling like someone could have had this same
feeling any time in the past 1000 years, on these same moortops.
Me: We
sometimes see footage of Boris Johnson running with his security detail. Have
you seen it? Do you think he is a jogger? Not as in does he run or even jog,
but do you think he is posing for the cameras?
Boff: I
think he probably is a jogger, deluding himself that running along a London
street for twenty minutes gives him some sort of old-school
testosterone-fuelled sense of power. He’s a despicable man. I imagine him
running along giving wide berth to all the homeless people on the streets.
Me: I
would like to see him running for his life sometime, preferably from hungry
wild dogs. Fun Question: are there any jogging politicians, past or present,
you’d like to see in similar straits?
Boff: There’s
a great photograph somewhere of John Prescott opening a bike lane or something
in Hull, balanced on a bicycle that he clearly has no idea how to ride, wearing
a cycling helmet that’s about five sizes too small for his huge head. Like half
a peanut shell on a coconut. Maybe all politicians should go running more so we
can see how stupid they look when reduced to such normal activities. There’s a
great film too of Theresa May walking along a London street and getting her
high heel stuck in a pavement crack. I imagine she’d look pretty spectacularly
awkward trying to run up and down Burnsall Fell. Bring it on!
There you go. Thanks to Boff for the answers and the insight, and the anarchy.
Footnote: I have run this week - I've done about a dozen easy miles and used KT tape. It works.
After the pain of over extending last week - running too far too soon - I have changed my goals for winter. Instead of jumping straight to marathon distance, and thinking I could handle it as an ex runner on a comeback, I've seen sense and decided to run sensibly and build a good solid base over the next three months.
I was running three times a week and covering up to 18 miles a week. For someone beginning again I think that is pretty modest but the length of the weekly long run took up the bulk of the mileage. That is what led to my problem.
Now I am running four times in seven days but only covering half of my previous load. It's all about quality, not quantity. Today I did a three mile LSD run, with a mile / pace average of 09:23. That is a little fast for an long slow distance, so will need to slow that down. I think that's reaching tempo run pace, although it generally felt comfortable, and as the LSD pace will eventually become my steady distance pace I need to reign it in.
In non-running news, here is something else I've cut this week- its a weeping beech, and one of three in the garden of the house I lodge at. Up until two days ago, its branches were touching the lawn. I crown lifted it. I'm happy with the end result. It's quite a thing to be able to hang out under this tree in the Spring. I hope I haven't killed it.
