Targets

If you follow this occasional blog, you might just recall me saying last time, in October 2023, that:

“In all honesty, I cannot see myself making a return to championship sprinting any time soon. The thought of it no longer instills in me the excitement of competition, but just a real and persistent fear of hurting myself yet again”

Well, a few days ago, I completely contradicted myself, and no harm seems to have come of it!

How so, you ask?

Well, last autumn, I was offered one of these “NHS Health-check” things. It was dreadful. So poorly done, that I could not recognise myself from the results I was given. The only factors given any weight in reaching the final results seemed to be age, birth gender and blood cholesterol. The first two of these even the fittest amongst us can have no control over, and the third is a controversial measure of anything. (See https://nutritionaltherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/The-Cholesterol-Myth.pdf to read why I say that).

This all led to me undertaking a quite superb “wellness assessment” at the chiropractor’s under whose care I have had the privilege of being assisted for the last 20 years. It was more detailed than the NHS “Health-check”, and included discussion of numerous aspects of my recent health, and occasional lack of it. To move forward to the follow-up session a few weeks later, I was asked to consider action I could take on several fronts, where there might be a risk of things that were once dear to me “drifting away”, to the probable detriment of my mental and physical health.

There were two “biggies” on that list. One was to take on a commitment to an activity like a journey to somewhere that had long been on my to-do list. I have become very adept at putting things like this off. The other was to give serious consideration to some kind of return to competitive sport. There was, I’d agreed, the risk of my training (which has been going well) taking on a sense of futility if it wasn’t given an end purpose.

Well, happy to say, I now have a big motorbike trip to Ireland at an advanced stage of planning, for this summer. And last weekend, as I write this, I raced at the British Masters Indoor Athletics championships. For the first time since 2019.

Ok, it was only in the 60 metres, and I was completely resigned to travelling to the Lee Valley stadium, getting knocked out of the competition in the heats stage, and coming back home again. But it didn’t quite turn out like that.

I quickly realised how long I’d been away from the competitive scene, when I arrived at the stadium and the first person to recognise me (someone I’ve previously regarded as a friend) said to me “What on earth are you doing here?” Ouch. That stung.

I needed to stay focused. I used to have things like pre-race warm-up routines rehearsed pretty much to perfection, and knew when I should be doing what. But a nagging voice kept telling me “Ah, but that was then, and this was now.” Realising I’d be seeing people who’d want to chat, and who I’d not seen for a while meant I needed extra warm-up time, or risk being seen as rude and unapproachable. Getting all this right was actually one of my biggest worries. I have a social anxiety condition, but here, amongst some of my best friends, while I felt I was in a safe place, it was one that could easily have distracted me from the real job in hand – racing!

As I alluded to above, when I’d seen the entries for my race, which had been posted on-line a few days earlier, I’d resigned myself to getting eliminated in the preliminary heat, and to quickly being on my way home. However, it seems my legs had other ideas, and I qualified for the final! Consider me more than a little surprised. In years past (ie up to around 2019), qualifying for the final was almost a matter of honour for me, but as I said earlier, that was then, and this was now. It began to dawn on me that the training I’d been doing for much of the last year was preparing me for a return to racing better than I’d realised.

I’ve run many better 60 metre races than that final, but I avoided last place. I was fourth Brit, which I didn’t think was bad, given my lack of races in recent years, and given that I was only a month away from moving up to the next Masters age group. It amused me to recall that events rolled out very similarly in 2019, when I was also just a shade away from moving up an age group.

So, two targets met or on the way to being met.

I’ll keep you posted!

Tom

The cost of trying

High time that I inflicted upon you another episode of this increasingly occasional blog. This is only the third time I’ve added to it in a year.

It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say. If you know me, you will know that’s unlikely! It’s more that dealing with life and things going on keeps taking priority over reflecting back on stuff. Well, as they say, “That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it”. Anyhow, this thing will also include some background for first time readers here. 

Let’s begin with some basic, subjective scores: My current physical health: B+. My current mental health: B-. The B+ might have been an A-, were it not for the ongoing saga of my achilles tendons. The B- might be me trying to look on the bright side. Others who know me might offer it a different score, better or worse. I suffer from a persistent anxiety thing, which seems to affect almost everything I do, or want to do. To be honest, I need a few significant others to give some moderation on the scores. Am I happy with either score? Well, what difference would it really make if I wasn’t?

Read on.

I call this my “athlete” blog, so issues linked to my running, or lack of it, are inevitably to the fore. From an “athlete” point of view, my achilles tendons – the left one in particular – have been a real issue for over a year now. At the moment, there are signs that I am winning that battle. But I must be wary of speaking too soon. 

My local Masters track and field League used to be a mainstay of my running year. It was fairly well organised, and well supported by local clubs. This meant that I could get a good standard of age-related competition every few weeks, from April to September. 

Around the calendar of League events, I could build a programme of regional, national and occasional international competition. Success in these was, in effect underpinned by the quality grass-roots League racing I was getting. For the best part of twenty years, I was content, fit and happy, though not necessarily all at the same time, or in that order, you understand. On top of that, I was blessed with the opportunity to be a successful photographer of Masters Athletics, and even to be regarded as one of the best in the world at it for a while.

I photographed our local parkrun for several years too, until I realised actually running in parkrun instead might offer me a way to try and build some resilience against injuries, even if running a regular 5k wasn’t in any way a “sprint-specific” activity.

I was about 60 when I had to admit that there were times when I wasn’t just “burning the candle at both ends” with my commitments to racing and trackside photography, but often also in the middle. Trying to photograph, say, a day-long (or week-long, or even longer) track and field programme in which, usually more than once, I was also competing as an athlete, was something I was finding increasingly hard. Any “golden years” I could claim were receding into the past. Nevertheless, I cherished then, and cherish still, every memory of things like being a runner in a World Masters Championships gold medal-winning sprint relay squad, in Lyon in 2015. The thoughts of that, and other good (though not always gold) medals, have always buoyed me up.

A few more years on, it began to feel like diminishing returns were setting in with my racing. Injuries are an unavoidable part of Masters Athletics, particularly if you’re a sprinter. I seemed to be injuring myself far too often. I was, nevertheless, firmly focussed on a return to big competition at the World Masters in Toronto in 2020, but, like almost all else at that time, the event fell victim to Covid. If I ever had a plot, I was beginning to lose it, quite quickly.

I’ll cut a long story short, but one morning in mid 2021, I suffered a completely unexpected collapse at home. I was told I’d had a seizure. For six months, it was misdiagnosed as epileptic, until I got a second opinion. Trying to cope with all the anxieties and practical issues around that led to a nervous and physical breakdown. I was unable to train or even to travel on my own for almost eight months. I had to surrender my driving licence, with no indication when I might be able to reapply for it. Happy to say, I have the licence back again now. More importantly, there has been no hint of a recurrence of the seizure. 

By then, Covid restrictions had dealt a death-blow to almost all of my photographic work, not just the stuff related to running. That’s why my other blog is currently even more neglected than this one. It’s on my “to do” list.

There have been occasional bright spots, though they seem all to have had a price attached. The invitation, in the late summer of 2022, to race at a memorial event to a friend who had died was irresistible. Basically, I did too much training, most of it too fast, and including an (as I later discovered) unhealthy volume of uphill running. Eventually, this thwarted my best efforts to “make up for lost time”. Sure, I won my race in the memorial event, but within a few days, I realised that my preparation had severely compromised both of my achilles tendons. They had never given me problems before, and uphill sprints had always been an important part of my overall training regime. I had plenty of time to reflect on this as I plodded through three months of lonely and boring remedial exercises that needed doing three times every day without fail. I’d fallen out with my local gym about post Covid pandemic precautions (or in their case, the near-total lack of them), so I was spending a great deal of time at home, with just myself for company.

However, five months further down the line, and on the back of minimal specific sprint training, I found I could still cut it, as it were. In February 2023 I won two regional age group championship gold medals on the indoor track. Don’t ask me how I found the courage to enter those races in the first place. Winning the medals was neither fast, nor pretty, but I began to fashion (or was it fantasise) a path back to how life had once been.

At least once previously in the life of this blog, I’ve quoted what, when I was first told it, was said to be an old Yiddish joke. “Q: How do you make God laugh? A: Tell him your plans.”

The week after the indoor racing medals, as I was beginning to look ahead, and my anxiety condition was filling my head with lots of “what if?” scenarios, I tripped on a speed hump near the start of our local parkrun course. This resulted in searing pain in my left achilles tendon. I’m sure I could hear the Almighty laughing. The initial pain lasted more than ten days, but its legacy is still with me.

So, I was back to the solo remedial exercises and regular ice-packs. Goodbye to any plans for a proper summer track season.

By early summer, I was facing the realisation that in one more year, I’d be 70. I was desperate enough to believe my self-talk that things were getting better, though. I even won a local league 100 metres sprint in a time and was fifth on the year’s UK age group listing for a while. That race hurt afterwards, but the pain was not enough to prevent my pride bringing me back for another race a couple of weeks later. This time it was at 200 metres. I’ve replayed that race in my head time and again since: I was leading off the bend, but with 50 metres to go, I suddenly seemed to have no “elasticity” in my left heel. After a few flat-footed paces, I watched the other seven athletes flow past me. I literally hopped across the finish line in last place. And it really hurt!

So, you guessed it, the price has been more remedial exercises since then, plus a complete ban on running uphill (though not downhill!). And even more anxiety about whether my chosen exercise is going to bite me again, next time I try to race. You’ll currently find me on most Saturday mornings walking much of the five kilometres of our local, and quite hilly, parkrun.

I mentioned the gym. Ours got sold off, but was bought in June by the firm that runs to local council leisure centre. It’s nice to be able to get back to some measured aerobic activity and bits and pieces of weight training again.

And that’s where we are today. In all honesty, I cannot see myself making a return to championship sprinting any time soon. The thought of it no longer instills in me the excitement of competition, but just a real and persistent fear of hurting myself yet again. I’ve been absent, or, at best, on the sidelines of my sport for most of the last six years. As  I mentioned, I will be 70 next year – but inside me there still lives a competitive animal hungry to be fed.

Tom

Back In The Old Routine (again)

Well, weren’t the six months since I last added to this blog a load of fun? Er, perhaps for some of you, but for me, in retrospect, not always.

I left you as I was beginning what became three months of a twice-daily exercise routine aimed at rehabbing my damaged achilles tendons. For the first six weeks, it was just a chore, used as an opportunity to listen to music, or watch a bit of tv while I counted off the exercise repetitions. Things changed at the point that the exercise schedule moved from requiring me to do the heel-drops with just my bodyweight, to asking me to do them wearing a weighted rucksack. In went four 5kg weights to an old but robust bag, and the “fun” continued. Only now I began to realise that the previous weeks of boredom and toil really had strengthened my lower legs. Coupled with two hard session every week on my Wattbike trainer (because I was assured cycling like that was not going to make my achilles tendons worse, and the sessions were great cardio-vascular work), I was tentatively maintaining fitness and not making aggravating my achilles injuries.

The routine ended just after New Year, and very slowly, I started jogging again. I was under very strict orders not to run uphill, but there was no ban on running downhill, within reason. I’d been walking round the course of the new-ish local park run we’d joined, for a little while, as much as anything to give me some fresh air, and that gave be a basis from which to progress. 

The Mote Park parkrun course has a certain reputation for hilly-ness. The start of it is around 800 metres in a straight line, 600 of which are uphill. The remainder of that 800 comprises two short downhill bits. After that, it undulates either side of three ascents and descents of the opening hill all done from its other side. I felt rather conspicuous to be walking those uphills, but there was a delightful release in being able to run downhill between them. This mixture gave me a very decent interval training routine. The parkrun course starts and ends at the same spot, so topography being the precise science it is, meant that I had an equal distance of uphill and downhill to do, overall. The return to the finish was a delight. It was like getting my revenge on the hills I was obliged to walk up at the start of the run. Save for two short uphills, I could stretch out and run as hard as any sprinter can with four kilometres already covered. Hmm. Shall we say, I don’t recall being overtaken on that finishing stretch, and I did my fair share of overtaking others, usually culminating in a final 200 metres as hard as my legs and lungs could still cope with. Lots of visualisation going on at that point too.

My 5km time for the completed parkrun was never going to be anything to write home about, but it was achieved with lots of walking uphill, remember. Just occasionally, to give some variety or to avoid aggravating a leg twinge, real or imagined, I would walk the whole of the 5km. Twice I did this while walking as hard as I could, and established (and subsequently broke) an alternative parkrun personal best, achieved with no running at all. And at the point of writing this episode, those kinds of fun and games continue on most Saturday mornings.

However, now, I have something else to motivate me. The parkrun stuff is, of course, a means to an end for me. I was going to say “just a means to an end”, but that would sound like an unkind slur on the excellent institution that is parkrun. However, as someone once said, “Who wants to live in an institution?” Getting fit and well again for me means getting back on the track and sprinting. It’s what I’m made for, and what I think I will always do. And, with the exception of the ultimately achilles tendon-wrecking experiences of last August (see last chapter of this blog), it is something that I have been unable to do since July 2019. That’s almost 4 years in exile, and it had to come to an end.

I looked at the fixtures calendar, and weighed up the pros and cons of several of the indoor track fixtures in February. The pros and cons included the likely quality and quantity of the opposition. I was prepared to get beaten – indeed I fully expected to be, after four years, but I drew the line at getting thrashed. Eventually I settled on the Southern Counties Masters Championships, at the newly resurfaced Lee Valley Indoor Arena.

Now, if this blog has taught me anything at all over the years I’ve been writing it, it is the truth of the old adage that “pride comes before a fall”. Therefore, let us suffice it to say that the day I spent feeding the athlete in me on 12 February was, in turn, delightful, worrying, exhilarating, exhausting, and eventually rewarding. I came home with one gold medal and one silver medal, plus a new age-group record for my club at 60 metres.

With a long way still to go, that’ll do for me at the moment!

See you next time.

Rest and Recovery

I finished the last episode of this blog fretting about how I could do justice to the memory of an old friend, a fellow Masters sprinter, at his memorial track meeting, being held a few months after his death. Acute achilles tendon problems were severely limiting my ability to do any sprint training at all. No way was I going to withdraw, and I was also very much looking forward to meeting a whole load of athlete pals I’d not seen for the best part of three years.

Well, with pain-killers and strapping, I did get there. It was a glorious warm day, and the event was the great tribute event to Bob Lewis we all hoped it would be. And I won my 100 metres race.

There was a price to pay, of course. These days, it seems there always is. No way were my achilles tendons ready for flat out competitive racing, but they didn’t fail me. The winning was nice, but better still was the race commentator praising how stylishly I seemed to be running, with good knee-lift and relaxation. Thanks Donald. Although I finished the afternoon hobbling around like a proverbial old man, those comments were fresh in my mind as I began the long job of really trying to get my tendons right and achieving a good winter of training. And my winner’s prize of a big packet of chocolate cookies was nice, too.

That was at the end of August. Two days later, I was scheduled to begin a 12 week programme of intensive exercises and routines, which I knew others with chronic achilles trouble had successfully used. I’d assumed that I’d have to find a way to mix this with some kind of aerobic exercise. But I was wrong, at least for a month. 

I’d got no more competition coming up, but somehow I’d overlooked the fact of ten days holiday away in Yorkshire coming up in a week’s time. Common sense began to take over. I’d take a planned training break, get properly stuck into the twice-daily remedial routines for my ankles, concentrate on eating and drinking well, and stay away from illness. How long the training break would be was a secret I even kept from myself. If the exercises delivered progress, there would come a point when it felt right to begin some kind of training again.

I won’t bore you with the detail of what my early morning and late afternoon exercises involved (actually, “involve”, because, at time of writing this, I still have more than two weeks of them still to do), but a key ingredient was perseverance. The stuff needed to be done twice a day, without fail, in order to reacclimatise my achilles tendons (and to a certain extent, my mind) to some intensive therapy. The “mind” bit was about maintaining a positive attitude that said “I can and will fit this pre-arranged tedium into my days, no matter how otherwise busy I think I need to be”, and “I will remain positive at all times that this is going to work for me”. It was, in fact quite easy to establish the routines, but it all brought home to me how three years of injury and illness had delivered me to the point of chucking it all in and retiring from the track. 

My situation wasn’t helped by already learning that I had/have two different kinds of achilles trouble, and that exercises that assuage one kind are not nearly so effective for the other (and vice versa). I just had to grit my teeth and accept that I’d actually be doing two programmes of exercise, side by side, for the 12 weeks. Overall, progress would come slowly and in very small increments, with the possibility that the 12 weeks might need extending a little.

The holiday came and went, without too much walking up hill and down dale, and I got really well-rested. We had a lovely little apartment in Grassington, and it was good to revisit places like Malham, that I’d not been to for donkey’s years.

Three weeks after returning came the point where my achilles exercises needed to move up a notch, by being carried out with the added burden of a 12kg weighted rucksack on my back. I was surprised that my legs seemed to thrive on this addition. I’m not tempting fate by starting running again yet, but the opportunity has also arisen to do a regular, very brisk 5k walk every Saturday morning, in a new role at our local Parkrun, known as a “Parkwalker”. Basically, it’s part of an initiative to encourage more walkers to take part in parkruns, and the job is a mix of mobile cheer-leader and back-marker. So far, it seems to be suiting me, and suiting my achilles tendons, very nicely. 

Starting that marked the end of what had become a month off. Illness aside, I don’t recall having had an extended break from exercise like it for at least ten years. I expected I’d need a bit of time to play catch-up in terms of basic fitness, and was surprised that I didn’t need as much as I’d thought to achieve it. A couple of Wattbike sessions, and the stats from my Garmin were quickly back up to what they were a month previously. I was also much more relaxed generally. Maybe it’s the inevitability of age catching up with me a bit, but I have to admit that the rest really did me good.

So, this is how it is for me, in mid October 2022. Thanks for following this blog.

An Achilles Tendency

Excuse the play on words.

Back, way before this blog began, I had a severe accident playing hockey (that’s “field hockey” to my US pals). I was fairly disabled for several months, and had long periods every week in traction for my spine, etc. Then began a long, slow rehabilitation process, during which it became apparent that my days as a competitive track athlete were at an end. I was 32 years old. Eventually, lots of things took its place, all of which were great, and helped me regain and rebuild my fitness, but it was a long time before running again came over the horizon. To cut a long story short, when I discovered I could still sprint, I promised myself that I would take any injury that befell me seriously, because I never wanted to go through again what I’d been through recovering from the hockey accident. And I still never do.

I’ve pretty much kept that promise. I have been blessed with physical therapists who have always taken me seriously, and never done less than their best to keep me going as an active older athlete. I’ve had my share of muscle tears and strains, and even a few broken bones, and weathered several spells of depression. All of these have probably been enough to keep my eye off one thing I probably couldn’t have done much about anyway. That thing is the creeping onset of wear and tear damage.

To me, and, I am sure, to many or most older runners, possibly the most common and intrusive evidence that you’re not the invincible human machine you once were (ha, ha) is achilles tendinitis, or, as I gather we ought to call it, achilles tendinopathy. I had sore achilles tendons on and off in my career as a summertime athlete and wintertime hockey player, but although I don’t recall treating it specifically, it always went away. I was a good sprinter in my fifties when it struck me again, but this time stubbornly refused to leave me alone. I learned the exercises to do to ameliorate the symptoms and to keep trouble at bay. However, I seldom gave thought about whether there was something systemic in my training and racing habits which might have improved matters even more. I’m what therapists call very “body aware”, and can usually determine cause from effect, yet I seem always to have relegated achilles tendon trouble as just “the occasional price to pay” for what I was doing with/to my middle-aged body.

Now, if you follow this blog, you’ll know that I’ve just had three years out of the sport, partly enforced by what Covid-19 restrictions did to sport in general, and more than partly the result of mental health difficulties think, I’m happy to say, I’m successfully coming through.

Part of emerging from that hell-hole was getting back to racing again, even if that meant I’d be making a comeback at age 68. I covered this in the previous chapter of this blog. I ached for a week or so after those first “comeback” races, but nevertheless took up the opportunity to enter some more races four weeks later. In between times, I needed to do something to address my shortcomings in the first two races, as observed on videos shot of the races. Mainly, I wasn’t getting good knee-lift, and I was running very upright. My chosen remedy was to put in some good training sessions that would involve me sprinting uphill.

I’ve been doing hill sprint repetitions for as long as i can remember. When I was a kid attending my club’s monthly Sunday training days, they were always a very competitive feature. Much more recently, charging up the steep 150 metres of mainly traffic-free road a few minutes from home was a key component in my arriving at major masters championship races in good form. I’d used the hill seriously for the first time in 2009, and credit training on it with my best-ever World Championships performances. So, summer evenings on the hill were once again my burden, as I sought “comeback” fitness and technique.

Then (and many of you will be ahead of me by now) my left achilles tendon told me it wasn’t happy. Its timing wasn’t good, with just a week before my scheduled race meeting, and I’d just confirmed my attendance. Ice buckets, thera-band stretching, and eccentric heel lowers (Google these if you don’t know!) got me to the stadium, and ready for warm-up.

All was good up to this point. The troublesome achilles tendon was taped up and strapped, and not really hurting. Then I got caught in a queue to sign in for my race, which took far longer than usual. I was jogging back down the track for final race preparation when, out of the blue, my right achilles made its own discontent known. I was already in my “race zone”, and remembered I had a spare achilles tendon strap in my bag.  Withdrawing from the race never came into my mind for a moment. I seemed to be justified, because I won the race – it was only my second 100 metres in three years, remember.

I had a painful hour or so after that, keeping moving, adjusting my achilles straps and descending deeper into denial that there was anything seriously wrong, before my 200 metres race. I’d been allocated the outside lane on the track, so I’d be running “blind”, and unable to draw on the pace that my opponents were running at. I actually don’t recall hurting at all, and seemed to be running strongly. I was just pipped on the line, but second place was ok, I guess.

Then I began to hurt! Both of my achilles tendons seemed to be on fire, and even walking was painful. Come to that, sitting in the car going home hurt, too! I realised that my gamble to get race-fit and fast, in almost no time, had pushed me to doing “too much, too soon, too fast”. All the online advice about achilles problems warned me about this. But it was only after these events that I began to notice the advice, in the same articles, about how running uphill was just about the worst thing one can do to keep achilles trouble at bay. So, add to the list “too steep”, as well.

So, now I am back in an all too familiar situation. I have another race coming up, in just over three weeks from now. I’d really like to do it, because it’s in a memorial event to an athlete friend of mine who died earlier this summer. But I’m injured, unable to train (to be honest, I was hardly able to walk down the street to post a letter today), and all the ingredients of rushing my preparation are there yet again. You can see it, I can see it. But we’ll all have to wait and see how it plays out…

“On Your Marks….”

Over the years, I must have heard those words a thousand times, as the final countdown began for a race I was in. And I’m delighted to tell you that I heard them again yesterday.

Yes, I raced. Three years out of the sport owing to a succession of injuries, plus all the Covid problems, and, of course, a prolonged episode of poor mental health, created a hole in my Masters Athletics career which, on many occasions, I really worried that I would never return from. So, thank you, Tonbridge AC, for staging one of your excellent Open Meetings, which gave me the opportunity to see whether or not I was ready to return as a sprinter. 

It wasn’t pretty, I’m sure, and it wasn’t nearly as fast as I’d hoped, but I can, for now at least, count myself an active athlete again. Actually, since originally penning that last sentence, I’ve seen video of both races. For sure, “pretty” doesn’t come into it! 

Reaction from some of my friends to the previous episode of this blog was really helpful in kick-starting me into action. One referred to the aforementioned Open Meeting. Rather than think about why I shouldn’t go and try and race at it, I simply went online and placed entries for two races. The idea came when, for a change, I was in a very positive frame of mind. I’d had to surrender my driving licence on health grounds a year ago. After being told I had been the victim of a mis-diagnosis and going through a bout of copious form-filling, I’d been able to reapply for the licence in March. With no prior warning, my licence was duly returned to me at the beginning of June. A major step on my return to something approaching “normality”.

At one level, sending off race entries like that was, of course, quite a rash thing to do. Not only had I not raced since July 2019, but during those three horrible years since, I’d probably done no more than a handful of “sprint-specific” training sessions. Nevertheless, having been quite a regular at the Tonbridge Open Meetings in the past decade, I had a good idea what to expect. In terms of a quality summer’s evening of athletics, I was not disappointed.

I wasn’t even particularly nervous. OK, maybe a few times in the preceding days, I did just entertain a “Now what the hell have you let yourself in for?” kind-of thought, but by and large, I just kept myself busy trying to remember all the things I needed to do in the last few days before a race. Athletes reading this will understand; there are lot of things to be done and remembered, especially when you have not done them for a while. It was surprising too, how low down the strata of clutter at home things like my running shoes had descended in three years.

One thing I found really hard was visualisation. As a technique, I used to use it as part of my preparation a fair bit. Picturing myself warming up for the event, envisaging that delicious feeling of being able to run at speed, etc were all things I’d done so little of for what seemed so long, that I’d really forgotten about them. But reality took over soon enough.

I felt like a beginner. I had to assume that the warm-up routines I had honed to quite a fine art over the years would still hold good for me after a three year break. So far so good. The race seeding process had drawn me against five of six youngsters, all of whom had estimated on their race entry form that they would run a time the same, or close to, that which I’d declared on mine. They, to their credit, seemed completely unfazed by having a grey-bearded oldie in a lane next to them on the track. I’d also not run from starting blocks for three years. I nearly didn’t bother with them this time, but an inner routine kicked in, and they felt comfortable enough when I set them up.

In my first race, the 100 metres, I was nearly caught out by the noise of the starting pistol. Or should I say, the relative lack of noise. These modern electronic guns, linked to electronic timing systems don’t go “Bang!” any more. I can’t describe the noise, but it’s not a “Bang!” I nearly stumbled a couple of strides after coming out of the starting blocks, too. It would have finished me if my first experience, after all this time, would have seen me fall flat on my face. However, I survived, and found I could still run fast. Peripheral vision suggested I was possibly in second place around half-way, and it was the most sublime feeling to be able to keep the power coming. I was a sprinter again!

I was in third place at the finish. Nothing had broken, I hadn’t disgraced myself. I was happy. Moreover I was also not as worried at the though that in an hour and a half’s time, I was going to have to race a 200 metres event as I’d expected to be. Twice as far to run…

There was a time, many years ago, when 200 metres was “my race”. But as it got faster, it also got harder. I became afraid of it, to be honest. No fears this time, except that the earlier 100 metres might have taken more out of me than I realised. It hadn’t, and although the video shows me running an uncharacteristically ponderous first 100 metres, around the bend, the 100 along the finish straight was adequate, shall we say. There was a point coming off the turn where we had the sun directly in our eyes for a good 20 metres, and there was a definite “wobble” in my progress until running back into the shadow. Anyone getting disqualified for running out of their lane then would have been very unlucky. Happily, nobody did, but it was a close thing.

So, I’d survived my two “comeback” races and all was well. Next morning, I was desperately weary, but happier than I’ve been for quite a while.

Furthermore, I am pleased to report that I’ve identified a couple of other late-season race opportunities, and I will soon be booking my entry. I’ve learned not to be optimistic in this blog, because that has always seemed to come back to haunt me. Here’s hoping things are different now, eh?

Time To Move On…

This chapter of my blog kind of picks up where the last one ended. I promised myself I’d write it sooner than this, but forgot that I had ten days holiday coming up, and I needed that holiday to be a time when I could try and clear my head more than writing would allow. Holidays are normally an opportunity to listen to more music than usual. One key takeaway was hearing, almost with fresh ears, the odd lines from songs I know well, which, this time, really resonated with me.

I am a big Tom Petty fan. I can’t believe it’s five years since he died, at a younger age than I am now. There are times when, listening to his lyrics, I think the guy knew a lot about anxiety and stress. I have listened to the “Wildflowers” album many, many times over the years. The track “Time To Move On” has the verse:

“Yeah, it’s time to move on, time to get going

What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing

But under my feet, baby, grass is growing

It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going.”

It encapsulates quite a lot of how I feel right now. A damaged Masters athlete watching what used to be his world pass him by. However, it’s tempered by another favourite track on the album which repeats something that, from time to time, becomes a bit of a mantra for me. Maybe not often enough, though. It’s from “Crawling Back To You“

“I’m so tired of being tired

Sure as night will follow day

Most things I worry about

Never happen anyway.”

I also stumbled upon this article by Tim Clare one Sunday morning after my recent spell away from home.

I don’t think that I suffer from “panic attacks”. At least, not like those Clare describes. There was a time when I had regular episodes of what I chose to think might have been panic attacks, with cold sweats and sickening, almost paralysing feelings of anxiety at times. They still occasionally hit me now, and are sometimes the more memorable for their reduced frequency. 

A bit like Tim Clare with his, I never really got to the bottom of the cause of them. Unlike him, mine didn’t seem to have specific triggers. I suspected caffeine at one time, and went quite a long time without touching coffee, even though there wasn’t much evidence that the abstinence helped. I used to spend a lot of time in Italy, where not drinking coffee is almost a social crime. I drink coffee in great moderation nowadays, and enjoy it very much. Also like Tim Clare, I wondered whether what I did for exercise and training was a causal factor. Hold that thought; we may well need to come back to it.

Unlike Clare, my spells of high anxiety never left me screaming on the floor, but they did/do made me intensely irritable and even more wary of contact with others than I usual am. However, they’d often hit me “even in the quietest moments” (as the words of another favourite song go, this time one by Supertramp. Good grief, did the album with that on really come out as long ago as 1977?) Again, the reasons why this should be, I still don’t understand. It led to me often restlessly seeking activity and energetic outlets, as some kind of a way to ward off being alone and quiet with my own thoughts, perhaps. 

Around ten years ago, after having been as near the top of my game sporting-wise, as a regular national, European and World Masters Athletics championships finalist, as I’m ever likely to be, my running performances took quite a sudden dip. At the time I blamed two things: injury – though with hindsight, those I had were really quite minor – and a nagging feeling that somehow I was doing “the wrong kind of training”. However, at the time – and to a great extent, even still- nobody was able to tell me, in specific enough terms to be much use, what the “right kind of training” for a sprinter (then) coming up to 60 years old really was.

Fast forward eight years or so, and my more recent, rather unresolved spell of poor mental health, as touched upon in my last blog episode. The timescale of this run-in with the dark side included the onset of Covid lockdowns etc. I can’t blame lockdowns as a cause, though. They didn’t cause me new problems directly: they just didn’t help me cope with the ones I was struggling with already. 

My anxiety about “the right kind of training”, for example, had been there for a while, since knee problems had sidelined me from the track in 2019. The closure of most regular training facilities only led me to worry more about my state of health and fitness. Hence I was very interested to see Tim Clare included in his recent piece a section headed “Find the exercise that works for you”: because the two types he mentions that worked for him have also brought me to where I am currently, but in a positive way. These are HIIT and LISS. I’m sure it’s not intended that they should rhyme with “hit and miss”, but hey: we’re not talking universally precise science here, remember.

HIIT stands for “High Intensity Interval Training”, or “High Impact Interval Training”. Take your pick.  Sprinters are no strangers to HIIT sessions on the track, but there has been a resurgence in recent years of interest in the benefits of HIIT in gym training and other forms. In August 2021, using the money I was saving through not being able to go to the gym, I bought a Wattbike trainer. 

I’d used one for several years at the gym. I’d had a nagging doubt about high torque, cycle-based training being a possible cause of my knee problems, but the basic fitness gains from age-weighted and fitness level-weighted exercise of a measurably consistent level, with very good, immediate feedback was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down at the time. And nearly a year on, the benefits seem still to be accumulating. HIIT work is only one of a number of possible options the Wattbike software offers. Others range right up to simulations of cycling stages and climbs from the Tour de France etc. Not for me, those!

LISS is perhaps less well-known as an acronym, and stands for “Low Intensity Steady State” exercise. I guess it’s the current descendant from the cult of “Long Slow Distance”, which was popular amongst some runners back in the 1970s. Even back in those innocent days, doing training with the acronym “LSD” would raise an eyebrow! 

Regular walking is a LISS activity. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in my blog here at all, but ever since Covid’s first UK lockdown, one thing I resolved to do was to take a regular daily walk. A few months previously, I’d bought a Garmin sports watch, which allowed me to set a target for a specific number of steps to achieve each day. The watch records my progress in achieving the daily target, and logs cumulative steps and distance covered. I set myself a modest target in May 2020 that takes me a little over an hour a day to reach. I can do those steps wherever I happen to be at the time. Obviously, most of my walks are from home, and the steps they contribute are in addition to those taken living a normal life.

It all soon mounts up, too! As I write this, I am now one day away from reaching two years without missing my steps target for for a single day. That’s 730 consecutive days. My steps tally over those days stands at 9,713,789. Nearly ten MILLION steps. I did, of course, (being me) regard my steps target as the day’s absolute minimum, and I usually walked quite a few more. My total distance walked in that time comes to over 8,000 kilometres, or just short of 5,000 miles. I guess that’s something like home to Everest Base Camp. I don’t know about you, but I find that impressive! Within about three months of starting, I was finding quite a few aspects of my physical health has improved, and I am sure that, however flaky it still feels at times, my mental health is better for the routine of my daily outing. LISS must have something going for it!

What I’ve learned (some of it from the reflection that has come through typing this blog episode) is that “HIIT & LISS” will definitely have been helping me build a decent base from which to start planning my return to active athletics.

(To be continued soon…)

Pleasure and Pain

(No, before you read on, please be reassured I have not taken to sado-masochism. Not in its strictest sense, at least!)

One of the upsides of what I’ve been going through in the last year or more has been that I have had the time and inclination to listen to stuff in my fairly large music collection. My tastes are what they used to call “eclectic”, and I am both a hoarder and a “completist”. That means I’ve hardly ever thrown any stuff away, and if there is an artist I like, I tend to spend time building a pretty complete collection of what they have published. The stand-out track for me these last few months has been “Pleasure and Pain” by the not long ago-departed Norma Waterson. (Click that link and it will take you to the track on YouTube.) It was written by a guy called Ben Harper in 1994, and Norma recorded it in 1996, if that’s of any interest to you.

“I’ve felt pleasure, and I’ve felt pain, and I know now I can never be the same.” 

That’s the line that keeps coming back at me.

As an athlete, I’ve had my share of both pleasure and pain. The pleasure has most tangibly come from such success as I’ve had as an active Masters sprinter. From where I’m sitting writing this, I can see my bundle of World, European, national and other gold and other medals hanging on a hook. They were hard-won, but the pleasure they represent is enormous, even now, some four years (gulp!) since the last one was added to that hook.

Much of the pain that comes to mind when I hear Norma singing that song is from much the same origin as the pleasure, of course. It seems to be the lot of the Masters athlete to spend his or her time sidelined with one injury or another (…and another, and another). The good thing is that the “pleasure” always eventually takes away the “pain”. It’s never the other way around, except temporarily. And success always makes you want more success. It’s part of where human evolution has brought us all, whether athletes or not.

Last weekend, I attended my first “gig” as a Masters athletics trackside photographer for a year, and only the second such event I’ve attended since June 2019. I met many athlete friends there. Talking to them hammered it home to me that a succession of issues has mean that it is also now coming up three years since I last competed on a running track. Knee problems, then all the Covid lockdown stuff, and my increasingly flaky mental health are responsible, but my goodness, those three years ratcheted up fast. I spoke to friends who have survived that three years well, but I also met several to whom time and circumstance have not been kind. To those in both camps, I was able to say, quite genuinely, “I share your pleasure” or “I feel something of your pain”.

I’d hoped that travelling to Oxford to photograph the event, which is one that has been on my list of photography fixtures for many years, would somehow kick-start me back towards the arms of that temptress that we like to call “normality’. It may just be too soon for judgements, but I’m already worried that it won’t, and that I’m going to have to work out a “new normality” before long.

Why so? Put it this way: 

I am apt to be a bit of a recluse. No big deal; I’ve been something of a loner all my life. At things like athletics events, there can me anything up to several thousand people present, but just as those competing have their own individual niche, the photographer has the opportunity to side-step the crowds, and use his camera to do his own thing, in his own chosen space. As an illustration of that, friend of mine photographed me at the World Masters Championships in 2018 with a shot that, for me, says it all. Thanks, Andy. 

Photo by Andy Gannaway

The photographic evidence of my recent day in Oxford confirms that I was able to drop right back into my individual niche, and come up with the usual good results. But, instead of heading home at the end of the afternoon thinking feeling “job done”, I realised I was entertaining thoughts that asked me “So, how badly had you really missed that?” and “Is that something you can see yourself going back to in a year from now?”. Maybe those thoughts will go away with time. But maybe not.

However, I don’t really need to tell you that making a return as a photographer is not actually the prime milestone. Getting back “on track” as a photographer is just a preamble. A preamble to working towards either reinstating myself as an active athlete, or to deciding that I’ve had a good run (pun intended), but that all good things come to an end. This blog is an attempt at a therapeutic discussion, largely with myself about those things – but feel free to chip in. Bear with me. I think I’ll write a further instalment soon, because it will help me keep these issues to the front of my mind.

Peter Pan?

If you’re a regular reader of this increasingly irregular blog, then firstly, thank you. Thank you very much. 

I started it quite a long time ago now, as an outlet to allow me to share some of the things I was doing as an older, competitive athlete. That aim still holds good, but there have been quite a few disruptions along the way. Sometimes, the words “older, competitive athlete” have been little more than a euphemism for “injured person”. I’ve had my fair share of hurt muscles, tendons and bones in the 20+ years I’ve regarded myself as that athlete, as well as enduring problems that were rather less in the arms and legs etc than between the ears.

However, I’ve often owned up to the fact that writing this blog is a kind of therapeutic outlet, and sometimes allows me to work out some kind of rationale for what might be happening to me at a given time. That will have been obvious to those regular readers.

I am now six months past my 67th birthday. If I’m talking with other people about what I do (and sometimes those “other people” can be active athletes themselves), and the issue of age and/or injuries arises, it’s reasonably common for me to be on the receiving end of an opinion that I’m “maybe just getting a bit too old” for what I do. People in general (including many athletes) seem to have a level of acceptance/tolerance for, say, older distance runners, that simply doesn’t seem to extend to older sprinters. There’s a lack of comprehension about what we do, or why we do it “at our age”. Well, for their information, and yours, no matter your distance, it’s still all about getting from start to finish in the fastest possible time. The difference in the case of sprinters is that we have rather less time to look at and enjoy the scenery.

Some years back, a good friend of mine (and older than me, as it happened – he’s sadly dead now) coined the expression “Peter Pan Syndrome” for what he thought must be driving me. He meant it as a friendly dig at how, unlike many other people, I have never seen age, per se, as a reason why I should be doing one thing, or stopping doing another. Unsurprisingly, the psychologists have already grabbed their own definition and description of a “Peter Pan Syndrome” (and for the ladies, a matching “Wendy Syndrome” too) as a form of psychopathology, but I don’t want you to go and look it up, because it’s far more depressing than the “Syndrome” I still enjoy. Mine is fundamentally down to doing a few things that most people, it seems, would think someone of my age would, by now, have stopped doing. But, as people say in other contexts, “if you’ve got it, flaunt it”.

The point of that rambling introductory part of this blog is this: I confess I may be losing my battle to remain in denial about the age versus activity-level thing. Some might accuse me of (finally) “feeling my age”. I can’t agree with them, however, because I have no idea what 67 and six months is supposed to feel like, and, of course, nobody has yet determined the age at which a person stops being “an older, competitive athlete”.

The prevailing headwind I’m battling against at the moment is the continuing fall-out from my “seizure” back in July. You can read all about it in my previous two blog chapters. The last episode ended with me still waiting to hear from NHS neurology services with a date for some tests that will, I hope, finally determine what actually happened to me on 5 July. Well, the news is…..I am still waiting. 

I was unable to make any headway contacting them on the telephone, and eventually spoke to my GP. He didn’t know anything about it. I was more than a bit of a shocked to find that he had not, at that point, (a good six weeks after the event,) been sent any information at all from the local hospital A&E people, who had seen me in July and had made the original neurology referral. However, once he’d obtained what he needed from A&E, he then told me that he didn’t have any magic wand to expedite a date for my brain scan. In these tough times for the NHS, I was just one of many people in a queue.

But there was more….

When I was sent home after my day in A&E, the duty doctor there explained to me why she was going to make a referral to the neurology services. I was given no paperwork, and didn’t therefore know that her report from that day’s investigations also included a recommendation that I be referred to a cardiologist. This was presumably to assess whether anything heart-related had played a part in my “seizure”. I suspect it’s a routine referral for people “of my age” in such circumstances, but it’s not something I know much about. Once he read the A&E papers, my GP spotted the omission, and actioned that referral. Result: I’m now waiting in two NHS queues, not just the one.

My recollection had been that the paramedics who had initially assessed me within an hour of the “seizure” were happy that I’d not had some kind of a heart attack. I tended to agree, having had the advantage of the heart-rate trace from my Garmin sports watch to look at, as some kind of guide. Throughout the incident, my heart activity on the watch appeared to be completely normal and regular for a fit person, sitting having his breakfast on the patio on a warm and sunny Monday morning. 

My figures meshed in very well with the ECG examination the paramedics had made with the boxes of tricks they bought with them. Given that a lot of my training is guided by heart-rate, and heart-rate based training zones, I feel reasonably confident that a hospital cardiology assessment won’t bring me any surprises. However, I can’t take that as read, so it remains another bridge I need to cross before I have any chance of life getting back to normal. Remember “normal”? With this all coming on the heels of more than 18 months of Covid disruptions, I’m not sure I do.

And that’s about it. On the plus side, it’s now three months since my “seizure” and I’ve had no kind of recurrence. I’m also doing some training twice a week, in keeping with the instruction that I should take things relatively easy, and avoid running if possible. I bought a “Wattbike” cycle trainer – a modern version of the one I used to use at the gym, and that’s all going well providing I don’t stress my knees too much.

The wear and tear on my mental health is one hell of a grind, though…..

An important and overdue update to this blog, added in May 2022 when I realised I had simply forgotten to do so.:

I waited, and I waited some more, but still nothing constructive came from the NHS about getting any tests and/or a second opinion on my “seizure” and the after-effects of it. My mental health was no longer being ground down – it was in free-fall. However, I did get called in to our local NHS hospital for the the cardio-vascular tests my GP had noticed had thus far been forgotten. And, what’s more, I got results from both of these very quickly. It was no surprise to me that they found me to be very well in that respect, with no need at all for follow-up or further tests.

And so, in February 2022, having been free of any kind of any recurrence or adverse symptoms for more nearly seven months since the original event, I took a deep breath, and decided I’d get some progress by going private, via an excellent non-NHS hospital not far from home.

Reassuringly, it took hardly any time at all to get to see the neurologist and epilepsy expert there. He reached the view that I had, frankly, been given a misdiagnosis by the NHS. He felt there was little in what had happened to me that should have led a neurologist to conclude I had suddenly developed epilepsy. He was also scathing about the lack of follow-up I had had (ie none whatsoever) for a potentially life-changing diagnosis such as epilepsy. A few days later, I received his letter, confirming precisely what he had told me when we had met.

Now to get life back on track….

“Still clueless after all these weeks”

(To misquote Paul Simon)

I was, literally, clueless at the end of the last episode of this blog.

Briefly, out of the blue, I’d suffered a collapse at home one morning early in July. After a day in A&E including a CT scan, I was none the wiser what might have caused this incident. I’d heard the paramedics and the A&E doctor use the word “seizure” to describe it. However, it wasn’t until I was being packed off home, basically, by that point, not feeling much worse after the day’s events, that any suggestion was made to me that I might have experienced some form of epileptic attack. I was, I was told, going to be referred to a consultant, who would give that some expert consideration.

Well, that consultation happened today, seven weeks later. It was a very “hands off” affair, with me being asked to go over what had happened, followed by a lengthy sequence of questions for me to answer. Any attempts I made to put the whole situation into what I felt was an appropriate and wider context (very fit bloke, no prior or post incident problems, etc) were all firmly brushed aside. This was to be diagnosis by some kind of predetermined framework, which apparently did not, or could not, allow for a 67 year-old to be as fit, free of extenuating circumstances, etc, as I apparently seemed to the consultant to consider myself to be.

It worried me just how concerned the neurologist was that nobody had instructed me not to drive, and to surrender my driving licence immediately after the incident. I recall being asked how I was getting home on the day of my trip to A&E, but when I said I was being picked up from the hospital, that seemed to be well-received, and nothing further was said or asked of me. Had I not considered the possibility, or the possible consequences, of me having another incident (forgive me for struggling with the word “seizure”), and of it happening while I was driving? 

Well, frankly, no: call me unimaginative if you must, but the thought had never once entered my mind. Whatever you want to call it, I was regarding it as a very “one-off” event. Although at A&E I’d been told to take things easy until I’d had my neurological consultation, I had felt pretty much able to resume normal life the next day. The intervening seven weeks probably were a bit lower key than usual, but consuming many hours of tv coverage of the Tokyo Olympics was the main reason! 

The neurologist grilled me about if, when and where I had had anything remotely similar happen. This was difficult: I remembered feeling very wobbly with heat and dehydration a couple of times while racing or training, but both times were at least ten years ago. 

I’d done my homework on epilepsy, though. “Late onset” epilepsy seems to account for about one in four new diagnoses. “Late” in this respect meaning over 60. The diverse nature of epileptic and non-epileptic seizures being what they are, tends to lead to some quite general descriptions in on-line literature, and what the pollsters call “confirmation bias” being what it is, I’d felt it easy to dissociate myself from a possibly pejorative description like “epileptic”.

“Have you noticed any deterioration in your memory?”, I was asked. What 67-year man old can honestly answer no to that? Did I ever have occasional moments where I felt a little “spaced out”? Ditto. 

It wasn’t, I’m sure, that the consultant felt I was wanting to make light of the situation. I never do that where my health is concerned. Long-term readers of this blog will be able to attest to that! No, the difficulty was that it was being made very clear to me that there could be serious consequences for me, and potentially for others, if I did not acknowledge the possibility/probability (depending on whose viewpoint you took), that I had indeed had an epileptic incident, and that it might prove to be only the first one. Being brought fairly abruptly face to face with a potentially life-changing situation is not something I’ve had to deal with often, I’m grateful to be able to say. It has come as a huge shock, believe me.

So, be that as it may, this fit, 67-year old athlete has now been referred for a series of neurological tests of my brain function and responses, to support a second, or further opinion from a neurologist at a different hospital. The hope is that these will be done quickly, but unfortunately that won’t be quickly enough to rescue my plan for an 8 day motorcycling holiday in three weeks from now.

I’ll keep you posted, and I’ll be grateful to hear from anyone who has first-hand experience of a situation similar to mine. Thank you.