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