That time I kind of got hit by a car

I reckon that in the 7-ish years that I’ve been a regular runner I’ve run somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 miles. And yesterday, for the first time in all those miles, I was hit by a car.

I’ll let that thought linger before I explain.

It gets a lot less dramatic from here. To be honest, it would be more accurate to say that a car was hit by me.

I was on a very slow recovery jog – early Sunday morning around the Tan Track in central Melbourne – unsuccessfully attempting to shake out some of the muscle and joint pain from my 16 miler the day before. The Tan is an almost uninterrupted trail that measures just over 5k from our front door, all the way round and back home again. I do it all the time.

To get to the Tan I need to cross two roads, both of which have traffic lights and pedestrian signals at convenient spots. So it’s probably no surprise that this isn’t where a car got hit by me.

I was on the home stretch having just left the Tan to run down a very quiet residential street, picking up a bit of speed on a downhill. I’m running on a narrow pavement – a bit unusual as this road is so dead that often enough I just run in the road itself. It would have been a better idea to do that on this occasion.

The nose of a car pulls out of a concealed lane. There’s an imperceptibly small dip in the pavement, no lines painted on the road, no visibility for pedestrians or drivers. The bonnet appears and then a door and then I’m thinking “Well, this is happening.”

The driver sees me and slams on the brakes at the point at which my chest and arms splay out melodramatically across his car’s bonnet. The car comes to a stop as my right knee connects with the wing, which buckles slightly under the impact. I’ve more or less tripped over his car and broken my fall with my entire self. I stay there a fraction of a second to check whether I’m dead.

I’m not dead, but I am immensely surprised.

In fact I’m not even winded – my arm is a little uncomfortable as I landed heavily on it, but as I take a step away from the car and lean back on a convenient tree, trying to catch my breath, I remark that I really am totally fine. I’m remarking this to the driver as he lowers his window and we both look at each other, wondering who is going to shout at who.

In fact neither of us shouts. He wants to check I’m OK because that’s a good place to start and I want to apologise because I am British.

Luckily I really am OK. Perhaps a little shocked but nothing more than that. He drives off, I wave and jog the rest of the way home. Carefully.

I’d like to thank my brain, which realised early enough that my legs weren’t going to stop in time to avoid a collision, so worked out that spreading the impact as much as possible was the best alternative. For a fraction of a fraction of a second it considered swerving me out in front of the nose of the car – but if the driver hadn’t stopped then I would surely have broken a leg or hit the pavement, maybe catching an ankle or something under a front bumper and leaving myself with a large medical bill and a severe disinclination to boogie.

So what have I learned from this little escapade? Well, not much. I learned that this particular laneway is there, and that visibility is appalling, so it’s worth slowing down for a spot of green-cross-coding. I also learned what I have long-suspected: that being run over – or indeed running into cars – is literally no fun at all. More importantly, as I trotted the rest of the way home, heartrate at 30 or 40 thousand bpm, I resolved to generally be more careful. In an abstract sense, I’d like to get to 10,000 miles, or 20,000 miles, or none at all if the mood doesn’t take me, but I’d ideally like to get there on my own two feet.

Happy running, be safe out there,

Dave
(5 weeks, 6 days to 26.2)

2016 to date: km's 442, parkruns: 6, races: 1

It's on like Donkey Kong

OK, you’ve done it. At the whim of the populace, I am committing, here and now, to run the 2012 Edinburgh Marathon in 19 days’ time. Thank you for your responses, I enjoyed them all immensely. For those of you who missed out, I posed the ‘to run or not to run’ question in this blogpost, and received the following smorgasbord of advice...

Marc: Very difficult question indeed. My inclination is that you should do it, but make it about something other than the time. Find a slower friend and pace make for them, or just try to run every mile the same speed, or intervals, or something. Anything to create a 'different' challenge from running the whole caboodle as quickly as you can. You love running, and I can't see you not enjoying it some way. But BE CAREFUL.

Dave: Thank Marc, I agree with all of your points. My ‘different challenge’ might involve a run/walk strategy, I might have a go at a charity chaser challenge, or I might take my iPhone and attempt to blog live through the event. All to be decided.

Iain: As the result of playing cricket through an injury (a pain in my left hip) I am now off for (yet more) MRI scans, I would advise against running a marathon at the best of times let alone when injured!

Dave: Iain, we have been friends for about 15 years and you’ve been injured for about 14 ½ of them. As such I should probably take your advice. But I am an idiot so I won’t.

Clair: Hi Dave, Sounds like you have a 'sportsmans hernia'. I say run if it feels ok and you feel ok, but if its just going to end up causing you more pain then what have you gained from it? You've already achieved great things so if you feel like passing on this one, I don't think anyone would question your decision. If however you decide to do it (I personally would err on the side of caution) the I'm doing the half! Wave as you fly by! :)

Dave: Clair, you are ridiculously kind to write such nice things about my achievements. I have been back and forth with the NHS since November in an attempt to determine whether or not I have a hernia of any sort. The diagnosis is that I have something called a perisymphyseal oedema, which I don’t fully understand, but apparently am allowed to run on if I take an enormous pile of anti-inflammatories too. I feel OK, and I’ll run gently... Good luck with your half!

Katie: Ask yourself: What would Jedward do? Then do the opposite.

Dave: Well there goes my don’t-run-and-then-lie-about-it-afterwards plan.

J-Mac: Defer your entry until next year. No shame in that!

Dave: J-Mac, you are so wise but the Edinburgh marathon is so stingy that if I did that I would just have to pay again. They would defer my place but keep my cash, hardly an incentive in a first-come-first-served race that’s easy to access...

Latterbarrow: Do it! - with a chest infection, and knowing I had little or no chance of completing, I travelled to Yorkshire and started the Three Peaks Race. For me, the old cliche of 'taking part..' is true.. (I got three miles, spewed up, and spent the rest of the day recovering in the pub)

Dave: This is full of mixed messages. Maybe I should just go straight to the pub?

Simon Freeman: I'd echo what Marc wrote and say that if you can find another reason to run, it might be one of your favourite races. While I was flogging myself to a 2 minute PB in the London this year, my wife was studiously ignoring her PB and jogging round, enjoying the day and treating the London as a training run (with a medal at the end) for the ultras she is doing in 2012. She loved seeing a different side of the race.

Dave: Simon, you sound like a clever man. Your wife sounds even cleverer.

Training plan: a Martin Yelling inverse taper.

Race strategy: banterous chat.

Predicted finish time: absolutely yonks.

It’s on like Donkey Kong.

Happy running.

Dave

2012 to date: miles run - 164.3, miles biked - 50.2, metres swum - 750, races - 2

To run or not to run? That is my question.

Should I run the Edinburgh marathon, just three weeks away on Sunday? I cannot make this decision on my own.

For:

• It would be my 5^th marathon in three years (which is awesome).
• Loads of my friends and colleagues are running one of the events over the weekend.
• It’s local.
• I’ve paid for it.
• It’s a downhill/flat course and hence not too challenging.
• I will feel massively left out on the day if I only spectate.
• I could just jog round and enjoy it.

Against:

• I am severely under-trained. I haven’t run more than a half marathon since October.
• I am carrying two injuries; in my left ankle and in my abdomen/groin.
• I am definitely not going to get a PB, in fact I am very likely to get a PW. Possibly by a long way.
• If I do start and things get really bad, I might DNF. The shame, the shame...
• If I pig-headedly struggle through it I could exacerbate my injuries and make things worse in future.
• I could just jog round and hate it.

So I leave it up to you lot. I shall make my decision based entirely on the tone of responses written in the comments box. Over to you. Don't let me down.

Happy running

Dave

2012 to date: miles run - 150.94, miles biked: 46.2, metres swum: 750

1087 miles: my 2011 in running shoes

What started with a broken promise ended with mixed emotions. I knew that my 2011 in running shoes would be the biggest, toughest and hopefully the most rewarding yet, but I wasn’t ready for how it would finish.

Pivoting on the San Francisco Marathon, all my training, racing and writing was focussed on getting into the best possible shape to run one of the most brutal road marathons in the world. My madly overambitious plans to start with the Lochaber Marathon were sensibly sidelined in favour of the usual crop of half-marathons and parkruns in the first half of the year, including a brilliant weekend in Campbeltown for the MoKRun.

My annual tradition of PB’ing in Alloa despite (or perhaps because of) being violently sick entered its third year, modified only slightly this year by a rather more exciting end to the day. But before both of those was the last-minute slapdash effort at the Meadows ‘Marathon’ in Edinburgh, which of course was only really a half marathon, run over seven laps of the Meadows in Edinburgh.  It may interest you to know that the organisers are planning a full length-marathon for 2012, covering a soul-sucking fourteen lap course (details here). You won’t be seeing me there.

San Francisco loomed large and arrived on my doorstep at the end of July. With the miles in the bank, hills in my legs and a Union Jack on my chest I was ready to run the best race of my life, and was rewarded with a hugely satisfying 3:49 PB. I’ve wasted enough of your time already on eulogising about this incredible race – go back and read it all again if you’re interested.

I came back from the USA with an enormous medal and two more goals on the horizon. My commitment to run the Great North Run for the Alzheimer’s Society, coupled with my wild over-commitment to run it barefoot, made for a superb combination of a world-class event and another tough challenge complete. Two weeks later I toed my final start-line of the year, accompanying the one and only Ben A. Nicholson around the Loch Ness Marathon, to complete my fourth lifetime 26.2.

 It was a good year for meeting heroes. I met round-the-world runner and adventurer Rosie Swale Pope in Campbeltown before the MokRun, then elite ultramarathoner Michael Wardian and prolific marathoner Dane Rauschenberg in San Francisco, and finally world 5,000m champion and British Olympic hopeful Mo Farah in Newcastle before the Great North Run.  If you’re interested, Michael and Dane were the friendliest. Rosie was busy at a book signing but very kind. I think I might have annoyed Mo – he was out for a drink with some mates. Sorry Mo.

Mike Wardian (after winning the SF Marathon)

Mo Farah

I was delighted to publish articles in Runner’s World UK again this year, reviewing the Alloa Half Marathon, the MoKRun and the San Francisco Marathon.  RW has a readership of almost 400,000, which, as I’ve said before, is almost as many people as read this blog (pfft!).  I very much look forward to publishing more in future. It was also a joy to watch this blog's readership grow and diversify - thank you for sharing it as widely as you have, it means a great deal to me.

Perhaps best of all was watching others achieve and succeed. It was a pleasure to run with my brother the day of his wedding, a delight to see that my sister completed her first 10k, an honour to accompany (and eventually be beaten by) Ben Nicholson in his first marathon. I took a Dalmatian and her owner to the top of Arthur’s Seat. I trained with future marathon world champ Megan Crawford, when she slowed down enough for me to keep up. I even coaxed the Crew Chief out on one or two occasions. I ran in Scotland, England, Portugal, California and New York, covering a total of 1087 miles and wearing out two-and-a-half pairs of running shoes. Here are the final stats:

miles run: 1087, parkruns: 6, races: 6, 

miles biked: 159, metres swum: 1225

I had a great year.

Except the hernia bit. That was shit, and still is.  Not long after the Loch Ness Marathon I started experiencing a great deal of pain whilst running.  By early November it had become unbearable, so I hastened to my GP. She thought it was probably a hernia, and ordered a surgical consultation (which still hasn’t happened, by the way).  In the meantime my running has dwindled to almost nothing, and at times it seems genuinely impossible to think that I have trained for and completed two marathons and four half marathons this year, as well as a few hundred miles on the bike. At times, genuinely, I can barely walk.

Swings and roundabouts, eh?

Happy New Year

Dave

2012 to date: miles - 3 (painfully)

Identity

It is a blog cliché to start a long-overdue post with an apology for not posting more often, but here it is: I’m sorry. Thing is, this is a blog about running and runners, and recently I have done much of the former or felt like one of the latter.

Almost two months ago I headed out for an easy five-miler along the river, when, as so often happens in such circumstances, I ran into trouble exactly halfway through the run and, consequently, when I was as far away from home as I could possibly be. A deep, dull ache gripped around my mid-section like a vice and tightened, making every step agonising. It was as if I was wearing a cummerbund of misery and pain and gross inconvenience. I paused a moment, almost winded by the shock of the pain, and decided to walk instead. But walking was even more painful, so, with great effort, I forced myself into a pitiful, laborious trot and headed for home.

The pain lasted for days. I’ve run two marathons this year and barefoot half marathon – I know a thing or two about pain – but this was by far the worst. I ached when I walked, stairs were agony and I could barely put on a pair of socks without wincing. This was torture. I live an active lifestyle: I walk to work most days, two miles each way, and am used to putting in anything from 15 to 50 miles a week running, as well as some time on the bike, too. I am rarely still. I fidget and pace and meander. I’d sooner walk than get a bus and rather sprint than miss a train. But this new injury put paid to all of that, or rather, made all of that hurt like hell. I even stopped walking to work - the discomfort made me nauseous.

Since then the pain has never been far away. Every run has been the same; starting well but deteriorating rapidly, the dull ache growing until I couldn’t take it anymore and ran for home as fast as my confused legs could carry me. My GP had no answers but plenty of scary words, like hernia, appendicitis and ‘surgical consult’. The fact that my injury only kicks in during a run seemed to annoy her – she suggested that I run until it hurts then present myself at A&E. An absurd notion. My physio decided that my back was to blame and spent an hour systematically demolishing it, to no noticeable effect. I’m still waiting for that surgical consult, by the way.

So I’ve been running horrendous, pathetic miles. 10 miles a week. Then seven. Then five. Last week just two; the kind of miles that I am ashamed to put in my training diary. The kind of miles that make me embarrassed to look at this blog.

He looks happy.

And so we reach identity. What is a runner? To me the only criteria have always been that you run because you love it, because you know what it means to have adrenalin surging through your veins as you haul yourself uphill into driving rain, because you have no shame in beaming and whooping and laughing as you hurtle down a snowy hill, because you get to the end of a long run beaten, battered and broken and triumphantly glowing with the sense of accomplishment you deserve.

I haven’t felt any of those things for weeks.

If you’re fit and well, then please, for goodness sake, go for a run this week. Somebody should.

Jog on

Dave

2011 to date: miles: 1077, parkruns: 6, races: 6, miles biked: 159, metres swum: 1225