Ten Miles Before Breakfast - Richmond Park

Up and out at 5am. I see a fox, a grey heron. I see masses of deer, both red deer and fallow deer, bucks, hinds, calves. I see jackdaws, pigeons, rabbits, squirrels. I hear woodpeckers but can't spy them in the high bare trees.
I do my ten miles then it's a bath and a breakfast of porridge, peanut butter and banana.
Perfect.

Road to Endorphia Chapter 1 - John O'Groats to Latheron

I start running.

It is slightly uphill out of John O’Groats, south towards the A99. There is the barest smirr of rain and a breeze just above stillness.

I have escaped. I am on the run. For however long this takes I won’t have to read a newspaper or pretend to have an opinion or listen to endless whining about the economy, the avarice of politicians and the unavailability of on-street parking in the Inner-London Boroughs. And however long this takes, if I narrow my focus sufficiently, is forever.

My spirit rises. My worship commences.

The single tenet of my atheistical faith is this: The Body is the Spirit.

By this simple truth you can judge all religious traditions. What your church requires you to do with your body, that is what it would do to your spirit.

Where the emphasis is on bowing and kneeling you can be sure that what is expected of you is submission. Walking in procession, chanting in unison, singing from the same hymn sheet, all instil the discipline of conformity. Sitting still, acceptance.

Submit, conform and acquiesce all you want, you truth-in-a-book, text-bound children of Abraham. Your soulless, iota-splitting, argumentative, mean-spirited, fearful creeds are not for me.

This morning as my heart pumps and my blood heats and my muscles flex I look to the gods of the east. And I chant to myself and the universe.

Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.

I invoke the Lord Ganesh. God of Doorways, of Entrances. God of New Beginnings. Remover of Obstacles. I invoke you Lord Ganesh in each of your hundred and eight names. Elephant Headed One. Pot Bellied One. Holder of the Broken Tusk. I invoke you from the bottom of my infidel heart.

I filled my three litre CamelBak water container before leaving John O’Groats and my pack feels heavy. With the full load of water I am carrying about fourteen pounds but I ran most of my training miles without a bag and I am finding it hard to get my rhythm. What can you do? I keep running.

It is still gently uphill. Then flat for a bit, downhill, flat, uphill again. Undulant.

Beyond my pumping left shoulder is the North Sea, swollen and sighing in a great, grey sulk. Buffering the sea’s swell is sometimes sand and sometimes rocks and sometimes both mixed in with hillocks of tussocky grass and, as the more regular line of the road moves nearer to and farther from the ragged line of the shore, sometimes the margin is filled with fenced-off fields where sheep graze. Mostly sheep but sometimes cows. At my right shoulder always there are fields and more sheep and more cows and sometimes a bruiser of a bull and in the distance there are hills. Sometimes too an old church, sometimes a farmhouse or a barn, sometimes a row of houses with cars parked outside, once a roadside war memorial.

The rain continues. The lightest of rains, just at the point where the heaviest of mist becomes subject to gravity. As I say, a smirr, a feathery drizzle. Here at the north east limit of the British mainland Scottish words seem to come more readily. And I am grateful for the word smirr which I now etymologise in my head. Smirr. From smear? Like the marks this lightest of rains would make on window or windscreen. Or on spectacle lenses I now notice.

I am not convinced of my speculative derivation for smirr but refrain from googling for further insight. O yes, brothers and sisters, I have not embarked on my thousand mile journey without internet access. I am wired up and plugged in. My iPhone is attached to the hip-belt of my Salomon XA 20 back pack and is protected from the rain by a thing called an Aquapac. The Aquapac is a little watertight plastic pocket designed to hold a mobile phone. It has a jack for my earphones so I can listen to music in the wet (they claim you can swim with it). The plastic is transparent and flexible so that I can access icons and keys without taking it out of the protection. I bought it from the big yachting shop by Embankment Underground station. At thirty five pounds it is the most expensive plastic bag I have ever owned.

I think about plugging in the earphones now but again I don’t want to slow down. I don’t usually listen to music on the run anyway.

Although I feel like a schoolboy on the first day of summer holidays with an impossible number of weeks between today and the next school year my running is sluggish. The pack on my back and the breakfast in my belly are slowing me down. Oh yes, the breakfast.

This morning when I arrived in John O’Groats it was already later than I wanted it to be. I had slept the night before in the Stroma View campsite which I stumbled upon in the dark after a long, disjointed journey from Motherwell by train, by bus and on foot. From the campsite you could see Stroma, the most southerly of the Orkney Islands (figured that out from the name, huh?) and in the morning in my lightweight sleeping bag in my lightweight tent I felt as if I had been baring my arse to the Arctic Ocean all night long. It took me forever to convince myself to get out of bed for the start of my Big Adventure.

Once I had made it to Britain’s Most Northerly Mainland Town I wandered about, vaguely looking for a steaming bowl of porridge with maybe several slices of toast and marmalade, orange juice and a big mug of tea, a mixture of fast and slow (simple and complex) carbohydrates. The only place I could find for a sit down meal felt a bit chichi for my simple requirements. I looked at the selection of croissants and sandwiches behind the glass, grunted and walked back out.

I looked around. You can pretty much see all of John O’Groats without moving from one spot. There’s a carpark, a signpost giving miles to a selection of exotic and not so exotic locations where you can take your photograph if you want (I did), a derelict Victorian hotel, a pier where you get the boat to someplace even more remote, the aforementioned chichi restaurant, some kind of half-arsed heritage museum and a snack van. Oi Oi, I thought, and headed for the van.

At the snack van, eager as I was to be underway, I settled for a roll with fried egg and square sausage. The square sausage is a peculiarly Scottish item. It comes in a big square cross-sectioned slab maybe three and a half inches on the side. Actually it’s slightly trapezoid rather than square but never mind that. The slab is cut into quarter inch slices, I dunno, maybe they’re a bit thicker than that but again that’s not important. What is important, and distinctive, about the square sausage is its fat content. The fat content of the Scottish square sausage makes Polish food look positively Californian. And the preferred method of cooking this four-cornered fat feast is to shallow fry it in fat.

A second after swallowing this nutritional black hole my pyloric sphincter shut like a trap.

I belch and continue to run. The rain stops. The sun burns off the clouds and the day warms up.

The minutes are mounting on the digital face of my now aged Timex Ironman Triathlon Speed and Distance System. I must have had this watch for eight years now. I know I’ve replaced the battery three times. I got it from Run and Become in Palmer Street, Victoria and it cost me a whole week's wages. Tony Smith himself sold it to me. I remember asking him, 'Is this good, then?' I was about to hand over two hundred and fifty quid. I wanted reassurance, and I reckoned for that kind of money I was entitled to it. But Tony Smith wasn't a salesman. He was a believer. He was a follower of Sri Chinmoy and running was life to him. He smiled and inclined his head to the side. 'Well.' He said, 'Some people find them useful.' That was good enough for me.

I fashion my buff into a headband to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Sweat trickles down my back.

The Timex tells me I’ve been on the go for more than an hour and I notice a shop coming up on the left. Everything you carry weighs something and I have to carry water, a tent, sleeping bag, inflatable mattress, waterproof clothing and spare socks, so I can’t carry too much in the way of food. My rule of thumb is no more than two tins, so I’ll have to eat from shops and caffs and pubs along the road. I don’t know this part of the route so I can't assume there'll be a shop when I want one.

I stop. This place where I stop, the place with the shop, isn’t working very hard at being a place at all. It isn’t a town, that’s for sure. And it would be pushing it to call it a village. There’s a single street of what looks like municipal housing between me and the North Sea. At my end of the street is a shop. I would call it a corner shop but to make a corner you need two streets meeting at an angle and, as I said, there’s only one street. Wait. The street meets the road I’m running on. Right. That’s a corner. It’s a corner shop. OK.

I buy Mars Bars and Irn Bru. I munch on one of the chocolate bars and store the rest in one of the belt pouches of the Salomon backpack. I am liking the backpack. It is relatively new. I bought it a couple of weeks ago from Field and Trek in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. There were a few packs in the same twenty litre size but what sold it to me was that you didn’t have to open up the main compartment to get the water bladder out (or in). The CamelBak fits in it’s own separate zippered and padded section so it’s easier and quicker to fill up. Nice.

I slug on the Irn Bru for quick sugar. Irn Bru is, of course, exactly the right thing to pour down on top of the still undigested square sausage since this carbonated drink is, depending on the vintage of the slogan, “Made in Scotland From Girders” or “Scotland’s Other National Drink”. It is too fizzy, too sweet and utterly repulsive. While I am belching out the gas from the first half of the bottle I shake up the remainder to deaden the fizz. It is a truly, truly horrible drink.

But, notwithstanding how it got aboard, once I start running again the sugar does the trick. I get my rhythm and, for a while at least, I start knocking out the miles.

Three and a half hours out of John O’Groats and seventeen miles south along the A99 is Wick and when I get there I stop for a late lunch of chicken curry in the Bridge Cafe. Tea is also welcome.

As I eat I mull over where I'm at. My daily target is thirty five miles so I’m just about halfway there for the day. I’m not carrying any maps on this part of the journey. Well, I do have a little half page thing I ripped out of a magazine which shows me how to get from John O’Groats to Inverness (117 miles). This is the only bit between the start of the run and Glasgow that I don’t know, but I just need to follow the A99 and the A9. What could be easier?

As soon as I get to Inverness I’ll get off-road. There's a long distance walking trail, the Great Glen Way, from there as far as Fort William (73 miles). From Fort William I’ll follow the West Highland Way, another walking trail, as far as Glasgow (96 miles). And from Glasgow I’ll just run through the streets to Motherwell (13 miles). I’ve walked or run the route from Glasgow to Inverness in full or part, up or down, any number of times and Motherwell/Glasgow is familiar to me.

Once I get to Motherwell I’ll figure out what route to take next. Yeah I know, maybe some people start a thousand mile journey having done some rigorous route-planning but that isn’t my way. I like room to improvise.

My big concern at the moment is where I am going to sleep tonight. There are a number of options for sleeping. Most expensive is bed and breakfast at, maybe thirty or thirty five pounds a night. Then hostels, between twenty and ten pounds depending on quality and location. Campsites are cheap. The chap at Stroma View the night before charged me four quid. But cheapest of all, and my preferred option for nocturnal slumbering, is wild camping. Wild camping is pitching your tent on a hillside or by a river, any spot that takes your fancy. Wild camping is flexible and it’s free and, in Scotland at least, it’s even legal.

Well, mostly legal. You can’t just camp anywhere. There are rules. Not in somebody’s garden and not, I think, within 100 yards of a road, not on forestry land and not in a field being grazed or under cultivation. Now I’m quite happy to camp on forestry land, and often do. But I won’t camp in somebody’s field if there’s a chance I’ll be interfering with the primary purpose of that land. So far today every square inch of land I’ve seen that wasn’t road or beach has been growing or grazing something. From Inverness down to Glasgow I know I can wild camp all the way. But until I get to Inverness, unless the landscape changes, and from Google Maps it looks like it won’t , I might have to pay for three nights of B and B.

Still, no worries. If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.

I linger a while over my tea but the shop starts to close as it approaches five in the afternoon. This morning’s late start is having a knock on effect. In the bathroom I refill my water bag. Out in the street I shoulder my pack, clip the belly and chest straps and start running.

I continue down the A99, the coast road, running on the right hand side facing the oncoming traffic which doesn’t seem heavy. Now and again an approaching vehicle flashes its lights at me. If you are running south on this road carrying a pack you are probably headed all the way down. Are they applauding my enterprise, my adventurous spirit, or are they pissed off that I am straying too far into the road. I interpret their signal as encouragement rather than reproach.

The hours pass. The road winds along the coast. I alternate between walking and running. Sometimes it rains a bit. Once I found I had lost my buff. Now a buff is a thing of great beauty. A plain tube of microfibrous material, it can be used as a scarf or a headband, or ,variously, depending on how you fold, twist or wrap this magical scrap of fabric, a cap, balaclava, turban, ski mask, scrunchie (not with my hair), and on and on (check the how-to videos on YouTube). On a hot day it will keep the sweat out of your eyes, on a cold day it will shield your face from the wind and in your sleeping bag at night it will minimise heat loss from your head. Once I convince myself that it is not in any of a dozen pockets or wrapped around either of my wrists (yeah, it’s a wristband too) I stand at the side of the road cursing for a bit. Then I turn and jog back the way I came. A good chunk of a mile later there’s my buff lying by the side of the road.

Along the road there are more Mars Bars and more Irn Bru. As I tire I feel resentment at the extra distance travelled in search of the lost buff. Uphill sections feel steeper. I feel resentment at the engineers who couldn’t be bothered to plan a flatter, less winding road. What’s wrong with people?

I grudgingly acknowledge approaching cyclists, winding their loaded panniers along the road, half a day’s cycling in front of them and the long slog, nine hundred miles by road, from Lands End behind them. Yeah, go on you pedal-pushing bastards, I know your kind. You’re all smiles now but I’ve seen you back in the Big Smoke, jumping red lights, mounting the pavement whenever you feel like it, ‘look at me I’m saving the planet’. Fuck off, you handlebar-hugging, tofu-munching scum.

You think cycling is like running. Well it ain’t. You’re sitting on a mechanical gadget which has a history of maybe a century and a half. It’s a Victorian contraption in twentieth century dress. See, here’s the thing. Running isn’t just running. Distance running, endurance running, is the engine which drove human evolution. And you know something, there’s more truth in that last sentence than all the bibles ever printed. We are the monkeys who learned to run. We are what we are because of running. Every muscle, tendon, gland, organ, bone, vessel in the human body is geared towards running long distances. You ever ask yourself the question why we’ve got so little hair? How many bald land-mammals are there? It doesn’t make any sense. You stand outside naked and, apart from the finest tropical weather, you’re cold. But start to run and it makes sense. We lost our monkey hair so we could shed heat faster as we ran. So don’t give me the old fellowship-nod from across the road you two-wheeled bastard.

My nomad spirit revolts at the wheel. And it resents running on a road built for them. But hold that thought, buddy boy. That's your own fault. My own fault. I could have researched a cross-country route south from John O'Groats, but I didn't. This road is my choice.

I convert my aggression into effort and hack away at the miles ahead of me, yard by yard.

I’m digging now. I run and I walk. I flinch from closely passing cars. I count. I run for a count of a thousand then allow myself to walk for a bit. I lie to myself. I promise a walk break after counting to a thousand, then make myself do a second thousand count before giving in to the promised walk break. I run again. I run in the ragged rhythm of the old man’s shuffle. I keep going.

In my weariness I should be appalled at the distance ahead of me but somehow I am not. I take pride in running through my fatigue. I am making my target. Even with walk breaks and sitting down breaks I am knocking out four miles every hour.

But my walk breaks become more frequent, my thousand counts shrink to five hundreds and by the time I reach the little town of Latheron, thirty five miles from John O’Groats, I am completely done in. It is half past nine and coming on for dark. OK. Now that I’ve got here how do I find a bed and breakfast. I’m not kidding about being done in. I really am. I just want to sit down and whimper. Yeah, whimpering would be nice. Then lie on my side, curl up and close my eyes.

But first I need to find a place to sleep. No. I haven’t googled for guesthouses in Latheron and called ahead to book a room. I was busy running, OK! Googling is what I try to do now but the internet is running like molasses and the more I whimper the slower it gets. There is a row of shops back off the road on my right. I give up on twentyfirst century communications and browse the adverts in the darkened newsagent’s window. The last thing I want right now is a pilates class and I’m really not up for a bring and buy sale. In the right circumstances I can see myself buying a labrador puppy who I’m sure will grow to love me but first I need a place to sleep. Please.

And there it is. An A4 sheet with a picture and information. The Old Manse Guest House, Latheron. That sounds good, not only is it a guest house it’s in the Old Manse. The manse is the minister’s house, that’s like Scottish for vicarage. Fantastic. There’s a telephone number. I’ll give them a call. And I suddenly feel edgy with suppressed panic. My big fear now is that I have somehow passed some kind of guest house cut-off time and that I have left it too late. Nobody will answer the phone. Or they will tell me there are no vacancies, not wanting to organise a room for me at this late hour.

No, wait. There’s a map. I’ll go there. I’ll go there and knock on the door. When they see me, when they see how little and harmless I am and they hear how far I’ve come they’ll take me in. They won’t turn me away.

I figure out the map and it turns out that I am just a few feet from the corner I need to turn. Up the hill on the right and there it is ahead of me, a big square house, the Old Manse.

I am lying in bed now between cool, crisp sheets. I have washed my sweaty body and my salty face under a hot, hard, soapy shower.

My legs are tight and my back is a slab of aching muscle. I am exhausted. But exhaustion is a good place to be when effort is no longer required.

The chemicals in my brain which earlier had me snarling at cyclists and all but blubbing outside a shop window now have me sending out to the universe waves of cosmic gratitude. I want to give thanks for this weariness and the day which brought me here. Yeah, I know. But you can put the book down. I have to live with this shit.

But where to direct that gratitude. The Lord Ganesh again? No. Much as I love Ganapati, I know he is not real. He’s just a great, big, cuddly, Vedanta-flavoured Dumbo, no more real than Jehova or Jesus or Jay Gatsby.

My iPhone on the bedside table is plugged in and charging up. I fumble with earphones and thumb menus and find some music.

If I can’t find an authentic god I can at least tune into an authentic prophet. I touch play and the scratchy remnant of Blind Willie Johnson’s growling, lisping words reaches me across the gap of eighty years. I listen in wonder to the unique sound of Willie’s blues guitar, his gruff voice and the sweet harmony of the woman’s voice coming and going and the rough, honest pain in the words.

'I want somebody to tell me. Help me if you can. Oh, won’t somebody tell me. What is the soul of a man?’

Jeez, I don’t know. I’m knackered.

Baltic Adriatic Run 2011 - Route Planning (Books)

I am now in possession of the two books which cover the route from the top of Germany all the way to Verona.
Europäischer Fernwanderweg E1 by Arthur Krause published by Kompass covers the 1773 km German section of the E1 from Flensburg to Konstanz. It's in German but I figure that a guidebook should have a fairly limited vocabulary which I'll be able to master pretty quickly. It looks pretty detailed. The route is divided into day hikes of roughly 20 to 30 kilometers. There's a little map for each day, it tells you what waymarkers to look out for, suggests how long it should take and other stuff I haven't figured out yet.
To fit the whole route into one volume means that the maps are pretty small scale. If I'm reading it right they are 1:200,000. Each section advises what larger scale maps are available for that section. So that's good.
The second book I'm using is Across the Eastern Alps: E5 From Lake Constance to Verona by Gillian Price and published by Cicerone, one of the Cicerone Guides. This starts from Konstanz and continues along the south (Swiss) shore of Lake Constance (Bodensee), cuts across Austria, a bit of Germany again and then Austria for real and goes through the Alps. Somewhere along the way Austria becomes Italy and then it's down the hill towards Verona which is just a cough and a spit from Venice.
This book too is divided into daily sections with distances and estimated times. Now, very usefully, it also gives ascent/descent details for each section, i.e. how much hill you're gonna have to get up, which, in the mountains, is a much more serious determinant of how tough a day is going to be than distance on it's own. Every few stages are summarised by a diagram of the altitude changes which is pretty good.
The Cicerone Guide has photographs which the Kompass book doesn't. I like the pictures. I'm getting a buzz just imagining going through that landscape. But they are also useful for giving you an idea of the terrain.
The two books together weigh in at 18 ounces or 520 grams. That's an extra pound I have to carry just for the luxury of knowing where I am. The need for more detailed maps really depends on how well these routes are signposted. If I do need more detailed maps I can, hopefully, buy them and discard them as I go.
So the German section is 1773 km, Konstanz to Verona is 585 km, let's say 100 km from Verona to Venice. Oh, and I want to do a day or two in Denmark before I start the German route just for the extra boasting rights, let's call that another 50 km. That makes the whole journey about 2500 km. In english money that's 1550 miles. Sheee-it. Now that, is a run.

Baltic Adriatic Run 2011 - Route Planning

Yesterday I was thinking that I might use the E1 walking route from Kiel to Genoa and that would mean ending the run on the west side of Italy rather than the eastern Adriatic side. However, I've now found that the E5, which goes from Brittany to Verona, crosses the E1 round about Konstanz/Lake Constance somewhere. If I start out on the E1 from Kiel, go south all the way through Germany, pick up the E5 at Konstanz and follow it through the Eastern Alps to Verona then I'm just 60 miles from Venice and the Adriatic.
I know, what's the difference between ending in Genoa and ending in Venice? Well, my old friend Thomas Duncan has promised me a place to crash for a couple of days in Treviso. It would be nice to finish the run among friendly faces.
There's a Cicerone book on that last, Eastern Alps, section of the E5 which I need to get. I can feel a visit to Stanford's coming on.

Baltic Mediterranean Run 2011

So I'm thinking the Baltic/Adriatic run is probably going to become the Baltic/Mediterranean Run. It's the same kind of thing. I'm just moving it a bit west, that's all.
Starting from Kaliningrad and heading down through Poland and what? the Czech Republic? Slovakia? towards Venice was a very attractive idea but when I bought a couple of maps of Poland to start planning a route I realised I might be stretching my navigational skills a bit too far. I don't even know the capital cities of some of the countries I was going to be traveling through. I mean back in 2009 when I was running from John O'Groats to Lands End I found it easy enough to get lost in Yorkshire.
If I start from Kiel and head down through Germany towards Genoa then I can follow European walking route E1.
It's a long distance walking route so there should be plenty of off-road hiking trails suitable for running, there'll be signposts, it goes through places like the Black Forest. There's even information about it on the internet. All the information I've found so far is in German or Dutch. But that's fine.
Now, the big advantage of taking the E1 is that I have a route to follow. The disadvantage, I'm guessing, would be that Germany has to be more expensive that Poland.
Here's a thing. I could save a lot of money by cooking my own food. But a camping stove, or rather the fuel, is a heavy item considering how lightweight I like to be. I have got the bivvy bag which I have yet to try out. If I could go with the bivvy bag rather than the tent I save over three pounds in weight. That would allow me to take the cooker. But is it realistic to sleep in a bivvy bag for thirty or forty nights? I dunno.

Barefoot Running - Recovery Update

It's Wednesday morning and I've just walked (hobbled) downstairs to make coffee and walked back upstairs without spilling any. I can use the flat of my right foot (gently) and my left heel. Should be able to make it to work.
I am definitely going to make a pair of huaraches. I found a great series of videos on YouTube which show clearly how to do it. Looks pretty easy.

Barefoot Running - Too Much Too Soon

It is Tuesday evening now. Two and a half days since my barefoot five mile run.
I am still pretty incapacitated. My feet don't look that much different than they did on Sunday afternoon.

The blistering is so extensive I haven't been able to walk. I've had to take two days off work. And I've been getting around by sliding along the floor on my arse.
Today, for the first time my right foot was able to bear some weight and I've been able to take a few crutch-aided steps. But it doesn't take long for the huge blister on my left foot to start feeling full to bursting and I have to get off my feet again.
Do I feel like a complete numpty? Of course, I do.
I'm hoping that by tomorrow morning my left foot will have healed some more and I can hobble into work.
I might take a taxi.
Jeez.
I've been passing the time reading Christopher McDougall's Born to Run and researching barefoot running on the internet.
I might get myself a pair of huaraches. In fact, I might make a pair. There's instructions on YouTube. Cool.