Coronavirus diary - 18 June 2020

Perhaps I went too early with the lockdown-is-like-an-ultramarathon comparison in a previous blog. But looking back now, those first days of quarantine were more like the warm up jog, filled with the pleasant novelty of not getting in the car for days on end, of running new routes near my home, of never being in a rush to get anywhere. Even as the days turned into weeks, the sun kept shining and it was all fine really. At least in my world.

But now, as the weeks become months, and the finish line can at times seem almost further away than when we started, the ultra marathon comparison is starting to feel a bit more apt. In ultra races you can feel, after say four or five hours of running, that you’ve been going for a long time, but looking back later, twenty hours or more in, you realise how easy things still were back then.

Back in March it felt like it would all be over by the distant highlands of September. We just had to keep walking, enjoy the journey, and we’d get there. But now as we approach, we begin to realise that those sunlit September Hills hide a false summit. The trail keeps going beyond them. The social distancing, the face masks, the cancellations keep rolling on into October … November … where is the finish? Maybe there is no finish.

I can sense the growing feeling of despair in the air, of people wanting to lash out, wanting to say ‘sod this’. People are gathering in bigger groups, taking fewer precautions. Maybe it doesn’t matter? Here in the UK at least, and in many places, the cases are coming down regardless. I went for a run with a doctor from the local hospital the other day who said things were quiet on the wards. Maybe we are closing in on some kind of finish line after all?

But that, too, throws up a mix of emotions. There is a part of me that isn’t completely thrilled or ready to go back to the old life. The rushing back and forth to London, keeping myself awake on Pret coffees, riding late-night trains through the rural south-west of England. And then there is the talk of returning to a ‘new normal’. Like the old normal, but worse. Face masks on buses, queues for shops, children made to stand in painted squares in school playgrounds, while stories emerge of renewed lockdowns in China, vaccines that won’t work, second waves, collapsed economies, job loses. My children, now teenagers, are soon going to step out into this ‘new normal’ world. Maybe it’s best we keep the doors closed a little longer?

The only solace I can take from my life experience, and in some small part from my ultra running, is that knowledge that it is usually the fear of what lies ahead, of the unknown, that is the most debilitating. But that reality is lived in the present, a continuous series of moments, each one simple, taking one step at a time, while the Earth continues to spin, and the breath continues to rise and fall. It’s a thin thread to hold on to, perhaps, but for now it’s important to hold it.

I’ve been working on my breathing in more ways than one recently, with my fitness maestro Joe Kelly expounding on the vital role of the breath in running. A couple of brilliant podcasts he sent me (links below) highlight the key importance of the breath. In one, author James Nestor says: “Breathing is very binary for many people: we breathe, we live, we don’t breathe, we’re dead. But there are so many nuances in those 25,000 breaths we take every day, and it’s a tool that allows us to harvest control of our nervous system, organ function, heart rate, mental state, on and on and on.

“How we breathe is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise we do, whatever genetic makeup we have. It’s really this missing pillar of health, and if you’re not doing that right, it doesn’t matter how well you’re doing the other things, you’re always going to be a little off.”

It seems the breath is the essence of endurance, the base of core strength, a key to good health, as well as the starting point of the awareness of the moment - and hence our own existence. It’s a pretty powerful thing and worth paying attention to. As Joe puts it, you really should be interested in this.

Those two podcasts on the power of the breath, which I highly recommend listening to, are:
1. How To Unlock The New Science Of A Lost Art
2. How Breathing Can Transform Your Life

Virtual racing

I've watched on over the lockdown as people everywhere have got involved in the virtual races and challenges being set by race directors as a way to compensate for the lack of real racing. I almost signed up for one, but then thought that if I wanted to run 10K on my own around my local area, I could just go ahead and do it. It seemed faintly ridiculous to sign up to an event in order to do exactly the same run. But feeling the motivation to push myself slowly ebbing as the months of running the same routes with no fixed goal mount up, I felt I should finally give it a try. I was partly convinced by this excellent piece by Andy Waterman in The Journal about a virtual five mile race he did: The magic is in your legs not the number

So I'm about to enter a team in the Ipswich JAFFA ekiden. It's one of the few ekidens in the UK (if you don't know what an ekiden is, read my book The Way of the Runner!) and between six runners we're attempting to run a sub-3 hour marathon. We'll complete legs of 5km, 10km or 7.2km and log them on Strava. To run sub-3 we need to average a pace of under 6:50 mins per mile (4:15 mins per km), so it's a good challenge and I'm already feeling more excited about that run in a few weeks than most of my usual runs along the same route, so it seems the virtual race magic is already having some effect.

An ekiden in Japan. Photograph: Adharanand Finn