Here comes the train
This was first published on my Patreon page on 26 April 2021 as part of my weekly Monday Musings column.
I spent the weekend running around Hampstead Heath in London. A few of you were there.
On Saturday and Sunday we held the first of two new London editions of what we call our Way of the Runner one-day explorations. We purposefully don’t call them “runs”, even though we do a lot of running, so as to temper any expectations that this is a hard training run. Because it’s not that. We spend a lot of time stopping, tilting our pelvis, breathing through our nose and leaping over fallen down trees. Also, Joe Kelly, our resident movement maestro, talks a lot, so we listen to him and ask questions and get bamboozled by his answers. It’s great fun.
Normally we do these one-day explorations on Dartmoor where the epic beauty of the landscape is part of the draw. So I was a little nervous about whether Hampstead Heath would quite cut it. I also wondered if it was big enough. I used to live near the Heath many years ago and I know it’s only about five miles around. But we chose it because it was the only wooded, hilly place anywhere near central London with the rugged terrain we needed for the sort of adventuring we like to do.
We set off each day in a long line, with me at the head. I had a vague idea of the basic layout of the park and of the direction I was running, but after a few minutes I spotted a narrow trail going into the trees to one side, and so I ducked down onto it, the pack following behind. The trail snaked through the trees, down over an almost dried-up stream, and back up, twisting and turning. Another trail cut across it, and so I snapped left, feeling the train behind me following on like a long plume of feathers.
All day, between our Joe Kelly stops - which involved everything from hill sprints to step ups, hip wiggling and running with our mouths taped shut - I led the train around and around, up and down, through the woods. And I loved it.
It reminded me of the training of the Ethiopian runners, which I had joined in with a few times when I was in Addis Ababa in 2011, and which Michael Crawley describes in his book Out of Thin Air. Inspired after reading that book, I had gone exploring on my own during a few of my runs in Devon, discovering new trails near my house just by following my nose, but I soon gave it up and went back to running my usual fixed routes. It somehow felt a little bit too much effort on my own. But in a group, it made more sense. It felt like a giant game of follow-my-leader.
Crawley says that when he asked the Ethiopians why they ran like that, zig-zagging one behind the other all over the place, following the smallest, most interesting-looking trails, sometimes getting stuck in undergrowth or having to scramble up steep mudbanks - as we did on the Heath - they replied that they did it because it was fun.
What an interesting idea: some of the best marathon runners in the world scrambling up overgrown trails, taking turns to lead their friends, just for the fun of it, as part of their training. If they can do it, surely we can too.
Hampstead Heath, it turned out, was the perfect place for this game, as it had so many tiny trails that always led somewhere, and we kept popping out in fields of picnickers, or on a hill overlooking the whole of London, or by a large stately house, before ducking back into the trees for more exploring. The miles whizzed by. My Strava maps from the weekend make fun viewing.
While, of course, measured running routes, timed sessions and road runs can all be part of the training mix, I have to say it’s a blast sometimes to get together in a group, take turns leading, get off the main trails and go and explore. And maybe, you never know, it might help us run a tiny bit more like the Ethiopians.
Zig-zagging off the main trails on Hampstead Heath, Ethiopian style