Overheard at Springburn Post Office

I walked past two 20-year olds in trackies in the post office today and one said to the other.

“Oh aye.  But see that Obama? He needs a wee bit mair muscle in his legs.”

Er, right then.  I guess the public have spoken.  Hit the gym, Barack.

Obama, you're dancing like a beautiful dance whore!

Sorry love, I’m just following protocol!

I was washing my hands in a Toronto airport bathroom recently when I noticed something in the vending machine that made me chuckle.  I suppose that it isn’t easy to come up with a good name for a condom company, but I think they could have tried harder than this.

The sexiest international agreement around

Protocol condoms?

A quick look at dictionary.com tells us as that protocol is defined as “the customs and regulations dealing with diplomatic formality, precedence, and etiquette.”  It has to be one of the least evocative names they could have gone for.  I’m not suggesting that sex is something you should associate with fairytale style superlatives but protocol?  Really?  It paints such a stringent, mechanistic and ultimately unsexy picture.  They might as well have called them ‘Bog Standard Johnnies’, brought to you in association with the Run-of-the-mill prophylactic company.

Good Guy

The pouring rain made getting the train an obvious choice, even though I usually preferred to walk home from the town.  It was shortly after 5pm and the Cumbernauld train was getting close to full.  I walked through to the second carriage and spied a free seat next to a man in his 50s talking on his mobile.

He had a large coffee perched on his pull out table, the container a little too large to fit into the cupholder.  I sat down on the aisle seat with a bump and the vibration caused the cup to fly through the air and spill all over his lap.  He continued his conversation on the phone as I readied myself for a confrontation.

It’s never nice when the first thing you say to someone is “sorry for spilling piping hot coffee all over you” but he was surprisingly pleasant.

“It’s alright.  I take a lot of milk so it was just a little warm.  Besides, I wasn’t really enjoying it anyway!” he said with a smirk.

I offered to buy him a new one but he wasn’t having any of it.  We struck up a conversation, talked a bit about ourselves. The usual: jobs, family, sport and he seemed like a happy, settled guy.  I was on my way back from a job interview and remarked how I didn’t really want the job.  He asked me how hard it would be for me to look for a better job and that if I could afford to.  I said it wouldn’t be difficult and that I could.

“So why do it if you know it won’t make you happy?” he asked.

Sometimes you just need to spill coffee over a stranger to get some clarity.

Political spotlight over Springburn

Following the resignation of the my local MP Michael Martin, former speaker of the House of Commons, in June this year my local constituency, Glasgow North East, today held an election to decide who the new man will be.  It has thrust Springburn into the media spotlight, which has made for uncomfortable reading in most articles I’ve seen that detail a number of damning statistics about how poor and deprived the area has become.

A quick look through the history books though would seem to suggest that this campaign for every party is merely a formality.  Springburn has been under Labour rule for 74 years, with only one election in the past 50 years resulting in a majority of less than 10,000 votes.  Perhaps this might explain the novelty presence of some of the names on the candidate list.  74 years and we’re bottom or thereabouts of nearly every social statistic league table you can think of, but surely it’s not yet time to bring in a former Big Brother contestant or (bless him) the hero of the Glasgow airport attack in 2007, John Smeaton.

Despite most of the negative press, I do like this little video on the BBC website, it doesn’t pull any punches but it makes it clear that it’s not all bad. I think that is something that people on the outside looking in seem to forget.  We’ll find out the results tomorrow morning, but I’m not bracing myself for a shock.

Marathon

The Preparation

When I rolled out of bed and into another miserable March morning for a light jog, the idea of running a marathon had never really crossed my mind.  Job hunting in a strange city was bringing me down and I needed something to take my mind off of it.  I had met a group of Irish lads in the city and after playing for their indoor football team I realised that a couple of months of inactivity had left me horribly unfit and I needed to take swift action if I wanted to make an impact playing 11s in the summer.

After a couple of weeks of jogging laps I was at an acceptable level of fitness and starting to regain some of the sharpness and pace that were lost during my drinking days at university.  I didn’t want to stop there though, I wanted to be the quickest and the fittest and to achieve this I’d have to set aside a lot of time for sprints, suicides and laps.  I stuck to the schedule and it was paying off, by the middle of June I was running my heart out on the pitch and not even feeling tired the next day.  It was around this time that two of my teammates were discussing the possibility of entering the Toronto marathon in October.

I had never been a distance runner and didn’t really know what I was getting into when I agreed to give it a whirl.  The training I had done up to that point was all geared towards being more effective on the football pitch, acceleration and quick direction changes, and even at school while I was a strong sprinter I always suffered in longer races.

The training scheme I was following kicked off in the last week of June and I was finding it easy enough to up my mileage slightly on a week by week basis.  I was doing two training runs a week rather than the three shown in that schedule because I was still playing football three times a week as well.  My shifts at the Hard Rock were relaxation periods in comparison to the miles I was clocking up in July and August.  It began to look like I would be running the race solo too when I learned that the two lads who put the idea of the marathon in my head were pulling out, one leaving the country and the other without the time to fit the training in.

As the days passed the runs were getting tougher and tougher but I still felt as if I had a big psychological edge every time I laced up my runners. I had never pulled up on any of my training runs,  every time I had set off I had finished where I expected and no injuries, aches or exhaustion had stopped me in my path.  Things like this would give me a huge mental boost on race day and I was hoping to cling to it all the way through.

Unfortunately the risks of playing football three times a week eventually got the better of me and a late knee high challenge during a crucial league match for the Toronto Irish at the start of September threatened to shatter the dream.  Along with that impact injury I was aware that a summer of five days out of seven running around was very hard on my knees and I was in danger of burning myself out. I lost my psychologica edge on my very next training run, a projected 17-miler, forced to pull up after just four miles unable to bend my knee without recoiling in pain.

I took the necessary precautions and iced the knee often, skipped a few training sessions and tried to stay off of it as much as I could.  I didn’t feel much pain in it on a day-to-day basis, but after around thirty minutes of exercise it began to ache and I’d have to give in.  I barely kicked a ball at the tail end of the football season, a 45 minute appearance in the end of season cup was all I managed out of the final few fixtures.

I sought some advice from the doctor in the final few weeks but my name never reached the top of the waiting line and by race day I was merely clinging to the simple ice and rest formula.  There was still a lot of training for me to do, but the risk of further aggravating the problem forced me to stay on the couch for a few weeks.

Race Day

I am notoriously bad at getting up in the morning and knowing that I was required to get up at 6am on race day, I decided to set three alarms as a failsafe.  Fortunately, the adrenaline was more than enough to wake me and one of the most testing days of my life began with some cereal and a nutrigrain bar.  The race start was at Mel Lastman Square in the north of the city and with it being Sunday morning the subway was not yet running and I was forced to rise at the crack of dawn to get on an extremely crowded specially chartered bus destined for the starting line.

The bus arrived shortly before 8am, an hour before I was due to begin, allowing the half marathoners to get to the starting line before the gun went off.  For the 26.2 mile club though there was a lot of waiting around.  I nervously jogged around and stretched my muscles in every conceivable way, trying my best to keep warm on what was a very chilly October morning.

When 9am finally rolled around I was in a huge crowd thirty yards from the start line and anxious to get started.  I felt a little nervous, as I always do before I participate in any type of sporting event.  The good thing here though was that this was something that would be going on for hours and hours, so after the initial nerves subside I would have plenty of time to enjoy the day.

I maintained a slow pace in the early going, wary of my knee trouble and trying to keep it feeling good for as long as possible.  The bad news came a lot earlier than I expected though and it began to cause me some pain in between the 2nd and 3rd kilometre.  After barely five minutes I was already doubting if I had any chance of finishing this monster.

I had done a lot of reading about mental preparation for the marathon in the week leading up to the race.  I was hoping it would give me an edge and a little more belief.  If anything though, it hindered me.  Every article I read generally had a theme of ‘If you ever think for a second that you might not finish the race then YOU WILL NOT FINISH THE RACE.’  The knee trouble combined with the fact that humans aren’t really supposed to run this distance meant that I was severely doubting myself for most of the time I was training and reading these articles was making me even more stressed.

Fortunately, I can tell you that those assertions about having doubts were complete bollocks.  The knee was a major worry but when it was causing problems before it tended to ache a little more every minute until it became unbearable and I could no longer bend it or put pressure on it.  This time for some glorious reason it just stayed as a minor inconvenience for the bulk of the race.

Crossing the halfway line in 1 hour, 47 minutes was respectable and seeing as I hadn’t been pushing too hard I still felt like I had lots in the tank as the second half of the race began.  I could feel that my pace was dropping in the third quarter though and some minor aches were beginning to develop alongside my ever stiffening right knee.  It was only once I passed the 32km (~ 20 mile) mark that I started to genuinely believe that I could get through this thing.  But the injection of some real self belief was sent off kilter by the onset of some severe aches and pains.

I kept telling myself ‘Six/five/four more miles, just six more, that’s all, the hard part is over’ but in my heart of hearts I knew that this just wasn’t true.  The longest run I’d successfully completed in training was 16 miles and the new ground I was treading came with a jolt of pain in every part of my body.  My knee was as sore as ever, but along with that my ankles felt like they were a few bounces away from snapping, my shoulders like I’d been giving Godzilla a piggyback to Tokyo and even my nipples felt like they’d been jabbed with a rusty razor, chafing under the strain of over three hours of continuous running.

As I came up to the final mile though I knew that there was literally nothing that could have stopped me.  I haven’t felt like I was going to cry from physical pain since my early teens and even though I was a little worried I would burst into tears in front of the many watching spectators I knew that I was so very close to achieving something I had worked like a dog for.   The slightly uphill final stretch on University Avenue was like slow torture for my aching muscles but when I did finally cross the finish line I felt absolutely fantastic.  My original goal of finishing in under four hours was not met (I finished in 4 hours, 6 minutes) but looking back on my injury interrupted training and agony infused final six miles made it rather easy to let myself off the hook on that count.

The pain didn’t wait around though.  Within five minutes of stopping my entire body was as stiff as a board and I wasn’t even able to walk without making my roommate laugh hysterically for about four days.  Still, it was all over and I had done it. The feeling of elation and an overwhelming belief that anything is possible with the correct application were worthy souvenirs to go alongside my new shiny medal.

Believe!