Passing Shots
RUNNING is by its very nature a very solitary and selfish experience. It is the ultimate DIY.
Driving to work in the morning, or out collecting the Sunday Scandal from the newsagents at the weekend, there seem to be more sweaty T-shirt-clad runners pounding the pavements and chasing those endorphins than ever before.
Why do it? Unlike football or cricket there is no collective good or defined result. You are not reliant on others you are only as good as you feel.
For those who choose to take their running a step further and race, there's about as much chance of winning as Paula Radcliffe is likely to be named on England's cricket tour of Pakistan and India this winter - well, the Bedford Bambi might score more runs than Ian Bell has this summer!
So why do it? Running is about personal pride, performance and what sports psychologists might suggest is "staying focussed within your particular zone". Running is not a team sport, though last weekend was the exception for hundreds of Hampshire runners taking part in the popular Test Way relays.
This is a 45-mile eight-stage relay, which starts at Inkpen Beacon and winds its way south via Mottisfont and Romsey to finish by the Salmon Leap pub in Totton. At most races, there are marshalls standing at every nasty road junction, but along the rural bridleways of the Test Way there is just you, a crumpled paper map, and a radar trying to pick out the tiny green TW signs which line this picturesque route. The only marshalls appear at the end of each handover.
Some parts of the Test Way are breathtaking. Chocolate-box thatched cottages, beautiful little villages, and some wonderful countryside with rolling green fields.
The key to the race is to recce your route beforehand. Mine was leg four, a 7.8km leg between Middleton and Wherwell, which was a tricky, twisty run darting down muddy paths, alongside an alley beside a row of houses, across a football field, and through a pub garden. You run across fields, past a stomach-churning piggery and beside a chicken farm. There's also a heart-stopping moment towards the end when you hurtle past some bloodhound kennels to receive a raucous canine welcome from the baying mutts!
When you're running in races, it's just yourself to look after. In a relay, you are so conscious of running as part of a team. You don't want to let anyone down, when you're tiring you know you can't let up, but keep your form, and finish strong. You also know you have to be there for the handover - how embarrassing for your team-mate to turn up at the handover and you're not there.
A friend drove me to the start of my leg, and some 45 minutes before I was expected to run, I had us totally lost. We found ourselves firstly in the middle of Andover and then heading the wrong way down the A303 towards Exeter. We got there in the end, though. Even though I had run the route beforehand, with no runners to follow because the field was so spread out, there were some sweaty-palm occasions when you wondered if you had taken the wrong turn.
For a couple of guys, one from my own club, Stubbington Green Runners, and also Winchester Running Club, they did get well and truly lost. The duo sheepishly arrived at their finishes having lost loads of time, just before search parties of St Bernards with whisky drams were sent out to find them.
Well done to Hardley Runners for organising another terrific event - now in its 19th year and to Winchester Ladies for smashing almost half an hour off the course record.
These fleet-footed females were so fast that they would have beaten my all-men's team, which finished a respectable fourth, by eight minutes, and were just half an hour behind men's winners, Southampton Running Club. That's a sobering thought.
By Dave King, published in the Southern Daily Echo, Saturday, September 17 - Passing Shots.