“When running your marathon, whatever you do — don’t stop for the massage sirens.”
This is the sage advice dispensed by Dr Tim Noakes. Before he became the lead proponent of the cult of protein, he wrote The Lore of Running — a Bible-like tome which, for years, I kept in a handy (next to the loo) location for regular consultations (several times a day).
Ignore his scientifically proven, much triangulated, triple-blind tested, published and peer reviewed advice at your peril.
As it happens, my first marathon was run in Paris, and the massage siren in question was a dashing French gentleman who proposed a gentle rub of my addled legs in a very seductive French accent. He could have been talking about anchovies or the benefits of regular colonics — I didn’t care — it sounded bloody marvellous to me.
I promptly succumbed to his ministrations. A kilometre later I was rueing the day.
Almighty waves of debilitating cramps were hobbling me, and as I looked up to the sky from the foetal crouched position that was giving scant relief on the sidewalk, I wailed, “Tim, Tim, why have you forsaken me?”
I pulled myself together and dug deep, remembering the sage’s words for just such an occasion. “Push through, kilometre by kilometre. Don’t worry, you’ve just hit ‘the wall’. It’s your brain doing its best to override your body, which is clearly hell-bent on running you into self-destruction.”
I pushed through. And when they offered the red wine at kilometre 40 (they are French, of course), I couldn’t recall that Tim had ever written anything against or for this particular temptation on the path to righteousness in the entirety of the lore, and therefore, I drank of it with joy in my heart and the blossoming realisation that salvation was at hand.
Once a marathon runner, always a marathon runner — and this could be fatal for one’s conversational aptitude. It’s terribly dreary to be caught up in the trudge of the amateur runner’s enthusiasm for Strava, training programmes, pronation, toe striking and the all-consuming shoe question.
I can tell you for free that in many a home this last week there are people whose frontal lobes have seized up and turned to jelly as they listen to their in-house bore discuss the minutiae of the recent London Marathon. And, at the risk of spreading this affliction to a wider audience, I have to talk about the shoe.
If you somehow missed this athletic milestone in the history of wonderful human endeavours (because, admittedly, there has been some other stuff going on), let me tell you. Please let me tell you! Everyone else is running for the hills every time I open my mouth.
Not one but two runners, Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha, broke the sub-2 marathon mark in a World Athletics-sanctioned race, with Sawe setting the world record at 1.59.30. Kejelcha came in 11 seconds later.
This didn’t happen on a course designed by Nike with lights shining on the path and a rotating cast of pacers but on the streets of London Town with 60,000 people running behind them.
To put this in perspective, the bulk of the runners — 33% — ran the same course in between four and five hours, and only 3,304 people ran it in under three. The media race time was 4.15.41.
So I predict a rush on the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, also worn incidentally by Tigst Assefa, who set a new women’s-only world record (2:15:41) on the same day. They cost about R9,000, weigh 93 grams, and the bouncy stuff inside apparently makes you run like a gazelle. They’re a one-hit wonder because you need a new pair for every race.
There was a time when swimmers were donning ever-more technically marvellous full-body swimsuits to speed up in minuscule but crucial increments in the water. They got banned. But racing shoes are a little trickier to manage. Because everyone wants a bounce in their step, what are you going to say to cyclists shaving weight off their bikes or tennis players with ever-smarter rackets?
But the all-important factor is the athlete themself — as a physical entity where technology is also hard at play in an arms race to perfection. So I was delighted to read that Sawe spent the last couple of months having blood being drawn almost daily to prove that he wasn’t doping.
All sorts of things, including the newfangled peptides, are on the list of substances aimed at keeping a level playing field in as much as the concept of “level” can be applied to the freakishly marvellous athletic outliers that these runners represent on the human biology median.
To see them run past you on a marathon that loops is to understand that you might exist on a continuum of human biology with these gliding apparitions, but in truth we would need to conduct some very deep research to actually prove it as a fact. To see them in motion is to apprehend that some of us are fast approaching another state of advanced being and grace.
That doesn’t apply to plodding old me, but a girl can dream. Also, that kind will never be tempted by the suave French masseuse with his sweet talk of Camembert because they don’t have time to register that the person exists in the split second they flash past his island of impending woe. Pass me the Beaujolais.
This article was first published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
