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I’m currently writing a book! About my novice exploits as a runner, and all the things I wish I had known before I did my first marathon. And my second marathon. And my third. So it’s pretty hard to write a book like that if I don’t actually go out and do some marathons.

These past two years (mid 2022 to mid 2024) have been particularly fraught, hence there has been a bit of an on/off relationship with my self directed training programme. This blogpost is mainly about that recent two year history.

Although first, I will need to tell a short story for those of you who have not been following me for the past twenty years or so!

London – 22 Oct 2024

In 2005 I took up running to combat an unhealthy life style. I was 42 when that decision was made, I had an imprecise plan, but it did at least include a 10K race within a year of starting my new found hobby. In the early years I did three 10K races, then a ropey half marathon, and then another couple of 10K races. Finally, I decided that I would do a marathon when I was 50.

A milestone achievement at a milestone age.

That meant more 10K races, and another Half, and plenty of training inbetween. In 2013, when I was 50 years old, I completed my first marathon. I did Milton Keynes in the most unimpressive way imaginable. Next, aged 55 (in 2018) I completed the Geneva Marathon with a marginally better performance. And then I planned to do my third marathon in 2023, aged 60.

It didn’t happen!

Owing to minor injuries in 2022 and 2023, I relaxed my 5 year cycle, and instead of 2023 I planned to do my third marathon in 2024, aged 61.

My training routes are mainly in central London, and I spend of lot of time on The Thames Path running along the South Bank. The lengths and the routes vary, but if you imagine Tower Bridge at one end, and Battersea Bridge at the other, you get a feel for my territory. And I’m a 6 o’clock man! Normally I wake at 5 o’clock (seven days a week) and I have a habit of always being out of the door at 6 on the dot, to run. Which was good until it wasn’t. No matter the weather, nor the season, nor the amount of daylight (meaning the absence of daylight) I would run my routes under London street lights . . . and that’s the problem.

London – 14 Dec 2023

Raised paving stones and sunken drains have been responsible for a number of injuries. In the dark I can’t see them. Yes, I’ve had other minor tumbles, clipping kerb stones, or losing my footing on gravel, but the only serious injuries were always the result of uneven pavements. After a particularly troubling tumble in Aug 2023, I started wearing a TubiGrip on my left knee, and I still went and did the Tonbridge Half Marathon on 1 Oct 2023. A bad injury (when it was dark) in mid Oct 2023 saw me substitute swimming in place of my regular running (for 6 weeks).  Then winter set in, and I spent more time running in the dark. By December I was back to my normal running routine again, when on Boxing day (in the dark at about 6.30am) disaster struck (again)!

London – 26 Dec 2023

By this time I had already been looking ahead for marathons I could run in 2024. Boston (Lincs) in April, Peterborough in May, Loch Ness in September, and Chelmsford in October. I had registered to do Boston on 28 Apr 2024.

After the tumble on Boxing Day, I took some time to think. Having done no running by mid January 2024, I asked to defer my Boston 2024 entry to 2025. I also gave up running in the dark. I resolved to wait as long as it took (not merely rest for the recommended 6 weeks) and I would resume running when I felt that I was truly ready. In my diary I wrote that might be one or two years. By the end of March 2024 I was running again, and I booked my place for the Loch Ness Marathon on 29 Sep 2024.

It’s OK to not be OK – stopping at 8K of a 10K run
London – 28 Sep 2023

Then, two more false starts in early 2024, and two more injury breaks followed. It was nothing serious, there had been no more falls (because there was no more running in the dark) but my body was telling me that I wasn’t ready to pursue my full training programme the way I normally do. The ligaments in my left knee were telling me to take it easy on them. I went for a 20K walk one day, and took an unplanned break after 16K. Luckily, by early July 2024, I was feeling 100% again. I could run without any complaints, and I was back to my normal weekly pattern:

Tuesday: 7K
Thursday: 7K
Sunday: 10K

However, if I was going to be ready for the Loch Ness Marathon on 29 Sep 2024 I would have to step it up a bit.

Yokohama – 16 May 2024

Some time ago I scaled back my mid week runs from 10K to 7K. I don’t really have enough time before work on a Tuesday and a Thursday to do 10K, but it was the normal pattern a while back. And it will have to be the normal pattern again “now”. In place of the sevens I substituted 10, and in place of the ten I substituted 15.

Tuesday: 10K
Thursday: 10K
Sunday: 15K

The Sunday runs soon became 20K, and I made time for myself to work on a heftier weekly pattern. Doing 10+10+20 wasn’t enough, I needed more muscle strength and hence more distance. I had never been this ambitious before. Another change of routine:

Tuesday: 15K
Thursday: 15K
Sunday: 25K

I followed that exact pattern for three weeks without any problems other than my calf muscles complaining about the unexpectedly high work load. There is no way that I can do more than 15K mid week without changing my work pattern. My Sunday runs will be extended to 30K, and then a further three weeks at 35K.

However, I am not going to be ready to do Loch Ness. Which is a shame, because it looks like a lovely event, and I really like Scotland. I could risk it, and I could probably finish, but what if I didn’t? It will take me two days to drive there, and two to drive back. I also had six nights booked in a hotel in Inverness. In total, ten days away from London, and a budget of well over £1,000. That’s a lot of time and energy and money, when I am borderline fit to run 42K at the end of September

But as they say in their race guide “if your training has not gone to plan, we ask you give serious consideration to your ability to run the marathon”. So I have had to let them know that I am dropping out. Instead I shall register to do the Chelmsford Marathon. That gives me more weeks for training, and most importantly, more Sunday runs at 30K and 35K. I will certainly be fit to do 42K by mid October. The extra weeks are enough to boost my stamina and to boost my confidence. Moreover, Chelmsford is a simple train ride from London, with a super off peak day return costing me less than £30.

And the book? The draft version already runs to more than 50,000 words, so it’s a serious book, starting with the early days in 2005.

Rural France, near CERN in Geneva – 2 May 2018

Let’s see how I cope with Chelmsford on 13 Oct 2024. Then I can write the Chelmsford chapter! And hopefully that means that the book can be published before the end of 2024.

Footnote – 21 Oct 2024

The Chelmsford Marathon was completed more or less according to plan. The book was completed during the days that followed.

Buy “The Third Marathon” on Amazon

On only two counts do I really stand out from the crowd.

● One is that I like running. Well, I have learned to like it. And I like it so much that I enter various races.
● The other is that I like foreign travel. I engross myself in it to such an extent that, before I go somewhere new, I often try to learn the language.

To date that means that I have learnt and forgotten some Greek and some Portuguese, although I did find that my elementary skills in both of them were particularly helpful when I visited the respective countries. My knowledge of Japanese and French is good, and I have retained lesser skills in German, Dutch and Spanish.

And then sometimes these two passions combine. I find myself doing training runs, or actual races, in foreign countries. I even have my own private log of 10km running routes across the whole of the UK, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan. I ran the Geneva Marathon in 2018.

As I’ve been getting older I tend to limit my new adventures, and I have given up starting on any more new languages. I’m now a creature of habit, spending quite a bit of holiday time in familiar places like Japan, France and Switzerland.

Photographs showing sunrise over the marina in Yokohama. And Paul running on a rural road in France at the back of CERN near Geneva.

In Feb 2024 I visited Yokohama for the first time. I have established some training routes in my adopted home city of Fukuoka, but this year I needed to map out a 10km course in Yokohama. Naturally, I started that by having a look at Google maps. Most of my running is done in central London. And in order to minimise interference (and to stay “in the zone”) I have learnt to follow footpaths by rivers and canals. Fewer road junctions and fewer traffic lights to contend with!

My routes in Fukuoka take me up to the coast line near the Dome (the baseball stadium), and it turns out that my 10km route in Yokohama took me directly to, and then along the coast towards the marina. There’s even a prescribed route marked out on the footpath from Rinko Park to Yamashita Park.

Unfortunately it didn’t fit my plan as I had to cover 2.5km just to get to Rinko Park, and another 2.5km back to the hotel. I covered part of the prescribed course, down to Zō no Hana Park next to Yokohama Marina, and then I headed back again.

I run early in the morning. Up at 5.00am and usually out hitting the pavement around about 6.00am. The official Yokohama coast line route starts in Rinko Park at the Angel Bridge (just visible on the right in this photo), it goes down past the Intercontinental Hotel (the high, bow shaped building) and then off to the marina and beyond.

As I passed the military facility at Yokohama Port (in the twilight) I noticed one of the decorative manhole covers that can occasionally be found in Japan. On the way back, with the morning becoming brighter, I noticed a colourful version of the “standard” Yokohama municipal design. Inevitably that meant that I wanted to go back later in the day, get some decent photos, and see if there were any more.

I walked the 5km along my coastline route (taking in the main entrance to the port) and I came back a different way.

And that was a surprisingly good decision! I stumbled across the Pokemon one!

The Japanese Navy has now retired the Nippon Maru, a fully rigged sailing ship, and it sits alongside the quay. And the pavement right next to the ship has its own specially designed manhole cover. This one is probably unique.

Finally, half way back to town (the central station is the centre of Yokohama as far as I’m concerned) I found the Moomin one when I wasn’t even looking for it.

I have seen others in the past. For me, they are a lovely curiosity rather than a passion to be pursued. But for some people, it is a passion! They even have a name for it – an enthusiast is called an operculist.

What can you really achieve as a public speaker? If you’re lucky or skilled or both, you may be able to connect with your audience and leave them better educated on the issue of the “Three Big Rocks” and avoid the problems of the “Condom Test”.

In the UK, the typical audience member will remember only three things. At the end of seminars I have a habit of asking some of the ordinary audience members “what are the three things that stood out from that talk”? On one memorable occasion (many years ago) I was an ordinary delegate at an upmarket event in the posh part of Berkshire, and I remember afterwards asking three people in succession about the “Three Big Rocks”. Each and every one of them failed to articulate even one single message that the seminar had sought to deliver. I don’t know if that was a failure of the speaker, the delegates, or the UK education system.

On Thursday 7 September 2023 I went to the “in-person” launch event of the UK Green Skies Report. It appears that the “Three Big Rocks” philosophy is something unfamiliar to the chair, the moderator, and the experts on the panel. In most presentations, the audience will remember the first thing you said, the last thing you said, and will forget everything in the middle. For this reason I open my speeches with the “Three Big Rocks”, and close them with the “Three Big Rocks”. In the middle I tend to expand the discussion of each key issue, and attempt to avoid the introduction of any new material which is tangential to my objectives. If I want my audience to remember one thing, then that one thing gets headline billing at the start and the end of my talks.

I have a style guide for my speeches and it starts with “when I get to the end of this meeting, how will I know if I’ve had a good meeting”? My early draft of any presentation then lists the “Three Big Rocks” that I want to focus on. I have objectives, written down in black and white. Once drafted, I apply the “Condom Test” to my scribbly notes.

If you have ever worked in marketing, you may already know about the “Condom Test”. Take any piece of marketing copy, remove the name of the product (say) “Time Machine” and in its place substitute the word “condom”. It works like this . . .

“Our time machines put you in control of your own destiny.”

. . . becomes . . .

“Our condoms put you in control of your own destiny.”

If the sentence still makes sense, in ordinary English, then the sentence is telling the consumer nothing about your product. It’s word soup. It’s a collection of wasted space on a page. It’s a missed opportunity to educate your prospect about the value of your offering, and instead bore them to death with platitudes.

I tried the “Condom Test” on the first couple of pages of The Green Skies Report. For example:

Government should heed the advice of industry experts and public bodies and introduce price support schemes, such as a Contracts for Difference scheme, for Condoms, to provide price stability to the market and support inward investment into a domestic Condom industry.

That sentence still makes sense, in ordinary English, and tells the reader nothing about the product, only that there is a desire to conduct political lobbying, but the validity of the “should” statement has not been articulated.

Had I written it, it would have said something like:

There are compelling reasons why the Government should implement these three industry panel recommendations:

• Recommendation A – Reason 1, 2 and 3
• Recommendation B – Reason 1, 2 and 3
• Recommendation C – Reason 1, 2 and 3

No platitudes, three big rocks, each backed up with three reasons!

This particular “Green Skies” event was attended by a few dozen industry insiders, and a couple of dozen industry outsiders. As an outsider, I felt lost within minutes of the start. The chair began with “we are delighted to be delighted today about delightful things and this delights us”. No big rocks yet!

The moderator then asked the first panel expert a question which was six questions in one, to which the panel expert replied “that seems to be six questions in one”. No big rocks there either! At the start of the discussion there was no meaningful introduction of the subject, certainly nothing that would have educated an industry outsider, and there was no opportunity for either of the experts to have (say) 60 seconds to introduce themselves.

A bad start was followed by a short formal discussion, mainly about lobbying and about how allegedly “brilliant” the UK is on the subject of “condoms”, and that lasted only 15 minutes. I for one did not have time to pick up the report beforehand and read it, and I was surprised that the short discussion omitted any clear indication of what the report said. It was an exercise where three people on stage engaged in mutual back scratching. I also gained the impression that they thought everybody in the room was an aviation expert and/or sustainability expert. The ordinary Joe Public was completely overlooked. There then followed a very long Q&A with the audience. Some of the questions were not questions. A two way dialogue between Panel Expert A and Overt Insurance Lady enabled her to say “insurance” several times.

When BigWig in the audience (from BigCo Airline) hijacked the discussion and started a long-winded comment, not a question, followed by a two way self promotional dialogue with the moderator, I pictured in my head this cartoon which I have often seen in the past:

In this case, it was more a long-winded, self-indulgent non-question, tangentially on topic but designed to raise the profile (and improve the public perception) of BigCo (which has a bad reputation). I walked out when it became clear that BigWig was not being shut down, and was getting more than his fair share of air time. This was not an audience Q&A session, but a sales fest for unashamed boasts.

The “Three Big Rocks” is a concept which Stephen Covey introduced in his book “The 7 Habits”. Today, what were the “Three Big Rocks” that the organisers wanted the audience to take away? I have no idea! This was not a presentation for an audience, and certainly not for an audience of outsiders. It was an industry event staged for the purpose of preparing a press release which in the next few days will be touted around national and international press outlets. That’s what lobbyists do. And I had been caught in a trap which I ought to have foreseen. They wanted press coverage, and they demonstrated little interest in providing informed debate for the delegates.

The biggest rock I took away from that talk is that I won’t be going back again.