Conquering the Monster

I was somewhat surprised today to discover quite how long it has been since i posted to this blog. Even more surprised that it was even longer since i posted about running. This tends to confirm that this, my third (completed) marathon campaign has been perhaps a little run-of-the-mill. For whatever reason, perhaps familiarity, perhaps the very extended build up, it has lacked quite the same feeling of anticipation in its lead up. Of course real life intrusions have also lent perspective. Perhaps not quite too much perspective this time round but still plenty to provide a distraction from the running. With running though, its often the performances that you don't have your eye fully on that are the most significant and that was certainly the case for me on Sunday at Loch Ness.

I will hold my hands up now and admit that i got my race quite monumentally wrong. I had a plan. It was a good plan. It was a plan that would get me round in a solid PB. It would let me complete a marathon feeling good and with something to build on. By the first mile marker that plan was looking shaky. By the end it was blown out of the water but with results that i couldn't have anticipated.

The plan was quite simply: 8:00 miles to come in with a time of 3:30. That was to be reviewed at both half way and around 18 miles but i wasn't planning on running any quicker than that before then. At this point it needs to be said that Loch Ness is not a course conducive to even pacing. Even accounting for the substantially downhill start, i was off too quick again. Mile splits were in the 7:40 range, later peppered with 7:20s. This was not how things were meant to go down. I had learned my lesson from Florence. Hadn't I? No not by a long shot. Fortunately though it turns out that it was actually my original strategy that was at fault and i was substantially fitter than i expected. The pace i was running proved to be sustainable and largely comfortable and the result was a whole 21 minutes off my best and a 3:20:10 clocking.

There has been some debate in the lead up and post-race about the extent to which the undulating course impacts on time. Is it a PB course? How much time are the hills worth? My view is coloured by the very good race i ran, but i am not convinced that it isn't actually quite a fast route. With some qualifications though. One of those being that you need to have strong quads. There is a lot of downhill running and you can make up good time there but if your quads are not up to it you will suffer later on. You also need to be prepared for the 'monster', the hill between miles 18 and 19.

Despite grim warnings from previous participants i was slightly underwhelmed by this. It is fairly long and has a fair incline but i dont see more than 20 seconds of an impact on my splits - probably about the same as the hill coming out of Taymouth in the Aberfeldy half actually. Now granted by heart rate did shoot up substantially so it took some effort to maintain pace but a well trained runner should be able to hold a good pace up it and recover on the downhill after.

It wasn't quite plain sailing after the hill but i felt good enough to ramp up the pace. The last mile to a mile and a half hurt as HR started to drift upwards but i still had enough in the tank to put in a sub-7:00 mile and get over the line whilst feeling just about human and not quite falling off the digestive knife edge into either an unscheduled toilet stop or a boak break.

I have to say that i love this race. Everything i thought about the event after last year's 10k has been confirmed and multiplied. The whole thing has such a lovely atmosphere and is so well organised. The weather also just about couldn't have been better - even down to the walk across the playing fields to the buses with runners appearing out of the mist from all directions. It is a shame to have a start without support but you would give that up for the trip around the Loch with the silvery water reflecting the mist-shrouded hills.

On a colder and windier day the start area would be challenging. It is exposed enough that even with the good weather it was pretty chilly and there is nothing quite like a cold wait in an endless toilet queue to take our mind off pre-race nerves. The route itself is much less exposed and the conditions were ideal for the most part.

Off the start i found myself going backwards through the field quite rapidly as the usual adrenaline kicked in and everyone piled off down the hill. After the first couple of miles very few passed me as i worked my way up the rankings steadily. The hilliness of my training really paid off on the early hills around 4 or 5 miles in which seemed to catch a good few out. Once those were out of the way and we reached the banks of the Loch the running felt good. If you are going to try and break yourself, it is quite a bonny place to try and do it. Lots of exotic accents amongst the runners suggest quite how attractive that proposition is around the world.

Other highlights included
- the chap disposing of his water bottle with an overhead throw from the other side of the road straight into a wheelie bin.
- discovering that while paper cups are an environmentally responsible way to deliver drinks, you end up wearing sticky energy drink if you don't stop to drink
- wittertainment - SHUTUP BUTTWAD!!
- a big menshie aff Bryan Burnett at the finish
- no boaks - substantial breakfast 4 hours before the start is the answer

So, again? Well, for the first time i come out of a marathon not planning to immediately sign up for another. I will do this race again but this all went just too well and i fear disappointment if i try again too soon. This has also been something like 9 months of fairly serious training. I need a bit of a break from that. The general plan now is to get quicker over shorter distances. There are 5k, 10k and half PBs to be had and improved upon and getting that speed in my legs will be what ultimately gets me a better marathon and under the 3:15 good for age threshold that will qualify me for London. 2015 will be marathon year (again).

A Favourite Resort for Drowning Puppies

Early accounts of George Square are not good. Descriptions tell of a hollow filled with green water, used as a site for drowning puppies and slaughtering horses. It is tempting to suggest that things haven't improved much since those days. While that would be manifestly unfair, the ongoing fiasco that is Glasgow's main civic space says a lot about the failings of our urban environment, attitude to design and indeed public life.

Even beyond its sorry beginnings, George Square has never really been the grand civic place of the public imagination. Starting out as private gardens more in the style of Blythswood Square, it was residential in use and lacking in grandeur for much its existence. The development of the the surroundings was piecemeal at best with previous recessions limiting the speed and scale of building around it. It says something of the muscularity of William Young's City Chambers that it takes this ragtag collection of the mediocre, the mismatched and the misplaced and almost turns it into a true civic space. Almost. One has always needed some degree of tunnel vision to be truly impressed by George Square. Not for Glasgow the vision of an Adam applied in a complete and harmonious manner. Glasgow is pragmatic and proud. Not short of ambition but rarely matching that ambition with real vision. Glasgow knows what it wants and isn't afraid to bulldoze anything in its way to get to it  but from slum clearance to slum clearance and from GoMA to Glasgow Harbour there is rarely sufficient clarity or sophistication of thought to make anything of true worth.

Thus it is no real surprise that grand plans to resolve some of the issues of the square turned quickly to farce and ended with the sort of parochial philistinism that pervades so much of Scottish public life. I will declare an interest here in that i am of the view that this small-mindedness is largely, if not exclusively, propagated by the Labour Party establishment who still have a stranglehold of many town halls across the nation. As Scots we take great pride in having driven the Conservatives out. The Labour Party however remains resolutely conservative and the difference in case is becoming less and less relevant over time. Far from just being resistant to change there is increasingly a need to justify everything in purely monetary values. This is still jarring when it comes from former socialists but from social care to education they talk more of costs that values. Anything which might be deemed frivolous like improving our shared public spaces is always costed out in units of schools or nurses.

So, if you could choose where you start from, it wouldnt be here but its only the problems which are actually problematic that need solutions. The stuff that isnt broken can happily stay as it is. We have a broken thing here, but what to do?

Redesign it clearly. That much is pretty obvious you would think. Except it turns out it isn't. Not when you have been through the farrago of a competition that GCC have run.  Not when you have bodged consultation and communication with the public. When you go through all this you end up with not doing that much really. Tidying the place up a bit is an answer but whats it an answer to?

Well, not that much but the real issue behind all this is the failure of anyone involved in it to really define what the objectives of the project are and to get people on board. If you are going to change something it isn't unreasonable to ask why you are changing it. Perhaps the competition brief did this. Not being party to that document it is hard to tell but from the outside the objectives dint seem clear. There certainly seems to be a mismatch between what Jimmy Public wants out of the square and what GCC want.

If we are to take the comments sections of various websites at face value, the man on the Govan omnibus wants somewhere nice to sit. Somewhere with trees and grass. According to at least one facebook page, they want a public park.

GCC on the other hand want somewhere to stage events, mostly for financial gain. They see lots of people attending events and concerts in the square and think that means they are probably a good idea.

I can sympathise with the council on this one. George Square is an appropriate venue for various events in the calendar from the Art Fair to the Great Scottish Run to the Olympic Torch Relay. While Glasgow has plenty of parks and green space it is hard to find another decent hard paved open area to accommodate mass events. Suggestions that these things should be banished from the city centre to the SECC should be treated with contempt. These are events which enrich the life of a city and help bring us all together. A central space for civic events has value.

This is something that the rest of the world doesn't struggle so much with. There are not many places in the world that fill up their main civic space with nicely tended lawns and ornamental borders. The very best spaces in the world are simply designed but provide the backdrop to the life of the city whether that is Piazza San Marco in Venice, Piazza Navona in Rome or the Grand Place in Brussels. No grass to be found but still plenty of opportunities to sit and linger.

This is where i think the real mistake has been made. Getting architects involved in something like this is dangerous. Architects like to build things. That is fine if you want a building but when you are dealing with the space between buildings it can be terribly dangerous. Where you thought you would get a nice piazza to sit in, you might have ended up with a great big clumsy blob squatting in it like Seville did.

So, less should have been more but that would only have gone part of the way. It would still fail to deal with the real issues of George Square which remain regardless of what is ultimately done with it. We cant do much about the scale of the space or what surrounds it in built form but if we look at successful civic spaces elsewhere we find that they are either entirely or partially pedestrianised. A civic space is a space for people, not a space for cars.  For a city that has had itself so heavily engineered to accommodate cars over the years it seems absurd that just about every single street remains a key traffic route from one place to another.

All of this is, i am sure, the result of sound engineering and analysis but here is a thought: if you cant divert the traffic elsewhere to make the city centre a better place for people, how about doing something to reduce the level of traffic until you can? We need bigger thinking than just repaving George Square, we need to rethink how people move around the city on a larger scale. If we don't there are whole swathes of the city which will remain forever blighted and impossibly to properly regenerate.

On the limitations of architecture

I have been thinking about the limitations of architecture a lot lately. That i am doing so rather than thinking about the possibilities it presents is probably instructive of where my thinking is going. As a profession we have never been less valued, either in esteem or fee value yet many architects still believe they have the skills and power to make an appreciable positive impact in the way we live. But do they? I am increasingly less sure. At the same time i have also started to question the extent to which architecture itself matters.

This situation is not particularly new. We have been sliding inexorably in this direction since the eighties. The abolition of the fee scale and opening up of competition in the profession had an undoubted impact. At the same time procurement changed radically. With design and build the architect was no longer central to the process. He certainly wasn't getting paid as if he was either. Our customers don't seem to need us and they don't want to pay us. Can we really say that we are giving them good value?

As much as i would like it to be, our ills are not all down to Thatcher and the greed-is-good culture of the eighties. We sowed our own seeds of destruction long before that by failing to change and to really understand where technology was taking us. We have clung to notions that we are somehow gentleman artists. Polymaths. Renaissance men who can turn their hand to most any design task, from tea spoon to city plan. We dislike justifying design decisions as if that casts aspersions on our judgement. Heaven forfend that we might try to base our choices on some sort of evidence base! That sounds awfully like engineering, we are artists. We believe in our highly developed sense of taste and aesthetics but this leaves us arguing for designs on the basis that they might "look better". How trivial this sounds. Is that the best we can do? A little voice crying in the philistine aesthetic wilderness for something which looks just a little bit better than the poor quality product that our clients/contractors/engineers/QSs (or indeed whoever it is we are blaming for our irrelevance this week) has proposed?

We don't even have any ammunition in this battle of taste. Architectural theory has long since disappeared up its own firmament. Reading such texts is an exercise in alienation and frustration written as they are in an obtuse, self-referential internal language. Where are the polemicists today? Le Corbusier may have been wrong but he had a view of architecture that engaged with the world. Now we have silly debates about silly shapes and the software we use to make them. We debate, on a bi-annual basis it seems, the relative merits of modernism vs classicism. And that's just about it. That seems to be the level of debate around architectural theory at the moment. Inspiring isn't it?

I sort of blame Frank Gehry. We are all living with the fall-out from the Bilbao Effect. This is the fallacy that urban regeneration can be driven by crazy architectural gestures. The Bilbao Effect is the thinking architect's 'wow factor'. It is the evidence we crave that architecture matters. Not just architecture though ARCHITECTURE!!!!!! Architecture that needs 50ft high flashing neon letters never mind a surfeit of punctuation on order to express it's importance. This gave us icons. In the past we were happy with attractive functional buildings that did what their users required and contributed in a positive way to the streetscape. Sometimes we fretted a bit about form and style but that was about it. Now everything has to be 'iconic'. It doesn't matter if it is an art gallery, a school, a waste processing plant or a morgue, if the brief doesn't ask for something innovative (what does that even mean architecturally?) it is wanting something iconic for whatever locale it is going to raise from mediocrity.

But steady on folks, is it really possible for *everything* to be an icon? What happened to good manners? To an understanding of the spaces in between the buildings? Where did we lose any conception of civic hierarchy?

What happened to the things which *really* give a sense of place?

Lets look at an example. Florence say. Florence has its share of icons, there is no doubt about that. The Duomo is about as iconic as they come, at least in the old sense which didn't involve swoopy silver blobs copulating in a windswept plaza next to a shopping mall packed with the same stuff that is packed into all the other shopping malls. The Duomo is allowed to be iconic though. It was the key civic and cultural institution of its time. Something which is shared by everyone can stand out. It can shout for attention because it deserves it. The Dumo gives Florence structure. It stands physically higher than its surroundings and acts as a navigational device from many parts of the city.

Any visitor to Florence will surely be impressed by the architecture of the Duomo. They might also find Santa Croce memorable. They may be awed by the scale of the Palazzo Pitti and the Palazzo Vecchio. You can be certain that while they will linger in the Piazza della Signoria they wont take any notice of the vast majority of the buildings surrounding it. They are unremarkable for the most part but that doesn't matter, the space in between them is the thing. These hypothetical tourists will enjoy strolling the streets and alleys of the Centro Storico. They will remember the charming shops and the picturesque streetscape. They will think very little of the buildings that line these passageways.

"The mother art is architecture" said Frank Lloyd Wright but that sort of thinking is dangerous. Cities are more important than buildings. Buildings are nothing but the Lego bricks that come together to make cities. Indeed they aren't even all the bricks. We have little control of street furniture, infrastructure, paving surfaces, economics, demographics, culture. Architecture is a minor player when you really consider the multitude of influences that make a place what it is.

Rather than pompously wiffling on about being the "mother art" i rather wish architects could have adopted a version of the hippocratic oath and vow to firstly do no harm. Architecture in isolation is demonstrably more likely to damage the qualities of a place than to enhance it. Looking out of my office window here i can only see one or two buildings which are positive influences on the urban environment. That's pretty atrocious. Our manifesto should be to conserve, maintain, repair where necessary and to improve where possible but to do it with humility. Most importantly though we need to start with the understanding that the space left over around our buildings are more important than the buildings themselves. Lets get back to thinking about people and how they interact with the urban environment.

Japan

A break from running chat. I failed to get myself to the Lochaber start line. Various issues got in the way not least of which was being away in Japan. Running goals are being reassessed but in the meantime, an intermission...

 It has been a while now since we got back from Japan and to be honest even after a number of days i don't entirely feel like i have properly processed the trip. It is of course naive to think that 10 days is enough to grasp a culture as complex and different as Japan's. I am still left wondering, "what was all that about??".

There are lots of trite things you can say about Japan though. It would be easy to glibly summarise it as a 'nation of contrasts'. It is of course a place with deep traditions that run alongside a mania for progress. This often results in some clanging juxtapositions that really jar our western sense of heritage and history.

Historic sites abound in the main cities. You are never far from a pretty Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple but these sit cheek by jowl with the seemingly out of control modern urban environment. Where we would impose a po-faced heritage exclusion zone around our major religious sites, with key views ruthlessly protected and good manners imposed, Japan takes a more matter of fact approach. The past, the present and future all seem to be treated as much the same thing. This is where i think the assumption that this is an enigmatic nation of contrasts is wrong. The ancient temples and the modern office buildings are all part of the same continuum. Every point in time is treated equally. At the same time, change is not just embraced, it is absolutely fundamental to the culture and the environment.

In many ways Japan is a difficult place for man to have settled. The forces of nature are felt very profoundly here with very real threats from earthquake and tsunami. There seems to be an acceptance that nothing is permanent. Everything can very quickly be swept away and renewal is in a sense more important than preservation. Unlike our culture of heavy masonry buildings that stand for hundreds or indeed thousands of years, Japan has a tradition of building in timber. This is much less permanent but that is not an issue. You will find that most temples or shrines have been rebuilt at some point due to fire, flood or earthquake. The beams and posts may be physically different but the connection to the past remains. Renewal and rebirth.

But this is of course fundamental to the mindset in may other ways. The religions of the area value a connection to nature and  while this may seem curious when in so many urban centres you feel like nature couldn't be further away, it retains an obvious presence in daily life. This is evident not least in the universal delight that the cherry blossom season seems to bring.

There is no doubt that cherry blossom is A BIG THING in Japan. Round the main sites it is hard to move for Japanese tourists taking pictures of it or standing in front of it getting their pictures taken. To my mind, its nice but the extent to which it is an event there seems out of proportion but it is really about the coming of spring. Our seasons tend to all meld into one so we don't really celebrate their changing much. All lot of those sort of festivities are also tied up with religion in the west as well. Shinto is very much focused on the nature so the coming of spring looms large in the Japanese psyche.

The cities though seem terribly disconnected from nature. Private suburban houses don't seem to have much in the way of gardens. The city centres are largely bereft of parks. What parks there are are imperial or former imperial sites. It seems like contact with nature is something only for the very privileged. The parks are largely amazing though. While we would balk at having to pay admission it seems to allow a high level of maintenance. Of course everything is also beautifully laid out in that typically Japanese manner which seems to us terribly picturesque but which clearly leaves very little to chance.

Unlike our parks too there is no sign of litter despite there being almost no bins available. The respect that is ingrained in Japanese culture extends to the immediate environment. Leaving rubbish or mess seems unthinkable. I don't know whether this cultural attitude came first or later but it seems to me that it is absolutely key to understanding how Japanese cities work and how they have developed. Without this inbuilt respect for others and your surroundings somewhere like Tokyo just couldn't work. So dense, so sprawling and so confined is the city that with an "I'm alright Jack" attitude of the sort you find in London the place would be a powder keg. Because everyone respects each other the infrastructural failings of the city are somehow mitigated. Busy subways work because people queue at carriage entrances. Massive intersections like Shibuya Crossing don't descend into chaos because people wait patiently to cross and then proceed at a leisurely pace when permitted to do so.

But it does seem to me like the cities lack a true civic heart and that has to have an impact on society. Tokyo though seems have developed numerous sub-communities. Being so big and dispersed has tended to make different functions or businesses converge together for convenience. Thus there is a sporting goods quarter, a kitchenware area and also Akihabara, Electric Town. Formerly the place to go for cheap electronics this place is now the seedy underbelly of the Japanese pop-culture that we are more and more familiar with in the west. Essentially a mono-culture of manga, anime, maid cafes and the preferences of the sort of chap who refuses to grow up, Aki is an example of what happens when a culture becomes insular and self-sustaining. It happens all the time on the internet where negative behaviours become reinforced till they are the norm because there are no dissenting voices to challenge them. In Aki Japan's issues with sexual politics become obvious and clear. The crossover between sexualised images and very young characters or pop idols is queasy to our western eyes. Alongside this is a particularly joyless trade in vintage toys. The whole thing seems like a very distorted version of childhood.

So at the end of the day, do i like Japan? That is a trickier question to answer than i anticipated before i went out. I cant claim to have felt comfortable like i do every time i visit Italy or to have fallen for Tokyo so profoundly as i did for New York. I am more than glad to have gone. It was fascinating and fun but there is so much about the place and the way of life that i just don't connect with. Aspects of the culture, food, craftsmanship and architecture were massively engaging but ultimately i think it is probably too different and too challenging for me to really connect with it.

Week 2

Runs: 6
Total Miles: 63

As a rule, i am not, and indeed never have been, "down with the kids". I am just not that sort of chap. Every so often however pop culture does make some sort of an impression on my world and i will end up ROFLing, accidentally using 'amazeballs' in an unironic way or flayling about in a vaguely Gangnam Style. Last week i someone managed to learn that H.A.M is hip hop for 'hard as a melonfarmer'. This week has mostly been about being that melonfarmer.

After the omni-wind of last week the early part of the week continued in a Son of Bawbag sort of way. Some substantially heavy winds battered the south of Glasgow over tuesday and wednesday in particular. In such circumstances the sensible thing to do is to find an incline of say 5 miles in length and run up it into a massive head wind. H.A.M...

If week 1 is all about freshness and optimism, week 2 is about fatigue and your lack of sharpness bringing you back down to earth. On top of weariness from the first week of proper training the schedule turns it up another notch or two. I have felt that this week. At no point have i ever felt truly recovered and it has mostly been a bit of a slog.

That was the case until Friday at least. As the saying goes, Friday night is tempo night. I dont do nearly enough tempo running. It never hurts quite as much as i expect and it always brings a massive training boost. Fortunately this particular programme as a decent diet of tempo runs over the weeks but i am tempted to introduce a few more and make it a regular part of my running week.

This week was 9 miles with 4 at sub-Half pace. That tempo section felt quite manageable. Not convinced i could have gone on significantly further but it wasnt an all out effort by any means. What was curious though was the warm down. First warm down mile felt great. HR came down nicely and my pace was good. Then i bonked. I guess the faster running had just depleted my glycogen stores and if i wasnt totally rested they may have been lower to start with. All the same it was unexpected to go from feeling great to suddenly being all wibbly wobbly in the legs.

As i have probably mentioned before i am generally trying to do this programme on a reduced carb-intake to try and develop fat burning systems. I must admit that while i have traditionally used nutrition on longer runs i have been slightly sceptical over the actual benefits that accrue from it. Omitting it suggests that it definitely does something whether that is as a placebo or physiologically. Sunday's long run demonstrated that. First half was great. Easy and decent pace. Second half saw my heart rate climb and climb. No bonking but the last few miles were a trial. I slogged through them to get my first 20 miler of the campaign in.

Hard as a melonfarmer.

Week 1

Runs: 6
Total Miles :56

First one down. Successful too. To quote a wiser man than i (i think it may have been Bertrand Russell, but i might be wrong), i am more or less hanging out the back of this week. Managed to hit every session and no ill effects. Of course 56 miles off my current base is still a shock to the system and my heart rate data shows an apparent step backwards this week. Post-lurgy recovery plus increased training load has resulted in some slightly slower running. Thats fine though. I would expect a bit of a hump at this stage and this hump is a lower hump than my previous humps (not lady lumps).

This week has also brought one of the joys of ttraining for a spring marathon - dealing with appalling weather. Friday brought some half-hearted snow and a slippery slidey plod around the higher reaches of Glasgow's southside. Sunday introduces a particular speciality of this place - wind which manages to come from just about all directions at once. Seriously, no matter how many times i changed direction i was heading into a howling gale. Physically impossible but certainly true. It made my 15 miles with 8 at marathon pace a bit of a challenge if not actually a problem. I say marathon pace though what i really mean is *target* marathon pace. 8 miles at that pace was more than plenty. More fitness needs to be accrued before i can claim this to be my actual marathon pace.

Pace is a concern for another day. This week ought to be 60 miles. Yes....hmmmm....

In other news, i am now officially in marathon training booze purda.

In other totally unrelated news, almost literally bumped in to Mark Thomas and Tony Benn at Glasgow airport. See? The running stuff *is* actually the more exciting part of my patter...

And we are back...

New year, new plans.

The original intention was for this blog to record the journey to Firenze. It did that and turned out to be a useful means for me to think about my training and how it was working for me so this is the blog that would not die.

This week is week 1 of training for this year's (first) marathon. Lochaber in April is the target. Though a fairly soft target. More on that at some point.

Like retaliation, excuses should always be administered early, so before i get too far i should list the reasons why i will fail in this marathon:

• Christmas. Nobody escapes christmas unscathed. Lets just say i am no longer quite at racing weight...
• Inconsistent training post-Firenze. It has taken a while to get back going again so mileage has been disappointing
• Lurgy. Some time lost in the last week the man flu
• Short build up. In order to win wifely approval for this enterprise (or at least minimise the disproval) i have agreed to a 12 week training schedule
• Travel. Looks like i will be away just prior to taper

This all sounds terribly gloomy but in reality its fine. Lochaber is not my 'A' race for this year. The general plan is to run it, try and solve some of the issues i had in Firenze, recover and then build to Loch Ness in the Autumn. Key ambition this year is really to get a full year of training in without significant interuption. Fingers crossed on that one. I am sure to break somewhere at some point.

So, 12 weeks of training. 55 miles a week and upwards. The grand plan is to reduce pre-run carb intake to try and revert to fat burning more effectively. Train low, race high. We shall see. Advice is varied.

I also have some very jaunty, colourful new running shoes. Louder shoes go faster. Its a rule.