marching on...

Long time readers will likely know a couple of things about me:

1) I like to run

2) I have been very lucky with my MS to be able to continue running.

I try not to take it for granted. I actually only really began taking my running seriously after my diagnosis. I think there was something in my head that made me more determined than ever to stay active. Multiple sclerosis is not something that I can really control; I can't change the way that my legs feel or the other ways that the condition is affecting me, but I do have some degree of control over my own determination to get out and to exercise. 

My first marathon was in 2015, and I've run six in total. My high watermark of this madness was between April 2018 and April 2019. In that time, I ran four marathons. At the beginning of October 2018, I ran the Chester marathon in a time of 3:58... that was a PB of something like 22 minutes. My last marathon was a glorious day spent accompanying my wife to a personal best at the Vienna marathon in April 2019. We got married in the city in 2007 and have some wonderful friends there, so it was a joy from start to finish. I haven't retired from running marathons and half intended to get one booked for 2020, but.... well, lockdown happened.

Actually, more than lockdown happened. MS seems to have taken more of a grip on me over the last few months. Since my symptoms first appeared in 2005, I've always had a certain level of loss of sensation/pins and needles in my legs and feet. It does feel weird to run on legs like that, but it's amazing what the brain gets used to. Over the years, I've increasingly had problems with cramp in my legs. Initially this was in my calves, but it's slowly spread so that I was getting muscle spasms in my thighs. There's also a fair amount of stiffness. I've been accustomed to staggering around a bit like an old man when I've been sitting at my desk for a while, but now this seems to be happening more and more often. After resisting for many years, I now take a very small dose of baclofen (a muscle relaxant) before I go to bed. I may need to start taking a higher dose soon.

I'm falling over a lot more too. The loss of flexibility in my left ankle and strength in my left side has always made me a bit prone to this. I drop my left side as I get tired and start scuffing my left foot, which leads to stumbles. This is happening more and more often, meaning that I now go out running wearing knee and wrist guards (my knees have taken a frightful pounding from this and are now sore most of the time). 

I could stop running, but I don't want to. In fact, although I might be running more slowly at the moment, I'm actually doing more miles in lockdown than I think I've ever done before. I managed about 1220 miles in 2019 and I've done 1382 so far this year with 7 weeks still to go. I'll probably go comfortably over 1500 miles for the year. I'm still capable of running more quickly, but my default pace now seems to be a rather sorry plod because I don't really trust my legs any more.

I'm not telling you any of this looking for sympathy. It's just that I'm starting to acknowledge something that I've tried to ignore for more than a decade now: my MS is progressing. The official shift in my diagnosis from relapsing-remitting to secondary progressive a few weeks ago was recognition of that simple fact.

My own sense of self and wellbeing is bound up in my ability to run. For better or for worse. I'm going to keep running. Of course I'm going to keep running. I'm just slowly starting the process of coming to terms with the fact that I'm not bulletproof and that I can't control the progress of this godawful condition.

 You adapt, though. What other choice do you have? I'll always have that 3:58 marathon, eh?

shake it off....

One of the drawbacks of injecting immune-suppressors every week is that they suppress your immune system. I never used to get colds at all, but since I began injecting these disease modifying drugs (designed to slow down the progression of my multiple sclerosis) they seem to hit me harder every year.

The sniffles I can manage, but I now seem to usually get a secondary infection in my lungs that lasts for ages as my body lacks the tools to fight it off - it took months to finally shake it off last year. The current infection is about 3-4 weeks in and has completely stopped me running (well, apart from two predictably difficult half marathons and a couple of parkruns that I stubbornly insisted on running).

I've had one course of antibiotics already and just started the next one; I'm using a brown inhaler twice a day and I'm supposed to be using a blue one 4 times a day; I'm also now having a chest x-ray. Good times. The doctor today saw me chafing at the bit to get out running (I've got two half marathons, two 20 mile races and a marathon in the diary to train for, you know!) and warned me to be nice to myself.

Hmm.

That's the hard part.

They say you should never run if a cold descends into your chest, but I'd be interested to hear the views of the people who say this on running when you can't feel your feet and have widespread numbness throughout the muscles of your thighs; or when you've lost 15% of the muscle mass on your left side and a good deal of the flexibility in one ankle.

Let's be honest: if I listened to my body, I'd probably never run at all.

Not that I'm planning on going out for a run.

Before Saturday, anyway.

*** I feel I should say that this post isn't supposed to be a pity party. I sometimes get accused of being overly rosy about MS and presenting a view that applies to very few people. I can, after all, run a marathon. I suppose this means I feel a bit of responsibility to show the other side too. MS can be an invisible condition, and for every time I'm shown as #inspiration, smiling as I finish a marathon or something, I feel I need to be honest about the rest of it too. I know that I'm still relatively very lucky with my MS. I'm not really looking for sympathy because the only thing this infection is stopping me doing is running, and I'm still doing a bit of that. It's frustrating, especially after my 4 week layoff in September, but it's hardly the end of the world.

Incidentally, I also know that my loss of sensation and muscle are nothing at all like running with a chest infection.  I'm just blowing off steam.  Probably best to ignore me, really.

don't stop moving...

There was a time when thought I was essentially immune to the common cold.  Well, perhaps not exactly immune, but I just never seemed to catch the infections that clobbered everybody else around me.  I might wake up one morning with a slightly scratchy throat, but it never seemed to develop into anything more substantial.

Rather smugly, I always put this down to the fact that I was reasonably fit and healthy and ate quite a lot more fruit and vegetables than average. Then I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and began to inject myself regularly with a drug designed to suppress my immune system.  The colds quickly followed.

It turns out that I wasn't immune to the common cold after all and that, actually, I was just being protected by a hyperactive immune system that was spoiling for a fight with almost anything.  The immune-suppressants soon put paid to that.

Dammit.

Worse still, when I go down with a cold now, I seem to find it almost impossible to shake.  Where most people are more or less back to normal after a week or so, I find that the symptoms drag out for months longer than that. For each of the last few years, I've had that a cold develops into something else in my lungs and, although it doubtless started out as a viral infection, I've ultimately needed an inhaler and some antibiotics to finally shake it off.

As a runner, of course, this is doubly frustrating as anything in your lungs makes running a very dubious prospect indeed. I lost six weeks of running at the back end of last year with a particularly persistent cough and every single day not running really eats away at my own personal sense of wellbeing.  I had to watch the Turkey Trot half marathon instead of running it. Imagine!

This year's cold, I'm told, is a particularly nasty strain.  Naturally, I caught it almost immediately.

Because I'm stupid and I'm stubborn, although my cold really developed over the course of the last week, I still dragged myself out on Sunday to run around the Royal Parks Half Marathon with my wife.  It was a lovely, sunny autumn morning and the course takes you through Hyde Park, St James Park, around Horse Guards and past the Palace.  It's well-supported and quite delightful.... but I predictably found it more of a struggle than either of my full marathons.  For (almost: mile 15-16 in our first marathon) the first time time running together, C found herself gently trying to pace me around the course. Not in the least bit surprising, right?

I look a bit like death in that second photo, eh?  Nice medal though.

I hate colds.  For someone with an incurable chronic illness, I have a surprisingly low tolerance for being ill.  Well, I've still got a couple of days before my next half marathon on Sunday, so.....

slow steady....

[sad face]

OK.

So my body is finally dropping me a hint so unsubtle that even I can't fail to notice.

I've been feeling a bit under the weather.  Time was that I would go from year-to-year with barely so much as a sniffle.  I used to think that this was down to my general levels of fitness and my superhuman intake of fruit and veg.... it turns out that it was more likely due to my overactive immune system.  Now that I inject immuno-suppressants every week, my resistance to colds has predictably been somewhat less impressive.  I still don't get all that many, but every couple of years I now seem to get a stinker that I can't shake.  I was pole-axed through November/December and some of January by a cold so persistent that I actually managed to crack a rib with coughing and wasn't really able to run properly for more than a month.  The rib has barely healed, and already I seem to be on the edges of another cold... the scratchy throat, the catarrh, the ominous burning feeling at the top of your lungs.... uh oh.

Coupled with this (and perhaps not unrelated) are the problems I've started having with my legs: the stiffness in my muscles that sees me staggering around like an old man in the morning and that seems to have taken some of the spring out of my muscles when I'm running.

I've been going to interval sessions at the track to try and shake my training up a bit and to accustom my heart, my lungs and my muscle to running a bit faster.  I'm one of the slowest people there, but it's been good to push my comfort zones and to work myself hard.  I idly dread the sessions all day, but feel great at the end... so I've kept going.

I ran 11.5 miles on Sunday.  I've got a half marathon coming up in a couple of weeks, and although I'll be running with a friend who is looking at running about 2.5 hours, I want to make sure that my body knows what's coming.  The hip on my weaker side gave me some bother in the last couple of miles, and I wasn't as fast as I'd like to be, but I was faster than the last time I ran that route, and it was all good.

Then I went to run 4.5 miles on Monday and just found that the well was dry and that I was totally gubbed.  I ran the same route in the first week of March and I was 8 minutes faster.... in practical terms, that means that I was a mile behind where I was merely three weeks ago.  My legs felt dead, my feet were completely numb and I just had nothing at all in the tank.

I felt terrible.

Alright! Alright!  Enough already!  I can take a hint!

I'm giving myself the rest of the week off (not including my cycle commute to work, of course... I don't count that as exercise any more).  I already feel bad about missing the track session tomorrow night, but I"m off skiing next week and I don't want to make myself any worse.

The last 12 months have shown me how strong my body is (London Marathon, Thunder Run 24 hours, 1200+ miles in the year), but also how fragile.

[/sad face]

don't stop 'til you get enough...

The mind is a powerful thing.  In the summer of 2005, a numb right hand was the first symptom of what was ultimately diagnosed as multiple sclerosis.  That was worrying enough, but that sensation of numbness quickly began to spread across my body, creeping down through my legs all the way to the soles of my feet (it turned out to all be caused by a lesion on the spinal cord in my neck, hence the widespread impact throughout my body).

I didn't run then anywhere near as much as I run now, but I still did the odd half marathon and liked to go out a few times a week.  Think for a moment what it's like trying to run on legs where the muscles suddenly feel numb and when you can't feel the ground beneath the soles of your feet.  It was so weird that I actually thought for a while that I might have to stop running altogether.  What would happen if I mis-stepped and fell over? The loss of sensations in your muscles that you would normally take entirely for granted made me suddenly feel very unsure of myself.

I was afraid.

But I kept running.  It ultimately took me four years to reach a diagnosis of MS, but through that time I just kept running, slowly at first but then faster and faster. It's amazing how quickly your brain begins to adjust to a new normal, and before long, I was running further and faster than ever before.  In fact, I think the diagnosis actually made me more determined than ever not to give up: I seriously doubt that the pre-diagnosis me would ever have even considered joining a running club and taking part in a marathon.

I know this.  I also know that I'm a fairly determined, stubborn old bastard, and I like to think that, should my symptoms worsen and I am unable to continue with my running, I will find something else to keep myself active.

But I still find myself worrying about the way my legs currently feel like they belong to someone else, possibly to someone who has been dead for several months? There's a new stiffness in my legs now that sees me staggering around like an old man first thing in the morning and after I've been sat down for a while.  I can feel it when I'm running, and I can feel myself becoming more cautious and slowing myself down.  Are these new symptoms? Is this temporary, or will I feel like this forever now? Perhaps this is the beginning of the end? Perhaps I should start to be more careful?

My rational brain tells me that I should keep going: my brain will adjust to a new normal soon enough, just as it did before.  It might take a while, and perhaps I'll have to slow down for a bit and maybe I won't ever manage to be as fast as I'd like to be.... but I can surely keep running.  I know all this.... but I'm still afraid; I'm afraid of the symptoms I feel and of what they might mean.

But you know what? Whilst all this has been going on in my head, I also went and joined that Athletics Club where I've been doing track interval training on Thursday nights.  They're a really friendly bunch and have made me feel very welcome over the last few weeks... I doubt myself every week, and I spend most Thursdays in a state of mild dread about the evening training session ahead because I can't quite shake off the feeling that I don't belong and that I'm nowhere near a good enough runner to be even thinking about training on the same track as these thoroughbreds.  I know rationally that no one cares about how fast I run and that they're simply delighted to have me on board and want me to be as good a runner as I can be... and I enjoy the sessions (once we're finished, anyway - it hurts!) All the same, the demons in my head keep whispering these negative thoughts, doubling down with the way my legs feel and trying to convince me to take the easy way out and to give up.

I felt that fear and I decided to join anyway. I feel the fear before every track session, but I go anyway.  Not only am I going to keep running, but I'm going to keep trying to push myself to be as good a runner as my body and - perhaps more importantly - my mind will let me be.

[partially inspired by this article on running demons]

black mirror...

We've only got a little bathroom in our house.  Plenty big enough for the essential functions, but there's barely enough room in there to have a good prance about in the altogether, if you like that sort of thing... and frankly, who doesn't?  There is a mirror above the sink, but it's barely the size of a piece of A5 notepaper: more than enough for shaving (especially when you have a beard), but not really much good for prolonged admiration.  Luckily, I don't think either of us is particularly vain (and C has a much larger mirror elsewhere in the house that I don't much trouble myself with).

The upshot of this is that I don't spend a great deal of time gazing at my own reflection.

We were staying with friends last weekend.  They've just had their bathroom done up and it now contains a splendid rain shower (which doesn't go quite hot enough for my tastes, but you can't have everything).  They've also had a fairly substantial mirror installed above the sink.  I mention this because I happened to catch sight of my reflection in this mirror as I was getting ready to jump into the shower.

I am PUNY.

I already knew about the pathetic muscles in my upper body. My first neurologist was interested in the size disparity between the muscles in my lower body and the muscles in my upper body, wondering if perhaps this was also a sign of neurological damage.  Well, maybe..... Although I do have muscle wastage and weakness from my multiple sclerosis, this kind of physique isn't all that uncommon in runners....

Besides, I have never liked spending any time pumping iron as it seems a ridiculous thing to do.

Who does that?

But what really shocked me was how concave my stomach is. Although I worry about middle-aged spread, it actually curve inwards.

As you probably know, one of my little foibles is that I honestly believe that I have the body of a much bigger man. In my head, I'm still the man I was around 20 years ago....at least seven stone heavier than I am now.  It's ridiculous, but there you are. That's just the way it is.  To actually stand in front of this mirror and to see my stomach curving inwards around my inguinal crease (which is apparently very fashionable at the moment, ladies.  It's sometimes called the 'love line' or the 'moneymaker'.  Just sayin'....) was to have the shocking realisation that, in fact, I am really very thin indeed.

This may not be news to you, but it was definitely news to me.

I guess this is just the result of calories in being smaller than calories out for an extended period of time, but I actually shocked myself at the realisation of quite how much my mental picture of myself differs from reality.

Thank goodness I've always been completely realistic about the magnificence of my luxuriantly full head of glossy, shiny hair.

Wait....what?

cos I hobble when I wobble...

I'm acutely aware that this blog is a little in danger of turning into an MS blog.  No matter how much I want to be writing about inconsequential ephemera, I seem to keep coming back to my multiple sclerosis. I try not to allow it to dominate my life, but there it is.  That and running.... or actually about how it affects my running. I try to have lots of other facets to my life that I extemporise on at length here, but i'm afraid that my portfolio of subjects seems to be narrowing.

Of course, when it comes to MS,  I’m very aware that - relatively speaking - I’m pretty lightly affected. If I was looking for a dedicated following of the kind of people who really hoover up the misery of MS Sufferers - and I have to tell you, that if you are a part of this audience, then there are many, many blogs for you to choose from that will be all too eager to serve you up some unmitigated wallowing - then you're probably looking in the wrong place here and you'd best go back to Azkaban with the other dementors.  In fact, eleven years since my first symptoms and I’m probably as fit as I’ve ever been. I’ve run a couple of marathons, for goodness sake… things could definitely be worse and I try not to moan about my lot in life.  Why moan about my health when the country - THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD - is going to hell in a hand basket around us?

But of course, that doesn’t mean that MS doesn’t affect me at all.

Any misery hoovers still there?  I know I generally seem excessively stoical about such things, but let me throw you a bone:

I’ve been bothered over the last few weeks by my legs: they don’t quite feel like they belong to me; they’re stiff and awkward and I’m finding increasingly myself hobbling around like an old man. It’s affecting my running too, and although my mind and heart and lungs are willing, my legs just aren’t able to carry me as fast as the rest of me wants to go. Although, to be fair, every runner probably knows that feeling.

It’s frustrating. I'd love to be setting new PBs like all my running friends seem to be doing at the moment... but I'm miles away from that kind of form. I'm delighted for them, of course I am... but I'd also love to be improving and not going backwards and running through treacle.

The other night, I had restless legs, with the muscles of my thighs twitching uncontrollably of their own accord as I watched TV on the sofa and tried to ignore them. The next morning, it took two attempts to get out of bed and to get my legs working at all. I'm still running, of course - I ran that very night.  It takes more than something as trivial as my legs not working properly to stop me running...If I thought that, then I would have stopped running years ago.  To be honest, I'm also not sure that resting will help all that much; this might just be how things are for me now.  I'm stoical about this, but it's still frustrating to feel so slow and to feel that 26.2 miles - a distance I ran as recently as six months ago - currently feels like a very, very long way.

But of course... 26.2 miles *is* a long way.  A really long way. I really shouldn't feel bad about slogging around 6 miles: it might be slower than I'd like, but at least I *can* still slog around six miles.

It probably sounds ridiculous, but no matter how slow and painful it might be, I do try to remember that running still feels a whole lot better than not running.

In fact, given that I'm not running a marathon in 2017.... is it bad that I'm thinking of entering a 20 mile race?

thunderstruck...

I’m feeling tired at the moment. Lots of people with MS find that heat triggers their symptoms, with some so badly affected that they have to wear cooling vests to try and keep their core body temperature down. Funnily enough, it’s never really bothered me. I’m sometimes troubled by a loss in sensation in my arms below the shoulders when it’s cold, but heat seems to be fine. In fact, I’m one of those masochistic runners who secretly really enjoy going out when it’s really hot and slogging my way through a really sweaty run. In my office, people were already complaining about the heat on Monday morning, but I’ve spent the last six weeks of the English summer cycling to work through monsoon rains, so I’m not going to start complaining now that the sun has finally started shining.

I am, however, feeling a bit tired. Fatigued, even. Lots of people feel lethargic when it gets hot, but MS fatigue is different. It’s hard to explain, but MS-related fatigue feels quite different to the kind of tiredness you get when you’ve not been sleeping enough or when you’ve been out running or something – that’s what I’d call a good, honest kind of tiredness and MS fatigue is an altogether different, much sneakier animal. It’s not the sleepiness you get when you haven’t slept well, but it’s fatigue that you experience physically that takes a hold of your body and makes it feel like you’re wading through treacle. Lots of people use Christine Miserandino’s spoon theory to describe how it feels

That’s great, but it seems to imply that there’s some kind of logic in the toll that different activities take on your body and on your energy levels. For me, this just isn’t true. How can it be true when I can run a marathon and feel fine, but other times, my fatigue can be triggered by a walk to the shops? I wish it was predictable and therefore manageable, but it just isn’t.

When this fatigue begins, I start to feel it in a tightness across my shoulders, followed closely by a sense of weakness in my arms and maybe some generalised numbness; I can feel my body start to almost tremble as I fight against the growing tiredness. Often, before I really know what’s happening, it’s like a switch has been flicked and all my power is draining away and all I can really do is get myself to bed and write the day off. I was in bed at 21:30 the other night, and on some days, more than eight hours sleep just doesn’t seem to be enough. Today, I found myself starting to struggle at my desk after about 3pm.

Naturally, because I refuse to let my MS rule my life, on Friday evening I’ll be heading over to Catton Park to join my team of 7 taking part in the Thunder Run… a 24 hour relay where I can expect to run at least three 10km laps between noon on Saturday and noon on Sunday, including at least one lap after dark. I probably won’t get much sleep and will likely run the best part of a marathon, but I’m really looking forward to it. I might even do a parkrun before we get started.

Fuck you MS.

here we go again...

When I was asked to be one of the official bloggers for the London Marathon, part of the deal was that I submitted four or five posts in return for the free stuff they were going to send me.  Fine, although to be honest, I would have done it for nothing.  They don't seem to be very organised though: they were slow to get started and took ages to get posts up after they were submitted.  Not the end of the world, but a bit annoying.  After a long delay between the posting of my first and second posts, we agreed that I would submit a post for the week before the marathon, and one just after.  Well, a week after submitting my penultimate post, it still isn't up.  Well, bugger them.  I'm putting it up here because it's really to be read before the run.

So here it is:

-

With less than a week to go before the big day and as the taper kicks in, my mileage is coming right down to make sure that my legs are fresh and ready for the challenge ahead of them. But you know what? Tapering is hard! Daft though it sounds, after months of slogging through ever-increasing distances, stepping that distance down is surprisingly difficult. There’s a fairly large part of me that feels vaguely guilty that my last ‘long’ run will be no more than 6 miles. After all, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I was running 22 miles; it barely seems worth getting changed into my running kit for something as short as a measly 6 miles. And yet…at the same time, those 6 miles seem disproportionately difficult, with every muscle feeling heavy and every step along the way little more than a sluggish plod. If it’s this hard now, how on earth am I going to find the energy to run 26.2 miles on Sunday?

You’d imagine that running was mostly about how much strength you have in your legs, but the simple truth is that it’s at least as much about mental strength. As the novelist and keen amateur marathon runner Haruki Murakami astutely observed, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”. It doesn’t matter who you are or how hard you’ve trained, at some point during a marathon, you’re going to hit some sticky patches and you need to be prepared. What gets you through those difficult moments is your determination not to stop, to keep going no matter what. Did you see Eddie Izzard running 27 marathons in 27 days? It was an extraordinary undertaking from start to finish, but watching the documentary, the thing that struck me the most was Eddie’s steely focus on putting one foot in front of the other, however much it hurt and however much he wanted to stop. I’m only running the one marathon, but the mental approach is the same.

My motivation to keep going when the going gets tough? I’m humbled by the generosity of the friends, acquaintances and total strangers who have helped us raise money for a cause that is close to my heart. We raised £7,200 for the MS Trust in last year’s race, and when you factor in gift aid and suchlike, this year we’ve already raised more than £10,000. We've been lucky to have the support of Virtual Runner, but what's really floored me is the generosity of those people who sponsor us, or who buy a raffle ticket for the chance of a rubbish prize or who put their names down for a finishing time in my sweepstake that they know I haven’t got a chance of making. The MS Trust is a fine charity and I'm proud to be raising money for them, but the reason I keep putting one foot in front of the other is because of the faith people like you are putting in me. Thank you.

Of course, you can still sponsor us!
http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

See you on the other side!

-

So, there it is.  I imagine that it will go up on the London Marathon site at some point, but it seemed a shame to waste it.  Consider it an exclusive preview.

All that remains now is to run the bloody thing.

do it anyway...

Someone asked me the other day what my preferred weather would be for the marathon.

Hmm. Probably sunny but cool, but the honest answer is that it really doesn't matter. If training over winter has taught me anything, it's that you get the weather you get. If you have a 10 week midweek run in the training programme and it's dark and throwing it down with rain, then you still go out and do the run, don't you? I do, anyway.

If there's one thing about Sunday that I can't control, it's the weather... so it seems like a waste of energy worrying about it.

That said, this is ridiculous:

I guess I'll be packing a woolly hat and gloves that I don't mind throwing away, then.

Maranoia (n.): Fear of something going wrong (illness, injury, etc.) in the weeks before a marathon.

We've passed £10,000 in our fundraising, by the way.  Thanks for all your support and there's still time to donate!

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

threads...

As part of the package for being selected as one of the official bloggers of the London Marathon,  I received a few freebies.  A few weeks ago, I was the lucky recipient of a pile of Lucozade nutritional stuff (jelly beans, drinks, protein bars etc.  Then, this weekend, the postman brought me a substantial parcel containing a whole pile of green accented, London Marathon branded adidas training gear and a pair of Ultra Boost ST trainers.  The trainers alone are worth £130, but apparently the rest of the gear (long-sleeved top, short-sleeved top, running tights and shorts) are also from towards the top-end of the adidas range.

...not that any of this particularly matters.  I would have written them blogs for nothing.  After all, I've been doing that here for more than a decade.

Still, if they want a few blogs in return for all this clobber, then I'm more than happy to oblige.  Here's what they say in the introduction piece on their website for this year's official bloggers:

"Meet the runners who will be sharing their training journey to the start line on Sunday 24 April in a regular blog. Follow their journeys as they complete their training and look ahead to race day as they each plot their course to hitting their goals in London! From the high of a new training PB to the low of a missed run due to illness or injury, training for a marathon is never easy, but it’s immensely rewarding, so don’t forget to support and follow our runners every step of the way".

Nice.  Except that they've only asked for one blog so far, which they put up a couple of weeks ago.  There are twenty days left until we line up at the start on Blackheath Common.... so exactly how much of my journey are people expecting to read?  Come to think of it, with all my longest training runs now done, how much are they realistically hoping that I will talk about all this lovely training gear they've sent me?  It's not as though I'm going to wear a completely brand new set of trainers now, is it?  In fact, I'm going to be wearing exactly none of this kit for the actual marathon itself.  I'm not a complete idiot.  Apart from anything else, I look like an especially ugly adidas catalogue model.

Well, what do I care?  I've got the kit now, right?

...except that I'm a blogger: the idea of writing the same shit that you good people have been reading here for years to a potentially completely different audience and passing it off as brand new work is an attractive proposition.  Surely you can understand that?  If you're lucky, I'll then republish the stuff from there on here, so you can enjoy the recycled drivel all over again.

It's win:win, as far as I can see.

have no fear, the camera is here....

Exciting news!  The London Marathon website have unveiled the four bloggers who will be officially writing for them in the run-up to this year's race:

"Meet the runners who will be sharing their training journey to the start line on Sunday 24 April in a regular blog. Follow their journeys as they complete their training and look ahead to race day as they each plot their course to hitting their goals in London! From the high of a new training PB to the low of a missed run due to illness or injury, training for a marathon is never easy, but it’s immensely rewarding, so don’t forget to support and follow our runners every step of the way".

Hey....wait a minute!  One of those ugly mugs looks familiar.  Him in the blue tutu and MS Trust running vest.

What's he got to say for himself?

Age: 41
Location: Nottingham
Occupation: Activity Planning Manager
Running history: I hated running at school, but somehow got the bug as I got older and now run 5 days a week and about 1000 miles a year. My younger self would probably hate me, especially as I run instead of having lie-ins these days. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009, but this has made me more determined than ever to keep running because I'm stubborn and refuse to be beaten.
Target: To enjoy myself all the way around and to raise as much money as I can for the MS Trust
Loves... cake, pie and beer. Maybe this is the other reason I run so much....

41? Well, that's a bloody lie for starters!

Well, his first blog has been published.  To be honest, with 33 days to go, it's a little bit late to be following him every step of the way through training, but better late than never, eh?

I'll copy it down here, but I suppose you can always go and look at it in-situ for yourself, if you like.

--

My name is Tim and I’m a runner. I haven’t always considered myself a runner and it still seems odd to say it out loud now, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to deny. I loathed cross-country runs at school and used to walk as often as I thought I could get away with it.

And yet, here I am about to run my second ever marathon and my second in London. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to run one marathon could be regarded as unfortunate, but to run two looks like carelessness.

Completing a marathon is an achievement for anybody: 26.2 miles is a distance that demands respect and should never be undertaken lightly. To be perfectly honest, a marathon is something that I thought would be completely beyond me. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009 after first developing symptoms in 2005. It’s an unpredictable disease that affects everyone differently, but for me it mainly brought pins and needles, fatigue, numbness and a loss of muscle strength in the left-hand side of my body. I thought I might have to give up running for good in 2013 as I picked up a succession of injuries in the hip, knee and foot on my left side - injuries that were all caused by that underlying weakness.

Fast forward to April 2015, and I was lining up on Blackheath to run my first ever marathon. How on earth did I get there? Well, freakish luck in getting a ballot place at my first attempt aside, we can probably chalk it up to a combination of determination, a stubborn refusal to give in and let the damn disease beat me and the support of lots of wonderful people in my running life, not least my amazing wife, who ran the whole marathon and almost every step of the training by my side.

I know how lucky I am: at every MS clinic I attend, I see people in the waiting room at the hospital with their walking sticks and their wheelchairs. I know exactly what kind of damage this disease can wreak to a person’s body and to their life. No one can say for sure if any of these things lie in my future, but knowing what could happen makes me doubly determined to wring every last drop out of life and to push myself as hard as I can for as long as I can. I’m also determined to raise as much money as I can through my running to support a charity very close to my heart: The MS Trust. https://www.mstrust.org.uk/

Training hasn’t been easy this year, but I know that every mile I run and every penny I raise will go towards helping people cope with the uncertainty of a diagnosis with MS.

You can find my sponsorship page here: http://virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

Or if you want to support me and earn a really cool, glow-in-the-dark Darth Maul medal, then details of my Virtual Run are here: http://www.virtualrunneruk.com/enter-revengesixth

--

What a big head, eh?  Just who does he think he is?

needle...

I've been injecting Avonex into the muscles of my thigh every week now since the summer of 2009.  I usually do it on a Tuesday, but I'm pretty relaxed about it, and from time to time I have moved it by a day or so either way, depending on what suits my week the best.  Mostly it's on a Tuesday night though.

There's not really a reason for this choice of day other than that Tuesday is the day when I had the initial appointment with the MS Nurse who showed me how to do it and when I had my first injection, and because I thought it would be preferable to ride out any side-effects on a weekday rather than to throw away a day at the weekend.  The routine is almost always the same: take a couple of paracetamol and 400mg of Ibuprofen, inject and then hopefully sleep through any side-effects.  Some people are so badly affected by side-effects -- headaches, flu-like symptoms and the like -- that they actually stop injecting themselves, preferring to do nothing rather than face those sorts of consequences every week.  Luckily for me, I seem to tolerate the drug pretty well.  It's not unusual to wake up on a Wednesday morning feeling as though someone is slowly pushing me back into the mattress, but it's never yet stopped me getting out of bed.  Avonex can affect the function of the liver, and I have to have regular blood tests to make sure that everything is still working okay... but so far so good.  It used to be that I didn't drink alcohol on the night I injected, but now I'm not even too worried about that.  Well, I hardly drink during the week anyway..... but still.

In all that time I've been injecting, I've never once forgotten an injection.  I sometimes remember when I'm lying in bed and have to jump up to get it done, and once in a while I only remember on a Wednesday morning.... but I've never forgotten entirely.  Given that I've injected in places like the back of a camper van on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and outside a tent at Etosha National Park in Namibia, I don't reckon that's too shabby.  I've carried needles and syringes onto planes all over the world (the only place that actually asked to see my Doctor's letter was in Hong Kong.  In Johannesburg, they actually had a wheelchair waiting for me at the transfer gate! I don't tend to bother to ring the airlines in advance these days... )

Until.... I was at lunch today with my team for someone's leaving do when it suddenly occurred to me that I had no recollection of injecting myself.  I'd been in a bit of a rush on Tuesday night, coming straight in from work and heading out to choir practice, but I simply couldn't remember if I'd got it done when I got home or not.  I thought probably not, as I couldn't remember taking the paracetamol or ibuprofen, but wasn't 100% sure.

It probably doesn't matter all that much.  Avonex isn't a cure for MS; it's thought that *maybe* it *might* help slow down the progression of the disease, but there's no way of knowing if it's made any difference to me or not.  When you are first diagnosed and you're offered the choice of going onto disease modifying drugs, it's a perfectly acceptable choice to say that you don't want to take anything.  I chose that I would rather take something that might be helping than do nothing at all, which definitely isn't.  Missing a week probably isn't that big a deal.

Still.  I was annoyed.

When I got home this evening, I checked the kitchen bin and the recycling for the packaging of my injection.  When I was convinced that I 99% hadn't done it and so wouldn't be at risk of doing it twice in the same week, I injected myself tonight. On a Thursday.

Unprecedented.

I reckon I'll roll next week's injection to Wednesday.  Why did I bother tonight?  Well, as I said, I'd rather do something that might be helping than do nothing.

don't need no key to unlock this door...

Well, that's it then: we're committed to running the 2016 London Marathon.

Six months ago, we ran the famous 26.2 mile course from Blackheath to the Mall in a shade under 5 hours.  In six months time, we'll be doing exactly the same thing again.  If ever you needed proof that the human body has a capacity to forget pain, then this is surely it.

The training programme doesn't really start for another couple of months, but you and I both know that training doesn't really stop around here.  Last time around it was a huge challenge and a step into the unknown to see if my body could withstand that sort of mileage.... not just in the run itself, but in the hours and hours of training you do just to be ready on the start line.  I've run 937 miles this year so far, and it's no coincidence at all that 166.9 of them came in March in the month before the marathon itself.  I've lost muscle mass on my left side, and I don't pick my left foot up properly when I get tired because of the loss of strength and a loss of flexibility in my ankle.  I was worried that I might break myself.  That I didn't was in no small part down to the fact that I did the vast majority of those miles in the company of my wife, running at a pace that was slower than I might have liked, but that without a shadow of a doubt helped me through.

But you know what?  I knew almost as soon as we crossed the finishing line together that I was going to run this race again.  You know what else? I also knew that I wanted to do it on my own.  I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to challenge 4 hours, because I really think my body will break.... I reckon I've got a 1:45 half marathon in me, but this is an entirely different kettle of fish.  4.5 hours is a lot more realistic a target, but to be honest, I don't want to set a target at all; I just want the mental and physical challenge of a marathon on my own.  I'll almost certainly go faster than I did the first time, but I'm not going to set myself any targets beyond that.  C. is running again too, and will face the challenge of getting herself around the course on her own with her usual determination.  Of that I have absolutely no doubt.

We're raising money for the MS Trust again for 2016.  We raised £7,200 last time around, and since then I've been lucky enough to get a lot closer to the work that this wonderful charity does.  They may not be as big as some other charities, but they punch well above their weight and play a vital role in both providing support and information for people who are diagnosed with MS and in supporting and educating the MS professionals.  I was lucky enough to be invited to a reception for the MS Trust at the House of Lords a few weeks ago, and a very eminent neurologist gave a talk there saying how much he valued and appreciated the work that the Trust does.

I'll try not to go about it too much, but I have set up a fundraising page:

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TCMS

As running is about to take up an even greater proportion of my life than it already does, what I can't guarantee is that I won't blather on about the training all the time on here.  Sorry about that, but it's just the way life is going to be for the next six months.

177 days.

Anyone else feel tired just thinking about that?

tuesday's grey and Wednesday too...

I usually inject on a Tuesday night.

This morning, I woke up after a restless, sweaty night's sleep to find that everything ached and that I felt as though I was being gently pushed back into the mattress by an unseen hand.

I dragged myself out of bed and unsteadily made my way to the bathroom, dragging the left side of my body a bit as I went.  It was raining and, as I cleaned my teeth and contemplated a soggy bike ride to work, I realised that I had a thumping headache.  Brilliant.  Just another Wednesday morning in my life.

I've been pretty lucky with the side-effects that I get from this drug: some people ultimately find the side effects so onerous that they prefer take their chances with the uncertain progression of their MS rather than dealing with the certainty of unpleasant side-effects every week.  There is, after all, no cure for MS and these drugs are only designed to *maybe* slow down the progression of the disease.  No one knows for sure if they actually make a difference, and because MS is so different for everyone individual sufferer and because there is no way of knowing what 'normal' disease progression looks like, no one could ever say for sure if they make a damn bit of difference.  You can well understand why some people decide not to bother, particularly if taking them makes them feel like death for a decent part of every week.

Since the very first day that I was asked to consider taking Disease Modifying Drugs (DMDs) for my MS, I've instinctively held the view that I would rather do something than nothing, even if there's no way of knowing if that something is actually doing anything.  Perhaps it would be a different story if the side-effects of my chosen drug hit me like a sledgehammer every Wednesday morning..... but the side-effects are manageable; it's a bit of a bind, for sure, and I don't exactly relish Wednesday mornings but it's nothing that I can't live with.

So this morning, like most other Wednesday mornings, I took a couple of paracetamol and just got on with my day.  It was a bit of a disappointment to remember, a little later on, that I'd actually forgotten to inject on Tuesday night and was going to have to do it on Wednesday evening instead.

Oh well.  Roll on Thursday morning, eh?

coming back for more....

The Robin Hood marathon and half marathon took place yesterday. It’s my local race, with the start within easy walking distance of my house, but I wasn’t there. I was actually entered into the half marathon, but I had other business at Twickenham on Saturday evening (don’t ask), and a lunch in Oxford with a friend making a return visit from Montreal, so unfortunately I wasn’t able to run.

Well, I say unfortunately, but actually I was pretty pleased not to be running. Although I’m clearly not doing the mileage that I was doing when training for the marathon in April, I’m still running four or five times a week and getting through seventy or so miles a month. Over the last few weeks it’s been a bit of a struggle: I’m still doing the miles, but I’m finding them much harder to do and I’m running about a minute a mile slower than I want to be. I thought initially this was down to a week off running when we were on holiday in August, and then I thought it might be down to a lingering cold that left me with a nagging cough. Maybe it’s a combination of both. What I do know is that I’m left feeling as though I have no power when I run; I have a tightness across my shoulders and arms, numbness in my feet and a feeling of weakness and sluggishness in my legs.

Perhaps in the broader scheme of things, I shouldn’t be worrying about running nine minute miles rather than eight minute miles…. But I do worry. Who knows what it might be or if my form will return?

As you might expect, I knew loads of people running yesterday. There were a bunch of colleagues from the office running to raise money for a local cancer respite home we’re supporting this year (I would have been proudly wearing this vest) and, of course, there were loads of people from my running club taking part. The marathon is a landmark distance for most runners, and I’ve found over the last few months since I ran my first at London in April that other runners tend to view you as a “serious” runner if you’ve completed the 26.2 miles of a full marathon. It’s not that you’re not treated with respect if you haven’t done one, it’s just that most runners understand what an undertaking the marathon is and how much time and energy the training takes up. Whatever your finishing time, it’s an achievement that definitely isn’t to be sniffed at. A bunch of guys in the club were running their first full marathon yesterday, and as I run with them a fair bit, they’ve been picking my brains over the last few months. It’s been fun listening to their worries and their ambitions, and yesterday I had a very keen eye out on Facebook to see how they did and to vicariously enjoy their success.  It's also been quite funny to see those, adamant that they would only be running one marathon ever, change their minds almost as soon as they crossed the line.  Well, we've all been there.....

I am glad that I didn’t run yesterday (and had a lovely Sunday lunch in the pub with friends instead), but I won’t lie to you: seeing the camaraderie amongst the runners and seeing how justifiably proud they are of what they’ve achieved, it’s renewed my hunger to get back into form and to push on with training for the London Marathon next year.

There’s miles to go yet before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep.

repeat...

We’ve been invited to a reception at the House of Lords in October. It’s an event that’s been organised by the MS Trust as a thank you to their fundraisers, and we’ve been invited along because of all that money we raised -- thanks in large part to you guys -- in running the London Marathon (around £7,000, once you factor in Gift Aid). It’s on a Wednesday night during a normal working week, but how do you turn down something like that?

Much to my wife’s amusement and slight irritation, the invitation was addressed to “Mr and Mrs swisslet”. It’s become something of a running joke in our house that, for all that she did brilliantly well to raise all that money and to run a marathon, it will apparently always be me that’s the inspiration in this particular area of our lives. She’s in Paris at the moment and was delighted that her visit coincided with a trip by some of our Viennese friends. Over dinner, apparently, one of the recurring topics of conversation, so my bemused wife told me over the phone later on, was how much of an inspiration I was, and how much adversity I overcame, and how determined I was, etc. etc. etc.

#inspiration.

It’s funny. If I thought of myself that way, then at the very least I’d need a good talking to, and probably a good slap…. But instead I find it amusing and ridiculous and baffling and humbling all at the same time.

Coincidentally (or not), the MS Trust have been emailing me this week, dropping hints about how they are now accepting applications for their team to run the 2016 London Marathon. One email thanked me for asking to be kept updated with the latest news from their running club and telling me where to find the application form for a place in their marathon team…. Information that I hadn’t actually requested, but thanks for the hint, guys.

When I crossed the finish line on the Mall in April this year, I was fairly sure that I didn’t want to run another marathon. I was worried about how my body would withstand the training, and although I got through it alright, it totally dominates your life for the best part of six months. Did I really want to go through that again? But before we had even got to the post-race reception, my brain was already beginning to wonder how fast I could do one if I ran on my own. I tried to kill the thought, but it has kept coming back to me, creeping into my head even as I’m slogging my way around a 10 mile run on a Sunday morning and feeling like I'm wading through treacle. Why on earth would I think about running 26.2 miles when I’m struggling to get my pace up over less than half that distance, goodness only knows… but there it is.

In the run-up to the marathon, I had a few sessions of sports massage.  After the marathon, I had one last  one to loosen out my poor, aching muscles. My massage therapist, on the basis of those four or five sessions, told me that he reckoned that I wasn’t the kind of person who would be happy with just one marathon.

Damn him, but he was right.  I knew, deep down, that he was right then... but it's taken me a few months to accept that to myself.

So, here it is: I’m in for 2016 and I’ve formally put in my bid for a gold bond place with the charity.

I feel tired just thinking about it.

holes....

You'll probably remember that I wear an ankle cuff when I run to try and prevent my ankle dropping.  This is mostly to stop me from scuffing my foot when I get tired, which has the immediate effect of sometimes making me fall spectacularly over, but has a rather more insidious knock-on effect on my foot, knees and hips.

On the whole it works pretty well, but I have had to make a few adjustments.

As you can see, underneath the ankle brace itself, I wear two separate sweatbands.  There's a two-fold reason for this.  The cuff itself acts as an anchor for an elastic strap which stretches down and attaches to a hook that I insert underneath the laces in my running shoe.  The stretched elastic flexes as I flex my ankle as I run, but it provides an extra spring to help the ankle fully flex back in my stride, rather than hanging back and dragging on the floor.  As I discovered in marathon training, this transfers force into my ankle and shin, and after long runs, I often end up with a big, swollen bruise.  I combat this by wearing a sweatband on the affected area.  It seems to work,

The second sweatband forms a more obvious purpose, and it's one that I discovered I needed the hard way:

As I run, the ankle cuff chafes.  Because I'm a runner, and because runners learn to ignore pain, this meant that I was often making bloody great big holes in my leg.  I now have a selection of interesting scars around my left ankle, but I also now wear a second sweatband to try and prevent from getting any more.

Does the whole damn contraption work?  Yeah, I reckon.  I've been falling over a lot less, anyway.

---

I went out for a ten mile run yesterday.  It was pretty hot, but for the first 4 miles, I was holding a pretty reasonable pace..... and then my body blew up, and I started getting slower and slower as fatigue gripped me across the shoulders and my body screamed at me to stop running.  I completed the full ten miles, obviously.  It wasn't much fun, and I slept most of the afternoon and had an early night, but I finished the run.  This evening's 7 miler was a little easier.

Grittily determined  / stubborn past the point of stupidity.... I'll let you decide.  Probably both.

only sleeping...

I spent much of my bank holiday weekend snoozing on a chair in front of the cricket. Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true: I spent much of my bank holiday weekend either out exercising, or snoozing on a chair in front of the cricket.  As well as all the snoozing, I managed to squeeze in a parkrun (5km), a swim and another run of a little over 6 miles with my running club.  That's not too shabby in a three day weekend that also included a Eurovision party (don't ask).

It’s been four weeks now since London, and that parkrun on Saturday was the first run since where I didn’t still feel the marathon in my legs… it was also the first in several weeks where I consciously tried to work my way back up though the gears to shake marathon pace out of my system. 23:37 is still  quite a bit slower than I want to be running, but it’s a good five minutes faster than I have been running parkrun for the last few months.

As for the snoozing….. well, one of the most common, “invisible” symptoms of multiple sclerosis is fatigue. It’s “invisible” because it’s not really something that anyone else can see, and yet for lots of people, it can be devastating. Can you imagine not being able to summon the energy to even get out of bed, never mind to leave the house? Can you imagine needing a blue disabled badge for your car before you can even contemplate a trip to the supermarket? Can you imagine then being abused by people for parking in that disabled space just because they can’t see anything wrong with you?

Clearly, given that I’ve just run a marathon, my fatigue is nowhere near those sorts of levels. Even so, sometimes it feels as though a switch has been flicked and I just run out of power and basically all I’m good for is sleep. This was one of those sorts of weekends. Energy output > Energy reserves = Power down.

Mind you, I can remember my dad coming home from work in the evening and falling asleep in front of the telly before dinner. We used to laugh at the way he would start snoring into the newspaper and would then be all grumpy when he woke up, denying that he had even been asleep in the first place. Given that he would have been about my age at the time, and I find myself doing more or less exactly the same thing now...I’m not laughing so much these days.

I suppose it’s entirely possible that the reason I find myself spending my bank holiday weekend afternoons snoozing is because I’m a 41 year old man sitting in a warm dapple of sunshine watching a game of cricket on the telly after lunch and nothing at all to do with my MS.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

round and round and round...

Spending an hour running around in circles. Round and round and round.  6 x 90 seconds at about one mile pace with three minutes recovery and then one last burst of 2 x 30 seconds at a bit faster than mile pace.

It hurts, too.

An hour running around in circles on the grass by the Embankment, pretty much literally going nowhere.

You'll notice that I tracked it on my garmin.

This is the kind of training you do to increase your speed and your speed endurance.  It's also the kind of training that I'm much more likely to do if there's someone there with a whistle encouraging me and telling me when to run and when to stop.  It's run over summer by the guys who organise the parkrun I attend most Saturdays, and it's completely free.  I did this last year, and although it's really hard and it hurts (if you're doing it right), it definitely makes you faster.  After four months of marathon training, it's just the ticket for shaking myself out of marathon pace and trying to get myself back up to somewhere nearer the pace I want to be running.

It's just how I like to roll on a Wednesday evening.  At least it wasn't raining this week.