Month: April 2010

It’s a Mythtery

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And a mystery (or mythtery, as Toyah would say*) it certainly is.

It is an absolute mystery to me that I can spend 10 hours a week, for 3 months, training for an event, do half a dozen really long runs, have a a great warm-up race, a perfect marathon taper, then go into the race that really mattered last Sunday and get horrible*** cramp at 14 miles; so much so that I ended up pleading for salt with those lovely people**** from St John’s, then walking large sections of the rest of the race, feeling very sorry for myself.

Anyway, the whole thing resulted in the slowest I’ve run a marathon for 12 years, and it’s really really really infuriating that I can’t put my finger on the reasoning. I guess if I were to take a world view on this sort of frustration, I would assess it as indicative of our desire these days to capture everything in black and white – everything has a cause and effect, and the simpler the better. And whilst it would be great to be able to do this, I think it’s pretty unlikely in practice – in this case, I might just have to put the whole thing down as a bad day at the office. And in doing so, maybe accept that there’s a bit of ambiguity and mystery in why things happen, and that sometimes all the planning in the world won’t stop some bad luck.

Meanwhile, at the end of the course, Jr Emu #2 was waiting with his mother.

“Well Done”, he said, really meaning it, “You did really well”

“Thanks”, I said, “but I should have finished about 15 minutes quicker than that”

“Yes, but Dad”, he reassured me, “I was watching everyone finish, and noone ahead of you looked nearly as old or as grey as you”

Which I think he meant as a positive.

Must dash now. Got an autumn comeback marathon to plan.

*And this does give me an opportunity to tell you my favourite Toyah story. Some time after her ‘classic’ EP ‘Sheep farming in Barnet’, Toyah shot to the top of the ‘hit parade**’ with an album that included hits like ‘It’s A Mystery’, and, err, some other stuff. A friend of mine was manager of a large record store at the time and took delivery of several boxes of the album. The record bombed, and he was left with boxes and boxes of records that he had to return. Normally, this would involve cutting open a record sleeve, putting a light scratch on it and sending it back damaged, but there were hundreds of these, and a) it would have taken ages and b) it might have been seen as a bit of a scam. So, in a moment of sheer genius, he put a ‘damaged/return’ label on each box, and wrote in big letters: “Singer has lisp”.

** ask your Dad

*** Really horrible

**** I’m sure they really are lovely people. Just wish they knew a bit more about fixing injuries.

Teenage Kicks

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The defining force behind the Marx Brothers was not Groucho, Chico or Harpo (or even Zeppo, or Gummo), but their mother, Minnie. Mrs Marx drove her boys pretty hard, to follow her into a career in Vaudeville, where she’d enjoyed a fairly lively career herself. In fact, trivia fans, her early career is referenced in the excellent ‘Carter Beats the Devil’ book, under the alias of Minnie Palmer. Anyway, I mention her name, as I heard an interesting story about her approach to parenting last week from Jr Emu #1. Apparently, in a bid to save money, Minnie would travel by train with all four (or five) of her boys on child fares. On one such trip, the conductor approached her mid-journey.

‘Madam’, he said, ‘Of your children on this train, one is smoking a cigar in the first class carriage, and another is having a shave in the bathroom’
‘Gosh’, said Minnie, ‘they grow up so fast, don’t they?’
I was reminded of this story, when called upon to give The Talk On Drugs And Sex to Jr Emu#2 earlier this week. TTOD&S doesn’t get made very often in our house, largely as the subject matter is delivered far more successfully by free access to the internet, adolescent boys being adolescent boys, and having a nurse for a mother. But occasionally, fatherly advice needs to be given, and for want of a more qualified person in the family, I’m enlisted to help.
‘So’, I said to #2, after a particularly challenging discussion on why meow meow was essentially a bad thing, is there anything you need to know about sex? Anything bugging you about stuff you don’t understand?’
‘Only one thing’, said #2.
‘Then ask away’, I said, in as much of a man of the world fashion as I could muster.
‘It’s just that I’ve never really understood what felching is’

As Mrs Marx would say, they do grow up so fast.

Shoot me the sherbert, Herbert*

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So, we’re back in foreign climes again, or as my friend Richard would say, the land of ecouté et repeté.

And, given that this part of my marathon training plan calls for a horribly tough training week, what better time to lace up, and head out the door, much to the surprise of the French residents hereabouts, who tend to regard anyone not wearing overalls and driving a tractor with deep suspicion. And yesterday, out the door I went, with a certain amount of trepidation, to try for a rather hilly 20-miler.

All good up to about mile 15, where I aimed to take on (as we runners call it) a drink and a gel to see me through the last quarter of the run.

I had been slightly influenced in this by a presentation on sports nutrition that I went to a couple of weeks ago. Now this had been sponsored by the lovely people from Lucozade, and reminded me, probably quite unfairly, of the posters that I used to see at school advertising drug use. Well, not advertising drug use in the traditional sense (although if you jotted down some of the numbers in the boys toilets then you’d probably be alright for a lively weekend. However, you needed to be reasonably alert – I knew a boy who swapped his moped one Friday for what turned out to be an Oxo cube.) I mean advertising that drugs use was pretty much A Bad Thing, and that people who dealt in such wares always gave the first few hits free.

And so it turned out with the Lucozade man, as he described how important it was to get nutrition into you during a marathon, and that the London Marathon would be supplying all runners with Lucozade gels and drinks on the course. Anyway, all interesting stuff, and in true Nick O’Teen (remember him?) style, he invited us at the end of the talk to help ourselves to as many free samples as we could justify to ourselves. Which, looking at some of my fellow runners, was quite a generous justification. Standing outside the scrum, I asked a friend if she could pass me a couple of gels, which she duly did, and off I went, happy that I could try the gels out (For Nothing!) before I set off on a race proper.

So, at mile 15, I had stashed a bottle of water and a gel, and picked them up almost without breaking stride. I should mention at this point that the weather at that point featured what I believe weathermen call ‘squally’ winds. I think this just means the wind blows fairly random directions, and I evidenced this earlier in the run when I spat out of the right side of my mouth, only for the spit to complete a 270 degree rotation of my head and land in my left eye. Anyway, let that be a lesson for all sportsmen to keep their saliva in their mouth at all times. Back to mile 15, and I expectantly bit the side of the wrapper off the gel, and squeezed the contents into my mouth. There followed an odd sensation, which was a bit like eating stardust sweets mixed with the inside of a sherbert dip. Not unpleasant, but not quite how I expected a gel to feel. About half way through I realised that I wasn’t eating a gel at all, but a single serving Lucozade powder. At which point, two things happened. Firstly, running along at a reasonable pace, I was briskly followed by all manner of insects, who were for some reason attracted to a runner caked in sweat with a unshiftable layer of raspberry sherbert all over his face. And secondly, I remembered about osmosis. Osmosis, you may recall from school, is where water diffuses across a semi-permeable membrane, such as you might find, oh I don’t know, maybe in your stomach wall. And if you put a concentration of powder that absorbs water into a stomach when you’re nicely dehydrated, you can almost feel the particles of water dragging their way across the stomach. I really don’t know if this is an exact physiological description of what happened, but it certainly felt like it at the time.

The rest of the run wasn’t quite so much fun as the first bit. The flies disappeared after a while, and I dragged myself back to the house.

‘How was your run?’ enquired Mrs E.

‘Finished.’ I said.

*If you get this reference, then good on you. I miss Norwich in the 1980’s.

Oh Boy!

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This morning’s Guardian carries a piece titled ‘We get what we want in life’, which is about couples choosing the sex of their baby. For me & Mrs E, this turned out to be an interesting read, and brought back some memories that frankly were probably best consigned to a bucket marked ‘irritations of the past’.

For background, and in rudimentary code, this is how our family arrived:

010 Set ‘children we have’ to zero

020 Mrs E fills a little faint, and several months later adds 1 to ‘children we have’

030 Despite expecting to have a girl, we had a boy. And he was gorgeous and we couldn’t imagine our lives could be more perfect.

040 If ‘children we have’ = 4, go to 060

050 Go to 020

060 Live Happily Ever After

Thus, by the time we got to line 060, we had four fantastic and healthy boys, all of whom were great value and continue to be so. And largely, you’d think, that would be that, and we could look forward to living HEA. Which, of course, we’ve largely done, and only little minor annoyances have distracted us from that course. Especially the early ones, where ‘children we have’ had just equalled 4. Mrs E would find herself stopped in the street by relative strangers, who’d tilt their heads gently to one side and tell her that she mustn’t be so sad at having a boy. While she was pushing him along in the pram. I heard one exchange with a woman at a supermarket till that ended ‘Oh dear; I was lucky of course, I had one of each’. I was asked incredulously at work (in an IT department, indeed) ‘What are the chances of having 4 boys?’, to which, of course, the answer is 16:1, i.e. the same odds as any sequence of 4 children.

Quite apart from the gormless insensitivity shown by people who really should know better, it really teed us off at the time to think that Jr Emu #4 should arrive as a disappointment. He has, incidentally, been a bit of a testing individual since, but that’s not the point. The point is that, by and large, he arrived healthy and happy and has continued to be so.

So, when the Guardian feature quote a woman with four boys as being ‘traumatised by what she hadn’t got’*, it really…feels wrong. Not so much morally, although the middle class outlook on gender selection is of tiny relevance compared to the interest in, say, India or China, but in the context of just being happy with your lot.

For our part, I don’t think any of us could contemplate a different gender mix in the family. Nothing against girls, you understand, just can’t imagine how it would work. For Mrs E, it’s like having two sets of the Kray twins on hand. For Jr Emu #1, he has 3 younger brothers to boss about, and for #4, 3 to copy, wrestle with and torment. And neither #2 or #3 has exclusivity on being a difficult middle child. And if you’re reading this and you have a family, you’ve almost certainly got a similar dynamic going on, because that’s how families work, they just get on with the situation of just being a family. And so, in my humble opinion, it should continue.

*Accompanying pictures to the article: 4 solemn looking boys on p16, the 2 girls born via IVF, post vasectomy sperm extraction then gender selection in Spain** on p17

** Because it’s banned in the UK