The Lincoln 10k Run

Time was when I trundled over the hill from Newcastle to South Shields on a couple of occasions, participating in the Great North Run, and I couldn't get anywhere near breaking the two hour barrier, however hard I trained. I'm just not built for running, big boned, awkward gait and the worst hand:eye coordination I have ever come across, so naturally I never excelled in sports, pub or otherwise.

Whenever I did a half marathon, I busted myself up really badly, and endured the most awful muscle aches for up to four days afterwards, so I decided to give myself the rest of my life off and concentrate on shorter distances that weren't so injurious, and it was 2001 that I first galloped round the Lincoln 10k. It was a record time, too, just over 52 minutes, but it was canine-assisted, as I was towed round the course by a fifteen-month-old cobrador that could have put an Iditarod-hardened huskie to shame. I had a few subsequent races that clocked appalling times as slow as 57 minutes, but this year turned into a grudge match, so draconian training was called for, combined with an Indian-delayed Lent.

Basically, my lovely boys, Sam (19) and Jack (18) both reckoned they could beat each other, and never even gave a thought that this old gimmer could be in the chocolates. As already established, Sam is at Manchester, and despite being a traitor to his genes and working hard academically, spent many hours in the gym and out on the track. Jack had done his basic training at the Army Foundation College at Harrogate a year before, and although he opted out (to a mixture or relief and regret) after the hard bit, was as hard as nails and incredibly fit. Like everything else in his current sloth-like life, training was too much of a hassle, and he knew he could just wing it on the day, Sunday 30th March 2008.

The weather building up to the race was a shocker, complete with snow for Easter Sunday a week earlier, and even the Saturday was a bleak day, but the Lincoln 10k is a charmed race, and the sun has never failed to shine for every one of my five entries.



The official race photographer was Ellie, who if her future is in the field of photography must learn to be a little less economic with the shutter, as herewith is the total of her day's work

Despite the sunshine, there was a cutting north wind, and the start was delayed by twenty minutes as some confrontational shit was refusing to move their car from a pinch point on the course. Eventually we shuffled up to the line........




..... and then we were away, a forced slow start, but probably not too bad for that fact. We had already decided we would run independently, and in the melee of the start, we were instantly parted and I honestly didn't know where they were, although I fancied Jack had already made a dash for it.

Fortunately, the course is around the old town on top of the hill, and does not feature that ball-busting hill up to the cathedral. There are still some spirit-sapping inclines, however, and the first one features in the council estate where everyone seems to run through fear rather than competition. I had started the race with my trusty old greeny-yellow biking jacket to keep my temperature up, but two miles in my thermostat opened and off the outer casing came. I ran with it screwed up in a ball, hoping to see Ellie mid-course and give it to her.

That bit of the plan worked, as she shouted to me, and I cut across the course to throw my jacket at her feet. It was at this point she took her last photo of the day, this unedifying snap of my dispatch.



Two things happened at this point. Firstly, neither Ellie or Jane recognised the fact I had delivered my heirloom garment to Ellie's feet, and coolly walked on and left it there, lost to me forever, and secondly, Jane shouting 'Go Jack! Go Greg!' And there he is in the picture, in the red shirt, the hairy little individual, trying to run my race!

Well, I didn't look round then or until the two furlong mark. I realised that he was hanging on to me, and we were both running my race. So I stepped up the pressure a bit, just at the 5 mile bit where fatigue is biting. The dispiriting thing about the Lincoln course is that it twists back on itself, so whilst you feel you are running the race of your life, the elite runners are cantering past in the other direction, having already done a mile and a half more! There is a flipside to this in that when I reached that very bit on the home straight, the backmarkers were running hard, so I must have been in the top half of the field.

When I rounded the cathedral for the heartbreaking hill climb over cobbles up to the finish line in the castle, I had a hard look back, and Jack wasn't there waiting to pounce, so I carried on running the best race I could. On previous occasions, I seemed to be able to summon up reserves of energy at the end to overtake dozens of people at the death, but this time there was nothing extra left, and the late-surgers were going past me. I was really pleased about that, as it meant I had measured the pace well, hadn't gone too slow or too fast earlier, just a solid performance throughout, a bit like a racing car running out of fuel on the finish line.

Endurance sports make me a bit mad, and I was suffering delusions in the closing stages that I had run a sub-50 time (I don't wear a watch) so I was devastated to see the clock on the line report '55.37'. How could this be, I had just trained for a month, and really pulled my tripe out? The good thing about these modern day races is that many of them, including Lincoln, use a timing chip, so one's time is measured between the lines, rather than from the gun, recorded on the clock. The bad thing is one has to wait until the paper comes out the next day to get the actual times.

My beef with these races is that organisers have starting pens based on expected finish times. Why, then, are there pantomime cows and pub landlords with collecting buckets immediately behind the Ethiopian elite, whom do nothing but slow down serious (or in my case Corinthian) runners? Are they seriously worried about donor-fatigue in crowds lining the course? I am justified in my fulminating, in that my gun place was 1,547th and my place between the lines was 1,541st, so I had overtaken only 6 people during the race.

The most important statistic for me was 54 minutes and 3 seconds corrected time, my second personal best, and without a tug.

1541 2432 Gregory Dunn M 00:55:37 1547 00:54:03
1686 2433 Jack Dunn M 00:56:56 1723 00:55:25
1931 2434 Samuel Dunn M 00:58:53 1981 00:57:21

Needless to say the lovely boys are livid that the old man kicked their arse, but I fear next year I will have to retire toothless to the edge of the herd as the young bucks rob me of my crown!

Sesquipedalian! Me?

My good friend and colleague Dr Richard Case was recently moved to accuse me of sesquipedalianism. Normally, my defence in that situation is to sit on the fence until I can extricate myself and find a reliable dictionary fast. However, with the good doctor, that sort of pretence isn't called for, as the man is learned way beyond his years, so I just asked for spelling and etymology by email, and this is what turned up.

"sesquipedalian adjective:
1. Given to or characterized by the use of long words.
2. Long and ponderous; having many syllables.

We owe this word to the Roman writer Horace, who wrote in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry): “Proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba” (“He throws aside his paint pots and his words that are a foot and a half long”). It comes from Latin sesqui–, one and a half, plus ped, a foot. It was borrowed into English in the seventeenth century and has become a favourite of those writers who like self-referential terms, or are addicted to polysyllabic humour.

It appears, somewhat disguised, in The History of Mr Polly by H G Wells: “Words attracted [Mr Polly] curiously, words rich in suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English, and no confidence in himself... He avoided every recognized phrase in the language, and mispronounced everything in order that he shouldn’t be suspected of ignorance but whim. ‘Sesquippledan,’ he would say. ‘Sesquippledan verboojuice.’ ”

Somebody who uses long words is a sesquipedalianist, and this style of writing is sesquipedalianism. The noun sesquipedality means “lengthiness”. If such words are not enough, there’s always hyperpolysyllabicsesquipedalianist for someone who enjoys using really long words."

I wouldn't agree about enjoying really long words, but I do take delight in trying to select really right words!

Now the rush is over........

....... of pictures of snow, I thought I'd bung in my Easter pics. The day started with three inches of snow and a monumentally stupid decision on my part to keep up my training regime for the Lincoln 10k run. Being mildly obsessive:compulsive, I have only one calculated route of exactly 10k, and as I can't possibly run for any less or more than the target training distance, it has to be this route. I failed to make the connection between the deadly combination of an uneven seawall on the Humber bank and the deep and crisp and even blanket of slippery stuff.

So it was a complete surprise to tear a muscle in my arse so badly that I thought I'd scuppered the race, still a week away, and I spent the next four days in gluteus maximus hell, but the run itself can await its own telling.

I got these shots before the ill-starred run and before the rapid melt set in.









On limping home, behind the cobrador for once, it was pretty obvious that we could make the drive down to Bury St Edmunds for the Easter feast at Jules' place, which I really didn't want to miss, as it was to be the first reunion of the old India hands, and the rolling out to the wider family of the wonders of Gin & Mango.

In fact, the severe snow coverage was only in remote North Lincolnshire and west of Bury, so the drive was easy and relaxed. Parties at Jules' are always great, and the craic was 90 (I have traced the origins of that peculiar phrase, and one theory was that it originated in the Isle of Man, and not in the Ireland that claims it), even for someone four and a half weeks into the alcohol deprivation of a delayed Lent. We went for the obligatory walk around Icklingham village in a bitingly cold wind and got these snaps.





Then it was lift-off early doors, as we had promised Ellie her birthday nosh-up in a restaurant of her choice, and she predictably chose Damon's, an upmarket burger joint on the Lincoln bypass, popular with the youth of the area and other lovers of predigested food. I love going there, but for anthropological and musical reasons, and certainly not for the disappointment of being told that the fella on the next table just ordered the last lobster, as I was all for ordering steak just to get a sharp knife to poke him in the eye. People's table manners fascinate me, and I wonder why. My late father, a man widely respected as being able to mount a spirited counter-argument to any reasonable opinion, passed on to me his firm belief that food should be loaded and unloaded in private.

Does anyone remember that wonderful play on the telly called 'John Fothergill'? Himself was played brilliantly, as ever, by Robert Hardy, as the restaurateur of that nosh-house in Thame that featured in Brideshead where Anthony B-b-b-b-lanche attempted the seduction of Charles Ryder. The line I remember vividly was Fothergill showing off to one of the glitterati by instructing his waitress to overcharge customers by a shilling if she considered them to be ugly. The scene of corpulent farmers trenching down plain fare on market day made a fitting backdrop.

The musical reason is attached to the anthropological in that it is so surprising that we all have a birthday every 365 days, and we're damn well going to go out and eat burgers and sing about it! Which brings me onto the musical content in that miserable dirge, because in a reasonably large gathering, not only do all twelve notes feature simultaneously, but there are half and quarter tones in the cacophonous farting. Then, after the atonal row during which at least half the choir forget the name of the stupid sod celebrating their epiphany, there is that awful wail that started life as 'hurrah!' and has been corrupted to the drunken belch we are subjected to today. And if that spectacle was enough, the 'management' turn it into a son et lumiere by prodding some poor sap of a waiter into the throng bearing a Swiss Roll with a sparkler in it! Strike a light!

Perhaps you are forming an opinion that I'm not a fan of ingestion as a team sport. Suffice to say it was someone with a far sharper wit than I who proclaimed the ugliest word in the English language to be 'burger'.

Catching up

Life has been extraordinarily hectic, stressful almost beyond endurance at times, and fleetingly beautiful over the past three weeks or so. Here begins a few of the highlights.

Every Australian Boy Needs a Shed?

That is the title of an otherwise forgettable song by Australian band Stampede (there Mary, you thought I'd forgotten!), and put me in mind of a long-held belief, way before Boggy Marsh's fleeting fame, that the true currency of life is sheds. I simply love sheds. This is hardly unusual, pretty much every bloke I know loves sheds, but the real reason that this subject has reared its head is that I have managed to secure tenure of what I can only brag about as being the quintessential foxtrot oscar shed. The sort of shed where I can not only work on my beloved boats, but also rig them! Yes, I can get the effing mast up inside this monster! It features a mezzanine floor, a storeroom, acres of space, natural light, surround strip lighting, three-phase electricity and a disgustingly dirty shithouse.







Needless to say I have expanded to fill the available space already, but the anticipation of driving to Holland this Thursday (unbeknownst of the present Mrs D - she doesn't grace these pages - I don't think?!) to view the mother of all sports boats, Zest, Yachting World Diamond No 1, the first planing keelboat in the history of the world is made all the more enjoyable if terms can be reached, in the knowledge that I can just about squeeze her in me new shed too!