33 weeks, 60.4 miles and a reminder why Sport matters

This week’s running has been one of the best weeks in recent memory. I covered a lap of 5.4 miles each on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. I then did a morning and an evening lap of the same route on Thursday and finished the week with 32.4 miles (6 laps) on Saturday and 6.4 miles with my friend Paddy today.

I used the Pardon The Interruption podcast to occupy my mind for the midweek running and spent 2.5 hours of yesterday’s run listening to the last part of day 3 of the Ashes cricket between Australia and England.

There was a certain juxtaposition about being out at 5am skating around on icy footpaths where the temperature was around 0 degrees C listening to a cricket match in the middle of an Australian summer!

The radio commentary was very compelling and I was impressed with how much of cricket ‘vernacular’ I remembered. The match was very suspenseful and I was particularly inspired by the sportsmanship of both sides. There was a moment where the England captain was hit on the helmet by the ball and the Australian bowler went over to check he was OK.

I was reminded of the above exchange between Andrew Flintoff and Brett Lee from the 2005 Edgbaston Ashes test. This was after England had lost the first test and despite a Herculean effort from Brett Lee and Shane Warne, England had just won to tie the series and Flintoff was consoling Lee. At the end of the 5 tests, arguably that match was the difference between England winning the series and losing. Although cricket has a reputation of being popular for ‘sledging’, it is great to see (or sometimes just hear about) sportsmanlike moments like this.

There has been another day’s play since but the defining element of what I listened to yesterday was the batting of the Australian captain Steve Smith. One of my main memories of watching cricket when I was young is about batsmen sticking around when bowling is at its best and single handedly keeping their team in matches. Being able to concentrate on every ball for day and a half to two day stretches is something that translates beautifully to Ultra Running.

I have grown to appreciate the tactical element of running long distances a bit more nowadays and genuinely believe it can be the small difference between finishing and not finishing. A lot of this is being able to adjust to unexpected situations and persevere with the task at hand. England had tried several fielding formations and different plans unsuccessfully to get him out. One of the commentators made a brilliant Blackadder reference by joking that Baldrick would have been exhausted!

What Steve Smith managed yesterday in adapting for 8.5 hours was a perfect example of the qualities outlined in the poem at the end of this blog.

Ultimately I believe Sport matters because it gives everyday people like me a chance to witness how incredible efforts like this can influence matches. One of my favourite sporting quotes was around when the NBA basketball player Kevin Durant was still playing for OKC Thunder. It was essentially that the effort of his performances in playoff matches make you try harder at your job through Osmosis!

Having listened to the cricket for the first part of the run led to me knocking 40 minutes off the last time I ran that distance. Hopefully if I can continue to make progress like this the Paris race will go to plan.