2018 has been an odd year. To use a tired cliche, it has been a real rollercoaster ride. Again, an end-of-year review is a cliche in itself, so perhaps my pursuit of originality has failed from the off. I digress.
This year has been book-ended by trips to Sierra Leone, but having the same location as a start and a finish is probably where the comparisons to Tolkein’s ‘The Hobbit’ end. Perhaps some metaphor could be built about a Lonely Mountain and of man-eating spiders, but I’ll leave that to the fantasy writers. The best way to look at my year, is through locations:
Sierra Leone
The year began on a beach, with a bit of a splash as I dove into the Atlantic ocean naked around 3 am, with a few too many Star beers swilling around my system. I was coming off a short injury period and had high hopes for the year – 2017 had been something of a breakthrough in terms of getting consistent training in, and as a result I had set PB times across the board – from 800m to 5 km. I was also excited to start a new job in Belfast in the New Year, so things were looking up. I headed back to Belfast with a glowing tan and some pep in my step.
Belfast
On arrival in Belfast in early January, I was keen to get stuck into training and my new job. Too keen, it soon became clear. In an ill-advised attempt to speed up the process of getting fit, I started jumping on a spin bike in the evenings. In one of the first sessions (a Monday evening, so potentially the first session, my memory is hazy on the details) I put in a good effort, but on walking home from a friend’s birthday drinks that evening my knee started creaking, and by the time I got home I could barely ascend or descend stairs without wincing and clinging onto the bannister for support. Thus began a deeply frustrating cycle – wait for the knee to feel normal, do a few runs and then have it seize up once again. By early March, having pulled out of yet another race I had planned to do, I was utterly convinced I was done running. I’ve had plenty of injury issues over the years, but this one felt different. Maybe it had something to do with being in full-time work. Regardless, I remember very clearly telling a friend in a grimy Holylands St Patrick’s Day house party that my running days were over.
That “retirement” lasted all of about 3 weeks. Queen’s was hosting the Irish University Athletics Championship and I put myself down to commentate. The morning of the championships I decided to go for a jog, and surprised myself, running quite fluidly and at a fair pace. While my commentary career was short-lived, my running was revived, and I even scored a win at my local parkrun a few weeks into this comeback. Two weeks later I was on the sidelines again, this time with a back injury, and I spent my 22nd birthday limping like an octogenarian. I had been in a bit of a funk for a lot of 2018 up to when I resumed training but once I was back running regularly I began to think a little more clearly. In late May I signed up for a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course in July, and I am almost glad I wasn’t training when I did that course – it was exhausting. The course finished in late July, I packed my things, enjoyed a boozy week of farewells and bid Belfast farewell.
Ramsgate
Early July saw me move back to England, to stay with my aunts in sunny Kent. My training was beginning to pick up again and I was able to catch up with friends from school between firing out applications for different language schools all over the world. Again, after a few weeks of training I jumped into a parkrun, and performed relatively well with a 3rd place finish and low 17 min run, off very limited training. Emboldened, I stepped up the training and surely enough I was injured again within a fortnight! Another back injury. I was disappointed but very quickly heard news that I would be moving to Spain to teach English for a year in late September, which made the injury much easier to take. The last weeks of my stay in Ramsgate were spent hurriedly attempting to learn some basic Spanish and checking out Segovia on google maps’ street view function.
Segovia
When I first got to Segovia I was still limping from the pesky back injury, but over a period of roughly two weeks I found I could walk more comfortably, then jog to the shop, then run 20 minutes, and eventually train properly again. The buildup was gradual and the moderate altitude (perhaps this is where to insert that Lonely Mountain metaphor) and high-20s temperature of Segovia kept my pace slow. On my third week of ‘training’ (really just going for a run as many days of the week as I fancied) I ran in a local race, 16.5 km of rolling trails and road from a town called La Granja back to Segovia. After a slightly stressful journey to La Granja where I nearly missed my bus, I started in the mid pack, intending to cruise through the field in the second half. The course was mostly downhill and before long the competitive juices were flowing and I was moving up the field. Although the course was largely downhill, there was a cruel uphill at the finish – about 2 km of steep climbing from the bottom of the valley where we had been running alongside the river to the finish under the famous Roman aqueduct of Segovia. I finished 13th in 64 minutes, and immediately began looking for more races to do! Cathal Logue, a friend of mine who I met in Belfast, lives in Madrid, invited me down to run a 10km race. The night before the race we discussed what shape we thought were in and both came to the conclusion that we didn’t really know, but thought we would run around 36 minutes. We jogged to the start line just outside the Children’s Hospital the race is run in benefit of, and it turned out we were a minute out to the good, as we both recorded surprisingly strong results on the tough out-and-back course, myself just inside 35 minutes with 34.54 and Cathal just outside with 35.02. Again, I was excited by the strong result (that was an official PB for me at the time) and I was keen to get stuck into training.
My next race was due to be the Joe Seeley 10km in Belfast on the first weekend of December, and in the three weeks following the Corre por el Nino 10km in Madrid I recorded 305 km – weeks of 95, 108 and 102 km. While I wasn’t doing very much fast running, a tough weekly fartlek and lots of easy running over rough terrain whipped me into shape. Despite a late night before the race travelling to stay with Matthew Devlin in Belfast, I felt fairly good on race day and after a short warm up jog I set off in the midst of an absolute stampede of runners. If I were capable of staying injury free consistently, I would make a point of running the Seeley every year. It is among the best races in the UK and Ireland to run a PB for 10K, unless you are running considerably under 31 minutes. The depth is incredible every year, and every club in Northern Ireland worth it’s salt sends a team. My team, Annadale Striders, ended up in 4th place overall, and I was dragged round to a 33.36 clocking – a PB by well over a minute! I also scored a valuable victory over ex-training partner Luke Dinsmore, if only by chiptime! A night out in Belfast and extremely hungover trip back to Segovia followed, my head almost as blurry as Tyson Fury’s after the devastating knock-out punch I watched Deontay Wilder deliver at 5.30 that morning (how he got up from that is a mystery to myself and I am sure a great number of people). Another two weeks of training passed, including two strong 23km fartlek runs, and on another visit to Madrid (again courtesy of Cathal) I took another handful of seconds off my 10km PB with a 33.29 run at the very competitive Villa de Aranjuez 10km. 2018 was well and truly salvaged in the months of November and December. Mixed in between those races were a series of exams for the pupils at the language school I teach at, and the accompanying flurry of end-of-term reports, so it is fair to say I was reaching for the finish line and am looking forward to a few weeks off.
Sierra Leone
And back again. With a third 10km PB in six weeks I have decided to call 2018 a year and wind down my training for the Christmas break (what a soft b*stard, I know…) As I sit in the Mohammed V airport in Casablanca I can’t help but feel a mixture of pride and relief about how 2018 turned out. Sierra Leone beckons and I am looking forward to having an easy couple of weeks of training, before getting stuck into marathon training in the New Year. I have a few races planned for 2019 but for now the main focus is to catch up on some lost sleep and get a suntan. Let’s hope Freetown is still as entertaining as it was last Christmas!
Max runs a marathon 