"Good luck!" says Emma as I leave. "If you keep to your schedule so far, this'll be your last session before the big day!"
It's a sobering thought. It's been probably 6 weeks since I last entered a swimming pool that didn't have a tube slide and a giant tipping bucket. Even tonight, I've dithered in getting out the door. I thought I was going to be saved by having left my goggles in the bag in the kid's bedroom. Alas, they were fast asleep, allowing me to sneak in and fetch them. I check my emails. I have another go at taming the new hamster (she's having none of it). But finally I can't hold off any more, and away I go.
I don't hate swimming. I don't even dislike it. I just have no motivation for it. Unlike running or cycling, it requires you to go to a particular place at a particular time, to go backwards and forwards in the same boring space, with little visual or audio stimulation. No-one ever wrote a blog post about how they swam to an old French fort and gawped in wonder at the Alps. Of course, it doesn't help that I have to pay £4.40 for the privilege either.
It doesn't even really feel like exercise. When I've finished a run or a cycle, I certainly feel it - I want to find the nearest lady, flex my rock-solid thighs and say "'ave a feel of that, love". When I finish a swim, I come home with a slight fatigue and whiff of chlorine. Maybe that's a sign I'm not really doing enough.
So, I get in the pool, I go backwards and forwards. It's not great, it's not bad, although I definitely have a bit of trouble with my right elbow, and I'm still looking at 20 minutes for 750m. Whatevs. I make a mental note to go and buy a wetsuit next week - I need the practice in open water, and it might alleviate some of the boredom.
In other news, a quick, and quick, ride on the bike yesterday.
Monday, 19 May 2014
Thursday, 15 May 2014
La Bastille
A change is as good as a rest, they say. I'm not sure I agree. In moving house, a work offsite meeting, a
week in Crete and a few days with work in Grenoble, routine has gone out the
window. Through it all, training is
hanging on for dear life. I haven't done
a decent cycle for about a month, and mentally I've abandoned swimming. It's
only running that continues to keep me honest.
The early morning sun peeks out from behind the clouds in
Grenoble, and around the edges of the blinds in the Park Hotel. It’s 6.30am, and the alarm goes off with a
deafening tone, one that surely would be considered for use as a torture device
in Guantanamo Bay. I switch it off
urgently, and fall back into the pillow.
It's so, so easy to allow my eyelids to close again, which they do for a
few minutes. It's cosy here. I tell myself how much I'm going to enjoy
getting up and going for a run, but the body does not believe it. Eventually, it's only the need to pee that gets
me out of bed. Even then, it takes an
awful lot of effort to convince myself not to get back in once I'm done. By the time I get out the door, it's nearly
five to 7, and I haven't left myself an awful lot of time to run before needing
to get back for breakfast and the cab to the office.
Outside, it's a little chilly, but otherwise a beautiful morning. Right across the street, I into the Parc de Paul
Mistral, a green hub in the middle of Grenoble.
On summer evenings, this place is chock-a-block with the sports-obsessed
citizens of the city. Running, football,
touch rugby, ultimate frisbee, slacklining, bicycle polo; all get an
airing here. But this morning I'm
largely alone.
I am on a mission - to reach la Bastille. There are easy ways to get up there - the Téléphérique, or Les Oeufs to the locals, can whisk you smoothly and efficiently to
the restaurant at the top in a matter of minutes. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that it doesn't
open until 10am, so today I'm running. At
dinner the previous night, my companions told me of a colleague who reached the
Bastille in under 7 minutes. Should take
me 10, tops.
Grenoble, "Capital of the Alps", is in fact the flattest
city in France. It really is very flat. The city sits at the conjunction of three
flat-bottomed valleys, forming a Y at the eastern end of the Alps. The flatness of the city, however, is almost
by definition - the bits that aren't
flat are so very not flat that to build on top of them would be crazy. It is on one particularly not flat bit, nestled
at the apex of the Y, that the Huguenot chose to build the Bastille de
Grenoble. It floats a few hundred feet
above the city, a vast stone edifice built into the mountain.
I reach the river. On the other side, there is a single road,
and a single line of shops and houses, that found the space to fit themselves
along the riverbank before the ground rises almost vertically to the Bastille
above. Straight ahead, a path heads
through a set of iron gates, inviting people to make their way up to the
Bastille. Looking up, it's clear that it’s
not going to be an easy task to get up there.
At least I'm only running - an invading army would surely have handed in
their collective notice at this point and gone home.
Beyond the gates, one hits a set of Escher-esque steps
through stone battlements that immediately lift you 100 feet above the river. At the top of the steps, the zig zag track
starts in earnest. The path is steep but
not unbearable, so feeling spritely, I try to keep up a relatively normal pace.
By the third hairpin, it’s clear this
is not going to work. My calves are
feeling the burn already. I plough on, but
I'm getting slower and slower. Another
runner appears from another path, and as much as I want to keep up with him, I
can't do it. Eventually I have no option
but to stop and catch breath. Which I
also do at the next hairpin, and the one after that, and after that.
A mile of path and 15 minutes later, I make it to the base
of the fortifications, 700 feet above the river. The final push is up a steep set of steps, which
are torture on my thighs and calves. At
the top, the steps turn through the stone wall, and on to an interior balcony,
with a large arch looking out over the city.
This was why I came up here.
Down below, the city sprawls out in all its flatness, the closely packed
medieval core clearly delineated from the 1960's concrete that grew up around
it. Beyond it, wooded peaks rise steeply
to meet the low cloud floating above them.
But the cloud is merely a decorative sash for the mountains behind, that
keep drawing your eye upwards to their snow-capped summits. For a boy for whom the Mendip Hills are high
peaks, it’s hard to grasp the scale. A
photograph could not even start to convey it. At this time of the morning, the sun hits the
mountains horizontally, picking out every crevice and rock in sharp relief. I feel
like I could take the pain every morning if this were the reward.
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