The running tracks of my life

In the past few weeks I have been getting to know the third significant athletics track of my lifetime.

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The first was the lumpy gravel loop that Maidenhead AC calls home, situated in a cluster of rugby pitches just a gentle breeze from the Braywick sewage works. Having moved on to pastures new, I now resent the joint-pounding hardness of the rutted home straight, the lack of grip and the horrific damage the cinder does to a pair of spikes, but without it I would never even have had the choice to take up sprinting. The next closest track is Eton and my parents didn’t have the time to take me what with two other boys with commitments and passions of their own to raise. I am grateful for its existence, but that doesn’t save it from holding the title of Comfortably the Worst Track I Have Ever Run On by Miles.

Note the puddles. Note the uneven surface. Note the colour.

One solitary floodlight, barely above head-height, is tasked every Tuesday evening with lighting the whole track, a task at which it fails admirably. Three sides of the track are shrouded in gloom for the entirety of winter, rendering sprinting impossible. Distance runners, seemingly unaware of the existence of the peculiar creature known as a “sprinter”, meander all over the place and dodging them without anything but the faintest illumination is all but impossible.

Too poor to ever lay a tartan track, in a futile yearly attempt at respectability every summer the council would paint wiggly white lines on the track, y’know, in an attempt to disguise it as a normal running track. Within weeks the white paint would be scattered and dispersed by a combination of the footfalls of Nike-shod runners and the ever-dependable British weather. It was about as effective as painting sand at low-tide. Not only that, but the Maidenhead track is the only one I’ve ever seen that has an eight-lane home straight, a seven-lane top bend, and six lanes for the second 200m. It’s also 440 yards. It’s that old.

For some reason, it’s not a place that I associate with good weather. I can remember times that it has been nice – one Easter it was so hot I trained shirtless – but owing to training mostly coming to a halt when school finished the scorching mornings and glorious warm evenings spent on the Southampton track are slower to come to mind than winter dreariness and three-minute runs.

The saving grace is the people. There’s a great little community of dedicated athletes and coaches and since I started there a decade or more ago the junior section has grown massively thanks entirely to their commitment. I reckon I’ll try and do the same when I’m a bit older.

*

In comparison to Maidenhead, running on the Southampton track was like running on a red carpet. A close-up: the foot comes down, spikes dig and grip, rubber compresses minutely under pressure, stored energy, the rebound. Repeat ad infinitum. A world away from slap-and-slip Maidenhead.

One of the feelings I most associate with the Southampton track is freedom. It is literally a big, flat infinite space to run into as fast as I can until I decide to stop. Neither going nor coming, just running. This is true for all running tracks to some extent, but the spacious green geography of the Southampton Sports Centre and its role as shelter from pressures of academic university life intensify this feeling in me. We dealt with some grim weather over the three years I trained in Southampton, but as I mentioned before, the sunny spells linger in the memory moreso than the storms. When it’s hot it’s almost like a dare: I’ve done your warm-up for you, now run fast. And then when you’re spent the warmth and sponginess of the track will afford you a lie-down.

Come at me, bro

But with pleasure comes pain, and with a greater level of dedication to my running, the Southampton track at times began to resemble a place of self-imposed torture. That’s barely an exaggeration. The sensation you find at the lowest, deepest fire-(or tartan?)red circles of fatigue is one of being wasted, if being drunk was agony. You can barely think, and you certainly can’t walk, not for a while at least. Not until your stomach is heaved empty. Eh. Worth it.

I should also stress the amount of time I spent on the Southampton track. A rough estimate points to about 700 hours over 2 ¾ years, which actually doesn’t sound like that much to me, but I guess when you think that’s 700 hours, or a solid month of intense exercise it starts to make sense. A significant chunk of my life has been spent there with a slowly shifting group of like-minded people who have become some of my closest friends. I’ve written about this bond before. Then I graduated.

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The autumn just gone I ended up back at the deserted Maidenhead track for two months, training alone. A regression in lifestyle, a regression in running surface. Without a car I had no choice – Eton was too far to cycle. Eventually, though, I got a temp job in Slough and with it enough money to afford car insurance.

The Eton track, owned by the school but open to the public, is enclosed entirely by trees, tightly enough that it is scattered with fallen leaves and twigs. The trees serve to keep the wind at bay, mostly, so the place feels quiet, hushed, collegiate; this in contrast with exposed Southampton and its gale-force headwinds. One evening a few weeks ago a thick fog rolled in, so dense that visibility was around 50m. There were few people there that night, so every now and again a jogger would loom out of the mist, whiz by before being swallowed again. Surreal. The expensive stands enclose a gym, sauna, decent changing rooms and, best of all, a rubberised indoor 60m straight.

And the track. Oh my.

It was re-laid in early autumn and it is perfect. Southampton’s feels dead in comparison. I float. You float. We float.

Even before training here regularly Eton was my third most-visited track, owing to all the district inter-school athletics events held there. These were some of the best days of my school life, and not just because I nearly always won, but also because of proper team spirit and the dependable good weather. Our relay team also wiped the floor with every other school in the district.

*

Tomorrow after work I meet up with some of the Windsor Slough Eton & Hounslow sprint coaches with the hope of finding a group to train with for the first time since June. Chapter three!

Little Red Yaris

Little Red Yaris,

You would be black and blue if I asked you

To take me to Paris.

Not that I'd want you to.

A England team with an identity

The needle has swung wildly in the opposite direction. In 2006, the England team was packed full of stars, men like Stevie and Frank and Wayne and Ashley and EBJT, all in their Champions League-troubling glory, and England expected. We had a great collection of players, we really did. Of course, things didn’t go according to plan. We struggled to score goals and went out on penalties in the quarter-finals to baby-Cristiano Ronaldo’s team of Portugeezers (which is not actually that bad, really).

Then came the recriminations. Overrated bollocks! shouted the papers. Pampered millionaires! shouted the rest. And as such, England, as a football-watching collective, went into the 2010 World Cup in Suthifrika with tempered expectations. Gareth Barry was in the midfield along with James Milner, and Heskey was Rooney’s best striking partner.* T’was uninspiring, but at the same time, we still had quite a lot of very good players who turned out regularly for the best teams in the strongest league in the world. Most teams in the tournament could not match that. I don’t blame the personnel, not really.

No, Fabio Capello is the man to blame. Most of England’s best players are all-rounders. The best, Rooney, is an all-rounder. Eight-out-of-tens across the board. Numbers three and four are Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, both of whom are all-rounders. Likewise, seven-to-eight-out-of-ten across the board. A team needs one or two of these players, players that can help out defensively as well as attack, pass, run and fire-fight. Any more than a couple and a team will lack the necessary high-end qualities to get through a tough defence: their roles will be poorly-defined and as a result the team will lack any focal-points. A team needs specialists, like highly mobile players to get in behind, predatory finishers who rely on anticipation and cold-bloodedness or players with outstanding ball-retention. With Rooney, Gerrard, Lampard, Milner (Happy 28th Birthday, James!) and possibly Welbeck when he’s played out wide, England have far too many all-rounders. Of those five, Rooney has to start, and personally I would play Milner on the left to bring some tirelessness to the midfield. Welbeck would be a good replacement, too. The key point is this: there is no space for Gerrard or Lampard, and particularly not both.

I can’t wait for Gerrard and Lampard to retire. They’re still playing frustratingly well at 34 and 35 years old, which makes dropping either of them a seriously tough decision for Woy. Gerrard’s the captain, and still a good player, I can completely understand why Roy persists. He does play well and it can be hard to be overly-critical of his play due to his general competence. Not only that, but he is the captain also – it would take a bold manager to drop his captain entirely from the set-up. Nevertheless, he shouldn’t be in the team.

I have more patience with Lampard who is cleverer and more cunning and could thus play a more advanced role, but he would overlap with Rooney’s skillset and between the two it’s a no-brainer.  

At the moment my team stands thus:

      Hart

Johnson   Terry   Cahill   Baines

        x

x    .

Walcott                           Milner

Rooney      .

                Sturridge 

A quick overview: Hart, obviously; Baines narrowly ahead of Cole; Johnson narrowly ahead of Walker; Terry needs to come out of retirement to partner his club-mate Cahill; Walcott is by far England’s most dangerous wide-player (sorry Andros); Milner is solid and dependable and offers good protection for attack-minded Baines; Rooney and Sturridge pick themselves by being the best two English forwards by a distance, and happily their playing styles are complementary. Pretty good, and nice and balanced, too.

This team has two spaces with which to fill the roles of distributor and defensive midfielder. Gerrard these days likes to be both, and frustratingly Roy is happy to allow him to try. Oh, Roy. Gerrard’s distribution is, it has to be said, very good, but when it comes to soaking up pressure and playing an understated game, he comes up short. For the role of distributor I nominate two players, one of whom is obvious, the other isn’t (unless you know me. Oh yes.)

Michael Carrick

Carrick is a graceful player and a fantastic passer. Is he too old? Probably not. He’ll be just shy of 33 at the start of the World Cup, and for a player in his position requires a lot of jogging but not much sprinting, that’s okay. On the downside, he doesn’t offer much goal threat and isn’t much of a physical presence. I can rarely remember Carrick being assertive, instead doing his best to allow other players to be assertive.  One advantage from Roy’s point of view is that he wouldn’t get much stick if things went wrong; Carrick is a safe choice. He’s not my first choice distributor though.

Tom Huddlestone

Hudd absolutely smashed Fulham the other day and for the first time I can remember, large-scale debate has sprung up around his ability and his potential suitability for England. Don’t worry, I’m not being swept along on a wave of hype, I’ve been advocating Thudd’s inclusion for years. He’s similar to Carrick in many ways, but has even better vision and is more technically adept. He wasn’t at his best last season but even then he would be subbed on early in the second half and would quietly set about changing the game, out-passing the opposition midfield and bringing wide players in with unerring cross-field passes, snappy balls into feet and weighted through-balls. Willing runners such as Walcott and Sturridge would thrive with his service, and his ability to thread a ball into an advanced player’s (Rooney’s) feet in tight areas would no-doubt prove effective.

Assessments of Huddlestone’s time at Spurs that he slowed play down are wide of the mark (it’s not about how fast you can run, but how fast you can play the ball. No issue there), but his lack of pace means he gets bypassed easily and doesn’t have much bite in the tackle. In fact, despite his size, he doesn’t throw his weight around much.

A further downside is that he is mostly an unknown quantity at international level with just four caps against crap teams, and to install him in the starting XI would be seen as a huge risk by the press.

If Thudd is to be the creative hub of this England team he needs someone to help him defend. The requirements are: good defensive positioning, energy, physicality, strong link-up play. There are a few candidates.

Realistic choices

Jordan Henderson

 He’s surprised everyone by being quite brilliant for Liverpool this year, marrying dynamism with guile. Not having seen Liverpool play many full matches I’m not really qualified to comment on his defensive ability, though. Sorry.

Jack Wilshere

Pretty similar to Jordan Henderson in many ways, I’m not entirely sold on his defensive ability either.

Phil Jones

This is the one, I think. The lad can defend, no doubt. He’s good enough on the ball to work as a double-pivot (someone’s been reading Inverting the Pyramid) and take the play forward himself as well as being tactically astute enough to let Hudd dictate the play. I’m on to something here.

Tom Cleverley

I seemed to be the only one who thought Cleverley put in a decent performance against Germany a few months ago. He was diligent in defence covered for Gerrard well. Essentially, he does what Phil Jones does, but not as well.

Left-field choices

Lee Cattermole

Cattermole is a prick that no one likes and often he seems to prefer injuring people than playing football. However, in a reducer role he’s really quite effective and is the kind of mad bastard that would complement Huddlestone's more cerebral style.

RAF Captain Scott Parker

He’s played alongside Thudd at Spurs quite successfully, but he’s been short of his 2011 hey-day for a while now. RAF Captain Scott Parker is made of gristle and English pride and as long as he follows the instruction of ‘pass it to Tom’ and he could probably do a decent job.

Jack Rodwell

Is Jack will broken? I’ve lost track. He’s got the potential to be great but he hasn’t got the consistency and isn’t playing regular football.

So there is it – my ideal XI

Hart

Johnson   Terry   Cahill   Baines

        Jones

Huddlestone    .

Walcott                           Milner

Rooney      .

                Sturridge 

Subs from: Forster, Ruddy; Walker, Cole, Jagielka, Smalling; Carrick, Wilshere, Townsend, Barkley; Welbeck, Rodriguez

I'm pretty happy with that. It's got satisfactory cover for every position except maybe Jones. Rodriguez could be dropped for Andy Carroll if he ever gets back to full fitness, but I don't really feel a big lump up front these days. It's a shame to leave out both Henderson and Cleverley, but that would re-introduce the all-rounder issue so it has to be done.

Flaws in this team: Hudd's good but he's not invincible. This team could get overrun in the middle by Spain or Germany. It would work well on the counter-attack, with Jones able to bomb on ahead. Alternatively, Sturridge would be replaced by Rooney who would play the lone striker, with an extra man added to mid-field - Jack Wilshere would be my go-to man owing to his ball retention and skill in tight areas.