a delicate balancing act. You’re young, you’re still developing physically, and if you put too much pressure on your body too soon, you run the risk of over-training and potentially giving yourself problems when you try to make the step up from the juniors to the senior ranks. If you look at junior athletics records, there’s plenty of kids who’ve won English Schools titles at Under-15 level and then failed to make the grade in the professional ranks. Equally, there are a number of kids whose development is slower and who don’t shine at junior level. Paula Radcliffe, for example, placed 299th when she competed in her first English Schools cross country race. Physically, I was a lot smaller than many of the runners in my age category, and in Alex I was fortunate to have a coach who resisted the temptation to overcook my training programme. He recognized my talent from day one and knew that I needed to be nurtured. Again, it was a case of right time, right place.
Training was hard but fun. Alex always found a way to keep it interesting. We’d start off with fairly simple stuff, doing repetitions across short distances that are ideal for juniors. Alex also introduced me to the concept of
fartlek
, a Swedish term meaning literally ‘speed play’, and perhaps better known as interval training. This is where you mix up intense sprint bursts with slower recovery periods so that over time you begin to build up your strength and stamina. On a
fartlek
session Alex would get us to choose how much effort we were going to put in on the sprints, the idea being that whatever effort we put in would be halved for the recovery period. So, say I did six minutes of intense running, I’d have to do a recovery interval of three minutes at a slower pace.
I started to get pretty good at running. By the end of a track session, I’d have lapped some of the other athletes a few times. It wasn’t long before I started competing in races.
My first runs for the club were in cross country because I’d begun training at the club at the end of the track season. I loved running cross country – back then I enjoyed it more than track. The course was usually held in some new and interesting place, and the courses themselves had lots of variations in the hills and dips. I have special memories of some of the courses. Twice a year I competed in the cross-country competition at Parliament Hill, on the fringes of Hampstead Heath. Britain has plenty of good cross country courses but Parliament Hill is right up there as one of my favourites. It’s hosted several English Schools races. It’s a tough, hilly, muddy course, and to win it I had to be at my best.
Running cross country was a lot less fun when it was cold. In the winter it used to be so chilly that I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. No matter how fast or hard I ran, how high my pulse rate was, I couldn’t warm up my hands and feet. I tried everything. Hats, gloves, extra pairs of socks. During one race, the cold was brutal. A sharp wind was whipping across the hill, my hands were frozen to the bone and my ears were stinging. It got so bad that I ran the second half of the race with my hands tucked under my armpits in a desperate effort to warm them up.
Running for the club had an unexpected benefit: it helped me at school. Word got around that I was a star at running. Suddenly the other kids in class had this respect for me. I’d always been a popular kid at Feltham because I was warm-hearted and made people laugh, and I wasn’t afraid of having a go. But doing well at athletics made me something of a local hero at Feltham. Alan likes to tell this story of how, a couple of years after I’d joined the school, our class was taking part in an endurance lesson: two laps of the field, with a few twists and turns to make it interesting. The best kids could finish the course in around nine minutes. I sailed around the course, did it in maybe six or seven minutes. Graham Potter, the
Training was hard but fun. Alex always found a way to keep it interesting. We’d start off with fairly simple stuff, doing repetitions across short distances that are ideal for juniors. Alex also introduced me to the concept of
fartlek
, a Swedish term meaning literally ‘speed play’, and perhaps better known as interval training. This is where you mix up intense sprint bursts with slower recovery periods so that over time you begin to build up your strength and stamina. On a
fartlek
session Alex would get us to choose how much effort we were going to put in on the sprints, the idea being that whatever effort we put in would be halved for the recovery period. So, say I did six minutes of intense running, I’d have to do a recovery interval of three minutes at a slower pace.
I started to get pretty good at running. By the end of a track session, I’d have lapped some of the other athletes a few times. It wasn’t long before I started competing in races.
My first runs for the club were in cross country because I’d begun training at the club at the end of the track season. I loved running cross country – back then I enjoyed it more than track. The course was usually held in some new and interesting place, and the courses themselves had lots of variations in the hills and dips. I have special memories of some of the courses. Twice a year I competed in the cross-country competition at Parliament Hill, on the fringes of Hampstead Heath. Britain has plenty of good cross country courses but Parliament Hill is right up there as one of my favourites. It’s hosted several English Schools races. It’s a tough, hilly, muddy course, and to win it I had to be at my best.
Running cross country was a lot less fun when it was cold. In the winter it used to be so chilly that I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. No matter how fast or hard I ran, how high my pulse rate was, I couldn’t warm up my hands and feet. I tried everything. Hats, gloves, extra pairs of socks. During one race, the cold was brutal. A sharp wind was whipping across the hill, my hands were frozen to the bone and my ears were stinging. It got so bad that I ran the second half of the race with my hands tucked under my armpits in a desperate effort to warm them up.
Running for the club had an unexpected benefit: it helped me at school. Word got around that I was a star at running. Suddenly the other kids in class had this respect for me. I’d always been a popular kid at Feltham because I was warm-hearted and made people laugh, and I wasn’t afraid of having a go. But doing well at athletics made me something of a local hero at Feltham. Alan likes to tell this story of how, a couple of years after I’d joined the school, our class was taking part in an endurance lesson: two laps of the field, with a few twists and turns to make it interesting. The best kids could finish the course in around nine minutes. I sailed around the course, did it in maybe six or seven minutes. Graham Potter, the
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