Tomatohead goes west.

Medium term I'll be fine. No ridiculous Rooney-esque hood wearing and forced celibacy while the implants take effect. Brushing the wiry and lightly greying thatch forward will see me through the next few years without too much difficulty, and when that starts to fail, I have reserves in the form of a pair of eye-brows that would give the Archbishop of Canterbury a run for his money. With that and the ear hair and a little imaginative topiary, baldness will only need to be admitted when I am about 60, by which time I imagine it will be the least of my problems, with the full set of real and imagined ailments that are queuing up. However, in the short term, I have a problem. Even those who barely know me cannot fail to notice my forehead. Not only is it a bit more expansive these days, but today it is glowing bright red, throbbing and pulsing like a like a dangerously over-heating nuclear isotope.

Pretty village with no shop

Yesterday, I was outside enjoying the glorious Somerset sunshine, listening to some of my favourite music and the big orange fella in the sky exacted a terrible revenge. I also have a lower arm and leg 'tan' and an Arkansian neck to go with it. No, I wasn't sweating around Glastonbury in the dry mud in wellies, though I was quite close. I decided to forgo the comfort of the family car in travelling from a Saturday party in Bristol to Vobster Quay diving school (on my parents' doorstep in Somerset) where Henry was getting Padi qualified. Rather than be wafted in hung-over and air-conditioned comfort, I decided to hike the 20.5 miles as my weekly long training session. I did think about getting some sun cream, but there wasn't much open in Bristol and when I got out into the country, there was nothing. Not even a village shop selling water. So I got a little 'tanned' and today it hurts if I frown. It also hurts where I got stung by stinging nettles and torn apart by brambles as I jumped into the hedge to avoid the young Sebastian Vettel wannabees. My route took me on the smaller lanes and roads, but in places a surprising amount of traffic hurtled around, making the best use of the warm tarmac and hugging the bends, little expecting a sweating, panting vision in lycra to be staggering along towards them sucking furiously on a camelback. So, somewhat de-hydrated after some vigorous partying on Saturday, hatless and without sun protection, dangerously low on fluid and with no food, you certainly couldn't accuse me of over-preparation. The good news is that I made it in a little over 5 hours with a mixture of walking and running - the bad news is that it was painful, and I can no longer con myself that I have time to gradually increase the workload in preparation for the big one. I covered just one third of the full distance and if you had told me to turn around, and do the whole thing again, twice, I wouldn't even have had the energy to hit you. So, it's time for some more sophisticated forms of self-delusion.

Last week, John, one of the fearless foursome, sent me a link to an article the Telegraph. The email didn't come with an explanation, just the link. I think he was trying to tell me 2 things; the first was to give me some handy tips on how to write a blog from someone who is clearly very good at it; the second was a reminder that whilst our challenge may seem pretty hard core and extreme, compared to the stuff that some people get involved in, ours is merely a gentle walk in the country. This screwball (the blogger - not John!) runs ultra-marathons for fun and has just set off on the epic 3220 mile race across America from LA to New York, covering around 50 miles a day every day for 2 months. Check out http://www.runningandstuff.com/ram/ if you are fed up with my whining about sunburn and sore feet and want to follow someone a bit tougher!

The point for mentioning this, and, as usual it is slightly tangential, is that the piece of mental trickery I am going to rely on to do triple the distance I did this weekend is this. Anyone who has ever done a longish run, bike ride, swim or whatever knows that the maximum distance you can ever do is the distance you set out to do. I know that sounds thick, but what I mean is if you set out to run 5 miles, you might fail and only do 4, you might succeed and finish, but you couldn't even do 5 miles plus 20 yards. I can cycle 100 miles, but if only set out to do 50, I can't do 51. So, if I set out to hike 100km, I might make it, but once I get to Brighton, I will not be able to walk another metre. Not on Sunday and probably not for a good few days afterwards. I am similarly sure that once this James Adams chap reaches New York, he will go no further.

Tomato-head

The other thing I am going to have to do it is to convince my team that finishing as a team is more important than finishing in a 'good' time. I did 20 miles on Sunday at a pace that would have us finishing in 15 hours and I now know, with absolute certainty, that I can't sustain that pace over the full distance, and I'll need the full force of the team's encouragement to get me to the finish line. We had a team call last week to agree our 'goal' and agreed that a good time would be good; I think we also agreed that we want to finish as a foursome and this is more important that beating the Gurkhas. So, unless one of us is badly hurt and can only crawl, we help eachother through the bad patches. Guys, I think I am going to need quite a bit of encouragement.

I've not peaked yet

I suppose this week was always going to be a bit if an anti-climax after the taste of the real thing in the rain last weekend. For starters, I was a little stiffer and more tired than I expected to be, so getting motivated again was hard. Then there is the fact that with the team so dispersed, I train mostly alone and it's pretty easy to 'listen to your body', when it is begging for a rest. It's more than that though. I'm not much for thinking too hard, preferring precipitous and often ill-considered impetuosity as a way of guiding me blundering through life, but it strikes me that this motivation thing is quite important.

One thing that has been front of mind over the last few weeks as No 1 son has been playing GCSE catch-up, paying for his lack of diligence early on, is how you motivate a teenager. Threats of physical violence are met with peals of derisive laughter and attempts at earnest career advice with the rolling eye treatment. Incidentally, two politicians have managed to get right up my nose; first Michael Gove, with perfect timing, talks about abolishing our totally devalued exam system, where A*s are doled out like Olympics tickets to Fifa cheats. Now I know Tom is pretty unlikely to read the article in the paper and would probably not get as worked up about it as me, but that's not the point. The point is that his Mum and I have lived through the pain of these wretched exams too and I don't like being told they are worthless. Then there was Cameron, saying how he wants absent fathers to feel like pariahs. Really? We all make mistakes and when we do, is it really the best thing to do to heap further scorn and humiliation on us? If I am scared of jumping off the high board, is it better to ridicule and humiliate me further, or to encourage me to jump in because the water's lovely?  Maybe I was just being a little over-sensitive on Father's day. Both of them may well have a point, but I am not sure I'd look to either for motivation.

Anyway, as I made my way to Box Hill early this Sunday morning I started to wonder about my own motivation; not just how I needed to raise myself from the anti-climax following the highs of last weekend, but the wider question of why am I doing Trailwalker and why generally do I go for these daft endurance events as I subside kicking and screaming into injury-prone middle age.

I kept mulling this over as I did 5 laps of a fuller circuit than I had managed last time I was here, two weeks ago. And I think I have reached a realisation; not some Damascene moment as I hopped across the stepping stones over the much swollen river Mole; more a recognition of something I probably knew anyway but, for me at least, seemed reasonably profound.

Obviously the whole exercise thing is just another manifestation of the 'mid-life crisis', but what does that mean? One of the proudest moments of my life was persuading my wife to let me buy an Audi TT with the line: 'Look, I am 40, what's it going to be...sportscar or mistress?' To her credit, she replied; 'Look, you're 40 - what's it to be, Soprano or Bass?' The sports car, the guitar, the tattoo; that's just displacement activity, another symptom, like doing Trailwalker. I have been trying to understand what lies beneath it. And that was what struck me; it's the need to deny that you have peaked. If you have peaked and everything you have done in life so far has been an exercise in getting gradually better, whether that is at sport, at work, at being a parent, all you have to look forward to is gradually accelerating decline.

What happened today was that I managed to pick myself up from the slightly flat feeling after the high of last weekend and show a marked improvement over the last time I was here. I ran all of the flat and downhill bits on an extended circuit at walked up the longest, steepest bit of the hill, completing a 4km circuit 5 times. And I felt like a machine. We still have a few weeks to go and I am pretty sure there is still some room for improvement too. I am in the zone now where I can pour on the effort and still get up and do it again the next day. Well, I may not dominate CS7 tomorrow, but I'll be there.

What's more, as I wobbled down Box Hill for the second time, I ran into an old cycle-buddy. Splattered in mud from head to toe, he was training for a mountain-biking tour across the Alps. 8 days of clean air, merciless gradient and endless competitive banter with a group of like-minded nutters. What's not to like about that? Maybe that could be next year's challenge. I've not peaked yet damn it! I'll show you.

Dancing with the Devil's Dyke

I've never really liked dancing. There's plenty of evidence that doesn't support this statement; those that have witnessed the jogging on the spot, flailing-armed style of 'Dad dancing' that I made my own long before fatherhood, might be surprised that I don't like dancing. Those that saw me at the work Christmas party in 2000 would be surprised. (I met someone last week who had been there and the first question she asked was - 'Do you still have those yellow pants?' - and, no, she wasn't American!) Those who saw me shirtless in a Paris gay-bar sharing a podium with a man dressed only in a 'cock-sock' might be confused at the notion that I wasn't actually a raging exhibitionist. The thing is, and I am sure I am not alone here; I can only really dance when I have rinsed away the inhibitions with sufficient booze. Over the years I have perfected the ability to drink just enough - as a youngster there was only a short window between getting sufficiently loaded to pluck up courage, grab a girl and get on the dance floor before losing motor control and having to lie down and sob.

I know this is particularly long pre-amble, but I will get to the point soon. I was thinking about the nature of exhibitionism in relation to this blog - it is after all the ultimate vanity to commit words to the ether and expect people to read them with interest and it occurred to me that that I find it easier to write without really knowing if anyone is reading. Much like dancing; knowing or caring that I am being watched makes me self-conscious. The reason I bring it up this week is that this weekend saw our team of 4 meet up and train together for the first time and one thing that came out is that the guys all seem to read this blog. Now, writing this, I know they are going to read it to see what I say about the hike we did across 30km of the South Downs Way, taking in Devil's Dyke and Ditching Beacon. Suddenly I feel like I am on the dance floor without the benefit of a number of strong cocktails to get my arms waving.

I'll start with Saturday, which saw me link up with my new cycling club for the second time. I rolled into the Herne Hill velodrome at 8.30 to join the club ride, hoping to find a group I was able to stay with after the sobering experience of a fortnight ago when the steel-limbed Frenchman gave me a demonstration in hill-climbing. True to form I grossly over-estimated my own ability and joined the second of 4 groups leaving Dulwich and was forced to make a quick re-assessment and drop back to the slower 3rd group after the lung-bursting first climb over Crystal Palace hill. Thereafter, all was well and I mostly kept up through the morning as we circled the North Downs. So hurrah! I seem to have cracked the cycling club thing. It also didn't rain, which was a bonus.

So to Sunday, when it did rain. All day, sometimes quite hard, often horizontally and usually accompanied by strong winds whipping in from the south coast. Michael and I met up in Balham; he lives in North London with his wife and 3 young children, so I imagine his day ended with having to talk his wife down from the ledge and untying the children having left them all day. Like the other 2 team members, he works for IBM and is the one responsible for putting the team together. He's a runner and would love to have had us running the Trailwalker so I have had to let him down gently on this one. We drove to near the end point of the hike to meet John and Martin, the ex-army duo who also work at IBM. John had driven all the way up from Hereford with a pal who was to help ferry us around. He stayed on in Hereford after leaving the army, so I was pretty confident that if there was any need for us to get involved in unarmed combat we'd be in good hands.

Martin, from Cambridgeshire, had volunteered to be map-reader in chief and, being an ex-army officer, had the immediate trust of the civilians in the team and the scepticism of the military men. Apparently, you never trust an officer with a map. However, despite some discrepancies between the map and instruction provided by the organisers, navigation was spot on, a factor which I am sure will help us when we have to repeat the section at night having already hiked 50 miles or so.

So, one of the biggest questions for me - did we get on? The event is going to mean us going through the fire together and if we didn't gel as a team, this would make it a much harder event. Those of you who are thinking that walking is easy and anyone could do this - you're wrong. I have done lots of nutty things and I reckon this will be right up there as one of the hardest. Well, the good news is that we did get on. Sure it rained,  yes it was not the ideal day to go for a hike, but I think we all thoroughly enjoyed the day. We all have lots in common - age, marital status, children; 3 of the team work in the same company albeit they don't have much to do with eachother at work. Most importantly though, and partly because of the ravages of time and an enduring love of putting ourselves through insane amounts of pain, we have a shared lexicon of injuries. Never have I spent so much time comfortably discussing torn hamstrings, prolapsed discs, heart murmurs, deep vein thromboses, sciatica and all manner of other things medical.  I was amongst friends and the miles slipped by with relative ease. The only regrets were that these guys don't seem to completely share my views on the essential need to construct the day around good food stops; and that I completely forgot to take any photos until Michael and I stopped on the return journey to buy coffee in a petrol station.

The other time that I can dance without being self-conscious is when I am surrounded by friends. Now I can dance with Dulwich Paragon and with my Trailwalker team. Don't worry though, guys, I can explain the podium thing and it's not how it looks!

The Grand Old Duke of York

When the boys were young, I used to sing to them. Not the sort of singing that would lull them gently to sleep; that sort of singing would require a slightly better voice than I have been (dis)graced with. Mostly, the singing I did was to wind them up and one of the old favorites was a variation on 'the Grand Old Duke of York.' Not the fabulously vulgar buffoon and "boorish freeloader" with the antlered daughter. The Duke of York I had in mind was the one who kept going up and down hills with his 10,000 men. The variation to the song went something like:

Oh the Grand old Duke of Pork (somewhat prescient given some of the tittle tattle)
He had 10,000 sausages
He marched them up to the top of the grill
And he marched them down again.

There is a reason for mentioning this; my cunning plan for this week has been to put aside the bicycle and to start to up the mileage on foot. On Thursday I did my best imitation of a well run-in diesel chugging into the office and then my equally impressive imitation of a slightly disabled, lumpen buffoon as I attempted to run/ walk home again at the end of the day. Still, 20km in one day is more than I have managed to date and it didn't actually feel too bad. So it was time to raise the bar again on Sunday.

Having raided the bar on Saturday, the rude shrieks of the alarm clock at 6.30am were less than welcome, particularly as our handsome and endearingly stupid cat had spent most of the night scrabbling on the radiator as he tried to squeeze through the window to do away with the insolent pigeon on the roof. Nonetheless, I set off in the car to Box Hill; site of the 2012 Olympic cycle race, which I won't be seeing because they gave all the tickets to Fifa. (Did you see that?? Sepp 'I'm not vindictive' Blather and his odious cronies are being given freedom of London, chauffeured around in limos at our expense with free tickets to all the best events)

Stepping Stones at Box Hill

Anyway, Box Hill, I must avoid getting too worked up about Sepp, my systolic readings are going off the scale; not to mention the tourettes. The idea was that I get in some training on hills, leaving the car at the bottom, walking up and jogging around and down back to the start. I have no idea how long the whole circuit is but I managed to do it 5 times in just under 2.5 hours. And for pretty much the whole time, that wretched verse of nursery rhyme, bastardised with references to tasty pork-based snacks, played around my head in an endless loop. Clearly, this type of event is best done in a team, where the cameraderie helps to stop you from suffering from spatial isolation psychosis. I am quite excited, for next weekend is the first time our team of four will meet up and train together. Excited, but slightly nervous. Less nervous having bested the grand old duke himself , but keen not to disgrace myself in front of my team. We are heading to the South Downs to see what's really in store for us in just over a month's time.

Speaking of which, thank you for all those who have sponsored us already; those of you who intend to but haven't got around to it yet, thank you also. Keep it coming.

It’s not fair

This has nothing to do with training for the Trailwalker – I am just writing today because I am cross. And not in a good way.

I didn’t get any Olympics tickets. Not one. I applied for a whole range of obscure sports that usually play to empty rooms and I have not got one single miserable ticket. It’s not fair. If I had known about that website in Germany selling tickets weeks ago, I could have bought some. If I was a civil servant I could have just allocated myself some between moaning about my index linked final salary pension and ambling to catch the 5.00pm train home. If I was on the Olympic committee, not only would I have prime finish line seats for the 100 meters, but I’d probably have a holiday home in Tanzania and a custom built yacht staffed by impossibly athletic blondes. Not that I would want that, obviously.

At least I have the pleasure of paying for the damn things with my taxes over the next 50 years and putting up with the much overdue but shambolic re-vamping of London’s creaking infrastructure in anticipation of coachloads of foreign dignitaries, hangers on and assorted scots and northerners crowding up my city to watch my Olympics with tickets that I should have had. It’s not fair.

And whilst I am on the subject of unfairness and crooked or incompetent committee men, what the hell is going on at Fifa? If it’s as corrupt as it seems to be, yet again we are being made fools of, taken advantage of as a bunch of cheats take our money and give us one solitary vote for a bid that was, by all accounts, the only one that made sense. And another thing. Twickenham and the RFU – we finally have a plan which sees Clive back in charge where he belongs and some wretched idiot goes and screws it up. Why? Is rugby going the way of football, where the lunatics take over and enrich a handful of celebrity-shagging louts whilst impoverishing the rest of the sport? All it needs is a bit of money and some catastrophically incompetent management and it has both of those.

And another thing. No I don’t want speed humps down my road. Not a single person has ever been knocked over on the road – it is a road to nowhere, a loop that gets you back where you started. I certainly don’t want speed lozenges or cycle-friendly humps even if I knew what they were. What I would like you to spend some of the remnants of my taxes on, Lambeth, once you have paid your chief exec £270,000 a year and blown £500k on that bloody awful communist propaganda newsletter, is to repair the roads. They don’t need lumps of useless tarmac to slow cars down, they need some of the mariana-sized trenches filled in so that whole families are not lost when they inadvertently try to drive down the road.

Mind you, I am not as cross as Paul, who still hasn’t got his Sky TV and Broadband he ordered a month ago and is now trying to book cinema tickets online. He’s stuck in automated call-handling hell and his bald head is now the colour of a ripe tomato. ‘I mean…why is life so difficult!!!’