No training this weekend, so if you are looking forward to the meticulously recorded training schedule, described and analysed in painstaking detail, I am afraid you are going to be disappointed. Not for the first time. Michael told me that with just one week to go, my training should be tapering, by which I think he meant 'stopping abruptly'. So, instead of tramping determinedly around the country, I spent the weekend watching the Grand Prix, the cricket and the Tour on TV with my feet up, resting for the big one next weekend. Just one week for the remaining aches and niggles to disappear and just one week to finalise the fantastically complicated logistics exercise of getting 4 of us and our kit from A to B. One week too for the pre-traumatic stress disorder to build nicely and I have my sister to thank for her extraordinary motivational pep-talk for revving that one up nicely.
My sister, Emma, recently returned from 3 years swanning around in the deserts, shopping malls and beach clubs of Dubai, is one of the central planks of our support team, living as she does now conveniently close to the route we will travel next weekend. She has always had the ability to make me collapse in hopeless fits of giggles, even when she was a 3 year old, singing in church on Christmas day. Not during one of the noisy bits, where everyone else is singing, but one of the bits where the chap in the frock is mumbling quietly to himself and everyone else has their heads bowed in pious silence. With assistance from the perfect acoustics of the high-roofed church, her clear, piping voice rang out as she sang; 'The farmer's in his wife, the farmer's in his wife. E-I-Addio the farmer's in his wife'. I also remember trying to play the recorder as I walked towards the nativity play stage in my shepherd's dressing gown and head tea-towel as she stepped out of the audience in front of me, looking the wrong way and with the same piping voice calling; 'where's James?' You trying playing; 'while shepherds watched' on the recorder when it's all you can do not to burst you are laughing so much. On Sunday, we were talking through the plan for next weekend and, knowing my tendency towards injury, Em asked how I was. She then started telling me about a Philip Pullman story, Clockwork, which is about a clockwork man who starts falling apart. Bits literally falling off him yet he determinedly walks on. Well, thanks Em for those carefully chosen words of support. I'll remember that as I stagger across the Downs, discarding unwanted limbs! Needless to say, the phone call rather lost the focus on support teams logistics as the tears of laughter mingled with the hysteria of terror.
So, pre-traumatic stress disorder. The jury is still out on post-traumatic stress, but I think it's just obvious. If you know you are going to do something that is going to hurt, your brain does stuff to you. Once you have done something that hurts, your brain does stuff to you. The worse the pain, the more your brain has to do. Now, I have never been shot at, if you exclude the numerous air-gun shots inflicted on me by my brother as a teenager. (Henry - that's why you can't have an airgun, your brother will shoot you and it will hurt!) Nor has anything really bad ever happened to me, but on the few occasions where my body has been tricked into pouring on the adrenaline in life-saving quantities, such as when I crashed a motorbike at 80pmh, I have a tendency to relive the incident again and again in my head until I can't distinguish real memory from imagined. I expect that's not unusual.
Pre-traumatic stress, then, is just another version of this - and for the last few nights, I have been doing Trailwalker in my sleep. Not in a helpful way, because of the uncertain, meandering nature of sleep thinking and it's been more about the tortuous logistics. However, I suppose it is a form of training. All I know is that if my head is already starting to spin a week before the event, my brain already knows it has some serious motivational talks to deliver to failing bits of body next weekend and is preparing the way so that it all runs like clockwork on the day. Let's just hope bits aren't falling off.
I'll do a post after the event and then that's probably it. You still have time to sponsor us if you haven't done so already, following the link up on the right hand side of the page. If you are interested in following our progress we set off at 6.00am on Saturday and aim to arrive at the finish early on Sunday morning. Martin will be tweeting and his id is Martw00. Think of us and just be careful if Michael calls you - you never know what he'll end up talking you into!
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