Athletics - 800m

Thursday, April 05, 2007


Seb Coe and Steve Ovett - a couple of 800m experts.

A mere six months after our first attempt at running the 800 metres (preview) turned into a very entertaining evening in the pub instead, Kev and I returned to the Iffley Road track last night to have another go at it.

This time, you’ll be delighted to learn, we managed to run the requisite two laps before retiring to the Marsh Harrier for a Guinness.

Kev is a bit of a runner. His three-marathon-challenge has turned into a four-marathon-challenge (three down, one to go), but as ever he offered to help me complete an event and came along to act as timekeeper, morale booster and opposition.

We did a couple of laps at a gentle pace by way of a warm-up and then, having pointed the video camera at the home straight and set it running, we pointed ourselves at the first bend and did likewise.

Unfortunately, video footage of two men running around a track at something less than a blistering pace – especially when you only get to see them for about a third of each lap – isn’t exactly riveting. Thanks to the Benny Hill feature on my iBook, I have managed to speed it up a little to save you the effort of watching it in real time.


At the end of the clip, Kev holds his phone to the camera. This is because he was using it to time us and not because Lord Coe had just text to say we were bobbins.

We set off together and remained so for about 200 metres, at which point Kev started drifting ahead. During our warm-up, my legs had felt full of spring and ready for action; almost as soon as we started running for real, they felt full of lead and ready for a bit of a sit-down.

We entered the home straight for the first time and Kev had already built up a reasonable lead. He was carrying his phone and using the stopwatch feature on it to time us. I guessed he was trying to drag me along at the pace I needed to be keeping in order to break the magical double-the-world-record barrier. As it turns out, he was just showing off.

He continued to show off into the second lap and I started fading fast. Halfway down the back straight, I felt something I haven’t felt since the early stages of the swim in the triathlon in 2005 – an almost overpowering urge to just stop and give up.

Proper athletes are astounding running machines with brains that focus sharply. As they come down the back straight in the final lap of the 800 metres, they are thinking about just one thing – when to kick for home – and everything else just sinks into the background.

The way I run is also astounding, but in the same way that a octopus falling out of a tree is astounding, and my brain has a tendency to wander wildly out of its lane at crucial moments. As I came down the back straight in the final lap, I was thinking about a million different things and none of them were even remotely helping me to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I came off the final bend and into the home straight to see that Kev was nearly finished. I presumed I was a long way off the target time, but suddenly, inspired presumably by the realisation that it was all nearly over, I found a burst of energy in my legs and was able to run a little harder over the final 50 metres.

I finished and Kev was all cockney grinning as he imparted the news that I’d smashed the target time and run a mighty 03:02.01.

I quit smoking at New Year. Three months on and I’m feeling very good about that, and feeling very healthy because of it. For an hour after the race last night I coughed and spluttered and felt generally tight in my chest as though I had started again. It’s good to tick another event off (a mere 101 remain), and always nice to beat the target time, but the biggest lesson from last night is that I’m pretty hopelessly unfit again (if I was ever anything else).

Result of Athletics – 800 metres:
1st Kevin Game (GBR) 02:46.00 61% Olympian
2nd John McClure (GBR) 03:02.01 56% Olympian

The Oxford Bogtrotters



Including special music, especially for Jamie.

Baskets and Volleys

Monday, April 02, 2007



Basketball was invented in 1891 when Doctor James Naismith - a Canadian PE teacher at a school in Springfield, Massachusetts – famously nailed a peach basket ten feet up a wall and told his students to have a go at lobbing a football into it. In a moment of inspiration, he called the game Basket Ball. His new game was initially popularised and developed across the USA and Canada by the YMCA.

A little more than three years later, William G. Morgan - the PE director in a YMCA just ten miles down the road in Holyoke, Massachusetts - decided to invent an indoor sport for the older members that was less rough than basketball but that still required a bit of effort. Less prosaic in his naming technique than Naismith had been, Morgan originally referred to his new game as Mintonette, but the American public at large couldn’t cope with his fancy French-sounding name and quickly took to calling it what it looked like: volleyball.

Basketball was an Olympic demonstration sport as early as 1904, but was only fully adopted in 1936. Since then, the USA has won all but three of the Olympic titles; the first time they lost a match was to the USSR in the controversial final of 1972. In Athens in 2004, despite fielding a team with combined earnings that could have funded a reasonably ambitious space programme, the USA had to settle for the bronze medal behind Argentina and Italy.

Volleyball was a demonstration sport in Paris in 1924, but had to wait even longer than basketball before it made it into the full programme, which it finally did in 1964. Despite being invented in the USA, the Olympic competition has been dominated by the European (particularly Eastern European) teams. It’s a serious business in Europe it would seem; in Greece last week, the crowd got so excited at a volleyball game that a riot kicked off resulting in the death of one man and the suspension of all team sports in Greece for two weeks.

Thankfully, nothing so dramatic happened on Friday night. Once again, an Oxford University sports club came up trumps and the volleyball club sent along half a dozen top class players who were willing to give up their Friday night to show a bunch of complete novices how to play their sport. They did so with patience, understanding and kindness. Perhaps as a result – or perhaps because it’s just a damn fine game – everyone seemed to really enjoy the first event of the evening.



After Brian and Ludo took the lead in showing us some basic technique and outlined the rules, we split into two teams of mixed gender, race, height and ability to have a match. Ludo started trying to formulate some sort of game plan for our team, but in the end resorted to my favourite sporting technique – “Never mind… we’ll improvise” – and we were under way.

We fought three close sets, each of which was littered with entertaining and impressive play, but in the end my team finished a tantalising second. I got the distinct sense that the top guys weren’t giving us the heat, but I also got the sense that it was probably just as well.

A couple of the guys were genuinely enormous individuals. On the odd occasion when they did find themselves opposite each other at the net, it was like watching gazelles robbing a pogo stick factory. It wasn’t so much the height they achieved – impressive as that was – as the length of time they seemed to be able to stay airborne; a talent some of them hung around to transfer to the basketball court later on.


Kev (right) would be the first to admit that he's not the tallest, but Tim (left) is 6'5". I dread to think what that makes Anders (centre).

Having played basketball, I could see why William G. Morgan felt the need to invent volleyball as an alternative for the “older members”. Having only a handful of people who really knew what they were doing perhaps hindered us, but it seems a game in which a lot of frenetic action leads to very little.

I have watched some basketball on TV and thought at the time that it looked a bit dull - they all just run to one end and score, then all run to the other end and score. Our game was exhausting, but it wasn’t dull, even if by and large all we did was just run to one end and not score and then run to the other end and not score. The only dull bits from my point of view were the bits when I stood around the centre circle trying not to wheeze too much.

There wasn’t much ebb and flow to our score line – perhaps the teams turned out to be a little lopsided – but my team, hindered by my lack of pace, fitness and talent, quickly found itself adrift and ended up losing by a margin that was in the end virtually forgotten. All I can really remember is that we were 42-28 behind going into the final quarter, and it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t much need to keep track of the score anymore - there was only one team going to win and we weren’t it.


Ben, the guy behind me, spent the hour that followed this warm up showing me that height in basketball isn't all it's cracked up to be. Without him on our team, we would have lost by a lot more than we eventually did.

The disparity in the scores did allow for some top class showboating. The prize for comedy moment of the game has to go to Will whose attempted through-the-legs-lay-up went hideously wrong and resulted in him making a last ditch pass to a completely unmarked breeze block in the back wall. One technique I did pick up from Will was the look-one-way-pass-the-other-way dummy. It would have worked wonders when I tried it, had I had the least bit of coordination, or any real idea of where my teammates were.



By the end of the game, despite spending most of the last quarter marking and being marked by an equally exhausted Rich Hughes on the halfway line, I was utterly spent. The basketball had been fun, but for those of us for whom the evening was presenting two relatively new sports, volleyball was the winner by a country mile. The pub was fun too, but then we all knew that anyway.

There are two questions I get asked a lot in the course of doing this challenge. One is “what’s your favourite event so far?” and the other is “are there any you have done that you want to do again once you’re finished?” After Friday night, volleyball is at the top of both lists.

Huge thanks to everyone from the volleyball club who came along to help out and then stayed to make up the numbers in the basketball. Thanks also to the legion of volunteers who came from far and wide (well, as far as Nottingham, and as wide as Simon) and helped make it a really fun night.


Volleyball
The Ultimate Olympian’s Dirty Half Dozen lost narrowly to Simon Bentley’s Screaming Spikes (25-21, 22-25, 15-11). Non-professional Man of the Match: based on sheer enthusiasm (two of his most impressive plays came while he was sitting on the substitute’s bench) the award has to go to Simon Bentley.

Basketball
The Ultimate Olympian’s Fearless Five had their asses handed to them by Will Clapton’s Dunking Donuts (65-35*). Non-professional Man of he Match: even though he only stayed for the first half, Michael “Air” Weatherhead, who is now officially annoyingly good at swimming, volleyball and basketball.

*score estimated later in the pub - may not be entirely accurate