It's all downhill from here

Strange how if you say a business is going downhill, then it implies things are getting worse. Same goes for the economy, the quality of food or even a relationship.

To say things are going downhill is to admit that things are getting worse.

Not so to the distance runner.

Yelling to an athlete that it's all downhill from here is just about the best thing you can tell him, or her. The hardest work is over and now it's free-wheeling to the finish line.

Which is always the feeling many runners get once we turn the end of the old year and the upcoming marathon hovers into sight.

Somehow in October and November it seems an age till the following February. There seems a lifetime in which to train. All the time in the world. Yet, when it turns the New Year, suddenly February is right there and what are not dissimilar to pre-exam nerves begin to bite.

Suddenly people react by getting far too serious about their training.

It's probably a truism that just about every distance runner on a startline wishes he, or she, had had another month in which to train before standing there.

Many admit to never feeling quite ready. If only they had another week. Looking back they recall that week off with flu, then that achilles (or other) pain that caused them to miss some track sessions in their build-up.

So here's what not to do if you feel these nerves creeping up on you; avoid the temptation to increase the training significantly.

Don't suddenly jump from four days training a week to six or seven. Don't suddenly increase your long Sunday run from 13 miles to 20. It's not that there is anything wrong with increasing mileage and intensity as race-day approaches, the main thing is to do so gradually.

A good guide is to increase by no more than 10 per cent per week. So, from 40 miles per week it's okay to increase to 45, but don't jump to 60 from one week to the next.

Experience shows that drastic increase in training volume is often quickly followed by illness or injury. It seems paradoxical that it is when you are at your most fit that you are simultaneously at your most vulnerable.

Hard, and/or high training volume acts to suppress your immune system, making you increasingly susceptible to coughs and sniffles and every other bug in the atmosphere at this time of the year.

For this reason, consider regularly supplementing with the following vitamins and minerals; A, C, E, along with a good B Complex. Also take Zinc and Selenium.

High volume (more training days) or harder training intensity (like intervals) also place greater stress on your tendons and ligaments. It takes only a slight strain to turn you from someone who can run for one and a half hours every Sunday to being unable to put your foot on the ground.

So, if race-day nerves are getting to you, be careful your running performance does not go downhill!

Avoid the temptation to drastically cram in more miles or more intense training. If you do want to add in one or both forms of training, then do so gradually, and take the supplements I recommended above.

Hundredth-monkey effect

The huge leap in participation in the recent UJ M2S 09, when the amount of finishers increased over the record of the previous year by a stunning 28 per cent, reminded me of something I had once read.

The hundredth-monkey effect is a supposed phenomenon in which a particular behaviour in a group spreads instantaneously from one part of a group to another once a critical number is reached.

An unexplainable instantaneous, spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea.

I had read about it with a small group of birds in the UK who had started pecking through the silver-foil tops of milk bottles on doorsteps. Researchers noted it first in a small group in the north of England, then, seemingly within days, others from the same species were doing the same thing 200 miles south in London.

Within a week, birds were noted doing the same thing all over Europe. The rapid expansion of such new behaviour was not explainable by birds travelling abroad and teaching others.

Researchers in Japan observed something similar in monkeys that started washing potatoes before eating them. Once a critical number of monkeys was reached - the so-called hundredth monkey - this previously learned behaviour instantly spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.

A third example I know of concerns children in Canada learning nursery rhymes in Japanese. The hypothesis is that once a critical mass of a group develops a certain ability, then that ability spreads to others.

We have never deliberately promoted the Mdina to Spinola event.

This year, I think, I discussed it twice in The Times. So, where did all these new runners come from?

Perhaps it's the hundredth-monkey effect. How else do we explain the dramatic increase in participants in UJ M2S 09. To go from 232 finishers to 296 in one jump stretches credibility.

And, while great for the health of the sport, it does fill me with concern over what could happen in the upcoming Land Rover Malta Marathon.

More on that next week. Until then, enjoy your training!

johnwalsh42195@yahoo.it