Crawley

If you really want to understand what Crawley is about, you should watch this video:



Crawley has no real meaning. It just is, but isn't very good at it.

It's the nicest trail in the forest. I think.



Backing music is Into The Wind by New Model Army. I love the track, but most people find NMA quite hard to listen to. You can hardly see what is going on in the video, but film is never as good as going out and doing the real thing anyway.

I'm just back from watching the Persepolis movie at the Hawth Theatre in Crawley. There were about 30 people in the audience, so not a huge turnout. You see more people standing in the queue at the local multiplex.

The film caught my attention because of the name: 'perse' is Finnish for arse, and 'polis' is Swedish for police, so I'd seen all these posters in London for 'Arsepolice'. But I'm into independant movies anyway, so I'm glad that I went. The Hawth shows about five or six indy films per year.



More people should watch films like this, they can touch you in ways that Hollywood can't.

I was racing up the steep hill in the forest, behind two girls in green tops from the Hayward Harriers. They had just overtaken me at the bottom of the last hill. Now we were five meters into the up slope of the next hill and the girls were starting to feel it. This hill is steep!

They say that it isn't the night before a race which is the most important night for resting, but the night before that. Two nights before I'd been out in Soho, London, with my good friend Toni. We'd started at Trash Palace, which is a gay bar in London. We had a bit to drink there before heading onto the Popstarz nightclub up by Centre Point, where we had still more to drink and danced A LOT. We finally stopped dancing at 3am. I had to go then anyway to get the last train back to home, finally getting home at about 5.30. I think I made about 4 hours of broken sleep before a friend called me up and called me out for lunch downtown. I was feeling a bit fragile, to say the least, but a nice hot bath and along leisurely lunch sorted that out.


I used to work with this cheeky chap, but he left the company so that he could travel. He's been round most of Eastern Europe already, now he wants to go to Africa.

I had a quieter night on Saturday. I stayed in and drank wine, watched DVDs and generally chilled out until about 1 in the morning. I was flipping through this month's copy of Runner's World when I saw that there was another race in Crawley on Sunday morning, billed as the Crawley Saints and Sinners 5+ Mile run, through Tilgate Forest. I had to go. It was not negotiable.

Tilgate Forest is my forest. I've spent enough time in it this year to know the major paths and the major hills, so looking at the route map beforehand I could see what the best strategy for getting round the course would be. I'm also the kind of runner who enjoys running up hills: I love the mental discipline you need to get up then, and I love the careful technical approach that you need as well. To get hills right you need to know when to push yourself, when you are going to recover, what pace to take the hill at, and you really need to be able to force yourself to keep going until you get to the top. It helps a lot if you know how many hills there are and how long they are though.

When I got to the track I was one of only a very few runners not in team uniform, so I was expecting to get my butt kicked by all these team guys. Annoying, but what the heck, I didn't have to worry about siblings, colleagues or friends seeing me coming in right at the end so I figured I could just relax and enjoy the run without worrying about time or position. I started fairly far back in the pack.

Races from the K2 stadium in Crawley quickly get into the forest and you spend the first mile or two mostly trooping uphill. Right from the off I was overtaking other runners who were having trouble getting up the hills or cutting across muddy areas – just like last week, nearly everyone else was running in regular road shoes, which gave me another small advantage.

Of course, it's a bit of fun really, and does nothing more than satisfy my competitive instincts. I got back in 40m 56s. That's 8m 7s per mile. Only three months ago I was finishing 5km races through town at 8m 31s per mile. Longer and harder races at a faster rate – that's not just a bit of fun, that's a genuine improvement in personal fitness**.

That afternoon saw Lewis Hamilton having a similarly good race at Hockenheim in the German GP. The start of the race was uneventful with Lewis way ahead, but a bad call by the team while the safety car was out saw the boy wonder drop to fifth place. Hamilton put in some good, solid laps and made a couple of neat overtakes to get his first place back and win the race – outstanding.

A friend* had sent me a link to s site which had a clever but simple instructions to make a camera mount for a bike, and I just had enough time after the race to rush out to the forest and shoot a couple of clips on it. The films aren't that watchable at the moment – the bike bounces around and swings from side to side so much that it is pretty hard to make out much of what is going on. But I did see four Red Deer in the forest, which was nice. I'll try and make something watchable out of the clips over the next few days, in the meantime here's one I made earlier:



It's a pretty short clip, taken from about 15 minutes worth of clips I'd done that day from around town. I'm wondering if for road biking I could make the films look even faster by mounting the camera lower down.

Anyway, have to rest now. I have work tomorrow


**I weigh myself every day, and in the last week have put on about 1.5 kilos. I think that's because I've gotten myself some extra muscle in my legs from all of the hills in the Adventure Racing the week before.

*A friend from MyOpera, no less!!