This is a slightly multi-faceted post. I have, like pushing mincemeat through a keyhole, hopefully, managed to link the eponymous ‘Man avec Hammer’ with both hard training and the unintended consequences of ‘hard training’. We’ll see how it reads……
Sure as night becomes day, you will have a meeting with el hombre con el martillo, l’homme au marteau or le tamaloa ma le samala (if you’re Spanish-, French- or Samoan-speaking you’ll know what that means…..likewise, if you’ve read from the start you’ll have a good guess).
The Man with the Hammer is, for all intents and purposes, pain personified. Summed up with the following ancient proverb, “sometimes you’re the hammer, sometimes you’re the nail….” The 80s hippedy-hopper MC Hammer was L’Homme in human form. We await His second coming.
Wait…….MC?! Is that….you??
You will suffer for your art.
Every endurance athlete has had an appointment with Him. Are you sat shaking your head? Just wait. He will come. You can run but you can’t hide. Therein lies the paradox (of sorts). You can run, yes, but in doing so you are drawing him nearer and nearer. Feeling good in that marathon were ye?? BANG. CRASH. The WALL. For El Martillo is a master builder.
And a wrecking ball.
He has the power to turn you from a floating gazelle to a dribbling lunatic, mad with the inexorable drip, drip, drip of lactic acid flooding your thighs and turning the lush, grassy slope in front of you into a Gladiatorial (the telly show) travelator. For He is a plumber too.
The good thing that comes from this?? The realisation that there is no control in running. We run out of gas simply because the Man with the Hammer has deigned that we have run out of gas. It’s as easy as that. We control nothing. So relax. Go hard. Keep your appointment with die koper van metaal met houtstukke (the thrower of metal headed wooden things in Afrikaans…..duhh). Train hard safe in the knowledge that you will be rewarded with vomit and bile. Live.
It is only by booking-in for regular meetings that you can develop the third-person relationship with your body that is so essential to performing well in fell running.
Chris Boardman (he of cycling fame) sums it up as well as can be (minus the romance) when talking of his Hour Record….”You have three questions going through your mind: How far to go? How hard am I trying? Is the pace sustainable for that distance? If the answer is ‘yes’, that means you’re not trying hard enough. If it’s ‘no’, it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re looking for the answer ‘maybe’.”
