Tag Archives: vegetarian

Ridgeway Run 2011

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I hadn’t originally planned on doing the Ridgeway Run this year despite really enjoying the 2010 edition. I already meant to attend Abingdon parkrun on Saturday 8th Oct for another PB attempt and had an easy 8 mile trail run down on the training plan for the Sunday. As it happened my parkrun was my 2nd slowest yet at 24:12, though I placed 11/43 so maybe we were all at bit slow what with wet grass and a strong breeze. I was pleased with my reasonably consistent pace for a change though and would have been a few seconds faster if I hadn’t felt like throwing-up when I tried to wind it up for the last couple of hundred metres. Maybe I will try forgoing breakfast next time.

Rich Kennington, the race photographer, had also turned up for parkrun but nobly volunteered himself as tail-runner instead at the last minute, he did ask if I was running the Ridgeway Run and seemed to think he’d seen my name down for it. Of course I started thinking and 9:00am the next day I was at Tring Park Cricket Club handing over my on the line entry.

I met fellow Vegetarian Cycling and Athletics Club member Mary Davis and we ended up walking the 10 minutes to the start and running the first bit together. VCAC Simon Cope caught us after a mile or so having arrived late and and having to play catch up. I was feeling pretty good considering the efforts of the previous day and took off after him up the second hill. I passed the Bridgewater Monument sooner than expected but remembered from last year that there was a bit more climbing to do.

The temperature was just right and the terrain and scenery were great with trees all around and no tarmac in sight. I was bursting though so took up off a side path for a leak, soon to be joined by another desperate runner. Meanwhile Simon repassed me so I overtook again and soon after we turned south west and after a descent were running along a part sunken track, the Ridgeway itself I think, through grassy hilltop into a rather strong headwind.

A steep haul up the first of two lumps on Pitstone Hill reduced a few to walking but I was enjoying the benefits of a slow start and was overtaking more than I was overtaken. Then it was down the other side and almost immediately spend any remaining oomph up the second crest where Rich waited in the wind with his camera.

Next a good, long, ‘technical’, descent through the woods watching out for protruding roots and slippery, wet chalk bits. Walkers were sharing the path in both directions but most stepped aside good humouredly. We rejoined the outwards route along a track through a couple of farms then sadly back to civilisation for the last bit though I was ready for a bit of flat and even terrain.

About a mile from the finish one of the marshalls spotted my VCAC vest and gave me a shout saying she was in Vegan Runners. I chatted away a few hundred metres with a Bearbrook Jogger (I think she was anyway) who was interested in VCAC, she said she hoped for a 1:30 finish so I let her go.

Then we were efficiently marshalled across a road and back into the Cricket Club grounds where the finish was conveniently near our entrance. A commemorative technical T-shirt for all runners seemed a good deal for only £12 entry fee. 1:30:24 for me, 314/517, with Simon and Mary finishing a few minutes afterwards. About 3 minutes slower than last year but I was happy with that and was very pleased I’d decided to give it a go. The lesson seems to be that yes I can run a race the day after a fast parkrun effort so long as I don’t go trying for a PB.

Hundred Thousandth Mile

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I rode my 100,000th mile last Thursday, or at least the 100,000th mile since I started recording them in 1998. Everyone of them on a vegetarian diet of course. Working on an overall average of 12.5mph (I’m not very fast) I think this is about 330 days non-stop or about 30 million pedal revolutions.

What with training for the Oxford Half I’d known in advance that I would be pushing it to get an audax perm in during September so I’d booked a couple of days off work to increase my chance of choosing a nice day. As the end of the month drew near it looked like warm, dry and sunny was to be the only option available and I wasn’t going to complain. So I decided on Thursday and, despite the unwelcome appearance of toothache the evening before, at 7:30am I was on my fixie heading out towards Hungerford on the 1st leg of the Marlborough Connection.

I knew I would get some traffic at this time on a weekday but most of the lanes were ok, in fact turning off the congested crawl of the A338 onto nearly empty lanes through Garford and Lyford was quite surreal. There was a road closed sign across the bottom of Hackpen Hill but I risked ignoring it and the work crew at the top kindly let me through though I suspect that I’d have had to retrace and climb up Blowingstone instead if I’d been a bit later and they’d started spreading tarmac. Close call!

The hilly lanes after Eastbury were lovely in the already warm sunshine, just me and a few pheasants who were hopefully unaware what was in store for them. At the top of a hill a black and white cat stepped into the road and requested attention. I stopped and patted his head, looked around for his house but couldn’t see it, there was a thick bit of woodland though which could well hide a cottage or two. He had no collar but his belly and laid back manner suggested he wasn’t starving. I worried for a moment whether I ought do ‘something’ but he wandered off out of our bit of shade and sat in a ploughed field in the sunshine looking totally content so I got back on the bike and carried on to Hungerford.

I bought doughnuts at Hungerford and they maliciously summoned my temporarily forgotten toothache. Oh well, a couple of ibuprofen, lots of water in me and my bottles and I set off for Wootton Bassett. Passing through Ramsbury it became clear that the local scarecrows had been out on the tiles. A couple of them relaxed near someone’s front door, one seated in a large planter. One sat on a porch roof with a bottle in one hand and a tankard in another. A scarecrow penguin stood in the pub garden.

The long climb up the Marlborough Downs was pleasant though I was very glad I’d plastered myself in suncream. A brief stop at Wootton Bassett then a bit of a tailwind through Cirencester and up part of the Whiteway before I turned east towards Calmsden for the first Info and then onto Lechlade for another short stop. I could have made better time but had already decided to take it easy being only a few days after my half marathon, I’d even brought lights just in case I loitered too long. It was good to ride with no target time for a change.

The Cotswolds, and particularly the woods after Charlbury, were very pretty in the late afternoon light and it was a bit of a shock to find myself on the busy A44 to Woodstock as the commuters streamed home. Fortunately there is a lot of usable cycleway between Woodstock and Oxford so the last leg was slow but not too hairy. I did get back on the main road for the last mile round Peartree and Woodstock Road roundabouts though as the cycleway takes you over 2 fast A34 slip roads then dumps you on the wrong side of a busy roundabout with no easy way to get back into the traffic flow.

I got back home before dark having taken about 11hrs 30m. That was the 11th monthly ride of my current fixed wheel Randonneur Round the Year so I plan to ride one more 200 in October then give it a rest for the winter so I can concentrate on my running.

(The toothache came back with a vengeance that evening and left me in pain for most of the weekend – I can feel myself developing an unwarranted aversion to COOP doughnuts which is a shame as they are vegan.)

Vegan

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I ‘went’ vegan, already having been vegetarian for most of my life, in November 2008. November is Vegan Month and as my second full year approaches, and I can start to look back on the first few months of transition as the past, I thought I’d go on about it.

So why vegan? Animal welfare is the core answer and only the blindest or thickest of people could pretend that farming in the industrial way we do is kind to, or good for, animals. Obviously just me not eating eggs and dairy doesn’t actually make any animals better off in a society which over produces and throws away many thousands of times more animal produce than I’m not consuming. But we supposedly have a market driven economy where suppliers respond to demand – and I demand soya milk and egg free meat substitutes and leather free clothing and vegan biscuits and the like. There are other important reasons of course, such as sustainability, limiting damage to the environment and eating well.

Does being a fussy customer work? Well it certainly did for the ovo-lacto vegetarian movement, almost every pub, restaurant and cafe in the UK now offers veggie choices, it would be economic suicide not to! There may not be so many vegans yet but the easy options are fast growing: a choice of tasty vegan frozen goods at Holland and Barrett; vegan curries at Wetherspoons – even some (but not many) bottled beers and wines are marked as suitable for us nowadays and many more prove to be ok after a bit of research. The emergence of tough, waterproof, synthetics increasingly makes leather look like a sidelined, fetishist, choice. Vegans are customers and the more we buy the more commerce will offer and this will divert resources from producing and promoting animal based products, in percentage terms at least.

But why me in particular? Well as a long term veggie, and an animal lover of the sort who can clearly see that a sheep can feel pain and distress as surely as my cat can, it was maybe only a mater of time. I am not one of those who pretends that becoming vegan puts me at the the top of the kind to animals status pyramid, I’m well aware that thousands of creatures die to allow our industrialised agriculture grow the grain to make the bread that I throw away when it gets stale, but I do see veganism as another step upwards and I do think these changes are best made in steps rather than too gradually.

Chickens kept by kind owners in non-commercial situations may well have a happy life. Once profit becomes the motive though welfare tends to go out the window!

For many years I’ve been an audax rider, a long distance cyclist, eating many, many more calories than I need so I can squander them in pursuit of another 100 kilometres – I was painfully aware that it is one thing to ride and eat without causing any harm but another to obtain my fuel at the expense of animal welfare. A further incentive came from the fact that in Autumn 2008 I had some concern about animal abuse becoming more prominent in areas of my life I have no influence over and I felt the need to balance this out with action elsewhere.

Also, importantly, becoming vegan was a challenge I set myself, a bit of a mountain to climb with views and satisfaction waiting at the summit for me. Making the change was more about achievement than deprivation.

So come November 1st 2008 I’d been practising by having vegan days and I’d done a deal with Jane, my veggie partner, that I’d cook 3 days a week but if she cooked for me it’d have to be vegan. It was only going to be for November at first. Making the change was quite easy and fun in many ways, experimenting with new recipes, pigging out on vegan meat substitutes and ice cream. Since she retired Jane spends a great deal of time eating pub meals with her friends so she could eat veggie then and seemed to enjoy the vegan adventure at home. I on the other hand dislike just about any social activity that involves sitting and talking in groups so nothing for me to miss out on and even a convenient excuse if I need one. Jane seems quite amiable to stuffing her face and nodding while I drink too much and waffle so we have a vegan (for me) meal out at Wetherspoons, or occasionally the excellent Garden in Jericho, at least once a week.

I wasn’t too sure about the no honey thing at first, it just didn’t fit into my definition of animal produce. After all bees are just insects, ‘good’ insects I’m sure, same as ladybirds, but still insects, same as the greenfly and blackfly I continue to be mean to when they attempt to eat the vegetables I’m growing. But about that time the media started highlighting how colonies of bees were shrinking alarmingly and the potentially devastating effects for agriculture and plant life in general that could occur as a result of their loss. The truth started coming out about how greedy commercial bee-keepers had been treating them, ferrying them round hundreds of miles to sell their pollination services, making them grow artificially large and weak by constructing oversize cells, taking not just excess honey but honey they needed to survive and replacing it with sugar solution of little nutritional value. Yet again the money men trash nature in their ignorant greed. So now I get the honey thing, it’s just another facet of unsustainable factory farming treating animals as product, and I don’t eat honey.

The beer thing took a while. I’d always enjoyed drinking cask ales as a vegetarian, ignoring or excusing the fact that they are mostly fined with fish swim bladders. I love real ale, it was difficult, but there are plenty of tasty, animal free, bottled options. Eventually I drunk my last fishy pint – we all have to sacrifice something 🙁

It would be great to be able to say that from the moment I went vegan I felt healthier in mind and body. It wouldn’t be quite true though. My digestive system really didn’t like being deprived of all those dairy fats to slow it down. For several months I was not really happy to be too far from a toilet for too long. I slept badly most nights partly due to irritable bowel syndrome type symptoms but also because of the endless circular internal monologues of stress and depression. I felt weak riding a flattish 200k and took longer than usual to recover. I took pre-biotics and B12 supplements and never seriously considered going back to dairy, but for a while I was not the best advert for the vegan diet!

Looking back now though it was just change and change isn’t always easy and quite often has mental as well as physical side effects. I was getting genuinely stressed because of changes at work and a badly timed attempt to impose a somewhat incompetent manager on me – that wasn’t just diet! Of course I was knackered after long rides – I’d just taken up running again and expecting to start running 20 miles a week while changing my diet and continue to ride long distance was a bit much. And yes the digestive process does quicken when you eat less fat, this means less time for food to hang about in the gut causing polyps which are associated with colon and bowel cancer.

Eighteen months vegan and feeling fine!

Almost 2 years on and I think I can now honestly say that I do feel better than before I went vegan. I sleep pretty well, better than I can remember for a long while. My stomach is mostly fine and predictable and is even quite open to pints of adventurous smoothies that Jane will only pretend to sip. I think I’ve become better at shrugging off dark moods when I don’t feel like indulging them and at ignoring the fact that I hate my job. (I wouldn’t want to be one of these always look on the bright side types anyway.) I take B12 supplements and flax oil for Omega 3 and sometimes protein recovery drinks, usually hemp in soya milk. I make sure I get at least my 5 a day and usually also manage my 21 units a week without much effort.

I can certainly run better than ever before, mostly due to training of course but you can’t train without a good mindset and diet. I really enjoy running. I made a point of completing a Randonneur Round the Year (200k brevet a month for 12 successive months), as a vegan, while still running, I’m no slower and recover well. I’m currently focussed on doing my best at the Abingdon Marathon in tens days time but after that I’ll be looking forward to shorter runs and getting back on the bike and trying some of the longer distances with animal free fuel.

Being a vegan is good – I recommend it 🙂