I'm working on some other stuff now...

Hello everyone - sorry for the lapse in communication!

The Eco Ironman project has gone quiet for a while, but will be back live at some point. For now, I'm working a bit too hard, so my eco-ness has gone a bit more theoretical. You can keep tabs on that at www.conservation-economy.org.

I am however continuing to pursue the green sport thing, and you can keep up with me and my new buddies at www.webjam.co.uk/racinggreen.

Go well.

I have a habit when I read of folding over corners that I think at some stage I might want to go back to. Obviously I very rarely do, but just on occasion...

Last night was one such moment. I decided to have a little look back over Born to Run, and came across this beautiful quote:

How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbours’ backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you’d ever be hassled for going too fast.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle – behold, the Running Man…

But the American approach – ugh. Rotten at its core. It was too artificial and grabby, Vigil believed, too much about getting stuff and getting it now: medals, Nike deals, a cute butt. It wasn’t art; it was business, a hard-nosed quid pro quo. No wonder so many people hated running; if you thought it was only a means to an end – an investment in becoming faster, skinnier, richer – then why stick with it if you weren’t getting quo for your quid?

This to me has resonations throughout the world at the moment. Everything must be measured and analysed, usually so its worth can be quantified in monetary terms. But what runners know(and I don't mean just elite runners - in fact, they're most likely to have forgotten), and know perhaps better than anyone else in the world, is that some things are valuable just for themselves. This knowledge is what makes two such seemingly different people as Scott Jurek and Arnulfo Quimares (two of the heroes of Born to Run, pictured above) fundamentally similar, in a way that belies the cultural context of their lives, and is rooted in a deeply spiritual attitude to the world. You can see it in their faces. Beautiful, isn't it?

One step at a time

In changing the world, as in endurance sport, it pays to take things one step at a time... and I think I was getting a bit ahead of the game with the British Council thinking.

Flow, as this fantastic book describes it, is something close to the essence of the true joy of sport, and a pre-condition is focusing completely on the task in hand. It is not all about winning - but equally, it is not about enjoying the view. It is about the perfect match of effort with challenge, the rubbing up of an individual against his or her individual limits. To reach this state, the action in question becomes the only thing there is... I recognise this deeply from my own experience, most recently from the swim in the Ironman, where the rhythm of my swimming became in some sense the whole of me. I was, for that period of time, a swimming creature, with no space or capacity to be otherwise. This is the purity of sport, this is its joy. The ability to be totally at one.

Of course, you don't have to be an eco athlete to achieve this. But I do wonder if it can make the sensation more authentic. It seems logical to me that there is an element of absorption in nature in this feeling - and it would therefore make sense that the fewer man-made barriers between you and nature, the purer that feeling, that joy can be.

Or maybe that's one project...

Wow. What a weekend. I've just been on the British Council International Climate Champion weekend workshop, refining my project plan for the coming year. And it's shifted things quite a bit. It all culminated in a short pitch, which is below.

Sport Uncut – creating a world where sport is an act of appreciation of nature, not a fight for money and fame

My project is to unleash the latent power of endurance athletes – marathon, ultramarathon and long distance triathletes – as a force for change.

This is a project with significant potential impact, for three reasons.
1) This audience is full of the kind of people who, if they do something, do it properly. You don’t complete a marathon without some commitment.
2) We have a deep visceral connection with the natural world – we know in our bodies if not always in our minds how much we depend on nature
3) We know (again implicitly rather than explicitly) that sport has gone wrong somewhere; we know that it’s not just about winning and losing

My project is to make this understanding, this deeply held knowledge, explicit. I see a world where endurance athletes are at the forefront of the ecological revolution that is just starting to emerge.

I am going to do this via 3 angles of approach

The first will be to define new types of endurance event, events where the competition is explicitly not just about the quickest time. We have a desperately narrow-minded conception of competition today – but the word originally comes from the Latin ‘cum + petere’, to strive together. I believe we can recapture this meaning, and my first idea is to work with an existing event, the Jurassic Coast Challenge ultramarathon next March, to find new ways – including a photography competition integrated into the ultra itself. The athletes will be striving together, not only to complete the course, but to fully appreciate the greatest moments of the race.

The second will be to celebrate and catalyse the production of new types of kit, more coherent with our attachment to the natural world than the desire to win at all costs. In the long term, I can imagine new forums, magazines, and so on being established – but for now I will start by establishing a stand at existing sports shows, bringing together such innovations as limestone-based wetsuits, bamboo and flax bikes, and ‘barefoot’ running shoes, under the banner of ‘the athlete of the future’.

Finally, I want to start to engage with the psychology of endurance sport, and sport as a whole, looking to understand where our narrow definition of competition has come from, and seek a new language for those of us who see an altogether broader reality. I hope to have the opportunity to do a PhD, and this would be the heart of my inquiry.

In the long term, imagine an alternative Olympics – an Olympics where we are striving together in appreciation of the natural world, not fighting over whether it’s the swimsuit or the swimmer, the athlete or the steroids, that are ‘winning’ the race.

Three projects for 2010

After a bit of a pause for thought, the plan is to continue with the blog... more for my sake than for anyone else's!

But just in case you do feel like keeping up to date, what you can expect over the next year is three main things.

First up, the attempts off the back of Barcelona to get the concept of eco triathlon into the mainstream. The first real victory has come this week, as Tzero-tri, a new website for triathletes by triathletes, commissioned a 'how to' guide from me on the subject. You can check it out here. I'm also hoping to work with Simon Griffiths, the founder of the site, on a couple of other ideas for working together with the goal of making all triathlon eco triathlon. I see no reason at all why tri shouldn't be the next surfing.

Second, I'm going to have a go at setting up a race. I won't take on a triathlon just yet (though you never know!), but what I want to try to do is get a 10k going to get more people involved in the idea that nature is a vital factor in the true joy of running. It'll basically be a cross country race somewhere near London to start with - but with a few twists. I've got myself on a British Council project with a bit of funding attached, and I've just registered the domain http://www.runwild.org.uk/. Watch this space (but not just yet, because there isn't anything there!).

Finally, I'm going to take on the Jurassic Coast Challenge in March, and use a barefoot running shoe to do it. I've been for quite a few barefoot runs now, and really enjoyed the feeling. So bring it on!

Peak oil and limestone wetsuits

A few people have been asking me what the scoop is on limestone wetsuits - understandably, as it's a slight difficult concept to get your head around.

Essentially, the deal is this. Most wetsuits are made of neoprene, a petroleum-based substance. So like a lot of stuff, it's made of oil.

Neoprene brings several problems with disposal, as it's a pretty hazardous substance, and very difficult to recycle. But the most significant environmental issue is the sourcing of the oil. Dwindling supplies mean we're getting close to (and many commentators say we've gone past) the point where new production of oil is outweighed by growth in demand. This is the point we call peak oil (thanks Wikipedia).

As this happens, we start to seek new oil with greater and greater desperation - a notable example being the efforts to exploit the Alberta tar sands in Canada. All oil is bad. But this stuff is mad. Because of emissions incurred in production, tar sands oil is responsible for 3 times as many emissions as normal oil. Not only that, but the tar sands are often in areas of ancient boreal forest. This sort of thing is just BAD news - on all counts. Greenpeace haven't even had to use their usual tactics; they've published the report above on the financial risks BP and Shell are putting their shareholders through instead!

What all that means is that anything we can do to move away from petroleum-based products is seriously good news. So ask for geoprene when you buy your wetsuit!

Making (small!) waves in triathlon world...

Feeling quite pleased with myself today, as it seems the concept of eco triathlon is starting to make a bit more of an impact where it can really make a difference - among triathletes.

An article is running on tri247.com, and I'm talking to tzero-tri about the possibility of writing a 'how to' guide to eco triathlon for them. I'm really hoping this can be the beginning of something - I'd love to think that triathlon could be the next surfing, the next sport to really understand the relevance of the environment to the sport we love. It feels like it makes sense...

That said, I'm almost as excited about another little development. My deskmate at work has just entered her first 10k run, having never really been interested before. She started jogging in the park near her house after feeling 'shamed' by me!

From small acorns?

The next project?

Thinking about taking this on... three marathons in three days along the Dorset coast path. Might be a good way to begin the barefoot running career...!

The numbers are in...

So we've run the numbers - as best we can - on the impact of the Ironman. It's proven difficult to look in too much detail at the products themselves, as none have undertaken full carbon footprinting as yet, which should be another call to action to the industry.

But what we can look at is the impact of travel and diet, and the numbers from these are even bigger than I was expecting. Based on these two variables alone, my footprint for a 6 month training plan of 5000 calories a day, and travel to training camp and the race by train, comes to 0.56 tonnes. To put that in context, the carbon footprint per person per year in Malawi is 0.7 tonnes according to a Norwegian study reported here. So even doing an Eco Ironman, only counting food and transport, I'm creating almost as many emissions in 6 months as the average Malawian in a year.

But that's nothing compared to the average Ironman, which is almost SEVEN times higher at 3.48 tonnes!

To me, this proves the point that we as athletes really need to think about what we're doing. All humans depend on the natural environment to thrive - but we should have good reason to be more conscious of that fact. And to do something about it.

So... was it worth it?

Ironically, this pic will probably be the most enduring of my memories of Challenge Barcelona. Jane took it in our hotel room, an hour or so after I finished - it was pretty much the moment when I started to be able to see the funny side of how I was feeling. My body temperature was rocketing all over the shop, and after a couple of random hot sweats I'd suddenly started feeling utterly freezing. So instead of going down to the course to pick up my kit, I wrapped myself in both the blankets from our bed and waited to feel normal again. This picture was taken when that beautiful moment finally came about.

Funny in retrospect, but presumably there was some fairly fundamental anger on the part of my body at what I'd put it through. So was it worth it? Was it worth not just this physical condition, but also all the time in training, the weekends sacrificed, and so on?

The answer has to be yes.

I can't pretend that I've made a massive difference to the psychology of all sportsmen, and in one hit lit the fire of a new generation of eco-athletes... but I have found better ways to align my values with my sport for myself; I have had conversations that I wouldn't have had otherwise, and found companies and individuals that are doing amazing things in pursuit of a similar goal; and I have developed ideas for what comes next that could continue this work. So something has been started.

I also can't claim to have inspired whole cohorts of city dwellers to find more space for nature in their day-to-day lives. But again, perhaps you don't always see the impact of what you're doing immediately. And what I have definitely done is raised almost a third of what the Wilderness Foundation need to formalise the TurnAround Project in 2010.

And of course I've done something I'll always be proud of. So that can't be bad.

Finally, we've still got the carbon footprint calculations to finalise, so hopefully one or two last interesting titbits to come from there before this blog signs off for good!

Mostly ow

So I´m alive, just about. Time of 11h32, which I have to say I´m pretty chuffed with. Swim was a total dream, did it in 1.06 which is way quicker than anticipated, and really enjoyed it - particularly the tunes on the music system just before the start, ´Let´s Get It Started´ and ´Crazy´, fairly appropriate! Bike was pretty good too, though the heat really started to tell towards the end, and I was beginning to be a bit scared before the run even began... and I was right to. Absolutely screwed by about 5km in, but managed to run between aid stations (every 2.5km), and was pretty chuffed to keep the marathon time respectable at 4.14. I genuinely can´t imagine having been in much more pain than I was by the end though - knees went numb at about 20km, and I´m really not sure how I did it from there. You meet a fairly unpleasant version of yourself when you get in that kind of condition!
Think the most lasting memory will be of sitting in the finish area with my head between my knees, concentrating extremely hard on not vomiting, and trying to look grateful to the German woman beside me who kept offering me peanuts and beer (admittedly alcohol free, but still not exactly what I was wanting to put into my system at the time). I was, if you´ll forgive my Catalan, properly bu88ered.
Hopefully my brain will kick in sufficiently to reflect slightly more intelligently over the next day or so, but in the meantime, thanks to everyone who´s sponsored me so far, and I´ll write more soon!

Bring it on...

Jesus. I´m about to do a 140 mile race in a day. That´s a stupidly long way.

It´s funny how these things only occur to you when it´s a little bit too late!

Calella is an odd sort of place, bit of a dive of the Costa Brava really, but out of season not bad at all, and the beach is beautiful. The clientele around the pool at our hotel are an amusing mix of fat Brits and Germans, draping their copious guts across their flag towels in the sun, and hardcore athletes of all nationalities, talking nervously in clusters of 2 and 3 in the shade. It´s a slightly uncomfortable mix, but quite entertaining to look down on from a balcony. Humans are an odd species, in many ways!

Biggest prospective concern is the heat. It´s looking like being about 25-27 degrees tomorrow, which is about 10 degrees hotter than my ginger complexion is particularly keen on. But I suppose an unseasonably cold day would have been mildly inappropriate given I´m doing this partly to raise awareness of climate change among athletes...

Well, I suppose this is it pre-race! I´ll update as soon as I physically can - I start at 8.40am local time, so with a following wind will aim to be done by 9pm (arrghh - 12 hours!!!!). Thanks to everyone who´s texted, emailed etc to wish me luck, and thanks hugely to everyone who´s sponsored me so far. Given I´m now as machine-like in physical fitness as I´ll ever be, I´ll leave the final words to the mighty Arnie.

Hasta la vista... baby.

Train travel - one last pleasure before the pain!

Looking forward to this afternoon - Eurostar have very kindly upgraded me and my girlfriend for the trip to Paris, which means she at least can sip champagne as we speed under the sea...
Have to say, though, I find train travel a real pleasure regardless of class of travel. It's been one of the easiest changes to make in lifestyle as I've tried to go greener; only when you stop flying do you realise quite how miserable it was in the first place, and how much it detracts from your authentic experience of a place to arrive in the cultural sterility of an airport! So much more real to travel through a landscape, seeing it change around you, than to parachute into greyness.

I also have a bit of a beef both with those who say it's expensive and those who say it takes too long, which are the most obvious arguments against train travel.

Money-wise there are a couple of factors. First up, if you book in advance, train travel is dead reasonable. Eurostar from £59 return all in (so no credit card or carry on bag fees, or transfers to and from city centres - no bl**dy Stansted 'Express'!), and the overnight from Barcelona cost 50-odd euros first class!Then there's the fact that we are simply not paying the true cost of flying at the moment - in many countries, airline fuel is subsidised while train is not. What you have to remember is that flying is both fundamentally unnecessary (particularly domestic and short-haul European) AND carbon intensive. Not exactly a winning combination in the present day. Can't believe they are trying to get away with a 50% reduction in emissions by 2050. Ridiculous.

Especially when you consider the time thing properly. Now, I'm leaving work at 2pm to go to Barcelona. I'll go to St Pancras, do a bit more work on the way to Paris, have dinner, get on the train and wake up in Barca at 7am after a lovely long sleep. Nice.

Or I could travel an hour out of town to get to an airport, check in by 4pm, get on a flight for 5pm, arrive at Barca airport by 9pm (with time difference), and get into actual real-life Barcelona after getting bags and so on for about 10.30pm if I'm really lucky, absolutely knackered and having been unable to do anything useful since 2pm. I generally don't sleep well after flying, so I'll still feel shoddy the next day, and I'll have generated 10 times more carbon emissions.

But yes, green living is all about sacrifices...

FRANK water - if bottled water can be good...

...then this is it.
For every litre of FRANK you buy, they develop 200 litres worth of clean water projects in India. Which makes a bit of a mockery of Volvic's 10 for 1 campaign earlier in the year. But more importantly, FRANK are trying to phase out bottled water altogether, encouraging people to use tap water where possible... and they're also campaigning for clean water wherever they can. This led one of their number to take part in the World Bog Snorkelling Championships recently, putting in a heroic performance which culminated in using a FRANK filter to render the bog water drinkable.

I'll be carrying my FRANK bottle on my bike on Sunday with pride.

Wilderness Foundation project in funding appeal

Thought it might be a good idea to highlight a specific Wilderness Foundation project, just in case anyone popping along to the site needs a last nudge to put hand in pocket! This is one of the most inspiring programmes I've seen, and deserves every bit of effort I'll be putting in on Sunday. I'll let Richard Corby, one of the key movers and shakers at WF, speak for himself.

TurnAround is a twelve month long intervention programme for vulnerable youth in mid-Essex, created and managed by the Wilderness Foundation UK. Over four years in development, and having completed a successful pilot programme in 2007 (where we achieved an outstanding 80% success rate in returning participants to full time education and employment - rather than detention in a youth offending facility where many of the kids were headed without help from our programme), we officially launched the programme this year.

Over four years in development, and having completed a successful pilot programme in 2007 (where we achieved an outstanding 80% success rate in returning participants to full time education and employment - rather than detention in a youth offending facility where many of the kids were headed without help from our programme), we officially launched the programme this year.

Working with the Police, Connexions, YOT, schools and families, together with experienced Psychologists, Counsellors, Therapist and Educational Specialists, the Foundation's "TurnAround Project" is changing the lives of young people for the better.

Built around wilderness trails, environmental and community-based workshops, one-to-one sessions with volunteer adult mentors drawn from the local community, TurnAround culminates in a graduation ceremony, then work experience and if desired, re-entry in to full time education.

Monitored by the University of Essex at every stage, we have categorically proven the relationship between time spent in nature and improved self esteem - the successes of TurnAround are clear for all to see. However, we urgently need to raise additional funds to continue the programme into 2010.

A twelve month placement for one young person costs £7,500 - all of which we raise ourselves. We receive no Government funding for this work and are dependant on the support and understanding of people like you to keep changing young lives. Compare this price to the cost of a young person spending a year in detention - estimated to be £47,500 a year to the tax payer - and you can see that TurnAround is not only creating positive futures, but makes good financial sense too.

Pretty compelling in my book. Click here to fund them through my page, or here if you want to fund TurnAround directly.

Slovenia - not a bad place for a finishing camp

This was taken yesterday morning, after I swam a couple of laps around the island of the Church of the Ascension in Lake Bled, Slovenia. Absolutely stunning place, which goes for the rest of the country as well... I've spent the last week hiking and biking in the Kamnik Alps while acting as groupie for my girlfriend on a young leaders' climate change conference. Quite the couple.

It was an interesting location for an environmental conference, not least because the Slovenian way of life appears to be a lot more dependent on local resilience than anywhere else in Europe that I've witnessed, particularly when it comes to food. Pretty much everywhere, even in the capital Ljubljana, everyone seems to have a little plot of land and be growing their own food. Transition Towns eat your heart out - these guys are really on it.

Mind you, hard not to have a bit of respect for nature when you live in a place like this.

Limestone wetsuits... what will they think of next?

So I was despairing a little about wetsuits, because as far as I could work out, no one makes swimming wetsuits out of anything other than petroleum-based rubber. But then I got a very entertaining email from Glyn Turquand, the man in charge at Xterra:

About 80 million years ago, a rock originally situated in the present-day Hawaiian Islands - home to the Ironman World Championship – traveled to Mt. Kurohime, Japan. The rock is what is commonly known as limestone (99.7% calcium carbonate) and it is free from almost all impurities.

While petroleum-based rubber may be cheaper, we have chosen to manufacture our wetsuits out of limestone. This is our little way of having environmentally friendly wetsuits. We also think it’s kind of cool that all our wetsuits are from Hawaii, albeit born there quite awhile ago.

Now that's pretty cool. A geology lesson, a bit of humour, and a solution to the wetsuit conundrum all in one hit. My new suit, a Vector ProX2, arrived the other day, and I could tell I was going to like it when I read the warning on the box: "WARNING: Will increase speed, efficiency, buoyancy and overall finish results. Wear only if desired effect is to increase performance".

That's the kind of environmentalism I like. Very cool, very witty... and very fast.

Clif Bar

Another very cool company I've just discovered...

These guys really come from the same school of thinking as me - athletes who love nature, and want to do something about it. They talk about the Eureka moment - out on a cycle ride, eating rubbish-y chemical energy bars, they decided to make them taste better and do good. That's the kind of thinking we like. Check them out here.

Ecologist article...

...has just gone live here

The last big weekend is done...

Less than three weeks to go, and we're basically into the taper from here. For those not in the know, the gist is that with an event as intense as an ironman, even the training can deplete your body pretty dramatically, so you start to ease off a reasonable time before the event so that you're in peak condition on the day.

Not that I'm pretending to be massively scientific about this... I have read one or two books on the subject though!

Either way, the last weekend was a big one. 112 miles on the bike on Friday, 3 miles in the pool and 10 running on Saturday, and then 20 mile run on Sunday. So in total, a little over the full distance, but split over 3 days. Enough to make me realise just how far this event is. Still, I've survived the meat of the training (touch wood) without illness or injury, so with luck I can at least focus on making it to the finish line rather than whether or not I'll make it to the start!