OF BEER AND LACTIC ACID
March 1st, 2010
Talent is a limited commodity. Most athletes waste what little they have, while a few realise a great deal, if not all of their prodigious gift. One or two manage to challenge all of the preconceptions by transmuting minor talent into precious metal. Charlie Spedding is one of that last group, ie one of a kind.
Spedding was not the most talented runner in the world, far from it, indeed he wasn’t even the most talented runner in his club. Fortunately Spedding knew that, and worked to his strengths. The measure of his success in doing so may be gauged from his bronze medal in the Olympic marathon in Los Angeles 1984, and the sixth place at the Games in Seoul four years later.
The same application, or sheer bloody-mindedness has resulted, 20 years later, in Charlie Spedding, from last to first, a self-published book* recounting his tenacious career, beginning with that last place in his first race, and ending, well ending, as Enoch Powell said of all political careers, in failure, but with lots of ‘firsts’ along the way.
The one fact that most people know about Spedding is that he almost died from anaphylactic shock, an adverse reaction to a pre-operation anaesthetic. His account here of this traumatic experience is made all the more riveting by the fact that, as a pharmacy graduate, he realised what was happening as he lost consciousness, unsure as to whether he would ever wake.
A subsequent operation, made all the more painful for being under local anaesthetic was one of the many setbacks during a career which could have ended on any number of operating tables. Because prior to that, Spedding endured almost a decade of good but unspectacular results punctuated by a variety of surgical interventions. Until a missed train gave him the opportunity to grab a pint of beer and indulge in a career revaluation. That evening, retold ‘tongue-in-glass’ in a chapter entitled The Beer Drinker’s Guide To Sports Psychology signalled a turning point.
I have a couple of caveats; I wish Spedding had included more non-running anecdotes - all runners have them, often hilarious, sometimes embarassing, always worth telling - and had he invested in a proper cover photo, he might have enticed more sales.
But it is an engaging account, told by a down-to-earth character, and is yet another example to today’s under-achieving UK distance runners how a little foresight and a lot of hard graft can take you, as it took Spedding to the unlikeliest of places. Like the one he describes in his final paragraph, ‘The greatest moment of my two decades of running came at 22 miles into the Olympic marathon (in LA), when I took the lead and pushed the pace………… I was running as fast as I dared. I was trying my utmost to fulfill my wildest dreams. …. I was doing it. I was flying and I felt absolutely fantastic’
Matt McCue was nowhere near as talented or successful as Spedding, but the evidence of An Honorable Run** is that McCue can write. And that, since he is pursuing a career in journalism (a far more honourable profession in the US than in the UK) means that he is already much further ahead of the game than he ever was in athletics.
A couple of examples, since you ask…. Of a hard training session, ‘After a particularly draining death-march…’. And of a race, ‘After lactic acid had bullied its way into my muscles…’.
Like Spedding’s book, this account (BookSurge Publishing) is a quest, with many trials en route. But it is essentially a love-letter to McCue’s Iowa High School coach, Bob Brown, and to a certain extent to his Colorado college coach Mark Wetmore, already made famous by Running With The Buffaloes.
The structure is as smart as the writing. For example, I liked the cod opener whose truth only gets revealed towards the end.
And though the pictures inside never make McCue look like the sort of sylph who has done the amount of training he describes, the backcover shot, perhaps by a professional, makes him look like the coolest dude on the planet. No bad thing if you live in New York City!
This book will appeal to anyone who has ever dreamed of being a great runner, which is to say, pretty much everyone who has ever laced a running shoe.
PS I found both books on amazon, but you can also buy directly from:

