I Jog with my dietary expert friend Dorothy. She looks very dapper in a matching Gor-tex running top, running trousers -there must be a technical word for ‘running trousers'- and even a matching head-band. It puts me in mind of an article someone has dropped into my reading tray from the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. It details Paula Radcliffe’s attention to detail as she became the world’s greatest woman marathon runner. She wears sunglasses to prevent the tension that is produced by squinting from getting into her body. She wears a strip on her nose to aid her breathing. (I am attracted to this partly because ex-Liverpool centre forward Robbie Fowler used to do the same). She wears knee-high compression socks to boost her blood circulation (not quite so tempting for me), and gloves to reduce the need for the heart to pump too much blood to her hands.

12.01km (68 minutes)

It appears that the railways, British built, are the conduits down which street children wash onto the streets of Kolkata. Nilam was lured onto a train with biscuits. Rajesh ran away from his torturing grandfather to find his dad who worked as a tea hawker in New Japaiguri railway station, a search that took him on a journey around India that R.K. Narayan could not have imagined for one of his evocative novels. Pappu, nine years of age, decided to run away and make some money for his impoverished family, but ended up on an overnight train. He had no idea how to get back. Cina Asha somehow managed it, but the problem keeps reoccurring. His family is poor. And Pappu wants to help. All of these little snippets of extraordinary lives are offered absent the real horrors that the children endure.

37 minutes jogging from home to work (6.34km)

Nilam’s story brings out the challenges and successes of Cini Asha’s work. She was picked up at the police station. The only thing she could remember about her home was that it was in the Mathpukur neighbourhood in Kolkata. She had been playing outside her home when a man tempted her away with a packet of biscuits. Before she knew it she was on a train. She escaped but then had to fend for herself in Kolkata, the world’s eight largest City.

Cini Asha workers toured Mathpukur with Nilam trying to find her home but with no luck. As they moved around they left information about their work. By chance two people who knew of Nilam’s disappearance picked up the information and got in touch with Cini Asha. A week or so later she was re-united. A bonus has been the support Nilam’s father gives to Cini Asha, helping the rescue of other children who suffered the same misfortune as his own.

60 minutes jogging (10.52km)

My running obsession means I take my eye of the ball of supporting ChildHope in its extraordinary work. While I splish-splosh along the foggy banks of the Exe Estuary ChildHope is supporting an organisation called Cini Asha to intervene with street children in Kolkata.

The early work started with the police, for it is they who are most likely to pick up kids on the streets. It turns out that police in Kolkata are a little like police in London or New York. A little sceptical at the outset but very smart and efficient once they are properly appraised of the situation. Cini Asha have been helping the police to understand why children are forced onto the street in the first place and to work out the best ways of getting them home, or at least to a better place.

As a result has engaged with almost 4,000 children over the last five years. A statistic that acts as a reminder about not only how much can be achieved but also about the size of the problem to be tackled. There are no hard and fast data but it is hard to imagine that Cini Asha’s work is doing anything more than scraping a thin layer off the top of a massive iceberg.

36 minutes jogging (6.63km around the Serpentine in Hyde Park, from which two women emerged in their swimming costumes unfazed by either the icy water or only slightly less chilly air.)

My first Half Marathon crept up on me almost unexpected. I had planned to run the following day but the weather forecast was poor. I had slept and eaten late but by three in the afternoon I ran out of reasons not to run. I set off to the Exe Estuary, a guaranteed flat route. There were no mountain goats, just deer in the grounds of Powderham Castle. It was wet underfoot so the swish-swish-swish of my arms in the wind was drowned out by splish-splish-splosh as I first failed to avoid big puddles and then abandoning attempts to stay dry ran right through them. Then it was squelch-squelch-squelch through the mud and the suck-suck-suck of a marsh I ran into by mistake. As the mist settled on the estuary I was more in mind of Magwitch and Pip in Great Expectations than Smith and the Governor in Loneliness. I expected to be slowed significantly by the conditions but I when I clicked off the iPod at two hours Joan Benoit-Samuelson congratulated me on my longest run so far, 21.2 kilometres, 100 metres more than a Half Marathon. I confess to not knowing Joan Benoit-Samuelson -the 1984 Olympic Gold Medalist for the Marathon in a time 25 minutes longer than I took for half the distance- but I am now counting her as a close friend.

Two hours of running and jogging (21.2km)

Dog tired after an overnight flight from Denver I don’t have the strength to drive the 20 miles to register for the Billy-Goat Half Marathon, never mind get up at 8am the following morning to run the race. So I settled for a gentle jog along the banks of the river to keep the blood following until UK bedtime.

30 minutes jogging (5.45km)

I run alongside a creek that flows through downtown Denver and into a river. I pass several gathering spots for homeless people. And then, rather prophetically, a jumbo packet of biscuits abandoned, unopened, on a bench. Possibly by a mildly obese biscuit lover running away to start the diet?

45 minutes jogging (7.34km)

My second round of training at altitude doesn’t come to much. Pressure of work means I manage just two short runs in the ‘Mile High City’. Maybe its the cold weather and snow on the ground but I seem to feel the lack of oxygen more than in Addis Ababa. The pressure on my lungs reminds me of my first dalliance with running about 15 months ago. I started with six, six minute chunks. Each chunk was broken down into three minutes jogging and three minutes walking, and then later four minutes jogging and two minutes walking and so on until after three months or so I could jog for 30 minutes or so without a sense of foreboding. These first forays were exhausting. I was gasping for air. And then slowly my body has adapted to the point where I can jog for more or less a couple of hours and, by my reckoning at least, at a reasonable pace.

The thin air takes about 10 per cent off my distances.

20 minutes jogging (3.38km)

Can there be a nicer place to run than this? San Sebastian is hilly and surrounded by mountains -presently and unusually snow-capped. But I can run down the river and around the La Concha -the first bay- and Ondarreta -the second bay- and back around both before circling the sea-edge of Mount Urgull and Zurriola -the third bay- before retracing my steps down the river.

I am in the flow as the psychologist Czikszentmihalyi would say. Smith puts it better in Loneliness when he says:

‘I ran to a steady jog-trot rhythm, and soon it was so smooth that I forgot I was running, and I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out. Then I turned into a tongue of trees and bushes where …. I couldn’t see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long distance runner running across the country felt like, realising that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me’.

I am brought back to reality by a caricature, an old man -in his late sixties maybe- with a Basque beret, a cigarette and a stick who turns to gasp at a man he would regard as old -in his early nineties perhaps- fully kitted out to sprint and who slowly jogs by in the opposite direction. Cigarette in hand the Basque beret breathless by what he has seen signals to me ‘did you see that!’

100 minutes jogging and running (17.27km)

Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is about resistance. Not like Roth resisting impulse. More of a class resistance. Standing against what one is supposed to do, what society wants one to do. Smith must decide whether or not to win the race for the Borstal Governor. He can win. And he can decide not to win.

The Governor has high hopes and talks with self regard about the possibility that Smith will become a professional runner to which the young man reflects:

‘it wasn’t until he’d said this and I’d heard it with my own flap-tabs that I realised it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff a rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks’

Should he submit to this corruption of the solitary enjoyments of his hobby? Should I give into the impulse to try out the Half Marathon that wise mountain goats defy?

My wise friend Santi who knows about a balanced life counsels caution. One injury could have lasting consequences. We talk about napping -one of Murakami’s secrets of a good life- and I relax a little. But back on the road I find I have Half Marathon anxiety and run too fast. Hence the star against the entry for Valentine’s Day. I surge ahead and then out of steam, and have to complete the last 15 minutes in the evening. My first cheat since Ethiopia. Today’s 20 minutes marks a return to normal levels of running neurosis.

20 minutes jogging (3.54km)
 

Just before I left for Spain I met another proper runner, the Chief Executive of our neighbouring charity, and we had one of those incredulous ‘is it possible to run that slow?’ and ‘is it possible to run that fast?’ exchanges.

In 10 days time the first bit of my training programme comes to an end with a practice Half Marathon. For some reason I cannot quite fathom I share this secret with the proper runner -I wasn’t even intending to share it with you dear reader. To my horror he suggests I participate in a real Half Marathon that happens to fall on the day of my practice Half Marathon.

When I check out the details on the web I realise my obsession with running is in its very early stages. Mania beckons. There are two maps of the course. One is traditional and shows a loop around the beautiful Devon coast. How lovely! The other gives the ground elevation. It’s a route for mountain goats. In fact mountain goats would surely object the course for being too hilly. Come to think of it, ever seen a mountain goat running? There is a reason.

40 minutes jogging (7.13 km)

In Nottingham recently I met a real runner. We had an exchange that has become familiar to me. (Running being my only topic of conversation these days I meet more than my fair share of proper runners). They tend to ask me what time I expect to do for the Half Marathon and when I tell them -just under 2 hours and four minutes- they give me a quizzical look. A little later I ask them how long it takes them to run a full Marathon and they say something along the lines of two hours and 45 minutes and I return the puzzled face. ‘How is this possible?’ we are thinking.

Over hearing this chat a Nottingham colleague Candida Brudenell is suitably unimpressed by Murakami and reminds me of Nottingham’s own runner-philosopher; Smith in Alan Sillitoe’s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It is extremely funny, especially the scene where the money that cock-sure Smith has stolen appears before the policeman he is irritating as if manna from heaven. It is this that brings about his spell in Borstal -a Detention and Training Centre we would say now- where he becomes a runner.

Sillitoe has the evocative Nottingham dialect -curiously overlooked these days- to a ‘T’. And his running vocabulary is so rich. ‘Puff-puff-puff. Trot-trot-trot. Slap-slap-slap go my feet on the hard soil. Swish-swish-swish as my arms and side catch the bare branches of a bush,’ says Smith.

90 minutes jogging and running (15.87km) with a 10 minute walk in the middle

The descriptions of programmes by ChildHope’s partners in South America never quite capture the horror of life on a rubbish tip. This I observed five years ago in Recife, Brazil. I went as a favour to the Swiss based Oak Foundation to assess support needed to boost the work of an NGO working with street children.

The tip was in some ways a miracle of recycling. But that was the only redeeming feature. I would defy even the stoniest hearted of commentators like Maskalyk and Doctorow to describe life there without a good dose of emotion and shame. Filth. Stunted growth. Absence of light in the night-time. Constant risk of violence. Lack of adequate shelter, sanitation or any form of health care. Who can conjure a happy ending out of that?

I clung to some hope for a young girl who we gave a ride to college. The NGO had befriended her, gave her access to school and a place to wash, and she had secured a place on the exam roster. She talked about being a travel agent and was fascinated by descriptions of Europe, the places she had seen in books, as distant no doubt to her as her garbage pile home was to me.

In Peru ChildHope works with Centro Proceso Social and Amhauta in mirror like contexts. It is as hand to mouth for the NGO’s as it is for the people they support. For every one child they propel into a life even approaching normality there will be dozens if not tens of dozens they have to overlook.

To me it seems almost impossible for us in the cosy North to properly connect with these harsh realities. We make our donations and expect miracles. But in Brazil, or in Peru, or in the many other countries in which ChildHope operates the reality is endless hard decisions and squeezing every last drop out of our meagre offerings.

25 minutes jogging (4.59km) and five minute walk

A couple of articles in the London Review of Books get me thinking about stony hearted assessments of what needs to be done and what can be done by organisations like ChildHope and its partners trying to protect children from exploitation.

Matthew Reynolds considers the work of E.L. Doctorow whose Ragtime I have just finished. Apparently Doctorow wrote it as a technical exercise to gauge his ability to capture a sense of restlessness. This he certainly achieves. The book reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie, like the The Royal Tenenbaums, in which dysfunction is routine, unremarkable and survivable. Like Anderson, Doctorow refuses ordinary feelings about individual and collective abuses.

Michela Wrong, correspondent for Reuters and Financial Times, reviews James Maskalyk’s, Six Months in Sudan, and comments on the dispassionate assessments that doctors are forced into when operating under duress. She reflects on Maskalyk, a Canadian medic volunteering via Medicin Sans Frontiers in Sudan, giving up on a child needing constant attention because, as he puts it, ‘at some point we went home to feed ourselves’.

Jogging for 30 minutes (5.23km)

The result of no biscuits, crappy chocolate bars, one pudding per week and responsible alcohol consumption over 20 weeks is!?

About eight bags of sugar. EIght kilos. Seventeen and a half pounds in old money. About a stone and a quarter.

That should be the end of the story. The No Biscuit Diet is vindicated. But there is another claim, yet to be corroborated. 

The No Biscuit Diet only need be applied once. It involves giving up something unsatisfying for ever. And the result should be permanent change.

Will this happen? Will I be back to digestive munching ways in a few months? Swilled down with regular vats of coloured meths and topped up by a daily Kit-Kat? I hope not but we shall see. This blog will end with the Liverpool Half Marathon in a few weeks. But six or nine months or a year or so from now I shall provide a short addendum giving the evidence on long term change.

In the meantime I am awaiting an avalanche of offers from publishers for The No Biscuit Diet (all proceeds to ChildHope). It may be short but its probably effective. What better recommendation could a publishing house want? There will be resistance from the biscuit and coloured meths producers. But I can take the heat.

In keeping with my hero Haruki Murakami who named his first bestseller after a Beatles song I am thinking about catchy and timeless titles. So far Happiness is a Small Bum is looking the most promising.

Jogging and running 90 minutes* (16.46km)

The No Biscuit Diet Deluxe: The Diet for Impatient Mildly Obese Biscuit Lovers

I spend part of my professional life showing people how changes in the lives of ordinary people improve not only their lives but also those of the extraordinary with significant problems. Alcohol is one way to illustrate the potential.

Over my lifetime alcohol consumption has steadily increased. When I grew up I never saw wine at home. My children, by contrast, must wonder if they are growing up in a vineyard. And not only are ordinary people like me drinking more, we also have more alcoholics in society. This is not a coincidence.

One solution is to get people like me and you, ordinary drinkers, to consume less. When we do that, for reasons I needn’t go into here, over time we get less alcoholics in our society. It can work in other contexts. If you don’t fancy hugging a hoodie you can reduce aggression by the few by being stricter with your own kids (so long as everyone else is doing the same for the many).

I was happy to tell everyone else about the benefits of drinking less but it never crossed my mind to take my own advice. Until the question of weight came up. Alcohol contains a lot of calories.

The potential of drinking less was made easier by the fact that most wine served in most UK bars is undrinkable. It is coloured meths. Sometimes they don’t even bother with the colour. And these days wine is served in small vats instead of a glass. Don’t get me started. I can feel another blog coming on. The Things I Write About When I Write About The Bloody Awful Quality and Dosage of Wine in UK Bars.

But back to The No Biscuit DIet Deluxe. My idea was to drink smaller amounts of drinkable alcohol instead of large amounts of undrinkable alcohol. So I replaced 21 ordinary UK bar glasses of wine with the amount recommended by the Chief Medical Officer, which is 21 ‘units’ of wine.

The word ‘unit’ is the key here. A small glass of Rioja is 1.65 units. A small vat of meth like wine in a UK bar comes in at 3.25 units. A couple of bottles a wine adds up to the weekly quota of 21 units. Or nine small glasses plus two pints of beer, if that is what takes your fancy.

That simple switch saves me another 1,000 or so calories per week, depending on whether it is wine or beer or spirits I include in my quota of 21. So when combined with the 1,100 calories from the biscuits, chocolate and pudding, losing six kilos became manageable in 20 weeks. 

As compensation I began to drink just wine that would be acceptable to a Spaniard, or French person or Italian. (Which practically rules out most bars in my home town of Totnes).

So I started to cut back on the biscuits, chocolates and desserts in September. And at the same time introduced the deluxe -less of better wine- component.

Has it worked? In November I was heading in the right direction. But I had not shed those six bags of sugar. Tomorrow I will have access to weighing scales when I visit San Sebastian. Twenty weeks on from the start of the No Biscuit DIet I will find out if the regime works.

105 minutes running and jogging (18.67km)

The No Biscuit Diet: The Diet for Mildly Obese Biscuit Lovers

The No Biscuit Diet is one way for slightly over-weight people to lose a few kilos, permanently. 

‘Biscuit’ in the No Biscuit Diet is a metaphor for food that at first excites but ultimately disappoints. Think of the things you have consumed and then thought ‘why did I eat that?’

Digestive biscuits are an exemplar. Low grade chocolate bars fit the description very well. Puddings in second rate restaurants. (How many times is it necessary to try a crème brûlée to find out that most UK and too many US chefs cannot master even the simplest of tasks).

There are some ingenious culinary adaptations based on this idea. For example, in the Spanish autonomous region of Pais Vasco it is possible to order a zurito, a wine glass of draft beer. Why? Because the first taste of beer, like the first bite of a pizza, is wonderful. But the last sip of a long glass of beer or the last mouthful of a big pizza is generally unsatisfying, producing a longing for more. Small amounts that leave us content are better than large amounts that produce discontent.

The diet involves setting your own goals. Every 3,500 unconsumed calories translates into about half a kilo in weight loss.

So I gave up biscuits. I banked on eating five digestives a week; on a bad day I could manage that in an afternoon. That saved me 350 calories per week.

I gave up crappy chocolate bars. I used to eat about one Mars bar and one Kit-Kat each week, usually in the evening with the kids or as a remedy for mild suicidal ideation consequent on being a prisoner on a delayed train. That saved me 500 calories per week.

And I restricted myself to one dessert in a restaurant per week, instead of at least two I had been subjecting myself to. That saved me another 250 calories per week.

So that came to 1,100 calories a week. Meaning it would take about 38 weeks to deposit the six bags of sugar I would otherwise have to cart around the Liverpool Half Marathon course.

A little bit slow? Tomorrow I offer a remedy for those seeking a quick fix. 

30 minutes jogging (5.42km)

When I started this running lark I was 76 kilos. That translates into a BMI of 25.2 making me, like most men of my age, mildly obese. By losing six kilos my BMI would fall to 23.3 making me, like most men of my age in the last generation, about the weight I should be.

I wasn’t much fussed about being like men in the previous generation. But the idea of not lugging around six bags of sugar on my Half Marathon was quite appealing. But I have never been on a diet. I tend to think of diets as a tool for people who want to lose weight and then put it back on again, and then lose it again and so on. I didn’t fancy dieting as a hobby.

You might imagine that all the training would translate into less weight. It helps but it is not in itself an answer. According to my iPod, five kilometres of jogging is equivalent to about 350 calories. That's about the same as four chocolate digestive biscuits. It takes half an hour to run five kilometres whereas the digestives are gone in no time.

Added to this frightening lack of equivalence is the tendency to want to replenish the energy one has lost from jogging. Not immediately afterwards. But as the day wears on so does the desire to top up.

So with some debt to my dietary expert friend Dorothy, who was extremely generous despite the spectacular failure of her No Dessert Diet, I devised a plan that may or may not come to fruition this week.

85 minutes jogging and running (14.97km)

One goal has been to train properly. Hence the 450 kilometres of conditioning. (Despite Tiger Woods’s proclamation, I reckon I am just 250 kilometres towards my target). The main objective is to enjoy running the race in the same time Haile Gebrselassie needs for a full marathon. Concomitant with these designs has been to start the race six kilos lighter than when I agreed to participate.

This last ambition may be about to be realised. Or not. My only access to weighing scales is in an apartment I use in San Sebastian in Basque Spain. I have not been there since November. But in six days time I will be back.

55 minutes jogging and running (9.5km) plus five minute walk

I wake earlier and earlier anxious to get running. It helps that the days are getting longer. The last day of this week will be 30 minutes longer than the first. I wake from dreams borne of obsession with running. Earlier in the week I passed a child and his mother watching a buzzard regal on its tree perch. In my sleep the buzzard becomes a leopard, hugely exaggerated in size, attended by a couple of pigeons. I drift into Upper Parliament Street in Liverpool and am passed by a chipper Harry Houdini. According to Doctorow in Ragtime the great escapologist felt unloved in the US and came to Europe for true acclamation. He appeared at the Liverpool Empire 106 years and a week ago this week, and his name is still synonymous with extraordinary sidestep. And he potters around in my mind as I try and rest.

80 minutes jogging (13.77km)

One of my interests in ChildHope’s work is to find out what is happening in what we used to call the Developing World and we now call the Global South that could help children in Europe or the United States. As I run under the long Park Lane underpass I get into a echoey conversation with a young homeless man. He asks me how far I am going and after considering my reply tells me I am an idiot. I am wondering whether I would be more likely to invest in him if he were a customer of the CDK Bank? All the same ethical questions arise. But my current salve for the conscience produced by homelessness, regular contributions to the poor box in Farm Street Church, is no less problematic.

45 minutes jogging, (7.93km)

One would imagine it is relatively straightforward to help children in dire need. But ChildHope’s work produces many ethical dilemmas.

The successful partnership with Children’s Development Khazana or CDK is a case in point. How do children who work for a living manage their money? They live by their wits. They often have no relatives who can mind their takings. Sometimes they have no home, and even if they do, no safe place to store money.

This pushes working children towards spending as quickly as they earn. It encourages instant gratification. It handicaps their ability to get out of the hole. And in some cases, say when earnings are spent on drugs, the money can deepen the hole.

CDK provide a banking service. The bank is owned by its clients. Its a ‘mutual’ or an old fashioned building society or a credit union.

There are 14,000 customers and several hundred volunteers supporting the Bal Vikas Bank as it is known in India or Butterflies as it is known elsewhere in South Asia. There are 75 main branches and 49 sub-branches, extending to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka as well as India.

Not only can children save at the Bank, they can get advances to start up small businesses.

CDK and ChildHope are providing a valuable service for working children. But by providing this service are they encouraging children to work? ChildHope must constantly reflect on this and other ethical challenges. Ceasing to support the expansion of the bank will not stem the flow of children into work. But helping working children to save may well be the spring for a better life.

60 minutes jogging (10.32km) plus 5 minute walk

If we see the Global South through the looking glass of television appeals -the simple touch of a celebrity bringing a smile to the face of sad but good children- we can think of it as a fable full of threats but with a happy ending. The reality is not like that. It is much much more miserable. And threatening. Plus all this misery and threat is normal. It’s part of life. 

In a regular review of programmes at ChildHope our colleague Allan Kiwanuka reports on his work in Uganda. 

ChildHope is working with two organisations in Uganda -the Reproductive Health Bureau and the Youth Anti AIDS Association- to help children affected by the AIDS epidemic. The work has been going well in urban areas and now there is an interest in extending it to 15 remote islands.

The goal is to reduce the HIV rate. The virus has reached a quarter of the population, four times more people than the national average.

The islands are remote. Men, who are paid cash daily and mix a risky lifestyle with their risky work of fishing, come and go depending on their economic needs. These men are not committed to their communities and there are more of them than women. So child sexual abuse is not uncommon. There is hardly any public health infrastructure to respond to victims of maltreatment or those infected by HIV.

There is nothing chocolate-box-like about this vista. It’s like the wild West. And in the wild West children’s rights get short shrift. Alan’s descriptions of the remote Ugandan islands chime with E.L. Doctorow’s of New York a century ago. In Ragtime Doctorow writes:

“Children suffered no discriminatory treatment. They did not complain as adults tended to do. Employers liked to think of them as happy elves. If there was a problem about employing children it had to do only with their endurance. They were more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency. In the canneries and mills these were the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed; they had to be counselled to stay alert. In the mines they worked as sorters of coal and sometimes were smothered in the coal chutes; they were warned to keep their wits about them”.

As in Ethiopia and as it was in New York, the challenge in Uganda is changing the way people live their lives. ChildHope’s proposed work seeks to reach 90,000 fisher folk, giving them information about health and child protection and testing plus counselling for HIV. This will coincide with better health services and support for victims, of rape for example . The proposed work with 2,400 children, half in school and half out, will begin to break the cycle of maltreatment that has become engrained in island life. It will give children the chance to be children, as in modern day New York, and hopefully before another century has passed.

Two runs today -to compensate for work keeping me off the road tomorrow. Once in the dark early morning and once in the dark late evening.

40 minutes jogging (6.87km)

30 minutes jogging (5.27km)

At the end of my run yesterday I hear Lance Armstrong say something on my iPod but I cannot quite catch it all. (Lance is busy with many other runners so I cannot ask him to repeat). But it includes the Americanism ‘way to go’ so I assume its positive. But then this morning Tiger Woods shows up. Tiger! On my iPod. A man so busy in so many ways but with time to tell me -mistakenly I think, but not that I care- that I have just clocked up 250 miles.

20 minutes jogging (3.4km)

I am about half way through the training regime. I have covered about 200 kilometres so far, about two and a half times my usual ration. I am edging towards the threshold that Murakami calls ‘serious running’ -about 150 miles per month- but still someway off what he would call ‘rigorous running’ -about 200 miles per month. Murakami is about 10 years older than me, but he is faster. And he can write whereas I cannot. To what extent can I close the gap?

Pondering this question my mind turns to another current hero Haile Gebrselassie. I differ from Gebrselassie is two ways. He runs twice as fast as I do over twice the distance. And he gets quicker as the race nears the end, whereas I get slower. 

On the plus side I am beginning to get the hang of the difference between jogging and running. The training regime has different combinations of the two, so this morning I jogged for 10 minutes, ran for 10, jogged for 20 minutes, ran for 10 and so on until I got to an hour and fifty minutes on the road. It was icy and the two days I spent drinking and eating too much did not help but nonetheless I find I can now slow myself down on the jogging sections, and speed myself up on the running sections. Before I got this idea I just set off at what seemed a reasonable pace and gradually slowed thereafter.

So what can I hope to achieve for this Half Marathon? I am going to try to get around the circuit in the same time Haile Gebrselassie would do a full marathon, two hours and three minutes (and 59 seconds). And like Haile I will vary my pace throughout the race. This way I can imagine crossing the finishing line with Gebrselassie (no matter that he will have been twice round the circuit to my one), Haruki Murakami will be able to say ‘not bad.’ Not good either, but not bad.

So the revised goals are: to complete the Half Marathon, within 2 hours and four minutes, varying my speed throughout the race. Plus, as Murakami demands, to have fun along the way.

110 minutes running and jogging (17.6km) plus 5 minute walking

.

As I run along the edge of the Dartington estate my colleague Julian pulls alongside me on his bike and says ‘do you want a ride, I won’t tell anyone’. I let him go but my mind turns to marathon scams of the ages. Earlier this month, almost a third of the runners were disqualified for cheating in the Xiamen Marathon in China. The variety of hustling was impressive. Some jumped into cars for part of the journey. The techies gave their microchips -that record the passing of the start and finish line- to faster friends. Nobody went as far as Rosie Ruiz who won the Boston Marathon in 1980 largely thanks to riding the subway for most the way. Or Fred Lorz who took the Gold Medal in the 1904 St Louis Olympics in a time that would have impressed Haile Gebrselassie. The secret of his speed? Eleven miles in his manager's car. Haruki Murakami reminds us that running should be fun. But for the Chinese runners a quick time, however achieved, eased entry into university. 

All this skulduggery is diverting and I run my fastest 10,000 meters yet.

60 minutes jogging and running (10.42km).

Murakami writes about the benefits of solitude and the mind mastering the frail body. In the first few pages he reveals one of his mantras, to be repeated throughout a run, ‘Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.’ Carver on the other hand writes about the frail mind propped up by an abused long suffering body. It crosses my mind that were I reading Carver I could be in training for drinking bourbon with a woman who no longer loves me. As I get up at six on a cold London morning the Carver training regime seems more appetising than Murakami.

50 minutes jogging and running (8.5km)

On leaving university, Murakami opened a jazz club and adopted a lifestyle of late nights plus plenty of cigarettes and alcohol. In his early 30s he gave up the Jazz club to start a writing career. Running was a way of giving up smoking (smoking and running being incompatible hobbies) and adapting to the disciplines of penmanship. He ran his first Marathon in 1982, and continued at about one a year ever since, about the same rate as he produced novels such as Norwegian Wood. But in 2007 he wrote a memoir What I Talk About When I Talk ABout Running. Its a play on the words of the title of a famous short story by American writer Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. 

60 minutes jogging (9.75km)

The facts keep getting in the way of my attempts to place mind over matter. Reading Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost his now 72 year old protagonist Nathan Zuckerman is unable to a seduce a 30 year old woman and knows that even if he succeeded he would be incapable of sex. He likens the disappointment to that of having run 10 miles. But in fact the effect of running 10 miles -the elation on having completed the run and the sense of energy that endures for several hours afterwards- is somewhat adjacent to the feeling of having succeeded in the seduction, not failed. Or when my knee complains as loud as a 72 year old knee I reckon that my mind’s ability to convince my body to run 19.5 kilometres might extend to convincing my aching joint to respond to a smelly potion that combines ginger, eucalyptus, clove, lavender and menthol. This witchcraft is called Jointace, a gel sold by one of the many sorcery shops in my home town of Totnes.  But looking on the web I find that its active ingredient is Glucosamine Chondrotin which, according to the esteemed National Institutes of Health in the US, is a proven remedy for osteoarthritis. Now I just need to convince my knee that it is suffering from osteoarthritis, which, by the time I am 72, shouldn’t be a problem.

Time to turn to the master of mind over the running body, Haruki Murakami, Japanese novelist and author of the memoir What I Talk About When I Talk ABout Running, after which this blog is named.

25 minutes jogging (4.26km) plus 5 minute walking.

In The Painter of Signs R.K. Narayan talks about Gandi encouraging his followers to look at their toes, so as to encourage self-reflection in a social country. It seems having come back from social Africa that the English have taken the Mahatma’s advice to heart. Early in the morning the streets are empty where in Ethiopia they are quickly filling. And those few souls around are surveying the ground where in Africa they were giving me, and others, intense inspection. I say good morning to one man but he is deaf and doesn’t hear me; but as I pass he looks up, see’s me and shouts out ‘good morning young man!’ (obviously short of sight as well as deaf) and then when I properly into his focus he adds ‘oh, and wearing shorts too!’. But he is one of the few eschewing the Gandi doctrine. 

The coverage of the Haiti earthquake continues on the televisions in hotels foyers. There is no more to say than there was at the beginning so CNN is reduced to a  story about how long it takes for an aid package from ‘the small English town of Cornwall’ to the disaster zone in Port-au-Prince. 

In a major crisis like the Haiti earthquake government aid and the big charities come into their own. But routine problems like poverty, HIV, child prostitution demand a local response. Tapping into existing local, natural processes is often one of the most effective ways of responding to individual needs. One of Chad-Et’s projects, using US funds (USAID), does just that. 

Respect for the dead is important in Ethiopian society. When people began to migrate to the cities and had fewer social supports on which to draw they established Idirs. Historically the Idirs collected small amounts of money for the purposes of paying for a decent funeral. Nearly everyone contributes. Our colleagues on this trip were paying about five or ten Birr or 25 or 50 pence per month to their local Idir. 

Chad-Et and other organisations began to ask the Idirs ‘why not work to help people before they die, as well as afterwards?’ So Idirs started to collect for carriers of the HIV virus and AIDS orphans and to support other needy children, providing for example school materials. The US donations supplement this capacity which consequently goes much further than had funds been mediated by one of the big international charities or been given directly to one of the thousands of small non-governmental organisations established to meet the myriad of competing challenges to healthy child development in such a poor country.

Back in the back streets of Nazret, early morning, the children are walking to school dressed in uniforms that if new would not disgrace a 1950’s English Boarding school. One small boy, maybe six or seven years of age, runs alongside me, effortlessly. He is quite serious at first but when we exchange smiles he asks me, in English, for my name. I tell him and he repeats it back to me. He knows it because it is shared by one of his saints, and today is St Michael’s day -which coincides with the day Emperor Haile Sellassie returned from exile in 1941. I ask him his name and he tells me clearly but I cannot catch it. I tell him he runs well, like Haile Gebrselassie, and he conjures the possibility. At the end of the road he tells me in clear English ‘you go left here’ and he turns right for school.

70 minutes jogging and running (11.48km) with unscheduled five minute break for a walk in the middle. 

We are surrounded by real poverty discussing how to alleviate terrible abuses of children. But it would be a mistake to see life in Ethiopia only in these terms. There are so many good things. Its a cliche to mention the people -who no doubt are like people the world over- but I am nonetheless stuck by their warmth, generosity and confidence (it is a matter of pride to Ethiopian’s that they were never colonised and twice saw off the hapless Italians). The food is fantastic, although, in a country of hunger, we are fed too much. Crime is apparently non-existent. Over-relaxed, I leave my belongings -passport, money, camera, phone- here and there but they never disappear.

It should be a Mecca for tourists. There are several World Heritage sites including the Simien mountains (think Grand Canyon without Las Vegas), Lalibela (think Jerusalem cut into the ground) and Axum (second home to the Ark of the Covenant) and much more besides.

But a big draw for me is coffee. Ethiopia is one of a small number of countries -UK and US not included- where coffee making skills are embedded into the culture. People expect and know how to judge a good cup of coffee. 

The pinnacle for me is to be found in Cafe Tadelech in Matahara, a small town on the main road from Addis Ababa to Djibouti. We tested several to ensure -to use the technical term- fidelity to the model.

For the first time in the training programme I wake relieved I don’t have to run. I have developed an addiction for jogging but this morning I am temporarily cured.

Providing a way of out of prostitution in Addis Ababa or intercepting children in rural Amhara making their way towards this way of life is an important service. But what about addressing the causes of the problem? My colleague Catherine Kirodotakou from ChildHope likens Chad-Et’s work to dealing with a leaky tap. They do their best to mop up the pool of water that hits the ground. Now they plan to catch and return to source some of the spray before it gets to the bottom. But what about fixing the tap so that no water escapes? What is causing all these children, some as young as 10, 11 and 12 years of age, to leave home and expose themselves to such dreadful risks?

The research undertaken by Dr Gebre Ayere identified several candidates. One was early marriage. It is the custom for many families in Amhara to marry their children at 12 or 13 years of age. Many successful marriages have been been borne of this custom. By chance I am reading R.K. Narayan’s funny and evocative The Painter of Signs which has a chapter on how ordinary such an arrangement was in 1970’s India. So it is today in Amhara region of Ethiopia.

The problem occurs when the child does not accept the arrangement. The only escape is to run away. Once they find employment the child may seek rapprochement by sending money home. If they are in the sex industry the remittances are larger but the family becomes dependent and the child is trapped.

So Chad-Et with ChildHope’s support is beginning to implement a prevention programme that will change attitudes towards early marriage and make people aware of the risks to children migrating unaccompanied by adults to local towns and the capital. They will be using the church and mosques, which hold great sway over public opinion. They are forming girl’s clubs in schools to help educate and inform. They employ a method called ‘community conversations’ that has proved successful in raising awareness about HIV to do the same for child marriage; the method brings together local leaders and gets them to discuss and find new solutions to major social problems (there may be much we can learn from this approach in the prosperous North).

The law in Ethiopia sets the minimum age of matrimony at 18 years. Chad-Et is trying to change public opinion so that the law is obeyed. Rather unusually they are going to rigorously evaluate progress and find out if they succeed. If they get it right thousands upon thousands of children may escape the risks of sexual exploitation.

I run and jog through the backstreets of Nazret (Nazareth). Many young boys wearing UK soccer premiership shirts shout ‘excellent’ as I pass. (Two days later exhausted by late nights celebrating Timkat or Epiphany my efforts beget more calls of ‘good’ with an extended ‘oo’ than ‘excellent’ with extended ‘e’s. The infants, with less reason to be polite, scream with laughter). The City is poor but every now and then I look down a side-street and its like a Robert’s painting of the other Nazareth, the sunrise bringing out the beauty and dampening the misery. I start at six but by seven thirty it is hot and busy and the air is thick with gasoline and for the first time in this training programme my brain fails to resist the impulse that my body is running out of steam and I stop early. I do the last 25 minutes of jogging in the evening, but every metre I am wishing I had got it over and done with in the morning.

100 minutes jogging and running (15.81km) plus 10 minutes walking.

Over the decade of its existence, Chad-Et has helped several hundred children out of prostitution and into schooling or ordinary work. But for each child that they rescue another appeared to take its place. The next challenge for Annania, Alemu and Chad-Et was to stem the flow. 

They knew from talking to the girls that most were coming from the rural areas. They commissioned research from Dr Gebre Ayere who works at Addis Ababa University that gave some clues about the causes of the phenomena.

It appeared that a high proportion of the girls were coming from rural Amhara in the North of the Country. They were leaving home and school and heading for small towns on the way to the capital. They went into domestic service and other low paid employment. Often they were badly treated and they would again run away. Some were abducted but most hopped from badly paid job to badly paid job, and from town to town, until they reached Addis where they were sucked into the sex industry.

These data gave Chad-Et an opportunity to intervene early before the girls reached the capital. With the help of ChildHope and funds from Comic Relief they designed a programme to identify girls in major transit towns in Amhara such as Debra Tabor, Woreta and Addis Zemen. The programme, which we are helping to refine, establishes child protection committees comprising leaders of the local community. Members of these committees with Chad-Et’s guidance train their staff to find migrant children, on the road, at bus stations…

In each of the towns Chad-Et is opening a shelter and drop-in centre. Girls who are brought there will have a place to stay for up to seven days while a counsellor works with them and their family to arrange a reconciliation. If there are economic problems -sometimes girls drop out of school for no other reason than an inability to pay for school books or uniforms- a specialist will teach the family how to generate an income. 

Our work this week has been to tighten up and make this intervention as efficient as possible so as to make the most of Comic Relief funds and make a template that others can copy if the approach proves successful. We estimate that the programme will intercept and bring back home 1,200 girls over the next three years. Chad-Et staff will undertake follow-up interviews to see if they girls stay at home, with their basic needs met and with the risks of sexual exploitation absent.

Our trip here is overshadowed by the earthquake in Haiti. In hotel foyers we see pictures from the BBC and CNN of reporters sticking microphones into the faces of people trying to rescue the trapped. But as much as we need to know if flashed at the bottom of the screen -100,000 dead- or from the aerial images of the devastation.

I jog into the bush with Annania who lets me go after a couple of kilometres. Whilst ‘running’ I begin to catch an Ethiopian ahead of me but when he realises he has dropped his pace to that of a fat old white man he kicks up a gear and I watch him slowly draw away. Later I see a real runner, incredibly elegant, whose speed is effortless. I no more imagine I can follow him than I can one of the occasional trucks negotiating the metalled road. Despite my snail’s pace I get plenty of encouragement from the guards with their guns sitting in front of the factories that are beginning to be built in the hinterland of Nazret and the bush. 

70 minutes of jogging and attempted running (10.78 km)

A decade ago, in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, Annania Admassu and Alemu Hailu began to address the problem of childhood prostitution in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Children as young as 12 years were selling themselves for sex in the central Mercato area of the City.

It is easy to be appalled by this prospect but put yourselves in the position of Annania and Alemu and think about where you would start to right the wrong.

They established a charitable organisation called Children’s Aid Ethiopia, later shortened to Chad-Et. They set up a shelter in Mercato where the girls could come, get showered and clean and, if they wished, to stay for the night. Personal hygiene turned out to be a significant draw for the girls.

Then they put their mind to how to entice the girls away from their way of life. That meant providing basic education, skills and an alternative source of income. The girls were trained to look after each other. They leaned the dances of the regions of Ethiopia (which would allow them to work for dance troupes). Eventually the operation expanded into other income generation activities.

Once there were girls who could sing and dance an opportunity arose to teach local people about the risks to children posed by the sex industry. Annania and Alemu converted a truck into a mobile theatre that toured Mercato and other Addis communities. The girls performed songs and drama that spoke to the misery of child prostitution and for the need for stable child development. The theatre plays to between 500 and 1,000 people three times a week.

Chat-Et is one of ChildHope’s partners. They are proud of the work they have done but they want to know whether they have been effective (hence our visit this week) and whether they could do their work better.

We work long hours so I rise early for my first run at altitude, through a barrio of night clubs that are still going strong at six in the morning. Addis is high and hilly and the air is punctuated by acrid gasoline from cars, buses and trucks. These are all the excuses I can find for such a slow run.

30 minutes jogging (4.86km)

Now for the serious business of trying to raise some money. So far I have one contribution from an eccentric in West London. I am expecting to clock up about 450km in training for the run. What’s a reasonable financial target? At least £2 per kilometre would make it worthwhile; with a bit of luck it will be nearer £4 per kilometre or a couple of thousand in total. So now is the time for other eccentrics to make their contribution; at http://www.justgiving.com/Michael-Little/ or just send in the cash and our special deposit service will take over!

Missed two training sessions due to cancelled BA flight in Seattle -they had my luggage and training shoes but no pilot for the plane- and snow on the ground in Dartington. Worked out that there is less snow and ice near to the sea, so resumed the programme in gloomy, mountainless, Paignton.

40 minutes jogging (6.99km)

Beginning my taxonomy of running styles:

-Rocky I, II etc: lot of sideways movement, slight punching action with arms, favoured by more rotund men.

-Prancing Horse: Exaggerated skips of the legs and pronounced arm movements up and down as well as back and forwards.

-Cartoon character: Forward tilting body, slightly desperate look in the face and rapid legs movement but little forward movement.

-Dog walker:  Body tilted forward and one arm permanently stretched out as if holding on to a dog on a lead chasing a rabbit

I wonder if Paula Radcliffe thinks about these things on her record runs?

85 minutes of jogging and running (14.2km) plus 10 minute walk in middle

First injury. A small sharp pain that started in my upper right foot has transferred to the front of my left knee. Its travelling upwards in a zig-zag. Where will it go next?  I have an additional pain in my neck that comes on when I switch from jogging to running mode. The knee is complaining about the jogging, the neck about the running. They will both have to get over it.

30 minute jog (5.26km)

Excepting the spectacular mountains, a vibrant City, Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks, Seattle is just like the South West of England. The Americans didn’t bring the Mountains but they managed the rest in less than a century. It is part of the cradle of world domination slowly drifting West to Asia. But today the City remains a fully functioning port, with real boats, huge ones, little ones, ferries, coast guards, container vessels, grain transporters and fishing boats. And huge railways to get things to and from the boats that go right downtown. This morning I ran past the fuselage of a partly formed Boeing 737 on a train, presumably bound for the place where the wings and engines will be added. So exciting for a boy! (There are even trolley buses connected to electric lines by a long arm). These days, in similar cities, in my home town for example, the port has been shifted out of town and replaced by museum exhibits to remind us of labour. But in Seattle, its all still functioning in full daily view.

35 minute jog (6.02km)

Still trying to work out the difference between running, jogging and walking as required in the training regime. Today I move slowly up through the gears taking on in my mind the appearance of Haile Gebrselassie as he sprints through the Marathon at a time that I will be lucky to match for the Half Marathon (2 hours and 3 minutes). I even manage to pass someone also apparently running not jogging, which involved me dealing with the risk of him (a) attempting to engage me in conversation or (b) starting a race.

I don’t know if any of this posturing is paying off until the end when my iPod tells me my first run was faster than my first jog but it took its toll to the extent that my last run was slightly slower than my first jog. I cannot imagine Gebreselassie has these problems. Still Lance Armstrong announced via the iPod that this was my longest run yet.

100 minutes of jogging and running (17.06km) plus 15 minutes walking

I went to see my dead friend Dave in Cornwall. He lies in a Humanist plot. It takes wisdom to decide to be buried outside the church so unlike him most of the people in his field are old. But he now has another younger companion, a 44 year old who, his wooden plaque points out, was married and a grandparent. Good going for a short life. Much to Dave’s amusement the humanist plot is next to a pet cemetery with headstones far more ornate than given to their human neighbours. Phoebe, ‘our little ray of sunshine,’ a dog, only lived 20 months but has been rewarded by her picture on a huge stone erected by ‘Mum, Dad and Family’. Good going for a Spaniel. What would Dave have thought of me running a Half-Marathon? ‘Make the most of the moment’ was one of his many wise bits of advice to me. I am finding it resonates better after 10 km than 3km.

70 minute jog (10.78km) plus 10 minutes walking

Amble past many dog owners. One pulls her little terrier out of the way with the words ‘come here you little rat’. If dogs can understand English as in Dr Dolittle on the television yesterday this terrier must be pretty depressed. Another owner holds onto his Alsatian and says to me ‘he doesn’t like anything fluorescent’ (i.e. my hat).

This is hard work. I am used to running three times a week, 20km in total. Four days into the new regime and I have already covered that distance. Beginning to wonder if there is something between a jog and a walk? 

Nice pictures of Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayres in Ali’s blog when I get back plus Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein who is part of the march. At my current pace I could run along the Israeli-Gaza border (51 km) about five hours, and polish off the Israeli-Egypt border (11 km) in an hour. But I cannot. And nor can even the fittest of the one and a half million people locked into these borders.

30 Minute Jog (4.79km)

In my enthusiasm started a day early so allow myself two rest days instead of one. Today the regime demands a mix of jogging, running and walking in 15 and 20 minute blocks that add up to an hour and 40 minutes in total.

I find I have no idea about the difference between a jog and a run so move faster than walking pace for 90 minutes and walk for 10.

Think about Ali Abunimah’s blog covering his work with over 1,300 people from 42 countries attempting to break the siege of Gaza. It is a year since the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that killed 1,400 people including 400 children. The Gaza Freedom March is trying to break the siege that has imprisoned the 1.5 million people who live there, conceived in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and nonviolent resistance to injustice.

http://aliabunimah.posterous.com/

90 Minute Jog (covered 13.85km) plus 10 minute walk

I have to decide between two training regimes offered on the Liverpool Half Marathon website, the beginners and intermediate. I opt for the former and start the eight week course several weeks early.

30 Minute Jog (covered 5.12km)