Runner Profile: Neil Winton
Sorry, did I hear that right? You want me to write a runner profile? Thanks, Tom Stephens, for the nomination, but are you sure you’ve got the right person?
When I read through the profiles of so many of the illustrious members of the club who have gone before, I found myself with a severe case of “imposter syndrome”. But on the basis that maybe I can reinforce the message that Felixstowe Road Runners really will welcome anybody, here goes …
Off to a promising start
One of my earliest childhood memories, of any kind, comes from my very first year at primary school. It must have been some kind of sports day. Those were the days before every moment of your life being documented and shared in full HD video, so there’s no record of it. Anyway, there was a race. It wasn’t a long one, probably a 20 yard dash … and I came third! I know that because I distinctly remember receiving a small, pale green square of card with a red star and “3rd” written on it. And I also remember being slightly envious of the beautiful red piece of card with a shiny gold star that the winner got!
So, that was my first running medal. And it was also my last running medal for more than 50 years. So what happened?
But then fading badly
That first podium position was at a school in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. But shortly after that, aged six, I moved to Jersey where my father had just started a new job.
Jersey is a wonderful place to grow up and, as it happens, I’m writing this from there now while visiting my family. There are beautiful beaches, many opportunities to be outside in the fresh air, and a thriving local sporting community. But, I have to confess, I didn’t make the most of that. So let me explain why.
As far as I can remember, primary school had the usual mix of impromptu games of “British Bulldog” (if you don’t know what that is, find someone over 50 to explain it), football kickabouts, and so on. I think I was probably a mostly willing participant, although I’ve never been built for the most physical of games. But then, in the last year of primary school, something happened that changed my (sporting) life. I had to start wearing glasses.
Being able to see what was being written on the blackboard certainly improved my academic chances, but it did nothing for my athletic ones. And that really became obvious when I went to senior school.
I was fortunate enough to get a place at one of the best schools on the island. It is an all boys school and had a good academic reputation, but it also had a very strong sporting ethos too. As someone who, without glasses on, was something of a liability when faced with rapidly moving cricket balls, hockey balls or even footballs, I was definitely one of the last people picked for any team. It became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that “I’m not very good at this” turned rapidly into “I really don’t like this”, which turned into “sports just aren’t my thing”.
Etched on the memory
The “peak-end rule” is the name for the effect where you tend to judge an experience based on how you felt at its most intense points (peaks or troughs) and at its end, rather than on the sum total of every moment. On that basis, the hours of loitering on the fringes of the action in freezing cold football matches, or being sent to the deep outfield in cricket have left less impression than a couple of school athletic moments.
The first “peak” was a cross country run. I can only ever remember doing one cross country in my time at school. We were bussed out to the other side of the island (all of about five miles away) to St Ouen’s bay, on the west coast. There is a long, flat, straight road there – of which more later – but there are also several miles of sand dunes. And, yes, the course was over the dunes.
I have a vivid memory of trudging up the side of a huge dune we dubbed “Cone Crater” with a similarly unsporty friend. We watched the keen athletes in the group disappear into the distance, somehow skimming across the sand. I also have a vague recollection of being glared at by the sports master for keeping the return coach waiting after being the last ones back. But maybe that’s just my guilty conscience for not having tried harder.
The other memory, which at least is a little more positive, was a team competition. We could pick people from our team to do individual events (no surprise, that wasn’t me) but everyone had to do a 1500m to finish. Points were awarded based on the finishing time slot. The last slot that scored any points ended at 7 minutes 30 seconds (that’s 25 minute 5k pace if you’re trying to translate that into a distance you might run regularly). I do remember struggling my way round and being cheered on to – just – make the 7:30 mark and claim my one point for the team. I suspect that I didn’t quite make the deadline, but they gave me the point anyway.
That’s enough of that then
Fortunately for my school career I was (and still am) a bit of a geek. Physics and software held greater attraction than physical education and sportswear. So I dropped the core sports as soon as I could. I did, very briefly, get the chance to try fencing (the sword, not the garden kind) for a term. I seemed to do reasonably well at that, but that might be because all of the really good sports people were doing more “mainstream” things so I was just relatively less bad.
As an aside, I think my dad was rather disappointed that neither I, nor my sister, were interested in sport. He was a bit of a sprinter in his youth. In fact, I have his medals from when he turned up at the Staffordshire county championships and, without any proper training, won bronze in the 100 yards and silver in the 200. Unfortunately he was never able to join a running club because most sessions and competitions were on a Sunday. He was, as am I, a member of the Salvation Army and – in those days – that kind of thing was frowned upon.
In due course I headed to university where, again, I completely failed to avail myself of all of the sporting opportunities. In my defence, an environment where some people are doing degrees primarily so they can be given places in elite teams is rather intimidating for the less sport minded. That, and the fact that activities like rowing seemed to involve getting up at 5:00am and scraping ice off boats, just didn’t incentivise me. Having said all that, I wasn’t desperately unfit. The mad rush of cycling between lectures or the hike of several miles out to the physics labs tended to keep the pounds at bay.
Settled in Suffolk
So eventually I had to work for a living. A software engineering job at BT brought me to the delights of Suffolk and, after a brief period living in Bury St Edmunds I settled in Trimley. Initially I never intended to stay with BT for more than a few years, but I met a local girl from Stowmarket and, 33 years ago, Libby and I were married. Libby isn’t a great sporting fan either (although she’s a decent swimmer). In fact, we have only ever played one competitive sporting match against each other. That was a game of squash which was most memorable because my lack of hand-eye coordination was so bad that she dissolved in a heap of laughter before we even finished the game.
In time our family grew. Our daughter, Becca, showed all the athletic prowess of her father, but fortunately was as good at swimming as her mother. Our son Ben, however, got the football bug at an early age and is a long-standing (and long-suffering) ITFC supporter. But apart from a kickabout in the garden it didn’t really entice me anywhere closer to sport.
After 12 years, I left BT and commuted to London for a while and, although the four or five hours each day did leave me pretty weary by the end of the week, surprisingly, it also left me fitter. I very rarely took the tube or bus from Liverpool Street to the office and the 20 minute brisk walk each way really made a difference. When I finally tired of the delights of spending so much time with Anglia Railways I tried to keep up the activity by going out for an early morning bike ride every day. But as winter drew in that just didn’t last.
So, I was back to a pretty sedentary lifestyle in front of a screen at Martlesham Heath.
A call to action
In May 2016 I was at the end of a two-week business trip – as it happens, with a certain Kerry Buckley – that had taken me to Bangalore in India and then on to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. On the last morning I went into the bathroom in my hotel room to have a shave. I looked at myself in the mirror, and suddenly realised that I couldn’t see my nose properly. It was as if there was a whole area in front of my face that was a blind spot. As I moved my finger through the space, it partially disappeared too.
You can, I’m sure, imagine that this is a pretty weird and unsettling feeling. I didn’t know what was happening, but I had suffered from “ocular migraines” in the past, which also distort your vision temporarily, so my first assumption was that this was a version of that. I was due to fly home that day, and really didn’t want to end up trying to negotiate the Malaysian healthcare system, so I duly went to the office, and later got on the plane home that night.
When I got back to the UK things didn’t improve, and other symptoms also appeared. So, to cut a long story short, I ended up at the Stroke Clinic at Ipswich Hospital. After a round of tests that showed nothing unusual, I finally had a CT scan. “Ah, right, it looks like you’ve had a stroke after all,” said the doctor. “Your blood pressure is fine, heart seems OK, you don’t drink or smoke, don’t have a family history, and you’re not massively overweight. So we really don’t know why it’s happened, but there’s definitely stroke damage.”
I was off work for about 12 weeks, but consider myself blessed to have made an almost total recovery, with no serious after effects. So, was this a wake up call that caused me to make dramatic changes in my lifestyle? Well, it certainly made me value more highly many things that I’d taken for granted, including my health. But it didn’t suddenly spur me into being a sports fanatic, signing up for a gym membership, or even remotely consider running.
I did try to become more active, for example, making sure I took a break away from my desk at lunchtime to go for a walk. Although the doctor had said that I wasn’t massively overweight when I had the stroke, when I look back now at some records I find that I was around 83kg (13st) at the end of 2017. That was heading in the wrong direction, and I needed to do something about it.
Doing that “Couch to 5k” thing
2018 was a year of dramatic change. BT made me an offer that I decided I couldn’t refuse to part company for the second and final time. That was shortly before my daughter’s wedding at which a considerably slimmer father of the bride walked her down the aisle. So I hit September with two less responsibilities and only sketchy plans to work as some kind of consultant. I had more time on my hands so, for reasons I can’t now clearly recall, I decided to give the Couch to 5k programme a go.
I think I had probably been subtly influenced by a number of former colleagues who were runners. On that trip to India and Malaysia with Kerry, I had seen just how much he’d got the running bug by the fact that he braved the heat of Bangalore and the heat and humidity of Kuala Lumpur to get out for runs. Frankly, I thought he was just a bit crazy.
Anyway, I fired up the C25k app on my phone and started the programme. To my surprise, I found it somewhat easier than I’d expected – at least to begin with! Maybe I wasn’t too unfit after all. I even joined the “HealthUnlocked” online forum and was encouraged by what I found there. I completed the third and final “graduation” 5k run in a little over 30 minutes in the first week of November 2018. Now, I don’t think I’ve yet managed to achieve that endorphin rush of the “runners’ high” but I certainly did get a real kick out of completing the Couch to 5k programme, and even being able to encourage other people on their way.
Errr … so now what?
A couple of weeks into C25k I’d bought my first pair of running shoes. I think I approached an assistant and said something like “I’m just looking for a basic pair of running shoes, nothing too serious, I’m not really a runner.” My intention was just to go for the “30 minutes, 3 times a week” to keep fit. But as many of you know, it doesn’t stop there, does it?
On New Year’s Day 2019 I was just one of the 671 people who congregated on Felixstowe seafront. It was my first Parkrun and I came in at 430th in 31:36. Frankly, I was disappointed and felt I could have done much better. But there’s always next week … oh … so, that’s how it starts …
There was a “Couch to 5k plus” podcast that I followed for a while, which gave some drills to help to improve speed and endurance, but it didn’t go that far. Still, I managed to improve a bit. And I’d started a new job that involved quite a bit of travel. Of course, that meant that I was now having to find room in my case for running gear. More interestingly, I was looking for routes around unfamiliar places: downtown Louisville, central Toronto, the Eilenriede city forest in Hanover. It was opening a whole new (early morning) world!
I’d also been starting to run for longer. I’d joined the “Bridge to 10k” forum on HealthUnlocked, and with a bit of encouragement from the folks there I hit that milestone in February 2020.
And then something unexpected happened.
Lockdown limits
I have been known to remark that I was working from home before it became fashionable. I had been home based for more than a year before the pandemic forced everyone to become intimately acquainted with Zoom. I already appreciated the flexibility that gave me in scheduling runs that broke up my day and dragged me away from a screen. That became even more important in the early days of the pandemic lockdown. I was privileged to be involved in the development of the first version of the NHS contact tracing app. It was a very intense process and the “one hour per day for exercise” certainly helped keep me sane.
Sometime during those months I also decided that 10k wasn’t enough of a challenge and maybe I should set my sights a little higher. I entered the Great East Run scheduled for 20th September 2020, and searched around for a beginner’s half marathon training plan.
My training was all going to plan when the inevitable happened, and the race was cancelled. Knowing what I now know about Freston hill, maybe I shouldn’t be too upset about that, but in any case I decided to run a half on the day anyway. So, in due course, Libby dropped me off in the car park at “The Unruly Pig” outside Woodbridge and this little piggy ran all the way home!
It was definitely a strange, but very rewarding, feeling to run past BT at Adastral Park knowing that I would be running a route I’d driven so many times over the years. I remember once, many years ago, deciding to cycle to work, feeling exhausted when I arrived, and resolving not to do it again. If only I’d known what was to come.
Finally going Red
In preparing for the half marathon I’d once again joined a forum on HealthUnlocked. There was a group of people planning to run half marathons (albeit mostly virtual) in September.That also introduced me to the joys of Strava as we formed a group there to share progress. I still interact with this very random group of people from all round the world, none of whom I’ve ever met (yet). I’m not a great user of social media, but I do find enjoyment and encouragement from seeing how other people are getting on – and that applies to those of you from FRR who’ve accepted my random “follow” request too.
One of the lessons from the pandemic, for me, was noting that many people’s worlds have become smaller. Particularly as a home worker, I felt that I did need to take steps to build some new connections with a wider group of people. I also realised that I wasn’t going to become any better at running if I just kept doing the same old things. So the natural thing was to find a running group to join.
I’d already heard of FRR from Kerry, so I thought I’d give it a go. I planned to do that in the spring of 2021, but picked up a bit of an injury which, along with other things, meant that it was June before I finally managed to get along. Those were the days when we still had to give our names at each session and (theoretically) apply some level of social distancing. But I was still made very welcome and somehow managed to survive my first session of circuits at Eastward Ho!
For a while, I tried to learn a new name every week. But that skill has always been one of my weaknesses, so if I’ve forgotten yours, please accept my sincere apologies, it’s nothing personal. Regardless of that, I can say that I’ve never yet gone home from a session without feeling that it has been good to be with a friendly bunch of runners – some of whom I can even make a passable attempt at keeping up with.
Races? You mean we do races?
It took me a long time to finally get round to donning that famous red vest in a race.
As I mentioned, I’m a member of the Salvation Army in Felixstowe. Most Sundays you’ll find me there and, yes, I play the tuba (one of those big ones, so my lung capacity measurements have always been pretty good, in fact, I suspect my Garmin VO2Max calculation is rather flattered by that …). Anyway, you’ll understand that Sunday morning races are not always an easy option. However, I signed up for my first “real” half marathon, the Stowmarket Robert Tomlinson half, in March this year. I’ll confess that I didn’t really know what to expect but, after finally conquering the art of safety-pinning my race number into some almost-level position, I was glad to join the pre-race team photo. That was, of course, pretty much the last time that I saw most people again until the end of the race – but it was great to be cheered home by a group of reds who’d stayed around long enough to see me make it back.
I felt much more comfortable at the first Friday 5, on home turf at Kirton. Like Tom Stephens, it’s very local to me so I’d run the different parts of the course beforehand, but with nowhere near the same dedication that he put in. I even roped a couple of friends and neighbours into the race. But I haven’t managed to convert them to the club. Yet.
It has also been great to be part of the action at the Twilight 10k and, with certainly the best medal, the Coastal 10.
Laying a ghost to rest
There is one race that I’ve done as a Red outside Suffolk, and that’s the Jersey half marathon, which I completed in June this year. There are some great views as you come down to the Five Mile Road at St Ouen’s bay which, if you’re still with me, you may remember as the scene of my one and only cross country race at school. While the half marathon course didn’t (thankfully!) take us through the sand dunes, I took a great deal of satisfaction from running past them knowing that 40+ years later I was probably in much better shape now than I was then.
Oh, and I can recommend the Jersey half, although there’s a small bit of a slightly tricky off-road cliff path and a rather nasty hill about 3 miles from the end. Just so you know.
What’s next?
I’ve started being able to travel with my job again. That has meant more chances to run in interesting places. Pretty much the first thing that goes in my case is my running kit, and my FRR vest has now clocked up a good few thousand air miles. Maybe Mr Buckley wasn’t so crazy after all.
I’ve signed up for the Great Bentley half in February 2023 and will probably go for Stowmarket once more too. I really, really ought to do at least one of the Winter Series cross country races this year. I suppose I might find that I even enjoy it.
I’m getting perilously close to breaking the 25 minute barrier at Felixstowe parkrun. Just another 15 seconds to find. Sometime soon, I hope.
Next year I might, just might, even pluck up the courage to actually put my name in for the London Marathon ballot. What’s the worst that could happen?
And finally …
Somehow, to my own amazement, I seem to have turned into a runner. I am unlikely ever to be one of the greatest runners or to manage a podium finish. The only way I might top my age group is if by some miracle I’m still running at 100 and there’s no-one left in my category. But I’ve learned that that really isn’t the point.
I will confess that I don’t always enjoy running – there, I’ve said it – but I love having the ability to run, and the feeling that comes from finishing a bit faster, or running a bit further than last time, or even just the satisfaction of having completed a run when it would have been so much easier to have stayed in. And I really enjoy the slight craziness of a group of people meeting together on a Tuesday night, come hailstorm or heatwave, running in circles or up and down hills and coming away feeling just that bit better for having done so … most of the time!
My nominee for next month comes from one of the small group of people whose names I can actually remember. So, it’s over to someone who seems to be going from strength to strength at the moment: Andy Metcalfe.
