My first half marathon is coming up at the end of the month! On some days I think I’m ready and on others, woefully unprepared. I think I’ll get around the course, which is the limit of my current expectation.
Last week was supposed to be Extreme Training Week, but I had a bit of a setback due to an especially bad flareup of pain and much subsequent loss of sleep. In the end, I did a little less training than usual. Oops.
So this week is the All-New Even Better Extreme Training Week. I’d better get started.
I’ll be starting a last big push for fundraising, too. The crowdfunder is doing well, but I’m hoping to reach £1000. Please consider donating if you can. Once this round is over, I’ll be looking at ways to raise money for nia and related charities on a more regular basis leading into the various other events I have planned this year (and subsequent years). Any suggestions are welcome!
As always, take a look at my fundraising page. I’m doing wheelchair half marathons (three this year, plus sundry 10k events) to raise money for nia, a women-led, women-only, secular, rights-based registered charity which has been delivering services to women, girls and children who have been subjected to sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, since 1975.
When I got my new chair, I also got me one of these:
Freewheel wheelchair attachment
It’s called a Freewheel, and you can get one at Invictus Active where I got mine. Also see that link for some other, unbearably cool motorised stuff.
The Freewheel attaches to the footrest, as you can see here:
Not me
It lifts your castors off the ground and provides a third front wheel which is more able to deal with rough terrain.
I’ve used it quite a lot, now, and I really like it. I recommend it even for general pavement use, providing you’re not going into any shops or twisty passages, all alike. Manoeuvrability certainly takes a hit, you take up a hell of a lot more space and you can’t stop without putting on the brakes as the front wheel is (deliberately) unstable. But it sails over small kerbs and bumps in pavements and makes it much easier to get up onto larger kerbs. I really wish I’d taken it with me when I went to Glasgow, but it would have been awkward on the train. It does make pushing significantly more difficult when there’s a steep camber, however. Watch out for that.
The Freewheel is meant for offroad use, though, and I generally use it with a set of offroad wheels to get into the nature reserve close to my house. Unlike the guy in the picture, I haven’t done any wheelies at the top of mountains, but I’ve travelled along some dirt tracks and gone up and down some pretty steep and uneven paths.
And it’s a lot easier. The problem of rear wheel traction doesn’t go away, of course, so you need to be realistic in your expectations, but overall, and if you have the upper body strength, I recommend getting one. If there’s ever another sunny day around here, I’ll try to remember to take my camera with me and post pictures of the sorts of terrain I’m talking about. You won’t be terribly impressed, but it will give you an idea of what sort of surfaces the Freewheel can and can’t cope with.
Attaching and removing the Freewheel is very easy from inside the chair. It just clips on with a lever and when you move forward the front wheel swings into position, lifting your casters off the ground. Do the same in reverse to remove it… but then you’re left with a bloody great wheel and chunk of aluminium to cart around. I understand there’s an attachment you can buy for your pushbar to hang it from, but I haven’t seen one actually for sale and I imagine it would play havoc with any bag you have attached to the back of the chair.
The engineering on the Freewheel is very nice, from conception to build, but you can tell it’s built and sold by engineers. Adjustment is a little fiddly and seems over-complicated until you understand it. The instructions are awful. Don’t even look at those, find a YouTube video instead, there are plenty out there.
Like everything wheelchair-related, of course, the Freewheel isn’t cheap. At time of writing, Invictus Active is selling them for £375 (in a variety of colours, should you be inclined). I paid a little less. Before you buy, make sure you have the right sort of footrest. There are adaptors for the various different kinds, but they cost extra.
You might be able to get a free trial of the Freewheel, if you shop around. I’d recommend that.
The issue is one of a proposed self-ID law in Scotland allowing men to enter women’s spaces such as changing rooms, toilets, hospital wards and prisons on the basis of self-identification, that is: nothing more than saying they’re women. Under self-ID, men won’t need to have ‘sex reassignment surgery’, be in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate, be taking cross-sex hormones or even to dress in traditionally female clothes to freely enter spaces where women and girls are undressing or are otherwise vulnerable.
This is a matter of women’s safety and dignity; the vastly, overwhelming majority of violent and sexual assaults against women and girls are committed by men and female-only spaces should be a refuge rather than an additional danger.
It’s also a matter of political necessity; if women cannot be recognised as a distinct class, how can policies affecting women be properly formulated? How can they be implemented if nobody knows where funding is most needed or best applied?
#WomenWontWheesht is a call for women’s voices to be heard in political decision-making and policy creation/enactment. It’s a call for their spaces, safety, dignity and political identity to be preserved in the face of a now relentless assault.
I haven’t written much about this issue here because this is supposed to be a blog about wheelchairs and training for half marathons in them. But it’s too important an issue not to write about it more. Besides, the issues have coincided twice now because I’ve had wheelchair news relating to two #WomenWontWheesht events: the first in Glasgow in July, which was simultaneously my first wheelchair-bound train journey and a protest in support of Marion Millar. The second was my first train and urban journey in my new wheelchair coinciding with attendance at this event.
The protest went really well. I’ll write more about it in another post and link to pictures and videos, when I’ve collected them.
The wheelchair news is also good and I’ll write about that in another post, too, because this one is already too long. Short version: almost all good news, but I really need to get a better bag.
I got my new chair a few days earlier than expected and spent the weekend playing with it. This is more or less the model I have…
,,,with a few minor differences. The backrest and footrest are a bit different on mine and it has (folding) push handles. Oh, and the castors on mine are black, not silver. But you get the idea. I also got a set of offroad tyres and a Feeewheel attachment, which looks like this:
…and attaches to the footrest, so that I will look like this when marauding around:
I don’t know why I’ll be trying to climb a small rock, but here we apparently are.
Anyway, I haven’t been able to test the Freewheel and offroad tyres outside because it’s been raining all day, but I took a trip around the village and then a decent run of ~5 miles. It’s a huge improvement in almost every way, since my old chair is an off-the-shelf one. The new one being made to measure makes all the difference, but I think I want to drop the centre of gravity a little bit and see if that generates a little more torque.
But definitely a massive improvement in covering distance. Inside, it’s a lot more manoeuvrable. I can get into the kitchen, now, without a lot of faffing around. Of course, I can’t actually reach the hob or anything from the cupboards while I’m in there, but first things first. It’s also a lot easier to get into the car: wheels off and straight into the boot. If I ever get a car with hand controls, I reckon I’ll be able to lift it into the passenger seat over my body without much difficulty.
All positive so far, no doubt I’ll find something to annoy me over time. I’m going to Edinburgh in it tomorrow, to this:
Edinburgh is hilly, but I shouldn’t have to go up too many of them.
I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been busy and distracted by builders (not in a good way). I’ve been keeping up with my training, though (two hours a day full tilt on the rolling road in blocks of half an hour or an hour, plus (usually) half an hour practising acceleration timing). I’ve been meaning to post some stats to prove to the easily-led that my speed and fitness are improving, but they’re fairly uninteresting, even to me. If anyone asks, I’ll get around to posting them.
But the good – the great – news is that my new wheelchair has been built and will be delivered – all things going well – in the next few days.
My new wheelchair will look almost but not entirely unlike this
I have to admit that even I, a repressed northerner of the old school, am quite excited. Several people have recently tortured me with tales of a new lease of life with a made to measure chair and I’ve made the mistake of half believing them.
So expect in the next few days either gushing accounts of exorbitant freedom or waves of crushing disappointment. But don’t worry if you’re a fan of both. It might be both.
Well, not quite, and apologies for the computer science pun. Now I’ve written it down I can’t bring myself to delete it even though it’s not funny and nobody will understand it anyway.
What I’m talking about is my getting away from the rolling road for a while into the real world on a nice, flattish road in calm weather conditions without a yawning chasm for a camber. Conditions almost as one might have in a race.
A race condition. Sorry.
But more importantly, I got to chase some people! It wasn’t a race…. and the people I was chasing were on foot…. and we were going to the pub… but bear with me.
It was the first time I’ve tried to catch anyone up over a relatively long distance. The people I was chasing were about 500m away and moving at going-to-the-pub speed (that’s fast, this was Glasgow.) Previously, I’ve just tried to go as fast as I can for as long as I can. On Tuesday, I learned something about catching people up – about pacing – that should have been obvious from the start. I learned about how much effort to put into acceleration vs maintaining momentum. I learned why people who do distance races seriously have pacemakers. It’s not just about maintaining a constant speed, it’s also about pacing acceleration. Real roads are different from the rolling one for several reasons, but one is related to the amount of torque the wheels can generate and the diminishing returns from the effort put in. It helped me understand more about how to use different pushing techniques.
I’m not sure that makes sense, but it has certainly inspired me to make some changes to my training regime. I’ll explain the changes later.
In case you’re worried, I did eventually catch the people up. But it turned out that the pub wasn’t wheelchair accessible, so it was all a bit of a waste of time. Other than the valuable lesson learned, of course.
First, I have news, which I’ll tease now and then cover in full in a few days: my new chair is finally on the verge of being ordered! The retailer is slow but, I have to say, thorough, and we’ve made sure all the measurements and accessories and attachments are right and the from just needs to be sent to the manufacturer. Delivery is expected round about the end of August, but I’m pessimistically going to add a couple of weeks onto that. Various people have proposed it, but I know it as Hofstadter’s Law, after Doug Hofstadter:
Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Hofstadter’s law
So I’ll get it when I get it, August or September, but at least the details are finalised and the damn thing is on it’s way. Possibly.
Those details are the things I want to talk about, because they’re all important parts of buying a wheelchair and ones which nobody told me about. I didn’t even know that some of the things were things I needed to know. But I don’t have time for that because I’m up early in the morning to go on an outing!!! So more on the measurements/attachments/accessories in a day or so.
The outing is to Glasgow, where I’m meeting a bunch of nice people brought together by the case of one Marion Millar. Again, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to cut my description short until I get back. This is because there’s a great deal to write about and some of it is central to the reason I’m writing this blog. The reason I’m training for half marathons in the first place. The reason I’m going through the mystical complications of buying a new wheelchair. So I want to spend some time on getting it right. It’s a free speech issue and in particular an issue about women being silenced because of their views. I happen to agree with Marion’s views (her actual views rather than some of the false, hyperbolic versions you might come across) but if I didn’t, I’d still be supporting her right to hold them. Police Scotland disagree, as does a contingent of social media and a cavalcade of cowardly politicians and celebrities, who should be ashamed of themselves. Because of it, a woman and her family are living under the endlessly-drawn-out threat of her prosecution and possible jail sentence for the ‘crime’ of Tweeting.
But no time for that now! This will be my first longish journey by myself since I’ve been in the chair and I’m a little anxious about whether I’ve packed the right things and whether the things I’ve chosen are charged. So I’m going to go and completely change my mind about that several times for the next hour and I’ll write more on the train, tomorrow.
Buying a wheelchair is more complicated than you might think. There are dozens of options, which I expected, but little in the way of advice about which options are the right ones. For example, do I want hard or soft castors? Why the hell would they be soft? What size should the castors be?
Wheelchair options
More importantly, what camber (tilt angle) do I want the wheels set to and how should the centre of gravity be configured? I want the chair to be comfortable and manoeuvrable for everyday use, but I also want to minimise the energy I need to push it over long distances. It seems as though these things ought to be trade-offs, but I’ve no idea how to work out what’s best for me.
Fortunately, finding stuff like this out is what this blog is about, so sooner or later, there will be answers!
Sooner, hopefully. When I ordered the chair, the company sent me a ridiculously confusing order form with tick and/or number boxes for each option. I worked through it as well as I could and asked for advice with the rest. When I have it, I’ll spill it and the chair will be ordered.
I’ve no idea how long after that it will be until I get my fetid claw on the chair itself. I’m guessing at least a month.
I chose the colour, though, which is the main thing.
I should start by saying that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. In my youth, back before the old king died, I was very fit. I did a lot of martial arts training, played badminton every day for years, ran about five miles almost every day and walked everywhere else. Injury and life rather got in the way of this and it was really only last year, at age 48, that I decided to start exercising regularly again. It was only this year, approaching 49, that I decided to train seriously.
Between those two dates, I lost around 7 stones in weight, but I also lost the use of my legs, so you will understand that my exercise regime has changed greatly. Even back in my youth, I had no formal training in fitness, no training in losing weight or graining stamina. I relied on my whippersnapperhood and on gradually pushing myself harder when whatever I was doing began to feel easy.
With age and infirmity, I feel I have to be a little more precise in my measurements. I’ll explain my thinking more fully as it develops, but for now, here’s the routine I’ve settled into for the time being.
Rolling road
Rollo is the key here. The rolling road means that I can train consistently and in all weathers. Of course, rolling on Rollo is different to rolling on real terrain. There’s no camber, for one thing. No potholes or broken glass to avoid (I feel like I might be painting an inaccurate picture of where I live, but it’s lovely here, honest.) There’s no wind resistance or hills. But the idea of Rollo is like that of a treadmill: to perfect technique and build stamina. I also train in the outdoors, but less consistently than I should. More on this in a later post.
Every day I do four runs of 35 minutes each consisting of repeated sets of:
400 normal strokes
400 strokes of alternate wheels, one at a time, at a faster rate than the above
Finished with five minutes of backward strokes. I’m told this is important because shoulder injuries can occur if you don’t develop those muscles too. Wheeling a chair is not really a very natural action for a human so it’s important to avoid causing undue stress on muscles and bones.
At the moment I’m not accurately measuring the frequency of the strokes; I’m just pushing as hard and fast as I can manage and counting to maintain a rough sort of frequency. I’m measuring (using my watch) the overall number of strokes per session, aiming to keep them roughly consistent. I’m also monitoring my heart rate, which I’m trying to keep in the stamina-building zone. None of this is very scientific and I’m working on ways to improve that. I need better ways to tell whether I’m improving. One improvement I’m thinking about is a metronome app for my watch to keep my strokes consistent. If there isn’t one, I’ll probably write one. In my imagination, this would make the watch pulse once per stroke for a set number of strokes until I’ve got the rhythm, then pulse once per, say, ten strokes so I can learn to keep the rhythm without constant reenforcement. And without killing my watch battery when I’m barely out of the starting blocks.
I’m also trying to keep an eye on technique. Correct technique requires sitting fully upright (or backward) in the chair and using long strokes from as far back on the wheel as possible. When I do this, I can feel it in my chest as well as my arms and that’s how I know (as far as I know) that I’m doing it right. I have a tendency to lean forward, especially when I’m getting tired, and I need to kill that habit.
There’s lots more to say about training, especially in the outdoors and with weights. I’ll say those things in future posts.
Predictably enough, the chair I chose was not available and I had to choose another. To be clear, I knew that the original Kuschall K-Series had been discontinued by the manufacturer, but that there were still some examples available to buy. However, the retailer I chose, Invictus Active, doesn’t have any in stock. I’m sure I could have found one elsewhere, but it turns out that:
Invictus are a little cheaper than most of the retailers I’ve found
They are currently offering a set of free offroad wheels with some new chairs, and
I’m lazy
So I chose another chair instead. As I said in the previous post, there isn’t a great deal to choose from between chairs at this price range (as far as I can tell) and I applied the same criteria. This is what I’ve ordered:
Quickie Helium
It’s the Quickie Helium, and while the brand name is as lame as I am (Quickie? Really?) I am assured that the chair is not. It’s a little lighter than the Kushall at 6.8KG (without wheels), which is about the same weight as my (admittedly monstrous) cat. Let’s hope it’s a good choice. It was a little more expensive than the Kushall, costing just a little over £2000.
Monstrous cat
The next step is to customise the chair (colours, options, accessories) and to have it built to my measurements and specifications. Much and great importance is placed on measurements when buying a wheelchair of this sort. I’m not sure quite how important that really is, though, since the instructions for measurement are fairly fag-packet, blind-man-on-a-galloping-horse in nature. We’ll see, I might get told off for saying that. Here’s Invictus’ instructions, which are much the same as others I’ve seen.
Invictus will be in contact in the next day or so to take those measurements and it might turn out that they’re really, really important after all, so be prepared for a grovelling update. As for other specifications, other than colour (of which there seems to be a bewildering array) the most interesting to me is the seat angle, which determines the centre of gravity. This seems to be the main factor in choosing between stability and manoeuvrability. On the face of it, this seems like a no-brainer; I’m always going to choose manoeuvrability over stability. But I suspect that it some configurations might be better than others for the kinds of moderate distance (half marathons, to begin with) I have in mind, so I’ll be taking advice on that. I’ll report back if and when I learn anything about that.
I still have a lot to write about wheelchair accessories. It’s a singularly frustrating topic and there’s very little advice to be had (hence this blog). But before I post at length on that subject, I should mention that I also ordered this thing:
FreeWheel attachment
It’s an attachment rather than an accessory, I suppose; It fixes onto the front of the chair, where the footrest usually attaches. It’s for offroad and uneven conditions. Given the state of the pavements around here, I suspect it will get a lot of use.
