Disclaimer: This is not a blog post inspired by Arthur Lydiard- LS does not stand for long and slow, nor does 6 mean 6 miles, 6 kilometres or 6 lots of anything. This is a blog post in tribute to and inspired by a humble postcode.
There are not many postcodes in this world whose simple combination of letters and numbers have an air of excitement, mystery and maybe even infamy. I can think of a few off the top of my head, SW19 is famous for the hallowed turf of Wimbledon, Stockton 209 for the hallowed toughness of the Diaz brothers.....then I'm left scratching my head. Perhaps it is the case that postcodes are secondary to place names, street names or even names of individual buildings. In this age of false news, divided communities and general disillusionment are there any new postal giants waiting to put themselves on the cultural map, not just on some now disgruntled privately-employed postman's delivery list?
For a group of runners living, training and making ends meet in the shady backwaters of the student wastelands of Leeds one such postcode is firmly placing itself as the scene of an athletic counter-culture. Away from the great fabled training locations such as Boulder, Bloemfontein and Chamonix this post code, composed out of parts of Beckett Park, Burley, Headingley, Hyde Park, Meanwood and Woodhouse, is taking it's place as an icon of modern running; a mecca in a place fit for a Mecca Bingo. Looking past the fears of a 'Broken Britain' and overcoming the shadow of 'Trump's America', we have a place where dreams become reality, where every terraced row is a Strava segment waiting to be conquered and every lamppost has claimed a victim on a pack tempo run. It's easy to think of a postcode as just being comprised of cold, hard geographical facts but as great jazz maverick Howard Moon once so memorably replied when asked the question "What is LS6", the only true analysis of this peculiar location is to say "LS6 is a place, LS6 is state of mind."
It is easy to see how the locations named previously have installed themselves as the monumental locations for running. Boulder is simply stunning, a community built upon the principles of living high in the mountains, a place where every lunch time runners head out to put in serious mileage. Running isn't just part of the culture there - in many ways it is the culture. Chamonix has altitude, views and some of the best mountain running in the world. My all time favourite place - The Chew has some of the finest trails in the UK and views to match. It is a little harder to capture the spirit and clamour of LS6 in such simple terms; the place is for the most part a slightly gritty, run-down student area with more of a reputation for being a drug runners hotspot rather than one for serious runners - on the face of it it's very much like a bespoke area designed to be the locale for a Shane Meadows film.
Perhaps it is the characters of LS6 who are emblematic of the spirit of the postcode. I don't generally mean the zombified students, snope sharers and the bedraggled figures who congregate outside the Brudenell but they in some part do encapsulate the spirit- a stoic attitude in the face of new interest charges on student loans, an attack on liberal values and the on going relentlessness of Brexit attitudes. LS6 endures. These are the stories and fables of LS6. It is a place looking inward but projecting outward, it's a hive of activity - gigs and social justice on every street corner, loud house parties and yet for a few it's about unlocking their running potential. The stoic attitude is the same, a grim reality - dodging dangerous drivers, clueless stragglers and pot holed pavements in search of self-improvement. Being waylaid by the pesky traffic lights at the bottom of Cardigan Road, the abuse of the local drunks outside Sainsburys - 'pick those knees up' or the catcalls of the drunken girls misspending their youth in an Uber.
Since moving to back to Leeds in August, I have been blessed with the good fortune of meeting some absolutely fantastic people through my running. My new club Hyde Park Harriers is made up of a couple of hundred members who are all amazing and made me feel very welcome from the start. I've found a great training group of runners who are all committed to self-improvement and also to the improvement of the runners around them. I think this is one of the things which has instilled a new found love for the area. I love the fact that in a relatively small area there are so many highly performing runners with as much of a passion for running and training hard as myself. I've come on leaps and bounds in the past 8 months and that is in no part down to the fantastic people who I've met through running in Leeds and I'm now extremely lucky to say I've got some really good friends at the club.
I've had my fair share of running clubs over the years. I started out training at East Cheshire Harriers but they weren't really for me. Then I tried Sale Harriers - same thing there. Saddleworth came next and they were the perfect fit for me at the time. I feel like they did a great job of reigning in my over-zealousness for long distances at young age whilst also giving me the push and support I needed growing up. Other clubs included Calder Valley (for a couple of years) and a short spell at Bingley Harriers. After a few years injured, I made a Wilfred Zaha-esque return to Saddleworth Runners and ticked over. Until I joined Hyde Park, I hadn't really felt that the clubs I'd joined, other than Saddleworth, had really fit with my aims and ambitions. First and foremost, I'm a running enthusiast, I love running and everything about it from race stats, training hard, going to new locations and reading anything about running I can get my hands on. Over the past few years, I think Saddleworth has kind of changed its focus and increasingly has become less top-end performance-centric and more about being social and running as a part of that, so maybe I was coming to the point where I had to find faster people to train with.I love the club and the people but admittedly I'm hungry for improvement and competition. Certainly, I found joining Hyde Park to be very refreshing and to be able to consistently train with a decent number of runners who are all around or above my pace has really brought me on leaps and bounds. I'm even managing to be very sociable by my standards. I'm currently helping to organise the Calderdale Way Relay teams for the club so I've been doing lots of research, reccying and getting to know everybody...I even think it's going alright for someone with about as much organisational consistency as the guy from Memento. If you are ever in Leeds for any reason on a Tuesday or Thursday night then you should get yourself out with HPH- they're just wonderful!
Then we get to the actual locations. For many inhabitants of the 6, this area is comprised of raggedy, damp terraces and the impending feeling that the TV License people are going to check on your false claim of not owning a TV. For a runner, these streets provide a comforting home of discomfort and fatigue. Akin to the favelas of Rio, the terraced mountains of Royal Park Road and Manor Drive rise high above the primordial soup like beacons of hard work and determination - former residences for many successful students but the stuff of dreams for the aspiring hill runner. The relentless red brickis punctuated by a plethora of green spaces; ranging from large parks to small snickets like going from uncovering treasure chests to hard-found trinkets, it's a canvas for training creativity and it's all out there to be discovered. Want to do a hard interval session, head for Burley Steps, want to go for a fast trail run then head to Meanwood, want to do hills then choose a direction. You truly are spoilt for choice here and as they say variety is the spice of life.
The great marathon runner Wilson Kipsang commented in an interview a while ago that one of the things which makes him so determined and able to endure pain for such a prolonged time is his living conditions when he is training hard for his events up in the mountains in Kenya. LS6 has that element to it- run down houses with uncaring landlords, a reputation for being able to see your breath indoors even in summer, Soviet-style kitchens with as many as six people sharing one toilet in a house. It's practically the perfect location for the discomfort needed to thrive as an athletic performer.....but if it gets too much then Grove Café is just down the road and it has a fantastic menu (you can even get vegan pizza) so it's not just for the masochists.
I haven't wrote anything on this blog for over a year now so I thought it was time to get something new (and not very serious) written - I don't believe everything that I've put here but I do put this to you - If Kipchoge lived and trained in LS6 then he'd have definitely have found that 26 seconds.
