The Carnethy lnterview - Curly Mills
One of the highlights of the Club year is the Scottish
Islands Peaks Race. Investment of competitors, and marshals for the running
part of the race is considerable – and very enjoyable. Nick Macdonald,
the Committee and the marshalling team leaders put in a lot of time and
effort before and during the Event. When you book in a t MacTavish's Kitchen
in Oban and see Barbara Mills organising the Registration and sorting
out all the last minute problems, this is the culmination of a year of
hard work on your behalf. He Interviewer thought it was time the mainspring
of such a superb event should be introduced to the Club and share some
thoughts with us..
Talk about your early memories and athletic
experiences.
I was born in
Manchester in April 1940 and spent most of my early life looking
out at the world whizzing by from a cycle sidecar as my Dad and
Mum were very keen cyclists. A little later I remember being ' dropped
off the back' of club runs and suffering 'the bonk' (it had a different
meaning then). On reaching the age of eleven, I was lucky enough
to get a place at a grammar school about 12 miles away and used
to ride my bike there and back every day rain or shine through the
cars and buses, murderers, rapists etc. (Parents were tough back
then). As a consequence, my little legs developed muscles and joints
adapted to circular motion and the school cross country was absolute
purgatory as I minced along behind.
Eventually, in my
late teens, bonking (of any sort) disappeared and I set out to make
my mark in the history books of sprinting on the steep!y banked
track at the Reg Harris Stadium. The high point of my career was
to be told after one rather rough race by the then British Sprint
Champion that if I tried that trick again he would elbow me out
onto the grass. Around this time I faced the big questions that
all athletes have to face. Do you have talent? Are you prepared
to make the necessary sacrifices to get to the top? My answer then
has been a great comfort to me ever since. Of course I had the talent
to get to the top but being an extremely well balanced individual,
I decided that the sacrifices would be too great and therefore generously
let others more needy of the adulation of the public to take my
place on the podium. I recommend this formula to anyone whose times
are not too hot.
An extension of
this philosophy is dabbling. This is the opposite of specialisation.
A dabbler has a go at everything and is probably not very good at
anything but he (or she) has experienced enough to admire the experts
in their fields and to enjoy the pleasures of each sport without
having to devote their entire free time to training and practice.
Hence cross training is the way I like to keep fit. I enjoy mountain
biking, road biking, hill walking and hill running with none of
it carried to what us dabblers would call excess but enough to try
to stave off death a bit longer. (Us older members are not just
doing it for fun, we are running away from the even older guy with
the long white beard and the scythe). Training can be both fun and
life preserving for us dabblers.
When it comes to
business, the dabbler is at a disadvantage to the full professional
unless he is running a small business where the ability to do a
wide variety of things reasonably well is much more important than
some outstanding strength. I was lucky enough to be in at the start
of a small heating and ventilation business and help it to grow
to become a national company employing 200 people. Selling that
provided the means to indulge a retirement devoted to more dabbling
in small business but this time in electronics design and manufacture
rather than in a
service industry but the jury is still out on whether dabbling is
really good for me or the business. (Small businesses have all the
problems and challenges of big business but intensified by lack
of staff, training, cash, premises, credit etc; it does not make
for a particularly restful retirement).
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I)o you read a lot?
| I do read a lot
of books, mainly paperbacks and would like to recommend a few good
reads that may not have crossed your path yet: The Bridge by Ian
Banks; Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey; Other Peoples Trades by
Primo Levi; All the Trouble in the World by P J O'Rourke; The War
of Don Emanuel's Nether Parts by Louis de Bernieres; One Hundred
Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marques; The Black Sea by Neal
Ascherson; and for scientists: The Odd Book of Data by R Houwink
(out of print but obtainable second hand); The Waite Group's Fractal
Creations by T Wegner and M Peterson (needs a computer); Surely
You're Joking Mr Feynman by Richard P Feynman (a genius whose IQ
did not prevent him being a fun loving dabbler too). |
Why hill running as well as all the other things you do?
| I think a necessary
part of a satisfying life comes from exercising both body and mind
together and this is something that hill running does so much better
than almost any other sport. These days, computers and TV have resulted
in a broad understanding of the how the mind and body operates but
I am not sure if it is generally appreciated how much brain power
is required to run in the hills. There is no routine actuation of
muscles as occurs in cycling or road runming. In hill running the
eyes have to scan ahead, assessing and measuring distances and heights
for the next few footfalls, the dynamics of the bodies motion have
to be factored in, muscles have to be instructed and
feedback from the present footfall assessed whilst data is pulled
from the short term memory for the next step to maintain the dynamic
balance and fit the terrain. That is an astronomical task for the
mind and to the extent that in downhill running, the limits are
probably imposed by IQ and not by physical factors. There is no
doubt that hill running is the most comprehensive and natural mind/body
exercise that we can ever take and it has the added advantages that
we are designed to do it and there is none of the damaging repetitive
pounding that comes from road running on hard even surfaces. |
What about The Race?
| The Scottish Islands
Peaks Race has obviously been an event that I have helped to organise
for some time now and my reasons are somehow tied up with the above
thinking. I like the idea of people learning about other sports
that they would not normally encounter and I know that many yachtsmen
and runners have taken up the other sport alongside their main one.
But my main motivation is to ensure that I can continue to compete
in it because despite the many years I have done the race it is
always different, always a serious challenge and always great fun.
Sailing into the night off Duart and watching the stars and the
phosphorescence, seeing the sun rise on the Paps of Jura, battling
round the Mull of Kintyre, timing the drop-offs and pick-ups and
finally arriving shattered at Troon are magical memories. Each year
I look forward to the race. Its an experience that I can't wait
to repeat; like any addict, I am hooked. |
Have you had any life-threatening experiences sailing or running?
Like most of us,
I am an adrenaline addict and so most of my most memorable experiences
have been when this has been at a peak; high speed sailing in big
seas, capsizing a 30ft catamaran at night in the North Sea in October
followed (hours later) by surfing in on big waves - four of us in
an eight foot rubber dinghy. Rubber reminds me of my first (and
probably last) bungy jump off a railway bridge in New Zealand and
also of pulling the tail of a 12 ft shark
in a cave 80 ft down in the Maldives. I will always remember running
out of petrol in my microlight 100 ft above the bottleworks at Kinghorn
(flying with a plaster still on my leg broken in a previous crash)
and on another occasion rigging the wing wrong so that it went up
Ok but would not come down without going unstable. Nowadays I get
a big kick out of snowboarding or sailing flat out on my sail board.
There are obviously
serious risks associated with most of these activities and it is
certainly true that like most of us, I could have been fatally unlucky
many times. But perhaps there is another side to running a life
of risk which may not he appreciated by the safety first school;
if we survive pushing our luck (and analyse what happened), we become
good at judging risk. This has had great benefits for me in business
where guessing right is the key to success. But there is no need
to justify risk taking in this way; we do it because we enjoy it
and without the element of risk, there would not be the same spice
to the adventure. The pleasure is to accept the risk and to overcome
it by skill and experience etc or to recognise that the risk level
is becoming too high and get out before it is too late. |
Have you any injury or health problems?
I have suffered
from some stress induced problems and after successfully trying
meditation, I realised that regular physical activity also had the
same relaxing effect but had the added advantage that it kept you
fit as well. Which leads me on to my adrenaline theory: We were
evolved in past times when life was much more physical and with
a fair bit of kill or be killed. Evolution led to the development
of a boost drug for the fight or flight situations and which we
now call adrenaline. It is important to appreciate that evolution
is completely blind, there would have been some individuals who
secreted adrenaline almost constantly and others who just got a
boost when needed and developed a switch off mechanism. The ones
who had an adrenaline switch off mechanism survived best and became
our ancestors because constant high levels of adrenaline led to
poor immune response, poor social interactions, degraded reasoning
and poor sleep patterns. These effects meant that the adrenaline
addicts of yore did not perform too well in the mating game in comparison
with their more relaxed competition. So the ability to switch off
the adrenaline has got obvious survival value and if you can turn
it off as soon as it is no longer required, you were more likely
to pass your genes on to the next generation. The next question
is what signals the switch off mechanism? The most likely signal
is the 'cessation of physical activity'. Mother nature gave us only
one feeling for two quite different conditions; mental and physical
tiredness. That is because in our evolutionary past, hard physical
work also involved hard mental work (as in hill running) hence 'tired'
described things nicely. Nowadays, a hard day at the office can
mean high levels of adrenaline and feelings of tiredness which actually
requires physical activity to resolve rather than the feet up in
front of the TV that the vast majority of tired office workers use.
But this is preaching
to the converted. Most runners know that a run after work is the
best way to lose that tired but edgy feeling induced by mental stress
and high adrenaline levels. I had to learn the hard way by being
hospitalised with a stress related condition before feeling my way
back to health by using regular physical training.
So I am sure that
hill running is the nicest and most natural way to keep both body
and mind in the best possible condition. |
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