Monday is normally a rest day, but with the Hyde Park 10 kilometre race on Wednesday (New Year’s Day), it seemed sensible to go for a three mile loosener this evening, and rest tomorrow instead.
Running in the rain offers a great sense of liberation. A dark night, the rain dense and cool, no one on the black, flashing pavements except a mad runner with a grin hanging from one ear to the other. The pleasure comes from the certain knowledge that you’re going to get soaked through. Why worry about it? It’s a kind of Buddhist perspective, I suppose. Discomfort ceases to be discomfort once you stop fighting it. That’s the theory, anyway. It works well enough with rain, though I confess I’ve had less success with violent stomach pain, toothache, and the fear of being beaten by Brentford.
I turned away from the main drag, and followed one of the local lanes for a mile or so. I can’t tell you how happy I was in this cocoon of darkness and liquid. For a while at least, it was like some unassailable state of safety; I was somehow detached and suspended from all those things from which you want to be detached and suspended.
Eventually I had to stop and turn back, as I was literally up to my ankles in rainwater. It wasn’t the squelching that put me off, but the worry that I couldn’t see what I was stepping on. A bite from an indignant jellyfish would have put me out of action for weeks.
I’ve discovered MP3s rather late in life, and have been having fun downloading and playing some of the musical odds and sods that litter the cutting-room floor of my rather dissolute existence. All sorts of things that I’d forgotten about have slid off the mortuary slab into some kind of second stab at life. This evening, for the first time in more than 21 years I’ve heard The Turn Of A Friendly Card by Alan Parsons. I don’t know why I thought to search for this, but it was a song from an album that I heard time and again in a hotel room in the Himalayas in 1981, where I and a hirsute German mathematician called Martin were held captive by a massive monsoon downpour for an entire weeekend. For some reason, this was the only tape that he had, and we must have played it dozens of times through that weekend, while we tried to disprove his assertion that it was impossible to die from smoking too much marijuana.
What a wistful half hour it was this evening, hearing this again – and again. And again.
And I wondered what might make me wistful 21 years from now? The discovery of a pair of ancient, rat-chewed running shoes in some dark corner of the shed…? A blackened, dented old medal from the Hyde Park 10K of Jan 1st 2003?
One memento that I won’t come across in 21 years time is my 2002/2003 Queens Park Rangers season ticket. Today I sent off the unused half to a fellow QPR fan. I’ve drawn a line under the Hoops for a while at least. Time to get running instead.
