6am. It’s dark and cool, and the streets are profoundly empty. Just a yawning fox, sitting on the pub wall, and me.
It was hard getting out of bed, but I did, and I ran. It’s one of those questions you’re often asked: how do you manage to leave a toasty bed an hour earlier than necessary, just to be able to run half-naked for several miles in the cold, black morning? The question, it’s true, has never been phrased quite like that, but it’s what people are thinking, because I think the same thing sometimes. Here’s the answer:
I suspect I’ve said this before, but running is the opposite of drinking. And using a credit card. Running is like visiting the dentist, or saving up for a holiday. With alcohol, and credit cards, you get all the pleasure first, followed by a period of extended suffering. With running, the pain comes first, the pleasure later. It’s like a feel-great pill with initial, horrible side-effects. You take your tablet and then have to suffer all sorts of discomforts: cramps in your legs, side-stitches, breathlessness, rapid temperature fluctuations, acute sweating, both biliousness and severe hunger pangs, social awkwardness, loss of self-esteem, paranoia about falling over or being hit by a car, and so on. What a terrible list that is. Imagine a medicine that did all that to you. It would never be approved.
But these severe side-effects last only 30 or 40 minutes, or say an hour maximum for the normal weekday dose. And immediately after they’ve disappeared you can luxuriate in many hours of mental alertness and clarity, and a kind of self-cuddling physical warmth. A mixture of elevated self-esteem and a profound sense of well-being. It can last an entire day.
And so, as I lie there in my warm bed at six in the morning, it becomes a simple transaction for me to consider. Do I lie here for another glorious hour, before a long day of regret and listlessness? Or do I get up, take my pill, feel terrible for half an hour then feel estupendo for the rest of the day?
That’s the mental side of the decision. On the practical side, it helps to have my running stuff ready and waiting. Having to fish around in the dark at six in the morning, looking for an escaped sock, isn’t conducive to getting out there. So the night before, everything is laid out over a chair next to the bed so that it stares back at me when I first open my eyes. It helps a little — and at that time in the morning, you need all the help that’s going.
This morning I left my watch at home and just jogged around my usual 3.5 mile early morning circuit. Black as pitch when I set off. Something I always notice at this time is the sound of the M4 in the distance. It’s inaudible at any other time of day but this early, when nothing else stirs, it’s alive. At a couple of points in the run, I can see sections of the illuminated ribbon in the distance. It doesn’t intrude enough to spoil the run, but there’s enough of it there to be a thought-provoking contrast to the tranquility of the lanes. The middle mile of the run is the best, through the local manorial estate. Now, even the sound of the motorway is gone. Here I can just make out the deer in the shadows of the great oaks, or faintly silhouetted against the pale grey lake.
This morning, floating past this divine scene, something unexpected and shocking happens: a single, loud gunshot, then pandemonium. Geese honking and flapping, and the plangent bleating of the deer, followed by the low drumming of their fleeing hooves. I don’t know where it came from or what it signified. Just the bloody countryside doing its bloody job, I suppose.
Then back home for a slab of home-made bread and honey, and coffee. A hot shower and warm, clean clothes. It’s here that the running pill starts to kick in properly, and as I stride off to the station, luxuriating in those first, fabulous waves of well-being and sheer glee, I marvel that I even considered not getting up to run.
