Have I ever talked about the Running Spiral? That’s just what I call it, but it’s a well-known phenomenon, and you probably know it as something else. The slippery slope. Thin end of the wedge.
It’s the tendency for running to create a momentum in either direction. Getting into a regular running routine becomes a self-fuelling conveyance, and one that gets better and faster and stronger. Perhaps just a broken skateboard to start with, then a rusty bike, a creaking jalopy, a modest saloon, and finally a glittering people-carrier. And it ends up as one of those because the enthusiasm really does seem to transfer to others, and they too get swept along on your optimism. In reality they probably don’t, but you feel so damn good that they seem to be happier and more hopeful and more positive.
But the opposite happens too — as it did a couple of weeks ago. You miss a couple of runs. Go to the pub in mid-week, then on the way home, devour a portion of fish and chips big enough to feed a small school. And a couple of Mars Bars from the machine on the station platform as you wait for the last train. And that’s it. Bang. Gone. The past weeks of achievement and buoyancy are lying there in front of you with a bloody great hole through them. You ask yourself: what’s the point of all this sacrifice?
When you use the word “sacrifice”, you know you’ve lost it. When the going is good, we know that running is more sacrament than sacrifice. But hitch a ride on the downward spiral, and the truth soon fades.
It happens because running seems to force us to forget.
When, today, I’m excitedly planning my run for tomorrow, I forget how bloody hard and detestable running can be. I forget how much I hate getting out of bed before six o’clock in winter. I remember it only when I wake up at 5:45 the next morning.
Sometimes I’m just too horrified by the idea to get up. I’ll run this evening instead, I tell myself. Or at lunchtime. But I never do. Usually I will get out of bed, feeling resentful and wretched. I’ll tarry in the draughty lobby by the back door, pressed against the fridge to keep warm, hating everything. I leave the house and want to cry. You forget all this, you bastard, I tell myself. How can you put yourself through it?
Trudge, trudge, trudge. Slap, slap, slap. Eventually that plateau of equanimity is reached. Oh well, at least you’ve done your duty for the day, the key trembling in your hands as you try to get the door open. Ears burning from the wind. Chunk of bread and honey, banana. Hot shower, clean clothes. Stroll down to the station, floating. High as a kite on your own sudden, shocking appetite for the day ahead of you. You forget how monstrously narcotic running is. Yes, even to a fat, old, eleven-minute miler like me.
Running is a constant process of self-renewal, and of re-remembering what you promised yourself last time you’d never forget. But we always do forget, and I sometimes think the true, essential wonder of running is just that — that it makes us forget, and it makes us re-learn. Or allows us to forget and re-learn. Over and over. And even though I’ve written all that down, I know that tonight I’ll still start looking forward to getting out early tomorrow. And in the morning, I’ll wake up and think “Oh Christ. No. Not now, please.”
This morning I did five miles along the canal under a pale, silver-grey sky. The page between winter and spring is turning, and how good does it feel to be there to witness it. How great to be able to see again, after all that darkness.
