I got up this morning and jogged up and down the stairs a couple of times to test my toe. The signs were bad. It was a major disappointment. I’d hoped to start the week with some positive news, but it wasn’t to be.
Yes, the toe felt absolutely fine, and I had no excuses to stay away from the race.
As usual, I left late, and found myself bombing down the M4 at high speed. My excuse this time was the de-gunkification of the soles of my Asics Gel Guts. I bought these items, my first pair of off-road shoes, just a few weeks ago specially for this race. I wore them once on a very muddy run to check they were OK, and had neglected them ever since, meaning the spectacularly contoured soles were still filled with rock-hard muck. This rendered them useless as off-roaders, so I had to operate on them without delay. I cursed my lack of organisation, but was at least grateful that M didn’t catch me at the kitchen sink, levering nuggets of granite-like dog shit from my shoes with one of her best knives. Twice she called out from the next room: “What are you doing in there?” Twice I replied: “Nar-thing”. Usually, the second straight bat would have been followed by the terrifying sound of dainty but determined footsteps, then a murderous shriek, then a tirade. Today I got away with it.
A few miles up the motorway, my feet started to freeze, and I realised that water must have got into the shoes. Only one thing for it. I had to change them for my ordinary shoes, and give my trainers a chance to dry out a bit. But I didn’t have time to stop, so had to swap them while hurtling up the M4 at 95 miles an hour. Pretty terrifying, but it did the job. Changing back into them at Cliveden, they were warm and dry.
Cliveden is now owned by the National Trust but operates as a hotel these days. It’s been rebuilt twice, following fires, since the first house went up in the middle of the 1600s. Its heyday came in the first few decades of the last century, after it had been bought by William Astor, the Bill Gates of his day, and given to his son Waldorf Astor, and daughter-in-law, Nancy. I’ve always had a thing about those country house parties of the twenties and thirties, and the Cliveden ones were legendary, with people like Churchill and Roosevelt and Charlie Chaplin and George Bernard Shaw making frequent appearances. Ex-PM Harold Macmillan was another frequent guest, and when told years later that the house was to become a hotel, is said to have remarked “My dear boy, it always was.”
And Cliveden really does have that ghostly “Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again” quality, looming as it does at the end of a long gravelly drive winding through the forest.
It was a freezing morning but the sun was out, creating one of those blissful wintry days that running was invented for. Combined with Cliveden, this should have been an exciting run in prospect. But my recent inertia was worrying, and the absorption of much wine and chocolate and other festive junk food over the past few days hadn’t helped. As usual, I amused myself by examining people’s shoes and socks while waiting for the hooter to… hoot. The bloke in front of me was wearing ordinary grey, patterned work socks and a pair of football boots. How very… individual.
Which reminds me of the story about Sir Thomas Beecham, when he was conducting the LPO in rehearsal one day. Noticing a new woodwind player, he said, “And you are Mister…?” “Ball”, came the reply. Beecham looked perplexed. “Ball? Ball? How very singular.”
We set off, back along the cobbles then the gravel drive and into the woods. Here the road turned into a muddy track then a grassy hillside, then a track again. Much of the race took us through dense wood, intercut with a lovely stretch of rural towpath along the River Thames. The first 1½ miles had been suspiciously downhill. My experience of races is that what goes down must, sometime, tragically, come up. 1½ miles in, we got our comeuppance as we hit a set of very steep steps up a fearsome hillside. 175 of them by my reckoning. They weren’t just steep but deep, so it wasn’t like running quickly up a staircase. It was a step up, then two or three soft, muddy strides, then another step up. This seemed to make it far worse as it was impossible to get a rhythm going. Halfway up, I stopped trying to run, and walked quickly instead. Stopping to walk in a race normally seems fraudulent, but this time almost everyone else was doing it so it became an allowable sin.
We finally got to the top where, a couple of hundred yards further on, we found ourselves back at the start for the end of the first lap. The second wasn’t an exact copy of the first, and even managed to be more beautiful. This was quintessential winter running. I was on my own now, plodding through the forest, seeing my breath in front of me. It was like exploring a long cavern, yet it wasn’t dark and it wasn’t frightening. The opposite. The combination of the golden-brown leaves, the crunchy frosted path and the flickering sunlight was theatrical magic. The race was an ethereal corridor through the forest, and well marked with streamers hanging from occasional trees. But there were all sorts of other tracks and trails leading off the main one that set me thinking about the great 1915 Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken (often mistitled The Road Less Travelled). The writer talks about the choice he faces by two paths in the forest, and how he opts for the one not so well trodden. It set me thinking that runners are often people who like to take the road less travelled, and how this can set us apart. The fabulous deceit we cast is to make non-runners think that it’s us who are being ultra-conventional.
Later when I got home, I had to look up the poem:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The race was tough, but it turned out to be eminently do-able. With every race entry seems to come an unopenable box, a threat, a chunk of fear, a reason why I need to wriggle free from the commitment. But this was my 25th race since I began running three years ago, and I’m beginning to understand that the bark of a race is always worse than its bite. I’m glad I turned up for this one. The long forest stretches were pieces of some childhood fantasy, and the frosty, private track along the banks of the Thames, beneath the low-hanging branches, with Cliveden in the distance, was like taking in a piece of English social history. It was impossible not to wander back to the early decades of the last century and wonder who else had shared this road less travelled.
It wasn’t fast, but it was never going to be. This wasn’t a race for speed or competition, but a race for reflection. The last couple of days have been dominated by the news of the earthquake and tidal wave in the Indian Ocean, and today’s run was a chance to do what races rarely allow us to do while they’re in progress: celebrate the simple joy of running, and of being alive.
