Runner’s World magazine should be renamed Déjà Vu Monthly. Or have you heard that one before? It’s just that every time I read it, or rather, flick disconsolately through it, I’m strangely certain that I’ve seen it all before.
That said, I am a subscriber, though the reasons for being so have long since abandoned me.
This month, no magazine turned up at all. Did I fire off an angry email to the circulation people? Nah. When packing my overnight bag for Rugby this week – the sort of occasion that does finally endow some raison d’etre to the mag – I just threw in the January 2004 issue instead. (Or was it January 2003? Is there any way of telling, apart from the date on the cover?)
It’s true that I may be harbouring some sort of grudge here. I once wrote to them with a list of “improvements” for them to consider. Needless to say, most of the suggestions involved an input from me. And needless to say, they snorted with laughter and told me to f*ck off.
The other reason I must feel disdainful towards them is that they unaccountably refused to award me the first prize in their short story competition a couple of months back. I wouldn’t have cared if the prize was the usual old rubbish. Nike ear-stud, Nike bandana, Nike compact mirror, Nike anal hair remover… This time, the prize was an entry to the North Pole Marathon. The North Bloomin’ Pole Marathon. It probably isn’t much of a race, but the location? How often do you get the chance to travel to a place like that?
I’ll tell you. Once.
So my dislike turned to indifference, which I’m assured by chaps in the know is the superior form of social refrigeration.
Where’s this all leading? I mentioned RW because it once carried an article I enjoyed, and from which I gained some benefit. A shocking claim I know, but I promise it’s true. It happened 2 or 3 years ago. Tragically, I’ve never been able to rediscover it. It was by someone I’d never heard of. Which makes me suspect that they probably had him bumped off to discourage other writers of quality thinking that the mag was fair game.
The piece was about ways in which running had taught him lessons. On one level it was a little banal. You know the sort of thing: running has taught me that the more I put into something, the more I get out of it. Running has taught me that I shouldn’t be complacent. That the unexpected can strike at any time. But it did get me thinking, and eventually convinced me that running was the source of plenty of unsought-after sagacity.
I was thinking about it yesterday while I was out for my long run. I was thinking that running has taught me that while I can’t fool all of the people all of the time, I can certainly fool myself for some of the time.
Here’s the problem. You wake up, you get up, you check your spreadsheet and you think, “Crikey, I’m s-s-supposed to r-r-run ay-ay-ay-eighteen m-m-miles today.” So you go back to bed until you feel ill or injured enough to write off your run.
How do you prevent this? You trick yourself. Yes, it’s possible to trick yourself. I first did it one evening in Yate, three years ago (23 Jan 2002), while training for the London Marathon. I had to run 6 miles, but was finding it hard to comprehend the possibility of travelling such an extraordinary distance without an internal combustion engine. I managed it in the end by telling myself that I was to run only half that distance. And then, when I’d run the three miles, I just sort of ‘ran away from myself’ before I really knew what was happening.
I didn’t know you could run away from yourself, either. It’s something I learnt that evening – that I could be both trickster and dupee. All along I knew I was setting myself up. But I still fell for it. It was a great triumph, and the lesson hasn’t left me.
Yesterday I told myself that I was going for my normal 3.5 miles round the block, and set off as normal. Some interesting things happened in the first 2 miles. I was surprised to find that the tiny local lane I run down was chockablock with traffic. Not just that, but almost every vehicle was a 4×4, and most had revolutionary stickers in their back windows saying things like BOLLOCKS TO BLAIR, and FIGHT THE BAN. Well I never, I’d stumbled across a clandestine political meeting. It was the Countryside Alliance, or the Provisional Wing of the Tory Party, as I tend to think of them.
I ran past a couple of kids – a boy and a girl around 9 or 10 – shouting “We don’t care, we hate Blair!” They were waving toy rifles above their head like grieving Palestinians at the funeral of Yasser Arafat. It reminds you of one of the troubles with these silly buggers. They’re an armed militia.
I don’t know what happened at the gathering, but half a mile further on, as I ran past the lake, I heard a great roar go up from the wellied crowd, and speculated that the hounds must have caught, and been disembowelling, one of the urchin kids from the poor end of the village. I left them to their ‘sport’, and got on with my own.
I did a second loop of most of the route to bring me back home just over 5 miles later. Home? Yes, that’s what I had to tell myself. I was going home. And I was. But only to allow me to fish inside the hedge for my water bottle. And then it was off again.
Just round the corner I run past a sizeable detached house, half hidden behind high gates. I’d occasionally muse on who might live there. I’d never seen anyone come in or go out, though I had heard voices and laughter a couple of times as I’d run past. And then, just recently, I mentioned it to someone at work who lives in the village. “Oh”, she said, “You mean the bush house?” “Why is it called the bush house?” was the obvious question. “Because Kate Bush lives there”, came the answer. So now I know.
I ran 6.5 miles up the canal, and 6.5 miles back, making a total of 18.3 miles. The longest run since Copenhagen last May. Knackering, but not crippling. What more could you hope for from a long run?
