When the subject of early morning running crops up, I enthuse.
Best time of the day, I say. Makes you feel great. Sets you up for the
day. Gets it out of the way.
All this is true, but the shameful fact is that I don’t drink my own
Kool-Aid, as our American cousins like to say. It’s months since I slid
out of bed before 7:30 to trot around the block. This morning at seven,
slowly toasting beneath the duvet, I thought about this. I thought
about it too much. I thought about it so much that I had to do it,
didn’t I? Got up and put my shorts on, quietly weeping as I did so.
Am I losing my nerve when it comes to running in cold weather? Until
last winter I’d wear nothing more than a short-sleeved shirt and
shorts, even in the very epicentre of the season. It wasn’t macho
stupidity. Or not just macho stupidity It was the
thought of wrapping up to run. After a few minutes I’d be hot and
sweaty, I reasoned. The clothes would itch and restrict my movement. I
must have got this idea from an early experiment, when I wore some sort
of woolly hat on a run. It didn’t work at all, and that was that.
Running through the frozen fog at 7 in the morning, virtually naked,
stared at by people dressed up like gorillas, became a habit. It’s the
way it was, and the way it would always be, I thought.
Then last year, out running with the local club one evening, I noticed
that of the 20 or so runners there, I was one of only two people with
bare legs, and the only one wearing just one layer above the waist.
Some had hat, gloves, leggings, 2 or 3 teeshirts and
a jacket. It made me think. Was it my cloak of blubber protecting me
from the cold? Or I was I being foolish?
As I keep reminding my wife (in vain), we should all revisit our
prejudices from time to time. I reassessed Sweaty Wooly Hat Syndrome
and one day soon after, I donned a plasticky “running jacket” I’d
bought from Aldi for about £2.50. It was essentially a
plastic rubbish sack with a tuppeny zip on it, but it sort of worked.
It kept all but the sharpest of icy gusts from my flesh, though I could
feel moisture evaporating from my midriff, then condensing under my icy
neck and dripping back down my chest into my groin. If only there had
been a vessel with a tube to collect the moisture and feed it into my
water bottle, I could have been totally self-sufficient.
This damp development didn’t put me off, and probably a third of my
midwinter runs from then were encased in this jacket, or the rather
smarter gillet I’d bought at a knockdown price from the generally
excellent wiggle.co.uk.
I wondered why it had been half price until the sweaty morning when I
found the colour had leached from the fabric around the zip, leaving a
red slash down the front of my London Marathon finisher’s teeshirt,
like a surgeon’s incision. This winter, rather colder than the last,
has even seen me in leggings once or twice, though I think leggings are
taking things just a bit too far.
So this morning, I donned 2 teeshirts and a jacket (but no leggings),
and left the house. As I did so, I found myself absent-mindedly singing
The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”, and realised that every time I
wander round the kitchen in this intimidating semi-darkness, this song
is in my head.
Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins,
Silently closing her bedroom door,
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more.
She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her handkerchief.
Silently turning the backdoor key,
Stepping outside, she is free.
It sets the right tone — a puzzling mixture of pathos and hope. It’s
how I feel as I move through that door into the icy darkness. I can’t
tell you how much I hate that moment.
But ask me again, 45 minutes later, as I stand in the same kitchen. Now
it’s daylight, and the central heating has been on for half an hour.
I’m chomping hungrily on a brick of malt loaf, and simultaneously
pushing a banana into my mouth. In my other hand is the end of the
second pint of orange squash. I’m a furnace, tottering on trembling
legs, breathing noisily. I’m staring blankly through the kitchen window
into the frosty garden, seeing all those things that non-runners will
never see.
Boys, if we could sell that feeling, we’d be worth bloody millions.
