Tuesday 4 July 2006

For 298,444,215 Americans and one fat old English bloke, today is
Independence Day.

Hang on while I dust down the old speech I like to deliver on such an
occasion.

[HEAVY BREATHING]

But even speaking is too strenuous an activity right now so I’ll rely
on that old stuck record instead. Ah, here it is. You may hear it
crackling in the background now. Or is that just the sound of matted
slow-twitch muscle fibres groaning beneath the burden of unrequested
liberation?

It’s 3 months since the chilly, sodden Zurich Marathon. The plan, as
always, was to take a break before running again. Perhaps 15 or 20
days. In keeping with that scheme, I’d pencilled in a few races to fill
the cool, waterlogged weeks of late spring. The Marlow 5 miler in May
was a definite, along with the traditionally bracing 10K round the
Olympic Lake at Dorney. Even the Seaford Half in early June had been
eyed up and winked at across the southern shires.

So the day after my football season ended, April 30, I got up early and
put my running gear on. A bad shoulder ache meant I never got beyond
the back door. I put it down to sleeping awkwardly, and decided not to
risk a run. Next day, and for the rest of that week, the pain persisted
and got worse. On the Friday I came out in a scarlet rash that raged
across my chest and under my armpit. For the first time since my
becalmed student days, I spent the entire weekend in bed. It got no
better. Eventually I saw a doctor a few days later who revealed that I
was enjoying a blast of shingles.

It’s always exciting and gratifying to have a proper disease rather
than just some anonymous pain passing slowly through, like a lurker on
an internet forum. No one believes there’s anything wrong with you
unless there’s a proper name for it. Walking round the house or the
office groaning loudly, rattling the pills in your pocket, is never
quite persuasive enough.

It may have been gratifying to be officially ill, but it was
inconvenient and painful. It was also a great time to be made
redundant. I could mooch around at home for 3 or 4 weeks with no shirt
to grate the spectacular volcanic mountain range that had swept across
my upper body.

It’s taken 6 or 7 weeks to die down and stop itching. The odd mixture
of numbness and sensitivity is still there, but I can wear a shirt
again, and I can get to sleep at night, despite the permanent burden of
my terrible secrets, and the stress of England’s failure in the World
Cup. I’m still anxiously waiting to see if I become one of the 5% who
never fully recover, but at least I can start to contemplate relative
normality again.

The world seems a quite different place from the one I remember. It’s
mid-summer all of a sudden. I have a new (and better) job. I’m
self-employed for the first time. The World Cup has pretty much been
and gone, leaving a large crater in my calendar.

And I’ve been for a run.

This momentous event occurred tonight at 7pm. I realise that some out
there may be sceptical, and admittedly there are few witnesses to
authenticate my story. I suspect that those there are will have spent
the rest of the evening trying to scorch the experience from their
memory with a gallon or two of strong ale. So you’ll just have to take
my word for it. I did it, but it wasn’t pretty.

It has to be reported that I’m…. I’m more substantial
than I was in Zurich. Twenty pounds safer from the perils of
emaciation.

The current heatwave didn’t make it easier. 200 metres into the plod, I
was fighting for breath. After 500, I decided to walk for a spell. I
should at least have walked first. I’ve had virtually no exercise for
three months. My body was in shock. I ended up alternating 500m of
walking with 500m of lumbering. Just 5 km in all, but it’s a start. I
averaged an impressive 14 minutes a mile. It has to be conceded that
I’ve had less inglorious workouts than this one.

[PAUSE. DEEP BREATH]

I still entertain a remote and ridiculous thought… to take part in
the Two Oceans Marathon (the TOM) in
South Africa on 7 April next year. Sad and funny, yes, but there you
have it. Compared with Zurich and the other 4 marathons I’ve done, this
would be a much harder challenge. Why?

The race is 40 weeks away, 7 April 2007.

This morning I downloaded an 8 week preliminary training schedule from
the TOM website. This is what it says for Week 1:

Mon: Rest

Tues: 5 km

Wed: Rest

Thurs: 7 km

Fri: Rest

Sat: 6 km

Sun: 10km

The first 5km can at least be checked off. What’s next? Ah! A rest day
tomorrow. At last.

So. Here we go again. That much-publicised first step of the thousand
mile journey. Yet things are a different this time. Things are always
different, I hear someone say. Perhaps, but things are truly different
this time.

A longer race to aim at, in terms of both the distance run and the time
I have to think about and prepare for it. I need to find another 9
miles or so from somewhere. Where? Just now, I can’t see the answer to
that, but it will appear, as it always must. Shuffling through the
final stretch of the Zurich Marathon, there was no internal locker big
enough to hold another mile, let alone nine of the sadistic buggers.

My idea of a tough hill climb is the ascent of a short flight of stairs
after a decent lunch. I’ll have to shift my perspective between now and
next April, when I’m scheduled to encounter the fabled Chapman’s Peak
and Constantia Nek. These aren’t massive heights
(about 600 and 750 feet respectively) but the elevations stretch for
miles, and come in the last half of the race, when the energy is spent,
and the midday African sun has cooked the runner, turning him into a
frazzled, brittle fragment of what he started out as.

There must be compensations of
course, and to reveal the attraction, you’d think it unnecessary to
look beyond the TOM’s famous tagline: The World’s Most
Beautiful Marathon.

But as even the marketing people know, there is more to it than this.
There must be. After all, if the magnet is the awesome scenery, what’s
to stop us just booking a holiday to the Cape, hiring a car and driving
round the coast road (as indeed we plan to, whether the race happens
for me or not). If driving seems too sedate, too detached from our
environment, we could hire bikes and take a leisurely ride around the
region.

No.

There’s something more here, but what? We (if I include the good folk
who inhabit the forum) have spent the last 4
or 5 years trying to answer this fundamental question. Sometimes,
particularly after a race or a long run, you get the sense that one of
us has found an answer of sorts. Or perhaps the point, the difficulty,
is not that the reason for running is remote and indefinable; but that
there are many, many reasons for doing it, and especially for wanting
to run long. Ironically, it’s people like us who aren’t natural
athletes who seem to have more reasons than those who are. The sleek,
nimble-footed runner does it because he can. We do it because we can’t.

Is it that our lives lack greater purpose? We sense that we’re on a
journey, but struggle to identify the destination and the stopping-off
places. So we have to invent them. It gives us a framework against
which to pin and to measure ourselves. And maybe that’s what I’m doing
here. Pinning and measuring.

The best thing about getting started again isn’t the excitement of
reaching out towards some new challenge, but the feeling of relief
about what I’m hoping to leave behind. As a hopelessly slothful
chocofile and wine enthusiast, I look for footholds in my ascent
towards good health and that dopamine-drenched sense of wellbeing that
all runners enjoy. It’s not a feeling I’ve had for a while, and I want
it back again. Surely it’s time to wave goodbye to my sugar slavery — again
— for a while.

And that’s why today, 298,444,215 Americans and one fat old English
bloke are raising their glasses of sparkling mineral water to celebrate
Independence Day.

Cheers.