Notes from the ledge
I woke this morning feeling troubled and empty, but didn’t know why. It was something beyond normal Monday fatigue, and the distant nausea that’s part of the aftermath of football weekends. Yes, I ate an Everest of mashed potato last night — a self-referential monument to my inability to judge food portions (as I would have it), or to my greed (as M would prefer). But that wasn’t it. I concede I’d ‘gone for a walk’ in the early evening, and returned with three agreeable pints of West Berkshire Brewery’s Good Old Boy seeping through my intestines. Shortly to be joined by a couple of generous measures of Tesco’s finest riserva Chianti, while I tearfully chopped the onions and peeled far too many spuds.
There would have to be a modest physical penalty to pay for these pleasures, but a better explanation was needed for this morning’s cranial fragility. It was a deep pang, hollowed out by something more emotional, more cerebral than simple over-indulgence. What was it?
I sampled a few theories, but the real answer didn’t come until mid-morning when I first had cause to reach for my phone. As the screen lit up, I saw it was flashing a reminder against today’s date. Strange. I rarely use this feature. A couple of key presses, and all was revealed. With a touchingly naive self-confidence, the message proclaimed: Today I run the Boston Marathon.
Today, as will be clear, I did not run the Boston Marathon. Nor am I even in Boston. The message was like a small, unexpected explosion. And when the dust cleared, a moment later, I suddenly saw where I really was, and it was a shock.
The journey up here has been so gradual and so free of self-questioning that not even I realised where I was headed. Here, on this lofty lifestyle window ledge, I can suddenly see so much.
I won’t exaggerate. I’m not clinging by my fingertips, but I am straddled across it in a rather careless fashion, and it wouldn’t have taken much. I hope I’ve spotted myself in time. Now comes the task of talking myself out of it.
Somewhere along the line I fell out of love with running. We lost that lusty joy. It became instead a marriage of convenience, despite there being little that was convenient about the arrangement. This running thing is a tag that has somehow helped give me an identity, though the cynic in me might prefer to see it as giving myself an alibi. Trouble is, I’ve latterly seemed to want these uncertain benefits without the nuisance of having to put in the graft.
Something in my relationship with this sport altered after the Zurich marathon. It’s a rather pitiful confession, but cracking the five hour marathon had become the pinnacle of my ambition, even though I didn’t fully realise it until after I finally achieved that in Switzerland. I’d climbed the stairs, and there I was, in fulfillment’s desolate attic. Nowhere else to go but back down the way I’d come.
Last spring, I did finally start to rediscover some enthusiasm, with a string of 10Ks. But something unfingerable changed after my significant birthday of last summer. It was as though I was asking myself if this was a worthwhile pastime for a fifty year old bloke. (The answer is yes, of course it is. In fact it probably gets more worthwhile as we age.) Arranging my Boston place through the JDRF was my attempt to arrest the drift, as well as raising some funds for that fine charity. It worked well for a while, until the intermittent knee injury that popped up every time I tried to step up my pace or distances, made it impossible to build up the pre-Christmas momentum I needed.
Almeria came and went, with little to show for it but a languid plod around the 10K course (which the legendary organisation managed to turn into 13K), and a careful jog down a dusty orange mountain to test the knee. It came through the examination with barely a twinge. But here’s a funny thing: I felt something closer to irritation than relief, as though aggrieved that I’d run out of excuses.
It was too late to resurrect Boston, but at least I could move gently back into a running routine with possibly a crack at the Reading Half in March. But no, that didn’t happen either. February sank without trace, hit by the torpedoes of work and beer, and the alleged good life.
March, and I’m now ten pounds heavier than I’d been in Almeria at the end of January. I climbed aboard a new eating regime, and started walking every day. Two weeks and the loss of those ten pounds later, I get inexplicably bored, and start to revisit the haunts of February. Until last week, when I start to realise it’s now or never.
So this evening I strapped myself into the iPod, hauled on those ever-tightening lycra undershorts (which I’m sure used to cover more than half my arse), and went for a four mile waddle. Christ, I am well and truly enlardened. This morning I was 234 pounds, by some distance the heaviest I’ve been since I started running, in 2001. I must lose one whole stone just to get back to where I was in Almeria, when I felt consummately unfit, and fatter than I had done in years. I then have to shed another 20 pounds to arrive at my relatively lissome Zurich self (and I’d felt pretty fat there too).
Tonight’s over-optimistic plan was to repeatedly jog for a minute, walk for two, and to assess how I felt after a mile or two. I got nowhere near this. The first minute of ‘running’ was like some form of rapid suffocation. I was constricted, unable to ingest enough oxygen to keep this mighty juggernaut rolling along. The entire two minutes of walking was spent panting, and staring at the pavement just ahead of my feet. I couldn’t take the risk of having to make eye contact with someone I know. Or even someone I don’t know.
The second minute of jogging was no better. The third? Far worse. Tragically, it coincided with Bruce Springsteen and Born To Run. I can’t hear this great song without being transported back to the start line of the Chicago marathon, when it was an inspiration and an emotional anchor among the chaos and the screaming excitement of a frozen Grant Park. It grabbed me again this evening, and elevated me. It made me believe I could just set sail again, as though I’d never stopped.
Owch. Bad mistake.
I felt a sort of crackle in my ankle, then a shooting pain in my right calf. But I think it’s OK: it wasn’t a red card, and probably not even a yellow. Just a stern finger-wag that meant: let this be a warning. Any more of that old nonsense and you really will pay for it.
So that was it. Three minutes of running, 48 of vigorous walking. But I didn’t mind. Getting out of the house was the important thing. I walked briskly through the avenues of blossom; along the familiar, secluded lanes, past a parked Porsche containing a grinning middle-aged baldie and a giggling blonde old enough to know better. As I continued on my way, I fancy I heard the painful splintering of a marriage or two on the gentle Berkshire breeze.
A dog-walker nodded, and chewed contemplatively on his pipe. On the other side of a garden fence I heard a child cry: “Yes! And Gerrard must score!” It’s a sentiment I’m in complete agreement with, just 24 hours ahead of a match that has become an established annual fixture: Liverpool’s Champions League semi-final against those gluttonous town mice, Chelsea.
On the return leg, I see a tottering figure in the distance. It’s Railway Bob, prima inter pares of the village drunks, stumbling homewards. He’s one of the old school. One of a dwindling tradition of happy inebriates. He really does stagger home, bouncing himself off the walls of some imaginary narrow corridor, huge grin across his purple face, murmuring some unidentifiable tune. As I approach, he clings to a garden fence, as if protecting himself from the threat of alien abduction.
“Good evening, Bob.”
“Hull-oooo sir! Ha ha ha! Hull-ooooo!”
I decide to leave the conversation there, taking a detour across the cricket pitch so I can slip back home with little risk of being spotted by anyone else.
I won’t pretend I feel great. I’m not sure I feel anything much, apart from mild relief. What I do know is that I’m back to square one. And square one is not some place I was in December or January. I’m back to the beach at Puerto Banus, April 2001, where I got up early one morning and set off, kitchen timer in hand, on the first step of what was supposed to be a ten week plan to be able to run three miles. It took me eight months. It seems like a long time ago now, and it’s another story. Or is it?
It’s hard to avoid the feeling that it’s actually the same one. Back then, although I didn’t realise it, I was 12 months away from what would have seemed like a laughably improbable London Marathon. This morning, I put my name in the hat for a 2009 London Marathon ballot place. Crikey. It’s déjà vu all over again.
In truth, there are major differences, the main one being that I’ve now been there and done it whereas before, the thought of completing a marathon filled me with awe, and an excitement that throbbed through every waking hour. That’s what’s missing just at the moment: the buzz; the thrill.
Let me work on that. In the meantime, I need a pencil plan. Before I think about proper running again… y’know, the sort where I set off and return, six or ten miles later, without having walked or puked or felt the need to cut across the cricket pitch to avoid being seen… I need to get a few basics in place.
Delardification has to be top of the list. The best thing about being as fat and heavy as this, is that the pounds will drop off quickly and easily. It’s instant gratification in the other direction. Time to relearn some good habits. Walk daily, eat sensibly. I need to roll away that Almerian stone, before I can leave this cave.
I also think I need to return here, to runningcommentary.net. We tried other things, but they never quite worked out for me. This feels like home. In recent years I’ve taken to calling this a blog, but I dislike the word, and I’m not sure I much like the phenomenon. And I just don’t want to think of RC as a blog. When I began writing it, in 2001, I’d never heard the word. I suspect that people were ‘blogging’ before RC began, but this website has never been part of any movement. The original premise was that if I publicised my struggle and my ambition, I would feel more motivated to keep going. That still holds true.
But what’s my ambition this time around? Just to ‘do London’ again? That won’t inspire me, or anyone else, the way it once did. At the moment, I’m a wobble without a cause. But the searching has begun. I need to sleep on it.
A final RC point, of which I need to remind myself more often: how many great people have I met through this site? We’re not a big gang, but we write, we fight, we run — sometimes together, sometimes apart. I’ve met so many inspirational people here. Perhaps that’s the best single thing to emerge from all this: the proof that people (well, runners anyway) are essentially good and interesting, and that the adventures of other people can so easily become our own, if only we are prepared to let them.
It’s one of running’s many paradoxes that, for an activity rooted so deeply in competitiveness, it’s remarkably selfless. I need no reminders and no persuasion about the rewards on offer. But ultimately, it’s the kindness and decency of people, and their support, that keeps me coming back.
Did that sound convincing?
