The party to celebrate my neighbour’s fortieth birthday went on late. I drank so much wine that I was persuaded to totter round the dance floor waving my arms in the air to Dancing Queen. Yep, that bad. I went to bed drunk, at 3:30 a.m., regaining consciousness around 4 hours later to be reminded that we had a long drive down to East Sussex ahead of us. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear at that moment, but duty intervened and demanded I deliver my wife and friend Sally to Brighton for a day’s shopping, and myself to nearby Lewes for another day’s carousing with forum legends Sweder and Seafront Plodder. Or Ash and Andy, as they are known when off-duty.
I arrived chez Sweder to find a reassuringly domesticated scene, with a grinning SP in the kitchen, behaving like some B-list celebrity chef, peeling potatoes with aplomb and tossing unsolicited cookery tips at anyone within earshot. Mercifully, he reverted to type shortly afterwards, and before long we were in the sort of old hippy pub that I would normally relish. Trouble was, with my headache throbbing in time to the thrash metal jukebox, the quivering pint of Harvey’s in front of me held little appeal. I should have stuck to my plan: to consume a couple of large Bloody Marys and leave the beer until later. There’s nothing quite like a Bloody Mary with lashings of Worcester sauce and Tabasco and celery salt and freshly-ground pepper, to seize a hangover by the gonads and sort it out. And I did have one of these marvellous items, but peer pressure forced a pint chaser on me. If that was a bad idea, it was an even worse one to shout up another round of Harvey’s. And another.
With my hindsight spectacles on, I can state that the least good idea of all was to move on to the legendary Dripping Pan, home of Lewes FC, and hand over a pile of beer tokens to watch the Rooks confront Ebbsfleet United. Goalless draws can occasionally be thrilling affairs but sadly, this wasn’t to be such an occasion. Instead, we donated two non-refundable hours to the elements. The greatest thrill, by some distance, was waiting to see if our ‘golden goal’ tickets would bear the minute matching the time of the first goal. The £3 investment at least ensured that we had three top-notch minutes to enjoy. I’ll say no more about the other 93.
Just before half time I elected myself burgermeister, and went off in search of some food poisoning ordnance. It was on this expedition that I realised just how bad my left knee had become. The nearby catering hut specialised in hot dogs only, and I was directed to the burger bar, in the opposite corner of the end, instead. Part of this trek involved descending about 20 concrete steps, each of which sent a ripple of pain shooting up my shinbone to jangle the knee, like one of those “test your strength” sledgehammer jobs at a funfair. The ache had started early that morning, and got steadily worse. By now it was giving me real discomfort. Back with the boys, mission accomplished, soundless bar the munching and ketchup slurping, head and knee throbbing, grimly watching the game in the wind and sploshing rain, stomach drooping ever closer to the earth, I reflected on how shit this all was. Not the company, or even the game, but me. The state of my health, and how much I’d declined in just two or three months of inactivity. Afterwards, as we traipsed up a short slope from one hostelry to another, I was left well and truly winded, as though I’d just climbed a steep hillside.
At this second place, we were joined by a character I’d half suspected had been manufactured by Sweder’s vivid imagination. A sort of Bunbury figure. Bunbury? I’ll let Wikipedia do the work for me:
“Bunburying is a term introduced by Oscar Wilde in the play The Importance of Being Earnest. It is the art of inventing a friend whose troubles are so compelling that nobody will question the need to visit that friend at short notice, and for any length of time. The art of Bunburying, when perfected, enables a person to follow their whims without fear of backlash from meddlesome friends and precarious family obligations.”
But no, “Captain Tom” is no Bunbury. He’s sort of real after all. I say “sort of real” because while he answers to this lofty monicker, his real name is Tim, not Tom. Or so he says. It’s sometimes hard to know what to believe in this Summerisle of a town. You half expect someone to step from a shop doorway and utter: “Welcome, fool. You have come of your own free will to the appointed place. The game’s over.”
Health concerns aside, we spent a jolly hour in this second boozer where, after another few beers, SP felt able to reveal that he was keen to enter the Brighton 10K this year. He will deny this, but before the day was out, he was inviting all and sundry to witness him in a couple of months time, prancing along Brighton seafront with nothing but a pair of lycra shorts separating him from total indignity. Even more rash was my promise to join him. The dodgy knee should have made this a forlorn aspiration, but such petty details are easily swept aside by a torrent of Harvey’s finest ale.
So what’s the point of all this? After all, it happened a few weeks ago now. Well, it serves to reintroduce the subject of alcohol, health, and running — three well-worn RC themes. Despite the excellent company through the day, and the later hospitality of Sweder’s hastily-arranged barbecue, my sleep-deprived bad head made the succession of beers that day really rather unappealing. I kept thinking: “I don’t want to drink this, but I am going to do it anyway.”
I reflected that I’d had a rather unhealthy couple of months, even by my low standards. Maybe not overly alcoholic (though again, my benchmark is probably not to be aspired to), but certainly in the food department. The usual culprits: red meat, cheese and crisps and peanuts. (Though strangely enough, very little chocolate. Am I losing my taste for it?) My troublesome knee had been a partial excuse. I couldn’t do anything active, the argument went, so I may as well regard this as downtime. I’d had a relatively abstemious year pre-summer, so perhaps I could afford to…. to write off a couple of months? Yeah, too hot to run anyway, even if my knee was OK. (Conveniently forgetting that we’d had the coolest, wettest summer since the days when Ye Olde Runnynge Commentarye was etched on parchment with a quill pen…) After this supposed rationalisation back in June, I then took an immediate step further than this, and concluded that my running career was as good as over, as was this website.
And they both may well be: I could have drifted on like this for a while longer. But a variety of things are forcing my hand, and straining to turn the clock back a season or two.
First of all, there was that sense of disgust at just how unhealthy I’d become; something that hit me quite squarely between the eyes during my day in Lewes. It was lot of fun, don’t get me wrong, but I was startled at how far I’d sunk.
Second, and this was something good that came out of my meeting with Sweder and SP, was the decision, finally, to have my knee looked at again. They nagged me. And it was looked at again, initially by the local doctor, then by one of the county’s leading orthopaedic surgeons. After prodding it a bit, the GP declared that this was a job for no less than “Dodds the Knee Man”. The name was uttered with reverence. And last week, I finally got to see the great man. Richard Dodds was captain of the gold-medal winning British Olympic hockey team in Seoul in 1988, and seems to know his stuff.
As I sat before him, it was impossible not to draw comparisons between us. We are pretty much the same age, yet he is one of those slender, hyper, lissome, grinning 50 year olds with a darting, gimlet eye; and I… and I am not.
He peered at the x-ray of my knee, and startled me by saying: “Are you aware that you have a piece of metal lodged above your knee…?
What?
He pointed at the x-ray, and sure enough, a small white lump stood out clearly. Good god. As the blood drained from my face, he leaned towards me and exposed the zip that runs around my trousers above the knee. “Fortunately”, he went on, “the lump of metal is attached to your trousers and not to your skeleton”. He guffawed at his own excellent joke before declaring that my knee was fine and I should carry on running. He then got down to the real purpose of the meeting: to compare marathons, and have a good old natter about running. He had first run London in 1982 as a medical student, and had been evidently dropping in regularly ever since. I wheeled out my usual lines about the marathon being about the journey, and not the destination… about the race being the reward and not the target (“I say, that’s profound”).
A good egg though. Apart from the x-ray, he gripped the troublesome joint in a number of exotic ways and observed that it was less muscley than the other, concluding that I’d probably gone down the classic over-compensation spiral: knee hurts, so I give more work to the other one to do, which then gets stronger as the other weakens, thereby making the weak one even more susceptible to injury. So he recommended some gym work, but thinks the sporadic knee pain is all about the basics: running too much on hard surfaces, carrying too much weight, and needing to check the suitability of my shoes. But that, taking on board these caveats, there is no good reason for not getting back out there.
Here’s an extract from his report (my emphasis):
…..Fifty-one year old man who took up running about 8 years ago and has done a number of marathons. He has had 3 recent episodes of severe patello-femoral anterior knee…. He has stopped running because of this, and is concerned that he will do more damage. He is in pretty good general health…..
…..On examination, he is a big man generally, but his hips move beautifully. He has no effusion in the knee, but slight wasting of the left quads. His knee moves through a good range of movement. He has no tenderness on the joint line and his patello-femoral joint is non-irritable. The knee is stable. X-rays show a bony spur off the proximal pole of the patella, but nothing significant…..
….physio is recommended to get him back into his activity though I think we should MRI scan him first to guard against significant pathology.
And the MRI scan happened a couple of days ago. I’ve often heard of footballers having one of these experiences, but I’d never stopped to wonder what it actually was. I now know. You have to dress up like one of those Monty Python ladies, in a flowery gown that barely covers the midriff, then sit in a waiting room with other plump middle-aged men wearing similar garb but pretending not to be. We all discover that the patch of carpet immediately adjacent to our bare feet is extraordinarily fascinating, to the point where we do not have time to have a conversation, or even concede that we are not alone in the waiting room.
Eventually I am released from this British torture, and invited onto the second stage of the process. Here’s what happens: you lie on a table with (in my case) my left knee encased in a tube. Then they clamp headphones on you and make you listen to a selection of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits as you drift in and out of a giant Polo mint. It’s all rather surreal, and even the Filipino nurse seemed sworn to secrecy, and just looked at me blankly when I asked about the link between Ol’ Blue Eyes and my knee. All she said was “The report will explain everything”. We’ll see.
So anyway, despite the claims of the knee god, I’ve been feeling in pretty bad health generally, and nowhere is this more obviously manifested than in my expanding girth. Yes, weight has been as permanent a topic in these pages as the plan to run the Dublin marathon, but things have taken a turn for the worse. I’ve spent the last year mostly working from home. This is a tremendous privilege, and I would hate to lose it. It should be a perfect arrangement for a runner: the opportunity to snatch an arbitrary hour here or there to get out into the rolling plains of West Berkshire. In earlier years I would have seized this miraculous change in circumstances with both feet. This year, for some reason, I haven’t. Maybe it’s even become too easy. Maybe you have to be time-poor to appreciate the opportunities. I’m the guy working in the chocolate factory who never thinks of nibbling the product because it’s all too easy and too available, and therefore lacking excitement. Being atavistic, maybe we need the thrill of the hunt.
The bald statistic is that 12 months of sedentary domicentricity has added around 25 pounds to my central regions. Trousers are painfully tighter these days, with all my belts groaning on their final, despairing notch. We like to joke about our… personal density on this site but while I was always overweight, I do now feel genuinely fat for perhaps the first time ever. Combined with my age, I’ve entered heart attack territory, and the verdict is clear and non-negotiable: something must be done.
Next reason is the Boston Marathon. It’s one of those events you have to do before you die, even if it kills you. Oldest, most celebrated marathon on the globe, now in its 113th great year. Entry by qualifying time only — unless you’re one of the lucky 5% who can grovel well enough to pick up a charity place. The great JDRF has given me that opportunity in April 2009, and I should seize it.
Then we have the economy. The economy? A bit left-field, admittedly. Only posterity knows how this mess was resolved, but at the moment things are looking bleak. Bad enough for the lamest lame duck president of the modern era, GW Bush, to exclaim memorably in the last week that “If money aint loosened up, this sucker could go down” — by which he meant the entire house of cards we’ve all been casually constructing, on the quicksand of dodgy credit and mixed metaphors. But that’s how many of us are feeling at the moment, that “this sucker could go down”. It’s no time to be complacent. I can’t be certain of keeping my job, and need my wits — what’s left of ’em — about me. Or within reach, anyhow. I’m not an Armageddonista, creeping through the undergrowth with a serrated survival knife between my teeth, and a few solid gold coins sewn into my underpants. But let’s face it: things are gloomy at the moment, and not helped one bit by the deepening chill of autumn, and the prospect of a long winter ahead. It’s a time to be clear-headed and resourceful.
There is yet another reason, and perhaps the most compelling of all. As most people who read this will know, Chris Moyle, a good friend of this website, is not well these days. Why these things tend to happen to the most decent, fittest people, is one of those mysteries I gave up probing a long time ago, because no reasonable answer exists. Chris will be out of action for a while as he goes through his treatment and recuperation, and I know that he is missing his regular running, and the social life attached to it. I received a mail from Chris recently, and couldn’t help thinking of the essential, touching truth in the sentiment often seen expressed on marathon teeshirts: I run because I can. If Chris can’t do any running at the moment, then we all need to do it for him.
And so, this week, I’ve been reawakening those muscles in the gym. Three good sessions so far, with around an hour of cardio-vascular each time. Treadmill, static bike, rowing machine, cross-trainer and stepper. Each time, I’ve emerged into the night dripping with sweat. How good that feels; how very good. I’d forgotten just how good.
This evening, just as I was settling down to watch the live football on TV, I had a quite bizarre thought. It must have been the sound of the heavy rain on the window that made me glance up, and notice the darkening sky. I hoisted myself from the sofa, and went to look out. There was quite a storm brewing out there, with the trees at the end of the garden bending in the strong wind. My bizarre thought was this: “I should go for a run.”
And I did. Within a few minutes, I was crunching up the gravel drive with the chilly wind whistling round my ankles. I reached the gate and set off on a 3.08 mile jog. My first run in four months. It was slow — very slow — but it was 3 miles of plodding, without a single walk break. The bad news is that I managed to ignore the advice of the great Dodds: I wore the same old shoes, didn’t warm up or stretch, and ran on the pavement instead of grass or trail. The very faintest of knee twinges as I got home was a reminder to me that I shouldn’t abuse this new opportunity.
A hot shower and clean clothes, then sinking back in the couch to watch the dregs of the game, feeling bloody marvellous. Certainly better than I felt on that wretched, hungover afternoon in Lewes, when my knee throbbed with pain, and the ketchup dripped from that deathburger as though it was my own blood, and my own sense of hope, seeping out of me.
