For the bawling baby athlete within, it’s been a disorderly, ill-fitting sort of week. With Tuesday to Thursday blocked out with day trips to London and Luton, I had high aerobic hopes for Monday — but as previously noted, Sunday’s prolonged activity prodded my ticker into mild panic. Unusually for me, I took the sensible option, the well-worn advice of coaches everywhere, professional and amateur, and I listened to my body. What I heard was the agitated flapping of the white flag. So I booked an unexpected rest day. And yesterday, my day in london was too long and too annoying to consider going out again in the late evening, so it was another green R on the spreadsheet.
Eyes are open at 5.30 this morning. I lie here for a while, too aware that all I’ve managed this week so far is a leisurely bike ride on Tuesday evening. Isn’t enough. With a day out of the house again today, I have to make a quick decision. I choose the only one, and slide out of my warm bed, into some strangely empty feeling running kit. Well, it’s been semi-retired for a few months. Through the back door, into the chill of a pre-sunrise October morning.
What a shock to learn that at 06:15, the world is now as cold and as black as the grave. When did this go and happen? Yesterday it was the warm cuddle of late summer; today it’s winter, and payback time for all those long bright days I wasted in the pub, or in my bed, or hunched in front of the PC.
Two minutes of brisk walking in one direction is the half-hearted warm-up, then I swivel and plod.
The music is perfect. The choir of King’s College Cambridge singing a medieval mass: the ideal soundtrack to this abandoned world.
Plod, plod, plod. It’s hardly a fast run, and I remain many weeks away from my version of a fast run. What I don’t do is walk at any point, which is heartening. Those first couple of runs at the start of any comeback, when I have to take walk breaks every few minutes, are just waiting room experiences. Eventually I’ll be through the door into the real thing, but I have to hang around for a while first. Today, even plodding eleven-minute-something miles feels luxurious to me as there is no walking involved. It means I’m back on the rails and heading the right way. I just need to coax fewer seconds into my miles. It will come.
The choir of King’s done magnificent, but 20 minutes in, as the eastern skies start to brighten, I need a change of mood, and switch to the shuffle. First up is the excellent version of Waterloo Sunset performed by a very competent folk duo whose CD the great Seafront Plodder sent me recently. It’s a greater song than I ever realised. Interesting how it sometimes takes a fresh interpretation, a variant, like this, to reveal the song’s true identity.
Next up is Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and a couple of songs from the great Rattlesnakes album. For me, it’s another one of these prominent musical landmarks. With Lloyd Cole comes a tumult of lunatic mid-80s flashbacks: late-night London, the wine trade and its parties, perilous love affairs and immense friendships — the sort you have in your twenties — largely now extinguished or outgrown or just spilled and lost forever beyond the brambles of adult responsibility. I shouldn’t torture myself with this stuff, but it’s like drinking just one more glass of vintage port. Some pleasures are so sublime that you calculate them to be worth the dreadful repercussions. Are they ever?
I could have listened to more, but the mood needed changing again. Something more upbeat to bring me home. So I fished out two great running songs from Springsteen: Born in the USA, and Born to Run. As mentioned ad nauseam in this place, the latter also transports me back a few years, but to a quite different sort of moment: the start of the Chicago Marathon in Grant Park in 2002. Born to Run was belting out as we charged through the start line. Like most rock anthems, it makes you believe you are gatecrashing some stupendous, unpredictable adventure, and if a marathon is nothing else, it is a stupendous, unpredictable adventure. In Chicago, it set the tone of the day, and somehow I can’t believe that the race, the whole Chicago experience, would have been quite the same without it.
The slowly brightening farm tracks of this insignificant Berkshire village are a long way from Chicago, though just for a minute or two, Springsteen brings us an unlikely moment of fusion. I arrive home relieved, and pleased, and excited, and sad, and tired. Only 3.6 miles, but it’s 50 seconds a mile faster than I managed over the same route at the weekend.
More tomorrow.
