Jogging Along

by James Birk

Chapter 9

  ‘It’s called an electric turbo shandy,’ said Ian with an air of mischief, ‘who’s up for it?’

  ‘What exactly does it involve,’ asked Neil with suspicion.

  ‘Well you’ve heard of a turbo shandy right?’ asked Ian.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Neil, ‘Bit old for all this nonsense really.’

  ‘Well your basic turbo shandy,’ Ian waved his arm drunkenly, in a vague attempt to help clarify his point, ‘is, well, it’s like a normal shandy, cept it isn’t really cos it’s turbo.’

  ‘What Ian is trying to explain, in his own unique way, is that in just the same way as a normal shandy is half lager and half lemonade, a turbo shandy is half lager and half lemon flavoured alcopop.’ Tim’s explanation was a little clearer and Neil nodded his head.

  ‘So a turbo shandy is basically a drink that tastes like shandy, but rather than being weaker than normal lager, is much, much stronger.’ he summed up.

  ‘Zactly,’ slurred Ian, ‘and its bloody brilliant.’

  ‘Right, well that sounds a bit mental to be honest, so I think I’ll pass on the turbo shandies and head home,’ he looked at our disapproving faces, before adding , ‘Got my little girl tomorrow,’ by way of explanation.

  We all nodded our acknowledgment that this was the correct course of action, except for Ian, who was not having any of it.

  ‘But Neil mate, I wasn’t suggesting we have turbo shandies,’ as if this revelation was enough to convince Neil to stay out for one more, ‘I was saying we should have electric turbo shandies.’

  ‘Which sound just as mental,’ said Neil, ‘so I think I’ll pass.’

  And he headed off. But he was wrong. Ian’s proposed drink wasn’t as mental as a turbo shandy. It was much more mental than that.

  An electric turbo shandy, as per Ian’s recipe anyway, consisted of half a lager, topped up with a blue alcopop, and then finished off with a double measure of vodka. It tasted quite nice, but the effects were fairly lethal to say the least.

  Somehow Ian convinced me, Darren, Tim and Alfie to partake in this madness. It would have been enough to finish me off, were it my first drink of the evening, as things stood it was my seventh.

  It was Friday and we were out celebrating the new recruits having successfully completed their training Even Julian had managed to get signed off, and was due to be bugging his new team leader with an unreasonable number of questions as of Monday morning. The end of training had coincided with pay day and Darren had suggested that we all go out to mark the occasion as we would all be working in different teams and on different floors the following week. Everyone had made it out except for Amy, Margaret and Cheryl. Margaret had claimed that she felt too old for this sort of thing, which I thought was reasonable enough, although in fairness there were plenty of people much older than her propping up the bars of Cardiff city centre that night. Cheryl was meeting other FFS employees for drinks first, but promised she would catch up with us later. Amy had apparently already made plans with her housemates and it was her absence that saddened me the most as I’d been looking forward to the chance to talk to her outside work for a change. I’d sensed there was something of a connection between us over the last few weeks. Certainly I knew that I’d been thinking about her a lot, but I had the impression that maybe she liked me too. Unfortunately she was moving to a different department as of Monday, and I knew that without her being in close proximity I probably wouldn’t have the nerve to act on my gut feeling. She would join the ever-growing list of girls that I referred to as the ‘might’ve beens’. Somehow this felt like more of a missed opportunity than normal.

  Thirteen of us had hit the pub at five o’clock and three hours later there were only the five of us left. Tim and I were celebrating the fact that Ian had been moved onto our team, as of all the new recruits, he was the one that we got on with the best. Tim was a little gutted that Alicia was going onto the same team as Amy and thus would be on a different floor to him, but knowing Tim that wouldn’t stop him from flirting with her as often as he could. He was a master of the ‘File Walk’ and was more than capable of spending ninety minutes away from his desk at any given time. Alfie I didn’t know very well, as he had been part of Darren’s cohort, but he seemed to get on with Darren, which naturally meant that I treated him with suspicion.

  However obnoxious I found him though, I was in need of Darren’s advice. He was currently the only person I knew who was training for a long distance run, and as my stamina had not improved greatly since my first run (in fact it seemed to be getting worse, the aches and pains seemed to be more acute and kicking in a lot earlier with each training session) I wanted to pick his brains on how exactly he’d achieved his level of fitness. I didn’t really know how to bring it up though, because asking for Darren’s advice on anything seemed to go against the natural order of things. He was already too jumped up for his own good, in my opinion. Fortunately Tim opened the door for me.

  ‘So how’s the training going,’ he asked.

  ‘Not bad,’ I replied, ‘it’s too early to say really, but I’ve been out for a few runs now.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking you!’ he said mockingly, ‘I was asking Darren. You see, unlike you, young Darren here will actually see his commitment through. Everyone knows you’re not actually going to run the Paris marathon.’

  ‘Well that’s where you’re wrong,’ I shot back, ‘I fully intend to honour my commitment, but I apologise for the misunderstanding, I’ve become quite single mined on the subject of training at the moment; what with doing so much of it.’

  I turned to look at Darren, who was regarding Tim and I bickering with a look of mild amusement.

  ‘So how is your training going Darren?’

  ‘Not bad, not bad, reckon I’ll get around the course ok. Was hoping to run it in one hour twenty but been having a few too many of these’ he pointed to his half empty pint glass, ‘on the weekends, so it’ll be more like one hour thirty now I reckon.’

  ‘I have no idea what that means,’ I said, ‘but it sounds pretty good. So how long did it take you to get fit enough to run thirteen miles then.’

  ‘I’ve always been pretty fit,’ said Darren, ‘I usually play five aside with the boys in work, and I’m down the gym most nights I can get there.’

  ‘But, I mean, you go running right?’ I asked, perplexed, ‘I mean how much running did you do to get fit?’

  ‘Not that much really,’ said Darren, ‘I go out probably about once a week, but really I find with the gym and everything, that I’m pretty fit anyway. I suppose I started easing off the weights and started doing a bit more cardio, but no, I haven’t done that much running at all really.’

  ‘Darren’s a beast down the gym,’ added Alfie, ‘he puts me and the boys to shame.’

  ‘Right,’ I nodded, ‘so maybe that’s where I’m going wrong with my training, maybe I should join a gym.’

  Tim snorted out most of his pint.

  ‘You mean to say that you’re training for a marathon, and you haven’t even joined a gym?’

  ‘Well, no. I thought that as it was mostly running involved, then I should probably train by running. Does that not make sense?’ I was genuinely confused.

  ‘Well it’s obviously a good idea to go running,’ conceded Darren, ‘I probably could have done a bit more training on the road myself. But you’ve got to vary your training a bit haven’t you?’

  ‘Have you? Why?’

  ‘Well if you just go running all the time, then you’re not going to improve very quickly. You need to give your muscles time to recover, but, I mean, you also want to keep training, so you do different things to work different muscles, so you can recover properly like.’

  Darren was nodding sagely, or at least as close as sagely as he could manage in his current state of inebriation. I had to admit that it did make some kind of sense. My dedication to training was unquestionable, but I was starting to feel like it was an uphill battle, although to
be fair, I hadn’t even attempted to run up any actual hills in training yet.

  ‘I bet you haven’t even bought any trainers yet,’ sniped Tim.

  ‘What’s wrong with these then?’ I pointed at my old tennis shoes.

  ‘Mate, you’ve can’t run a marathon in those,’ gasped Darren, ‘you have to get some specialist running shoes like.’

  ‘Well, I was going to buy some new trainers at some point,’ I acknowledged, ‘but I didn’t think there was any rush.’

  ‘No, you’ll mess up your joints in them shoes you’ve got on,’ warned Darren, ‘You need to go to a specialist running shop, and they make you run and that, and then they tell you what kind of trainers you need. Like whatever way you run, depends on what support you need.’

  ‘Although a fat bastard like you is going to need a lot of support,’ laughed Tim.

  Ian, who had been largely oblivious to the conversation, was looking at his phone.

  ‘My housemates are going to ‘Riviera’,’ he announced, ‘any of you up for that?’

  ‘Yeah, the boys are going there an’ all,’ affirmed Alfie, and Darren nodded.

  Tim drained his pint, ‘Sorry boys, I’ve got some business to attend to,’ he announced, ‘so I’m going to head home.’

  ‘You mean you’re going for a wank,’ laughed Ian. ‘What about you Chris? You staying out?’

  Riviera was the latest in a string of ‘flavour of the month’ bars that had opened recently in Cardiff. It was currently the mecca for all the young trendy people to go, and consequently had the audacity to charge for entry, while still being extortionately expensive as a place to buy drinks. It was the sort of place that Rob and I avoided back when we used to go out drinking on weekends, choosing more often than not to head to the preceding ‘flavour of the month’ bar, which would have considerably cheaper drinks and free entry in order to attract some kind of custom now that it was being overlooked by the cool kids. But Rob had not been available for drinks for quite some time, even our regular Wednesday sessions had all but disappeared now that he was an expectant father. So, even though it irked me to go to Riviera, a night out in a place that I disliked seemed better than no night out at all.

  ‘Count me in boys,’ I said.

  Several hours later, I was woken up by the unremitting ringing of my ‘pay as you go’ mobile phone. I reached over to my bedside cabinet to answer it and found myself punching the said cabinet, which was somewhat higher that I recalled it being. Swearing profusely I opened my eyes and discovered that I was in a strange room not unlike my own but with slightly different furniture and rather less clutter. The phone had stopped ringing by now, and glancing quickly at the screen I saw that the missed call was attributed to my parents, who in all honestly could wait until the very painful hangover I was currently experiencing had abated. I decided too that the mystery of my location could wait and I rolled over about to return to my slumber when I noticed the presence of someone else in the bed.

  My memories of the previous evening were incomplete, and aside from the knowledge that I had clearly drunk far too much, I had no idea what had transpired. I vaguely recalled chatting to a girl, who at the time I had found attractive, and as I was clearly not in my own room, I reasoned that I had been ‘lucky’ the night before. Indeed I had a distinct memory of sharing a taxi with the girl in question and so reached over and drew back the covers.

  And that’s when I woke up properly.

  ‘Good morning,’ smiled Cheryl with what seemed like genuine affection.