After Christmas, marathon training continued, and I started garnering—maybe even commanding—more respect from those around me. I enjoyed having my body praised for what it could do rather than how it looked. For years I felt my male friends had seen me as a woman first and a friend second, and I had never troubled a boyfriend with my almost anti-competitive spirit. My newfound physical ease didn’t merely translate to moving my arse closer to the holy grail of looking better in jeans but to making the world seem smaller, more accessible, on foot. It became—and remains—a delicious pleasure to stride up the escalator in a tube station, my breathing steady and the strength of my legs powering me.
It wasn’t only moments of passing smugness that were my treats; it was being able to have more fun with more spontaneity. I will never forget the look on my toddler godson’s face when I saw him for the first time in a few weeks and picked him up like a tiny rocket ship, blasting him into the air. After months of running up hills, my arms were stronger than I had realized, and my enthusiastic “Woooooosh!” was followed by my nearly shoving him through the kitchen ceiling. We laughed conspiratorially as we both realized that I’d surprised myself with my new strength.
Whenever anyone asked me how I’d done it, the answer was simple: I decided to be able to.
As my body changed and my sense of its capabilities started to shift, I developed a more masculine side to my personality and, dare I say it, a competitive streak. I was getting to know my way around London per mile rather than per tube stop. I was happy to engage in sporting chat in a way that I could have done only with a heavy sense of irony before. Just as I had relied on goofing around on the sports field to mask anxieties I’d felt about performing sport, I had become dependent on humor when discussing it as well. Before, wry comments about “men chasing a ball around a field” were as far as I could get where sports were concerned, and I was the first to leap in with “Yeah, I can do a marathon too. A brunch marathon” when the London Marathon was televised on a Sunday morning every April. Now I wanted to chat about it. And I was finding it easier to spot—and then ignore—others who were relying on the same humor mechanisms instead of engaging with the subject. In time, I found the confidence to breezily wander around shops filled with fitness gear.
My new knowledge and grit didn’t lead to my becoming a social outcast; rather, people seemed more interested in me. While women were admiring of my tenacity with training and my ever leaner legs, men wanted to know more about me. I was garnering admiration, interest, and kudos not just from blokes I was dating but those I’d known for years. My male friends were viewing me with renewed respect: She’s actually going through with this, I could see them thinking.
My confidence filtered into my relationships with female friends too. I sensed respect from them: I was sticking to my plan, I was going to get it done. In embracing my masculine side, I was becoming a better woman. I found it easier to admit that I had goals or dreams and that it took dedication to achieve them.
After a lifetime of accepting that my body was to be looked at rather than used, I was learning to appreciate what it could do. Food became a practicality, not merely an indulgence or a torment; I came to associate it with fuel. I never stopped enjoying it, but I enjoyed it differently—because it helped me, not because I had guiltily used it as a bribe to get me through bleak days or cold nights. I became proud of my strong thighs. I didn’t care that I would never be as thin as some girls. I knew I would be stronger than many. While compliments are always lovely, I struggled to care when people remarked on how much weight I’d lost. “But have you seen what I can do now?” was all I ever wanted to reply.
My perspective on exercise shifted. It was no longer about getting fit or reaching aesthetic perfection. Now I was enjoying the thrill of setting goals and sticking to them, of developing the kind of mental discipline only sports could inspire. I saw that competitiveness and sweat needn’t be unfeminine or aggressive qualities. They could be attractive.
My goals and challenges weren’t all Pollyanna-ish either. I cherished the simple childlike glee of shoving on weird, bright stretchy clothes and going outside to leap around to loud music. I let my mind float off, pretending to be whichever rock star I was listening to, or imagining I was running from certain peril, or simply that I was winning a race I’d never entered. I chuckled inwardly as I wondered if passersby could see me nodding to a particularly juicy bass line. I felt my face soften as a song appeared on my playlist that had been sent to me as part of a flirtation. I grinned as a song that reminded me of a particularly high-octane party appeared out of nowhere. I was getting little extra bursts of living out there with my music, the intensity of each emotion heightened by the fast pumping of my blood.
My confidence, which in the past had been battered and bruised by romantic and career endeavors, felt as if it had been given emotional Botox. Boosted from within, it felt plumped up, more delicious than it had in years. Running around meant that I saw more people, my place in the world felt a little sturdier, everything felt a little less of a catastrophe and a bit more like the natural ebb and flow of life. It became harder to scuttle home from a bad meeting or an awkward date, head bowed over my phone or a magazine, then stay in and sulk for a weekend: There was a running plan to be dealt with. I couldn’t stay in, or marathon day would catch me out. Once I was out of the house, I felt my gaze shift outward again. A granny struggling with some shopping that I could help with, my arms stronger now. A couple squabbling on a park bench, reminding me that being in a couple wasn’t an automatic pass to happiness. And then the warmth of a bath and the sofa as a reward, rather than the fetidness of having been in one or the other for forty-eight hours.
Running ceased to be about what others might see when they looked at me. It became about what I saw when I ran. I started to find the change in the seasons more interesting than the changes in my body. This weight was the heaviest I could have shed. I was no longer running to prove that I could finish a marathon, or to impress my dad, or to sound good on dates. I was using these runs to give me clarity and focus, to remind myself of what I was capable of, and to spur me on in all areas of my life. I felt unstoppable.
Until one day I had to stop.
5
Injury
Everyone who has run knows that its most important value is in removing tension and allowing release from whatever other cares the day may bring.
—Jimmy Carter
I knew it would be a cold January run when I set out from home to Hampstead Heath. I had on my new thermal leggings and a pair of gloves. After half an hour, I was coping pretty well. The tip of my nose was as ruddy as ever, but my eyes were not watering too much, and my feet were surprisingly warm. For reasons I didn’t fully understand, my hips were taking the full blast of the afternoon’s icy winds. Each stride felt more like a stinging slap than the last. It had happened once or twice before, but the winter had been long and cold, and I assumed that this was just a weak spot of mine.
Stopping to cross the street, I tried lifting my heel up behind me and grabbing my foot to stretch out my hip flexors. I slapped the tops of my thighs on either side, trying to get the blood circulating, anything to warm up. It was no use; the pain was getting worse. Eventually, I decided that I wouldn’t run as far as I had planned and headed home with only two thirds of the run completed. I had to almost drag my leg behind me, despondent at the parade of runners sailing by.
An hour later, once I’d had a hot bath and changed, the pain across the top of my right leg was still excruciating. It felt as if someone had tightened the ligaments and tendons holding me together. I wanted to stretch and stretch, though it never made anything feel any better.
I headed out to the tube, on my way to meet a friend at the cinema. I barely made it to the station, almost unable to lift my leg. By the time I reached the South Bank, tears of pain were stinging my eyes. What had happened? I hadn’t fallen or knocked myself. I hadn’t knowingly sprained anything. I had no i
dea what could be causing such piercing agony, and I spent the length of the film shifting in my seat, longing to know if a decent rest would ease it. As the credits rolled, I dreaded standing.
Within forty-eight hours, I was sitting in a physical therapist’s consulting room. I was lucky to have been recommended a decent sports therapist. Josie—a dark-haired woman as tiny as she was commanding—was sympathetic and genuinely interested in what was causing my pain. In minutes she had got me down to my underpants and bra and had stuck tiny dots—the sort that usually indicate that a painting has been sold—on my shoulders, hips, elbows, and the backs of my knees. Then she put me on a running machine and told me to jog, which she filmed for a few minutes. The hip pain had eased considerably by then, but I was still wincing.
Once I was dressed, Josie rewound the footage and looked at it. Then we watched it together, her gaze hard with concentration, mine glazed with the sort of hopeful ignorance I used to reserve for trying to spot the baby in a friend’s ultrasound snapshot. Moments later, Josie looked at me and asked, “Have you had an accident recently that had a large impact on the left-hand side of your body?”
I had not.
“And possibly a secondary impact on the right?”
Nothing rang any bells. I had been fine for months, perhaps a year. Sure, I often had pain in my pelvis after sitting down for long journeys, and had done since long before I started running, but it seemed like a fair trade-off for a job that saw me mostly sitting at a laptop or curled in bizarre positions reading.
I gave her a blank look. “No, nothing.”
“Are you sure? You seem to have sustained a pretty big blow,” Josie repeated.
I racked my brain. Surely I would remember a massive blow to the left-hand side of my body. “No, really, I’m fine.”
“Okay, have you ever been in a traffic accident?” she persisted.
“Really, no, I have never been in a car crash,” I replied, as frustration at her surety bubbled up in me.
As my mouth formed that final “sh,” the realization hit me with a crash of its own: Four years previously, I had been knocked off my Vespa on Kilburn High Road by an SUV when it turned right without looking and drove straight into me. Sure, I had never been in a car crash. That was because I had been on a scooter. And then in the air.
As I watched the tape replay again and again, every bit of pain I had felt for the last four years made sense. Josie slowed down the footage and showed me my running gait in motion, complete with all of its attendant weaknesses. At the time of the accident, I had been checked over and told that, aside from a few ripped muscles, I had sustained no serious injuries. Back then I wasn’t a runner. What was more than evident as I watched myself run on the treadmill, the little dots rising and falling in irregular patterns, was that I had been injured after all. My pelvis was not in the correct place; it had been knocked around by the impact of that huge vehicle. Consequently, my body had adapted around the injury, growing weaker and stronger in equal measure.
My running training had made me stronger, but not symmetrically so. I had started to develop something of an imbalanced Frankenstein’s monster of a body. The front of one thigh was strong with a weak hamstring behind it. The reverse was true of the other leg, which was slightly farther forward than its partner on account of my misaligned pelvis. The pattern was repeating itself across my entire body, until my front hip flexor was no longer able to pull my leg forward without excruciating pain. All because one woman in a Chelsea Tractor could not be bothered to check her side mirrors four years ago.
I sat on the edge of Josie’s consulting couch, watching my marathon dream fade to tatters. I swallowed time and again, desperate not to cry in front of someone I had just met. What was to be done? Could I run again? Or were all of those people who had claimed that running would “destroy your legs” correct after all?
Josie calmly talked me through what I had to do and how we were going to get it sorted. Part of me had been hoping for something high-tech, a properly medical problem that could be remedied with a prescription. The reality was much the same as most of my running journey: Hard work was required. She told me immediately that I could not run for at least a month, until I had done exercises every day to strengthen and rebalance the muscle groups working so hard against each other. I began a daily regimen of painstaking Pilates-like movements—often while tied to a door handle or the back of a chair with stretchy physio banding to get the necessary resistance. Slowly, over the next few weeks, I managed to right myself. Though it was too late for me to be perfect in time for the marathon, the dream was not over. I submitted to whatever Josie instructed me, secretly impressed that I had endured the pain as long as I had.
It wasn’t the pain or the tedium of the exercises that proved to be the worst part of the experience. It was not being able to run. Under Josie’s instruction, I joined my local gym for a month so that I could keep my fitness up on other machines. Anything but running. What so recently had been an activity that filled me with sheer dread was now what I longed to do more than anything else. I felt caged in the gym.
I would wake having dreamed of running, and in my waking hours, I fretted endlessly about what would happen the next time I attempted a run. The idea that I once was anxious about buying a pair of socks seemed ludicrous compared to my fears about giving up running for good. Having gone from viewing my body as a tedious accessory to something genuinely useful, I now saw it as a great treasure. For six weeks I followed Josie’s orders; I shunned high heels; I prayed for the best.
With running injuries, it is often the case that you don’t know how recovered you are until you undertake a long run. Though you have to be prepared to fail, you can’t let yourself consider that tiny window of possibility. As in a grim game of chicken, I vacillated between wanting as many people as possible to know about the injury and keeping it a secret so it couldn’t take hold and gain power over me.
As marathon day grew closer, I began some tentative recovery runs. Amazingly, the pain had gone. It looked as if I would be on the starting blocks after all. I never managed to catch up with my original training plan, but I did what I could within the limited time frame. I got through March, thanks to Josie, late nights spent chatting on the London Marathon website, and a steady stream of texts, e-mails, and chats with my dad. I stretched, I fretted, I did my strengthening exercises. I watched the entire first season of The Wire standing with one foot tied to the bottom of a table leg. I did everything I could think of to get through, up to and including pestering everyone I knew for sponsorship, in order to drive home how much I needed to get round that course. One fact remained: The only way to find out if I was physically—or mentally—capable of finishing a marathon was to try and run a marathon.
6
The London Marathon
If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon.
—Kathrine Switzer
I could not have done more to prepare for my first London Marathon, yet I have never been less prepared for anything in my life. My mental image of the starting blocks was not dissimilar to that of an egg-and-spoon race at a school sports day: a handful of eager enthusiasts willing to give it their very best. The reality felt more like the chaos of a music festival. I was exhausted before I reached the starting line.
The day before, my parents and sister came up to London to cheer me and my brother along. We all went to the local pub for a high-carb lunch. I walked delicately, worried that the slightest knock could damage my chances of reaching the finish line with a misplaced bruise or sprain. I did not eat delicately; I polished off a bowl of seafood pasta as if it were my death-row meal. Then my sister ordered us shots of sambuca, convincing us that it would wear off long before bedtime.
Before I went to bed, I checked my sports bag, all packed for the next morning, and laid out my running gear next to it. When bedtime arrived, I found myself wishing for more sambuca. I had never been more awake. Perhaps it was nerves, perh
aps it was my body swimming in carbohydrates. Either way, I slept lightly, lying awkwardly in a variety of positions that I thought would rest my muscles as much as possible, while a million worst-case scenarios painted my mind in Technicolor.
Within seconds of my alarm sounding, I was whipping up scrambled eggs with a speed and focus that would have made my military father proud. I swallowed them grimly, still full from the day before. Their relentless rubberiness reminded me of school food: necessary nutrition and nothing more. I dressed, checked my bag another six or seven times, and sat on the very edge of the sofa, waiting for the taxi. Twenty minutes later, I was approaching Charing Cross station to meet my brother. His training had gone more smoothly, but he was just as nervous as I was. We had shared late-night anxieties, bizarre and hitherto unfamiliar food cravings, and endless tips, and he had provided a steadfast level of support since day one. I could barely wait to see him.
I had imagined he’d be easy to spot, a lone nerdy runner in a swarm of London day-trippers and homeward-bound nightclubbers. The reality made me draw breath. The only passengers at Charing Cross were runners, a sea of tense, solitary figures in wicking fabric. Eventually his face appeared in the swarm. There was barely space for us all on the trains heading toward Greenwich, and we shuffled onto the carriages in eerie silence. I assumed everyone else was an old-timer, destined for an impressive three-hour finish time and a quick fry-up before heading home. I know better now: That silence was a result of us all thinking the same thing. Everyone was nervous, whatever their fitness or experience.
We poured out of the station at Blackheath and began the fifteen-minute walk across the grass. The weather reports had been mixed all week, predicting everything from rain and wind to sun and unicorns. As we headed through southeast London, the air was crisp and clear. I imagined I had joined a cult that met in a secret London. We were marching to some sort of promised land, searching for answers from a leader we had yet to meet. It was an hour before the official start time; what would we do until then? What else did this strange pilgrimage hold for us? The answer, it turned out, was Porta-Potties.
Running Like a Girl Page 6