He never would have seen me, because he barely had a face. At first I thought that the sunlight was dappling shadow across his features. But no, he really did have only half a face. It was as I glanced at him, trying my best not to stumble in shock, that I saw the text on his vest was that of an army regiment. I understood that he was probably a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. And his injuries were profound. Where once there would have been eyes, there were only smooth scars. Likewise one of his ears. All of this above a body in perfect working condition. I swallowed and ran on, stunned by what I’d seen and ashamed of my knee-jerk assumptions.
Those mornings when I hadn’t felt like going on runs, when I felt the ghost of a hangover, when I chose to watch dross on TV instead of doing my stretches, seemed ridiculous now. Here was a man half destroyed by war, choosing to push his body to the limit, while his mate described the scenery. I reached the finish line transfixed by thoughts of the opportunities I had and how little I made of them. It was a perfect boost to my training for the Brighton Marathon the following month, which I was more committed to than ever.
9
Runner’s High
Stadiums are for spectators. We runners have nature and that is much better.
—Juha Väätäinen
If my first marathon had been about seeing whether I could do it, and my second had been about helping a friend make a dream come true, my third was about finding out what I was capable of. I wanted to know how far I could push myself, how fast I could go over a marathon distance, and how successfully I could harness my emotions.
There was nowhere to hide. I was running a marathon in my hometown, injury-free. No excuses. Before I had busied myself by attaching emotive monikers to my endeavors, as if they were lost episodes of Friends: The Lonely One, The Enraged One, The Sobbing One. This time I would approach the project like a machine. A marathon machine.
Things went better than I could have hoped. I trained hard throughout the spring. I was disciplined about losing a bit of weight, so there was less Hemmo to carry along the course. I did my stretches, and I worked hard with a trainer—the unfailingly patient Adam, whom I had been seeing for eighteen months. When I’d committed to running the London Marathon with Julia, I had found a trainer I could work with occasionally to strengthen the muscles from which I needed the most support when running. The memories of my injury—and the tedium of the physio exercises—I had endured the first time round convinced me that parting with what felt like an extravagant sum was worth it. Adam, a keen triathlete and well-qualified trainer, was my age and knew I was interested in the science of what was going on in my body and had little interest in being “beasted,” military fitness–style. His encouragement and practical approach to my physiology (and emotional roller coaster) has worked wonders. I remained uninjured.
Gradually, I relearned the lesson that I ran to improve my life; I didn’t improve my life in order to run. I ate better than I ever had, forcing myself to love oat smoothies under the tutelage of the former flatmate whose North London runs I had envied all those years ago. I took part in local park runs every Saturday and felt buoyed by the communal effort; I focused on fund-raising to make sure that for every aching muscle I suffered, I was reminded that there were others in greater pain. I took resting seriously for the first time in my life and didn’t regret saying no to the odd night out. I was sleeping better than I ever had. I relished the admiration that the garbagemen expressed when I lifted almost the same amount they did with ease. The routine propelled me forward, freeing me to be more creative in other areas. I ran along the seafront, I ran across the Downs, I ran myself happy. I was ready for my third marathon.
Until tonsillitis. At first I thought I was tired. Then I thought I had a sore throat. Next came the shivers. Two days before the marathon, I showed my throat to a friend who took one look, shrieked, and announced, “You look as if you have babies’ anuses down there.” It was a low point.
The next day I tried calling my doctor to see if I could get an appointment. She said she would leave me a prescription at the pharmacy, which I duly collected. Tonsillitis it was. Though my hopes of running a strong marathon had faded, I wanted to know if I could at least make the starting line. I didn’t care if I ran a slow time, but I wanted to take part in the event for which I had been training six months, the one that ran straight past my front door. My only concern was lasting damage. In endurance running, there is a fine line between gritty courage and downright dumb-ass bravado. I preferred to stay on the alive side of that line. I tried calling my doctor to ask whether I should run, but the office was closed.
I put out a plea on Twitter in case there were any doctors online who could help. I received a barrage of answers about people having heart attacks and inflamed brains, along with plenty of other horror stories that only the Internet could provide. There was one useful tweet: A friend pointed me in the direction of Tim Weeks, a trainer who offered to call me. Moments later, I was talking through my symptoms with him, as he is a hugely experienced runner and trainer, and his wife is a doctor.
“I don’t mind it if it’s hard; it’s going to be hard anyway. I just don’t want to be a fool and damage myself in the long term,” I explained.
“You won’t do that with tonsillitis,” he reassured me.
“Are you sure? I have a lot of friends telling me not to run. . . . ”
“I am sure. But if you start, you should do so having accepted that you might not finish.”
“That’s the opposite of everything you’re told about setting out for a marathon!”
“Yes, but you clearly have tonsillitis. You are in a weakened state. Just keep your chest covered for as long as you can when you start. And don’t expect too much of yourself.”
The next morning I set off for Brighton’s Preston Park with a long-sleeved top on and three scarves in my bag. Handing over my bag left me with a slightly limbless sensation, as if I were missing more than just a few possessions. It was me and my body at the start line, ready for another expedition into the unknown.
The first half of the marathon was a breeze. I kept covered up for well over an hour and received a steady trickle of texts from friends, family, and the lovely Tim Weeks. As we hit the seafront, I saw Julia, waving like a maniac at me on the side of the road, and soon we had covered the distance of a half marathon. I received a text from my brother to say that he had just completed the Paris Marathon. I ran past the square where I lived; I saw more friends and even my neighbors out on the street, shouting and cheering. Then, at around mile twenty, I abruptly felt as if someone had pulled a stopper out of me. I had never eaten or trained better for a race in my life, but I felt utterly bloodless. It was something I had never felt, even in the extremes of exhaustion. This wasn’t just tiredness; it was a bodily refusal to engage. I stopped at the next water station and took two drinks, which I sipped while walking slowly on the side of the road. I gave myself a pep talk and decided to continue.
As with the London Marathon, a significant chunk of the second half of the course was in a large industrial space. It went past the Shoreham power station and a powerfully depressing sewage works. My brain was looping, telling me off for not having trained properly, for being weak, for not having the mental rigor to achieve my goals. You’re just tired, you have an illness, I kept trying to tell myself, only to have my brain reply louder each time, reminding me of my inadequacies. We plodded past iron gates and concrete wastelands while this hideous internal dialogue continued to torment me: You’re not good enough. It’s not even that you’re not good enough, it’s that you can’t get any better. You’re just not good.
Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and slowed to a walk, a heaving sob in the well of my stomach.
“You can’t stop,” said a voice behind me.
I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t in the mood.
“Seriously, you can’t stop,” the voice repeated. “You’re the only thing keeping me going.”
; I turned and saw a bloke about my age, running a couple of feet behind me. I raised my eyebrows at him. Well, I tried to. Even my eyebrows were exhausted.
“Honestly, I’ve been watching your feet and trying to keep mine in time with yours. It’s the only thing that has kept me running since we were back there.” He waved a hand dismissively, suggesting that his opinion of a Sunday spent touring a sewage farm was as favorable as mine. “If you stop running, I will have to stop running, and I don’t want to let my friend down.”
“Well, where is your friend?” I asked, dragging myself back into a run.
“He’s gone ahead. But we were running this together for his mum.”
“Oh no. Is she okay?”
“No, she died of cancer a few months ago. I said I would run the marathon with him to raise money for the hospice where she was.”
“Oh.” I felt stilled. Perhaps my woes weren’t quite that bad. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, but really, you have to keep me running. I can’t flake out now.”
“Yes, you’re right, we really do have to keep running, don’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Deal,” I said. “I’m Alex.”
“And I’m Nick. Nice to meet you.” We shook hands.
“I won’t leave you until this is done,” I said.
Run we did. For the last five miles of that marathon, we plodded along together, not fast but not walking. I promised him for miles that there were friends at a house on the seafront, waiting to cheer us. It seemed like weeks until we got back to Hove, but when we did, what a greeting! They had made bunting! They were having an actual party! I waved and pointed at Nick, yelling, “This is Nick!” until they all cheered for him too. As we approached the last mile, his supporters did the same for me, and I beamed as his girlfriend caught his eye, tearfully proud.
When we got to the finish line, nineteen minutes after the four-hour-and-thirty-minute time I had been hoping to achieve, we shared the kind of hug that you can have only with a total stranger you have shared an intense experience with. I had learned more about Nick in that last hour than I ever found out about people I’d worked with for years. I heard about his work rebuilding the Cutty Sark, and I told him about running past it in the London Marathon. I told him about my family, and he told me about the friend he was running to support. We had battled forward, part of that collective endeavor to convert energy to money, to aid, to solace. We were making something bigger than salt, sweat, and swollen feet. Only the two of us knew how horrible those last few miles had been, how spirit-crushing our internal mechanisms could be, and how sometimes it is only the hand of a stranger extended toward you that can get you to the very end. When we got there, it was all the sweeter for it.
“I’ll rest!” I promised my friends, who were muttering darkly about me overdoing things. And rest I did. I stayed at home in my deliciously ugly compression socks, eating whatever I wanted and catching up on ridiculous television. When I was better, I spent a month going to parties wearing silly heels. I enjoyed myself doing whatever I wanted, letting routine’s grip relax a little. I kept up with a few park runs and did some social runs with my sister, who was busy losing her baby weight by running around the parks and commons of South London. I enjoyed the lack of pressure, letting myself acquiesce to the fact that no matter how hard you train, chasing a time or fund-raising target need not be the focus. My acceptance and enjoyment were a delight, and running brought me unmitigated gentle pleasures for months.
Then came the e-mail. Edinburgh. I had forgotten about Edinburgh. During my post–London Marathon madness the year before, one of the more “fun” runs I had applied to was called the Speed of Light: a live running installation that would be part of the world-famous Edinburgh Arts Festival. Its aims sounded lofty—“a desire to elevate non-elite distance and endurance running to the realms of the extraordinary”—but the practicalities really bewitched me. Put together by a public art collective, the proposal was for a group of runners to wear bespoke LED suits controlled from a distance, which meant that they would change color, brightness, and the speed at which they flashed. We would run across the crags of Arthur’s Seat in formation, as taught by a choreographer, at different speeds, creating an elegant cross between Tron and a host of fireflies on the hilltop. In my post-marathon flush of enthusiasm, I was determined to be a part of this event. It wasn’t just childish excitement about donning a space-age suit that had fired my imagination; it was being part of a statement that running needn’t always be about distance or time. That there could be beauty and validity in the act. Yes, the more I thought about it, the more I believed that this was the event for me.
But as time had passed, the communication from NVA, the organizers, had been very infrequent. I hadn’t been convinced it would happen—my perception of the Edinburgh Festival had been tainted by that of the Fringe: a pub table of twenty-two-year-old stoners trying to find a back room for some improv. If it did happen, I thought it would be much more about spectacle than any sense of athleticism. I’d forgotten about the event and about training for it. After all, it was four months after the Brighton Marathon. Until the morning I sat in bed with my laptop, some toast and peanut butter, and a coffee, and saw the e-mail. About training.
Whereas e-mails from the London Marathon usually arrive via the charity you are running for and are chatty blocks of text gearing you up for the challenge, this was a video. Of a man looking very angry on top of a hill. The man was Angus Farquhar, the organizer of the event, which was to comprise groups of runners in full-body light suits, running up and down Arthur’s Seat in the dark, creating stunning visual effects for the spectators, who would be watching live on the hill. While I had been excited by the event, now I was exhausted. And terrified.
The video began with a stern talk about how hill training was different from any other form of training, that if you could run ten miles confidently on the flat, you still might struggle with the challenges that Arthur’s Seat presented. “Doing a few road runs will be a complete nightmare. You simply will not be able to keep the pace up, and keeping the pace up is essential,” warned Angus as the wind came straight off the sea and ruffled his hair vigorously. “If, after ten minutes, you need to walk, your whole group will have to walk, and the whole beautiful effect of this work will be destroyed.”
Running as art didn’t feel like it was going to be that much fun. Angus spoke sternly of the type of training needed and of how we WOULD NOT COPE if we did not complete it. “There is no magic to hill work; you just have to go out and train on hills.” Fair enough, but Angus, please, a smile would not hurt. There followed an even sterner talk about footwear. We were to buy proper trail shoes. Anyone in a regular pair of running shoes was a fool, as good as taking her life into her own hands.
The camera focused again on Angus, looking increasingly livid. A final word. “I said we were on steep terrain; we are actually on the edge of a cliff, Salisbury Crags.” The camera panned past Angus to show a vertical drop of nearly fifty meters. “But don’t worry, we will never go within two meters of the cliff. It will be really easy to trip.”
Within two meters! With wind that stiff, it didn’t seem like much at all. My heart rate had been rising steadily. I forwarded the video to Adam, my trainer, with a bold “LOL!” beneath it. His response wasn’t quite as chirpy; the text that pinged back almost immediately announced a change in tactics. I would have to up my running. Again. It was time to learn to run on rough terrain, and it was time to run at night. I guiltily kicked a new pair of heels under my bed and looked up some tips on hill training.
It was a full moon for my first night run on the South Downs. Adam and I had set out at ten P.M., as early as we could have done, given the late July weather. Dusk was falling as we drove out of Brighton, and by the time we set off from Devil’s Dyke for Truleigh Hill, the moon was almost directly above us. While I had grown to love runs after dark along the seafront, I still gasped when we reached the top of
the first hill and I looked out toward Brighton. The sea was visible, the moon reflected in it. The scene was the sort of thing a Goth teenager might have on a bedroom wall, complete with a sympathetic yet masterful wolf at one side, howling. I was wearing my headlamp from the White Night Half Marathon, and Adam was carrying a flashlight. The galloping sensation of running over chunks of chalk and flint was utterly different from the reliability of hitting tarmac or pavement. I could feel each of the muscles and bones in my feet pulling together, getting stronger and having a strange sort of fun as they tried to work out what they would hit with the next step. I felt my heart rate increase as I headed up and up, and I felt my body giggle as I juddered down a hill, using all the core body strength I had built with Adam to stop me from toppling over entirely. I got home after midnight, excited. I didn’t need to be scared; I was going to become art after all!
On the night of the event, I realized that no matter how lofty my artistic ambitions had been, they could not save me from the enormity of Arthur’s Seat. It was a Saturday in midsummer, and as I headed through central Edinburgh, the entire city seemed to be warming up for the mother of all parties. I paced through the streets in my nerdy little trail shoes and merino-wool running top, past bars humming with the nervous energy and lip-glossed hope of a good Saturday night. I headed out of the city and to the tiny city of marquees housing the event and equipment at the bottom of the hill. We gathered in groups and then walked out onto the hill to hear a run-through of our routines. We would be running in circles, zigzags, and other patterns across the landscape, wearing our light suits like wannabe spacemen, and holding special flashlights that lit up when shaken. Excitement bubbled through the group, and I felt a flicker of smugness at those I had passed on the way. Pah! I was going to be the one having the magical Saturday night after all.
Running Like a Girl Page 11