Call the Midlife (20 page)

Happiness is life’s way of letting us know we’re getting things right.

PART 2

Marathon Diary

Friday, 2 January 2015

Ow, fuck, I mean – really ow, really fuck. It’s 5.15 in the morning and I’ve just hobbled to and from the toilet for another of my ever weaker, ever more frustrating, every more worrying pees in the night. The cravings for which seem to keep me awake more than I’m asleep nowadays, feeling like I have a gallon of urine bursting to get out but always culminating in no more than a forced and all too often painful, hot dribble. I need to go and see someone about this. I did a year ago but my doc said it was nothing to worry about, probably a urine infection at worst. ‘Certainly nothing to do with the prostate or anything else as potentially sinister.’

I need to go for a big check-up this year anyway. A Mayo-style deal. Mayo, the clinic a good friend told me about. The place in the US that can tell you what nasties are creeping up on you almost before even they know themselves. That’s all to come. It’s all part of the plan. The plan I’m still working on. The plan that I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of years.

The reason my knees are hurting like they want to disown me, and the whole of my right leg feels like it has a red-hot poker embedded in it – is because yesterday, 1 January 2015, I ran further than I’ve ever run in my life before: twice around the lake near to where we live, 9.4 miles to be precise.

Ouch.

Double ouch with bells on.

It was something I had promised myself I would try to do before the end of 2014. New Year’s Eve was my original scheduled date,
but as it was my wife’s thirty-sixth birthday, we had to go to see my eighty-nine-year-old mum and had agreed to attend a friend’s drinks and dinner party, this was not the wisest choice of dates.

Idiot.

One day late was OK though, as long as it didn’t spill over into the 2nd. Not that things looked at all promising when I woke up at ten o’clock that morning. My mouth was as dry as the desert, my head was like a cracked bowling ball and my throat felt like someone had poured broken glass down it in the middle of the night. The dinner in question had gone on until 2 a.m. We’d drunk champagne, beer, red wine and brandy. Tash had got up early with our two sons, five-‘But nearly six, Dad!’-year-old Noah and two-and-a-half-year-old Eli, whose new game is entering our room just after 6 a.m., as regular as clockwork, declaring his allegiance to Peppa Pig and her family.

By the time I dragged myself out of bed and staggered downstairs, Tash had already been up with the boys for two hours. The three of them were currently mustered at the breakfast table by the bottom of the stairs, midway through porridge, various slivers of fruit and a communal jug of water. Noah was being his usual smiling enthusiastic self, Eli was in the middle of his daily musing on what the heck everything was about, while Tash, quite frankly, looked like the living dead – bless her.

‘Babe, back to bed, immediately,’ I declared. ‘Your turn, it’s mine from here.’

She hesitated in that stoic mum way that means, ‘Don’t worry I’m up now, it’s OK.’ But for once I surprised myself by saying exactly the right thing: ‘Either you go back to bed this instant, or I am. There’s no way I’m not taking advantage of this situation if you’re going to stay up with the boys.’

‘In that case, they’re all yours.’

A few seconds later Mummy had gone back to the land of nod, back to the still-warm, gorgeous pit I had left only moments earlier. I felt like shit, but so what? The kids were in sparkling form and ready to eat up whatever this next day of their brief lives had
to throw at them. I could have put a movie on, declared a duvet day – both totally acceptable in the handbook of the hungover parent – but neither option would get me the brownie points I needed later on that afternoon to disappear before darkness fell for the two hours required for me to get round my lake twice. This was diabolical planning all round; I’d had a skinful of booze, followed by terrible alcohol-induced sleep, yet here I was contemplating a head-on, serious boys’ day out with my sons to give me what remaining chance there might be of retrieving the situation.

The run couldn’t wait until tomorrow. In my mind, 1 January is still technically more part of the year before than the dawning of the next. Don’t you think? New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are two halves of the same story, the definitive annual two-parter; 1 January simply cannot exist in its own entity, it is the full stop of the preceding twelve months. Therefore 2 January is the true new beginning, like the day after people get married. ’Tis with the dawning of the first complete twenty-four hours after the ceremony that the fairy dust of the big day begins to settle and reality kicks in. So provided I could get my run in on New Year’s Day, I would be OK.

But why the time pressure? Well, the truth of the matter is, it was one of many unofficial deals I had made with myself since the idea of this book came up.

All my deals with myself are unofficial, in as much as they are never written in stone but somehow hover above my head, waiting for the green light. Sometimes weeks, or months, or even years pass by while I let my subconscious mull over what to do. I simply wait until the deliberations are over and the answer pops up, telling me what to do. In this particular instance the answer to the question, or rather questions: Do I think it’s important we should all know what it feels like to run, or walk, or crawl a marathon before we die? How would doing so change me as a person? Would doing so enlighten me in any way? And, more pertinently: Do I think I could complete one, even if I wanted to? Both mentally and physically.

With these and other considerations in mind I had taken it upon myself to just make a start. Not running but shuffling.

Every day on my regular commute back home from work I pass Virginia Water on my right-hand side. A beautiful man-made lake commissioned by the Duke of Cumberland as part of his sprawling Surrey/Berkshire game park back in ye olde times of 1753. For a number of months towards the end of last year (2014) it kept on catching my eye, each time gradually drawing my attention more than the last. The more I acknowledged the feeling, the stronger it became. Something was literally telling me I had to stop one day and begin to run round it.

A genuine calling.

And so one day that’s exactly what I did. I pulled into the car park, took my parking ticket from the machine and set off anti-clockwise around the perimeter to see how far I could manage before I had to stop for a breather.

Like I say, whether I was actually running or not wasn’t the issue. All I had to do was effect any movement other than walking for as long as I could, hopefully getting a little sweaty and out of breath in the process.

I didn’t care what it looked like, as long as there was an outside chance it may become sustainable. I mean, we are talking way below even the level of jogging here. In fact, during one of my first ‘shuffles’ round the lake, two power walkers overtook me. I didn’t mind, and they were far too polite to giggle, although they did go respectfully quiet as they carried out their manoeuvre, like a stream of cars slowing down to pass a hearse.

They had their agenda and I had mine.

All I was concerned with in those early outings was to make it around the lake, any way, anyhow.

The first time I shuffled for perhaps a few hundred yards short of a mile before taking a break, and then perhaps four or five times after that. But the feeling of satisfaction, after I’d completed that first circuit first time out, I felt for the rest of the day, right up until I was in bed and dropping off to sleep, was immense. I couldn’t wait to do it again the next day and then the next and the day after that.

My first few days of shuffling saw an exponential increase in stamina.

On only day two I could make it round having just paused three times.

Day three twice.

And then on day four I made it round all the way without stopping once.

Even though I was moving painfully slowly, glacially almost, I convinced myself I was now a runner.

Every day I felt secretly great. A similar feeling to when as a teenager you finally bag a girlfriend, but only you and she knows, that feeling when the world seems so much more exciting and shiny and bright than it did the day before.

If this was how running/shuffling was going to continue to make me feel, I simply had to carry on doing it.

As my confidence grew and the car park tickets began to stack up, my shuffling pace increased until I could complete my beloved circuit in under an hour, then fifty minutes. On Christmas Eve I even managed to record a personal best of forty-three minutes – though admittedly it nearly killed me.

‘I won’t be doing that again anytime soon,’ I said to myself, still feeling faint fifteen minutes later. By this time I had already started to flirt with thoughts about the ‘M’ word. I figured with the right amount of preparation I could probably shuffle a marathon, but not if I messed my joints up needlessly ‘running’ as fast as I could.

I don’t take many things in life seriously but when I do, I go to a different place. I wish I went there more often as it seems so much more peaceful than where I normally exist, but I suppose that’s the whole point. We have to really want something to stand any chance of experiencing it. And my main focus here was endurance. So, why go quickly? Why punish my 48-year-old joints and lungs more than I had to, especially if in doing so I risked jeopardizing my chances of ever making it around 26.2 miles.

Sure, it was good for my ego to know that I could probably bust the forty-minute mark, but that’s not what this was about. This was to be an anti-ego process. I wanted to figure out my realistic chances
of running/shuffling a marathon without stopping, so excessive speed (i.e. in my terms – or perhaps that of a sloth) was of no consequence. I promised myself I would never let such vanity enter my ‘training’ again.

Wow, now there’s a word: ‘training’. And I suppose it was valid. After all, that’s what I was doing. Training . . . perhaps . . . for . . . a marathon.

My God.

As the shuffling continued, the quietness began to creep in. Quietness, I have found, is a usually very welcome ingredient to most recipes to do with creativity or positivity. In fact I can’t think of a single instance where the opposite has been true.

I was further buoyed when my running became ever quieter, lighter, as did my breathing, my thinking, what I was doing had quickly transformed from an uphill struggle into a daily release and endorphin high. Ergo, I continued to look forward more and more to my shuffles around the lake with each new outing.

The moment I jumped in the car I started smiling from the inside out. The plain fact is that by the time I returned home again, I would have experienced another hour, minimum, of something that was unquestionably doing me, as well as those around me, a whole heap of good.

I had also, almost immediately, begun to lose weight. Not a lot, but a few pounds. My skin felt tighter under my arms, my middle-age podgy back-fat seemed to be showing signs of disappearing – all because of doing something bit by bit, day by day, quietly, calmly and thoughtfully. Even making sure I had the right change for the meter in the car park gave me a sense of self, bringing back memories of asking Mum for the 20p sub for scouts of a Monday when I was eleven years old.

Shit. Life really is so simple. How come we let it get away from us?

And so it was all going swimmingly, with the question ‘when and how will I know whether or not I think I should attempt a marathon?’ happily simmering away on the back burner.

But why, other than the reasons I have already specified, had this
idea entered my thoughts in the first place? Well now, that’s where this book comes in.

As I witnessed the beginning of my fiftieth year on the planet, a milestone in anyone’s life and an experience I wanted to write about, hopefully slaying the Midlife Crisis dragon in the process.

In order to make sense of all the ranting and raving, and to tie up any loose ends, I needed an ultimate destination at which to end my journey. The marathon, I decided, would give that journey purpose. But if I was going to succeed it would need to be the most doable, achievable, non-midlife-crisis, non-painful marathon of all time.

So now you see why, before embarking on this journey, it was vital to carry out a preliminary assessment to establish whether I stood the ghost of a chance of pulling it off – and emerge still standing at the end.

Once around the lake without stopping became twice around the lake without stopping.

The first time I attempted this, it brought all the memories of my first shuffling day flooding back.

The same trepidation, the same nervousness, the same intrigue. And in many ways a similar outcome. I didn’t make it all the way round the second circuit without a break. In fact I stopped twice but that was OK. There was no rush. Two laps was now the norm. Continuity would come soon enough. All I had to do was stick at it.