Running Like a Girl (17 page)

Like an evangelical, I wanted to preach the benefits of My Way to everyone I knew. I would do this, I decided. I would no longer be the woman who encouraged those who already knew
they wanted to run—I would convert them all! I would create a nation of runners, strong and proud! Then I fell asleep until the Wolverhampton train stop, my feet gently throbbing in my running shoes.

As the train pulled into Euston, I felt the excitement wear off.
It's understandable
, I told myself.
You were bound to feel a little high after an event like that
.
Just focus on the training for San Francisco—two months to go!

Earlier in the year I had managed to secure a place at the Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco, but in the whirlwind of other projects I'd undertaken, I had begun to focus more on the trip than the marathon. San Francisco had a certain hold over me, one that had only increased since my move to Brighton. And the idea of running in a women's marathon went directly to the part of me that had felt intimidated by the male bias at the other marathons I'd run.

But somehow, the idea of training for another marathon so soon seemed overwhelming. The excitement for running hills had blunted the reliable pleasure of endurance training. Excuses started to creep up like ivy around a solid house. I knew I could run a marathon, why stress myself out about this one? Was the point not proved now? I wanted to spend time with Louis before he was running himself. I wanted to see more of my London friends, feeling badly for not making it to parties on the nights before big races. I wanted my goals to stop shifting. Meanwhile, I was falling in love, and the disadvantages of hauling myself out of bed on a Sunday morning were no longer about tiredness but about leaving someone behind.

I plodded along the seafront in a daze. My running times slumped. Seams I never knew existed on my running clothes started to irritate. My hair would flap in my face, obscuring my
vision until I was convinced I'd veer off the pier. My necklace tangled in the cord of my headphones. I was sure I was always running into the wind.

Perhaps, I found myself thinking, running was something I had done to fill a void. Maybe it was a pastime for the lonely, giving a shape and purpose to empty nights and weekends. It could have been a way to brag all along—a cunning disguise for elaborate attention-seeking. Now that all areas of my life were so much happier, it seemed like little more than indulgence, an unnecessary purgatory that I had inflicted on myself. What once held a certain nobility now seemed almost pathetic. If that were the case, perhaps I no longer needed it.

The thought solidified inside me, a crackling crust forming round my misgivings. A shiver ran through me. I shoved these doubts as far back in my mind as I could. I halfheartedly reassured myself that everyone felt a dip in enthusiasm from time to time, not only those in love. I continued to plod along the seafront, shaving one or two seconds off my time but little more. My determination to achieve a personal best in my next marathon seemed to be dragged further away with every passing tide. The idea of running after it seemed to be drifting even further.

“The only way to run a faster marathon is to get used to running faster,” Adam told me as I huffed with indignation that my legs seemed to be refusing to run any faster. He assured me that the books were right—sprint training and shorter, faster distances were what I needed to focus on. I already knew I had the endurance. I hated sprint training; it was everything that had put me off running in the first place. The aggressive, leonine competitive instinct that required you to run
as fast as you possibly can,
turning your mind to nothing but speed and pain, repulsed me. The whole experience served only to remind me
of those very first runs, when every single judder of my arse felt like my own body taunting me.

I could just about tolerate heading up and out of Brighton to the pretty Withdean athletics track, pretending I was Jessica Ennis or Steve Prefontaine as I attempted to hurtle across the terra-cotta tartan, which is the ridiculous name for the substance the track is made of. But when I was tasked with sprint training, I filled with purest despair. It is one thing to master the mental sleight of hand required to dress in tight Lycra and run in public, but to sprint up and down the seafront, thirty seconds or one hundred meters at a time, felt like tempting fate. I'm not built like a sprinter. I knew I looked like someone trying too hard, someone reaching beyond her capabilities. There was none of the pleasure of running and all of the pain. With every passing day, I felt like more of a fraud.

“What is it you are running from?” a friend asked when I said I wouldn't be able to make his Sunday lunch because I would be doing a half marathon.

“I don't know,” I replied, flummoxed by the question. Was I running from something? It had never occurred to me that I was.

“You can't run from yourself, you know,” he said with a wry smile.

I tried to focus on his paunch and the woolen sweater vest stretching across it. “Oh, I know,” I said. “Me just keeps popping up at the finish line, wherever I run.”

I laughed it off, but the question haunted me. A month previously, I had felt so proud of my strength and leanness; I now felt my own paunch mount a slight return, the result of lazy love-struck afternoons spent at the pub instead of haring along
the seafront. I couldn't work out what I was running for, let alone what I was running from.

If I was happier now, doing work I adored and enjoying the love of those around me, was I merely some sort of traitor to all runners? Could such a thing exist? A fair-weather runner whose running is not dictated by the climate in the sky but by her own emotional climate?

Was it too late to pull out of San Francisco? My eyes drifted around my bedroom, looking for something to trip over. You can't argue with injury.

I kept these thoughts to myself for as long as I could. I posted the photographs of my Edinburgh experience online and lapped up the interest and enthusiasm from others. Yet it did little or nothing to reinvigorate me. I thought if I bottled it up, the feeling would pass, dissolve, sporelike, into the atmosphere. Bottling things up, I would learn, came about as naturally to me as sprinting.

One August weekend, I went to a friend's birthday dinner, a party I'd been looking forward to for weeks. I knew that my favorite people would be in attendance, along with bundles of good food and lots to drink. As I sat there and looked around the room, I realized it was exactly the sort of thing I hoped I'd be doing by the time I was in my mid-thirties. An enormous sense of contentment came over me, one with a dash of luminous smugness running.
This is it, I have achieved adulthood splendidly,
I thought.

There were about fifteen of us seated at makeshift tables composed of various people's garden furniture. It was the prettiest dining hall in Brighton, candles flickering and glasses of champagne being raised at regular intervals in a flurry of
congratulations, celebrations, and happy birthdays. Two huge serving dishes of lobster macaroni and cheese were brought to the table, complete with elegant pink lobster claws. We gasped in excitement, and a dish was held in front of me. I reached for the serving spoon on the table and dolloped a huge rosy chunk on my plate, emboldened by booze.

“Why not? It's a party!” I said as I saw how much I had served myself. I hastily passed on the dish.

“I suppose when you run as much as you do, you can have as much as you want!” said a friend of a friend sitting opposite me.

“Well, exactly!” I said chirpily, vowing never to let on how little running I had been doing recently.

“How is it going, anyway?” asked another friend, her eyes twinkling with enthusiasm. I sensed a threat. This was someone who had previously asked for my advice on running in the past. I mumbled a noncommittal reply, hoping that my friend wouldn't notice. No one was listening; they were probably as bored as I was by the whole thing. She probably hadn't even stuck with the running.

“I'm sorry?” she said, clearly assuming she had not heard me on account of the general hubbub in the room.

Something inside snapped. I couldn't fake it anymore. I smacked the table, hitting it far harder than I had intended, causing cutlery to jangle and wineglasses to clink. Silence. Heads turned toward me.

“I'm just so bloody BORED of running!” I said, far too loudly for a now largely silent room. “I mean, what's the fucking POINT?” I raised my glass of champagne to my mouth defiantly. The secret was out.

“Oh, that's a shame,” said my friend. “It used to make you so happy. You even got me into it!”

“Why, are you . . . not enjoying it?” another friend asked timidly.

I rolled my eyes dramatically. “I just can't see the point anymore,” I declared. “I know I can run a marathon, I know I can get to Saltdean and back when it's raining, I know I beat a lot of people my age, and I know I will always be beaten by a lot of others. I don't need any of this. Why should I be trying sooo hard to get twenty minutes faster? What's the purpose? What would I ever do with that extra twenty minutes?” I waved an arm drunkenly. “I don't have to run far to find berries, I don't have to run fast to escape tigers. I just don't need to run. I can't work out why I ever bothered, really.” I was on a roll now, unplugged. I seemed unable to stop.

Silence.

“I know, I know, it's awful,” I added.

“It's not awful,” ventured a voice. “It's just a bit of a shame. You were so passionate about it.”

“I don't know why I have been trying so hard—I'm never going to win, so why am I so concerned about getting faster?”

“That never seemed to be why you were doing it. You always spoke about how happy it made you in other ways. It never seemed that much about speed.”

I shrugged and scooped a second helping of lobster macaroni and cheese onto my plate, willing the focus to shift from me.

“Which marathon is it that you are training for now?” piped up a friend's husband.

“The Nike Women's Marathon.”

“And where's that?” someone else chipped in.

“In San Francisco.”

“Oh, wow! That is my favorite city in the world.” Nearly the whole table was looking at me.

“Yes, I have wanted to go for years,” I replied. “The race starts really early, so you see the sun rise over the Golden Gate Bridge. I've wanted to do it for a long time.”

“That sounds fantastic!”

“What an experience!”

“It must be such an amazing way to see a city—they close all the roads for you, and people cheer you on, like visiting royalty!”

“Yes, yes, it is.” My voice was smaller.

“If you can do that, why would you even bother about how fast you can do it?”

“I suppose I need a sense of . . . progression.”

“So you see getting faster as the mark of progression rather than enjoying the experience more?”

“Well, yes, yes, I suppose I do.”

When I woke up the next morning, groggy from booze and mildly ashamed by my churlish outburst, I wondered again why I had fallen out of love with running with such a thud. Was it the pressure of chasing times again? Did I think I didn't need it anymore? For the first time in months, I tried to solve a running dilemma the old-fashioned way: I e-mailed my dad. The subject header: “I just don't seem to be able to get any faster at running!”

His reply was succinct: “Why do you want to move fast when you are training for a marathon? Fast is relative.”

When I explained my frustrations, how I felt I was running in treacle, how I wasn't sure I could be bothered, a similar reply came back: “It's not always about the time, it's about the experience, how you feel when you're out there.”

He was right. Of course he was. I decided not to think about
times, to abandon the ceaseless math project of working out paces and applying them to miles and kilometers. This in turn freed up some mental space for other thoughts while I was running, instead of endlessly checking my pace. Most crucially, it freed up space in my mind to try and enjoy the act of running once more.

For the final few weeks of training, I made a real effort to relax, to relish every step, to look forward to the process and not the destination. To feel my feet pushing the ground away from me, not feel my knees reaching forward. I got up one Sunday to run my locally organized 10K along the seafront and stunned myself by completing it four minutes faster and being in good enough shape to enjoy six oysters afterward with the man I had left sleeping ninety minutes earlier. Perhaps there was space for my love affair with running as well as other affairs of the heart after all.

Out of the blue, after years of following her career, I was given the chance to interview Paula Radcliffe at an event being held by her sponsor, Nike, on Clapham Common. I arrived huffing in the clammy summer heat. A crowd had already gathered to see her interviewed. As she walked out, I saw that she was with sprinter Carl Lewis. My heart was in my throat. The eight-year-old me who had been entranced by Lewis's prowess in the 1984 Olympics wondered what my dad would think of my seeing him in person.