Running Like a Girl (8 page)

Increasingly, he was the only person who kept me going on some of those long runs, the thought of how he had gotten up every morning for years and done it with so little fuss that the most my mother had to complain about was slipping on a magazine. All that time I had thought that we were so different, my father and I. Yet the first time I saw a photograph of myself running, I could pinpoint the exact mid-eighties snapshot of my father that it reminded me of. These legs were his. It was his lungs that were powering me up hills. And it was his quiet acceptance that “yes, running can be hard but is worth it” that was helping me get through the most desperate moments of my training.

My mother maintained a sort of detached bemusement, which in turn amused me. I would come home for the weekend and spend an hour poring over maps at the kitchen table, trying to work out a great training run. She would stare across the room with the same benign lack of interest that she had displayed twenty years earlier when a new pair of New Balance running shoes arrived. My dad ordered them from the States, and they took weeks to arrive via the military post to whichever army base we were stationed at. The day he brought them home was always exciting. New running shoes! Back then I thought that the excitement on his face was entirely unmatched by the gray practicality within. I smiled and remembered my mother's baffled eye roll as she picked up a trainer, ran her finger along the mouselike suede, then returned to whatever she was doing.

Somehow things had changed. These days I understood the joy of a new pair of running shoes and what they represented.

I started making up random queries so I could call my dad
for a pep talk from time to time. He was becoming more than a father and more than a friend; he was becoming a genuine inspiration.

As the training runs became longer, I started doing more of them near my parents' house in Wiltshire. Aside from the glorious views, there were the benefits of my dad's advice. We enjoyed marking out potential courses on his chaotically photocopied Ordnance Survey maps the night before, drawing the route with a highlighter and then wrapping the paper in a plastic folder that I could carry in my palm. I'd be approaching a hill that had appeared so inviting from the comfort of a gliding car's window but was in fact a relentless, demonic gradient on foot. Just when I was about to lose hope, he'd pull up alongside me with water and half a banana. “I figured you'd be about here!” he'd say as I tearfully asked to be driven home. “Not a chance,” he'd say. “I saw the way you took that hill on, you've got at least three more miles in your legs. See you later for lunch!”

It was like talking to a hellish tower of confidence. There was no negotiating his faith in what I could achieve. At times infuriating, it was also powerful. It kept me going. It got me home in time for lunch.

I was also calling my brother more often, and for increasingly geeky conversations: maps, routes, training schedules, lined socks, and weird new food groups. We learned about an interval training method called the fartlek and giggled at the name.

By Christmas I was a proper runner. I received thermal running tights from my brother on Christmas Day and didn't break my marathon-training schedule. Running was changing everything.

It wasn't just my family who saw changes in me and my
attitude. After a lifetime of endlessly discussing feelings, having spats, and indulging in gossip with my mother, sister, and female friends, I recognized that I was developing confidence and a better understanding of how to communicate. Emotions didn't always need to be spelled out or talked to death. Sometimes time is how you spend your love. Without ever expressing our newfound closeness, I realized that as the time I spent with my father and brother had increased, so had my confidence when dealing with men in general.

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.

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 idea 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.”