Run and run
Men, forget Strava and your smartwatch and just run for fun
The thinking: I was going to write about something else this time. That piece is pretty much written – an introduction to counselling and me: my initial fascination with the subject; the courses I did to begin the training required to be a counsellor, or therapist; and the £70 a pop sessions I currently have on the couch (or a nice retro armchair actually). So how it all started and what all that has done for me. That’s the piece and it may well be the next Woe Men piece. But then I went out for a run this morning…
Running. We go back a fair way now. I think I was 45 when I finally gave in and accepted a friend’s challenge to enter a 10K run; so that’s 13 years that running has been a thing for me. But it’s not been an uninterrupted, trouble-free jog. There have been gaps and injuries and frustrations, and long periods when I did think it just wasn’t for me, but for a while now I’ve been in a zone with it, the place I always hoped I might get to, where it’s a relief, an escape, a place to think, an uplifting experience beyond simply making your legs and heart and lungs work to keep a nearly sixtysomething bloke vaguely healthy. A bit like counselling in fact.
Like I said, running hasn’t always been like this for me. The first time I remember consciously making an effort to go running was when I moved to London in my mid-twenties in search of freelance work as a journalist. I’d given up a staff job on a local newspaper (as you did if you wanted to get to Fleet Street) and taken my chance doing ‘subbing shifts’. All UK national newspapers back then relied on ‘casuals’ – freelance sub-editors, and sometimes reporters, to supplement the staff they had and make sure they could get the paper out each night. It was the most common route to a sportswriting job (which was what I wanted) – you got in to a paper as a casual sub, got to know the important people, and then set out to show them you could write. The staff jobs (whether writing or editing) were never advertised. They didn’t need to be; they had a group of eager casual staff who they knew and who they’d been effectively interviewing for the past year or two.
So that’s what I was doing and I told myself that, if I was to succeed, or even survive, I had to be on it. I had to be hungry and proactive and put myself about. I already knew, I think, that that wasn’t really me. I preferred opportunities to come to me, rather than go in search of them. If I was to go against my grain, I thought, I’d better get a bit fitter.
So I went out running. I went to a park and ran. I ran until I couldn’t run any more (which was probably about 15 or 20 minutes). I felt crap at the end but then no pain, no gain (which I’m not sure I’d heard at that stage but would come to sum up that approach). I went out again the next day or the day after and did the same. Same result. I did it for two or three weeks. Same result. I was surprised it wasn’t getting easier; that I wasn’t feeling any fitter; that I wasn’t running any further or faster. I think the Gulf War then started and The Independent needed casual subs to run a dedicated war ‘desk’ and I knew someone who knew someone. So shifts started to happen, and the running stopped happening.
On your marks…
Fast forward almost 20 years (four children, one wife and a career that was rapidly losing its appeal later) and a friend teased and provoked me into entering a 10K run that he was doing. I don’t know why that particular friend got through to me at that particular time when others had suggested running before and failed to convince me, but he did.
I had thought for years that distance running for most people was completely mad. Back in the 90s I’d had a close-up view of London Marathon runners at about the 18-mile mark as I walked to work in Docklands one Sunday lunchtime in April. They were decent runners judging by the running club vests most were wearing but they all looked so awful. They were grey and gaunt and dead behind the eyes, and I was genuinely shocked seeing them in this state when it was supposed to be the most uplifting event and something that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. A lot of them looked like that wouldn’t be very long.
That view stayed with me for a long time. But the 45-year-old me decided to try 10K. That’s not a marathon. It might take me an hour or so but it wouldn’t take five or six. The biggest problem was the run was only about six weeks away. I found a beginner’s training plan on a running magazine website and tailored it to the time I had and got going. And I couldn’t believe what happened.
Couch to 10K
Rather than run until you can’t run any more, the plan broke the task down into much more manageable chunks. You all know this, but it was all about walking for five minutes and running for one, walking for five minutes and running for one. Gradually over many days you cut back on the walking and slowly step up the running. And the totally mind-blowing thing is: it works. I couldn’t run when I started. I’d be a wheezing, coughing mess after 15 minutes. By the day of the 10K I could run for an hour. Or an hour and 27 seconds to be precise – which really pissed me off.
And right there is the next part of the story. For some reason based on nothing at all I wanted to do the 10K in less than an hour and was agonisingly (literally) close. Agonising because it was such a hilly course and the finish is all uphill and I was huffing and heaving as I got to the line. I was delighted to have finished and to have done it – but 27 seconds!
I got a running watch soon afterwards and yes, I carried on running. And timing. I found a few routes I liked and I would go out two or three times a week. That was great. But I fretted: about my condition on any given day, my breathing, what joint or muscle was hurting, or whether I was going to beat my best time for that particular route. I would pore over my data on Strava to see how that day’s run compared to the 21 previous occasions I’d done the same route and what my average cadence had been.
As I pushed myself to get better, I found that various bits of me started to complain. Groin muscles, calf muscles, hip flexors, feet. Plantar fasciitis became a familiar term. Running had become stressful.
Run free
Two things changed my approach: my wife and parkrun. My wife found the whole Strava, running watch, timing thing hilarious and baffling and I suppose annoying. She would smile knowingly every time I mentioned a little pain or discomfort, or she noticed me limping or grimacing. She wondered why I couldn’t just run for the sake of running, for enjoyment, just appreciating the outdoors and the freedom of it. Hmm… you don’t understand, I’d say, not really understanding.
I ended up thinking that running, as I was doing it and as, I think, a lot of people do it, was a very man thing. It was about competition, about suffering, about thankless tasks, about process, about sacrifice, about an absence of emotion.
My wife had read Sharon Creech’s children’s novel, Heartbeat. And she said that I should. It’s about Annie, a 12-year-old girl who loves running and can’t understand why her best friend Max, who regularly runs with her, wants to join a club and run competitively. (It’s about some other things too, like life and time and death, but that’s not the point here.) Creech’s free verse beautifully captures what running means for Annie. I can’t now find the book anywhere as I’d like to quote a bit of it, but as the Goodreads review says:
‘When she's barefoot and running, she can hear her heart beating . . . thump-THUMP, thump-THUMP. It's a rhythm that makes sense in a year when everything's shifting…’
Even after reading that book, I still didn’t really get the running for fun idea. Then in 2016 I gave in to another couple of friends who’d been badgering me and joined them at our local parkrun. For those who don’t know, parkrun is a free, timed, 5K run every Saturday morning at 9 o’clock at locations all over the country (in fact in 20 countries now).
I’d been running for six years by this stage but the idea of doing it with a load of other people hadn’t appealed. I’d done the 10K with hundreds of others but that was a one-off (or a two-off as I did it the next year too). But generally running was very much a solitary pursuit for me. I preferred early mornings, sometimes as early as 6 o’clock depending on work, and would often think that being only half awake was a big help: it was an auto-pilot thing; any more awake and I might think myself out of going. So plodding round quiet, often dark streets on my own, not quite with it, was my thing.
That changed one Saturday morning in May 2016 when I ran my first parkrun. Now I wonder what took me so long to start. First, ours is a beautiful venue: a lovely park about a ten-minute walk from my home, with a lake, geese, huge trees and, crucially, a half decent café.
Looking back, I think that confidence was a big part of me finally joining in. Even with six years of pavement plodding behind me, I still didn’t feel like a proper runner and was perhaps overly self-conscious of my ability/style/kit. Maybe it took those six years for me to get used to running and feel comfortable enough doing it to go properly public with it.
The benefits, though, are enormous. There’s something life-affirming about running with so many people. There are all ages and sizes and abilities. And I’m forever fascinated by the range of running styles: some people are upright, elegant and effortless; others all elbows and angles, grunting and glowering. But all run in their highly individual ways. It takes all sorts.
Some shoot past you going up hills but then you might overtake them coming down the other side. Some walk the steep bits to conserve a bit of energy. Some like to chat when you find yourself running alongside each other. Some suddenly become highly competitive when the finish line is in sight and bust a gut to beat you.
There’s one aspect of our local parkun that always fascinates me. Half the course is proper school cross-country and in winter this means: muddy. There are a couple of very soggy bits and one which, when it’s rained, becomes a huge, deep puddle. I don’t like getting my feet wet and my trainers caked in mud so I tend to take a diversion when this puddle gets too big to leap across. I’ll happily add 20 or 30 yards to my run and duck through some dense, prickly bushes to avoid the squelchy mess in and around the puddle. But one of the friends I regularly run with is different. He ploughs straight through the middle, whatever the conditions. He’s been known to lose a trainer in the brown depths but still he goes right through it.
The whole scene makes me think of Steve Coogan in the first series of The Trip when he falls off some stepping stones halfway across a river in the Lake District and Rob Brydon shouts out: ‘It’s a metaphor!’ And a drenched Coogan defiantly yells back: ‘It’s not a metaphor!’
That muddy puddle on our parkrun course is a metaphor. I see it as being like working life for so many men. You keep doing the same thing, over and over, because that’s the course that is set out for you and you have no choice but to do it. But I think there is a choice: you can go round the puddle, find another way, if you don’t fancy wet socks and muddy trainers.
And parkrun is a metaphor. It’s about life and its challenges and being in it together; about finding a way through it; and about the satisfaction afterwards of having roused yourself and done something difficult.
In it together
As I found in some counselling studies groups I was part of, I think I’ve struggled to be myself in groups, and to take part meaningfully, and this in part contributed to my hesitancy in starting parkrun. And I feel that even now. I’m still an outsider even though I’ve done my local one nearly 200 times. But even so, it provides a link, an attachment, to a community, however tentatively I’m able to grab it. And for that I’m extremely grateful.
This morning’s run made me think of all this. About halfway round I realised that I felt better than I had last week when doing pretty much the same run. Then I stopped and walked a steep hill because I felt a bit groggy and I cut short the route because I didn’t have the energy to do a longer run. I felt out of sorts. Today I had more energy and I felt much stronger. I’ve finally learned to listen to my body and react accordingly, rather than push it and be disappointed by some of the results.
For years I worried when I ran: what’s hurting, how do I feel, am I over-pronating, should I shorten my stride a bit, are these shoes not really helping? It took a long time but gradually in the past few years I’m aware that I’ve become able to switch off when running, not think about running itself and actually not think about very much. It’s then that you can actually do some really great thinking: ideas come to you, feelings become clearer, decisions suddenly seem a little easier. I used to read that this was the appeal of running for those runners who wrote books or lifestyle pieces in newspapers; the reality for me back then was that it was an ordeal to get through, to work at, to get better at. It finally dawned on me as I realised I was nearer to 60 than 50 that continued improvement and the ability to keep beating Strava was a stupid thing to be aiming for.
My wife and Sharon Creech’s 12-year-old Annie are right: it’s about the joy of it.