Month: September 2011

Last night’s interval session was performed to a soundtrack of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Village After Dark”, read by Ben Marcus on the fabulous (and free) New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

It is an eerie tale, set in an “airtight world”, as Ben Marcus put it. I ran my 1200m intervals on a loop of surburban streets in the dying evening light. As I ran, the sentences of the story crossed the Crouch End roads like swooping telephone lines, catching me in their imaginary web. At the close of my final interval the story ended and the discussion began, but the web I had weaved still held me as I headed slowly up the hill back home.

I love listening to short stories when running, and the ones I love best are those where I have to work hard to understand them, where I have to take part. Where meaning drifts in the space between the words, waiting to be found. This was one of those stories. I savoured the delicious feeling of uncertainty, of teetering on the edge of confusion and clarity. I think that feeling might be a secret door into the unconscious mind. I felt it at the end of the film Mulholland Drive. I didn’t know why it made sense, I couldn’t explain exactly what happened (and I didn’t want to), but I knew it was right and I knew it was great.  Sureness and confusion, safety and danger, all experienced at the same time.

I’m not going to make an analogy with running here. Running is sometimes a complex combination of mental and physical effort, but last night’s effort was purely physical. My mind was working on other things and the disconnection was almost total. My body was running, my mind was listening and my brain was putting together a story about memory, about death, regret, guilt, self-loathing, or just a small village after dark.

I do.

It’s beautiful: big sky, tall buildings, wide river, friendly people, scouse accents. There is a lot to love here. This morning I skipped an 8am session on immigration law to run 6 miles around the city centre and the docks. I ended up in Toxteth at one point because my navigation skills were rather lacking, but that just added an extra frisson to the experience.

The docks are spectacular, great clouded pools of sky. There were hardly any people around – I ran right past the conference centre but saw no police with guns; it was much more relaxed than Birmingham. Like that city, huge amounts of money have been spent here on regeneration but, in contrast, it hasn’t all been spent on shopping centres. Whatever you think of the Museum of Liverpool building, it is at least a whacking great monument to there being more to Liverpool than places to buy stuff.

This week I went to my first party conference. On the train on the way to Birmingham, studying the agenda and working out what to attend, I entertained a brief hope: maybe it wouldn’t be a gathering of political activists, journalists and special advisers? Maybe it would actually be a conference about parties? Or a conference OF parties? Perhaps we would all have to eat birthday cake and take part in organised games for prizes? I was briefly cheered.

Sadly, it really was a party political affair, though there were an awful lot of free sandwiches and many terrible jokes. There was also singing, though the only prize for that seemed to be getting as far away from it as possible, which I was happy to do.

Despite ‘fringe’ events starting before 8am, I managed to fit in a run. I don’t know Birmingham very well and worried about the route. Usual rules seem not to apply there – being able to see your destination is no guarantee that you will actually be able to reach it. Public spaces are suddenly intersected by motorways, roads cut off by shopping centres. I had a look on mapmyrun and saw that most people’s routes in central Birmingham were along canals rather than streets. This made sense – provided I could find a canal there was little chance of getting lost on the towpath.

I chose the Worcester & Birmingham Canal and had a very pleasant, if a little quiet, 4 mile run.  Tall trees and buildings rose directly from the opposite bank, shutting out the morning sun. Under gloomy bridges, the pounding of my footsteps echoed loudly, only to be swallowed up by the dark, still water on my escape. I passed a couple of other runners, a few cyclists whizzed by at a frightening speed, but mostly I had the city to myself.

Arriving back at Gas Street Basin, two armed police with huge black guns waved me back onto the street. Back to civilisation.

Yesterday was the second day on the new plan, and a marked improvement from Tuesday. My legs felt twice as strong and I ran the ‘4 miles steady’ (plus a bit more) at an average of 7.5 minutes per mile. This was only 15 seconds slower than my supposed 10-k pace, but felt completely comfortable.

In less positive news, I nearly got run over by Highbury Corner. I was looking at the green man flashing rather than the traffic and both the oncoming car and I had to make an emergency stop at the crossing. There was some horn blowing and shouting, and not from me. I was at fault, and lucky to get away with just a bruised ego.

It’s amazing that this doesn’t happen on every run. I can be thinking about dinner, looking at my watch, listening to a podcast, looking out for uneven bits of pavement, dodging oncoming buggies and calculating the speed of passing bikes all at the same time. Running down Upper Street at 5.30pm is like a 3D game of Frogger – it can be mentally exhausting working out a route between the crowd, but I love it. I could have a PhD in Pedestrian Dodging.

I’m just not so I’m good with the cars.