Running – Not a Jogger

September light and darkness

Here in Peterborough it’s 24 degrees on 29 September – Michaelmas Day. Colder in my house than it is outside but, after months of heatwaves, that doesn’t feel strange. This morning I wake up half an hour before my alarm and decide to just get up. I put on shorts and a t-shirt and run 4 miles with a headlamp in the gloom. When I get back to the house it’s still dark. I’m sweating.

It looks like autumn, but feels like summer.

On Thursday, it will be October. Will it feel like autumn then? The river is low and the garden is ringed with patches of dead grass. All my regular footpaths are dry and cracked. But my daughter is back at school, the park is littered with apples, and last night it was dark at 7pm. In town, the Bridge Fair is filling the night with screams and whizzing lights.

Michaelmas is traditionally a quarter day – time to settle debts and pay rent. Since I quit my job in July I’ve been getting more emails about loans and credit cards. “Mrs Crane, unlock your life goals”. Maybe I’m just noticing them more now. Obviously I am going to get a job and obviously I will one day have an income again. Obviously.

My mum used to say that we shouldn’t eat blackberries after Michaelmas because the devil spits on them. I think this just means they don’t taste very good and should be left for the birds. But this year’s blackberries never tasted good. They tried to ripen desperately in July then shrank to nothing – too wizened even for the birds to eat.

On Friday I took my dad out for a walk around Ketton. It was too long a loop for him and he was too hot in his zip-up sweater and cap. I insisted on linking elbows while we walked and could feel him trying not to lean on me. But when we walked downhill, I had to push my palm on his chest to hold him back from falling. There was a haze over the fields and purple shadows by every hedge and furrow. A farmer was rounding up her sheep and the sheepdog sniffed dad’s hand. On the track back to the car, exhausted, he spotted a clouded yellow butterfly. From the car on the way back home, another.

Clouded yellows are a migratory butterfly, coming to the UK from North Africa and southern Europe, most likely to be spotted in early autumn. Will this be a “clouded yellow year” when warm weather brings large numbers? Maybe. I am seeing cyclamen everywhere at the moment, popping up under trees like tiny candle flames. Cyclamen sleep through the drought of summer and emerge, thriving, in the autumn and winter. Animals and plants follow nature’s clock – a mix of ancient instincts and adapting to current events. I don’t know if humans also have a clock like that but if we do, I hope mine is working.

Catching myself counting

On Wednesday evening, I went to the running track. It was 21 degrees at 7pm and the infield was split in two by the August sun. For the first 200 metres we ran in the light, and then dipped into shadow on the curve before the final straight.

A group of fast kids were finishing their training before our session. One at a time, they sprinted past, upright and strong. Impossible leg action.

In our warm-up, I held the image of those kids in my mind while my body was transported back to school PE humiliation. Lining up in lanes, we tried our best to do high knees and squats and skipping, ignoring adult aches and pains.

Running around the track, with the wind in my hair, I felt better. I stopped caring how I looked from the outside. We ran a five minute tempo section and then began the intervals: 2 minutes effort, 1 minute break; 1 minute effort, 30 seconds break. Six times.

I was daunted at first. At the beginning and end of each effort I could only think about the ones stretching ahead in who knows how many loops. But after a couple, I lost count of the reps behind or ahead. I just held on to whether this was a 2 or a 1 minute effort.

When Kirsten blew the whistle I walked – no shame in it. I used to try to “float” between reps because I thought that’s what athletes did. I’m over that now. Not that it was a choice this week – I needed to walk to recover.

I entered a kind of trance. Circling and re-circling, passing and being passed. Light, shade and light again.

Towards the end, I found myself counting in my head to get through the reps. I sometimes count in races, or at the end of a run when I want to give up but I have one last section to get through. I count slowly – one count every two seconds – and it works. It uses up the time. It gets me through it.

Lately, I’ve been catching myself counting at other times. On a car journey. In a meeting. On a run when I’m just trying to enjoy it. I want to stop doing this.

There’s a short post in my ‘drafts’ from June 2023 that I kept because I liked the title. It says:

‘I went to the track this week. The last time I did a track session was four years ago. Saw the kids running. I could feel the magic but it wasn’t my magic. I could see it, and feel its shape, but I knew it wasn’t mine. I would never get caught up in it. As I left, I joked “see you again in four years’ time”.’

It only took me three years.

The post was called Borrowed Magic.

In my pomp at the Yaxley runners timed mile. The building behind has been demolished.

Tell your loved ones

It’s Father’s Day today. I phoned dad at 7:45am to ask him to let me in to their house. My key wouldn’t turn in the lock. I had rung the doorbell, no response. My heart was beginning to race, but he was up and answered quickly.

Inside, it smelled normal and the radio was on. Good signs. I went through to the back room where we’ve put mum’s bed. The curtains are pink and the light was soft. It’s midsummer today.

I got up at 4:20 to catch the sunrise and fit in a run before going over. The sky was blue when I left the house, but fog covered the fields on the way to Stamford. I ran up the track to Easton on the Hill, stopping to look back across the valley through the mist. I walked through Wothorpe Woods, like mum and dad have thousands of times, together. In Burghley Park, I stopped enjoying the run and started worrying about what I would find when I got to their house. How well I would cope.

I don’t know when mum woke up and I can’t ask, but the light is bright in this room – an extension to the dining room with patio doors at the foot of the bed, and a big window next to it. She had probably been awake a while. She wasn’t unhappy; she was keen to get up. We’ll need those, she said pointing to her shoes. Not just yet.

Dad was trying to help and I brushed him away while I worked. After failing for the third time to get mum to get back into bed to sit up I shouted for him to get me a clean sheet – any sheet. He returned with a duvet cover.

Sheet on, mum had a moment of clarity and shuffled up into a sitting position. I covered her legs with a dressing gown until I could change the duvet cover, and got the table in place. Dad brought the tea and toast. I opened the curtains onto the garden.

Lately, I have been listening to this song quite a bit: The Morning Fog, by Kate Bush. I think it’s about an astronaut returning to earth or something, but not for me. For me, it’s about my life right now.

The light
Begin to bleed
Begin to breathe
Begin to speak
Do you know what?
I love you better now

I am falling
Like a stone
Like a storm
Being born again
Into the sweet morning fog

Do you know what?
I love you better now

I’m falling
And I’d love to hold you now
I’ll kiss the ground
I’ll tell my mother
I’ll tell my father
I’ll tell my loved ones
I’ll tell my brothers
How much I love them

Wildlife versus running

Every Sunday morning before my long run, I make a decision. Do I wear the ugly hi-vis acid yellow long-sleeved top I got for £3 in a charity shop and not get hit by a car? Or do I opt for a “forest green” one so that I don’t scare the wildlife? The green top was a gift, is still soft, and doesn’t smell. The yellow one is… safe.

Spotting birds and animals has become one of the reasons I run. From trails and roads in Cambridgeshire or Northamptonshire I have seen hundreds of hares, deer, foxes, muntjac, toads, rats, rabbits, bats and squirrels. Occasionally I spot a seal, an otter, a stoat, a water vole and – once – a mink. I have never seen a live shrew, but I’ve seen plenty of dead ones. Always in the middle of the path, with not a scratch on them.

To see wildlife, you can’t let it see you. Running should make this harder, but on a road I sometimes feel invisible, part of the modern landscape like a car or bike. It’s only when I stand still that I become a human again. Deer a hundred metres away will ignore me while I’m running but, as soon as I stop, they will all turn their heads and stare. No longer a moving target, I am now a threat.

Birds do the same. Running along a country lane, yellowhammers sing from hedgetops so close I could touch them. When I pause to take a picture, they are gone before the phone is out of my pocket. Along the River Nene, a heron stays at the edge as I run by, unbothered even as moorhens noisily sprint away over the surface of the water. If I stop to watch, the heron lifts off immediately, its great wings beating waves onto the water.

I don’t see much wildlife during the week. 5:30am runs are mostly done in the dark, on city roads. Even then, there is nature. On the Oundle Road, Magnolia petals cover the pavement near the parkway underpass, and I hear a tawny owl calling from the trees behind the Best Western Hotel.

This morning – Sunday – I was out by 6:45am, prepared for disappointment. Misty and cold for late March, there were rabbits and squirrels in Ferry Meadows, but no hares or deer in the fields. Kites above the trees, but no buzzards or kestrels. Shivering in the hi-vis top, I stuck to an out and back route, wary of giving myself any chances to cut the route short. At my turnaround point in Marholm village, I scanned the skies above the thatched cottages, hoping for the first swallow of the year.

Not today.

Clipston Trail Half Marathon

“How’s your training going?” A coach asked me in the gym. I was confused – what training? Am I supposed to be training for something? Because… I haven’t been. My running is the same every week: two or three short runs and one long run. Sometimes I run up some hills, occasionally (very occasionally) I run a bit faster.

I haven’t been training because I haven’t been racing. I ran the St Neots half marathon in November 2024 and haven’t put on a club vest since. I really don’t miss it but I don’t want to feel like I’ve given up for ever, so I signed up for my annual race. The Clipston Trail Half’s description was perfect: ”run on trails across beautiful countryside”. Stiles, fields, views, hills, fewer than 100 entrants, no plastic waste, no time cut-off. My kind of race.

I ran with my brother-in-law, Lee, while my sister Liz did the five mile race. Half way through the run I was stood waiting for Lee to reappear after a trailside wee and a passing runner kindly asked if I was ok. Yes, I said, I’m just waiting for my… friend. I never thought about how weird it is to say “brother-in-law” to a total stranger. Especially when the brother-in-law isn’t present.

These are the kind of thoughts that have time to pass through a person’s head when they’re not worrying about how fast they are running. The week before the race, my friend Lee got injured, and I caught a cold. We should really have dropped out, but we agreed to “take it easy” instead. In my head this would be 9 minute miles, but the hills and my heart rate called for much slower, so we finished in 2 hour 20. The remarkable thing about this is not that it’s my slowest half, but that I didn’t even look at my watch until we were a mile away from the finish.

Running a race for the experience, rather than the time, is not something I have done often. Even if I’ve said I “just want to enjoy it” I’ve always had a secret goal. Not having one turns the race back into a run. It’s even allowed to be fun. We chatted. We walked. When a marshal said “don’t miss the view”, we really looked at it. I took pictures. I spotted birds. I ate two flapjacks and two gels and emptied my water bottle.

After the first hill there is a narrow footpath section where runners are forced to run in single file for half a mile. In any other race I would be frustrated to be stuck in a queue early on, so it felt good to remember all the times I’ve felt like that before and realise that this time I didn’t care. At mile four we settled in behind a trio of runners and, instead of wondering whether we could overtake them, I wondered whether we could keep them in front of us for the rest of the race.

It was a gorgeous race. The course is out and back with a couple of different loops and constant rolling hills (1,000 ft over the 13.1 miles) to keep it varied. The footpaths were dry and mostly gravel, firm grass or well worn single tracks, with only two ankle-breaking sections. The first was a deceptively beautiful wide path curving steeply down a hill which had been secretly churned up by horses and baked solid beneath a sward of grass. The second one we were warned about in the pre-race briefing: two ploughed fields in the final mile.

Knowing that you will have to walk in the final mile is enough to put anyone off aiming for a “good” time in a race. Even I would hesitate to call trudging up a hill of loose soil my idea of a “good time”. But after the furrows of doom there was a downhill of joy, and Lee leapt like a salmon for the photographer while I beamed in genuine delight. At the finish, people clapped like they knew us, and the Race Director greeted every finisher with a medal and a personal congratulations.

Walking back to the car with a flushed face and a paper plate of cakes I realised: this is the race I have been training for.

Marking the equinox

Last Sunday was the autumnal equinox. A moment of uneasy equilibrium, when day and night briefly share 12 hours before daylight tumbles towards the winter solstice. I meant to go for a run, and pay special attention to the sunrise or sunset. To mark the moment with pictures, maybe write about it. I didn’t remember. I did run but it was raining and, behind the clouds, the sun was just an assumption.

This morning while I drank my pre-run coffee I read about the equinox. I learned about the “solar terminator” – the edge between night and day – that separates the part of the earth experiencing darkness from that experiencing daylight. A circle constantly rotating around the earth’s surface, twice a day, moving at 463 metres per second. At the equinox, it moves around the globe like a spinning line of longitude – bringing darkness on one side, and light on the other.

In spring and autumn, at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, both poles see the sun, and both northern and southern hemispheres share the light equally. Afterwards, one’s loss is the other’s gain.

The weeks around the equinox are a dream time for running. Every pre- or post-work run catches a sunrise or sunset. One wet evening I chanced on a rainbow in the eastern sky, the nearby clouds lit purple. But really I’m a sunrise person. In between some biblical rain, this month I’ve seen the mist rise from the River Ouse over York Minster, caught the first light of the sun turning a gate into a magic portal, and gazed on ghost trees in the fog over flooded fields.

At sunrise, I have the paths to myself. I like to run along the river, or in the woods. The colder nights and still warm days mean that vapour rises from the water and floats among the trees. The grass is soaking, and fences drip with tiny golden orbs of dew. In the city, the neon lights of the Esso garage are briefly a fairground ride against the technicolour sky.

This morning I remembered the Equinox – a week late, but does it matter? The sun rose today at 7am, and will set at 6:41pm. The nights are being drawn in for us in the northern hemisphere, whilst the days loosen their grip, extending their warm grasp southwards.

At the gate to Old Sulehay woods, the fog was lying over flooded fields, with a sunrise lightshow peaking high above. To the south of the path, the meadow was waist high with grasses lit ochre, mist blurring the trees and bringing everything closer, nearer. I took some pictures and they are spectacular but they don’t contain it. The sounds of birds rustling and settling and jostling the leaves. The distant cars that never appear. The tiny lights of a farmhouse on the horizon.

In the woods, the lightshow is reduced to a strip of gold and blue overhead, with clouds looming pink in the west over the horse chestnut trees. A carpet of curling leaves and conkers litter the top of the hill. It is darker here, and a tiny bit creepy. I take my earbuds out so that I can hear the birds, but also the sound of anyone approaching. Back on the road, the sun has risen and drifts of roadside weeds burn orange against the fields. No interesting birds today, just pigeons and magpies, starlings. A few pheasants.

No hares in the fields, but plenty of deer. I run a couple of miles along the road to Kings Cliffe, stopping for a wee behind a gate. Over 11 miles, I don’t see any people. A few cars, but no cyclists, runners or dog walkers. Everyone is at home, in bed or inside, enjoying the warmth. Maybe putting the heating on for the first time. Maybe preparing to go out later, when I will be at home warming up and hiding inside.

This summer, on holiday in Sardinia, I took a video of a sunrise over the sea as it lapped against a ruined tower. When I uploaded it, instagram asked me if I wanted to flag it as AI. At dawn, the world looks so perfect that it doesn’t seem possible, or real. Mid-way through the clip, a tiny mosquito buzzes across the screen on its way to biting my arm in three places.

Walk ‘til you feel like running

Places I have cried lately: in the car (many times), on the train, on a run, in the office, at parkrun, at Lidl.

I’m 48 and sandwiched between my 11 year old’s dreams and the reality of coming to terms with my mum’s dementia. I have a full time job that is rewarding, but stressful and serious, and on my mind, always. I used to have hobbies. Now my hobby is seeing my husband and daughter in the two hours between finishing dinner and going to bed each day.

What has this got to do with running? Everything and nothing. I wish I had more time to run, but I don’t. Making time for running means going out with the dawn at 5am, or the bats at 9pm. But it also means cutting back on sleep and I can’t do that now. So running has had to become less important for me, and I’ve become really envious of people taking on new challenges or gym work or big sessions or long runs. But when I look harder at the envy, I can see that it’s really about me, not them, that it’s just guilt – guilt that *I* am not doing more, that *I* am not fit or fast.

Running is my solace in stressful times, my escape. I can’t let running become another stick to beat myself with, another item on a to do list I can never finish.

This Sunday morning I wanted to run 10 miles. The forecast was fine and I planned to get up and out at 5:30am. Instead, at midnight on Saturday I was wrenched out of the first blissful hour of sleep by my daughter plaintively saying she felt sick. I spent the night on the floor in her room while she dozed with all the lights on clutching a bowl. In the morning she was fine, but I was a wreck.

At 7am I made a coffee and had a little cry in the kitchen, as I blearily crushed and squirted 3 different medicines into our ancient cat’s food. It’s just too much first thing in the morning, to be making coffee and toasting bread and drinking water and microwaving milk and wiping surfaces and checking for cat sick. I was grumpy as I stomped up the stairs, and mean to humans and felines alike.

I sat waiting for the coffee to do its work and searching for a reason to go for this run. I wanted to do it, I wanted it to make me feel better, but I was tired in the brain and in the stomach and in the legs. I wasn’t ready to go out until 8:15, too late for early birds and peak walking hour for dogs – my least favourite time to run.

I left the house and started walking, taking my own advice from yesterday’s parkrun with Martha: “just walk until you feel like running, and don’t worry if you don’t”. I walked a mile before I felt like running at all, and then jogged slowly on and off to Ferry Meadows. While I was jogging I listened to part 2 of the Bandsplain podcast about Pearl Jam. Then I listened to Corduroy three times in a row. I love that song. I love how we can get pleasure from other people’s pain, even from our own if there’s beauty in it.

At 5km I stopped my watch. I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to sit on a bench and cry, and I didn’t want to run. I decided to walk to the cafe, buy a coffee and walk home. It felt good to decide this. Sometimes you can’t escape your feelings. Can’t outrun them. When I run I can usually get out of my own head but I knew that wasn’t going to happen today. 5km is a good run. 5km was enough.

It’s ok to be a gym lightweight

Social media is sometimes like an aunty who once heard you say that you liked frogs and then buys you frog-shaped content – slippers and soap and ornaments and birthday cards – for the rest of your life. The minute you get curious about something, let’s say… how to do a deadlift… social media will give you so much content about deadlifts you will feel like you never want to do a deadlift again.

When we hold all potential human knowledge in our pockets, it’s so hard to hold on to curiosity and learn something new. But I have been trying. Once a week, since January, I’ve been to the gym to lift heavy weights. I’m 48 and menopausal, with creaky knees. After battling injury for a year, I now fully believe that lifting heavy weights is going to keep me running.

Heavy weights? I thought this was about being a lightweight. It is, I promise. The weights I lift are puny compared to what I see the awesome women in the gym lifting. But they are heavy for me. I can feel them engaging my core, challenging my stability, and building new muscles. I’m going once a week, and my legs feel stronger and more stable when I’m running. When I did crossfit a few times a week, I was strong but I had so much DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) I could barely run.

If you don’t lift weights, going to the gym can be intimidating. Everyone looks like an expert. It’s hard to pick what to do, even harder to know if you’re doing it right. It’s scary to join a class, and expensive to get a 1:1 personal trainer. So social media is doing a lot of heavy lifting (sorry) when it comes to training advice. Over the past few months I’ve had instagram accounts telling me that I won’t make progress unless I lift 3 times a week, that I shouldn’t do deadlifts, I should do romanian deadlifts, I should only squat, I should never squat.

I’m not going to give out training advice, but I will share that I:

Only lift once a week – once a week, every week, is my commitment;
Prioritise strength, not fitness – I get my cardio from running;
Take my time – yeah I look at my phone between sets;
Pick things I like – slam balls are fun;
Do the same workout every week – then I don’t have to make decisions;
Embrace being a lightweight – form is more important than numbers;
Increase weight s l o o o o w l y – in four months I’ve only upped my squat and deadlift weights once;
Regularly put my wedding ring in the washing machine (in my shorts pocket).

This is working for me. I can now squat down to sit on the floor and stand up again without using my hands! This is my olympics. Find what works for you, and don’t let people on the internet tell you what that is. Including me.

Three minutes of nirvana in a business park

It’s midsummer and I’m jogging eastwards on the cycle path that runs between Lynch Wood business park and the Oundle Road. I’m sweating and tired from five miles of running. 22 degrees at 7am, the sun is high above the treetops already, and there’s only a hint of freshness in the air to remind me it’s early morning.

I turn the corner onto the shaded path. On the left, office buildings are hidden behind trees planted 35 summers ago. To the right an occasional car can be heard, but not seen, passing on the A605. The hawthorn hedge is bursting with umbellifers after a rainy spring. Even the tarmac is a pattern of leaves: the penumbra of plane, hazel and ash. The leaf shadows shift and move in the light, blue and gold against the grey. I slow down, and move to the right, as a man passes with a loping dog.

Alone now, my jog drops into a walk. The shadows deepen into forest on either side of the path, and I shade my eyes with my hand against the sun. I drink it in. Pollen and insects loop around in the breeze, backlit gold on dark green. A bee hangs in the air, a still point as I move past, wings beating furiously to hold it in place.

Ten metres ahead, a muntjac pushes through a gap in the hedge on my right, turning its head to look back at me. It hesitates, deciding whether to push back through. Instead it trots ahead, keeping to the path. I try to keep pace, to keep it in sight between patches of sunlight. After a few seconds it shimmies through a different gap in the hawthorn and off towards the road.

Uplifted, I start to run again. Slow. Aware of the sound of my breath and the brush of air on my arms as they move. I turn back to check for movement: humans, dogs, deer. Looking west, the light shifts into the harsh glare of summer. Leaves lie flat against the sky, and I’m aware of how weary I am. How much I don’t want to get home, to the heat, and all the work I haven’t done.

The end of the path approaches. The avenue of trees opens into a concrete junction. A roundabout, bollards, road signs, kerbs. A mock-tudor office block. For a few minutes, nature took over the suburbs, and joy pushed up through cracks in the concrete.

I swam one length

I’m not badly injured. Just the kind of injured where I can run, but I’m not sure I should. The kind of injured caused by “overuse” rather than anything specific.

A running injury caused by running: a classic of the genre.

The physio said my knees are “irritated”. The right one is particularly pissed off, making weird clicks when I bend it, and both knees feel a bit swollen the day after a run. Clicks are normal, apparently, but mine don’t feel normal.

I tried running less, stretching more. Leaving it a day between runs stopped the swelling, but I felt too nervous to run fast in case the knees got worse. I don’t want to put up with it, I want it to go away. So I’ve been resting for a week to see if that helps.

I am not good at resting.

After days of doing nothing, on Friday I cracked and cycled to the gym for some sweet sweet sweat. I rowed 2km, did 30 minutes on the elliptical, swam 20 lengths, and cycled home. Swam 20 lengths? So why does the title say one?

When the London marathon was beginning without me in it, last Sunday, I was walking in the rain listening to Lauren Fleshman’s excellent book, GOOD FOR A GIRL. Everyone who cares about women or girls, or running, should read this book. It’s so insightful about what it means to push our bodies and minds to the edge, and how risky that can be for women in a system built for men. Anyway, a throwaway line from the book stayed with me – when injured, Lauren just decided to teach herself front crawl.

I never had swimming lessons. One day my dad took my armbands off, held my belly up for a bit and then let go. It was like riding a bike, if riding a bike involves your parent constantly asking why you still swim like a banana. As a consequence, I can swim one stroke: breaststroke. Badly.

At the pool on Friday, I thought about Lauren Fleshman *deciding* to swim, and I thought about my daughter worrying every week about swimming lessons but going anyway, and I thought about the few times I’d tried to do front crawl and couldn’t get the breathing right, and I just decided to do it anyway. I kept swimming, I kept trying to breathe in every third stroke, I kept trying to breathe out less forcefully in between so that I wasn’t desperate for the breaths every third stroke. It didn’t work, I did run out of breath. But I did keep going.

I swam one length of front crawl and hated every second. Yesterday, I went for a run and loved every second. And my knees are still irritated.

I know the feeling.