cod-philosophy – Not a Jogger

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.

I used to be scared of the wind

When I was 8 years old, I was so scared of the wind that I got into a stranger’s car and asked him to drive me home, just to get out of it.

Every morning before school, I would open the curtains to see if leaves or rubbish were being blown along the street. If I could hear the howl of the wind in the chimney, my throat would tighten and my stomach would begin to churn. “I feel sick”, I would say, and mum would let me stay at home. Why didn’t she make me go to school? Mr Leroyd, my teacher, had told her that 8 year olds often develop sudden phobias which go away if they are ignored, so that’s what my parents did.

I don’t remember what happened when I got out of the stranger’s car when it pulled up to our kerb, but I do know that the man took me to our door and spoke to my mum. It makes sense that letting me stay at home to watch tv was preferable to that.

It’s been windy this week, and I have hated it. I had to get the train to London on three of the days, which meant cycling against the wind to the station for the first time in weeks. My knees are creaking as a result and, today, I cycled so slowly back from the supermarket that I nearly fell off my bike. It’s a short, flat ride.

Running in the wind isn’t as hard as cycling. Today, on my day off, I cycled to the gym (why do I hate myself?) so that I could go for a cross-country run. On the bike, the wind was grim. On foot, it was fine. Refreshing, even. I ran from Thorpe Wood, up Ferry Hill and out towards Marholm, then across the public footpath which skirts the Milton Estate to Castor Hanglands and back through Ailsworth and Castor. I love this route in every season. It’s high ground (for round here), so even at its muddiest it’s still a pleasure to run.

The path goes through farmlands and woodlands. Flocks of linnets rose and crossed my path from field to field. A single skylark struggled against a gust, eager to get away from me. Approaching the crossways of two footpaths, the windsock that marks the private air field was being blown horizontal. A long sward of clipped green grass sat temptingly behind the PRIVATE sign. I always think that this airstrip would be a great place to do interval training, though someone would probably shoot me for it.

Back on the Helpston Road, a pheasant scooted across my path, backlit by a weak winter sun. A constant comb of light, a few shafts breaking through the clouds, hovered in the eastern sky. As I approached Ailsworth I slowed to a walk to get my heart rate down, the remains of November’s covid still lurking in my lungs. Before the A47 bridge, birds of prey circled concentrically: red kites on the left, a buzzard on the right.

I was surprised by the January colours on this run. I was slow, and had lots of time to look at the landscape. The ploughed fields looked purple, but shards of hay glowed orange in the furrows. So often, colours seen at a glance reveal themselves to be two quite different ones, in close up.

This week I went to a training session that’s been on my mind. It was on polarity thinking, something that can be used for ongoing problems that have two correct answers which are interdependent (eg, self and others; continuity and change). There are upsides and downsides for each pole, and the aim of polarity thinking is to stay in the upsides of both poles, without sinking into the downs.

As I was running, I was thinking about being scared of the wind. Was it the wind that was frightening, or its effect: how it made me feel? The swirl and howl of a gale raised a panic in me that I couldn’t deal with. Indoors was safety from that. Outdoors was risk. I’m not frightened of the wind any more, but I am scared of heights, stairs that you can see through, and really big dogs. Staying inside my house would keep me safe from all of those, but stop me from doing almost anything. You never know when an architect is going to put one of those staircases in.

You do not have to run.

I have The Cold. It starts with a hacking cough, you know the one. The one you think is Covid but can’t be Covid because you just had Covid and managed to run 27 miles last week and you were really looking forward to running further than ten miles this weekend and maybe making it to the magical half marathon and over 30 miles for the week but now you can’t run because when you cough it feels like a knife to the lungs? That one.

On Thursday night I could feel The Cold approaching. Both the husband and child already had it but I was firmly in denial until this morning, when I finally had to face it: I had The Cold. I felt a quiet and controlled rage. It had been such a busy work week with no time to run, leading up to a Thursday with not one but two board meetings. Instagram and twitter were full of photos of people running around in the frost while I sat like a sloth at my desk. I had a plan to get back to fitness after Covid. I had a two a day mince pie habit. I *needed* to run.

I gave myself a talking to. It is good to eat food I enjoy, and lots of it, in the winter. It cheers me up and literally no-one cares if I put on weight. It is fine not to get fit or fast in the next few weeks. I know I want to, but it’s better not to be injured and run a bit, than to be injured and not run at all. It’s not my fault that covid affected my heart rate and running, but it will be my fault if I rush back to training hard and do myself more damage.

Whenever I get that panicky feeling that “I have to run”, I stop to examine where it’s coming from. It’s usually not a good place. I don’t think running should be a punishment, or a chore. It’s something that I love. I might not love every run, but I can give myself the chance to.

I don’t have to run, I want to run. But today I couldn’t run, so I went for a walk instead. Then I ate a mince pie. It was delicious.

My 6am Moment of Zen

In a perfect world I would never run before breakfast, but this morning I had one of those rare moments worth interrupting dreams for.

Running down a quiet North London street, towards the rising sun, the tall Edwardian villas rose in sepia like friends in an old photograph. The air was chill, but the promise of warmth lingered like a faint memory. Over our heads two aeroplanes trailed bright pink arcs in the ice blue sky, headed towards the sun.

I ran on and the tight trails frayed like unravelling ropes. Neon sharp lines shifted into salmon spray, then faded into the dawn.

I ran on.

New shoe shuffle

I bought new trainers at the end of August. As ever, I had left it too late and waited for holes to start appearing in the toes of my existing ones (pair II) before shelling out for new ones (pair I). Pair II needed to be binned straightaway, but I couldn’t start running 30 miles a week in pair I. The worst running injury I’ve ever had (a stress fracture in my foot) was caused by a long run in new trainers in 1999.

Pair III came to the rescue – my marathon shoes, sentimentally kept on the shelf. They were in better shape than pair II, I decided. They would have to do.

I am still, after a month, alternating pair I and pair III. The new pair still feel small (they’re not) and tight (they’re the same size). Last night, running home, I had to stop and loosen the laces twice in 5 miles. At the weekend I stuck to pair III over the half-marathon distance. I know that soon I’ll break the new pair in properly, but that just as I do they’ll start to break down. The toes will rub thin, the inside of the heel will wear and tear into a hole.

Too new becomes too old so quickly and, for the brief period when the shoes fit perfectly, you take them for granted and forget you’ll ever need another.

And yes, it is my birthday next week.

Brain Training

I’m just back from a fabulous weekend in Cornwall for a wedding, and didn’t manage to post this while I was there due to a) the wedding, b) alcohol, and c) all the fun.

Before heading down on Friday, I squeezed in a quick 4 mile circuit of Crouch End on Thursday night. Running was just one of a long list of tasks to tick off that evening. If the ideal run is ‘free’, unbounded by time or distance pressures, then this was the opposite of that. My mind was racing over packing and remembering the bridal make-up and borrowing the video camera and buying confetti and would we get a seat on the train and what time we should leave and before my brain had started to unwind the run was over.

To make amends, and to balance all the merrymaking, we planned a 5 mile run in Cornwall on the Saturday morning from our borrowed house in Stithians. It was a glowering morning, the few splashes of sunshine chased away by swift clouds, wind bobbing the hedgerow flowers. The roads were narrow and winding and a car swerved wildly around one bend to avoid us. The greens and blues I had been expecting from the Cornish countryside were strangely leached of brightness and I couldn’t seem to fix the route map in my head firmly enough not to worry constantly about becoming lost.

We ran to a ‘lake’, which held an Ordnance Survey promise of rolling beauty, but what we found was this:

That’s me, crossing the concrete dam of the reservoir, which had turned what was probably once a charming valley into a giant grey water trough. It was a bleak sight, even in the shaft of sunlight that greeted us as we approached the shore. It might be unfair to stretch this observation into something wider, but it seemed to me, as I quaffed champagne on a deck overlooking Helford Passage later that day, that the crumbling working parts of Cornwall were bringing the manicured parts into uncomfortable relief. A drive past boarded up buildings in Redruth on the way to drink cappucinos in St Ives this morning increased my unease.

As runs go, this wasn’t free in terms of route or timing, but I can picture every corner and hill. I was free to think about the land, the houses and who might live there, the weather and the passing cars. We weren’t running fast so I wasn’t thinking about my body at all, not even my hangover. I think it was mainly an exercise for my brain.