music to run to – Not a Jogger

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

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.

Last Gasp of Autumn

Sunday was the kind of day that we used to call ‘unseasonably mild’: 17 C (62 F) in mid-November. I wonder if it’s now ‘seasonably’ mild? In any case it felt like spring, not winter, was around the corner. In my garden the rambling rose which began flowering in April is again in bud.

The last of the falling leaves were calling me outside. My bed was warm, but the sunlight was warmer. I think this might be my last ‘long’ run for a while. I managed an hour, stopping to walk sometimes, taking my weekly mileage to a weakling 15.

Enough of the self-pity, it was an amazing run. As I crossed the top of Alexandra Palace park I was on a literal and metaphorical high. I slowed down to savour the view: trees, newly empty of leaves; a blue mist over miles of rooves and chimneys; a couple sitting on a bench far away enough always to look happy.

Mid-way across the park, this song came on my i-pod. Like all the best Low songs, it sounds like sadness and glory, fear and hope. It could make a grown woman, running across a sunlit park on a November day, cry. Especially me.