Losing a whole year
The summer holidays finally came around, immediately after I had received a rejection for the grant bid. The bid had occupied much of the last year, my first year at Aston as I was trying to find my footing and work with someone to help me get my project off the ground. This rejection was particularly bitter: we didn't get through the first round, which is the worst I've ever done under this particular scheme. I couldn't finish reading through the feedback, after I looked through the first set of comments. I imagined a reviewer who had received funding in the early 00s and was only looking at this proposal because of some success they'd achieved when things were easier, more straightforward, and when I was inexplicably in Niigata, Japan, on some ridiculous Evangelical Christian side quest. I closed the window, turned on my out-of-office reply, and promised myself I would think about it after I came back.
The Bedford Autodrome half marathon was the race I signed up for right after the Manchester Marathon in the Spring. It was an impulse post-race, redemption decision, motivated by the meltdown I had experienced in final miles of that race. The summer training cycle, however, had not gone well: I had been depressed and been running sluggishly and gained weight to the point that I am struggling to take my wedding ring off. I feel constant discomfort, an internal dialogue manifest in shovelling handfuls of cereal into my mouth at nine-thirty at night, a cyclical, annual occurrence that is easily predictable, and impossible, it seems, to hold off when it comes round. A summer race, in my head at least, will serve as a buffer against the worst of it I think: an activity to leash the worst of my impulses from running away. Of course, more physical activity is never a good plan for fighting emotional, compulsive eating, and I woke on the morning of the race feeling as though I'd made the wrong decision. Still, I packed up my shoes and petroleum jelly and banana and bagel in the grey light of the morning, and ate and sat on the sofa, messaging the family that I was leaving and would be back sometime in the afternoon.
The autodrome race, on a GP track, has had my interest for a while, given my litany of complaints about marathons: namely, getting to and from the race, and staying in a hotel the night before, and the thousands of people, and the parking. After the Manchester marathon, I got caught in a packed, hot tram train that stopped between stations and I suddenly felt like I was going to vomit and shit all over myself, and was contemplating the best ways to announce this to the car in a way that would not lead to panic. I also dislike the unpredictability of the city marathon course, not being able to see the line well or predict well the next part of the race. On the autodrome, it's 4 laps for the half marathon, plus a first mini-lap. You know what to expect. The line is obvious. The knock is that it might be boring, but a boring run is generally a good run in my head.
Mercifully, what I visualised was exactly what happened. I positioned myself between the 1:40 and 1:30 pacer at the start, thinking I would fall off at some point, but as I came through the third lap straightaway, I felt a surge of energy I've not felt running in a year and then ticked through the final three miles like I was suddenly the runner I was capable of being, running 6:44 miles, with my chest up, sprinting through the finish and feeling, at least for a moment, some flash of the runner I have been before, in control and patient and finishing stronger than I started.
You can write off a year to finding your place. You don't know what you've learned until you’re looking back on it. On Thursday, the family was all back together for the first time in a week and we had dinner, the thing I hold on to as my measure of success: we still have dinner together most nights, and everyone has something to say, and you can just listen. I opened my takeaway Chinese fortune cookie and it said great works are produced through perseverance. I don't want anything great anymore. I want the ability to produce happiness for myself — which fortune cookie says that. There are hundreds of acceptable fortunes: No year is lost; Love is not given or accepted; No one can be what they aren't; Waiting for someone to change is foolish. We joked about our fortunes, about what is and is not good luck and the family dispersed again, to the corners of the house. It's all temporary, another cookie could say, everything good and bad is temporary.