Separating

In which I sleep, wake, and run

When my daughter was accepted to university last year, in the ten minutes after she got her results, I signed up for the Edinburgh Marathon. As I reflected on this in the following days, I felt a kind of narcissistic guilt that I had suddenly made my daughter’s success and future about me in some way. Surely, this was a strange impulse, a strange way to cope with the feelings of loss and change coming my way. I shut up about it almost immediately and promptly forgot I had done it, as my life got caught up in travels to Glasgow and then Tokyo, and what could only be described as a complete overhaul of my identity. I became a politician and though I’ve been many things in my life, none of them required me to go door-to-door, as I have gone weekly since September, telling strangers that I am this thing, asking them if they would be happy to support me in my new life, and needing something like one in three of them to agree, while the other two can tell me to fuck off.

Running is not an identity like that. You don’t go door-to-door asking people to accept that you’re a runner. Running is a fundamentally isolated thing, something I do by myself, motivated by something inside of myself, and leading me to do things that don’t make sense to other people and indeed don’t really make sense to me. As I wake on Saturday at 5:35, thinking I could sleep more, my alarm will not go off for another twenty minutes. Still, I get up and pull on my clothes and shoes and head out to run twenty kilometres with eight kilometres of marathon pace running in the middle, running that you describe, without any irony, as comfortably uncomfortable. The running where I can maybe have a conversation for three or four minutes if I were running with my sensei, but eventually, I have to focus.

I’ve been thinking about the eighth or ninth mile of the Manchester marathon a few years ago, when I was hit with a kind of terrible malaise about the race, but also running in general, and the feeling like actually, maybe I didn’t want to be a runner, that I didn’t actually like running, and the incumbent panic of thinking what would fill the space that running took up in my life, the hours and hours I spend on it and thinking about it and trying to be a better runner and talking to people about running. These thoughts, thankfully, quieted down as we came up and around Old Trafford and that long straight stretch of that race where for miles and miles you can fall into a sort of trance, forgetting about everything and just putting one foot in front of another. I took an enormous shit at the beginning of mile twenty-five and crossed the finish line with my stomach cramping terribly, but I didn’t, in the end, give up running.

I’ve not had to confront this sort of doubt again, and like most marathons, as I think back on that day in Manchester, I remember wanting to quit, that I hated it, that I didn’t want to do it anymore, but what I remember more than anything is overcoming those thoughts and finishing. I almost never, when I’m running, wish that I wasn’t running.

At 6:15 on a Saturday morning in March, when I set out for my long run, I normally feel sorry for myself, thinking of the houses full of couples who went out on Friday night and made love and now don’t need to get up for hours, while I fell asleep and woke up alone and am gearing up to stare into the void for at least thirty-five minutes of the next two hours of my life. Of course, once I remind myself that this is a choice, that all of it is a choice, I find that part of me that I admire and pick up the pace as the watch beeps with a fifty-meter countdown, looking over the edge just as I start to fall, the separation of your mind and your body narrowing to an indistinguishable distance.

I’ve been trying hard to not wish my life away, to see everything now as a challenge to overcome until I can somehow continue with my pursuit of happiness which I’ve realised, late at forty-three, probably requires a kind of companionship I don’t think I understood I needed when I was a twenty-three year old Evangelical Christian believing some series of lies about how any relationship can be successful if you just work hard enough. Thursday night, I was riding my bicycle home in the rain. It was raining hard, torrential even, and I could feel my clothes starting to stick to me. It reminded me of a time I was caught in the same sort of rain in Malaysia, and parked in a strip mall, watching cockroaches swarm out from god knows where and terrified that they were going to crawl up the legs of my trousers. In both cases, I wanted to fast-forward through the experiences, for them to magically end and for me to be home and dry with the time disappearing from my life, to just become a memory of a thing I experienced.

Thankfully, I survived and got home and pulled off all of my clothes and changed, and my daughter and I went out and talked about our lives lazily as we wandered around the supermarket past ten. But that moment too, the one that I wanted to last, also receded into my memory, with the memory of the gust of wind hitting me so suddenly that I almost had to stop to push my bike, and I thought about how life can feel strangely symmetrical.

Eleven years ago, I was trying. I had a job interview at UCL that summer, and it was, as far as I could tell at the time, the most promising opportunity to finally succeed in a way I could appreciate for myself. It was the day that Jeremy Corbyn announced he would stand for leadership of the Labour party, and I remember this because I walked past the room where he was making the announcement: the first door with a window revealing the back for the room with the media, the cameras, and then as I kept walking, the second window where I saw Corbyn himself, standing at a podium speaking. In one memory, he looked over at me as I walked past and we made eye contact, but this is probably a false memory.

I didn’t get that job, of course, and wrote at the time about how I would feel in the future looking back on this, and the life that I was living, almost incidentally it felt, going from thing to thing that interested me without any of them feeling like the one things that was going to be it, the thing that was going to bring it all together and create a golden thread of the narrative, the thing that’s meant to pull the whole story together into a single meaningful theme.

The eighth marathon pace kilometre of eight marathon pace kilometres feels the best. The end is coming, and you can push it to that end, focus on how you are swinging your arms and the turnover of steps, really feel your body as again the last fifty meters beep off on your watch. The end comes, and you pull up and slow, and watch your heart rate drop, and your mind separates from your body again and you can see yourself and analyse yourself again, like you're watching a movie. I sit on the stoop in front of the house on Elisabeth Road and scroll through the numbers and think something I didn’t think when I was younger, that this is the pace I could run today, rather than this is not the pace I wanted to run today.

When I was younger, I didn’t know what I needed to do to get where I wanted to go, to run the pace I wanted to run, but now I know what I need to do. It’s something you can say about being this age: nothing is a mystery, you don’t need to spend any more time trying things that don’t work. You know what you need to do now: it’s the sort of sudden understanding that comes after years and years of not knowing, the way salt separates from water when it starts to boil. You just need to do it when you can do it.