Variation on a theme
Sixteen weeks ago, the start of my marathon training, it was Christmas. I ran five miles at an 8:32/mi pace, up and down Woodgate Valley, where I have run for over ten years now. I’m sure it was cold, but I don’t remember it, in the way that you never remember the runs you do again and again and again. I’ve run that same route hundreds of times and I only remember a handful of them, when something unique happened, maybe a dog chased me, or I saw a colleague who had cancer and had been on sick leave, and whom I only recognised after I passed her and her partner. I was thinking on this Christmas run, I’m sure, about my marriage, about the gifts I had gotten Yoko, about the next year, and only vaguely about the race, which was in the future, beyond the horizon.
At some point in my early life, something went wrong in my relationship with food, in that I don’t ever remember being able to recognise feeling full as a prompt to stop eating. I was fat as a kid, fat in the way kids could be fat in the eighties, fat in the way that people would just say to you, ‘You’re fat’ and you would accept it as a thing about yourself. Sometimes, you would have a euphemism — I would get jeans in a ‘Husky’ cut, but mostly I was just fat, naturally fat, where I held fat all over my body. I would stop eating when the food was gone, when the plate was cleared, but I don’t remember ever thinking to myself, I’m full now, that’s all I need.
Running for me has always coincided with attempts to overcome my fatness, starting the year that I met Yoko and some insatiable desire led me to change everything, to start running and buy new clothes and an engagement ring. To stop eating sleeves of cookies and begin weighing myself every week, and then suddenly to revert back, to eat and eat without being able to stop. I remember someone saying, when I came back from Japan with Yoko the Spring we were engaged, that I had lost my baby fat, and I had. I had figured out there was some relationship between my body and the world around me, that you could go out to a restaurant and order something other than a hamburger or pizza and fries.
People say that you need to fuel your run, which is a metaphor wherein food is fuel and your body is a fuel-burning machine. I know that this metaphor is basically accurate, but I also know that if I run without eating, the app will praise me, the icon will stay green rather than yellow or red. If I can’t trust my body, I can trust the app, I can trust the maths of an algorithm. And this works fine, until it doesn’t, until you are up at 11:30 at night having slept for two hours already and are making what is meant to be your breakfast for the next day. It’s calories in, calories out, yes, but not really, or rather, it really is that, but the known unknowns are more substantial than you think. My grandfather once returned a car to the dealership because the miles per gallon he got didn’t match what was advertised. My dad told me this and I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to admire this trait or not. It’s all an approximation isn’t it: we live in a fantasy world where we can allocate a numerical value to an Oreo cookie and then a corresponding numerical value to the movement of a human’s body. What is truth.
This cycle, I was better. My weight stayed neutral, and my anxiety about my weight was manageable. I overdid my training, peaking in February: this is clear to me now, but at the time, I was only thinking that I would get better. If I was running 6:51/mi for ten miles at eight weeks out, I would certainly be able to run them all in April. It, of course, doesn’t work that way, and as I stood at the start line of the Manchester Marathon on Sunday, sixteen weeks after that first run, I didn’t feel the sort of energy you need to feel. I felt dread. You can’t recognise it as dread at the time, but that’s what it is, and when the three hour pacer in front of me set off, I lied to myself and said, I can stay with him, and made the mistake every man who has ever run a marathon has made: I can do better than I actually can.
And then, you believe that for about eight miles until your watch buzzes a bit early for the next mile marker and you’ve slowed and then you have a good mile, and then two slow ones and then a good one, and then it starts to fall off more and you begin to bargain with yourself, and put off that feeling you have that you might need to stop because it’s only six miles now, and you think about something you heard that the marathon is two races back-to-back, one that is twenty miles and one that is six miles. You can train to make it easier, but you can’t ever really train for the feeling you have when it comes. You think about what you ate and what you didn’t eat, about how those last six miles are just the Woodgate Valley trail, out and back. Two parkruns. To work and halfway back. Hardly anything.
The cumulative effect of all of this, the overtraining, the strict adherence to a particular caloric intake, the specific complex carbohydrates, was me in a porta-loo just shy of Mile 25, for forty seconds, and then a final mile that took the equivalent effort of the previous five miles, the sort of pain you can’t really describe as unbearable because you are, in fact, bearing it and are, here in your free time, in an event you have paid to participate in, choosing to go forward, towards the finish with thousands of people screaming and seeing you at your worst, hobbled and exhausted while someone who appears to have had a much better race, a man getting a PB, sprints past you with his arms raised.
There are things you recognise as things you need to fix, but recognising them is not enough. I know I should not start too fast — the race literally began with Labour Mayor Andy Burnham telling everyone to not start too fast, but I believed something that wasn’t true about myself. Or rather, I believed something that wasn’t true about myself on the day, but might have been true. It’s impossible to tell if this belief is a mistake or not, if I should regret it. There is no fate. You can change things with belief, or rather sometimes you can change things with belief. Many times you can't, but the times you do, you become something amazing. You run twenty minutes faster than you ran before. You actually do the thing you can't actually do.
I do know when I am full: if I pay attention, I can stop eating. I don’t know why I didn’t learn this when I was younger, but it doesn’t matter now, does it. I know what I need to fix, and I need to fix it, to stop wondering why it was broken in the first place. It’s good to know why you’re broken; it’s better to fix the broken things you can fix.
I love and hate running. I love and hate that so much of my personality is doing hard things all the time. I love and hate standing at a start line with a thousand other people, nervous and knowing that something is going to happen on the course that you can't predict, but know is coming. I love and hate being alone all day, not having anyone with me to support me. I love and hate the hours and hours of running alone on the canal, of looking down at a pace during an interval and thinking it's right on. I love and hate being middle-aged, feeling like I finally know what I want and feeling like I'm getting closer to the end than the beginning. I love and hate thinking about what I did right or wrong, how I made right choices or wrong ones. Surely this is all just an analogue to everything else in my life, a way to practice when it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter if I ran three hours and twenty-one minutes when I could have run three hours and six minutes. It’s just a chance to learn, to do another iteration of the same thing and mark whatever progress you’ve made.