The Memory of Running

I recently re-read the Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. Broadly speaking, it's a made up story about a very overweight 43 year old Vietnam veteran from East Providence, Rhode Island called Smithson Ide who spends his time lounging in front of the TV drinking, smoking and eating Pretzels. At the start of the book, his parents have just been killed in a car crash on the way home from a holiday, and just as he is absorbing this news, he finds out his mentally ill sister who has been missing for 20 years has been found dead in California, and he has to go collect the body. In a drunken stupor he gets his old 3 speed Raleigh bike out of the garage and rides it with flat tyres until he passes out in a field. From there his journey begins, cycling across America from East to West to collect his dead sister.

It's called the Memory of Running because as a wiry youth he would run everywhere, as he describes it, like a duck being shot at. There's a lot of flashbacks to his life of 20+ years ago, as well as the main narrative of his present day journey.

Recently my life too has undergone some pretty radical changes. Thankfully not as tragic as the ones that befell Smithy, but still pretty major. Part of it has been that a few weeks ago, I moved back to Leeds, after nearly 25 years away. I guess when I left, my life was all potential for the future, whereas now a lot of it is past history.

Although I'm not as fat as Smithson Ide, and I've never been shot at in any wars, I can relate to his feelings of loss and sadness in the book.

Having recently passed my 46^th birthday, I recently spent some time looking at my rugby team photos from school, wondering where those 30 years have gone.

In the days when those pictures were taken, I was like the young Smithy Ide, I could just run and run. I could run beyond tiredness into a place where I felt like I could run for ever. I was always out playing football it seemed, often till well after dark, jumpers for goalposts and all that, even in the summer. Some nights it would be so dark, you couldn't see the ball anymore, although you generally knew it was somewhere near when it either hit you in the face or went whizzing by your ear, but we'd keep playing anyway.

As well as playing rugby for school on Saturdays, I used to play football for a team in Garforth on a Sunday. In those days running was incidental, a way to be faster at chasing a ball. It wasn't an end in itself.

I suppose, in some ways, running for me has always been a bit like the cycling was last year. A series of false starts. I used to be made to run cross country at school, but after 3 weeks of it, when I was just getting good, we'd stop. I ran a 10k in around 45 minutes when I was 18, but in those days running was just something I did to kick start my rugby and football training after a summer off, so I never stuck at it for it's own sake.

I started running briefly in 1994, and again in 2002 in preparation for the Great North Run which I never took part in because I was having trouble getting beyond 5 miles at a time.  The last time I even tried running was before I got Rheumatoid Arthritis in 2002. After that my joints were so sore I couldn't even run for a bus.

So anyway, here I am, back in the place where I grew up, dealing with a sense of loss over the potential that was my life 25 years ago, and also feeling somewhat melancholy over stuff that has gone wrong in the intervening years, and I wanted to do something to help make me feel better about myself, as well as helping me feel more at home and part of the community. And I'd somehow stumbled across Parkrun when I'd been Googling something or other, and I thought it sounded good.

In some ways the previous few months prior to moving back to Leeds had been good preparation. The autumn and winter I spent walking to work through roads lined with dogshit in Darlington coupled with not eating as much crap as I used to had helped me lose a stone in six months, so I thought at my current weight of around 13 stone I might be able to run for a short while without my knees shattering. I was sort of right.

Running is very low tech compared to cycling I thought. You don't need to know about anything mechanical, and you don't even need to carry a puncture repair kit.

Anyway, it took me a week to get my Parkrun barcode printed, due to the library printer breaking pretty much every time I tried to send a print to it, and when I turned up 4 Saturdays ago at the start of my first Parkrun, I hadn't even managed a practice jog.

The parkrun at Temple Newsam, like all parkruns is 5 kilometres long. It's basically 2 laps of the park, and at Temple Newsam it starts by going uphill and over the brow of a hill. It's probably about 200 metres before you're out of sight. My goal was to get over the brow of the hill before I started walking.

I surprised myself on that first run, because although I was progressing at a snail's pace, I could breathe okay, and I was managing to keep running. I didn't look back but I knew there must be a few people behind me. At one point I overtook a man who looked about 70 who was walking with his grandson. In your face grandad! I thought. Actually I made that part up.

Although what I was doing seemed to be barely above walking pace, I did manage to get round the full 5k without stopping, in a time of 35 minutes 46 seconds. Just as I was approaching the finish someone shouted to me 'next time try not doing it in a jumper!'.

For 3 days after that I was pretty much unable to walk. I'd been too tired to warm down properly and my legs were just smashed from the shock. And my feet were killing me because my 12 year old running shoes were apparently no longer a very good fit, if they ever were. But the boost to my mental state was impossible to calculate. Partly the social side of meeting new people but also the actual running made me feel better.

Since then I've bought some new running shoes, and I've done 3 more parkruns, as well as a few other 3 mile runs. Over the first 4 parkruns, I've been improving by around a minute a week timewise. Clearly that won't go on for ever, because if it did, I'd be in the Olympics in about 3 months, but if you're slow to start with, it's easier to get faster. I may have overdone it by doing a bit too much too soon though, because I'm currently getting a lot of knee pain, and having started cycling again too, I need to manage how much I do of each.

But after re-reading 'The Memory of Running' and after doing a limited amount of running again myself, I've started to remember the sense of joy and freedom that can come from being out there on the road. Although there are a lot more aches and pains than there were 30 years ago, I know that, whatever the rest of the circumstances of my life are, on the days when I run, I feel better than on the days when I don't.   

Of course England lose at penalties - our goalies are just not mad enough

Some people say England lose in big football tournaments, because they can't take penalties, I say it's because England goalkeepers are just not crazy enough..

It can't be any coincidence that the only big game that has ever ended satisfactorily for us on the world stage was at the end of the Second World War in Escape to Victory when someone snapped Kevin O'Callaghan's arm in half so they could send on a big dumb American to play in goals.  He didn't even know how to play football but he still managed to save the last minute penalty.  The German penalty taker didn't miss it because Sylvester Stallone was any good between the posts.  It's just that he was larger than life and he had a right gob on him.  And he jumped around a lot in slow motion.

I occasionally used to play in goals when I was a kid. Mostly when none of the first five choices of goalkeeper were available. I once played in goal in a pre-season friendly against the age group above us that we lost 13-2. I was about 12 at the time. The only save I made in the whole game got knocked in on the rebound. And do you know what the manager said to me afterwards?

He said: “To be fair, although basically your all round game was shit, your main problem was that you were nowhere near angry or dangerous enough. None of the attackers at any point were afraid for their lives, none of them expected to lose a limb when they got near the penalty box.”

I'm 46 now and I've got arthritis and if I drop a tea towel on the floor it can take 15 or so minutes for me to bend down and pick it up, but I think if you stuck me between some goalposts doing my tea towel thing in slow motion I could probably still save one penalty in 10. Most of them just go down the middle anyway. And if you were to wonder where you'd seen that old tea towel recovery manoeuvre before, that's right you've guessed it, it was Peter Shilton in Italia '90.

I don't blame Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle for 1990. It was Shilton. He was 40 at the time, and he wasn't so much going down in instalments, he was going down in those weekly instalments that you get from the newsagents that you used to spend your pocket money on. You know, the ones that were cheap for the first two weeks, and then they cost a fortune every week after that for an unending load of old crap. He seemed to spend the entire shootout waiting for Issue Z.

Now, admittedly Shilton is the most capped England player of all time, and I've won, well no caps for England, but let me advance a theory...

England don't get knocked out because they lose on penalties. They get knocked out because their goalies just aren't hard enough. England goalkeepers are neither the right sort of crazy nor the wrong sort of dangerous to make truly world class stoppers.

And Robert Green throwing the ball into his own net wasn't even the start of it...Oh no...

Maradona in '86, for example. All that controversy about the handball should have been academic. Maradona shouldn't have got anywhere near that ball. The much taller Shilton, who was actually allowed to use his hands, should have cleaned him out well before he got even close. I'm not sticking up for Schumacher and his atrocity against Battiston in the 1982 World Cup semi-final when he nearly killed him, but at least in that incident, and despite the clumsiness and recklessness of his actions, Schumacher was at least alive to the danger. The ball hadn't even got into the penalty area.

And Maradona's second goal in '86, you know the greatest goal of all time and all that. If it'd been Ramon Quiroga of Peru circa 1978 he wouldn't only have stopped the first Maradona goal, he's have stopped the second one too, by strangling him on the halfway line.

Going back to Shilton, it should never even have got to penalties in 1990 against Germany. If Shilton hadn't fallen over into the net after Paul Parker's deflection, it would have been 1-0. If Peter Schmeichel had been in goal he wouldn't have even needed to jump for it, he would have scared the ball away just by screaming at his defenders. And in the penalties themselves Shilton was like a statue. The German lad was half his age. Why didn't he retire in about '87?  He didn't even think to try and put the Germans off by doing a jelly legs Bruce Grobbelaar impersonation.

Then there was Seaman in 2002. Falling into the net and crying into his ponytail, because he got chipped from the halfway line by Ronaldinho. If he'd been a nutjob like Higuita from Colombia he wouldn't have only stayed on his line, he'd have cleared it with a Scorpion kick. Or if he'd been more like Chilavert from Paraguay he'd have gone up the other end and smashed in a free kick of his own to equalise, then if they'd still got knocked out by the world's first ever Golden Goal from Laurent Blanc he wouldn't have sat around crying in the goal and feeling sorry for himself, he'd have gone round and commiserated with all his team-mates

And I wasn't old enough to watch Bonetti in 1970 but I do know his challenge on Gerd Muller for the winner was non-existent, I've seen the replays...

It's not as if the English haven't had any role models to follow. If only we'd paid attention. When Bert Trautmann was running around with a broken neck snapping the legs of anyone who dared come near him in the 1956 FA Cup Final, why wasn't this being put into an FA coaching newsreel to be shown to our up and coming goalkeepers. I could have done with a dose of that myself. I might have only lost 12-2 then.

Some people have said that I can be a bit harsh on Shilton, and admittedly I'm no football expert. So here are some words from Brian Clough, someone who managed him for a number of years at Forest, from around 1989. (I met him once at a book signing, but every bloody local journalist in the greater Teesside area was trying to get 5 minutes with him, so I never got the chance to ask him about the 1990 penalty shoot-out)

"Shilton has shot his bolt," insisted Clough, after the veteran keeper gained his 102nd cap against Sweden.

"The World Cup finals are 18 months away, but 18 months is a long time for a goalkeeper who is already 39 years old".

If he'd retired sooner, instead of going on to amass a record 125 caps, he could have avoided the spectacle that was his final game, the third place play-off against Italy at Italia 90 when he ended up wandering around his penalty box for about half an hour, like a man who'd forgotten where he'd parked his car. Of at least if he'd chopped Baggio or Schillaci down, like Trautmann would have done, he could have gone out in a blaze of glory.

I suppose in retrospect he was still a better goalkeeper than I was. I never got another game in goals after that 13-2 defeat. Although I did go on to become quite an aggressive outfield player, who at one point circa 1982 did my very own Ramon Quiroga impersonation, by rugby tackling a big fat kid with tree trunk legs who I otherwise just kept bouncing off. I didn't even get booked. Everyone just laughed, including the referee. It was in the days of Schumacher when football was more like cage fighting, and you had to more or less kill someone to even get a yellow....But that's another story....

Borrowing the will of the ball

For about two years now I've pretty much hated cycling. Even seeing people in lycra has annoyed me. I hated it so much I gave it up. For 197 days since last October.

Mentally for me, cycling had become an attritional and miserable activity involving being wet and cold and in the middle of nowhere, and bikes had become the kind of obstacles that you fall over repeatedly indoors when you're trying to get the hoover out of the cupboard, rather than things for outdoor use. A hobby that started out as a bit of fun and a chance to get some fresh air and see some new places had turned into the sort of thing that Peter Jackson could have made a new trilogy out of.

Arriving in Arnside in June 2012 under a misty, soggy, dark and rainy sky, after a 108 mile, 13 hour bike ride, and being unable to remove my own socks, knowing I had to do it all again the next day, then being up most of the night downing Powerade and doubting my own legs and then getting up and doing just that might have been my greatest ever achievement on a bike, but it was also the point when I realised most clearly that it had stopped being fun. I pulled more muscles trying to get those socks off that I ever did on the road.

But that wasn't the start of the misery. No, that came a long time before. At the start of 2011. With a whole year's worth of cycling for Ruth and I having been not only planned but written down in felt pen on a laminated wall planner (being so organised for once must have been a bad omen), Ruth was hit by a car in January and all those plans were ruined.

Except I didn't notice. Instead of adapting to the new information, I kept plodding along the pre-planned track, thinking that it was just a ripple in the stream that would correct itself.

The low point of my evidence denying lunacy was attempting a 200k Audax on a baking Easter Saturday, while Ruth was at home in the garden. I was being driven by forces I didn't even understand. After 30k of it, having pulled a few muscles going off too fast, and stunned by the bewilderingly long list of places I was supposed to cycle in and out of in the next 12 hours, in weather so hot I could have fried an egg on the pavement, I gave up and went home. But by then Ruth and I had become out of sync.

I persisted in arranging a cycling holiday for us in May 2011, when for Ruth even the sound of a car engine could induce panic and fear, and it became less a holiday and more a post traumatic stress filled, ash cloud and hurricane strength winds fleeing misery.  

With that, my main fortnight's holiday of the year was gone, and plodding along as I was in a job that was driving me round the bend, by the summer of 2011 I was completely unravelling mentally.

By August I reached a breaking point. I walked in to work one day and walked straight back out. At a time when Ruth needed me to be there to lean on, instead I was collapsing under the weight of my own anxieties.

2012 started with some unemployment and a trip to India. I'd become a dead man walking, and it was an attempt to bring me back to life. For someone like me, who hates unpredictability, it should probably have been kill or cure. In the end I'm not sure it was either.

Another accident in February 2012 put paid to Ruth's cycling recovery, and our chances of getting back into sync on the road. By that time I was heavily into training for the absolutely bonkers challenge, that was cycling Coast to Coast to Coast over 2 days with a bunch of other 40 something mid-life crises made flesh. The irony is, despite the unremovability of wet socks, and the appalling weather on that ride, and in all the training rides that led up to it, it may well have been my finest hour on a bike. It just didn't feel like it. It was nothing like the fun-filled, sun-filled lengthy pub lunch enjoying (and occasional trip in an ambulance) jamboree that had been 2010's C2C. No, it was grim.

After 2 years of being disconnected from her bikewise, I resolved at the start of 2013 to put the emphasis back onto cycling with Ruth but again January was a disaster. I was miserable all through a group weekend away, feeling mentally completely fatigued and all at sea, and within 4 months we'd somehow contrived to split up altogether.

As a cycling year 2013 was a failure. At first I couldn't get going on a death trap of a bike that had a special gold ring missing from the steering (cue Peter Jackson). Overweight and with no motivation or will to continue, I was half-hearted at best. Instead of completing things in a weary and bedraggled state a la 2012, I stopped completing them at all. I'd gained two stone since the high point of 2010 when I'd done nearly 5000 miles, and I was feeling sluggish in every way.

By May 2013 I was living alone in Darlington, and the few rides I did with friends that year, rides I would have coasted through previously, I either grovelled through, or gave up part way. Going uphill in particular had become a crawl-a-thon.

By the summer of 2013 I decided to start at the very beginning again. Instead of trying to be a macho man riding the big distances in the wind and the rain I decided to start small.

Instead of thinking about distance, I tried to just enjoy being on a bike again. And for a while it worked. With no car anymore, I really started to enjoy the 3 miles each way to work and back on the mountain bike (the other bike Ruth had bought me, the less death trappy one).

The roads were pretty potholey but with the suspension and the big tyres I didn't feel the bumps, and I was really enjoying being able to ride up the kerb. I also liked the fact that I didn't need to carry any spares, because the longest distance I'd have to walk in the event of a breakdown was a mile and a half.

And so I had a brief relapse into enjoying cycling again. I rode through South Park each morning with the morning dew still fresh on the bowling green, getting abuse off parrots and talking to dog owners and on those short sun-filled journeys, whatever it was that had ruined cycling for me was being repaired bit by bit but then in August some little shite stole that bike I loved and that was the end of that. My enthusiasm was lost all over again.

For a while I continued tackling the potholes on the road bike, but I felt the bumps a lot more, and getting up the kerbs wasn't anywhere near as much fun.

There was a bright spot of going to Scotland in September to ride round some Scottish Islands on the finally fully functional former death trap, but mostly that was about using the most efficient means of transport at getting round the islands, rather than wanting to ride. Even an 80 mile dash back to Ardrossan to get home in time for Graeme's Audax was ultimately a bit of a let down, when I didn't complete that ride either.

By October when the clocks had changed and I was going to and from work in the dark, on skinny tyres, and over potholes everywhere, I just thought 'Ah, fuck it, I'd rather walk'.

So for almost six months, from October till the end of March at which point I gave up my job to move to Leeds I walked to work every day. 3 miles each way. In the dark, and in the wind and the rain. Along roads lined with dog shit, under a railway bridge that had to be power washed every day to get the pigeon crap off. Because I didn't have a car, I walked lots of other miles too. Some days up to 10 or 12 miles. I know this because for a while I carried a pedometer.

I don't really do strategy, but if there was any vague strategy behind my actions it was that I was going to spend six months walking, and then if I ever did get back on a bike again, I'd have lost some weight, and I'd have some residual stamina in my legs to start with.

When I moved to Leeds last month, I thought the move would help revive the cycling. Having somewhere new and different to ride. At first it didn't. I bought the Sustrans map of West Yorkshire, but for a month I only ever looked at it from a chair, and never from the road.

I even took up running instead. There were various reasons for this, but some of it was undoubtedly bike avoidance.

Then one day, shortly before I passed 200 bike free days, I finally took the road bike outside again. The cycling was pretty much how I remembered it. Fatigue, mental confusion, inability to map read, going round in circles, mud, dog's climbing up my leg, potholes, dirt tracks, bin lorries scaring the crap out of me, so tired I lost all language skills by halfway. That sort of thing.

But despite all that, it gave me the push I needed to finally replace the stolen mountain bike. And then a morning of nearly removing my own fingerprints trying to attach an old style bike computer and magnet to the mountain bike convinced me to buy a Garmin, and so the ball was rolling again. But I was still felt somewhat lacking in real motivation.

For a long time in the last year or so, I've been fixated on the past. On the pivotal moments in life when I've chosen certain paths. And I've been very aware of the things I've lost. Sometimes those feelings have seemed overwhelming. The decision to move back to Leeds after nearly 25 years away brought back a lot of memories and it made me weigh up everything that has happened during that time away.

I know that there's a tendency, which I'm invariably guilty of, of sometimes looking back on large periods of life, and only picking out the salient events which demonstrate the areas where things have gone wrong. Woe is me and all that. It's probably that thing called awfulisation that my counsellor was on about that time. Well, for a long time that had been me and cycling (it was also me and Darlington, but that's another story). For those 197 bike free days I was only thinking about the bad stuff. Like a child with an otherwise happy childhood, who couldn't stop thinking about being force-fed Brussel Sprouts at mealtimes.

Anyway, as far as the recent past goes, and the cycling in particular, well somewhere in the misery that I got myself lost in, I managed to separate and alienate myself from the person who was most responsible for getting me into cycling in the first place, and who was the one who would pick up the pieces on the road when I crumbled, mentally or otherwise. The person who I was most evenly paced and in tune with, and who would take charge and go order me some food when I was imitating the action of a zombie in Killin or Berwick-on-Tweed. And in other places, when I couldn't remember my own name, or where I'd come from that day. That's not to suggest it was all plain sailing out there, all sweetness and light. Far from it, there were plenty of instances of near divorce at the roadside too.

As for things as they are now, well whatever the rights and wrongs of the past, you can only start where you are. I suppose, in the end, with life, as in cycling, eventually you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself, thinking about what's gone wrong, and just get on with things. For the sake of the present, and for the future. Otherwise 197 days can turn into the rest of your life.

Re: the cycling, some advice I'm probably misquoting came some time ago from my friends Graeme and Stephen, who have both said (sort of) that if you don't set any goals, you won't do anything.

If I know myself at all, I know that I lack the motivation for going it alone. I just don't have the will to do big stuff by myself. It's why I never decorate. Historically I've always been better in a team, or a partnership. It's why I was good at rugby and football but crap at squash and tennis. When it was only me I just didn't care.

There's a scene in the film Awakenings with Robin Williams, based on the real life experiences of Oliver Sacks, where otherwise seemingly comatose patients will stick their arm out to catch a passing tennis ball, and he describes this as 'borrowing the will of the ball'. Sometimes I lack the means of giving myself the push I need to do things, and so I also need to borrow some willpower from outside myself.

Anyway, since I want to do some stuff, but haven't got the heart for going it alone, I decided that the only way to properly kickstart my enthusiasm for cycling again, was to join some organised events.

Because I lack the get up and go to get up and go by myself, a possible way round it is to find some other people who are going, and get up and go with them instead, even if I don't know who they are. So that's what I'm going to do.

Today I've signed up to do a Coast to Coast ride at the end of June and an End to End (Land's End to John o' Groats) ride in September. Both trips will work out somewhat more expensive than if I were to do them alone and unsupported. But that's kind of the point. To do them alone and unsupported means in all likelihood not to do them at all. Because for me they are big things. Not just physically but mentally and emotionally. And to do them I know I'll need the benefit of mutual encouragement / shared experience / no man is an island and all that.

Now if it would just stop raining for 5 minutes, I could go out and do some training..