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.