Stay away from the light! Hovering somewhere between life and death at my local running club

I joined a running club a couple of months ago (Roundhay Runners). As much to meet people and to have something to do as for the running. I'd found myself living in a new place, and with a lot of time on my hands, and I like running so it seemed an obvious thing to do.

I've been running for about 8 years. Mostly Parkrun, and mostly the same type of running. Running as fast as I can for between 25 minutes and an hour. No real variety. No slow running, no interval training. Just the same all the time. Since I joined the running club things have been different.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in the Leeds Dock Relay. Teams of 3 people, running laps of a 0.9 mile circuit at Leeds Dock, as many laps as you can in an hour. It sounds easy, you only have to run for roughly 20 minutes each, with 40 minutes off. Don't go off too fast, people said! But there's crowds cheering, and you see your team-mate coming round the corner, and they high-5 you, and off you go!

Rather unhelpfully, the first 100 metres actually has a 100 metre track painted on the pavement, and so off you go, and you think 'Hey, look at me, I'm in the Olympics, I'm the King of the World'. And then about 100 metres later, you get to a Tesco on the corner, and you realise that you're nearly dead, but you've still got 1300 metres to go. Luckily, the next 1000 metres or so, no-one can see you. You go round the back of some buildings, and you may as well be on the dark side of the moon, you're in a lonely netherworld purgatory, where your lungs are screaming, and your legs are screaming too, but you can't hear them for your lungs. And then after that you emerge into where people are again, and so you put a brave face on it, and keep running for the crowd. That first lap I did in 6 minutes 30, which is probably the fastest I've run since I was at school. But it's okay, because then you get about 12-13 minutes off, and because it's so fresh in your mind, you think, well I won't be doing that again. Then 13 minutes later, well, there's crowds and cheering, and there's adrenaline, and there's a 100 metre track on the road, so you do exactly the same again. Purgatory, hovering between life and death, I haven't learned a thing! And again, just to prove how little you've learned, you do it all exactly the same again, for a third time. And at the end, you forget about the death, and all you remember is that you had a really great time.

That was two weeks ago. This week I had a different kind of near death experience. In the form of a handicap race. It's a 6km route, made up of 2 3km laps. Everyone submits an estimate in advance of how fast they can run it, and then you set off at intervals, slowest to fastest. I submitted a pretty accurate estimate, since I run this type of distance a lot, some people provided slightly more questionable guesses. A group of 5 set off about 2 minutes before me, who I know can all run faster than me. Well, I'm never catching them I thought. Again, I ran at the limit of myself, which is a state of near death, but instead of the 1000 metres of purgatory down the back of some buildings on my own, I ran this one with the help of others.

You must have heard stories of people who've reported having a near death experience. Where they go down a long tunnel towards a bright light, and at the end of the tunnel there's a beautiful garden, and all their friends are in the garden. And although the garden seems really appealing and full of love, it's not their time yet, as there are still things for them to do, and so they get sent back again.

Well, on Thursday, all along the 3km circuit I ran, there were other members of the club acting as marshalls, maybe one every 300 metres. Making sure I didn't run the wrong way. And they were so positive and encouraging about my running, I felt like I was running towards that beautiful garden Admittedly, I was running down a long painful 300 metre tunnel, but I still felt the warmth and the acceptance. At one point, I could also hear someone shouting my name from across a road, but I couldn't figure out who it was (I still don't know), and while I was looking to the side trying to identify them with my sweaty eyes, I nearly ran into a lamp-post. Maybe that was the equivalent of getting to the post-death garden and finding someone there who you've completely forgotten was ever in your life. 

Anyway, if all runs were like this, they would all be easy. If you could set them up in advance with people stationed along the route to encourage you, you could run for ever. By the time I reached my second lap, people were starting to overtake me, but even they were supportive, and they each took time to tell me I was running well. And so, even being overtaken was fun too. And at the end, more encouragement. And then pizza! 

I've been wondering a lot lately what it is to have a home. I think feeling accepted somewhere is a start. At times I've felt like a wreck over the last 3 months. And when I'm running I certainly look like one. In recent weeks, various people have taken photos of me while I've been running, and I haven't seen one yet where I don't look to be in pain.

But everyone at the running club has treated me like I belong there. So, even when I am half-killing myself at the limits of my physical ability, and hovering somewhere between life and death, I'm still sort of okay too. It's just that the good parts of running don't always show on the outside.

Nothing else I was supposed to carry - Why I run

Part One - Shit

In early July I went on a short break to the Eden Valley. As I set off early one morning on a solo walk up to High Cup Nick, despite being in a beautiful place, I realised that I had become fixated on worrying about something 10 days in the future. I was imagining fantastically elaborate things that could and probably would go wrong at this future date.

And the thought occurred to me, that I waste approximately 80% of my mental energy on shit. About 40% on self-recrimination and rumination about things I've done or decisions I've made in the past, and about 40% on things that could go wrong in the future.

That only leaves about 20% of my energy left to run my life. Sometimes I do succeed at focusing on the present. For example, when I'm writing this, or when I get into a flow at work.  But often my thoughts are dominated by past regrets and future fears. 

In times of crisis, that 80% shit can increase all the way up to 100%

I was in a relationship for nearly 8 years which broke up in May. Immediately after the breakup, I couldn’t stand to be me. I felt embarrassed and ashamed of my life, and the decisions I've made which put me where I am. I hated being seen or making eye contact with anyone, in case I was see-through, and the shit inside was visible, For the first few days all I could think about was what I’d lost, and I wished that I didn't exist. I didn’t know what to do next or where to live, and I didn’t know how to fill the big hole in my life where the relationship used to be.  I couldn't switch off from thinking about how and why ‘everything had gone wrong’. I can’t remember a time when I felt worse about who I am.

Part Two – Happiness

Probably the time in my life when I felt best about who I am was when I was 17.

It was 1985 and I was on a German exchange to Hannover with school, with a group of friends. One evening on that trip, we went to the park, and we met some German soldiers, not much older than us doing their national service. We played them at football, they agreed to play in bare feet so they didn't kick us too much with their army boots, and after the game we all shared a crate of beer. It could have been the beer, but afterwards I remember lying on the grass with my eyes closed on that lovely July day, and feeling 'happy enough to die'. As if life would never get any better than this. And in some ways it never has.

At that point, I was probably as full of myself as it's possible to be. All through school I was singled out as a bright student, and I believed my own publicity, that I was better than the average, superior to most. With no sense of irony, I would quite happily lecture grown ups on their life choices, never having made any myself. I regularly told my step dad where he was going wrong. But it was all theory. I didn't feel any responsibility for the past, because I hadn't made any real decisions, and I had no anxiety about the future, because I assumed it was going to be great, because I was great.

At that age I’d never had a serious relationship, or a full-time job, or my own house, or any real money. I'd never been turned down from any jobs, been made redundant, got divorced, or had to arrange any funerals. No real failures, no real responsibilities.

Part Three – Suitcase

I was recently reading a book by Haruki Murakami on running.

He says looking inside himself is like ‘staring down into a deep well… all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centred nature that still doubts itself – that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or nearly funny about the situation. I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect….”

I guess it’s part of growing older that you have to look down into that dark well for yourself. Then you have to then carry the weight of what you find there. Including the disappointment of where your life doesn’t measure up to the imaginings of your youth.

Part Four – Running

How do I carry this weight? Well, running helps. One constant which acts as a stabiliser whatever else is going on around me is the routine of going to parkrun on a Saturday. And regularly going to new ones gives me the added distraction of new experiences. I’ve done 12 new ones in the last 12 weeks, including Wetherby, York, Harrogate, Fountains Abbey and Knaresborough. Oh, and Chevin Forest...

Despite my intention to ‘take it steady’, the first 200 metres of Chevin Forest parkrun was a near death experience. Not so much a run as a desperate scramble into a mass of post-earthquake rubble, as if trying to locate a lost dog in a collapsed building. When I was still alive at metre 201 I thought I'd better keep going for the full 5k. At the finish I scanned my barcode and then lay on the grass with my eyes closed, feeling knackered. I wasn’t so much beside myself, as outside myself.

In those 5 minutes of recovery, there was no suitcase to carry. I existed outside my life. I had no awareness if I was in a relationship or not, where I live, whether I'm a success or not. It was just recovery from physical effort. And all the differences between 17 year old me and 54 year old me became irrelevant.

A couple of weeks later I joined a running club (Roundhay Runners). One of their training nights is interval training. The first time, it was just running up hills for 20 to 30 minutes, punctuated by jogging back down to the bottom of the hills to start again.

After the hills session, I realised I hadn't had a single conceptual thought about my life the whole time I was running. Who I am, where I am, who I'm with or not with. There was only room for run, recover, run, recover. 

A week later it was a pyramid session. A similar thing, but basically running in circles instead of up hills. Laps of the cricket pitch, with short gaps in-between. No time for narrative, just run, recover, run, recover. Then lie down.

Part 5 – Numbers

Someone I live with now asked me recently ‘Do you think you might be autistic?’ ‘I don’t know’ I said ‘It’s never been measured.  I know I sometimes like numbers more than people.  I find relationships difficult, and conflict in relationships almost impossible. But I like looking at football results, league tables and cricket averages. When I was a child, a lot of the books I got out of the library were books of facts, about how tall buildings were, or comparing the wingspan of different aircraft. I love learning languages, but sometimes I’m more interested in looking at the rules behind them than I am in using them to actually talk to anyone, I really like maths because the answer is either right or wrong, and my favourite subject at Uni was Syntax. For my job I spend most of my time at work entering data into spreadsheets and databases, and I’m also one of those fruit loops who records everything he does on Strava and who can’t bear to leave the house without his Garmin, who believes that if a run isn’t recorded, it didn’t happen. But other than that, probably not’.

Compared to the sometime brain fog of my internal monologue, running is safe because it can be measured objectively. When I think I'm achieving nothing, or going nowhere in life, having thoughts such as ‘I’m 54, and I’ve got nothing to show for it, I’ve ruined my whole life’, that’s just speculation, but if I can run a bit faster than last week over the same route, that's a fact. Unlike the aftermath of a relationship, trying to figure out what happened, who did what to who and why. I can say that at a certain time and place, this is where I was, this is what I could do, Stats don't lie. I ran, this is how long it took, that's all.

Part Six - Ego

Eckhart Tolle says that. ‘Suffering cracks open the shell of ego’.

When I look back now with at my ‘happy enough to die’ self from 37 years ago and my ‘wish I didn't exist’ self from a few weeks ago, both seem equally ego-centric. In both states I was literally ‘full of myself’. Full of my stories and of my life drama. And not paying much attention to what was actually happening in the moment.

Now, and often in that period of recovery after running I see my thoughts as something not to take too seriously. No longer a source of pride or distress, they seem more like clouds floating by overhead or a TV that's on in another room that I'm not really paying attention to.

Part Seven – Respite

It still depresses me sometimes to consider my faults and failures, my wrong turns in life and the things I've messed up. But when I run, for a short time I can leave those thoughts behind.

At those times of detachment I wonder ‘How could I possibly assess my life objectively from inside my head anyway?’ It’s impossible. It’s more complicated than looking at facts or statistics. Especially when life gets tangled up with other people’s lives in the messiness of relationships.

I didn’t choose to lose the things I’ve lost, and the things I failed at, I wasn’t trying to fail. And if people have been hurt by my actions, it was accidental. And pretty much everything that has gone wrong in my life, I tried to stop it going wrong. But all those things I did imperfectly, and so the results were imperfect too.

Running doesn’t stop me being me, at least not permanently, it’s just a kind of standby mode for my overthinking brain: respite care for the mind. It’s a chance to realise that the suitcase I carry with me, my stubborn and uncooperative nature, I am allowed to take a break from it and put it down once in a while.

Part Eight – Acceptance

Another Eckhart Tolle aphorism:

“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy”

I spend a lot of my time and my mental energy fighting against my life story. Fighting against the circumstances that I find myself in and the events that have happened to me, even though there’s now no way of changing them.

But, when I run, for a short while, where I am is exactly where I need to be. And the contents of my life, I carry them with me because ‘there’s nothing else I was supposed to carry’.