A feeling of genuine happiness: Leeds Abbey Dash Part Six

I ran the Leeds Abbey Dash yesterday. For the 6th time. Last year I ran it in 49:17. In many ways speed was all I cared about last year. This year remaining uninjured has become more important than speed.

To give you some idea of relative speeds, a week before last year's Abbey Dash I ran a 5k in under 23 minutes. This year it's been 6 months since I ran one in less than 24 and a half.

So, to run a 10k PB yesterday would have defied all logic. Even to get sub 50 seemed a long shot, but with my friend Kerrie offering to pace me, that's what I was aiming for.

We decided we'd try for 49 minutes and see how it went but our more realistic Plan B was sub 50.

I got over excited at the start, and started running ahead of Kerrie. 4:40 for the first k. My ego was telling me to go for the improbable 49 minutes. By 3k I knew that was a mistake. Kerrie had said if you're doing it right, it's meant to hurt but I'd gone too far.

14 minutes in I wasn't just in the pain cave I was the Chilean miners stuck in their mine. I was the 13 Thai schoolboy football players miles underground with flood waters rising.

I panicked. I thought Kerrie would be better off leaving me to it, and I told her she could if she wanted.

I thought I'd blown it and I had no idea how to make it through another 7k, through another 35 minutes. I'd entered a nether world of pain where I just wanted it to stop.

Rewind a year. After last year's Abbey Dash I was walking along Street Lane in Roundhay and I heard someone calling my name. It was Kerrie from the doorway of Banyan, she saw me go past and asked me to join her and some other Roundhay Runners for drinks. It was the first day I'd properly been out socially with them. It was from that day that they started to become friends and not just people I ran with.

Exactly a year later, here I was with Kerrie again. Let's just slow down for a bit, she said, get things under control. So we did. For a couple of k.

At the 5k point at the Abbey it really helped that other friends from Roundhay Runners were there, cheering me on. I hoped they couldn't see how bad I was feeling but of course they could.

Somehow, in the second half of the race I managed to settle down a bit. The impossible simply became difficult.

I felt myself coming back to life. And yet, at the point where Kerrie said, only 7 minutes of running left, I didn't believe I had 7 more minutes in me. When she said only 3 more minutes I felt the same.

It seemed to me that only when I crossed the finish line and I had actually finished did I really believe I would finish.

Our finish time: 49:59. By exactly one second we got what we were aiming for.

I was 42 seconds outside a PB. But it really didn't matter. It wasn't my fastest run, but it was one of my best.

At the start Kerrie said I'll do the pacing, you do the running' I made life more difficult for myself by not trusting in that enough at the start, but the main thing was just to keep going.

Too often I'm a skeptic, a pessimist, my own worst enemy. Someone who's anxious and afraid, who doubts himself, who makes life harder than it needs to be. On the day I didn't quite believe in myself enough. At 3k my internal monologue was trailing me through the dirt, like someone in a western who's been shot but is attached by one foot to a horse which is still running. But the external monologue of a friend, running with me, who calmly talked me though it and who wouldn't leave me behind when I wanted to leave myself, carried me through.

We went for burgers after the run to a place called Almost Famous. With the race now finished, I said to the people around me that I was experiencing a 'feeling of genuine happiness'.  Chris said to me that's what I should call this blog post. So, there it is.

Some people I talk to think running sounds nuts. And sometimes it is. Running can be the best I ever feel or the worst I ever feel. On a 10k it's usually both.

If this story has a hero, then because it's my story, I would say that it's Kerrie. But that's not the whole story. We were in it together and I did my part too.

Postscript. If you care about such things, here is my race according to Strava. Quite an accurate reflection of how I was feeling.

Jonathan 2.0. Finding myself at Morag's party

When I was 7 (around 1975) I wrote a story called ‘Martian Maroons’. It was (as you can no doubt tell from the title!) about some people being stranded on Mars. My teacher Miss Hodgson asked me what a maroon was. I said it’s someone who is marooned somewhere. She said that’s not a real word, and she crossed out my title and called it ‘Marooned on Mars’.

I said 'Miss, you may have made it grammatically correct, but you’ve also ruined it. It sounds all wrong now. You can’t just put words in any order, you know, they have to sound right!'

Despite ruining my story, she did also say to me ‘When you grow up, you should become a writer’. My oldest friend Shelagh from primary school is always telling me that too.

Last Saturday in the year 2023, I went to my friend Morag’s 50th birthday party. She’s a friend from the running club. I went there with other running friends (Kerrie, Megan, Chris, James, Eleanor amongst others) It was the swankiest party I’ve ever been to. It wasn’t so much a party as a trip to another world. I was having trouble following the sat nav on the way there and I think I must have accidentally gone down a portal into another dimension.

Morag said there was a tee-pee in the garden. That sounds small to me. When I arrived, it was less a tee-pee, not even a marquee, it was as if the circus had come to town. It was the kind of big top you can see for miles around.

Earlier on Saturday, I’d got myself in a mental tangle trying to organise something which didn’t need organising. A trip to York parkrun. I kept getting stressed about the logistics of getting 10 grown-ups from Leeds to York and having breakfast after. As if I was playing 3D chess.

Anyway, I may have used up all my nervous energy in the morning trying to be in control of something which didn’t need controlling, because I felt quite relaxed by the evening.

I dressed in a Hawaiian shirt given to me by my brother, which I’ve never worn, I had some flowers for my hair, and some glasses with yellow lenses. Morag also had a box of hats. With the yellow glasses on instead of my own, and in a fancy shirt and wearing a Mexican hat or a policewoman’s hat, or a red sparkly bowler hat, I suddenly felt like I’d accessed a different version of myself. The boring person I think I sometimes am with my not very interesting job and my self-consciousness about the way I move was hidden behind a disguise. And the songs were mostly by Abba, so I know the words. Songs that are mostly from the 70s, like an earlier version of me also is.

For one night only, those things I think about myself; having a boring job, and being anxious, they were just concepts. Mental constructs I’ve acquired. Stories I tell myself about who I am. But on Saturday, I was someone else entirely.

Through the fake glasses, I couldn’t see properly, so I couldn't properly analyse other people's facial expressions. If anyone had a look on their face saying ‘Look at that idiot’, I had no way of knowing.

At one point, Kerrie told someone that I was miles out of my comfort zone, and I thought ‘Yes I am’, but that’s because the people I want to be with are here. And if I don’t go, I won’t see them. The next day Megan said maybe my comfort zone is expanding.

Morag introduced me to a few people, but when she did, she mostly described me in the context of things I’ve written. And it occurred to me later, ‘who you are isn’t your job, it’s what you’re known for’. Other people throughout the night came up to me and said ‘I loved that blog post you wrote about the Otley Run’. James told me how relatable he’d found it reading something I wrote about joining the running club.

I always think of myself as failed potential, as someone who was supposed to be a writer but who has never had the discipline to do it, as someone who was supposed to do lots of things but hasn't, And as someone for who, the things I did instead of the things I should have, didn’t always work out. But all that is just mental projections. Who I am really is maybe not for me to say.

I don’t write for a job, I don’t even write all that often. I only do it when ‘I can’t NOT do it’. When there are things that happen to me in life that I have to share, because keeping them inside would make me burst. Because I think I’ve seen an aspect of something that no-one else can.

Anyway, I had a dream last night. I was back in primary school. It was the 70s again, and I was back in West Garforth Junior School. The old wooden building, the one that doesn't exist anymore because it got burnt down in the 80s, the one that existed before the school that's now called Strawberryfields.

Shelagh was there, and so was Miss Hodgson. At this point, Morag hadn’t long ago been born, and some of my other friends were a long way off their parents even meeting.

In the dream, I’d just written a story called ‘Martian Maroons’. Miss Hodgson said 'I’m not sure you can call your story that’. I said ‘You know that Mars is the Red Planet? Well, in the light there, the astronauts space suits look dark red, a colour not unlike Burgundy. Because of that colour, they've decided to call themselves Maroons'

“Oh I thought it was because they were marooned there?” She said.

'No, that's just a coincidence'.

'I like it', she said. 'When you grow up, you should become a writer'.

I was so excited I could barely get my reply out.

‘But I did, Miss, I did!’

'I did grow up, and when I did, I went to a party at my friend Morag’s. In the year 2023. It was the fanciest party you could ever imagine. And she introduced me to her other friends and told them about all the things I’d written. This Jonathan that’s here now, that’s Jonathan 1.0. In the future, I’m going to be a writer, and I’m going to go running and to parties with friends, I’m going to wear silly hats and glasses I can’t see through, and I’m going to dance like no-one is watching. I’m going to be Jonathan 2.0.

Miss Hodgson said ‘That sounds a lot like a dream’.

And I said ‘Some dreams come true, Miss!’