Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike

Author:Catriona Menzies-Pike
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Affirm Press

8

Rejoice, we conquer!

I kept running and, gradually, it became a habit. I ran another half marathon, and then another and another. My race times weren’t impressive, but I’d learned how to move. I could run just like anybody else. Any residual concerns about the awkwardness of my scratched knees and flapping elbows drifted away. If I was tired, I simply slowed down, and sometimes I walked.

Old certainties gave way to new ones. I knew how fit I needed to be to run 21 kilometres. First, work up to running 10 kilometres, then nudge a little further each week. If I could run 18 kilometres in training, I would be able to run a half marathon on race day. I couldn’t spell out such equations to myself without chuckling. Race day. I knew that if, after a training run or race, I didn’t stretch the big muscles that strap around the femur, my gait would be stiff the next day. I knew what sort of push I needed in my legs and lungs to run up a hill; that if my hips started to grate, I could keep running, but that if I landed hard after leaping off a gutter and jarred my knee, I’d have to walk home. I could predict the furious hunger that kicked in an hour or so after a long run, and the deep weariness that would take me to bed in the evening.

Hitherto I’d been unable to understand feedback mechanisms that govern the body. After Mum and Dad died, I was always tired but rarely able to sleep the night through. Sometimes I ate for comfort; often my view of hunger and satiety was clouded by emotion. Now, I observed closely the relationship between exertion and sleep from week to week. An icy bright negroni, even early in the evening, would turn my feet to lead the following morning. Pasta was top-notch running fuel; potato chips were not. A salad was always too little; lasagna was always too much. In no other areas of my life were the dividends on behaviour so simple to calculate. There was a balance to this empiricism that pleased me enormously. I became aware that I was both healthy and mobile, and very lucky to be so – that I might one day not be able to run, due to sickness or injury, was a grim thought. I had no children competing for my attention in the mornings, and my work schedule was flexible enough to accommodate both running and recovery. As I logged more half marathons, I could see no compelling reason why I could not run even further.

Twenty-one kilometres is a substantial distance, but it’s only half a marathon. Running a marathon had once seemed to me as abstract a goal as swimming to the horizon from the beach. An idea that I’d used as a trampoline, springing higher and higher until I could see what was over the fence next door, and then past the garden beyond. If I could jump high enough to gain a clear view of the neighbourhood, I could run a marathon.

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