Your Pace or Mine? by Lisa Jackson

Author:Lisa Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publisher

The loss of my aunt just four years later hit me almost as hard as the death of my mother. After completing our first half marathon together in Newcastle she’d run beside me in eight marathons. Aunty Rosie was a dream running companion and we’d save up stories to tell each other during our races as we both subscribed to the running philosophy that the more you talk, the faster you run. We even wore the same running shoes: Nike Vomeros, which we jokingly referred to as our Vomiteros. I always marvelled at her cheerfulness as she never once moaned about anything while running, no matter how much pain she was in. I also admired her stamina and ability to encourage not only me but other back-of-the-pack runners, who frequently mistook her for my sister.

A highlight from our many marathon exploits was finally persuading her, after seven marathons where she’d been cheered only as ‘Fairy’s Friend’, to run in fancy dress. She ran as a bumblebee for the first time in the Paris Marathon – and applied so much yellow face paint that she ended up looking more like Marge Simpson than a bee.

And then, in February 2011, when I called her to ask if she’d be joining me in doing another marathon, she told me the devastating news: she had lung cancer. Again the room spun around me: I couldn’t believe this was happening again. She’d never smoked, and had led an unusually healthy life. This was a woman who’d done both a BA degree and her first marathon in her 50s, had started doing triathlons in her 60s, and had been contemplating running the entire length of the Thames Path (a distance of 184 miles, or just under 300 kilometres) as a way of ‘doing something a bit different’ after turning 70. This was a woman who dreamed of being ‘a silly grandma aged 90’. Just five months later, we were following her woven-willow coffin outside the country church where her daughter Darian had got married.

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