Running Like a Girl Read online

  My sister’s wedding came and went in an ecstatic flash. My reaction to the multiple photographs of me, however, was less joyful. Instead of the confident curves I’d always seen myself as having, I realized that part of the juddering agony of that first run was due to the fact that I had put on weight. Running would help with the weight, but the weight did not help with running.

  I began to understand what other women meant when they talked about feeling trapped in their own bodies; the magazines I would sniff at in railway stations and doctors’ waiting rooms were full of them. I used to think I would never become one—until I found myself watching runners with increasing longing, wondering what their secret was, how they knew what to do, what got them going. Yet running still seemed an impossibility.

  Everyone has limitations, and I had reached mine. I was sure of this, though it made me sad. I would see other runners, catch snippets of their conversation as I waited to pay for a coffee, be drawn to their image on magazines or on TV. Increasingly, I was attuned to them in the world around me. Surely, if I stayed alert, I would discover what the secret was that they all knew and I didn’t. As I paced the house looking for my lost glasses, I would lift magazines and search websites, hunting for the golden nugget of advice or inspiration to reassure me that a runner lurked in me after all. Because without it, there was no way I could face that Saturday-morning experience again. As the summer ended and the leaves began to fall, I would walk home grudgingly from the tube station, overtaken by the occasional runner, who served only to make my heart heavier. I resolved to try and forget about running altogether. The secret escaped me.

  I did my best until a few weeks later, when my siblings and I were staying with our parents for a weekend. My brother casually mentioned that he was going to apply for a place in the London Marathon.

  “Wow!” I gasped. “How amazing to be able to do that! I was so surprised when I went to cheer on a friend. It’s such an emotional event.”

  “You should do it too, then,” said my father. His voice didn’t flicker. He didn’t look up from the cup of coffee he was making. His hands remained steady at the task. All very well, coming from a man who’d run several marathons when we were children, but this was me we were talking about.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” I exclaimed. “I can’t run.”

  “You don’t run,” he corrected me. “But you’re more than able.” There was no shadow of doubt in his voice. Hearing it from someone else made me realize: There was nothing stopping me from running but me.

  And that was that. The seed was planted.

  The next morning I announced that I was not to be broken. August’s dismal performance was an anomaly to be forgotten. Indeed, I would run again. I started making a kerfuffle on a scale that suggested I was planning to run home from South Wiltshire to North London. I commanded my father’s computer for hours, Googling “small run northwest London,” “how to know if you can do 5K,” “supplies needed for 5K run,” and various permutations of the same.

  I downloaded maps, I discussed nutrition and running style with my brother, and I chatted about shoes and bras with my sister. Somewhat exasperated, my father explained that I had two working legs, no medical problems, and a lot of long walks under my belt. He reminded me that it would be about half an hour before adding, “If you get tired, you just walk. You know you can do that.”

  It was afternoon before I returned to London. By the time I got to the Regent’s Park tube station, night had fallen. I hugged the darkness to me, relieved that no one would be able to see the fear on my face. I crossed into the park, made sure no one was around, and set off.

  At first it was exactly like the last time: the burning, the panting, the panic. This time there were two key differences: I was not in my neighborhood, so there was little chance of seeing anyone I knew; and I was running a loop, so I had to get back to where I had started. After about twelve minutes, a miracle: It got easier. My heart rate, while still high, started to even out. Instead of feeling like a never-ending heaven-bound roller coaster that would only ever go up, I steadied. The two beats of my feet started to match the two beats of my breathing—in and out. I was doing it. Yes, my legs were hurting. Yes, I was scared that I would never make it all the way around the park. But yes! I was running.

  By the time I got home from my second run, I was awash with a heady cocktail of endorphins and undiluted smugness. I did some ostentatious stretching with my lights on and curtains open, took a bath (curtains closed), and ate a bowl of pasta approximately the same size as my sister’s wedding cake.

  It was as if I were experiencing a reverse hangover. The wondrous, magical, heady phase of being drunk lasts for such little time—an hour, perhaps three at best, before it melts into discomfort, delirium, or just plain boredom. Yet the hangover can last a day or two. Finally, I could see with startling clarity that the time I had spent experiencing pain on a run was outweighed by the amount of time that I felt good about it. I was aglow. I was invincible. I was thinking I might be able to do it again.

  One of the few concrete pieces of advice my father had given me the weekend before was to keep a running diary so that I could remind myself how I felt after different runs. When I look at that first entry, it says this:

  18th October 2007

  5K round Regent’s Park

  5:45–6:20 P.M.

  So exhausted after 12 mins. but then it seemed okay. Felt so much easier than expected. Might go again!

  The next day I e-mailed my brother. I was going to run; I was going to need a goal to keep me on course. Bumbling around the park indefinitely would not hold my attention, and I wasn’t going to see my brother embark on a marathon without me. After all, this might be my only chance for a training partner.

  “Hey, do you have that application form for the London Marathon?”

  I pressed send.

  2

  Learning to Run

  Anybody can be a runner. We were meant to move. We were meant to run. It’s the easiest sport.

  —Bill Rodgers

  The idea of me running the London Marathon was of no interest to some and hilarious to others, whose reaction to news of my new hobby was: “You’re doing what?” or “Yeah, good luck with that!” or the odd “Ha ha ha, we’ll believe it when we see it.” The spectrum of reactions created in me determination and terror in equal measures.

  Then there was the e-mail from my friend Vanessa, who worked for the charity Sense. Sense is a charity that does amazing work with families of deaf-blind children. Vanessa had been part of the team for years. I had seen photographs of events, I had met her colleagues in the pub, I had heard about families she’d worked with. I knew from her direct experience what a difference fund-raising for them would make, and shifting that focus from me to a charity only cemented my determination to see the plan through.

  So it was Vanessa whom I contacted to see if my brother and I could be a part of their charity team. To our amazement, after filling in forms with our fund-raising ideas and committing to do the training properly and raise eighteen hundred dollars each, we were given places on the team. Despite all of this, an e-mail arrived from Vanessa the next day, delicately reminding me that what I had just committed to doing was “quite hardcore.”

  I had been bold enough to assume that people’s tones might change once I had a confirmed place to run. And yes, most were encouraging—no one wanted me to fail. But there was an unmistakable sharp intake of breath after I told them my news. A nervous giggle. One too many Seriously?s. They tried to be polite, but the responses did little to quell my increasing suspicion that I had taken on something insane, something undoable, something that remained indisputably not me.

  Each time I told someone about the project, I found myself needing a little extra steeliness to protect myself from that uncaught, impulsive mixture of mirth and disbelief. Why the hilarity? I found myself wondering time and again. It’s just running, surely there’s a cap on how funny that can be.
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br />   Every time I gritted my teeth, bent on doing things properly despite the sniggers, I was seized by fear and acute self-awareness. As a child, I was unself-conscious. My earliest memories of sport were of standing in sunny fields playing softball, waiting patiently for a ball to come my way, or leaping effortlessly around a netball court.

  My clumsiness began in my adolescent years. When I was twelve or thirteen and my body started to change, I felt utterly alien from it, as if I’d been deposited in another being’s skin. I grew so fast that I spent the better part of a summer crying with pain. On a wretched holiday, I sat on a sandy beach, watching my brother and sister play, as the ratcheting agony of the growing pains in my knees occupied every inch of my mind and body.

  At first my family members were sympathetic when I would leave a room and hit a table or a door handle with my hip. Until it started to happen several times a day. Just passing the salt across the dinner table involved knocking over a full water glass with my new boobs, or swiping at a jar of ketchup with my suddenly long arms. I felt like a novice forklift driver, trying to control mechanisms I was inadequately trained to operate.

  Sport became torture. The other girls in my class seemed to grow stronger and slimmer as I became more curvy and unwieldy. My body, once a source of such fun, was now more of a straitjacket. When I wasn’t fretting about how it looked, I was worrying about what shape it might be next.

  I did have a fail-safe weapon in my arsenal: humor. Too proud to let anyone know I cared and too young to worry about lack of fitness, I goofed around during sports. I became the class clown on the sports field. Take a funny pratfall, and no one will mind if you lose the team a goal, I realized. Or mess around enough during tennis lessons, then the girls who can really play won’t pick you anymore.

  These were easy lessons to learn, and soon I turned those years of loathing into fun. Here began my tacit acceptance that sport was not for me. I was one of the funny girls, the clever girls. I didn’t have time for earnest sorts and their sweaty enthusiasm. Sport had slipped, sandlike, from between my fingers.

  Now in my thirties, I realized I was paying the price for twenty years of playing the clown. For every pratfall I had taken to prevent anyone taking me seriously on a sports field, there was a giggling e-mail from a friend or colleague, complete with wiseass query about how many vases I might have knocked over stretching, or whether my place for the London 2012 Olympics was confirmed. I might have decided I wanted to be taken seriously, but no one else seemed to be on board with that plan. Despite these reactions, there remained a dusty, barely used corner of my mind where I knew I wanted to prove to everyone what I could do. I wanted to be treated like a grown-up, to be believed when I said I had set myself a goal. I wanted to be respected, not just liked. With a marathon, I saw my window of opportunity. It was just going to take a lot of running.

  The acceptance of my marathon application meant there was no turning back. I was committed to running regularly, despite having little or no idea what I was doing. Pushing aside the practicalities, I focused on the marathon as a goal and used it as a motivator. I had cheered on friends in the past and been moved by the sight of so many humans trying their very best to do something. I ignored the memories of men running by with chafed-to-bleeding nipples, and feeling quite faint from the heat of a particularly hot April’s day despite being a spectator, standing entirely still. I would cross the finish line proud, I was sure of it.

  It was this tiny, gritty speck of determination that kept me going in those early days. My running diary from the autumn of 2007 is filled with entries that say little more than “Well, it started fine but then I got INCREDIBLY TIRED” or “My legs felt like actual lead until the last ten minutes—why bother?” or the charmingly pragmatic “This run was so awful I don’t want to record it.”

  Perhaps I kept the diary because I wouldn’t believe I had done the runs otherwise. My father had recommended it as a way to remind myself what I thought I was capable of and seeing it change.

  This was before the advent of smartphones and running apps, so I would map my runs online before leaving the house, having scribbled up my arm the order of the street names I needed to follow. I cared less about getting lost than I did about being seen. There were too many jokes. Phoebe from Friends, Forrest Gump, and The Littlest Hobo. They all haunted me as I scuttled through side streets, residential roads, and the shadiest corners of local parks, convinced that all passersby could spot my rookie status from five hundred meters. Avoiding eye contact at pedestrian crossings, I kept my cap on and my eyes down, lest I see one of those women summing me up.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to be one of them—the lean, toned women who resembled those in the sportswear catalogs, their golden limbs glinting and their ponytails swishing—I just didn’t want to exercise anywhere near them. I would lose concentration when one ran toward me. I would feel the edges of my running shoes clip the edge of the pavement if one shimmered through the park. I would feel my stride become irregular if I heard one approaching from behind. After a while, I began to realize that no one was watching. Everyone was ultimately more interested in themselves, their children, or their mobile phones. As I discovered when I started trying to smile at approaching runners, quite a few were so tired that they weren’t focusing on anything at all.

  It amazes me now that I kept leaving the house for those crucial early expeditions, particularly as any potential rewards seemed so far away. I tried whatever I could to maintain momentum, even though I had no real idea what I was doing. I was too proud to ask for advice, lest I give away how much I cared. Google became my friend, and I found myself talking online to novice runners on the other side of the country about where specifically their ankles were hurting. I walked and ran, I ran in tiny bursts, I ran after dark when the sidewalks were emptier. I downloaded podcast after podcast so I could pretend I was doing research for work while I stomped along in my own sweaty world. I kept going, I kept going, I kept going.

  After two or three weeks of doggedly jogging around northwest London, I stood on my dusty bathroom scale. “Oh, I never weigh myself! You can’t quantify what I am in pounds or ounces!” I remembered telling my mother and sister with a flourish the previous Christmas.

  I looked down at my feet and saw that I had shed a few pounds. Later that week, during an idle moment queuing in my local supermarket, I picked up a two-pound bag of potatoes from my shopping cart and let its heft sag in my hands. I had already lost the equivalent of one of those. I imagined the bag strapped round my hips and pictured myself trying to run like that. No wonder half an hour of running felt easier; there was simply less me to carry around. Running began to slide, slowly but surely, from a torment to a joy.

  What I didn’t know on those early runs—the ones where even my face seemed to hurt when I got home—was that I wasn’t lily-livered or weak-willed. Nor was I biomechanically unable to run. I was, in fact, “going lactic.” As we run, oxygen is constantly being flushed through our bodies, but when there is a shortage of oxygen, the body goes into an anaerobic state and creates lactic acid. The buildup can remain in our muscles, creating that charming run-over-by-a-truck sensation. It stings, it burns, it makes you hurt from your fingernails to the roots of your hair. I had no idea what pace I should be going when I started out. My goal was simply not to die before the end. As a result, I burned myself out by going anaerobic before properly warming up. For weeks I suspected I was able to run for only ten minutes. I would belt out the distance as fast as I could, determined not to walk. When I got home, I’d collapse and descend into existential torment.

  I want to weep when I think of the number of women who head round the block only to return twelve minutes later, broken and tearful. I don’t doubt that when these women meet me and hear that I have run five marathons, they want to weep for me as well. I suspect that they believe all runs, forever, are as crippling as those first few; that’s certainly what I thought. They are not. If only someone had told me sooner.r />
  Except someone had told me sooner: my father. Though it had been his calm acceptance that I could run a marathon that gave me the courage to apply for a place, I had become reluctant to let him in on the mission. That may have been on account of his great eagerness to help. The minute places were secured for me and my brother, our dad offered his thoughts about training plans, anaerobic exercise, and the importance of stretching parts of the body that I’d never heard of. Little of this meant anything to me. While my brother seemed to absorb the basics of the science at a precocious speed, I was stuck on the emotional basics of running.

  With the particular charm of an independent-minded, first-born daughter, I sharply informed my father that this was my project, it was about reaching my goals, and it would be dealt with my way. The response was a gentle smile that I half remembered from my tiny hand pushing his away as I tried unsuccessfully to tie my first pair of sneakers for myself. That, and a quiet “Okay then.”

  A week or so later, when I blithely described to my father how dreadful I was finding my runs, he gently suggested that, as the distance of 26.2 miles was my goal, I should be trying to steadily increase how far I could run rather than attempting a series of bizarre sprints around my neighborhood. Perhaps he had a point. However, I was reluctant to let him take over my project. I looked instead at the training plans in the marathon book I had bought and barely opened. I started to understand the importance of working at a pace rather than running for as long as I could without collapsing. (At this point, there might have been a murmur of thanks in my father’s direction, but it was very faint.)