Running Like a Girl Read online

  I started to plan the route for each run as a loop, so I had no choice but to complete it, even if I had to walk. Encouraged by an increasing number of e-mails and texts from my dad, and the training plan from the team at Sense, I worked out that I should be running shorter distances during the week and long (or endurance) runs on weekends, increasing the distance incrementally. Long runs required the most planning and levied the strongest emotional hold over me. In an attempt to work out my pace and avoid getting lost, I’d recite street names the whole way round, remembering which turn corresponded with which mile. These days the apps you can download to your phone or iPod are excellent. They monitor your warm-ups and cooldowns and keep tabs on your heart rate, calmly talking you through the interchange of walking and running, making sure your heart rate is elevated and has a chance to recover, rather than blasting on all cylinders and running out of steam. Six years ago I was trying to figure it out on my own, like a crazed Victorian inventor discovering electricity—with running shoes on.

  As the weeks wore on, my ramshackle training plans seemed to work, though I was plagued by fears almost every time I reached the end of my road. It was no longer the fear of ridicule; rather, it was that I would be facing down a longer distance than I ever had in my life. I’d stand at the front door, carefully curling my headphone wire round the back of my neck, internally muttering that this would be the one to finish me off: Seven miles was definitely the killer, and I must be crazy to contemplate nine and a half.

  Ever more elaborate disaster scenarios played themselves out as I approached the limit of what I had run the week before. There were the standard trips, sprains, and breaks. (Mine were always embellished with some sort of humiliating clothing rip, exposing me to the residents of a particularly chichi street.) There were the Lost Run dreads: the fear that I would somehow circumnavigate London with no sense of space or time, apparently unable to recognize my surroundings or get home. Then there were the vomiting and diarrhea terrors. What would happen if I were sick in the street? Or if I needed the loo? What if I ate something untoward and had to pay the lavatorial consequences five miles from home? Would anyone understand? Greatest of all was my inexplicable yet all-consuming fear of dehydration or hitting the Wall.

  It is entirely impossible to read anything about running that does not hammer home the importance of hydration, and there is no literature on marathons that fails to discuss the so-called Wall, the notorious point when your body has expended all of its stored energy and has yet to convert any of the food or drink you’ve taken in. The idea of losing control haunted me. Scenes flickered across my mind of my body shutting down as I blacked out from dehydration and exhaustion. I pictured my face turning putty-gray as I lay—probably on one of London’s most historic streets—foaming at the mouth, publicly flailing, alone. People would laugh and point, sneering, “That’s what happens if you don’t train properly” or “She probably didn’t have enough water” or, most shaming of all, “She clearly took on more than she could manage with that distance.” There was no doubt in my mind that it would happen one day.

  It has never happened.

  Things that have happened to me: I have tripped on a sidewalk and fallen; I have ripped my running tights; I have realized halfway through a run that the elastic in my running tights has gone; I have gotten lost and had to retrace my steps a little; I have become very hot; I have become very thirsty; I have become very tired.

  To date, neither my bowels nor my bladder have inflicted a roadside betrayal. As a child I often longed to be stung by a wasp, just so I could know for sure how much it hurt—so I could stop bloody worrying about how much it might hurt to be stung by a wasp. I felt the same about needing the loo while running. It was a momentous day when, about three months into my training, I was on a cold uphill run through Kilburn cemetery when it hit me that I was going to need a bathroom long before I was home. Beloved Kilburn cemetery, which I found so uplifting, so inspiring, such a wonderful place to run. I simply could not shit there. But for at least ten minutes I thought I was going to.

  My brain was whizzing. I ran a finger around the elastic of my jogging bottoms. Could I get them down with one hand, or would I have to put my iPod in my mouth and my keys in my hair? I would have to move fast. I couldn’t do it. By now every time I hit the path, a judder went straight up my legs and rattled my sphincter. I could not last much longer. Was it a bigger risk to walk and thus delay my arrival somewhere more suitable, or to run and keep the judders going? I went for a sort of tiptoe run, as if silent footfalls would con my ass into containing itself that little bit longer. I turned and crossed the top of Kilburn High Road, realizing it was only five or ten minutes to home, and all downhill. Not even that convinced me I was going to make it. The potential horror of knowing that I had crouched beside a noble Victorian artisan’s grave was replaced with the grim vision of running down Kilburn High Road smelling like a sewer.

  Time sped up. I ceased to think of anything but the most basic survival. I spotted a pub on my side of the road and knew it was my only hope. There was no time left for me to fret about the fact that I had been scared of that pub and everyone I’d ever seen going in or coming out of it for three years. As I made those final few strides toward its saloon-style doors, I pushed the sights I’d seen at those doors as far from my mind as possible. There was no time to dwell on the fight I had witnessed midafternoon on St. Patrick’s Day between two men barely able to stand, or the stream of doorman-sized fellows I’d seen squaring up to one another after a particularly important rugby match had finished being screened inside. As for the toothless old guys whom I’d spotted on the rare sunny day when the doors were left open, they’d have to go too. My choice was simple: Pull myself together and be prepared to encounter some of Kilburn’s shadiest faces, or soil myself.

  I was at the saloon doors. I made a sort of martial-arts gesture, chopping across the wire of my headphones so that the earbuds pinged out as I entered the pub. Still moving at quite a canter, I kept my eyes trained on the back of the venue and whipped straight past the barman, who was standing alone polishing a pint glass with a dishcloth.

  “I need to use your bathroom, I will explain in a minute!” I yelled as I whizzed by, iPod wires windmilling behind me. Within seconds I was on the loo, stomach gurgling with relief. The heat of the building mixed with the crippling shame of my dramatic entrance meant that I was puce, even by my already ruddy standards. I took a deep breath and tried to run a hand through my hair, sticky with sweat. Mercifully, as I exited, the barman was deep in conversation with a customer and I was able to give an airy wave and a cheery “Thank you so much, you’re incredibly kind!” before bolting for the door.

  As I headed home, running faster than I ever had, a thought struck me: The ability to run was actually useful. Not just for raising money for charity, or for losing enough weight to fit into a dress you thought you never would, but for getting somewhere fast. My legs seemed to be gobbling up the pavement as I headed out of the pub I had been so scared of for so long. That day I could have outrun anyone in the building. I was high on the realization for hours afterward, as well as feeling huge relief at having made it to the bathroom at all.

  With the clarity afforded by hindsight, I can see that my father had told me pretty much all of what I eventually worked out for myself in my new running existence, up to and including bathroom anxieties. I didn’t listen. I would see him open his mouth and hear words coming out of it, but before any of those words reached me, I would launch into my own “Just because you’ve done this doesn’t mean that I can’t do it; I’m in my thirties now, you’re not the boss of me, I will find out this information for myself because I am a strong, powerful, and independent woman and times have changed since this was YOUR thing” speech.

  As I discovered when I did turn back to him for help, the feeling of swallowed pride is not dissimilar to that of lactic acid.

  3

  Wicking Fabric and How to Style It Out
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  Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

  —William Faulkner

  The great thing about running is that you don’t need a whole load of fancy equipment. You just pop on some running shoes, and off you go!

  But which running shoes?

  For a few months, I ran in a pair of shoes I had bought to celebrate one of my ill-fated gym-membership phases several years earlier. They had been a purchase made entirely based on style rather than on practicality—they’d merely matched some workout gear I was fond of in my early twenties. I’d wear them with the gear and carry a small bottle of water for most of a Saturday morning before deciding time was pressing and I should start to focus on plans for that night’s party. It’s fair to say that these shoes were experiencing a rude awakening.

  Toward the beginning of my training, my father exhorted me to get a pair of shoes that were slightly too big. This seemed like nonsense. Instead of thanking him for his advice, I did my best to brush him off, to end the conversation. What could he know about running shoes? Had he forgotten that only a couple of weekends ago, he was telling us how he ran his first marathon in a pair of Dunlop Green Flash? My siblings and I had chuckled, half awestruck, half-appalled, as he recounted the story of his first marathon, from the can of Coke he was given by the organizers as an energy drink, to the minutes he spent lying on the side of the road for a break, to the fact that he wore through his Dunlops until the sole was flapping off.

  My father hadn’t had the typical baby-boomer experiences of music festivals or traveling the world. He’d joined the army and had children at a very young age; I was present in my stroller at his graduation from the Defence Academy at Shrivenham. His travel had been done with us, his family, in the form of many military postings abroad and the places he could visit from them.

  It seemed that he had found his Woodstock in running. Like a hippie dad telling his kids not to get high on the wrong sort of weed, he had found an audience in me and my brother, and he was keen to share tips and wisdom from the early days on the scene. My brother, a more confident athlete, was happy to listen and take away from the chats what interested him, but I was flailing between what I needed to know, what was relevant in my dad’s experience, and what my own stubbornness was prepared to let me listen to.

  While I was starting to appreciate my dad’s somewhat Zen approach to running, there was one area where I decided his advice had been rendered almost obsolete in the twenty-five years since his marathon prime: gear. What was a hobby for my dad was now a market. When my fund-raising pack arrived from Sense, I realized what an industry running had become.

  For every piece of information I sought—whether it was about training plans, socks, or moisturizer—there was someone trying to sell me something. I had no idea whom to trust or where to turn for real objective advice. I had no idea what half of the products were for, or that there were solutions to niggles I’d discovered. It took me two weeks of wearing new running tights to discover the perfect credit-card-sized pocket discreetly folded into the waistband. Time and again I realized I had no idea what was worth buying. Even the language used in reviews seemed utterly alien.

  What is a new hobby if not a shopping opportunity? Before long, I had tops that looked good but ruched up above my waist the minute I started to move. I had trousers with pockets designed for a use I had yet to figure out, and I had a rain jacket with a tiny hole above my collarbone that mystified me—until I made the happy discovery that it was meant to keep my headphone wires from flapping in the wind. But in the meantime, I was still trying to run with my fists full of coins, keys, and a subway card, as well as my iPod.

  As the weeks peeled away, I became increasingly obsessed with getting the right gear. Partly because I was wearing the clothes so often that it seemed insane not to like what I was wearing, but also because a hunter’s instinct had kicked in. As I waded across my flat, now a forest of drying Lycra, every radiator decorated with socks like an athletic Christmas tree, I continued to wonder whether I’d chosen the right products. I wanted to be more nonchalant about this. I wanted to be the sports-shop equivalent of the cool girl who walks into a bar and challenges the boys to a game of pool. I wanted to be able to hold my own during a chat with the lads. (There were no lads for me to have gear chats with, but still.) Unfortunately, I was far from cool.

  Just as I was desperate to find gear that would make my training easier, I also wanted to look good without—crucially—looking like I was trying too hard. There was that goofy schoolgirl inside me, whispering, “Don’t try too hard. If you dress like a dork, no one will expect anything of you. Just stick to black.”

  At least for now there was one thing I didn’t need to address: running shoes. Or so I thought.

  Apart from the ceaseless quest for the perfect outfit, things were looking good. My confidence was on the up. I could run for over an hour without praying for death, and I had learned some survival basics. I was not going to dehydrate like a novice raver halfway around Regent’s Park. I was not going to let the money in my pocket fly off across the river. I was not going to get lost between the Heath and my house. As Christmas approached, I dared to let myself believe that I might—might—be able to see this plan through.

  Until I did my first ten-mile run. I had been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading it. While I was excited about conquering double digits, there seemed innumerable reasons to pull up the duvet and stay home. It was already well into the festive party season, and I was feeling a little delicate. I was halfway through a crime novel I was spellbound by. I had fresh coffee in, and someone had recently given me a box of peppermint creams that I hadn’t finished. However, the ten-mile milestone was ludicrously enormous and had to be passed.

  The statistics rattled around in my head, becoming more mind-boggling with every spin. I was about to run ten miles for the first time in my life. Ten! And after only a few months of training. I absolutely knew that if I didn’t get it done this weekend, it wouldn’t happen until after Christmas, and that by then it would be almost impossible.

  All it says in my running diary about this run is: “Very cold. Very windy. Very horrible.” It was the sort of Sunday that was made for lying in bed with someone you really, really fancy, feeding each other high-carbohydrate foods and talking about novels that, for that day, you truly believe are meant for you and you alone. Instead, I was wearing a selection of ugly, garish clothes, including my old tatty sneakers and a pair of fleece gloves I’d borrowed from my sister.

  It had to be done. It had to be done. It had to be done.

  I set off down Maida Vale with the list of relevant street names scribbled on the back of my hand. My skin chafed with cold every time I peeled back the glove to check that I was going the right way. I crossed the canal, headed through Kensington, and turned in to Hyde Park. It was bleak, gray, almost deserted. A few old men were resentfully walking the small dogs of wives who had remained indoors. A lonely-looking father pushed a sleeping baby round and round the pond as I ran in the opposite direction. Another runner, a young guy, flashed past me and vanished into the distance down a path near the bandstand.

  My ears were raw with cold. I took the glove off one hand and tried to fit my fist in my mouth to warm it up. I wiped my bare palm across my upper lip and realized that my sweat had frozen into little salt crystals across my face. I was miserable. I headed out of the park by Queensway, and the road started to incline slightly. Every time my foot hit the pavement, it hurt more and more. It felt as if the pads of my feet were entirely flat, leaving me running on near bone. I began to wince with almost every stride. My toes were the only part of my body that felt hot; now they were almost radiating. I’d never experienced this level of pain, apart from slamming my thumb in the car door as a wriggling child. The practicalities of my efforts no longer stacked up. If I felt so much pain in ten miles, what would twenty-six feel like? I was barely running, just tru
dging along, muttering “Keep going keep going keep going” to myself, as condensation poured from my mouth.

  I was two and a half miles from home—nearly there. Six months before, I couldn’t run two and a half miles. Being nearly there was an enormous feat in itself. This thought alone propelled me onward, despite my throbbing feet.

  Eventually, tearfully, I made it home. My hand, clawlike with cold, took over a minute to unlock the front door. I made myself a bowl of pasta, had a long bath, finished my book, and only then looked at my feet. They seemed normal, if a little rosy. Two of my toes were very tender, like a bruised steak. It wasn’t until I swung my feet out of bed the next morning that I spotted two of my toenails were dark blue.

  My toes looked as if they had been hit with a hammer, cartoon-style. They had not been hit by a hammer; they had simply been for a long run. I had not run on any different or unusual road surfaces. In fact, I had made an effort to avoid running on the cement, which I’d heard was bad news. Over the following days and weeks, I watched with fascination as fresh new nails grew on two of my toes: Each one began beneath the existing nail, from just a couple of millimeters to a full-sized toenail, slowly pushing off the dead nail. It was mesmerizing. After a couple of days I felt no pain at all, merely intrigue. Would the old nail fall off before the new nail was fully grown? Would I have twelve toenails now? Would the new nail grow back in time to paint my nails for spring? These questions consumed me. Until it was happening to my own feet, I had always assumed that the dreaded process of losing a toenail from running would involve the nail coming clean off one day, in a spurt of blood and gore. But no, nothing ever hurt as much as the day of the ten-mile run. I continued through the party season, giving my open-toed shoes a wide berth. A few months later, my new toenails were good to go.