Monday 3rd November, 2003 – Running Leads to an Important Lesson

Despite my big talk about refusing to get sucked into the false-economy-world of extreme cakey indolence, interspersed with bouts of life-threateningly intense exercise…. I have. The only time I raised myself from the horizontal all weekend was to (a) assist my swallowing mechanism, and to (b) go on a ridiculously exhausting and over-ambitious 3 ½ mile run with Jane. I know it’s not that far.

Jane is used to all this, as she visits the gym at work every weekday, goes to ‘kae-bo’ class on Thursday evenings (where she is pushed to her limit by a super-defensive instructor who protests too hard that ‘this is not aerobics ladies – this is a martial art!’), and actually competes in actual real-life running races for actual, genuine, gold- and silver-effect plastic trophies. I, however, am not used to it, and have the fitness level of a cake-loving mid-20s man who suddenly thinks he’s Sebastian Coe just because he has a week’s worth of brisk lunchtime walks under his belt.

Yet, I allowed myself to be talked into going out for a run on Saturday morning. I’d agreed to it he previous evening, and remembered my foolishness at about 5:00 am Saturday, spending the next 3 hours fruitlessly praying for rain. To no avail.

We rose at 8:00 am and readied ourselves. Jane stretching and warming up in her expensive, matching running top and leggings, me trying to get a toothpaste stain out of my unforgiving, stiff, Gap-purchased, French-style shorts, that would later form painful peaks around the crotchal area, excruciatingly jabbing my balls with every step.

We stuck to the roads on a pre-prepared route that Jane has run before, and that took us from Guildford into Merrow and back. It is very public and, even at half eight in the morning, there were quite a few people on the streets. However, rather than feeling self-conscious, as I expected to, I didn’t really mind people seeing me. In fact, I felt quite proud, and imagined the admiring thoughts they must have been thinking as I swept by. This despite the fact that, whenever I see a jogger on the street, I just think that he is a vein cocksucker. Strange how the mind works.

Anyway, you will not be surprised to learn that, despite starting strongly, it wasn’t long before I was breathing out of my arse, and trying to casually quiz Jane about how long it was before we were allowed to turn around. All the same, the little David Coleman in my head (not THE David Coleman of course, that would be ridiculous – just a tiny clone, who lives in my head, commentates on my day to day life, and tells me to spy on ladies in the toilet) kicked in when we turned around to head back toward Guildford, instantly transforming Jane into the Kenyan 10000 metre record holder, and me into plucky, northern, early-90s underdog Peter Elliott.

So, after running in her wake for a couple of hundred yards, I broke for home early (after the Evesham industrial estate, but before the Pet Doctors), my long stride eating up the distance between me and the finish line. Tiny David Coleman roared his encouragement in my head, reminding me of the hundreds of thousands of middle-distance fans who had stayed up into the night to watch me run, and all the kids who would be inspired to take up athletics by my performance, and that they would be my true sporting legacy.

Naturally, by the time the end was in sight, my head was bursting with the effort, and I was taking huge Hilary Clinton-style gulps of air just to keep going. And when I finally stopped outside the front door, I realised that I urgently needed a massive shit. And that Jane had the keys.

So, a lesson there.