Long Run Read online

  A tiny network of runners developed among my circles of friends. A couple of women I had known for years started to run, and we exchanged training tales, surprised by a new intimacy. They didn’t approach the sport in the way that I did, solo and slowly; they joined groups and trained with greater commitment than me. I always ran alone, but I’d nod and wave when I passed other runners in the morning. If distant friends and acquaintances posted pictures of their running triumphs on social media, I browsed them with bemused recognition. Every now and then, I posted my own photos, advertising that I too had become a runner.

  I was working as an editor in a small, open-plan office, and two colleagues were marathon runners. Whenever our publishing schedule slowed, they gave me training advice and answered my many questions. Was it okay to have skipped a weekday run? Did I really have to run intervals? And I discovered runners from my past: a former flatmate who’d played videogames until dawn was now doing half marathons; a researcher whom I’d got to know smoking outside libraries had turned over a new leaf and planned to run a marathon; a stockbroker friend took a ‘career break’ to train for an iron-man. Neighbours appeared in the fruit shop queue wearing marathon t-shirts; baristas wore marathon visors; the ex-lovers of old friends turned up at half marathons; one-time cocktail companions went home early to prepare for morning runs.

  My indefatigable cousins were also running half marathons regularly, and so were their partners and half-siblings and partner’s cousins and uni mates. My sisters sensibly left us to it. Each year, a larger family group would congregate in the starting area of the big Sydney half marathons. Thanks to an uneven distribution of athleticism across the family, my cousins would always finish long before I did. The upside was a cheer squad waiting for me when I crossed the line.

  *

  Racing – though that still seems like an overblown term for the events I’ve completed – is very different to training. For me, it is in the everydayness of training that the pleasure of running lies. Cognitive behavioural therapists and Protestant guides to self-improvement are fixated on good habits, especially when they can be aligned to larger changes in wellbeing. If a habit becomes second nature, then, so the thinking goes, we face fewer stressful decisions and can live a little more lightly.

  A good running habit should involve an alarm and a burst of energy, without a moment of indecision to separate them. I’ve known and chucked several ostensibly bad habits: smoking cigarettes, staying home in bed, letting the phone ring out, pessimism, crappy television, crappy novels. Procrastination might be understood as the purgatory between good and bad habits, and I’ve spent time there too. The usual objection to habits is that they make life routine, that the burden of self-coercion dulls spontaneity. This didn’t worry me. I had lived for a long time without much of a structure of self-care. Having my runs as a steady, predictable element of my week was preferable to the survival-mode reactivity – the less glossy version of spontaneity – that had governed so much of my adult life.

  I didn’t reorganise my life around my running schedule; I’ve never quite pulled that off. I slotted in weekday runs where I could and scrimped my habit-forming energies for a weekend splurge on a long run. As Freud and everyone else knows, there’s pleasure in repetition, and the habits I built around my long runs were evidence of this principle.

  I would get up as early as I could and go straight to the kitchen for a hasty breakfast. I’d smear honey and peanut butter on a slice of nubbly toast and eat it, still standing, as I watched the sky change colour through the kitchen window. Then, a little banana, a big glass of water, a tiny espresso: the order of these mornings became a ritual. I’d start to run exactly an hour after finishing my coffee. I had time to get dressed, to make sure my shoes were exactly tied, to rub sunscreen over my face and shoulders. In my pocket I’d stuff a twenty-dollar note, insurance against old fears that I might not be able to get home under my own steam. If I didn’t need a bus or a taxi – and I never did – I’d buy a sugary drink and gulp it down as I walked the last leg home. If I planned to run further than 15 kilometres, I’d take a sachet of one of those revolting sweet carbohydrate gels or some jellybeans with me too. It’s fuel, I’d tell myself, as if I was an expert in biochemistry.

  I was drawn to the same spots each weekend. I loved running around the tip of Mrs Macquaries Point, with Woolloomooloo and the big grey ships of Garden Island on one side, and the great open harbour on the other. Along the sandstone-edged paths in the Botanical Gardens I’d pass Bronwyn Oliver’s melancholy sculptures of oversized pods – still, I think, my favourite artworks in the city. Heavy fallen bronzes, it is as if they rolled to the water’s edge from an ancient tree and stayed as a reminder of the life and fecundity of the site before the bridges and parks and roads were built.

  Brilliant postcard views: from Kirribilli, the Harbour Bridge rising from its magnificent and lonely northern pylon; from the Aquarium, Luna Park smirking beneath the firmament marked by the Bridge; looking eastward from the highest pitch of the Bridge, out over the brash, rhinestone-speckled water to the Opera House and washed-out little Pinchgut. Blazing skies, stormy skies. A friend who’d decamped to London told me he’d left because Sydney was so beautiful that it made us all lazy, killed our ambitions. Only when I started to run did I understand the addictive pull of the harbour and grasp its connection to the horrors of property prices. In the early morning on the Bridge there are dog walkers, jetlagged tourists, harried parents pushing babies in prams, lots of runners, brunch couples and many amateur photographers. Even on dank days, the water is bright. Sunglasses, lattes, aggression: the Sydney clichés proliferate as you cross the Bridge. Faced with that eternal harbour, who cares?

  To be a runner is to enjoy a sensibility attuned to place – light and shadow, gradient, the surfaces that move underfoot – and to be largely indifferent to real estate, an unusual vantage point in Sydney. As I ran, high fences striped me with shadows in the morning sun. I sought out the wooden decking at Cockle Bay Wharf and Darling Harbour, and congratulated myself on giving my knees a break from the concrete. I looked out to see the algal stains on the wharves and piers when the tide was low, and when it was high, to watch the water splosh up onto the jetties. Water everywhere: seeping through sandstone, motionless in swimming pools, billowing after ferries, breaking new paths from the inland to the harbour. Rushes of honeysuckle, frangipani and orange blossom in Lavender Bay. The frustratingly uneven pavement on the steep climb up from McMahons Point. Shafts of light breaking through the tangled branches of giant figs. I used to run through Millers Point and down to the foreshore of Barangaroo, along a deep flank of the harbour that was shut off to pedestrians for years. Now there’s a new park there, and a casino half built, and I can remember what it was like before all the development, when the view west to that stretch of water was still being wrangled over by politicians. My body carries a record of the city’s history, my version of it, anyway.

  I knew that when I arrived home, I would hunger for oranges, and so I tried to make sure that there would be at least one waiting for me in my fruit bowl. I got my act together to have clean shorts and socks ready for the weekends; I ate a proper dinner and went to bed early the night before my long runs. Buying oranges and getting my laundry done: I wasn’t exactly following Pheidippides, out there delivering messages and dying for the state. Instead, in the name of running a marathon, I began to take care of myself a little better. I’d otherwise flunked the neoliberal tests of self-management; to find myself adhering to a new and sustaining set of habits was novel.

  Often I’d meet my sister Laura after these runs, and together we’d cross the city to have lunch with our grandfather. Claudia and Lucy had moved out of Sydney years earlier, but if they were in town they would join us too. Each week, I’d make the same salad with ingredients that had been decided by consensus years earlier: iceberg lettuce, a short lecture on the pitfalls of modern greens from my grandfather, shallots, avocado, Dijon mustard vinaigre
tte, and verification by Laura that it didn’t contain cucumber. My grandfather would pour us each a glass of the same sauvignon blanc he poured every week, which he’d taste before declaring his preference for beer. We would sit in the same configuration of chairs on his balcony. That night, I would sleep soundly.

  I let myself become fixated on the marathon and its parameters. What proportion of the distance had I run? How long would it take me to run 42 kilometres at this pace? My email address had been added to several running enthusiast mailing lists – I’d failed to check the ‘don’t contact me’ box on entering races. I didn’t unsubscribe straight away, letting my inbox instead clog with ads for new gear. I was a runner. The marketing departments of Nike and ASICS recognised me as such, even though I didn’t upgrade my shoes or buy a GPS watch or a belt on which to strap fuel bottles. Eventually I’d delete these emails, but I did it with a grin on my face at finding myself an inhabitant of this new category.

  I noticed that if I didn’t run every couple of days, I became edgy. My appetite changed, and so did my sleeping patterns. I became used to the strange shifts of emotional energy that take place over the course of a long run. Suppressed rages and distress would pound at my temples, and then disappear. I’d be muttering to myself about something or someone, and then a black cocker spaniel would distract me, the traffic lights would change, I’d turn a new corner and find an easy downhill stretch ahead of me. I listened for the beat of my footsteps on the pavement, but usually they were lost in the hum of the city. A state of constant, steady movement was my aspiration. If you try to rush when running long distances, you run out of steam. If you run too slowly, you never get home. Marathon runners are supposed to include sprints and faster tempo runs in their training, but I found the changes in pace too tumultuous. I wanted only to run for a long time, and to be soothed by the incomprehensible emotional shifts this produced.

  The marathon had a hold on me – but I didn’t always manage to stick to my training program. It is, I discovered, exhausting to train for a marathon. It was more difficult than I had anticipated to fit life around 40 or 50 kilometres of running a week. The distance puts a strain on the heart, the joints and the muscles. Most of the time, I didn’t worry about whether I was refashioning patriarchal history or not. I was just too tired.

  9

  Plan B

  I ran and I ran but I didn’t finish that first marathon. I didn’t finish it because I didn’t start it. I’d filled in the forms with so much merriment, relishing the prospect of a long run with a beginning, a middle and an end. I would run a marathon and watch the world change. So I ran and I ran and I grew much stronger, but as the date of the big race drew closer, I realised I didn’t have a hope of running my way to a triumphant conclusion. I simply wasn’t fit enough. The toll of sheer fatigue was too high. This was no pathetic capitulation to self-doubt. It was an objective assessment of my fitness. I had left too many holes in my training program unpatched. No amount of self-belief and positive thinking would have carried me 42 kilometres, and I doubted I’d be ready to run 30. So I filled out a change-of-entry form and faxed it to the event organisers in time for the cut-off date. The woman at the post office wanted to talk running, but I didn’t and I left, mumbling my apologies. A few weeks later, I ran a gloomy half marathon.

  What had happened? As joyful as my long runs had been, they just hadn’t been long enough, and I’d skipped too many weekday sessions. I babbled on about running whenever I could, but training wasn’t the sole focus of my weeks. As the year wore on, my grandfather had become unwell, and I’d spent many evenings with him, drinking remedial whisky and bickering over the news; I wouldn’t necessarily rise early the next day to go running. It had been a rainy winter, and I’d tucked myself into the corner of a couch and re-watched several seasons of The West Wing. Those late nights cost me a few runs too. I wrecked myself on a back-country ski trip, lugging a heavy pack in sleety weather and sleeping in the snow. I returned home bone-weary, and weeks passed before I could run as far or as fast as I had before I left.

  In a fit of enthusiasm, I’d joined a running group that met in Centennial Park, but only turned up to one session. I ran close to last in a 5-kilometre time trial, and the long-term members of the group didn’t speak to me. ‘Typical stupid unfriendly bully jocks,’ I muttered on the way home. I could see myself being yanked back into the past, to a school ground where I was slow and clumsy. I struggled to view this lightly, as just another encounter with contingency and not as a sign of grotesque personal lack. Maybe if I’d stuck with the running group and toughed out the lukewarm welcome, I would have found some discipline. The group might have generated sufficient fear of humiliation to motivate me.

  I was irritated with myself, of course, and worried that dropping the marathon meant I’d done my dash. Maybe half marathons were all I could manage. One runner friend told me that I’d had too long to train. ‘Next time, give yourself less preparation time,’ he counselled, ‘and then you’ll feel that every run is urgent.’

  If marathons are supposed to make you feel like a million bucks, opting out is a monumental downer. If the marathon is a yardstick that can be used to measure achievement, it can also measure failure. Was there a lesson that I was supposed to learn from this defeat? I already knew I wasn’t a natural athlete and that I’d need to train carefully to succeed. Was I just too lazy? What was the appropriate response to this situation? Control your impulses! Defeat the weakness! Find the time! No excuses! I did what I could to shove away the impulse to bullying self-reproach.

  A plodding few months followed in which I didn’t run quite so frequently. Tired and disappointed, I felt the strength sap out of my muscles as I idealised my former super-fit state. Why was I able to get up in the morning then and go running? Who was that diligent person who wouldn’t drink more than two glasses of wine the night before a biggish run? I joked my way around a little clown act about how one day I’d run this marathon, just not this year. I nodded as people told me how great it was that I hadn’t given up on my dream and that they really admired my persistence. Running successes and failures both invite clichés.

  The manuals are coy when it comes to pulling out of a marathon. They’re full of homilies about injuries – but not about slacking off. The disheartened novice is advised to keep her chin up, to keep striving. Not long after starting to run, I’d become attached to the fantasy that I might stay on an arc of steady improvement, that if I kept training more or less steadily, I would find myself to be infinitely perfectible, turn into a lump of speedy gristle, and scoff fondly at my novice years. I had let myself get giddy thinking about what I might be able to be or do if I could run a marathon. That’s nonsense: but when I opted out, I was made uncomfortably aware of my self-improvement failures.

  I’d been a running dilettante who’d placed too much emphasis on pleasure, treating my runs like sightseeing opportunities, not training challenges. A bigger problem was that I hadn’t calculated my long runs according to distance, but according to time. On slow days I hadn’t run far enough. I’d just been pleased that I could run for such a long time.

  Some runners worry over wasted kilometres: runs that contribute nothing to a training routine except fatigue. Those are the runners who, I imagine, maintain a perfect balance between calories consumed and expended, who know exactly how far they’ve run each week. They only slack off when injured and make up their runs later. This is, admittedly, a sensible approach. I’d failed to string out my energy over the training period and so hadn’t found the balance between not doing enough and overdoing it. Like a credit addict, I had wasted many, many runs by sticking to a too-slow pace and failing to track my distances. If I’d been subject to a performance review, this failure to monitor my KPIs would have been noted. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, young lady. Don’t forget the metrics. That kind of talk makes my blood foam – and yet, it all added up. Or rather, it didn’t.

  A year later, I was ready to give
it another go. I’d returned to regular running and finished a few more half marathons. Lapping the park in the early morning still brought me great pleasure. I was ready to swallow my doubts and try again. I entered another marathon.

  *

  I was aware that my obstinacy about the kind of training I would and wouldn’t do was hindering my progress. I loved long, floating runs, and I hated sprints and hill drills. To prepare for what I had hoped would be my first marathon, I’d avoided strength training altogether, though my running manuals were of one voice: do some strength work. Everyone I knew who’d run a marathon agreed with them.

  As I contemplated this next marathon, I decided that I’d go back to the gym, twice a week, and build up my legs – whatever that meant. ‘Squats and lunges,’ Brendan from work had advised. ‘Get into them. You’ll be fine.’ The quiet Kings Cross gym I’d first frequented had shut down by then, so when I found a leaflet in my letterbox offering an amazing deal at a corporate chain, I signed up. I told myself that I could even run on the treadmill for old time’s sake if the rain set in; I’d have one fewer excuse for skipping a training run.

  When I’d last joined a gym, I wasn’t able to run 2 kilometres at a stretch, and the gym hadn’t been as awful as I’d expected. Now, my body had changed; I had changed. I was reasonably fit – fit enough to run half marathons – so what did I have to fear from a gym? Plenty, it turned out. I thought that running in heavily branded half marathons had prepared me for intense manifestations of mass fitness culture. I was wrong.

  In the change room I was assailed by ads for tooth-whitening and skin-bronzing treatments, for cosmetic surgery and non-surgical facial enhancement, for protein shakes and delicious meal replacements. These exhortations to self-transformation horrified me. The place reeked of sanitised bodies working hard to turn themselves into better bodies. Fat was the enemy. I wanted to leave guerrilla copies of Susie Orbach’s firecracker book Fat Is a Feminist Issue on the benches and flee. I botched the dress code too, wearing a baggy old grey t-shirt printed with an image of Clint Eastwood from his Sergio Leone days. My thousand-yard stare hit the mirrors and reflected back to me a schlubby mess out of place in a crowd dressed in bright synthetic fabrics. The sonic environment was that of a manic dental hospital: metallic thuds and human grunts against the whine of high-energy remixes of terrible dance tracks. Was I reading J.G. Ballard at the time? That might have been why I experienced the place as some kind of psychosexual dystopia.