Long Run Read online

  I picked a route through the cardio room and looked for the switch to flick this flesh-and-metal madness into something I could recognise. I’ve heard people say they prefer to exercise at the gym because it’s a private space, but this all felt very public. The treadmills were shoved against enormous windows that looked out over Kings Cross. Across the road stood a pub with a rooftop bar. I’d sat up there drinking spritzers on many apricot-hued summer nights, watching people flog themselves on the machines under fluorescent lights. Were those treadmillers looking back at me, wondering how I could abuse myself like that? I didn’t put myself in their place to find out. I chose the treadmill furthest from the windows and kept my head down.

  Metrics pose no problems for gym-goers: everything is geared for measurement and efficiency. At this gym, even the layout was designed for peak performance, with treadmills and stepper machines packing the cardio room to maximum capacity. The free towels were exactly the right size – which is to say, too small. The exuberant young man who took my details was convinced that I’d see returns on this wise investment in my body very soon. His promises about how good all this exercise would be for me, if I’d just lighten up a bit, were much more grandiose than any future benefits I might have hoped to gain from running a marathon. Forget the marathon – if I stuck to my gym plan, I’d be more productive at work, I’d be on the path to incredible hotness, whatever mating dreams I entertained would be realised. I could have it all! No need for me to cultivate good habits: here, it was inputs and outputs, drills and results. Friends tell me that this is exactly what they like about the gym: they turn up, work out, and go home feeling better. That’s what I’d said to them about running in the park.

  As a sign-up bonus, I was offered a few free sessions with a personal trainer. Let’s call him Biff. He was younger and taller than me, and his tattoos were of the boorishly heterosexual variety. I’d broken the news that I planned to run a marathon later in the year without mentioning the fiasco from the year before. ‘You’ve got a lot of work to do,’ he said. ‘Running is a great way to lose weight, but I don’t think the marathon’s right for you. You’ve got the wrong body type. Sometimes we set our goals too high.’

  ‘Oh, I’m pretty determined,’ I replied, in what I hoped was an even, amused tone. What would Violet Piercy or Bobbi Gibb have done in this situation? I wondered. There were plenty of feminist icons in my mind urging me to tell Biff to fuck off. I asked why he was making me do bicep curls, and he laughed. ‘You’re feisty, I like that,’ he said. ‘But you leave the decisions to me – I’m the trainer.’ He threw a medicine ball at my stomach and told me to show him what I was made of. I’m not sure whether it was supposed to be punishment for my intransigence, but I held that heavy ball above my head and lunge-marched lap after lap of the gym, driven far beyond my pain threshold by irritation. ‘Good work, darling,’ he said, and winked. The following day I couldn’t sit down without clutching a table for support.

  Session two involved an hour of crap advice that five minutes online would have debunked. ‘The tannin in tea sucks iron from your body. That’s bad news for vegetarians like you. If you’re serious about the marathon, the tea has got to go. Hope you like beans, I’ll have you eating a lot of them. Farts! Farts! Farty farty farts! From now on, 4 litres of water a day – minimum. That trip you’ve got planned to France? If you don’t get yourself into the mountains and run at altitude, you’re crazy. I don’t care if you’re going to Paris to work, it’s an altitude opportunity. Have you got a boyfriend? French men, watch out for them, eh? How about a fat test? If you’re serious about the marathon, girls like you have got to think about body fat. Fat’s a big problem – you need to be lean, but you’ve got to keep something in store.’

  I ran on a treadmill as Biff screamed at me and pushed the speed arrows higher and higher. ‘I want to see you sweat! Faster, yeah, faster. Stand up straight and don’t slouch. Don’t think I’m going to show you any mercy. Don’t fight me, darling. Are you serious about this? Are you?’ When I was done, he tried to hug me farewell. ‘Good girl.’

  An old negativity had surged in me, a child’s bewildered fury at finding herself out of place. Running had transformed my ideas about my body – and here, that same body was construed as an enemy to be disciplined and controlled. Punishment as reward, self-loathing as motivation: I’d had enough. I declined to take up the third free session with Biff. Was I serious about running a marathon? Maybe, but it wasn’t going to involve rebuilding my attitude at the gym.

  I stormed home adamant that I’d never return and was thwarted even in that modest goal. In spite of my many requests that my membership be cancelled, the gym continued to extract fees from my bank account. Finally, I climbed the stairs again and used my loudest, least impressed tone of voice to settle matters. It took years for them to stop calling and asking me if I was ready to return. In spite of our obvious personality incompatibility, Biff too pursued me with phone calls for months. Couldn’t we give it another go? He was still prepared to take me on as a client. He’d give me a great rate. He was impressed by my attitude. I asked him to drop it and, eventually, he did.

  *

  When I quit the gym, I still hoped it might be possible for me to run a marathon later that year. I would just keep running and see how far I could go. I hopped on a plane to Paris, and took my sneakers and my marathon dreams with me.

  Did I take Biff’s advice and run at altitude on that trip? No, I did not. I was fed up with tests and ordeals. I’d done enough thinking about failure – if I happened to get to the starting line of the marathon, I’d deal with all the drama of potential failure then. I sat in a bar on the day I arrived and toasted my father, who had lived and died an unreconstructed Francophile, with a pastis. He’d given me a print of a Toulouse-Lautrec era advertisement for absinthe that had been tacked to his bedroom wall when he was a student. I’d stuck it above many desks and, as I worked, would look up to see a red-headed urchin stealing a glass of absinthe from the table of a glamorous courtesan, her bodice picked out in Campari red, as she entertained her admirers, only one of whom noticed the thief.

  That particular Parisian afternoon fell in early spring, as the streets were beginning to warm up again. It was late night in Sydney, and my eyes were confused by the pale sunshine so I sat inside and stared into the past. What had I been doing in that gym? I shouldn’t have been conned by that talk about self-management. If enduring a major catastrophe teaches you anything, it’s that it’s easier to maintain self-control and make good decisions when your environment is stable. Discipline may make sense in a controlled space like a gym – but it doesn’t necessarily hold as a rule in a world where planes fall out of the sky, where the structure and figures of authority prove vulnerable to collapse. It can look like a crazy, desperate gesture.

  I had no firm understanding of why my father had taken to endurance sports in his thirties, and if he had entered any events that he’d failed to compete in, I’d forgotten them. I suspected that if he’d entered a marathon, he would have finished it. Deliberations like these were not as painful as they once had been. I’d somehow endured the first horrid decade since Mum and Dad died, even if I hadn’t run a marathon. I would never share a mid-afternoon apéritif with Dad in a cheap bar in Paris. He’d given me the taste for fierce, sweet aniseed, and it was in the hope of holding on to the vivid memory of him that I ordered another pastis. He would never answer my training questions, and we’d never get to have an awkward conversation about breaking points, about the unspeakable motivations of endurance athletes. If he’d trained for triathlons to cope with some deep hurt, he never told me about it. No matter how far I ran, that would remain unknown. And if my father kept me company that afternoon, my mother would some other time.

  On that trip, I carried a sincere intention to run often. Running at home was easy, but I still found running in new environments difficult. I’d arranged to stay in Montparnasse and told myself that I’d run through the Luxembou
rg Gardens, just around the corner from where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had lived and kept their salon. The problem was familiar by now: I couldn’t face the dash through busy streets to get there. My habits were out of whack and I didn’t know where to stash the huge ring of keys I needed to open the doors to my building and apartment. I had packed the wrong sunglasses. I didn’t know where the bubblers were. The paths in the gardens were dusty, and if I tripped I’d graze my knees. And so I didn’t run. Instead I walked for days, thinking about how all this walking was building my endurance.

  I’d been utterly miserable when living in Paris half a decade earlier. Research for my doctorate had taken me there – along with the hope that my heart might be lighter somewhere else. The battle to turn that research into a thesis lasted several years; if a terror of failure had kept me going then, I hardly wanted to revive that brutal self-discipline to run a marathon. Even though I hadn’t smiled much when I lived in Paris, I think I would have snorted with laughter at the suggestion that one day I’d seriously be talking about running a marathon.

  Now here I was, back in Paris, a runner who wasn’t running. Instead of running, I was mulling over Gertrude Stein’s incantations about continuity and repetition; instead of running, I was considering which of the Parisian artists and poets of the early 20th century, women who had so captivated me, might have run marathons had they lived now. Stein, certainly not. Djuna Barnes and Jean Rhys, certainly not. H.D., possibly. Perhaps one of Natalie Barney’s circle, perhaps Missy the music-hall star.

  I bought a pair of shoes with heels that were too high, shoes that a runner should never wear, and walked up five flights of stairs in them to drink rosé with friends. ‘Who runs on the Left Bank?’ I sighed as I dramatised my inability to run in the city of lights and lovers. We talked about wine and universities and unemployment and running and, by way of consolation, they told me even Parisians were going to the gym these days.

  *

  Later on that trip, in Lisbon, I came across a reference in a newspaper to Haruki Murakami’s memoir about running and realised, with a jolt, that it had been more than a month since I’d been out running. Even with a few months to go before my second stab at the marathon, I had a presentiment that my training plan was gone. I found out that Carlos Lopes, a Portuguese runner, had brought home the marathon gold medal from the 1984 Olympic Games, but that his win had been overshadowed by the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon. None of this information urged me on.

  Once more my plan was overwhelmed by place. Excuses not to run were easy to find in Lisbon. The square cobblestones were too slippery and often smeared with dog shit. The hills were too steep, the footpaths too narrow. And anyway, I was utterly involved with reading David Foster Wallace’s great book, Infinite Jest, an endurance undertaking in its own right. I lay on an uncomfortable cane couch with a scratchy polyester cover and read for hours each day, mesmerised. In his introduction to the edition I was reading, Dave Eggers wrote that it took him a month to read. I was pleased that I would finish it faster than him, mainly because I’d spent so long resenting Eggers. I had been given four copies of his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when it was published not long after the plane crash. These were kind gestures from people who thought that someone whose parents had both died suddenly might want to read a book by someone who’d had a similar experience. Eggers had turned being orphaned and loaded with new responsibilities into his own literary genre. Not only that, he’d also established a worthwhile publishing and education enterprise. All up, he seemed to have made a much better fist of things than me. I’d read the book unable to shake the sense that I should have made more out of my own disaster. Every time a silence was broken by a slightly tentative voice asking whether I’d heard of Dave Eggers, I’d snap that yes, of course I had.

  Now I read and let myself unravel through the improbabilities and kindness of Infinite Jest: tennis, addiction, diversion, yearning, recovery. In this other world, I forgot again about my idiotic race with Eggers. The running I love most involves this kind of forgetting – it’s not an escape, but an immersion in a parallel reality. The book was a mirror and a maze, and to finish it so fast required an effort of crazed concentration that I found exhilarating. It recalled to me that fictions can be as transformative as physical exertion. By the time I’d finished it, I was less bothered by the weeks I’d spent not running, less hung up on having screwed up that first marathon, not so worried by the likelihood my next effort might not work out. I might not know how to approach a marathon, but I did know how to make my way through a monumental book.

  I resolved to hunt down a copy of Alan Sillitoe’s short novel The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner when I returned home. By distinction of being one of the only novels that’s more or less devoted to running, it’s probably also the most famous novel about running. I’d read it when teaching a course on post-war British literature and hadn’t thought of it for years.

  There’s a 1962 film adaptation directed by Tony Richardson, starring a dreamy, angry Tom Courtenay. My parents would have been too young to have seen it at the cinema, and I don’t think they would have had any interest in looking up the acerbic 60s films of young British directors like Richardson. Their loss. What had stayed with me from the film were images of the protagonist, a loose-limbed young man named Smith, running alone in the British countryside, all stiles and hedges and benevolent trees. I remember how peaceful that running seemed, and how eloquent and expressive his movements were. (I wish that I could summon similar scenes from film history that feature young women running like this, safely abstracted.)

  Sillitoe’s book is often cited by running coaches as a touchy-feely motivational aid – a feat that requires some dextrous misreading. Why? Because in this narrative, the hero, who loves to run, throws a race. Smith is stuck in a borstal – a reform school for young delinquents (or a prison, depending on how soft your heart is) – and is granted permission to train in the countryside for a running competition against another institution. He’s given this special privilege by the borstal’s governor, who wants him to win the race as his proxy. The governor may have power over Smith, but he has no dominion over his inner life: ‘I’m a human being and I’ve got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn’t know is there, and he’ll never know what’s there because he’s stupid.’ The physical pleasure of running is literally an escape from confinement and, as Smith’s stream of consciousness narration reveals, it also enables a glorious mental flight: ‘as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world’.

  On race day, Smith, the favourite, stalls just before the finish line. He’s nobody’s show pony, and his refusal to win is subversive and terrific. The opposite of the winners-are-grinners approach. I think of him when I bump into packs of corporate runners jostling pedestrians out of the way, and when I walk past that slick gym, still full of shouting trainers. Who needs to win the race? What did I have to prove by running a marathon?

  How could I explain to any running coach, let alone a knucklehead like Biff, that I’d let my training slide, walked a lot, read a long and wonderful book – and that I was now ready to start running again. That reading had make me think of running in new ways, and that running had taken me back to books I’d forgotten. In Sydney, I settled into a new running routine but I didn’t manage to run a marathon that year. A month before race day, I demoted myself to the half marathon pack. No great crisis had arisen. Nothing was wrong with me. I wasn’t injured. I wasn’t terribly depressed. I simply hadn’t done enough training. I ran a fast half marathon and this time, it didn’t feel so much like failure.

  10

  Over the line

  I’d started out a hopeless runner with zero confidence and no expectation that I’d be able to run even 10 kilometres. I’d turned into an adequate half marathoner, a runner who knew how to train just enough to make the distance. I’d discovered that continuous, uni
nterrupted improvement was a pipe dream, that athletic alchemy was a myth. As much as I loved running, it hadn’t reshaped me into a highly disciplined creature. I knew that I couldn’t run forever. And yet, I still held on to this desire to run a marathon.

  And then, one wet January Monday in 2011, on a slightly mopey whim, I put my name on a list to express my interest in running the New York City Marathon. A week later, I found that I’d been allocated a spot in one of the most famous marathons in the world. My entry had been approved so quickly that I didn’t have time to think it over. This one, I was not going to fuck up. By reasoning that now appears a little shaky, I decided to run the Gold Coast Marathon in July that year by way of preparation. If I managed to finish that one – known for being an easy, flat course – then I’d start in New York in November without any pesky first-time nerves. In that year, I started two marathons – and finished them both. A triumphant narrative – finally.

  By this time, I’d had lots of practice training for marathons. A weekly long run and two or three weekday runs. My long runs were longer, and I skipped fewer of the weekday runs. With the help of my smartphone, I tracked the distance of all my runs and was often disappointed to discover how short they were. In a notebook, I maintained a terse record: Tues 12 km; Sat 17 (rainy). Not a clear victory for self-management, but a formidable advance, and a very useful one. I wish I’d kept more notes on the rich physical experience of running: how my feet felt when I took off my shoes, the sensation of rain on my face, the tightness in my shoulders. I stopped avoiding hills and added tiny sprints to my weekday runs. I practised yoga as often as I could to stay flexible and strong. I didn’t bother with the gym but, occasionally, when I was very motivated and in the mood for clowning, I lunge-walked a few laps of my apartment.