Long Run Read online

  How far is 10 kilometres? A lap of a typical sports oval is 400 metres. To run 10 kilometres you need to make it around that oval twenty-five times. At school, I hated running around the oval more than any other activity; then, I could have imagined no greater abjection than long-distance running. To a super-fit endurance athlete, 10 kilometres is nothing. It isn’t much of a training run. To a natural athlete, possessed of good coordination and enviable confidence, 10 kilometres is a manageable distance, one that doesn’t require any particularly rigorous training. To someone who doesn’t run, it’s a hell of a long way.

  That night, I knew my legs could take me 10 kilometres, further if I wanted them to. I had planned a longer solo run a day or two after the race, and could have run 10 kilometres anywhere in the city on that rainy Saturday. I stayed because I wanted to find out what it was like to run in a crowd of women. I stayed because these experiences of being in a mass of runners, even as they irritate me, remind me of all the ways that my life has changed, that even the most unlikely scenes can yield possibility.

  Running has a way of dragging you into the present moment of exertion. In those early races, when I was worrying about my calves seizing up, the attention I devoted to the sensations between my knees and my ankles made me forget about any other concerns I had to lug around. At She Runs, the present moment was pink and loud and bright, and as the shuffle toward the starting line finally gave way to running, I relaxed into the fizz of the crowd.

  The first half kilometre was a narrow chute tightly packed with sharp elbows, along which I hopped and skittered, looking for clear space to move. The course widened, and we left the lights behind. In the darkness I found a rhythm. I wriggled my toes to feel the bounce as my feet left the ground. My heart rate picked up, and the real warmth of movement flowed through my limbs. As my shoulders loosened, I pulled my head up higher to better take in the crowd.

  Other women were realigning their bodies to fit into the space, as pleased as I was finally to be moving. Was it the reliable endorphin hit that made me smile at this scene? If we had nothing else to share, we had the same finish line in sight. I waved at the kids who were huddled on the sidelines waiting for their mothers to pass by. I got dizzy running through a stretch of the park lit by a spinning disco ball, then was surprised by darkness – at one point, when I looked down, I couldn’t quite make out my feet. I slowed down and placed each foot carefully, worried that I might trip over my shoes or skid on a loose rock.

  I ended where I’d started, in the candy-cane event village. This is how most running stories end, back at the beginning. And yet, I carry with me – and so does everyone, I think, who crosses a finish line – the sense that something momentous has taken place. Running through the final colonnade decked with Nike flags, I heard someone blurt out a triumphant, ‘Yes!’ It could have been anyone. To finish a race, even slowly, even under pink lights, even when you harbour no doubts about being able to complete the distance, is a fine feeling. The run had lifted my mood – but not enough for me to join the awesome pink party. I cut a path across a section of the park that hadn’t been lit up, and when I reached the gate, I turned back to watch the lights of that one-night-only running utopia flicker, knowing that next time I visited the park, all traces of the event would have disappeared.

  2

  On the treadmill

  I’d like to be able to claim that I started running with one great, effortless reflex, that I sat bolt upright in bed one morning with a resolution to start running, that I pulled on a pair of sneakers and tumbled down a joyful path to the park at the end of my street, that I ran through a screen separating the runners of this world from the non-runners, and emerged an electrified body, springing ecstatic between the earth and sky. That all came much later. The truth is, I started running on a treadmill in the back corner of a grimy Kings Cross gym.

  The treadmill was invented to punish prisoners with work. Inmates in 19th-century prisons around the world walked on treadmills for hours to grind grain. Prison supervisors reported that the repetitive exertion also ground down morale, and so ensured that the prison population remained docile, or, failing that, just exhausted. Not all prisons used their treadmills to process grain – some set prisoners to walk for hours as mindless, pointless punishment.

  Gyms are where such futile exertions are restaged, only with consent and for a fee. If one were, in a moment of disquiet, to launch a diatribe about what’s wrong with wealthy Western cities, a gym would be a good spot to start: in gyms it is possible to observe the most debased expressions of contemporary ideas about the body, work, pleasure and leisure. Wooden banter about everyday masochism – punishing yourself with a workout, penance for caloric splurges – is built into the discourse of self-improvement. To me, those rows of cardio machines, facing screens tuned to tranquilising television, look like props for a giant dystopian con. I know gyms are standard destinations – everyone goes to the gym these days – but until I started running, I would have dismissed as ridiculous the notion that a gym might serve as a refuge.

  I walked into that gym in Kings Cross months after declaring to my family that I would someday run a marathon. When I first stepped onto a treadmill, running a marathon was a bizarre and distant fantasy. I loathed running, but something about the idea of running long distances had lodged in my imagination. I was drawn to the theory and so, in what still seems an astounding suspension of long-held views on exertion, I decided to give the practice a go.

  I’d just returned home from a long year of aimless travel, and I was very unfit and still aimless. I set upon a modest goal: to complete the City2Surf, a 14-kilometre run from the centre of Sydney to Bondi Beach. It’s hard now to explain just how unlikely this scenario was. I doubted I’d stick with my gym membership, let alone enter the race. Would I actually run it? Any punter who knew my previous form would have held on to their dough. Until now I’d complained vehemently about the noise and inconvenience this race generated, especially to inner-city residents like me. Why would I cast myself into a pit of unreconstructed running evangelists, and align myself with the joggers who made waiting for coffee on the footpath so hazardous? I didn’t let these questions get under my skin. The starting date was months away, and I was as used to abandoning my plans as I was to making them.

  *

  And so I started running at the gym when I was thirty, plugged into a treadmill like a subject in an experiment titled ‘The Effects of Exercise on Depressed, Unhealthy People’. Really, though, the story of why I started running, and why the discovery of movement was such a revelation, has deeper roots. For ten years, my life had been stuck still, immobilised even, by loss.

  When I was twenty, I wasn’t thinking about running. I was an undergraduate at Sydney University, deliriously happy to be living in the city, to be an inhabitant of that careless, liminal state between adolescence and adulthood. I was marching in anti-Nike protests and smoking rollies on the balcony of Manning Bar. Treadmills, I would have insisted, were a technology of self-loathing, an instrument of the patriarchal control of women’s bodies. Treadmills? I wanted rollercoasters, magic carpets, teleporters, time machines. It was a moment for manifestos and declarations. My parents worried that I was becoming strident – ‘bolshy’ was my father’s preferred appellation – but they left me to grow up on my own terms. If my tone is nostalgic, that’s because that irretrievable time, being twenty years old, represents the point just before my life was upended. Until then, my days were full of the lifting possibilities of being young and, although I didn’t really understand it, loved and safe.

  And then, one Sunday, my three younger sisters and I received news that a plane carrying my parents and four of their friends had gone missing. They had flown to the coast for a weekend away, in a little Cessna that belonged to one of their group, an experienced pilot who was in the cockpit. To celebrate submitting an essay, I’d taken myself to the Blue Mountains for a day of solo hiking. My housemates had fielded phone calls from family
friends all afternoon but I was oblivious to anything but the autumn sun and the train timetable. None of us had mobile phones then; I’d spent the day truly away, watching skinks play under waterfalls. I arrived home to my shocked friends and this prospect that was just too gigantic to credit. A plane crash? That night, I flew home to Albury, the town where I’d grown up. It seemed like an overreaction.

  The next morning, just after nine, a young policewoman knocked on the glass front door of our family home to break the news. I remember her mousy hair and how terribly nervous she was. My sisters had taken the day off school. Dad should have been at work, asking questions about someone’s dud hip, hitting some kid’s knee with a hammer. If it had been a normal day, he would already have been up for hours. A person possessed of formidable energy and self-discipline, my father expected others to share his enthusiasm for work. It was autumn, too cold for kayaking, so he would have gone for a run or hopped on his bike. He should have caught up on the medical reports that he always seemed to need to write, or watched a gory, unclassified video of a procedure that he’d have to perform later that day. My parents, Jane and Ian, were both doctors. They’d fallen in love in their first year of medical school, married on graduation, raised four daughters, and never separated. Mum was an early riser too. She would have taken the dogs out into the brisk morning for a walk, fussed in the garden, read the newspaper looking out for the names of people she knew in town.

  They seemed to me terribly conservative and settled. I was primed for cosmopolitan adventure: graduate school in New York or London; the life of a crusading lawyer, perhaps; bars in Tangier and Montevideo; transcontinental train travel, rickety ferries, reckless journeys; daring literary feats, scandals, even; many lovers, brilliant friends; worthy environmental crusades, no compromises; ruins, art, literature, rebellion, revolution, the usual. Like many other undergraduates from fortunate homes, my aspirations could be summed up in a few words: not being like my parents.

  On a normal morning, Mum and Dad would have shared breakfast before my sisters had rolled out of bed. Instead, Lucy, Claudia, Laura and I were sitting on a couch surrounded by adults who should have been at work. The report on the search for the missing plane was on the front page of the local newspaper and it was already out of date. The plane had been found in the Jagungal Wilderness, the policewoman told us, and there were no survivors. It had hit the ground, that same newspaper reported the next day, ‘like a frozen brick’. The policewoman burst into tears, and so did everybody else in the room.

  There was no space for a nicely organised five-step grieving process, for a regulated passage from denial to acceptance. It was the wrong kind of pain, the wrong kind of loss for a twenty-year-old arts student. I was geared for heartbreak, artistic self-righteousness, political protest – not this. Whatever structure our lives had, it collapsed. Anyone who has read a book of fairytales knows that orphans have a hard time. My sisters and I were terribly vulnerable to the cruel, and also to the curious. Shock quickly gave way to responsibility.

  I’d already moved out of home and was the only one who looked like an adult, and that, barely. Laura was thirteen, Claudia was fifteen, and Lucy was eighteen and finishing her last year of school. I’d shaved my head the year before in an act of feminist defiance. That was now juvenilia. I had a major in semiotics and was writing an honours thesis on the prosody of the American poet Marianne Moore. Now people were asking me questions such as, Where will the family live? What will you do with the house? Who will take care of your mother’s roses? In many families faced with a dreadful situation like this, the responsibility of caring for the younger siblings would have fallen on the eldest. The guardian named in my parents’ will wasn’t much help, but generous family friends, truly the best of people, made it possible for my sisters to see out high school and for me to continue with my studies part-time.

  We didn’t always make the right decisions, but we managed to work out a path from week to week. My sisters have their own stories about that time, and they’re not mine to tell. I kept my room in Glebe with my beloved housemates, and ping-ponged between Sydney and Albury weekly at first, then fortnightly. I had plenty of time to read on the train. The treadmill is sometimes used as a metaphor for dead-end jobs or relationships, for scenarios in which people work hard and get nowhere. That’s what this felt like.

  *

  I became very familiar with the rhythms of the night train that still leaves Central Station soon after eight o’clock and arrives in Albury in the darkest hours of the morning. One autumn night, just shy of a year after the plane crash, I’d told a friend of my parents not to pick me up from the station. It wasn’t far, and I could walk, I assured her, or just catch a taxi home. I didn’t want to inconvenience her. The kindness we’d been shown felt like a staggering burden, a debt we’d never be able to repay. And anyway, I wanted to appear independent, to show that I was surviving.

  Country towns are horribly quiet in the early morning, and I listened to my footsteps echoing through the wide streets as I walked home. My parents would not have approved. A clock chimed three times, and I jumped in fright. It was cold and dark when I arrived at the gate of our empty house. Nobody had lived there for months.

  I was exhausted, but when I tried to open the back door, my key didn’t work. No one had told me that the locks had been changed. I climbed into the garden and tracked a path around the house looking for open windows, but they all had new locks too. I couldn’t even jemmy the window of my childhood bedroom as I’d done so many times in high school.

  I stood in the sheltered area by a door, wondering what the hell I was going to do. A car pulled up in the driveway and paused, headlights blazing on the other side of the gate. The arrival terrified me. Had someone seen me walking home alone? Everyone in town knew that our house was empty. I drew myself out of sight and waited until the car drove off. The next morning I discovered that it was the woman who’d offered me the lift: she’d wanted to make sure I arrived home safely.

  I was too tired and too rattled and too cold to pace Albury’s empty streets alone until dawn. Instead, I folded myself into a shivering ball on the doormat beside the back door of the house, pulled all the clothes out of my travel bag, tucked my jeans and t-shirts around me, and waited for the light.

  I was woken by a neighbour who’d come over to check on something, I forget what, and found me under a pile of clothes on the step. I woke up, stiff, dusty, dirty. He thought I was a homeless person, and I could see that he was readying himself to make a speech. I stood up, shedding my makeshift blankets, and hurried to explain. He recognised me then, that this was my home, or at least had been, and neither of us knew what to say.

  *

  Plane crash, both parents, younger sisters, orphans: these were components of a story I didn’t yet understand. I’d just started to find my own identity, and now I was defined as my parents’ daughter all over again.

  It’s not so bad, I told myself. I learned how to pre-empt questions from new acquaintances and colleagues about my family, to manage their distress and awkwardness and pity. I got used to hearing about people’s fear of flying. Polished stories and a slightly distant manner are helpful shields to hide behind when your life has broken in such an obvious fashion; it’s not possible to be emotionally authentic with every stranger or friend who asks, Where do your parents live, are you going home for Christmas, is that your mother’s smile, who are these people in the photograph, do you ever really get the feeling that your parents don’t understand who you are?

  Terrible things happen in this world, I made myself say. In some ways, we’re lucky – and we were, insofar as we were on safe ground financially. I knew we were protected by money and I knew godawful things happened to others who didn’t have this cushion. I volunteered in community legal centres where I heard aching stories about lives in crisis. Some people let my sisters and me down terribly – but we had good friends who helped us survive. It could be worse, I reminded myself, but actu
ally, this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

  Nothing sprang back into shape. The great catastrophe of my parents’ deaths was followed by other setbacks. It would take a different book to itemise the sadness and stress of those first years after Mum and Dad died; everything was immeasurably worse because we had to cope without them. There were years of unhappy wrangling with the insurers of the plane. The changed locks were a premonition of what was to come: difficulties with the executorship of my parents’ will escalated quickly and ultimately took legal intervention to settle, amid much ill-feeling and misunderstanding. Behind the bolted doors, our family home fell into empty disrepair. People who wanted to help were scared away, and the broader family circle was torn.

  My mother’s mother was stunned by the death of her only child. She died of a broken heart a few years after her daughter. Disoriented, my sisters and I took our bearings from a few adults: our grandfather, our wonderful aunt Anne, a loyal cluster of family friends in Albury. We were welcome in many houses but, still, we had lost our home and our centre.

  My recollection of this time isn’t complete. The dates and years blur into one another. I didn’t take many photographs and kept gloomy journals only sporadically. I struggled too to remember who my parents were. Memories of a halcyon before seemed like snapshots of someone else’s life. I remember my sisters and I teasing my father when he brought home fancy new cycling gear, flashy bright lycra togs that didn’t match his personality. His moods were hard to pick, but in this moment we are eating breakfast in the kitchen, there are yellow flowers on the curtains, sun streams through the window like a flare, and my father is laughing with his daughters. Such memories are shot through with a warm light, and we all move fluidly, as if there’s nothing to resist. It was a happy, comfortable house; the snags and whorls of family life just sink into that mellow glow.