Long Run Read online

  Such half-truths and distortions are the kinder deceptions of grief. In this light, my mother is glamorous. If her emphasis on appropriate dress once frustrated me, now it is her soft red sweaters, beautiful creamy shirts, dark, rustling evening gowns which she had few occasions to wear, that I remember. Her silk scarves were always ironed, her silver necklaces and brooches were always polished, and I, her eldest daughter, worried her terribly by letting my hair get ratty and insisting on grubby second-hand clothes. I can’t see her running; she preferred to amble, to chat, to see what was blooming in the gardens on her route. It took years for me to realise that my parents might have astounded me, that the lives they would have led after their daughters grew up and left home might have been nothing like those they did lead in their thirties and forties when they were looking after us.

  Some people appear to thrive after trauma. Loss emboldens them, they form great ambitions and stride forward as if nothing, now, could hurt them. They are exhibits in those old stories about disaster being character-building, strength in adversity. My experience, to my shame, was nothing like this. I couldn’t find it in me to do much more than reel from one day and year to the next, with little optimism about what lay ahead. I must often have been difficult to be around: self-destructive, and often full of anger and denial. Friendships and romances were made and then unravelled. I got wrecked as often as I could, and stayed up late watching westerns and film noir. I daydreamed about staying in bed for weeks at a time, ignoring the phone and letting everything slide.

  None of this I recognised as grief. I called it being fucked up, being stressed out, a proportionate response to difficult circumstances, and, only much later, depression. I had no idea how to grieve. I watched others openly mourn the loss of friends, pets, family members. Even now, I still read op-eds by writers with something coherent to say about their mother’s recent death, and I have no idea how they do it. I was angrily envious of friends who’d followed a careless path through their twenties, who’d been free to fight with their parents, to abandon their jobs or degrees and take up new ones, to take risks, to follow their silly schoolgirl dreams, to screw up and be bailed out, to know where they were in the world.

  *

  I somehow managed to finish my honours thesis the year after Mum and Dad died and, after ingloriously dropping out of law school, enrolled in a PhD in literature. The discipline and order of that long dissertation provided me with a structure, one that made it easier for me to avoid social situations in which I felt uncomfortable. If people were worried about me, most of them accepted my academic commitments as a reason to leave me alone.

  I won a scholarship to study in Paris for a year, but being far from Sydney didn’t make me any happier. I read Stein and Bergson, Pound and Vico, Joyce and Dante. The difficult rhythms of writing suited me, and so did the isolation. I thought I would never finish it, but I did. I taught undergrads about books and films, and when I felt under siege, I turned off my phone and read. I put a lot of effort into presenting a coherent front to the world. Mostly, though, I felt at the edge of a breakdown, terrified that I’d fall and then shatter.

  I’m aware, as I write this, of how unhealthy my behaviour sounds. It was, and I wish I’d gauged my sadness sooner. I wish I hadn’t been so convincing a performer, that I’d been able to respond honestly to all those kind questions about my state of being. What, I wonder now, should I have done? Seen a therapist or taken antidepressants sooner? Tried to come to terms with the reality of my parents’ deaths, and not just dealt with the consequences? Weekends away? Massages, meditation, laughter yoga? At any rate, I think running would have seemed too literal a response. All I wanted to do was run away from my life. I was hardly going to actualise this desire by taking up jogging: an activity for light-hearted people who brushed their hair each day and enjoyed interesting holidays, not for me.

  I was the recipient of a lot of good-hearted advice, including the wise and frequent counsel, Do some exercise. I wasn’t entirely sedentary. I commuted around Sydney by bike and occasionally went to yoga classes. I swam laps every so often. Once, I joined a gym but gave it up, horrified, after two visits. I have a half-memory of running around Enmore Park on a cold afternoon, during a particularly unhappy period. I’m not sure why I set out, just that I wore green shorts and it was a one-off. I must have hoped it would help, and it didn’t.

  But as time passed, life became a little steadier. When two friends ran the Sydney Marathon – in 2005, I think – I met them at the finish line by the water in the Royal Botanic Gardens. I found them sprawled on the lawn, eating bananas. We were surrounded by exhausted, elated bodies. What were they all thinking about? What would it feel like to have run that far, to have kept moving for so long? I had a vision of the mental spaciousness in which they were lolling. Although I was colossally impressed, it was hardly a conversion experience. On the way home, I chortled to myself that it would be easier for me to learn Mandarin or complete a PhD in astrophysics than run a marathon. My father had never run one, but he’d been hugely keen on multisport endurance events. As a teenager, that unnecessary exertion had struck me as outlandish. When Dad strode into the house after a run, his ‘Albury Road Runners’ t-shirt stinky, cracking jokes and laughing at them, I’d scoffed. Now I was a little curious, and I paid attention whenever marathons were mentioned. Marathons! Imagine running a marathon! The idea stayed with me, and I kept adding to my mental list of difficult things that would be easier than running 42 kilometres, such as stopping smoking, sorting my life out, or filing all the legal correspondence that was stacked in boxes under my desk.

  *

  I submitted my PhD in 2005 and finally graduated in 2006. My sisters had built lives for themselves by then. I had long dreamed of careless travel, and in 2007, I bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok with a view to roaming for as long as I could. My plan-that-wasn’t-a-plan was to cover as much distance as possible, preferably without leaving the ground.

  I took the night train to Chiang Mai from Bangkok, the slow train to Mombasa from Nairobi, the Eurostar to Paris from London. I tried to reach a museum devoted to Andy Warhol in eastern Slovenia, but couldn’t figure out the bus timetable and drank beer in the town square instead. I caught the bus to Vang Vieng from Vientiane and then all the way to Luang Prabang, to Chisinau from Odessa, to Varanasi from Patna. On the ferry to Bastia from Marseilles, I slept on the floor and remembered that sad night on the doorstep.

  Mostly I was alone, knotting a string of variations on the themes of repetition, movement and forgetting. I picked a path through the broken footpaths of Bucharest; I climbed to the top of a Corsican mountain and traipsed back down the other side. My mind dislodged as I watched scorpions fight and overripe mangos fall into the dirt during a meditation retreat in the hills behind Mandalay. (The damage done to my hips from sitting cross-legged on a wooden floor for two weeks still returns as pain in cold weather.) In corrugated-iron and bamboo sheds jerry-rigged with wires for ancient modems and computers, I waited for Skype to load so that I could speak to my family. I told lies about my life, that my parents didn’t mind me travelling on my own, that I’d be meeting my jealous husband at the next port, that I’d be waiting in a particular cafe the day after tomorrow.

  A year after I’d left Sydney, I sat with my family in the front seats of a bus driving through Rajasthan. By now, the steel frame of the hiking pack my father had chosen for my nineteenth birthday had worked through the canvas and was a hazard to handlers. The bus passenger list reflected the shifting calibrations of a family life: my aunt Anne; two sisters, Lucy and Laura; two cousins, Ali and Laurie; and Anna, Ali’s girlfriend, now wife. Claudia was at home with her husband, looking after their three kids.

  The company was a delight. We took the high desert road between the dream city of Jaisalmer and the enormous colonnaded fort at Bikaner. We played long games of cricket at roadside stops with the mountains behind us. Our talk somehow turned to marathons. In the vastness of northern India,
where time and space and habit seemed to me so distorted, and after all those buses and trains, talk of these dimensions didn’t feel so incongruous. Unlike me, my cousins are superb athletes, exactly the type of people you’d expect to run marathons. Courting impossibility, I joined in, declaring that one day I too would run one.

  Running – of course! I’d been preoccupied with distance and endurance and bloody running away for years. I was caught by a weird sense of mission: I would work out how to run for long enough that being still would be a consolation. I’d sat on buses for so many days that I’d forgotten the city I’d left, for so long that I’d lost sight of my destination. I wanted to take my body into the landscape and run into the world, to move with its rhythms, and to forget where I was going. I would run a marathon. ‘That doesn’t sound like you,’ they said. (They were right, it was utterly out of character.) ‘Well, it is,’ I replied. I bet you can’t. I bet I can.

  *

  A few months later I flew back to Sydney and started running on a treadmill. To my surprise, it didn’t feel like punishment at all. After that long overture, I can’t really recollect any vivid scene of beginning. I must have climbed the orange-carpeted stairs to the gym and inquired about a preliminary membership arrangement. I have no great defining memory of the moment I first stepped on a treadmill. I would have looked at those flickering controls, gingerly pressed a few buttons and started to run – very slowly.

  I had conjured up some big ideas about running but had no firm idea about how I’d become a runner. My sense of myself as a fledgling athlete had many limits, the most notable being that I didn’t want to run outside. The treadmill was far less daunting to me than the idea of running in public. Sydney’s parks are full of fit, athletic joggers, and the awkward schoolgirl in me suspected that these gazelle-like beings might laugh at me or accidentally push me over as they zoomed past. I also worried about slipping on wet leaves and spraining my ankle, or tripping on a broken piece of pavement and tearing my knees open. I worried that I’d get lost and run out of juice, like a sick toy, and not be able to get home. I worried about blisters, sports bras, dehydration, and where to put my keys. I worried about running in the dark and being chased into the trees, and I worried about my face getting sunburnt. I worried about bumping into someone I knew, scarlet-faced and puffing, and having to laugh with them about how ridiculous I looked.

  Had I started in the park, not one jot of attention would have been directed my way. Now when I see novice runners out of puff on the hills, my former faint-heartedness seems histrionic. Even so, if I hadn’t started running on a treadmill, I might not have started at all. It was precisely the anonymity and impersonality of the gym that kept me going. I liked feeling that I was nowhere and no one: a person with no past, in a place that could be anywhere. I stepped off the street and into an artificial reality where life was measured in minutes and calories, kilograms and kilometres.

  I felt unusually inconspicuous in the gym I’d chosen to join. It was located next to a strip club and it had very few patrons, which is also why it shut down years ago. The imaginary gyms that cause me so much disquiet are slick and corporate: this one was reassuringly grotty, and reeked of stale sweat and buckets of disinfectant. The large, sunny weights room was frequented by off-duty security guards and local tough guys who ignored me. The treadmills were hidden up on a mezzanine level; most of the time, I slogged away on my own. I never joined an exercise class and generally avoided eye contact with other patrons. The winking red lights on the treadmill dashboard were mesmerising, and I listened to podcasts to drown out any noises (daytime soaps, cruising muscle-men, couples on the cardio machines), keeping my eyes on the control panel as kilometres and hours accrued.

  There I was, running on a treadmill, squashed into an exercise cubicle like a robot athlete – and yet I felt wildly alive. What a glorious paradox. I was used to the sensational world yielding pain and fatigue. Now I was aware of my limbs and my lungs, of the sweat dripping down my neck and the thudding rhythm of my feet. My chest carried my body forward, my weight pitched through the concertina of bones at the front of my foot, my hips surprisingly still. It was only as I walked home, ruddy and merry, that I returned to my usual state of anxious self-consciousness. I was sharing a flat with Laura, and she bore my excited babble about this beginning with great patience.

  The gym offered a discount on personal training. For a month or so, I met each week with a woman called Lisa who taught me a series of stretches and insisted on calling the City2Surf my ‘training goal’. She had a lot to say about crunches and quad strength and the importance of my core. She was very kind and a bit daggy, and her advice was helpful. I couldn’t fit her into my almanac of gym idiots.

  A detailed account of a person getting fitter is always tedious. What happened is that I kept running on the treadmill and found that I could run further and further. I began to stretch a little behind the treadmills after each run, enjoying my new proficiency in tension and release. Not every session was uplifting, but the cumulative effect was. I tracked my progress on a piece of paper shoved into my diary, and I marvelled at the improvements. No science to it: I just pushed the speed arrows a little faster and stayed on the machine a little longer each time. I bounced home when I was able to run 8 kilometres at a stretch and shouted about it to Laura.

  I’ve heard people say that they launched into a running program on the back of a New Year’s resolution, and that their body hated them for it. Not me. I slept soundly. I took a new interest in my body, in the big muscles at the tops of my legs, in the position of my shoulders relative to my hips. Those notorious endorphin draughts shot through my limbs if I ran for long enough. This, finally, was what it was like to live in a body, to thrill in movement.

  *

  I’d been keeping my new habit quiet. I thought my peers would be as shocked as I was to discover not just that I enjoyed running, but also that I was planning to run the City2Surf. In this, I was mistaken. The responses were low-key. A few raised eyebrows, perhaps, but otherwise my enthusiasm was greeted with patience and support. I kept at it, pushing the speed arrows, watching the distance log, and when I’d run 14 kilometres on the treadmill, I entered the race. By the time I lined up to start the City2Surf, that rolling loop at the gym was the only surface on which I’d run.

  On the day I arrived far too early and shivered for an hour as I waited for the action, telling myself to impersonate a runner so I’d fit into the crowd. Even though I had friends in the pack, I’d opted to run alone. As if I wanted to join a community of runners: I’d done everything I could to make my running a solo, even covert, endeavour. That me-versus-the-world narrative was shattered when I found myself in a crowd of seventy thousand people.

  The starting gun was fired, and I began to run. No one laughed at me. I was perfectly prepared – over-prepared, actually. I swerved away from sprinklers at Rushcutters Bay, and waved at the old men playing trumpets and banjos in Dover Heights. The big hill that I’d been warned about, Heartbreak Hill, was nothing like the edifice I’d been dreading. I didn’t have to convince myself to keep going, I just remembered how far I’d already come and let my feet take me all the way to the beach. The morning turned into one of those cold, sunny winter days that cast such a spectacular light on the water, and I reached Bondi with a smile on my face. That’s when I discovered that the painful thing about the City2Surf isn’t running it, but getting home afterwards.

  As it happens, the things that get said to the grieving aren’t that different to the consolations offered to runners: Just keep going. It will all be over soon. You’ll get there. Would I have started running if I hadn’t been exhausted by grief – or, rather, by avoiding it? Certainly I was well practised in denying discomfort, in plodding along and watching the clock tick. It might have made less sense to step onto a treadmill if I hadn’t spent ten years feeling like I’d done nothing but flail, getting nowhere. It’s reassuring to think that all the difficulties before I started run
ning somehow primed me for what followed.

  That would make for a neat story. The truth is, mine isn’t really a tale of redemption through running. The world had begun to move around me before I stretched out my legs, and I had begun to travel around the world. Already, I was cautiously emerging from that long retreat. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the sheer pleasure of movement, the extraordinary effect of that shift in attention to my legs, my breath, my pulse. After a long wait, it felt as though I might be going somewhere.

  3

  Born to run

  One version of the story about the first woman to run a marathon goes like this: it’s 1896, March, the month before the first modern Olympics took place. A Greek woman wants to compete in the marathon, the most anticipated event on the program. She runs from the town of Marathon to Athens in four and a half hours to prove that she can do it, a gutsy effort. No, say the organisers, women did not run in the ancient games, nor shall they run in ours. In the name of historical accuracy, the woman is sent home.

  The woman who ran from Marathon to Athens took ‘Melpomene’ as her pseudonym, after one of the nine muse-daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. It’s a name derived from the Greek verb that means ‘to celebrate with dance or song’. The mythological Melpomene was first named the muse of singing, then that of tragedy. This origin of the woman runner’s chosen name lends her story a mythic sheen, which also diverts attention from the fact that it’s pretty short on detail. Why did this woman choose the muse of tragedy as her classical alter ego and not, say, Athena Nike, the goddess of victory, or Artemis the hunter? Maybe this pseudonym was a sign that ‘Melpomene’ had a dry sense of humour.