September

[Sweder]

Murakami-san has a lot to answer for.
I finally finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a book that echoes, or more accurately given the chronology of events, spookily previews my own relatively short running life. A tough ultra almost ended Murakami’s affair with running, beating the joy out of his footsteps, withering his resolve. It took a long while for him to fully recover, longer than he had at first thought, and perhaps that’s happened to me too. It’s no coincidence that the Two Oceans was the last big race on my calendar. Something in me shrivelled on that gruelling quest. The comparisons don’t end there; knee troubles, worries about writing, running shoes, rekindling a passion for running and the joy of finding that passion, whilst buried and bruised, still alive and kicking, all feature in this excellent autobiographical tale. It gave me hope, more it made me think – really think.

So when I woke up in the wee small hours, an ugly maelstrom hammering on my windows, I grinned like a man on the very edge of reason and reached for my running shoes. Don’t tell Nicola, my ever-watchful, brutally honest physio. She’ll punish me horribly for breaking my earnest vow of abstinence. I had to know; I had to look inside and see what lay there. Separation can be a terrible thing but it can also lead to an honest appraisal of where we are. I’d been completely apart from running for about a month and to my deep concern I wasn’t really missing it, at least not in a tangible, every day sense. Would there, could there be a reconciliation? Is there a future for me and my useless knees on the muddy hillside trails, or am I destined to pedal off into the sunset to pursue a new and less destructive affair with my admittedly attractive mountain bike?

If anything would find me out it was a fifty mile-per-hour broadside swirl laden with heavy rain and laced with spite. I started out slowly – really slowly – sensors focused on my mutinous joints. Tess, the ageing whippet of legend, took one look at the cavorting mist-rain, shook her lean white head and trotted back towards the house. Fair enough. The other two put their heads down and ploughed on, up the stiff early climbs and into the hills. A mile in and my early frantic pace settled. Sure I felt heavy (no shock there) and terminally slow, but so far so good on the knee front and I was still moving. Up past the stables, onto Mount Harry and finally that long pull up Blackcap, wind lashing in from the south to clatter into my banana-yellow windcheater, stinging the exposed pink flesh of my legs, an endless stream of cruel, darting barbs.

There’s a helluva wild whirlwind tearing through the world just now, not just out in the hellish hills around Lewes or even the beleaguered US Gulf ports of Louisiana. My beloved New Orleans may have dodged the very worst of Gustav but another dark and violent storm threatens to rip through the heart of the shell-shocked Republican convention some thousand miles due north.

On the plus side for the Right Gustav’s timely arrival has caused Messrs Bush and Chaney to bail out from almost certainly doomed lame-duck speeches at the star-spangled gathering. No sooner had the collected sighs of relief swept through the bedecked streets of Saint Paul a vicious, icy blast knifed in from the north-west. John McCain, surely the man most likely to collapse on reaching office since the last inaugurated Pope, rolled the dice and picked a spritely young female governor as a running mate. Female and feisty, commander in chief of her regional National Guard, Sarah Palin was chosen to smite the Obama publicity machine just where it hurts - in the pro-fem marginals, to take those disillusioned Hillary-ites and flip them across the red-blue divide. White-haired, wrinkle-jowled the Kingmakers at GOP HQ froze in horror as scurrilous rumours swirling around their hastily assembled 'Dream Team' were flatly denied then cruelly affirmed. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is, to coin the current Hollywood vernacular, knocked up. Pregnant out of wedlock, a heinous crime that until recently warranted burning at the stake in the unforgiving Republican heartlands. The only thing better than this for Barrack's bandwagon would be if the co-creator proved to be either a torch-burning hoodie or -oh please oh please oh please - of ethnic origin. We're told today that the two 'plan to marry'. In this age of substitute opening ceremony singers can we be sure it'll be the biological father at the sharp end of Sarah's Moosekiller?

I nipped onto the GOP website to check my spellings and you know I could barely find hide nor hair of the VP-elect. This handsome, radiant, all-action mother of (four? Five?) who, just 24 hours earlier, threatened to derail the seemingly unstoppable Obama Express, has been swiftly swept under the royal blue Republican cyber-carpet, at least for the time being. One can only imagine the degree of throbbing to be found in the temples of the Grand Wizards; frightening. Put the Minneapolis emergency services on red alert, there’s coronaries in them there halls! What fun to see the spin and counter spin emanating from the north, enough perhaps to unwind the power of Gustav as the storm sweeps inland.

Speaking of ill winds there's a heck of a twister raging through the incomprehensible world of Premiership football. A bizarre day/ night saga involving Arab trillionaires, Oligarch gazumping and an apparent tug of war over a surly Bulgarian. Robinho heads for Middle-Eastlands with the scorn of his former employer ringing in his ears. ‘He has deep emotional issues; every time I talk to him he cries’ claims Real Madrid supremo Calderon, waving his slightly mucky hanky and peeling a small onion. Wait ‘till the Brazilian maestro gets into Manchester and finds out they have two premiership teams and he’s signed for the other one. They’ll need considerably better flood defences than the cracked levies in the Big Easy to cope with that sorrowful deluge. The irony of City being bought out by a company with United in its name is not lost here. But away sour grapes! for any swell of envy swamping my bile duct is surely (temporarily) cleansed by the joy of watching Roman and Peter kneeling together on the Stamford Bridge carpet in a rich parody of Nixon and Kissinger, wringing their hands over the tear-stained mugshot of their Brazilian idol. Get used to it boys. Al-Fahim's wealth is so great it can be seen from space – last night’s Fiver described the robed-one ‘playing with Abramovich’s yacht in the bath’. I have to admire the brass neck of the City suits, throwing out a wicked smokescreen as the witching hour approached; Berbatov, Villa, Gomez . . . genius boys, pure genius. I’ve no doubt there were plenty of squeaky bums at the Devilbowl as Lord Ferg and David Gill watched the Sky Sports News ticker in wide-eyed disbelief. Now Spurs can count their haul, Sparky can rub his hands and Abramovich can lick his wounds. Commence au festival!

Turning at the peak of the Cap I faced nature's wrath, a mere snapshot of the brutal power looming over the southern States but fierce enough for a man standing alone atop an exposed knoll clad in flimsy shorts. Not for the first time I realised that the side wind had in fact been shoving me outward. Now it roared back into my face with gleeful intent, daring me to step off the rise and start the homeward plummet. I grinned, a maniacal leer towards a squint-blurred impression of a hillside, setting my heavy legs in motion. As the ground raced to meet my hurtling form the answer to my question rose from the deep, bursting into my mind to embrace the endorphins streaming through my veins in a wild dance of sheer unfettered joy. My worries, my fears, dalliances with bicycles and thoughts of other pursuits fell away like spent fuel cells after a Space shuttle launch. I gathered speed, mindful not to do anything stupid like blowing a gasket or taking a terminal tumble off the rain-slicked flint. Running is, and shall always be in what ever limited capacity, a part of me. I'm pretty much a Godless soul but I thought of Eric Liddell, truly a man of God, the Flying Scot immortalised in Chariots of Fire, and this wonderful quote:
I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.
Well, when I ran today I felt my pleasure, and that's all I really needed.

The trail, wide and undulating at the dip, narrowed as I climbed again, tall grasses, heavy, wet and mean, leaning in to whip my lower legs. I grinned again, calm, soothed, safe in the knowledge that on this foul and heartless morning I’d got my answer; my passion lives! It’s there, muffled by injury, stifled by the frailties of my rubbish body, but it survives, it endures.

When the time comes and I get the all-clear and this bloody stupid knee settles down I’ll be back out there in the wind and the rain to gamely gallop across this unforgiving downland. The hunched silhouette returns! The haggard bundle of rags on stilts bowling along the Lewes ridge, hustling and bustling towards some far-flung fanciful goal. For now I’ll huff and puff my way across these trails on my trusty stand-in bike with renewed hope in my heart. Who knows? Maybe the bike will stay on, helping to ease the burden on ageing limbs, extending my lease on this running life. I hope so, but if she does she’ll play second fiddle.