Running Like a Girl (11 page)

“Looks like I won't make it. Very weak now.”

“Don't be ridiculous. Just tiredness. We are close.”

“WHERE probably going to stop soon can't go on.”

“BENEATH ONE CANADA SQUARE.”

“What? We don't even go there.”

“You do can see other runners now.”

“Won't see you. Must have passed.”

“What mile are you on? You will see us. The crowd is ready for you.”

“Won't. Will probably just stop.”

“KEEP GOING WE ARE NEAR.”

That was it. I had missed them. They had traveled miles across central London to try and get to a second cheering, and it had been for nothing. My father probably had been staring at an unnecessary map as I passed, while my mother and sister gossiped. I bet they all saw my brother, who didn't need any
support. Tears streamed down my face, and my pelvis creaked with pain. I resigned myself once again to the hopelessness of my cause as I rounded yet another corner to yet another tedious urban vista. Stupid bloody London.

I stared at my feet, grimly plodding forward.
Keep going, keep going,
I muttered to myself. I began to feel as if everyone around me was doing the same. I looked up. Everyone around me
was
doing the same. And there was my family, surrounded by a huge group of forty or fifty total strangers they seemed to have rallied to cheer when I appeared. “Keep going,” they were yelling. “Keep going!”

Then I saw her, my mother, her hair balanced like a bird's nest, the result of too much excitement and too much weather. She seemed to have acclimated to the raucous crowds. My sister spotted me first, and the tears and giggles came together. My father was grinning widely. “I told you,” he mouthed. I ran to the side of the road and flung myself at him for a hug. I felt my sister gingerly stroking my hair. Everyone around them carried on cheering, telling me I could make it, explaining how long they'd been waiting to see me and how much they had heard about my fall. My father placed his hand beneath my chin and lifted it to meet his gaze. “You will finish this. You have done the hardest part. You are strong.”

I bleated about my pelvis, my tiredness, my despair. He wouldn't have it. He would not countenance the idea that I might not finish. There was no arguing with his calm granite faith. I hugged him again and rejoined the route. My legs remained exhausted, but my heart felt lighter. There was hope. I passed Captain Caveman's club, which had been discarded on the roadside among empty water bottles, and hoped he was feeling okay too. We began to weave away from the heart of
the City, and the crowd seemed to get thicker again as the roads narrowed. I remembered one of the nuggets of advice my father had given my brother and me at lunch the previous day: Talk to someone if you get lonely. You don't have to run alone.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned round. A young man smiled at me and asked me to move aside. I did, confused by what seemed a very formal way to approach the simple step of overtaking someone. I saw two men behind him, bound to each other with the kind of wrist strap that I had only ever seen on toddlers in supermarkets. The older of the two men was blind, and the younger was leading him. The third man, who had tapped my shoulder, was clearing a path for them.

For a few hundred meters, I watched the team, marveling at how fit the third man must be to circle his team like that. I truly understood what running rings around someone meant as he raced about, covering twice their distance, alerting other runners to their approach with an effortless charm. It seemed easy to slot in behind them, watching the blind man's feet and using them as a pace guide while taking advantage of the small oasis of calm behind them. After half a mile, one of them offered me some of the sweets that they were eating. I took a cola bottle and thanked him profusely. The third man smiled and asked how I was getting on. I explained that my mood was clearing, but it had been dark for a while.

“It's a big deal, running a marathon,” he reassured me, despite barely having broken a sweat and continuing to run rings around us.

“Is it your first time?” I asked timidly.

“No, this is our seventh.”

“Wow, you've run seven marathons! All together?”

“Yes, we've done them in the last seven days.”

“You've run . . . seven marathons in . . . seven days?”

“Yes, this is Blind Dave. He's doing it for charity.”

My head was spinning. They had been doing this every day for a week. Yet they seemed like the sunniest people I'd encountered all day. I wanted to hug them but was reluctant to break their stride. So I ran alongside them for four or five miles, sharing food, water, and anecdotes. My father had been right. Just chatting distracted me from the excruciating pain in my hips and knees. Talking to them kept my mind busy, away from self-destructive and despairing monologues. And they reminded me how fleeting my own pain was. God knew how their hips and knees felt after seven marathons.

We headed away from the City and along the embankment to the final stretch. The crowds of spectators increased, and the cheering became frenzied. My grin was back. I was going to make it after all. I was looking around as the sites loomed into view. The river, the London Eye, the parks. I didn't care how my feet felt anymore. I knew I was going to make it.

“You look like you're perking up,” said my new running pal. “You should speed up for the last mile, do it in style. But make sure you enjoy it.”

So I did.

A final desperate surge of energy bubbled up and propelled me faster, away from Blind Dave and his helpers. Everything I had felt at the eighteen-mile point flipped into reverse. Every single training run made sense as my legs found the power to overtake handfuls of other runners while I grinned and waved at the onlookers. I wasn't a failure, I wasn't pathetic, I wasn't weak. I had proved that I could set a goal and meet it. I had shown that I could redefine who I was and who I could be.
I had discovered that tenacity in myself along with a huge well of goodwill in my friends and loved ones.

I was literally following in my father's footsteps. I was driven by his faith in me, in the texts I'd received all day from him and others. I was riding a tide of adrenaline, doing it for all of them. I saw children catching sight of their loved ones and felt proud of everyone around me. My legs were getting stronger as we approached Big Ben and then curved toward the Mall. I was a tourist attraction, a superhero, a medal winner.

The finish line seemed to be coming toward me as every part of my body heaved with the final effort and an all-consuming relief that I was about to cross the line. As I approached it, there was only one thought in my mind:
I am never, ever doing this again
. My feet carried me over the line, and I threw my hands above my head to look up at the red banner. That thought was immediately replaced by another:
Next time I could do it faster.

In running it doesn't matter if you come in first, in the middle of the pack, or last. You can say “I have finished.” There is a lot of satisfaction in that.

—Fred Lebow, New York City marathon cofounder

I
glided through the summer after my first marathon basking in the shimmery golden rays of my victory. At business meetings, at weddings, at Sunday lunches, people who hadn't seen me in a while wanted to catch up on every detail of my impossible feat. How on earth had I managed it? How had I trained? How had I discovered I could do such a thing? I was the Girl Who Did, an inspiration to all!

I was convinced I'd be a runner for life. I was high on my achievement and thrilled by others' fascination. I glowed when my friends sought my running advice; I gave it freely. People nodded thoughtfully as I blessed them with my knowledge, while I was intrigued by how obvious it usually was. The only
answer I had for those who said they would never be able to make it farther than 5K was: “You have to decide to. You just have to want to.” That was all I had done. I had wanted to.

Somewhere in my subconscious, something was shifting. A tide was receding. An opaqueness was settling over my marathon glow. I started to refer to my running self as another self, a temporary self, a self who had been built to make an impact, not to withstand one. I heard myself referring to what I had done rather than what I did. A subtle resignation to that experience being an exceptional time in my life seemed to settle in. I was not a runner—I had run.

The act of running returned to being something hypothetical: something that celebrities did to sell DVDs, something that shallow people tormented themselves with in order to stay slim, something that others did with élan while I pottered along with my handbag and a Twix bar. As for the psychological side, it must have been something I'd made up. It felt like a fad, like the time that I decided to study homeopathy, or the year I spent convinced that Simon Cowell was sexy.

I had never imagined that it would all go away as fast as I had created it, if not faster. I was exhausted, and the thought of running was repulsive to me. The sports gear I had chosen so carefully seemed as alien as a school uniform. Once so familiar it was now merely representative of a bygone stage in my life. I thought I had become a runner. I had just become someone who could run a marathon. I didn't know how different the two were back then.

Within a year of finishing that first London Marathon, I was no longer running. Perhaps I was making it round the park once a month, but I was getting progressively less fit, less healthy, and less happy. I had done a marathon; why did I need to run anymore?
The motivation had deserted me. My toenails grew back, and with them a layer of extra me. My muscles softened, my heart slowed, and my skin grew dull again. I focused on other things—I changed my work situation; I moved from London to Brighton, a seafront city on the south coast about forty-five minutes on the train from London; and I made new friends.

That first summer living in Brighton I was exhausted, unhealthy, and heartbroken. I had started smoking again and felt ashamed when I saw London friends who associated me with a swooshing ponytail and a pair of running shoes. There was one remaining thread of healthiness that kept me going: the seafront. As I had done three years previously, I walked myself happy. I left my flat, still mesmerized by the fact that I lived with the sea on my doorstep, and headed either east or west along the coast. I walked everywhere, down the hill to the seafront, along the beach to wherever I needed to be, and then back up. The rest of my new home went largely unexplored.

Then, with a lightning bolt, everything changed. A friend needed me. My pal Julia, who had been so utterly steadfast in her support over my horrible summer, asked me to run the London Marathon with her. One of her dearest friends had died suddenly from a particularly aggressive form of cancer, weeks after his diagnosis, and left Julia and their social circle crippled with shock and grief. Julia, who had a toddler at home and was utterly devastated, was overwhelmed by the need to do something with her pain. She had to pay tribute, create some good from the suffering, do something that would make her friend proud.

Julia is not a woman who makes false promises or asks idle favors. One of my most inspiring can-do friends, she had long been the one I turned to for undiluted real talk when things
were hard. She was always the first to tell me when a boyfriend was “good for nothing beyond giving you wet shoulders,” her expression for men who ended up weeping on me. She never hesitated to encourage me to take career risks. She was strong. So to see her weakened was not just upsetting but profoundly unusual. It convinced me that anything really is possible. For her to pull through something that could make her seem so frail, she would need every scrap of help I could give her.

I had become completely accustomed to saying I would never run the London Marathon again: I would never earn a bib, I would never find the time to train, and I would never be that young again. These weren't excuses; I genuinely believed them. If there was no need, why should I do it? Now there was need.

“It doesn't matter if we walk it,” Julia said. “I just need someone to be there with me, someone who knows what it's all like.”

When someone you love has experienced a tragedy, you cannot say no to anything that might ease her grief. Committing to help Julia run in memory of her dear friend Jerome was a decision I didn't hesitate over. Seeing her visible pain created a rush of “What's the worst that could happen? My toes might hurt, but that's it.” It hadn't been that bad, had it?

Before I knew it, I was going to run my second marathon, and on top of that, I was helping another person through it. Now I had to convince someone else that she could run, that she would finish, that it would be worth it. We committed to raising a large amount of money for the Institute of Cancer Research, and then we started training—Julia in London, me in Brighton. Our online communication was constant, with me explaining everything from basic training plans to what highs and lows Julia could expect to feel after runs. In return, she was
always there when I texted her “Help it's raining here give me a funny reason to leave the sofa.” A reply never failed to follow moments later.

A huge fear that once dogged me had lifted for one simple reason: I knew what to expect. I knew what the emotional dips were and where they were likely to come. I knew what it felt like to need the loo on a long run and to overcome it (or not). And I knew with absolute certainty that I could finish a marathon.

I also remembered that I had grown up in an environment where my parents engaged in feats of endurance without fanfare. My father's marathon prowess gave him the authority to tell me with zero hesitation that I could run that first marathon. My mother's family is from Trinidad—veterans of carnival. And what is carnival if not a marathon: two days spent on your feet wearing bright skimpy clothes, sweating profusely as you tread and retread the streets of the capital while people hand you sugary drinks. What was more, I'd had one of the greatest tools that a first-time marathoner can get her hands on: a support system, people around me who had absolute faith that I would finish, even if I did not believe it myself. I was determined to give the same kind of support to Julia, who was bigger than I was and even less sporty. She was going to need it.