Running Like a Girl (12 page)

The training started well. My confidence-building campaign was working, and Julia made incredible (if not literal) leaps. In a matter of weeks, she transformed from a woman who thought that the idea of her getting round the park was hilarious, to one who could confidently complete five kilometers half walking, half running, then one who could run the whole way. Best of all, she seemed to be enjoying it. Having spent the last year or so at home looking after her little boy, she relished the little pockets of space in her day that running created. She could clear her
head and lose herself in the post-run endorphins. She realized that running with a hangover was not the worst thing on earth, and it often got rid of a hangover altogether. Her confidence, so shaken by grief, started to return. Her cheeks began to glow. Julia was back.

Meanwhile, in Brighton I was reacquainting myself with the idea of running, not to mention running itself. I had agreed to take part in this epic mission without hesitation and with little or no consideration of what it would mean for me. My only reservation was not that I might not finish it but that the relentlessness of training would bore me on the second go. Compared to London's parks, hills, and back streets, my beloved Brighton seafront seemed rather limiting. One of the greatest joys of my previous marathon training had been the huge variety of landscape I'd encountered: cemeteries, narrow seventeenth-century streets, wide sloping Regency terraces, the wilds of Hampstead Heath. Now my runs would have the same two views for the next six months: You go one way and you see the Palace Pier or the marina. You go the other and you see the West Pier and Shoreham power station.

Except that wasn't what happened at all. The view was never the same, not once. As I began to train, I started to notice the subtle movement of the tide—something that I had never spotted while walking, phone in hand, checking messages and chatting with mates. I saw how the birds circled at different times of day depending on how much food had been left on the beach by the tourists. I watched the shape and color of the sea shift and mottle according to what was happening in the sky above.

As autumn slowly turned to winter and the clocks changed, I learned what the seafront looked like at dusk and then in the
dark. I started to cherish the sight of the sea at night and, with it, the magical feeling of having my eyes open but seeing only darkness, as if I could run off the edge of the world. I began to recognize the chandeliers and the fanciest paintings on the walls of the largest homes in the smartest crescents on the seafront. I was soon able to identify the party flats in the blocks rising above it, smiling to myself at the colored lights flashing within. I watched surfers dance on waves at dusk and ran for four miles watching a murmuration of starlings.

I learned about the Undercliff Walk, a wide esplanade cut into the chalky cliffs, running from Brighton Marina to Saltdean in the east. I would run along it, basking in the glare of the winter sun, then turn and make my way back along the top of the cliffs, feeling a few steps from flying. I would watch the Palace Pier twinkling at dusk as the lights came on, and see the West Pier seeming to bob up and down with my movement, like a regal spider in the bath.

On New Year's Day, I ran for a mile behind two emaciated, shivering Goths who hugged and huddled against each other. When I caught up with and then passed them, I wanted to embrace them both. As January took flight, I watched teams of workmen repaint the pale green Victorian railings along the front, taking a few each day, slowly making progress. Each morning I would say hello and congratulate them on getting a little farther.

When I needed to add miles to my runs, I would shimmy down narrow streets lined with fishermen's cottages and parks I'd never seen. I discovered little Tudor-style cottages and pockets of midcentury design tucked away from the endless wedding-cake prettiness of the creamy Regency seafront.

I felt myself become part of my new city as it became part
of me. I ran along the pier early one February morning, looking up to see a seagull hovering above, searching for doughnuts to grab. I dropped my gaze to see the sea raging beneath the wooden slats of the pier. Running between gull and water, I had never felt happier or more like I belonged. I started to understand the rhythm of the weird mists that appeared over the sea but never seemed to make it to land. In turn, I myself became part of the view: a runner whizzing past the tourists who dawdled by shops filled with flip-flops and ornaments made from shells. As I enjoyed the landscape of my new city, I was also absorbed into it. Like the laces pulling the two sides of my running shoes together, running was meshing me and my home closer together.

It didn't feel as if I was falling back in love with running; it felt as if I was falling deeply in love with Brighton. For the first time in my life, I had chosen a city, rather than letting my job or my father's military postings dictate where I called home. And now it was up to me to become a part of it, let it truly become part of my identity. My hair was salty with sea spray wherever I was. And I spent so much time with my legs still moving beneath me that I barely noticed I was running. Running became my meditation. Not having yet reached a point where the runs were pushing me to the point of breaking, I was able to enjoy them, thinking about the end goal and basking in the process and my surroundings.

Just as I was enjoying the gifts of running more than ever, Julia was struggling with the enormity of what she had taken on. Sadness continued to wash over her, and with it the brutal confusion of grieving for someone who had died too young.
As our marathon training ramped up, I noticed a shift in her attitude. She was preparing the ground not for victory but for potential failure. She suffered an injury in her coccyx—a nasty sprain—that caused her a huge amount of pain. She became scared to run. Her confidence stalled, then eroded. She worried about not spending enough time with her son, she worried about the amount of money we'd committed to raise, she worried about letting anyone down.

Watching her, I remembered the cast-iron belief I'd once had that I could never run a marathon. I remembered my father's calm, consistent confidence in me and how a particularly bad run had felt at times like a sort of defiance against him. I recalled with crystal clarity: I didn't doubt that I might not make it; I knew I couldn't. Now I knew I could, and I knew she could, but I didn't know how to convince her.

“But you're so much fitter than me,” Julia would say.

“Only because I did the training,” I replied.

“But you're a natural runner,” she'd say.

“No, I am not! Have you seen my boobs? I was not born a runner. I became one.”

I tried everything I could think of to reignite her self-belief—joking, pushing, ignoring, cajoling, recruiting mutual friends—but there was no convincing her. She firmly believed it was not possible.

One time we threw a trivia-night fund-raiser at a bar, and I heard Julia's husband reassuring her that it didn't matter if she didn't make it. I felt despair. How dare he undermine her hard work? How dare he undermine
my
hard work? I felt like he was deliberately fueling her self-doubt. I was furious. (It was only years later, when someone said the same to me, that I understood it came from a place of unconditional love.)

As marathon day approached, Julia and I locked in a battle of wills: She became ever more convinced that she couldn't do it, and I remained sure that she could. It was as if we were determined to prove each other wrong. She was even painfully embarrassed to run in front of me, despite being strong and significantly leaner than ever before.

At one point the only thing that seemed to be impelling us both was the fact that we were raising significantly more money than we had dared to hope. We asked everyone we knew and everyone they knew for help. It was crucial that the whole endeavor had some sort of tangible result. We started compulsively checking our fund-raising site to see how the donations were totting up.

We auctioned film and TV memorabilia that we'd managed to beg, steal, and borrow. Julia arranged a sellout night of live comedy as well as the aforementioned trivia night. I wrote about our project in a national magazine, and we charted our progress online. Entire families were involved, whole friend groups. A community grew. I hoped that Julia felt the swell of goodwill toward us when she doubted herself in the dead of night, because it was certainly there; at times it was all that kept me going as I tried to maintain high spirits and confidence. Our charity was thrilled and gave us two tickets for supporters to sit with the press and VIPs at the finish line. Julia decided that she wanted her husband and friends along the course, so the tickets were sent to my delighted father. No standing on the sidelines in the rain for my parents this year.

As training progressed, the weather flip-flopped insanely between the temperatures of midwinter and midsummer. It was so hot during my seventeen-mile slog in Brighton that I ran into the sea. It was the closest I have ever come to heatstroke—the
white chalk of the cliffs glowing under the beam of the sun. I dreamed of water, imagined it oozing from the ground. My tongue seemed to be growing inside my mouth like that of a dog stuck in a hot car. I waded ankle-deep into the sea, wishing I could drink it. I looked around. There were women in bikinis on the beach. It was March. I took off my running top and dipped it in the icy water. I wrung it out and put it back on. The fabric stuck to my skin, cooling me down with reassuring speed. I would make it, we would make it.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, we became fitter. On the weekend before the race, a dear friend had her bachelorette party in Dorset. I attended without touching a drop of alcohol and still had the time of my life. My confidence in my body had returned, as had my enjoyment of food and its disassociation from guilt and shame. Once more I was proud to be able to
do
rather than to watch. I spent the entire afternoon exploring the tidal pools, leaping happily from rocks into the sea like a chirpy little mountain goat. Julia texted me a couple of times, terrified that I would hurt myself and be unable to run. What she didn't know was that even if the rocks of Dorset's Jurassic coastline had smashed both of my legs to smithereens, she would not have tackled that marathon alone. I was ready.

It was not until a few days later, when we went to the London Marathon Expo in Docklands, that Julia allowed herself to believe she might make the finish line. Held at the enormous and terrifying ExCel conference center, the Expo is a three-day event where competitors collect their numbers, their running chips, and final information regarding the event. They are bombarded by corporate stands and loud vendors who hawk every conceivable type of event, outfit, shoe, power food, and accessory. The Expo is simultaneously reassuring and leg-numbingly
scary. You are confronted with a world of running otherwise limited to magazines, TV footage, or word of mouth: It is a runner's mecca. It's comforting to meet other runners and discover that they are people just like you. They are dads with kids, grannies with family, friends supporting friends, and large charity groups egging one another on. Among them are many who, like Julia, are undertaking the challenge not for bravado-instilling bucket-list reasons but for emotional ones. They are making a tribute; they are offering up their suffering to help others who have suffered worse.

At the hall's entry was a large white wall steadily filling with scribbled-on messages and dedications. Julia wrote a small note to Jerome, and I signed a note next to it in support of her. As we stepped back and looked at our tiny handwriting, almost lost in the sea of others' jottings, I put my hand out and held hers. We were going to do this. We were part of something bigger than us. And we would see it through to the end.

On the morning of the event, I woke up as sick with nerves as I had three years before. This time the nerves were not about whether I could get myself round the course (which was feeling like less of a certainty) but about whether I could get Julia round it. While her anxieties had ebbed a little—and her sense of humor was doing its best to mask them—the importance of her finishing had grown with each passing day. For Jerome, for those who had helped us with the fund-raising, for those at the Royal Marsden Hospital who would be helped by the money, and for our eternally patient loved ones. We had to do them all proud.