Running Like a Girl (14 page)

What followed was one of the most extraordinary forty-eight hours of all of our lives. I met my sister, headed home, made her some toast and tea, helped her in and out of the bath, and put her to bed. There was no sign of their baby; nor was there any sign of her husband, who remained attached to myriad mysterious hospital wires. The next morning I accompanied my sister to the midwife, then to the hospital to see her husband. I looked away when he told her that he was going into emergency heart surgery in a matter of hours. I held my breath when I heard him ask the surgeon what the alternative was. I did not breathe out when the reply came. “There is none. Your condition is very rare, and fatal if untreated.”

My sister was advised to go home and rest while the surgery took place, and that the procedure would take two to three hours. Resting was easier said than done; it took us ten minutes to get her upstairs, wracked as she was with sobs of despair. I went downstairs and made three dishes of lasagna, wishing I had my running shoes. I was still wearing the same outfit I'd left for the cinema in the previous day.

Four hours later, we had heard nothing. My sister sat at the kitchen table and pressed redial for thirty minutes. Eventually, we were told we could go and visit. Amazingly, her husband was fine, his condition cured entirely by pioneering keyhole surgery. The next morning my sister went into labor and had a beautiful, healthy baby boy: Louis.

A week later, I ran the Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon in London, as planned. There had been a point when I wondered if I'd be able to make it, but in the end it seemed like the only sensible thing to do. The previous week had been spent
in a flurry of e-mails and phone calls, recounting the story of the extraordinary turn of events again and again. I visited the family, I visited my friends, I visited everyone I loved and could reach. I wanted to hug them all. I told the story until it was ragged, worn away by retelling, until it started to seem like a plotline from a soap opera I was summarizing for a stranger. It was almost as if it hadn't happened to me.

I was nervous the morning of the run, as I always am when I go to a big public event alone. Had I forgotten something? Who would get me home to Brighton if I fell? Would this finally be the race where I wet myself in front of a crowd of onlookers? The usual worries. Race aside, I felt happy and relaxed after a week in the company of those I loved, grappling with the dramatic but ultimately joyous news.

As I crossed the starting line, I felt a little emotional at how beautiful London looked that day. It had been a bizarre year for weather, and while there had been rain that morning, the autumn sky was now gorgeously crisp, and the leaves in Hyde Park were exquisite. I felt a little lump in my throat as we left the park and headed out along the Mall, then down along the river. We crossed at Waterloo Bridge and began to run back. That was when it happened. The tears.

Initially, I thought it was a tiny eye leak, the kind you might get at a moving political speech or a great novel. You know, if you've had the right amount of whiskey and some good company. A moment in passing. But the tears that initially could be mistaken for eyes streaming from the cold soon turned into heaving sobs.

The first one appeared as a half-gulp, half-yelp. The second one was an identifiable gasp. Five miles into a half marathon, I was off—proper full-blown crying. I didn't know what was wrong with me: I wasn't sad; in fact, I was very happy. The news was all good, wasn't it? Yet it seemed that after almost a fortnight of coping, my body and mind had decided to unburden at mile five, in the anonymity of the crowd. Only I wasn't anonymous; I was wearing a top bearing my nickname, HEMMO, in eight-inch letters. By the time I realized this, a thousand feelings per second had started to course through me, as if I were some sort of magical emotion kaleidoscope. Every other second came a fresh sensation I hadn't let myself feel in front of my sister, the surgeons, or anyone in the hospital. It was a tidal wave of tears.

Before I knew it, my sobs were almost uncontrollable, to the point where the rhythm of my feet on the pavement had become the only thing stopping me from losing it altogether. I don't know how I managed to keep running, yet it was all that I could do. The memories of the previous ten days flashed before me: my hand round my mobile in that dark cinema as I waited for news; my sister's hand as she signed the consent form for her husband's surgery; my brother-in-law's hand as he stroked her bump. The smell of the antiseptic in the hospital, the smell of the food I made while my sister slept, the smell of my newborn nephew's head. Flashes of the conversations I had been having for days on end, until they lost all meaning to me, flooded back into my consciousness: “What, he could have died?” “What, the baby was born the next day?” “What, you're still going to run at the weekend?”

Of course I still ran; it was a habit. The date was in the diary, immovable. As I now realized, it was only through running that
I was able to process how traumatic those few days had been. Except the spectators along the route that day didn't know the reason for my sobs. They just saw a runner in distress and cheered me on. Which, if I am honest, only made things worse. Because with every step, my heart seemed to be swelling—expanding to make room for this newly realized love I felt for my brother-in-law, my new nephew, and the friends who had supported us all. There wasn't space to love the sweet faces of the children who had come out to support a dad or a sibling and found themselves cheering me along too. Was there? So their kindness was converted into more grinning tears as I gulped and tried to smile back and explain: “Oh no, don't worry, I'm fine! It's just that . . .” and I was past them.

“WELL DONE, HEMMO,” they shrieked at my back. And that just made me cry more.

Calm down, you're embarrassing yourself now, you need to get your heart rate down if you're going to carry on,
I told myself, which only prompted further tears at the very thought of hearts.
Oh, hearts! Hearts are so amazing!
Once again I was lost in the wonder of life itself.

I don't remember the last couple of miles, until I reached the final straight. I saw the finish line and felt a strength I didn't know I had. Admittedly I had not run exceptionally fast, given my busy schedule of weeping, but I felt more powerful than ever. My brother-in-law had survived. My sister had survived. We had all survived. So I sprinted. I felt myself speed up until I could see that I was overtaking the people around me. I left them behind, running faster than I ever had. Slowly, I felt my face begin to tingle, then my hands. As I came within meters of the finish line, I wondered if I was going to make it at all. I did, straight into the arms of a St. John Ambulance
worker who had seen me coming. He tilted my head forward over my knees to steady my breathing, which was now hysterical. I thanked him through my weird gulpy gasps, and with relief I took the water he gave me. Moments later, my brother appeared and bought me a sausage in a bun. It was the best sausage in a bun I have ever known, and they are
always
good. On the train home, I e-mailed my girlfriends the story, expecting to be told I was quite mad. But they understood. They understood it all.

That day in October was the day that taught me so much about why I run. It wasn't a habit, it was a necessity: the essential realization that I can carry on when I am sure I am about to die; that to survive, I just have to keep going, keeping the faith that I could leave the house almost trembling with trepidation about what lay ahead, and if I could keep myself going, a few minutes, a few lampposts, a few blocks at a time, I would be improving not just my running but how I managed my life.

Slowly, as the seasons changed, so did my legs and my lungs. I clung to my realization that those moments of anger or desolation at desperate points of a lengthy run were basic physiological reactions to the situation. I told myself that if I could accept what they were, then I could learn to conquer them, and then I might begin to believe that anything was possible. I ran during the Christmas break and even went for a New Year's Day run after a particularly gleeful New Year's Eve party at a friend's house on the seafront. Queasy from champagne and dodgy cocktails, I left the house on legs like Bambi's, frail but determined to start the year undefeated. I tottered along the seafront only to be greeted by the entire house party from the night before, cheering and whooping from the doorstep as I passed. Walkers, only their eyes visible amidst hats and scarves,
turned to stare, curious about this lunatic woman shrieking, “I might yet spew!” at a Regency villa. By the time I was home, my hangover was gone, replaced with a more honest tiredness and a renewed sense of my own resilience.

Sixteen weeks later was my birthday, the weekend of the Brighton Half Marathon. After applying two years earlier and not making it due to food poisoning, then attempting it the year before with Julia and pulling out within a mile on account of further illness, I was worried that I was blighted by my guts when it came to running in my hometown. This year I was the fittest I had ever been. I knew a half marathon was not an unreasonable race, and I had friends and family, including my now adorably rotund nephew, Louis, coming down to cheer me on and enjoy a big birthday lunch afterward. I wanted it to be a happy race. I decided it would be a happy race. Perhaps because of that, it was. It was the happiest race I have ever run.

The moods caused by running are part of a delicate and mysterious alchemy. I will never forget the boiling rage I experienced on my way through Hyde Park a few years before. It was a bitterly cold January day, a training run for my first London Marathon. I was aiming for eleven miles, the farthest I had ever run in my life and farther than I could have imagined I'd be able to go only three months previously.

The sky was so crisp that the world looked like it was being broadcast in high definition, and the ground underfoot was frosty in places. I had my hands balled into fists within my running gloves and my phone in the pocket of my thermal running tights. I had managed about five or six miles—which was by then an average midweek run—without too much of a problem. About twenty minutes later, I started to feel tragically tired. My fingers were losing sensation in the cold, my face was becoming
brittle from bracing itself against the wind, and my thighs felt like liquid lead. I was eight miles in and sure I would have to lie on Park Lane and beg a taxi to take me home.

Then I saw them. On the north side of the park. Together. The couple holding hands. Nothing wrong with holding hands on a lovely Sunday walk, I can hear you say. But they weren't on a lovely Sunday walk. They were runners. Runners holding hands. A his-and-hers run. Matching slinky running tights, matching headbands, and fully synchronized strides. And their hands clasped between them. Who does that? And why? Who are these people who are so inseparable that they need physical contact
maintained
while running? My rage was as pure and brilliant as the snow sitting on the duck pond.

Then there have been the times when I have been frustrated beyond comprehension by dawdling shoppers crossing a road, or desperate with loneliness at the farthest point from home, or almost delirious with joy on realizing that I have run for three miles with almost no recollection of it. It is these moments of meditative blankness, followed by piercing clarity: That is the feeling you're chasing on the best runs.

For this half marathon I held that feeling, as solid and sparkling as a diamond, for almost the entire run. The weather, the sky, and the sea were exquisite. I felt as if every breath I took in went directly to my muscles, my organs, my spirit. I have never felt more like a runner. I don't know why. Perhaps it was because instead of running filled with fear, I wanted to run as quickly as possible so I could see my friends and family. I was so happy that they had come down to support me on home turf, and so excited to see my nephew, little Louis. I honestly believed I was running directly into their arms that day. I felt golden, untouchable.