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Anger Management

Bit of a stream of consciousness rant coming up. Sorry ’bout that.

I shouldn’t be this angry, I really shouldn’t. I have no right to it, no real reason for feeling this way. It’s probably going to be something to do with low blood sugar and frustration but I’ve eaten and been to the shops and I’m still, still fucking furious.

I could blame the bastard crash on the A14 this morning. Two lorries collided closing the road westbound and pushing all the traffic through Fulbourn and along Cherry Hinton Road. It was closed all day. I thought it would be fine when I left to go to the track this evening but it really, really wasn’t. The A14 was still closed, traffic was still piling up through the western part of the city and had I known about it I would have driven or even run the four and a half miles to the track. It would have been quicker.

I don’t know whether anyone was hurt in the accident. I really hope not. I’d like to find the fuckers truckers involved myself and ask them what happened. In that parallel world where I’m a bad bastard, I’d beat their heads together until their ears bled. Whatever momentary lapse of concentration happened this morning resulted in accumulated days of lost time for everyone caught up in the aftermath. It was a pile of shite for everyone.

I’m being generous. It’s equally likely that one twat didn’t want to give ground to the other twat and the two twats twatted each other there and everyone else within a six mile radius. That A14 is a relentlessly joyless piece of tarmac. There are accidents and incidents (hints and allegations) causing delays nearly every day. I hate it and I have to travel along it whenever I’m going anywhere other than London or Essex.

I shouldn’t take all those incidents personally. That’s what concerns me. It’s irrational. So what that wasn’t able to get to the track on time for training tonight? I helped coach the track session of 3 sets of 4x400m and really enjoyed it. The athletes responded well and I was happy while it was going on. It’s always good when the athletes click into the session and give each rep everything. I find it inspirational.

I thought I’d go for a run after the session instead but I was getting hungry and I think that’s when my disappointment became anger. I headed out to Tesco after eating to pick up some extra bits and bobs. That’s when my iPhone decided it didn’t want to play the podcast I wanted and I completely lost my shit in the car. The fucking thing.

I could have gone out and done my own thing when I got to the track this evening. It would have been easy to do an easy couple of miles to warm up, then four miles at a decent 10k pace and then either cool down for a couple of miles or pile on the pain for a fast finish. Boom! That’s a good session if you can nail it. I had to see some people and missed them at the start of the session and really didn’t want to miss them at the end. That’s why I couldn’t leave until I’d seen the people I needed to see. I didn’t know when everyone would return.

Running is my refuge. It’s what I do to maintain my calm. I know that some of you would question whether I am ever really all that calm. Imagine what I would be like were I not running. I managed to keep that bloke at bay this evening by fucking off by myself and swearing at an iPhone and not at anyone near or dear to me. I vented and I still really don’t know why.

There were no breakthroughs here. It’s a fucking mystery.

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Caddisfly

I don’t like glace cherries. I never have. Fresh cherries have an odd taste anyway. Preserving them with sugar syrup or embalming them or whatever they do with them to make them inviolable like that does nothing to improve them as far as I’m concerned. Glace cherries are the winnets of the preserved fruit world. There are tastier things dangling from round the arseholes of sheep.

Yesterday was my last day as event director at Wimpole Estate parkrun. I have had the privilege of being at the heart of a wonderful community. I’ve built that community round me like a caddisfly larva builds its protective shield. The silk is creative swearing and there are pebbles and bits of weed and they’re represented by the friends and dogs and dogs of friends and the sheep and cows and geese and ducks and gorgeous children and they’ve all kept me safe and sane when my world has been coming apart.

Now I’ve left it behind. In a way. It’s its own thing now. I’ll be part of it and I’ll let someone else feel the love the way I have. I am not good at accepting praise. It embarrasses me. I deflect it or dismiss it with a joke. It’s not important to me. What is important to me is a sense of mutual respect and I am grateful to have had the chance to set the tone of our community if I’ve even done that much. I prefer to think I’ve let others do the touchy-feely stuff while I’ve been just the right side of misanthropic for sanity.

Yesterday was still mildly surreal. I didn’t want any fuss but Chris was never going to let me get away easily. He stood up and was warm and effusive and I was mildly embarrassed at the attention. It’s never been about me, it’s always been about the runners and that special landscape we run through and about the community we’ve become. He gave me a National Trust goody bag which is why I wittered on about glace cherries. They’re in a cake, an otherwise remarkably lovely fruit cake which I started with a cup of tea this afternoon. They’re the only disappointment in a day full of delights and I can pick them out of the cake if I really have to.

I’m a lucky, lucky man. I have friends and health, a roof over my head, food in the larder, the love of an excellent woman, a cat on my lap whenever I want one and sometimes when I don’t. I don’t need an artificial shell.

Good luck to Colm Crowley. You have a remarkable thing to curate and I know it’s going to change and grow and develop and continue to be a place where friends can inspire and be awesome for one another.

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What Is Wrong With Us?

I’ve had a bugger of a cold this week. I wish my legs ran as well as my nose does. I’d be running five-minute miles and two-thirty marathons. I’d also be a lot more attractive. There is nothing quite as unsightly as a man who’s left his snot faucet wide open desperately looking for a fresh tissue.

(That’s probably not true. I thought of at least half a dozen more unpleasant sights while I was writing that sentence. Ask me about them some time when you’re feeling strong.)

I’ve gone through three big boxes of tissues and filled the wastebasket twice over with the detritus of my virus. It’s all soggy tissues and crushed and empty lozenge blister packs in there. It’s really quite unpleasant to look at and I can’t imagine it’s much more pleasant for anyone else to contemplate now I’ve mentioned it.

I felt really quite ill for the first half of the week. I’ve been very tired; off to bed well before ten at night and sleeping for nine or ten hours. The last time I felt as poorly as this was last April  in the week before the Manchester Marathon. At that time, I passed out at home on the sofa and couldn’t do much at all to prepare for my race. I missed that race, of course as I have so many others.

I passed out once before. I woke one night feeling really odd when Anne was away in Wales with some friends. I went to the loo, spent five minutes heaving and sweating, threw the contents of my stomach up into the pan and then blacked out. I came to some time later with Harry knocking on the door, asking me if I was all right. I wasn’t completely coherent. I desperately wanted to go to sleep there on the floor but something was telling me that I should get up, move around, get to bed, at the very least take off the sodden dressing gown which was very nearly not staying wrapped around me. Ewww…

Pus and snot and blood and shit and urine aren’t often fit topics for dinner table conversation. They’re not fit for the sensibilities of a lot of people and I’m sorry about that but I’m preparing an argument and I had to do it. So, while we can’t often talk about pus and snot and all the rest we can’t ever talk about mental illness.

I read Andy Baddeley’s blog post this week about his depression and performance anxiety. It resonated so strongly with me. The most important thing in his post is that he felt he could talk to his friends about his depression.

People who fight cancer are now seen as heroes, warriors against an implacable and nearly invincible foe. People fear cancer because it’s a nasty disease. Nearly everyone must know someone who has died of cancer. Fear means that people don’t want to talk about it but slowly, slowly, attitudes are changing. Prognoses for many cancers are improving as a result of research and better cancer care. People are living with cancer now and not just dying from it and that means that people are willing to talk about it more.

The same is not true of depression or other mental illnesses. I can guarantee you will never, ever read a tabloid headline about a schizophrenic hero overcoming the the odds to fight against their disease. Never. Not ever. Papers will publish pictures of mums with cancer but without hair being brave and awesome and being mums. Race For Life is a fantastic phenomenon which has given many women the running habit and it’s a fundraiser for a cancer charity. I can’t imagine that Run For All The Sad People would have the same impact and not just because I’m crap at naming mass-participation fundraising events. It’s not about the name, it’s about our attitudes to mental health and those who lack it.

We are even more afraid of mental illness than we are of cancer. Mentals are mental after all, aren’t they? They get locked up because they kill you, don’t they? Bollocks, complete bollocks. The trouble is that the popular conception of someone with mental illness is the axe-murderer. I think this is because we don’t talk about our own mental illness when we have them.

Mental illness is not rare nor is it always severe. Most people with depression for example have the psychiatric equivalent of a bad cold or a mild dose of flu. It’s not pleasant but it does pass. The cruellest thing about mental illness is the isolation that goes along with it. It’s seen as a weakness or a failing. Nobody sees flu or Ebola or heart disease as a character flaw. As Andy says in his blog, nobody wants to admit to failing so we keep our mental health issues quiet. We go into seclusion when what we need is the help, support and love of everyone around us. You can’t catch depression from a depressed person.

There is something wrong with our society. I hope that we’ll see more blog posts like Andy’s in future to dispel the nonsensical shite that clings to mental health issues. If more powerful people like Alastair Campbell talk about their mental health then we’ll see that it’s not about weakness or failing it’s just about being well or unwell.

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Food, Glorious…

I want to talk about food. It’s so much more than just nutrition. We have a complex, complicated, infuriating relationship with food. It’s bound up in external power structures and personal struggles for freedom or control.

There have been times when I just couldn’t be arsed to eat but that’s depression for you. Hunger failed to overcome lassitude until I could summon the oomph to toast some bread or boil a kettle for tea. There was just the smallest feeling that I might not be able to move my arse from the bed or the sofa but I could overcome the need to eat. Sometimes even the smallest and most stupid victory is all you have. There could be something of a much larger magnitude going on for some people living with eating disorders. I don’t really know.

In a more positive way, there is food as celebration. I’m an awful one for cake. It’s a code for a small luxury or reward and not just a confection of flour, eggs and sugar. It’s notable that we celebrate with cake and not, say corned beef sandwiches. (Other sandwiches are available.) We have birthday cakes and wedding cakes, cakes at Christmas and Easter and to mark every other celebration. Cake is acceptable when alcohol just isn’t and not just when children are involved.

I’d like to know why. Why it’s cake, that is, and not bread or cheese or fruit or honey or anything else. A birthday sausage is somehow almost completely wrong and not just for vegetarians. Sugar has been a luxury and indulgence for centuries. It’s very expense made it a means to display the wealth of the person laying on the spread. The depth of a man’s purse on display in the delicious shape of a very sweet slab of cake.

Celebratory cakes are an evident hangover from those times. We have a cultural memory of hand-crafted display and indulgence even if we can buy some mass-produced, iced confection from a supermarket for a couple of quid. I’m still not sure why it’s cake and not another expensive foodstuff like squid ink pasta, for example.

All those beautiful, tasty, sweet and sugary calories in cake bring me back to  the complex emotional relationship we have with food. There is that slight tang of guilt that some of us swallow with every mouthful. If food is a reward for “good” behaviour then starvation can be a punishment for “bad” behaviour and there we have a very simple and probably completely inaccurate explanation of the origins of eating disorders.

I don’t want to talk about them and not only because I don’t know enough about them. Whatever I say about anorexia or bulimia or dysphoria would probably upset someone for no good reason and I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to link to Beat’s website and point you there. Whereof thou knowest nought, thereof thou shouldst keep silent. Nevertheless, if you know someone who would benefit from help, please point them or their loved ones in the right direction.

Remove the joy and the fellowship from food completely and you’re left with food as nutrition. The only place I’ve ever heard of food only as nutrition is from the founder of a company called Soylent. I can’t find the reference here to the interview. The attitude lying behind this product is that food is just food, a means to keep physiology running. I disagree completely, of course. A shared meal is an opportunity to bond and talk, to exchange ideas and news. When you do it, where you do it and what you eat while you’re doing it are all less important than the people you share the meal with and that you talk while you’re doing it. I don’t think you’d have much of a shared experience over a vat of concocted food powder. You’d have a better meal of porridge. The emotional connection goes through the food somehow to the other people.

All food comes from somewhere of course. Its production and distribution is increasingly complex. There are geo-political implications involved for nations in considering their food security. Meat production uses up land and resources and demand for meat is increasing as more people become wealthier. We’re going back to food as display here. I really want to talk about GMOs in food but that’s probably another post when I’ve had a chance to do more research. I’m not going to talk off the cuff about that. I will say now that I can see the value in using as many different technologies as possible to meet the challenge of feeding the billions of people living on our planet. The rational thing would be for us all to farm maggots or eat Soylent or its like but we’re not at all rational about food and that takes me back to where I started.

Sorry for the lack of swearing this week. Normal service will be resumed soon when I talk about fuckwits or falling over.

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Tell Me The Truth About Lufu

There is a problem with English. We don’t have enough words. Really. There are only about 170,000-ish entries in the OED and it’s nowhere near enough. There are about another 47,000 obsolete words. You’d think that among those 211,000 or so words and another 9,500 derivatives there would be sufficient words for love.

Maybe it’s hyperbole but I find myself loving a lot of things and many, many people. I love running – of course – except when I don’t. I’m not especially enamoured of it just right now. My mojo has become nojo and rather than fret about it I’m just letting it go. I’ll run or I’ll not run and hope that the love comes back in time for me to get some Thunder Run training in. Because I’m not bricking it about that at all. No. Not me.

I love cheese and sausages and bacon. Sorry, vegans; I do. I have been experimenting a little with not eating meat and cutting back on dairy and to be frank, it hasn’t worked at all. I’ve tried soy “milk” and almond “milk” and thought I might as well have had Milk of Magnesia. My knee-jerk breakfast when I haven’t had time for my porridge in the morning is a bacon roll. I forget about the pig who died to sate my hunger until I see an animal transporter and then the guilt hits me like a bolt gun. Tonight’s beef with peppers and paprika was spectacular. I thought this afternoon about dinner and that’s what popped into my head and I was out of Tesco’s with 400g of cattle flesh before I’d even remembered.

Love and guilt, mixed together as if I were having an affair with meat.

Which brings me to people and relationships. I love my friends, I really do. I can’t think of a better word to describe the general feeling of esteem, bonhomie or intimacy I have for all of them but at the same time love is a completely inadequate word to describe every relationship.

I remain besotted with my wife more than 10 years after we met. I need her like I need my next breath. Then there is the whole naked thing and I’m really not going to go into that here. I think everyone is going to be so very pleased about that. She is my closest friend and dearest companion. I like her even more than I like bacon and I love bacon and there we have an example of the inadequacy of the English language.

Nor is it particularly nuanced. There are no graduations in love for varying degrees of intimacy, friendship or esteem. It goes without saying that I don’t have any real desire to get sweaty and breathless with any of my friends except when we’re racing, yet I love them. I don’t want to share intimacies of the same kind as I do with Anne even with my dearest friends but I don’t have any word to describe the emotion I have for them other than love.

I love a cup of coffee in the morning but I don’t derive the same amount or kind of pleasure from it as I do from seeing my wife’s face.

Then there are the cats, chickens, nephews and nieces, parents, brothers and sisters and everyone else I love. It’s such a small word, such a huge range of emotions. Ancient Greek does better. There is eros, that naked, sweating, boobs and bits love. Philia covers my feelings for cheese and bacon quite well. Family stuff is mostly storge unless you’re in parts of the Appalachians then there is agape. Agape is the selfless love of one for another. It gets mentioned most often in relation to theology nowadays and that’s quite sad. There should be more agape in the world. It would mean fewer misunderstandings when telling a friend that you love them.

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Dating Disasters

Valentine’s Day is coming. This used to fill me with small amounts of dread. When I didn’t have anyone to spend the evening with, I would be filled first with self-loathing and then with Guinness and vodka. Then sometimes I would have a Valentine’s date and the stress of what to do for the evening would leave me gibbering. The Day of Love, my arse.

I’ve often wondered how a Roman priest became the patron saint of over-commercialised expressions of hopeless amorousness and very expensive flowers. He’s also the patron saint of beekeepers, epilepsy, plague, travellers and greetings, not just greetings cards and their makers. I suppose that epilepsy and plague need a patron saint. Lovers and engaged couples certainly do.

Useless daters don’t have a patron saint as far as I know. I could have done with a bit of supernatural intervention down the years. It’s not just the times I’ve wanted to swallow my own tongue to stop myself saying stupid stuff. Is there really a need to tell your date you’re off to the loo, for example? No, I can’t think of a reason to do that.

One time I thought we were both enjoying ourselves. We’d ordered food and a second bottle of wine. I came back from a trip to the loo to see her disappearing out the front door of the restaurant with the second bottle of wine. She shouted, “That’s my bus!” and disappeared onto the mean streets of Richmond leaving me with two pizzas and the bill. Who does that?

Yawns are a strange reflex. I yawn when I’m nervous. You’re probably going to yawn when you read this sentence for a start. I yawn when I’m nervous too. It’s physiological, irresistible and certain to worry a date who thinks she’s boring. “No, you’re not boring me at all. You’re making me really nervous.” Another one for the tongue-swallower.

The next stage of nervousness on from yawning is barfing, of course. The liquid yawn. Of course, it is. It should be realising that you’re not nervous at all and that the person in front of you is enjoying your company but no, it’s not. I have several times had to disappear to the loo to regurgitate the meal I’ve just eaten. On one really special evening  I had to pay that visit twice in five minutes. Not easy to explain that one away. Do you lie and say something along the lines of “Sorry, bothersome prostate?” Your date would no doubt be really flattered were she to know that she was having such a strong effect on you. This particular effect? Not so much.

The thing about all of these disasters is that I never felt nervous at the start of the evening. It’s only when things were starting to go well that the yawning, the shaking – I haven’t told you about shaking so badly I couldn’t put my glass to my lips without risking rattling my front teeth with it – or the puking start. My body always let me down.

I need to close with a running analogy. That one’s really easy though. My body always lets me down.

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The Forgetful Man

I am a distracted, forgetful man. It’s true that the internet makes you stupid. In spite of having access to the accumulated wisdom of several thousand years of civilisation, constant internet access has reduced me to being a three-year old who has discovered a stash of chocolate and pictures of puppies. I can’t concentrate on anything for much longer than it takes to get pissed off with a Britain First post on Facebook.

Actually, anything on Facebook is a distraction. I was at a very good workshop today. Hello to any Bits on the Side who are reading this. I said during one of the sessions there that I would do the Hitler thing to Mark Zuckerberg if I could. Not kill him, but go back in time and prevent the coitus that resulted in him being born. Give Mark’s dad a spot of brewer’s droop or his mum enough of a headache to tell his dad to sod off. Of course, that would probably only result in all of us wasting time on My Space instead.

So, I am a distracted, forgetful man… Wait a minute.

I was forgetful and distracted long before I could blame Mrs Zuckerberg’s little boy for anything though. I’ve always been much more interested in the next thing than the thing at hand. Or the thingie at hand since I can’t always remember the word for the thing I have at hand. It’s as if the little name tag which is supposed to be attached to something falls off. I know that a table is a table that it’s not a hat, for example. I know that just because it’s got legs I don’t have to try to put trousers on it or take it for a walk.

A table, even a very expensive one, doesn’t have feelings. People do. That doesn’t stop me temporarily forgetting some names. I know Anne is my wife and I am daily ever more grateful for that. Nonetheless, I don’t always remember her name. She has, with her usual compassion, taken to introducing herself to my friends just so that I don’t have to stress out about it and spend time saying “Ummm…” Who would want to be known as Ummm Lyle, anyway?

If I can’t always remember the name of the woman I love, what chance does anybody else have? Bugger all, really.

Having said all that, I woke up very confused one morning last week. I’d had a very vivid dream that I was married to someone else and didn’t have a clue who the woman next to me was when the alarm went off. Alzheimer’s is going to be a complete sod.

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Small Pleasures

Small pleasures are those little things which mean a lot to oneself and which probably mean nothing at all to anyone else. Some have disappeared. Kit-Kats in foil wrappers, for example, the four-fingered ones. I used to slip the red paper part off and then rub the foil smooth over the fingers so that the logo stood out. Then I’d slide my fingernail down between the fingers. I had to get the tension exactly right or the foil would tear and that would have been dreadful. They’ve changed the packaging and the four-fingered Kit-Kats come in this nasty wrapper which is doubtless more robust and keeps those little slivers of wafer and chocolate fresher for longer.

Small pleasures shouldn’t be the great big things in life. Kissing is never a small pleasure. If it is, you’re probably doing it poorly or kissing the wrong person. My advice would be to find the right person so that every kiss becomes a comma in the sentence of your life together. Who says you can’t combine romance and punctuation? Sexy times shouldn’t really be on the list of your small pleasures either. There’s a reason they call it the Big O. If you’re screaming, it’s not a small thing.

I really liked the smell of Kick the Cat’s head. Other cats don’t have the same smell. Kick the Cat was not a personable creature. She was distinctly grumpy, in fact. She hated practically everyone apart from me. Me, she barely tolerated. She was a serial sausage thief and inveterate bin diver but in her passing few adorable moments she had a sweetly-smelling bonce. When it wasn’t covered in week-old curry sauce. Tilly has even hairier ears than I do. That’s no reason to dislike her, of course, and the space between them doesn’t appear to be filled with anything more substantial than fluff and nonsense. Even though she shares none of Kick’s delinquent tendencies, Tilly just doesn’t smell as good. Bertie of blessed memory would gently chew on on of my fingers which was lovely. Mouse is an instant purrer. You just need to rub her ear and off she goes.

My last post was about the sound of leaves make as you run through them, that ship-ship-ship sound. Getting your cadence and form just right as you run through a drift of fallen leaves is definitely a small pleasure. Even better is running through a puddle. Today’s parkrun at Milton was beautiful. There were puddles the width of the path in places and you could mince round the edges or go straight through the middle. Who ever took pleasure from going round the edges?

New books smell even better than small cats. A magazine which nobody has opened before is a special thing indeed. Lighting the gas on the first click does odd things to the corners of my mouth. A man shouldn’t smile at that. A sane man shouldn’t smile at that. Then there’s the crunch on a good creme brulee when you put the first spoon in. (I can’t do the accent things on this keyboard. Pretend they’re there.) Or what about the texture of extra thick double cream? Mmmm… A spoonful of that and I’m a happy man.

Life should be full of pleasures of all sizes. If your life is like a jar – bear with me on this – if your life is a jar or a vase and pleasures are rocks then you can have two or three big rocks and an awful lot of emptiness or you can pack in more, smaller pleasures – or pebbles in this analogy – even ones as small as a grain of sand. Oooh, that reminds me, running on wet sand on a beach is marvellous, just marvellous.

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Ship, ship, ship, ship…

It’s sensory overload, really.

There’s a sound which stands out in every season. Sounds are muffled by snow in winter so that all you hear is your own breath entering and leaving your body. If there’s no snow, the muffled sound comes courtesy of your hat pulled down over your ears so again you’re left with your breathing and the sound of your feet splashing through puddles and over pavements. The colours of winter are muted greys and blues with dazzling white for a handful of days if you’re very, very lucky and live away from polluting city traffic.

In the spring, there’s the smell of new leaves and the vivid, virid new growth. Life returns with enough punch and power to drive roots downwards through the earth and branches up and out through the sky. You can feel that power, if you’re enough of a hippy. The rest of us just feel better because we’re getting more daylight. Late in spring, the yellow of rape screams across field after field like Young Farmers pissed up on cider.

In summer, you hear skylarks but seldom see them. They’re little disembodied piping voices coming out of a blue, blue sky. That green of spring gets bleached out eventually even in the dampest of dismal British summers so that by late August greens are pallid and the cereals in the fields are burnished golden by the sun. Hot tar in cities has its smell. Damp earth after rainfall is a special smell.

Autumn is my favourite time of year. I was running through the woodland belts round Wimpole yesterday. In the place of the pad, pad, pad noise my feet make on the same trails during winter they were making a ship, ship, ship noise as I ran through drifts of fallen leaves. I remember Seonaid talking about going shoof-shoof through the piles of leaves as she walked around when she was a child. I may have misremembered exactly what she was talking about but that sound is so evocative of the life lived outside at this time of year. There is also the smell of all those leaves and their beautiful colours.

I’m not sure why I like autumn so much. There are quite a lot of anniversaries marking the deaths of family, friends and even pets at this time of year. Those beautiful leaves are filled with waste products and toxins before they drop. The new academic year has always brought some kind of hope of change and renewal even as the days shorten and the calendar year draws to a close. That hope and the shoof-shoof of an autumnal walk or a brisker ship-ship-ship are what make life seem just a little lighter in the gathering dark.

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‘Morning!

I get confused when I’m running. I can only really concentrate on one or two things at a time. Today it was all about running to a pace, keeping a nice upright posture and only if I had sufficient extra mental capacity would I worry about bits of me hurting. I saw Megan for some advice and massage on Tuesday a year to the day after my last trip to Fit Again Sports Therapy and she said I could train as long as I cut back on my mileage while I was still doing the physio on my Achilles. I did a very easy parkrun at Milton yesterday and nothing pinged or went twang so I thought that a longer run today would be a good check on whether I could restart training with a light week next week. I think I’m good to go. I have an odd wee twinge from my ankle but both Achilles are fine. There was a momentary flare from the right one just at the end of the session a couple of hundred yards from home but it was so fleeting it might not have happened at all. It might have been in my head. Runhausen’s Syndrome, perhaps.

What with all that going on, concentrating on my pace and form – don’t go so quickly that you break or so slowly that your form collapses – what with all that, I didn’t really have a lot of brain-room left for other things. We were told during our CiRF course that most athletes can only cope with one or two coaching points during a session and I’m definitely one of those athletes. So, I’m moving along, glancing at my watch every minute or so but running on feel for the most part and my pace is fine. I think about a balloon coming out the top of my head to keep everything nice and upright and I find that everything else follows from there. I’m relaxed, my arms are moving easily, my knees are coming up and it’s all good. As usual, I occasionally feel my left shoe brush my right calf as it comes through but once I concentrate on keeping everything in line then that stops too. It’s all going marvellously.

Then I spot some people on the path ahead. Now, I know some of you will find this hard to believe but I was brought up to be polite. It wasn’t all “Fuck you, you fucking humpbadger!” from the age of six. I still feel the need to greet people with a smile and a nod and to say something as I glide athletically past. I don’t want to be one of those runners, the wordless ones who avoid eye contact in case they have to deviate momentarily from their course, the ones plugged into some iPod-driven hell of introspection and sweat-sodden self-loathing. You know the ones. I saw one like that this afternoon coming the other way. I smiled. I nodded. I said “Hi!” Nothing. Not a thing. The fucker wasn’t even going so quickly that he couldn’t get a word out. Headphones will do that to a man.

So, these people coming the other way. There was a family of two adults and two children occupying the width of the path. Not a problem for the considerate runner. No traffic in the road so I run along it for a bit, do the smile and nod thing as I go past and get a smile and nod in return. The positive exchange, as the Naked Runners used to call it. Next is a little old lady walking along at little old lady pace with what is almost certain to be a badly buggered hip from the way she is limping. She smiles. I smile back, nod and say “‘Morning!” It’s almost five in the afternoon. I’m an idiot. I almost run back to her and say “Sorry, I meant to say ‘Good afternoon,’ because it’s afternoon after all, isn’t it? But I’m a runner, you see. I can only concentrate on my pace and my form and I don’t have time to think about the time of day too. Terrible, isn’t it? I’m quite bright, really. Well, it’s the first time I’ve seen you today. The first time I’ve ever seen you so for some reason my brain says that I should wish you a good morning and not a good afternoon. Brains, eh? Who’d have one? Anyway, sorry to startle you coming back like this. I’m not a mugger, ha, ha. No, not me. I’m a runner. Nice talking to you. Bye!'” What would you have done?

Onwards again. My route takes me through the grounds of Cherry Hinton Hall and then out along the babbling brook where the path is very narrow. I pass a couple heading in the same direction as me by running on some grass where the path goes past some houses. I give them a wide berth. I’ve caused screams before as I’ve gone by because people can’t always hear me coming. I take that as a compliment to my form but I don’t like to cause anxiety. I wave thanks to them as I go by and wish them a pleasant evening. There are a couple of cyclists coming the other way down the narrowest stretch of the path. We each slow down to allow the other to pass. Smile. Nod. Onwards. Finally, I have to come to a stop to allow a couple of families with pushchairs past. Of the four adults, only one man returns my nod and smile. The rest avoid eye contact. I know I’m a bit sweaty by now, a bit snottery and slightly breathless but I was being polite and all I get in return was one hurried and embarrassed nod.

I can’t be the only one who’d like to build a community one exchange at a time. It’s not just about the runners or the cyclists or the swimmers. I tell my athletes on a Tuesday night to be careful when they encounter pedestrians. A group of athletes moving at pace can be a very intimidating thing for someone to encounter. They’d be alright, speeding up and buggering off round a corner. It’s me that’d be in the shite. I have the club’s name and badge emblazoned on my chest and Coach Rich on my back. I’d get the letters. So I tell them to slow down or to give other pedestrians room and acknowledge them as they pass. It’s only polite after all. I don’t want us to be one of those clubs after all. I’d like to include those of a less athletic disposition in the community even if it’s just by nodding sweatily as I go past whether they want to be included or not. I might get fewer screams that way and fewer of those fuckers with headphones instead of social consciences would irritate me.

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