Still Running (weakly). Issue 128

PAST – inspiration – “I shunt Donny into the lead for the last lap around the track.  I daren’t let him beat me; if he does I’ll be the second best Briton.”

Towards the end of the most disappointing race of his life – the 1972 Munich Olympic Marathon – “Just an intense and sickening disappointment” – Ron Hill still tries to beat Don MacGregor and be first British runner home.

Hill was at his peak, but at the age of 33, it was probably his last chance for Olympic glory.  (In 1976, he would finish an agonising fourth in the British sudden-death, first-three-go-to-Montreal Olympic marathon trial.)  He had won European (1969), Commonwealth (1970) and Boston (1970) marathon titles.  And he had done everything humanly possible to win that Olympic medal.  He had run 120-140 miles per week.  He had gone to altitude.  He had experimented with the glycogen bleed-out diet.  His kit was homemade of silver reflective material.  His shoes were as light as possible.

And yet here he was trying to outsprint his compatriot for sixth place.

But what I admire about Ron Hill here is that, even at his lowest ebb, he still tries to salvage some vestige of success from the wreckage of his failure.  His mind alighted on one last target whose attainment would make him feel slightly less bad.

PRESENT – perspiration – I’ve never met Paula (not Paula Radcliffe), but I know her husband, who has often confided in me about her attempts to get back into running following a long break having children.  He even bought her my book, The Run of Life.  Wise man!

This year she was more determined than ever and wanted to do the Great South Run.  But she got a heavy cold and spent most of the week leading up to the race in bed.

“What the hell,” she decided the day before.  She was going to do it come what may.  So, on the morning of the race, they met up with their son and daughter-in-law, who had the same target time as Paula.  However, given her illness, she put aside all thoughts of a time, just wanting to get round and get her medal.

Her husband waited at the finish in the wind and the rain.  He was surprised to see Paula come in well ahead of the other two, in fact matching the time she had done 10 years previously.

He asked what had kept her going to do such a fantastic time.  She replied, “It was the personal message written inside the cover of the book you bought me: ‘Pain is temporary.  Pride is forever.’”

Now I of course did not coin that phrase, but it does sum up what you need to focus on in extremis – in the depths of the struggle to keep going – this will pass, and then you’ll have all the time in the world to recover and savour your achievement.

I was very touched that those few words had made such an impact on Paula, and that her husband had taken the trouble to tell me.

FUTURE – suggestion – I expect you are all dying to know how my push towards a sub-30 parkrun this year is going.  Well…………….

Having made decent progress and reached a low 37 by the end of April, I felt that my blood’s oxygen-carrying capability – severely compromised by lymphoma and chemotherapy last year – was returning.  Indeed, my blood counts had all returned to normal.

However, since then I have stagnated and even gone backwards a bit.  It is a pretty much all-out effort to get under 40 these days.

So, I think there must be something of a delayed reaction.  I only had the intense chemo and the stem cell autograft last December.  And they do say it can take a year or more to get all of that out of your system.

But I have to admit that sometimes I moan, “I’m 68 years old.  I’m never going to get back to anything like a decent level of fitness.”

Now, that may be true.  But four strands of positivity keep me trying.  First, I enjoy the feeling of running – or run/walking, to be accurate – as hard as I possibly can.  If I am going for a 39-minute 5km, it feels just the same as when I was pushing for a 33-minute 10km back in the 80s.  The pain is the same; the pride is the same.

Second, as Derek Turnbull said to me, and as, goodness knows, I have said to numerous other runners, “Never give up.”  Once you give up, the world closes in on you, the possibilities shrink, it’s a narrower life you lead, a more circumscribed existence.

The third thing of course is, I still do think that I may be able to ‘get back to something like a decent level of fitness.’  So I plug away at parkrun, trusting that these efforts, though pathetic in their quality, are laying the groundwork for faster times in 2026.  So, this morning, when even a sub-40 was slipping from my grasp, I still tried to make it an honest effort – if I couldn’t do a 39, try and do a 40, do a low 41 – like Ron Hill, to salvage what I could – in order to more clearly visualise better days ahead.  As Don Ritchie, the greatest ever ultrarunner, said of long-distance runners, “I think you require….… a high capacity for delayed gratification.”

Fourth, at the end of it all, whatever the result, along with Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when he tries but fails to lift the hydrotherapy unit to smash his way out of the asylum, I want to be able to say, “But I tried, didn’t I?  Goddammit, at least I did that.”