Still Running (weakly). Issue 89

PAST – inspiration – “I retired from competitive running when I could no longer break 32 minutes for 10km,” Tony Simmons (European 10,000 silver 1974, 4th in 1976 Olympics) once told me in a Swansea pub.

I had a similar feeling when, in 2022 I struggled, with a yet-to-be-replaced knee, to get under 50 minutes for the Swansea Bay parkrun………… at the exact same venue where I had set my 10km PB of 33:15 in 1986. That was a long perspective that did not suit me.

Because, as Philip Larkin said, “Truly, though our element is time, / We are not suited to the long perspectives / Open at each instant of our lives.”

Time is indeed our element. As runners, we work so hard to shave a bit of time off our personal bests, only for Time – Father Time in this case – to come along after a while and rob us of that capability.

PRESENT – perspiration – But long perspectives are not granted to those who die young. In ‘To an Athlete Dying Young,’ AE Housman wrote, “Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honours out, / Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.”

Athletes dying young. One thinks of Lillian Board, who won Olympic 400 silver in 1968 and two European golds the following year: Youtube footage of the last lap of that 4x400 can bring tears to my eyes, knowing that she died of cancer at the age of 22 just a year later.

One thinks of Steve Prefontaine of the US, who died at the age of 24 in 1975, three years after coming fourth in the Olympic 5000. And of Ivo van Damme of Belgium, who, like Pre, died in a car crash, at the age of 22 in 1976, a mere five months after winning silver medals at both 800 and 1500 in the Montreal Olympics.

FUTURE – suggestion – What can old codgers like me do, when we have outrun our youth, our talent, and even perhaps our body’s willingness to co-operate? What consolation is there to be had in this harsh, objective, binary world of running, where the stopwatch does not lie?

We can perhaps reset our personal bests every five years as we gleefully join a new age-group. (There are even tables that can tell us, say, that our 25:02 as a 60-year-old is better than our 19:48 as a 30-year-old.)

We can aim at quantity, not quality. Certainly, in this respect, parkrun, with its emphasis on participation over pace, came along at just the right time in my running life. And it allows me to order any results in undeniably the most significant way – that is of course, in descending order of number of parkruns done!

Bottom line: we can simply keep on keeping on, can’t we? And however we attempt to make peace with the fact that we are half as fast as we used to be, we do on some level recognise our new, true worth. As doctor/writer George Sheehan once responded to a fellow runner, who had said, “You know, Doc, we used to be good”………..

“We’re as good as we ever were. We’re doing the best we can with what we have. You have an injury and I have an illness. But we’re still out here, giving our all. No one could do more, or should do less.”