There’s a cupboard in my house that makes an alarming noise if anyone bumps into the door – a cacophony of clanging from the dozens of running finish medals hanging on hooks just inside. I’m sure plenty of runners have a space like this at home, full of the memorabilia of years of taking part in events. A few weeks ago, I finally had to sort out this cupboard and, among the old race numbers, certificates and medals, I found a blurry photo of a 27-year-old woman, waterproof jacket flapping around her legs, running down a nondescript suburban road.
It doesn’t look like much, but that picture represents the pinnacle of my running career. It was taken between miles 18 and 19 of the 2006 Abingdon Marathon. Seven or eight miles later I ‘sprinted’ into Tilsley Park athletics ground to finish in 3hrs 28mins 4secs. I had run a marathon PB for the second time that year and felt sure that my London Marathon Championship place (sub 3:15) was just another year of training away.
It wasn’t to be. I’d already asked a lot of my body, botching my way through various niggles, on the way to that race. The following spring, on a training camp, I did something to my left ITB and – to cut a long story short – I’ve never quite been the same runner since. That’s how the photo came to be stashed away in a cupboard. I used to look at it with sadness but, when I found it again and realised the race was 10 years ago this month, I came to realise something else. I’m not sad to look back any more. I would face an uphill struggle to run those kinds of finish times again, even if I was completely injury free – I am 10 years older, after all. But that no longer matters to me. In the intervening years, not being able to run marathons ‘properly’ has meant finding new ways to run, learning how to swim, completing two Ironman triathlons, making new friends. I’m not the runner I used to be – but I’m a happy runner all the same.
Of course, it has taken me a long time to get over the idea of chasing those finish times. Many runners are driven to train by the thought of achieving faster finishes or completing longer courses. “It’s very tangible,” says coach and runner Laura Fountain (lazygirlrunning.com). “You can put in four weeks of training and then take a minute off your parkrun time, and it’s justification for going out there and doing it. I don’t know that you get that in other forms of exercise, like gym classes – you might enjoy it, but you don’t have a measurable thing that says ‘You came and you worked hard and look at this improvement.’”
I certainly know how addictive it can be to work and improve times – by the time my marathon PB came around, I’d already been running for eight years, steadily slicing minutes off my times for everything from a lap around the park to 10Ks to marathons. It’s not surprising that so many women find it satisfying – after all, we live in a resultsdriven society. This Mum Runs founder Mel Bound says that, in her early running career, working for faster times was part of a wider picture of striving for measurable achievements. “I’ve always been someone that pushes myself quite hard,” she says. “I came from an academic school and an academic university, and then a career that was all about numbers. It was just part of a broader landscape of my life at the time.”
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