On running

‘I hate this’, I tell myself, when my run gets hard and the park seems hilly. ‘This is a waste of time’, I reason, as I run past a patch of delicate white snowdrops, and alongside a fence upon which two squirrels are shadow-boxing. But I keep going. It isn’t masochism that motivates me, although of course there’s some sense in which all exercise is taken for that reason: to put the body through its paces, to test the machine to its limit, to see what she can do. I don’t run to lose weight, and I’m already happy with my body nine days out of ten. I run because I want to be stronger, less tired, fitter. I run to forget my worries, and to feel better. And in the moments when it isn’t awful, it’s absolutely brilliant.

I have a predilection to run when no-one else is around. But so far I haven’t managed to get out of the house before 7am, by which time Hove’s older residents have already donned their quilted anoraks and summoned their little white dogs from slumber to walk in the park too. So far I haven’t made friends with any of my fellow joggers; I act furtive, avoiding eye contact, and concentrate on just trying to continue running.

It occurred to me the other day that when I leave the house to go running, it’s one of the only times in my life when I go out into the world without caring what I look like. Wearing my bog-standard running outfit of old t-shirt, sweatshirt, and jogging trousers which I paid £3 for, I don’t care, and I love it. Returning home with a blotchy red face, messy hair and a runny nose which I have taken to wiping on my sleeve (no pockets for tissues!), it reminds me of doing sport at school, and actually enjoying it. I dimly remember a time when self-consciousness hadn’t yet arrived, when I wanted to run around and ride my bike all day, when I was proud to get onto the netball team and wasn’t yet ashamed of how I looked in the pleated skirt. I think it’s sad that exercise has been hijacked to the cause of vanity and the search for the ‘perfect’ body, when what it can actually give you back is the confidence to be active purely for the fun of it.

Sometimes I overdo it, and sometimes I get it about right. If I get home and take less than ten minutes to recover, I think I probably did as much as I could handle. On the occasions when I stumble through the front door and lie on the floor for so long that the cat comes to take a disinterested sniff at the new object that appears to have arrived in the living room, I wish I’d taken it a bit easier. All of which makes me sound like the Liz McColgan of Seven Dials, which I’m certainly not. I couldn’t be further from it. I am just an ordinary girl with a simple dream: to be able to run for ten minutes without stopping.