J Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons. I measure mine with footsteps. There is no digital gizmo involved, just my head. Sixteen hundred steps from the office will take me along Regent’s Canal as far as the Constitution pub. Whatever happens, I know I can count there and back as a run of sorts. 4,000 steps takes me to the wild dogs and pelicans at London zoo. 6,000 and I’m at the end of the towpath. 12,000 steps is a good run. Six miles. No inner monologue, no conversation with my running partner. Just counting.
It allows me to nurse my obsessive compulsions (I say hello to every coot along the way, touch the railings 10 times, run 100 steps on the spot at certain points) and to forget them. (Despite all the ridiculous ritual, my mind clears.)
There are runs that stick in the mind, a photo album of sorts. The night in Israel as a 16-year-old when I felt I could run like the wind (it never happened again); running away with friends from a curry house in Leeds without paying (literally, and pathetically, because we wanted to do a runner); running seven miles to see my dad in the psychiatric unit, and looking so sweatily deranged when I got there that the staff wouldn’t let me in at first; running a half-marathon in record slow time with my partner Diane.
Running is chafingly painful, repetitive, booorrring. It is also the best source of natural serotonin. Afterwards, once you’ve recovered from feeling half-dead, you’re fully alive.
Running is also about relationships. There’s Brian in Leeds, next-door neighbour Simon at home, Dave the Glaswegian miserabilist at work, and now occasionally Philo, who used to be a bit of a slug but is turning into a Greek god (he used to be plain old Phil before the metamorphosis). Occasionally, I’ve indulged in threesomes and foursomes, but they always felt sordid – more competitive than we liked to admit.
It’s probably only when I’m running that I properly observe the world; the astonishing colours, different air thicknesses and how they impact on my lungs, that smoky smell of late autumn, the number of wild dogs at the zoo (up from three to seven or maybe eight).
The great Nancy Banks-Smith once wrote that you can tell you’re getting past it when you can no longer pull on your undies with one leg off the ground. I feel like that about running. Once I can’t get out there, I’ll be on the way out.
For a few months I stopped. My knees were too sore. I started on the gym’s treadmill (so aptly named), but there were no railings to count, no coots to address. Nothing but steps, and that’s never going to be enough; not even for me. Then when I returned to the towpath, I fell twice. On the second occasion, I was helped up by a frail elderly couple. It was as touching as it was humiliating.
There’s only so much blood and dignity a man can lose. I began to fear for my running days.
But that was then. I’m back now. Slower, achier, more bored than ever, my head too full of numbers to utter a word to Philo. And you know what? It’s heaven.
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