My Life in Sport - Running

 My Life in Sport was a series that ended rather abruptly here four years ago after covering my modest careers in football, cricket and cycling. I think more pressing concerns of a literary nature needed attending to and I never got back to it. Well, there might be a bit of a hiatus in literary issues now as I take very kindly to Balzac and order three more but might not have much to say about them beyond the great enjoyment. I saw that Andrew Motion had a new book out earlier this year, there's a new recording of Spem in Alium with a James MacMillan counterpart to it and August Kleinzahler is now due in November but otherwise, there is time and space to fill and so My Life in Sport can cover running, chess, darts, pool and a short appendix on my brief, inglorious career in Gaelic Football. I kid you not. As my life in sport unfolds further it becomes more apparent that I had a lot to be modest about but there can be something gently soporific about a memoir.

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I finished second in the sprint on school sports day every year from infant school in Nottingham in the mid-60's to the 100 metres at big school in the mid-70's. Like most sports, I wasn't blessed with a huge talent but was better than most so I was good enough to take part respectably without often having much chance of winning. 

While cross country looked like voluntary masochism at big school, it did mean an eventual escape route from the barbaric form of outdoor pursuit that made rugby union considered suitable as sport in Gloucester, where the slightly more sophisticated round ball game, at which I was any good, was outlawed to unofficial, flapping track status. But David Bedford's zapata moustache and solo runs half a lap in front of toiling opposition made distance running look glamorous and so I did it anyway. School was conveniently- inconveniently, some might say - nestled on the outskirts of Gloucester at the bottom of Churchdown Hill and the cross country course made its way directly through the housing estate before crossing the dual carriageway by bridge, across the gradually increasing gradients of some ploughed fields punctuated by stiles and fences to some steep climbs and then back down again. Mud helped to make it more treacherous as winter deepened, Les Gray and Tiger Feet notwithstanding, and just in case we needed to get a bit fitter, we could just run the steepest field and do interval sprints up the hardest part. But, if anything, running downhill could be worse than going up.

It was both Spartan and Corinthian, to mix Classical metaphors, but one returned for more training and races without apparently questioning that other boys just went home and did their homework and I could have been listening to my Steeleye Span LP. It did make us a formidable team, though, and as one of the team putting in a solid block of high enough placings against schools in Cheltenham, Stroud and anywhere else within a minibus ride, I collected any number of medals and certificates as a matter of routine.

My debut in Cheltenham was fairly successful on a cold, November Saturday morning in the days before thermal sportswear and when 11 year old girls were sent out to run over hilly, long distance courses in no more than their PE kit which was likely to make them faint from exhaustion which some of them, unaware that some decades later female sport would be regarded as just as legitimate as male sport, duly did.

One of the courses for away fixtures included a section round the perimeter of Cheltenham racecourse, which could have been useful if we'd been passing during a race of interest, but another used Leckhampton Hill with a flat start along an unmade road, a sharp right turn to go up a steep incline, a mile or so along the top, a downhill road followed by a seemingly endless woodland path covered in soft fallen leaves, by which time one could see neither the runner ahead or the one behind. In this weird, solipsistic downtime, I played Al Green records in my head in the same way that UB40's Kingston Town was later to sustain me in long, isolated parts of 12 hour bike races. After the woods, it came out into a clearing and the finish was at the other side of a dip. Having not seen another runner for so long, I once emerged to see a procession of figures ahead of me, lined up as if ready for the taking, put my stylish soul record away and set off down the hill in pursuit of as many of them as I could get. I sailed past maybe a dozen until being locked in a determined battle to the line with a good athlete, his name was Howells, who didn't seem to think I should be going past him but I had some impetus behind me and was in the mood and, a few yards from the line, he gave way. You know you've been in a race after something like that but it makes it worthwhile   

We went further afield in search of greater glory, being the dominant force in the area and circa 1975 (I'll amend this for detail if and when I find dates on medals), possibly due to an injury to somebody better than me, I was one of the four that went to Cardiff for the Cantonian relay, which each leg being a 3 mile circuit (roughly, probably). I ran the second leg and was handed the baton in second place, not far off the leader, but I soon got to him and found him struggling, wheezing and making funny noises, the second leg being where teams usually put their weakest runner. For some moments, I enjoyed sitting on his shoulder knowing that I was going to beat him until I realized that I needed to go past him straightaway and put distance into him to give my team-mates an advantage on the last two legs. I wasn't used to the tactics that went on at the front of a race. It's only now that I realize I ought to have been worried about potential threats coming from behind but there weren't any. I fell over on a gravel path towards the end and bits of gravel stayed in my knee for a couple of weeks but it was a 'gold' medal and several minutes spent at the front of a running race, which wasn't going to happen to me very often.

Before the sixth form, it was getting harder to stay fit, it was becoming a sport for those who meant it more seriously and I managed to drift away but the summers meant one term of athletics on the track. I had declined the opportunity to be twelfth man in the first cricket match our year had had in favour of the Gloucester City Cycling Club's junior club run which consigned me to a role of maverick outsider in school cricket henceforth but gave me a free choice of what running events to do for my 'house' team because they were short of athletic talent. We needed to scrape as many points as we could wherever we saw fit. I was always going to be an each way chance in the 100 metres and so always did that but a brainwave in the fourth form decided me to go for the two laps of the 800 metres on the grounds that the sprinters had everything up to 400m covered and the stars of cross country won the 1500m upwards but there was a gap in the market so I won that by half the home straight and even tried to suggest, somewhere during this new-found domain, that I might have set a new school record. I don't know what made me think that but I was waved away without much consideration. First place there had taken me to the Gloucester trials in which there was hardly any opposition at all and so I went to somewhere in Bristol one hot, summer Saturday to wait all afternoon for the 800m in the county trials, having to borrow a pair of somebody else's spikes to run on a gravel track I'd not seen the like of before. From the off, I was run off my feet to hold fifth place in a tightly-packed bunch, could never have got any further forward because I was flat out all the way round and that was something like where I finished, never having had a glimpse of the front. And so I do very much know what it's like for a 33/1 shot that is sent to Fontwell for a novice hurdle and is inevitably an 'also-ran'.

In the meantime, year-in, year out, I ran the first leg of the 4 x 100m relay, benefitting from not having the responsibility of grabbing the baton but supposedly getting us off to a good start. Thus, I had an annual assignation round the first bend with Phil who ran the second leg but by the time it got to Andy who was the anchor, he'd have needed to be Valery Borzov to overhaul the leaders and I don't think we ever troubled the judge. 

I returned to defend the 800m title in the fifth form, fondly imagining myself thus favourite, but the emergence of the newly-sculpted physique of a grand rugbyman who for all I knew had been valued for his weight rather than his speed made me wonder. I didn't know he'd been spending time at Gloucester Athletic Club turning himself into a lump of dedicated muscle. He set off at a blistering pace that I could only follow in the unlikely hope that he'd gone off too quick but, of course, he knew what he was doing. I briefly lost second place going round the second last bend but I wasn't having that. I like to think I was gaining on the winner at the finish but he'd gone by then. It was fair enough. He'd put in a lot of work whereas I had thought turning up might be enough. And that was pretty much that as far as running was concerned, certainly the fitness it had provided had helped with the football but I wasn't really made to be an out-and-out runner.

I did 'run the world' a couple of times for Bob Geldof, not collecting sponsorship but paying my pound to do so on two laps of course based on Portsmouth's Mountbatten Centre, both as last minute decisions, one of them the day after drinking Guinness all evening with my mate in Gosport. You need some sort of target or else sport is, literally, meaningless so I saw a girl dressed as a waitress and decided I had to finish in front of her and did.

But in 1995, fit for long-distance cycling, I happened to be in Gloucestershire for the weekend, at my parents', for the Fairford Festival, which included a Fun Run which, for those who wanted it to be, was a race. It was 3k. The medal has been hanging on the back of my bedroom door for as much as twenty years so I knew where to find it.

As usual, I finished behind those who took it seriously but ahead of those who were 'just taking part', which is where my position in sport has always been. I finished 10th out of 130-odd but much of the big percentage of those behind me were families of four with little kids so the high placing flatters me more than somewhat.

I thought I'd have a go, turned up and thought I'd jog round for a laugh but, once in sport, one can't help but want to try. Lined up for the start, it didn't matter to me until the last moment when I suddenly became competitive and I found a place on the front row on the far left.

Not having studied the course, I didn't know that after proceeding down the High Street, we would turn sharp right so I lost several yards when everybody else did that but I stayed with it, established a position and, very unfamiliarly, ran rather than pushed the gears round. I was soon well behind those who had turned up with the intention of winning the race but ahead of those who presumably hadn't. I walked a bit near the Sports Centre so that I could at least put in an effort at the finish. I was vaguely aware of a bloke some way behind me and knew I had to beat him so calculated when I should recommence the running.

It wasn't pretty. I knew he was coming. I didn't actually know it was a Top 10 place that was up for grabs, that I had it and he was determined to nab it off me. I had to put it all in, as desperate, all out and concentrated as any of those sprint races in school - he was right on my shoulder, he was almost alongside- we went into the finishing funnel and I was still a short head in front. I don't think he was quite desperate enough to shove me out of the way but I did enough to let him know I was there.

10th, Top 10, is so much better than 11th.

 

Running was hard work with few of the compensations of long-distance cycling. I can't now imagine why I did it. But I seem to remember it with some enjoyment so it can't have been all bad.

If the opportunity arises (which is when I can't think of anything else to write about), we'll maybe do Chess next.