From McDonald's to Marathons
Growing up unfit, and unencouraged, I never knew I was a runner.
In the “about” section of Wordsmith I dare to call myself “an author, musician, traveler, and runner” and I state that this page offers my musings on writing, music, travel, and falling over. Running is a large part of my life, falling over an unfortunate occasional consequence of it, and I have thought for a while about writing a “Why I Run” article as hopeful inspiration for others, but I’m not sure I have anything new to say on that subject that you can’t read, better, elsewhere. Ditto, I could write about coming back from my fractured knee this year, or I could offer reports on these three ultras I somehow completed in just the last three months, but those would sound vainglorious.
So for this weekend’s long article, in an act of encouragement to everyone else out there to (continue to) exercise physically, whatever that activity may be, and as a mental exercise for myself in memoir writing, I am going to write about how I never knew I was a runner. Because I didn’t. Not until middle age. Inevitably, what I have written has only brought me half-way there - which may explain why I am, increasingly these days, a long (and ultra) distance runner. Evidently, I don’t know when to stop. Part 2 will follow. (It finally has done. It is here.)
Until I actually became one, I never knew I was a runner.
In this, I suspect, I am far from alone. My story of mid-life self-discovery, of ‘finding’ something recreational that I enjoy, that keeps me healthy and happy and which, as much to the point, I might actually be quite good at, is uniquely personal. But the general concept - that an ability of some sort was there all along, lurking beneath the surface, begging to be discovered - may be highly familiar to others.
Me, I’m a child of the 1970s, a decade in which my home nation, comically known to the rest of the world as ‘Great’ Britain, or even more amusingly, as the ‘United’ Kingdom’, fell apart. It was a decade that began with the break-up of The Beatles and ended with the election of Margaret Thatcher, and in-between those epochal events it featured union strikes, the three-day week, power cuts, IRA bombing campaigns, and the worrying rise of the racist right wing. Health and happiness just may have been the name of a nudie ‘naturist’ mag, but it certainly wasn’t an everyday slogan. On television, the soap operas were largely set in pubs, and the characters smoked (and drank) openly - as they did on talk shows too. The glam rock stars of the early 1970s carried their beer guts with pride; the punk rock anti-stars of the late 1970s spat out their beer with equal glee; and during the brief lull in-between, the landed gentry and the newly dispersed tax exiles of the former 1960s rock generation, so it seemed to those of us on the other side, snorted cocaine, popped quaaludes, drank brandy, and injected heroin, not all of them all at once unless their name was Keith Richards.
On our side of the divide, taking up cigarettes was a rite of passage; I started at age 11 (though not seriously until, oh, about 15). Meanwhile, on the corners of the terraces, in the back of cars, and more openly in the parks, teenagers and young adults smoked “hash,” laced with unfiltered tobacco. Hitting the pub for a few pints was a nightly ritual from one’s mid-teens onwards; the pub landlords didn’t card, because no one had cards and the landlords wanted the money and besides, everyone did it. Under all these circumstances and given the dubious role models, staying physically fit was not exactly at the top of most people’s priority lists.
Those who see me now often think I was born this way: vegan, thin, in shape, a life-long long-distance runner. I was anything but.
Nor was there much to encourage it at school. Gym teachers were almost uniformly sadistic, and physical education therefore to be evaded. Besides, city schools did not have playing fields. Nor, for that matter, did most of the housing estates, their isolated green spaces posted with the requisite degrading signage, ‘No ball games allowed’. And only someone who could fight their way out of the inevitable confrontations would risk playing in a public park. Sport, therefore, was best left to the professionals, who themselves seemed to be poster boys for bad behavior: footballers smoked and drank like the rest of us, enjoyed a good punch-up on the pitch and were generally presumed to be shagging each other’s wives, and not necessarily behind each other’s backs either.
On the home front, my dad at least laid claims to fitness. He always liked to climb. After John Noakes scaled the Crystal Palace tower (the telecom mast on top of South London) for the TV show Blue Peter, my father applied for permission to do the same thing, so I was told by my mother. He was turned down, so she said. He left home soon after – I don’t believe the two events were connected - and I didn’t miss him. Nor, in hindsight, his pipe, the relentless smoking of which, through the first four decades of his life, probably explained the cancer of the esophagus that took it at the end of his sixth decade.
My mother and a healthy lifestyle were never on good speaking terms, meaning that her involvement with sports was limited to watching football from the director’s box at Crystal Palace (she majored in Friends In High Places) or else in front of a television, preferably with a gin and tonic in hand – and easy on the tonic. As for food, she hailed from the Shetlands, where cuisine was not part of the lexicon, especially not in those wartime years of rationing during which she had spent her early child and on which she looked back so fondly.
The London that became her adult home must have seemed almost impossibly cosmopolitan, and deliciously decadent, by comparison, what with the teasing lunchtime pint at work (which was a school, but as with the kids, all the teachers did it), the fondue parties at home, and the arrival of the Iceland chain and with it the acquisition of a freezer and convenient reliance on the frozen meal. She was a good cook by the standards of the time, but dinner was, all the same, mostly meat (balls) and potatoes, spaghetti Bolognese or an impressive lasagna, and occasional slabs of fish served in various shapes and breaded form; mum may have hailed from an island where fresh fish was the primary currency, but she’d never learned to cook one – and even the poached salmon that her former teaching college friend brought down from Berwick on rare visits (meaning that it was acquired, illegally, through a poacher) was otherwise eaten simple, smoked.
I developed an early taste for chicken skin and for the fat off the lamb chops; not surprisingly I also developed a decent tummy, though much of that was, ironically, accumulated the summer of 1974 I spent in Canada visiting my distant expat father, during which my brother and I were given free rein of the hamburgers, Pepsi and ice cream that were as pervasive on the North American continent as they ran scarce in the UK – the occasional ’99 or soft scoop on a beach holiday being the exception.
A certain hankering for exotica was evinced by plates full of whitebait, eaten whole as I remember, crunching down hard on the eyes; there was also the Christmas holiday where one of those Friends in High Places returned from visiting the Shah of Iran with so much free caviar that we were gifted full tins of it and ended up having it on toast before school on the cold January mornings that followed.
Such rare luxuries aside, peanut butter and jam sandwiches constituted a healthy snack, and crisps and peanuts a requisite cocktail accompaniment even before I began joining my mother in an alcoholic aperitif, which I was invited to do long before I turned 18. Meals out were limited to the pricey Dulwich Steak House (usually at someone else’s expense, a male suitor most typically) or Il Carretto in Streatham, where the dishes were closer to my mother’s budget and likely to come laden in cream sauce, vodka sauce or perhaps even both; there were occasional journeys into Leicester Square to join my mother’s brother and his beautiful wife, chain-smokers both, who lived on the opposite side of suburban London from us and owned neither a phone nor a car, for feasts of pasta (for all of us) and cheap red wine (for them) at the inexpensive Spaghetti House. But other than a near-annual treat to the Hard Rock Café off of Hyde Park, I genuinely can’t think of another place we ate out at in London.
Once I acquired an office in West Kensington, lunches were typically taken at the pub, with white-bread sandwiches to slow down the pints, until my friend Pedro suggested that the local café would be a healthier option, and I agreed, especially once I discovered that it served wonderful curry, chicken, rice, and chips (meaning French fries, my Yankee brethren) – all on the same plate. Evening meals during those years was often limited to a Mars, Twix or Marathon bar mid-evening, some crisps at the pub, and then a frantic queue at a chip shop before the last bus, so as to stock up on starch and meat, the latter in the form of a saveloy or sausage or, once I had a few more spare coins in my pocket, a doner kebab. Eventually, McDonald’s opened in London and burgers became affordable, and though the Big Macs never quite sated my taste buds, there were few better ways of abating a morning-after-the-five-pints-and-a-doner-kebab-the night-before than with artery-clogging milkshakes.
It was then, if you’ll pardon the obvious understatement, not exactly a healthy upbringing. And it’s important to say as much, because those who see me now often think I was born this way: vegan, thin, in shape, a life-long long-distance runner. I was anything but. And yet, through all of this, and despite all of this, there were glimpses of someone else in there. Consider the evidence:
1) The caravan on the South Devon coast, our home-away-from-home during school holidays. There, after a certain point of familiarization, I took daily walks, through the woods, on my own, down to the village to pick up breakfast items from the bakery, the farm, and the post office; none of us thought twice of it at the time. But though that also points to a future me, the day that clings to mind out of so many others was set before that, in the small, largely unoccupied field where we were first allowed to place the caravan. I was maybe ten years old, and that morning I decided that there was nothing I wanted to do more than run around the field, continually, for as long as my legs would allow. I can see myself now, even after all these years, circling it relentlessly, and relentlessly content. Looking down on me now, from somewhere above as the memory banks allow, I am not tired, and I don’t have a reason to stop running. Presumably I must have done so at some point or I’d still be out there. Maybe food called. Or an outing. But at the time, there seemed no better use of that time. Running seemed the most natural exercise in the world – because, of course, it is.
2) The school trip to Guernsey, a year or so later, a reward of sorts for our years at a primary school that had been a reward in itself. Our school football team was invited to play a local Channel Islands school football team, and I was not selected. I knew as much in advance - I never fitted in with the sporty kids, not even in primary school, where I got on with them in every other regard - and I wasn’t offended. And so I spent the entire match running up and down the touchline, shouting encouragement instead. And I know this one is not a false memory because decades down the line, I reunited with the teacher who oversaw that trip, who was also our form teacher, and he recounted, unprompted, that very afternoon just as I remembered it. My running that day could have been down to the boundless energy of childhood rather than any signal of athleticism, but I was the only one on the sidelines doing it, and I suspect I covered more ground than the players, even if at the time I was carrying more weight than them. There was, evidently, something there.
3) Running for the bus. I attended secondary school at Kennington Oval. It was several miles from home but that was not meant to be an issue, given that the Number 3 bus went from the end of my main road almost to the school’s doorstep. Unfortunately, that Number 3 bus was notoriously unreliable – let’s face it, in 1970s London, all public transport was unreliable – and it was not uncommon to be kept waiting thirty minutes between buses, even in the morning rush hour. I learned then, upon turning the corner at the end of my road, to be mentally poised, like a sprinter on the starting blocks, and that should I see a bus coming down Dulwich Wood Park, or should it be at the Gypsy Hill roundabout bus stop already, and even should it be pulling away by now, I was ready to leap from those metaphorical blocks, across the zebra crossing, and if need be, alongside the traffic to jump on board the bus – and as these were the old-fashioned Routemasters, with their easy rear access, I was successful more often than not.
In time, this skill would extend to buses all over London. If a bus overtook me while I was walking to the stop, I would race it, figuring there were usually enough people waiting ahead to give me time to catch up. (Bus conductors took a perverse delight in signaling the driver to set off just as you got close, which gave me extra incentive to make it on board regardless.) Similarly, if I saw “my” bus poised up ahead at a red traffic light, I’d quickly calculate distance, time, and based on a variety of other factors – number of vehicles at the light, my familiarity with the junction’s traffic system – would instantly decide whether to sprint for it. More often than not, I made it, if not before the light turned green then at least before the bus pulled ahead of that green light.
Gradually and in turn, this skill at sprinting for all buses extended to the tube, where I learned to recognize the wind whipping up the down escalator as the signal for an incoming train, and took to leaping two stairs at a go. Likewise, for late-night connections, a sprint through the maze of tunnels could make all the difference between a last bus back to my home, versus a night bus to Streatham and a long walk back home. Yet throughout these years, it never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than running for the bus, running for the tube, running for the train. It never occurred to me that I was running because I could.
4) Running from a fight. This was a useful skill to have if you didn’t possess the more impressive attribute of knowing how to take a punch and throw a harder one, and it came in especially good use at the football - especially inside the ground, where throughout the 1970s and 80s, rival crews would size each other up, call each other out with a few well-chosen insults, then almost inevitably launch mob attacks on each other. Officially, none of this was meant to happen - opposing fans were nominally segregated on different terraces - but I had been adopted by older lads, upper middle-class trouble-seekers and hooligans all, who took take great delight in infiltrating the home end at away grounds and bringing me along with them; knowing how to outrun the almost certain charge against us once we were recognized for being unfamiliar was not much less than a matter of life or death - and as I’m still alive to tell the tale with no razor scars or broken bones as souvenirs, I have to figure my cowardice came in useful.
5) Running for Games. This is the one that gets me. As noted earlier, we didn’t have a playing field at school, not in the heart of South-Central London. But during certain amenable seasons, for PE, we did take a train to a shared schools field in Motspur Park for the afternoon, where teams would self-select for football, rugby or cricket and I’d either be left on the sidelines as an unwanted substitute, or thrown out in the least active part of the field. (I was still not a sporty kid and now not a particularly popular one either.) Later in my school life, I simply stopped attending, and the PE teacher seemed all the more grateful for that and I was never reported. But somewhere in-between, we did cross country.
I don’t remember doing it often and I have no idea of the distance; I suspect it was but a couple of miles. What I do recall is the one day I ran long and hard, figuring that the sooner we got it over with the better, and I was surprised by how well I performed because it had never occurred to me that I might be any good at this. And if I didn’t know instinctively that I was running better than expected, our PE teacher, positioned at a turn as we came through the woods, close to the finish line, called me out by name, exhorting me to push harder. I don’t remember in what place I finished, but it would likely have seemed mighty impressive for someone who’d otherwise shown a conscious aversion to sporting participation.
And yet here’s the thing that stuck with me about that day, and about all these youthful years in general. No one ever took me aside to remark on my potential. Nobody, not even that PE teacher, sought to say, “You know what, Fletcher, you may be a natural runner, you may actually have something here.” Such encouragement was thin on the ground in general in those days of wasted education, and it’s possible that, given my inclination to rebellion, I might have ignored any entreaties anyway. As it turned out, I never voluntarily entered a race until my mid-twenties, by which time I had started another life several thousand miles away.
Towards the end of my teens, however, while still in London, I formed a football team. It was about the only way I could guarantee myself any game time. By now I had acquired the nickname “Flumpy” from my Apocalypse band-mates (or/and their girlfriends) for my general blob-like physique, but I was achieving some good shit and acquired the confidence that came with it. We entered ourselves into the Musical Associations League, and though we weren’t very good, the possibility of playing against members of The Sex Pistols, Madness, Spandau Ballet, The Alarm and, oddly enough, the Radio 1 DJ Peter Powell, at least ensured a full turn-out each week. Plus, we had fun, and again, I learned not only that I could run but that I didn’t mind doing so.
This knowledge came in handy once I upped and moved to New York City in the late 1980s, immediately asked around for a football team made up of expats, found it my first weekend – in the East River Park, just a few hundred yards from my one-room rental on the corner of East Broadway and Grand - and with it met my permanent peeps and some of my closest friends throughout those halcyon years.
This team wasn’t bad, and amidst a revolving door of players who worked the legal and black-market nightclubs and occasionally showed up for Sunday morning matches straight from a shift and illicitly wide-eyed, I was able to claim and hold a place. I didn’t have the selfishness, courage and skill to score many goals; nor did I have the brute physicality required for solid defense. What I did have was the ability to run longer and harder than the others both on my team and - often enough, the opposing team too. I found myself stationed to midfield, out on the flanks, a position that required sprinting up the pitch to provide support and back down the pitch to provide cover. I liked it. I didn’t mind chasing the ball - or, as often as not, the player with the ball.
There was a brief point where we pretended to get serious with our fitness and ran round the East River Park’s fenced-in football pitch for fifteen or twenty minutes as a warm-up. That first time we tried it, one by one the rest of the team dropped away. I did not. It was duly noted by our self-appointed captain, who was monitoring proceedings from the sidelines a little like that PE teacher of old. And yet, even there and then, in the midst of the evidence, still it did not occur to me that I was a runner. Only that I was a modestly competent footballer who enjoyed participating enough to keep running.
And so that’s what I would do: I would run like crazy throughout these ninety-minute matches, and at the end of it I’d join my fellow expats at Sophie’s bar on Fifth Street between Avenues A and B, where we would drink ourselves pretty much under the table on $2 Rolling Rocks, with the occasional round thrown in by the bartender for free, because it was the East Village and it was back then and it was how you lived and it was the halcyon days. Monday mornings I’d wake up with legs that felt like tree trunks, and which moved no less laboriously. I considered that inability to walk the price to pay for the previous afternoon’s exertions, and I sported the pain as a badge of hono(u)r, just as I carried the hangover around as an unconscious reminder that beer alone was not the most effective rehydration fuel. The important thing was that I had learned that I could run. I just hadn’t yet learned that I was already a runner.
That was about to change.
Above: some episodes that concern or cover running, from my podcast One Step Beyond, in an approximate order of progression. The important takeaway from all of these remains that anyone can do it: something physical, recreational, and fun.