Running Like a Girl

Part One

1 Not Born to Run

2 Learning to Run

3 Wicking Fabric and How to Style It Out

4 We Are Family

5 Injury

6 The London Marathon

7 The London Marathon. Again

8 A Runner for Life?

9 Runner's High

10 The Right to Run

11 The Finish Line

Part Two

12 Head over Heels

13 Getting Your Kicks

14 Get Involved

15 The Perfect Running Style

16 The Big One: Everything You Wanted to Know About a Marathon but Were Too Afraid to Ask

17 The Magical Secret

Acknowledgments

About Alexandra Heminsley

For my father, who taught me to put one foot in front of the other.

For my brother, who has kept me going more times than he can imagine.

And for David, who brought me sunshine.

It's the most natural thing in the world.

We were born to run.

You just put on your shoes and head out the door, that's the beauty of it.

It's just you, the road and your thoughts.

These are the things that people say about running. These are lies.

Running is awful. It feels unnatural, unnecessary, painful. It can hijack you with breathlessness, cripple you with panic, and overwhelm you with self-consciousness. It isn't a warm fire or a deep sofa or a cup of tea and a smile. It is cold and hard and unforgiving.

It is also the pleasure of being outside on a sunny day, feeling the prickle of the sun on your skin. It is the delight of feeling your body temperature rise despite the crisp winter breeze against your face. It is feeling blood rush around every part of your body and coming home to a welcoming bath and a delicious curry, your skin still glowing an hour later.

And, as I have learned, it is an honor, a privilege, and a gift.

Before I get to the “gift” part, I want to tell you about the hard beginning. When I began, I too was repulsed and intimidated by the beatific smiles and radiant smugness of the determinedly Sporty Types. For years, running seemed a punishment—yet another way we were being told to keep off the pounds, to feel
the burn, to pay for that half glass of white wine and square of chocolate. God forbid we might have a body that was less than beach-ready!

It wasn't always this way. I could remember how everything just felt more fun and free when I ran as a child. Now that I was a woman in my thirties, who'd spent several years forgetting supper on a Friday in place of a night out, there didn't seem much to encourage me.

So, this book is the one I didn't have but would have liked to read before I went on my first (disastrous) run. Something for those people who think they can't run, for whatever reason. For the women who think they aren't slim enough to wear running tights or that it's not worth it if they don't want to complete an entire marathon, for the women who think that running around in circles is an idiotic way to spend the best part of an hour. For those women who don't trust yet that it really is a source of immeasurable pleasure, self-belief, and unexpected companionship, rather than a necessary purgatory—that they might, just might, enjoy the confidence, the physical ease, or the mental clarity that running brings.

Because it was in running that I found all that and more.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

—Robert F. Kennedy

I
don't remember making the decision that I couldn't run; it was simply one of those things that made me
me,
like my love of cheese or my distaste for men in turtlenecks.

My certainty that I couldn't run was absolute, my envy profound of those who could, and my admiration for my flatmate boundless. She would appear at the front door, glowing from one of her regular routes around Regent's Park or Hampstead Heath, and I would welcome her enthusiastically. We'd chat about what she'd seen, while she leaned at the kitchen counter sipping a glass of water and I sat on the sofa with my laptop propped on my knees like a windy baby.

“I wish I could run.” There is a certain comfort in saying it aloud. “It looks like so much fun,” I'd say, sighing, as she took off her running shoes. I felt a twinge of sadness, knowing that it was too late for me to start. I would reach for the TV remote with resignation.

As I watched my flatmate's running clothes circulating hypnotically in the washing machine, I never questioned the casual lunacy of my conviction that I couldn't run. I remember being six or seven and running being what I could barely wait to do during break time at school. And I remember being thirty, having total confidence that running was utterly beyond me. The change had been cumulative, something that I let happen to me, a state of affairs I succumbed to without question.

Somehow I had forgotten the itch in my legs when I was in school, looking up at the clock, back at the teacher, and out of the window. Soon. Then, the very second the bell rang, we would grab our coats and head outside to play whatever game we could think of, as long as it meant running around. We didn't call it running at that age, because running was how we did everything, mittens trailing from our sleeves and braids whipping at our cheeks. We were just children doing our thing. We ran and we laughed. They were one and the same.

As a ten-year-old, I stood daydreaming at the start of the four-hundred-meter circuit. In the warmth of summer, I watched the sun shine through the pinprick holes in my navy blue shirt, noticing how it browned both my arms and the grass of the track. I would merrily run round it for as long as I could, sometimes straight across the middle if I fancied a change, until we were called back to lessons or until someone else needed the track.

Twenty years later, it was as if I had never run. It didn't occur to me that I could. I wasn't a runner, and that was that. Somehow I had lost sight of the fact that not being a runner and being unable to run were not one and the same.

I wasn't the sporty type. It was as simple as that. I was a curvy girl with little or no competitive spirit. I rarely made a
connection between bat and ball during games at school, and I neglected my body almost entirely for three years at university. Perhaps I broke into a run that time I was pushing my friend Clare down Cotham Hill in a shopping cart, and I know I danced on a podium a few times, but those were definitely the sum of my collegiate athletic endeavors.

Then I moved to London and joined the eternal treadmill of private gym membership. Each time I looked round a new venue, I told myself that this would be the one. This would be the gym that would make me fall in love with exercise. They never did. Once the oleaginous buzz of viewing the facilities, being given my workout profile, and trying the steam room for the first time was over, the magic faded and I returned to fleeting, guilty glimpses at my bank statement as I realized each visit was costing me more and more.

Back then I didn't know that the gym was just sticky methadone to the heroin of running outdoors. How could pounding along on the treadmill, going nowhere in front of a wall of relentless rolling news, compare to the freedom of running along the seafront, looking up at a hovering seagull and finding yourselves neck and neck for a moment? Still I continued. Next came the (Madonna-influenced) yoga phase. Relaxing, but only as relaxing as it could ever be to race across the city and part with more money than I'd spend on three weeknight dinners for the sake of ninety minutes bending and sweating in front of myriad freelance Web designers and stressed-out fashion editors. Then came Pilates and even a flirtation with meditation.

Finally, after a summer of heartache followed by almost crippling depression, came the walking phase. After a hectic routine of lying under my coffee table weeping, I had reached a point where I had to get outside and see daylight. I wanted
to feel the breath of warm air on my skin; I yearned to feel my blood circulate round my body again, and I needed to do it with a view that was not just that of a ceiling tile or a yogi's tatty three-week-old pedicure. Half-deranged by weeks of erratic sleeping—nights spent enervated and panicky followed by sluggish, heavy-limbed days—I decided in desperation that physically exhausting myself might make the nights seem a little more welcoming. I longed to long for my bed, instead of seeing it as a sleepless battleground. I yearned to yearn to lie down at the end of the day, legs aching from use rather than the anxious jiggling they did under my desk for hours on end.

Thus began my walking phase. One day I up and left the house and didn't return until nearly dusk. I began walking for hours at a time. Hampstead Heath, Regent's Park, Hyde Park. I would leave the house on a Sunday morning and not return for three or four hours. Often I could barely remember the time I had spent away, as if the repetitive quality of my strides had hypnotized me. I would begin full of fire, longing to get away from the dirty streets, the dawdling pedestrians, the local shops whose owners had seen me tearstained and bedraggled during my summer of agony and bad eating. As the parks opened up before me, I would feel my spirits lift. I would romp around the heath, deliberately getting lost in a wooded area I didn't recognize. I would stroll through rose gardens, wondering about the stories behind the blooms' names. A tiny part of me I thought I had lost started to wriggle back to the surface.

I arrived home from my walks exhausted but noticeably lighter of spirit. My head felt as if someone had popped in and run a duster around it. I formed a truce with my bed. I cherished my time off the grid, uncontactable and alone. The coils that had spent endless nights tightening in my mind loosened
a little; my imagination wandered toward the positive rather than the self-focused disaster-movie scenarios it had devoted itself to. I remain convinced that those walks in the summer of 2006 saved me. Not just because they restored my ability to sleep but because they delivered me that first germ of physical confidence. If I could walk for four hours, what might happen if I sped up . . . and then sped up even more? My heart had begun to believe that anything was possible. I had even let myself entertain the notion that maybe, just maybe, I was capable of going for a run.

It was this expansive spirit of optimism that inspired my first run to Queen's Park a year later. If my heart could survive the pummeling it had taken, my legs must have more to give. I'd been taking three-hour walks regularly for about a year, so I figured I
might
be ready for a run.