Running Like a Girl (9 page)

“Okay, have you ever been in a traffic accident?” she persisted.

“Really, no, I have never been in a car crash,” I replied, as frustration at her surety bubbled up in me.

As my mouth formed that final “sh,” the realization hit me with a crash of its own: Four years previously, I had been knocked off my Vespa on Kilburn High Road by an SUV when it turned right without looking and drove straight into me. Sure, I had never been in a car crash. That was because I had been on a scooter. And then in the air.

As I watched the tape replay again and again, every bit of pain I had felt for the last four years made sense. Josie slowed down the footage and showed me my running gait in motion, complete with all of its attendant weaknesses. At the time of the
accident, I had been checked over and told that, aside from a few ripped muscles, I had sustained no serious injuries. Back then I wasn't a runner. What was more than evident as I watched myself run on the treadmill, the little dots rising and falling in irregular patterns, was that I had been injured after all. My pelvis was not in the correct place; it had been knocked around by the impact of that huge vehicle. Consequently, my body had adapted around the injury, growing weaker and stronger in equal measure.

My running training had made me stronger, but not symmetrically so. I had started to develop something of an imbalanced Frankenstein's monster of a body. The front of one thigh was strong with a weak hamstring behind it. The reverse was true of the other leg, which was slightly farther forward than its partner on account of my misaligned pelvis. The pattern was repeating itself across my entire body, until my front hip flexor was no longer able to pull my leg forward without excruciating pain. All because one woman in a Chelsea Tractor could not be bothered to check her side mirrors four years ago.

I sat on the edge of Josie's consulting couch, watching my marathon dream fade to tatters. I swallowed time and again, desperate not to cry in front of someone I had just met. What was to be done? Could I run again? Or were all of those people who had claimed that running would “destroy your legs” correct after all?

Josie calmly talked me through what I had to do and how we were going to get it sorted. Part of me had been hoping for something high-tech, a properly medical problem that could be remedied with a prescription. The reality was much the same as most of my running journey: Hard work was required. She told me immediately that I could not run for at least a month,
until I had done exercises every day to strengthen and rebalance the muscle groups working so hard against each other. I began a daily regimen of painstaking Pilates-like movements—often while tied to a door handle or the back of a chair with stretchy physio banding to get the necessary resistance. Slowly, over the next few weeks, I managed to right myself. Though it was too late for me to be perfect in time for the marathon, the dream was not over. I submitted to whatever Josie instructed me, secretly impressed that I had endured the pain as long as I had.

It wasn't the pain or the tedium of the exercises that proved to be the worst part of the experience. It was not being able to run. Under Josie's instruction, I joined my local gym for a month so that I could keep my fitness up on other machines. Anything but running. What so recently had been an activity that filled me with sheer dread was now what I longed to do more than anything else. I felt caged in the gym.

I would wake having dreamed of running, and in my waking hours, I fretted endlessly about what would happen the next time I attempted a run. The idea that I once was anxious about buying a pair of socks seemed ludicrous compared to my fears about giving up running for good. Having gone from viewing my body as a tedious accessory to something genuinely useful, I now saw it as a great treasure. For six weeks I followed Josie's orders; I shunned high heels; I prayed for the best.

With running injuries, it is often the case that you don't know how recovered you are until you undertake a long run. Though you have to be prepared to fail, you can't let yourself consider that tiny window of possibility. As in a grim game of chicken, I vacillated between wanting as many people as possible to know about the injury and keeping it a secret so it couldn't take hold and gain power over me.

As marathon day grew closer, I began some tentative recovery runs. Amazingly, the pain had gone. It looked as if I would be on the starting blocks after all. I never managed to catch up with my original training plan, but I did what I could within the limited time frame. I got through March, thanks to Josie, late nights spent chatting on the London Marathon website, and a steady stream of texts, e-mails, and chats with my dad. I stretched, I fretted, I did my strengthening exercises. I watched the entire first season of
The Wire
standing with one foot tied to the bottom of a table leg. I did everything I could think of to get through, up to and including pestering everyone I knew for sponsorship, in order to drive home how much I needed to get round that course. One fact remained: The only way to find out if I was physically—or mentally—capable of finishing a marathon was to try and run a marathon.

If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon.

—Kathrine Switzer

I
could not have done more to prepare for my first London Marathon, yet I have never been less prepared for anything in my life. My mental image of the starting blocks was not dissimilar to that of an egg-and-spoon race at a school sports day: a handful of eager enthusiasts willing to give it their very best. The reality felt more like the chaos of a music festival. I was exhausted before I reached the starting line.

The day before, my parents and sister came up to London to cheer me and my brother along. We all went to the local pub for a high-carb lunch. I walked delicately, worried that the slightest knock could damage my chances of reaching the finish line with a misplaced bruise or sprain. I did not eat delicately; I polished off a bowl of seafood pasta as if it were my death-row meal. Then my sister ordered us shots of sambuca, convincing us that it would wear off long before bedtime.

Before I went to bed, I checked my sports bag, all packed for the next morning, and laid out my running gear next to it. When bedtime arrived, I found myself wishing for more sambuca. I had never been more awake. Perhaps it was nerves, perhaps it was my body swimming in carbohydrates. Either way, I slept lightly, lying awkwardly in a variety of positions that I thought would rest my muscles as much as possible, while a million worst-case scenarios painted my mind in Technicolor.

Within seconds of my alarm sounding, I was whipping up scrambled eggs with a speed and focus that would have made my military father proud. I swallowed them grimly, still full from the day before. Their relentless rubberiness reminded me of school food: necessary nutrition and nothing more. I dressed, checked my bag another six or seven times, and sat on the very edge of the sofa, waiting for the taxi. Twenty minutes later, I was approaching Charing Cross station to meet my brother. His training had gone more smoothly, but he was just as nervous as I was. We had shared late-night anxieties, bizarre and hitherto unfamiliar food cravings, and endless tips, and he had provided a steadfast level of support since day one. I could barely wait to see him.

I had imagined he'd be easy to spot, a lone nerdy runner in a swarm of London day-trippers and homeward-bound nightclubbers. The reality made me draw breath. The
only
passengers at Charing Cross were runners, a sea of tense, solitary figures in wicking fabric. Eventually his face appeared in the swarm. There was barely space for us all on the trains heading toward Greenwich, and we shuffled onto the carriages in eerie silence. I assumed everyone else was an old-timer, destined for an impressive three-hour finish time and a quick fry-up before heading home. I know better now: That silence was a result of
us all thinking the same thing. Everyone was nervous, whatever their fitness or experience.

We poured out of the station at Blackheath and began the fifteen-minute walk across the grass. The weather reports had been mixed all week, predicting everything from rain and wind to sun and unicorns. As we headed through southeast London, the air was crisp and clear. I imagined I had joined a cult that met in a secret London. We were marching to some sort of promised land, searching for answers from a leader we had yet to meet. It was an hour before the official start time; what would we do until then? What else did this strange pilgrimage hold for us? The answer, it turned out, was Porta-Potties.

My brother and I made two stops, thoughts of roadside peeing looming larger in our terrified minds. On entering and exiting, we avoided eye contact with the other runners, kindred pilgrims complicit in the same fleeting madness.

When we reached the starting-line area, the atmosphere became more like that of a carnival or feast day than the earlier reverence. Thick black speakers belted out relentless motivational music. A cheesy DJ read dedications and good-luck messages. A gospel choir would not have surprised me. Half an hour later, I spotted one.

It was an enormous spectacle, and we were irredeemably a part of it. Numbed by the volume of activity around me, I handed over my bag with barely a second thought.

Relieved not to have missed any trains or broken any legs en route, my brother and I became almost hysterical, the mood of the crowd sweeping us up in nervous anticipation. Nibbling on crackers and bananas, we joined the hordes of runners leaning against trees doing last-minute stretches, and took silly photos of each other in our running vests. Maybe it would be fun
after all, we started to tell each other, glancing around. Everyone seemed to be okay. I relaxed into the idea of spending the day in Greenwich Park, getting to know my new friends, my fellow pilgrims. Then, suddenly, we were called to the starting enclosures. Just as suddenly, I desperately wanted to go home.

Runners at the London Marathon line up by expected finish times. The fastest runners leave first so they don't get trapped behind the rest of us—the nervous, the slow, and the becostumed. I was divided into a pen based on my anticipated time, as predicted six months earlier on the application. The me who had filled in that form now seemed as foreign as the professional athletes warming up for the BBC cameras. I'd had no idea what I might be capable of; the prospect of finishing had filled me with wide-eyed wonder. Consequently, I had no recollection of what I had stated as my predicted time back in October, and it was only when we collected our race numbers that I discovered I'd gone for the slowest time possible. My brother, who had done some basic research, had not. He was due in a pen two hundred meters away. He turned and grinned at me. “Good luck!” he said, stretching his arms out for a hug and doing his best to mask his own nerves. “You'll probably win!”

My baby brother, heading off without me. My bottom lip wobbled. “Have an amazing time,” I replied, trying not to look flustered by the huge number of runners flocking toward the starting enclosures. “See you at the end—and text me when you've finished!”

I walked toward my pen, which seemed to be populated by the elderly and people dressed as cartoon characters. My cheeks burned with shame as I realized that my low expectations for myself had labeled me as one of this lot. I looked around and smiled, hoping for a similarly aged face that might take pity
on me and smile back. Everyone else seemed to be with someone, bonding over something. The crowd packed in around me, emphasizing the aching loneliness that washed over me. I felt something like the homesickness that I had felt as an eight-year-old at boarding school for the first time. The thought of the run no longer bothered me. But the thought of doing it alone, with nothing but my thoughts for the next few hours, flooded me with anxiety.

Another problem I had never even considered was creeping up on me—my fear of crowds. I have never been to a music festival; I avoid big sales at the mall; and I skulk around at the beginnings and ends of big sporting events until almost everyone has left. I have jumped fences in Hyde Park and run through the trees in the dark to avoid the drunken crowds coming out of concerts. I always, always seek to avoid my worst nightmare: being caught up in an unpredictable tsunami of humans. If possible, I will walk rather than take a packed train, or I'll wait until a crowd has passed, so horrified am I of being moved by a mass of bodies in a direction I can't control.

I looked around the pens, occasionally bouncing on tiptoes to check on the river of people ahead, and saw that this was exactly where I was. Six months of training, most of them entirely alone, for this: the biggest crowd I had ever been part of. As I had pounded my local pavements alone, run across ox droves and through grassy valleys circling my parents' home, and around the lanes of Tobago on holiday, I had never considered the glaringly obvious fact that on the day there would be other runners alongside me. How had I not thought of that? How would I find my place among the bodies? How would I deal with the relentless lava flow of runners?

My heart hammered in my chest, and I stared down at my
shoes, hoping to contain the rising panic. The feet around me began their slow shuffle toward the start line. I looked up; the red start banner was so far away that we could barely see it. We moved forward, the chatter rising and falling, people wishing one another good luck. The pace quickened as we turned the corner and suddenly saw the arch, with its familiar clock sitting above it. The crowd began to jog, slowly, apprehensively, at first. And then a real run as we crossed the mats that triggered the timer chips tied to our shoes. People around me cheered and whooped as they set off. I let out a nervous, fluttering laugh. I was running a marathon.

Five minutes into the first mile, the crowd had eased into a steady pace. I was able to overtake a few slow joggers. We were heading through Greenwich, streets of smart residential houses with families outside—many still in pajamas—wishing the runners well and cheering them along as they hugged morning cups of tea. Their smiles lifted me as my heart rate leveled out and my feet found a regular rhythm.