Running: The Autobiography (17 page)

14

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‘Tuesday, gym, Terry. Fifty minutes. Weights, top half, chest, thighs and shoulders, sit-ups, worked hard and felt strong.’

I trained hard yesterday, it was tough for me, but I felt okay this morning. It’s April 2013 and I’m just beginning to get back to fitness. Last year, after winning the World Championship, the running fell by the wayside. I was just getting back into it when I broke a bone in my foot on a run – the metatarsal, a common bone for footballers to break. When I broke the metatarsal I was gutted. I was getting fit at the time and I was running with my mate Alan. We’d had a lot of rain, it had been First World War trenches, but this was a nice sunny day. We were running through the forest, putting a few nice little efforts in, and there was a woman walking with three of her dogs – big dogs, Staffies. And I thought, fucking hell, here we go; I’ve been chased by a few dogs when I’ve been running so I slowed down and as I did I went boom! and twisted my ankle. I tried to run through it, but this time I couldn’t because it was so painful, and I knew I’d done something bad. I hobbled back to the car, went to hospital the next day and they said, you’ve broken a bone across the middle of your foot.

For three months I was on crutches, then for the next three I wasn’t in the mood for training. So I put on a bit of weight, got fat, no snooker, and cranked myself up to 13½ stone – two stone heavier than when I was at my fittest. I’d put my clothes on, they didn’t fit, and it made me feel shit.

There’s six weeks to go to the World Championship and I want to be at my best for my comeback. This means a lot to me. Now I’ve said I’m coming back I don’t want to make a show of myself.

Today I did some one-to-one training with Tracey. She’s been a big part of my life. I’ve known her since I was 15, and I really admire her because she’s one of those who walks the walk. She’s 50, looks brilliant, comes third and fourth in loads of the local races, always number one veteran. She’s a fantastic athlete, and has always been there for me. Tracey Alexandrou has been a constant in my life. For 20 years on and off she’s been training me, though only seriously for the past 10 years.

Rather than just running, I decided to train with Tracey because she does lots of core strength work. Typically we’ll meet in Hainault Forest down the road, do maybe a mile warm-up, then she’ll put four cones down and a bench, and I’ll do 20 dips, run round, 20 dips, run round, 20 dips, run round. Then it will be 20 press-ups, run round, 20 press-ups, run round. Murder. Each circuit was like a boxing round – three minutes. At the end we’d run back, but I had to walk back because my legs were burning.

‘Trace, I’m done, man, I’ve hit the wall.’

‘What d’you mean, you’ve hit the wall?’ she said.

‘I’m done, I’m slaughtered, we’ve got to stop.’

‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she said. ‘You’ve worked really hard, you’re really fit, you’ve done great today.’

She’s lovely, so supportive. If I’m not fit she won’t say it for
the sake of it. She gives me straight talk, and that’s what I like and need.

I suppose there are a lot of people in my world who don’t talk straight to me. Mum, Dad, my mate Irish Chris, Kimo, Damien, Antony, Tracey, my Scottish mate Chip, whose son is an unbelievable snooker talent (four foot nothing, 12 years old and already under-14 champion in Scotland), they all talk straight to me. But I’ve learnt over time that a lot of people have an ulterior motive. Although most of them care about me and like me, I know they are also saying things to me because it will benefit them.

That’s not people in general, just some people in the snooker world. Basically, they don’t care if I’m depressed, in pieces, so long as I’m out there playing, potting a few balls, and making them look good. It’s not nice to find that out about people. I’ve always been a bit naive, but as I head towards 40 I’m beginning to see the world for what it is.

Even people who are rooting for me, such as my manager Django, if the relationship is professional there has to be a mercenary element to it. Django has come from a tough background, a bit like my dad, where he had nothing and with him every penny and every shilling counts. Django’s done brilliant things for me and he’ll always be my mate, but when it comes to work we have different mentalities. I wish I had his ruthlessness. I love him, and he is the best cook in the world. I’ll always owe him for showing me how to cook a decent Chinese!

Django thinks I’m a soft touch. He calls me the ATM – the automated cash machine. ‘You’ve got so many people poncing off you, right left, and centre,’ he says.

‘But I don’t care, Django,’ I say.

‘You’ve got to stop it.’

‘But I can’t help it if there are vultures out there,’ I tell him.

While Django’s always had my best interest at heart, plenty are interested in nothing but the money. When I quit snooker as I’ve said I want to do a bit of media, radio, television, commentary, interviewing. But I don’t want to be controlled by some corporation, at their beck and call. What I do want – and need – is something to get me out of bed in the morning; something to occupy me. A bit of media, a few personal appearances, motivational talks and I’ll be happy. If I can do something, a social event, and somebody comes away saying they really enjoyed it, well, that will do me nicely.

The least vultury people I’ve ever met have been through running. And I’ve met lots of them. There was a period when I was picking up strangers by the day. I became a proper running tart. It was Dad’s idea really. ‘Why don’t you just treat tournaments like a training camp?’ he said.

So when I went to tournaments I’d get my friend Terry McCarthy from Woodford Green Athletics Club to get in touch with the local running club and hook me up with a runner.

Terry the fix-it-man would give me a ring. ‘Alright, Ron, I’ve got Eddie for you in the morning and Trevor at night.’

Lovely. So he’d leave me the number, I’d give them a bell and say: ‘Eddie, I’ll be up Saturday so if we can meet Sunday. That would be great.’

Boom. Job done. I come downstairs in my shorts at 8 a.m., look for another fella in shorts. ‘You must be Eddie?’

‘Yeah, you must be Ronnie?’

‘How far d’you want to go?’

‘Five or six,’ I’d say. And we’d be off. We wouldn’t have a clue what each other was like. Sometimes you’d think, God, this geeza’s quick; occasionally you’d think, cor, he’s a bit slow. But nine times out of ten you’d think, he’s run 34 minutes for
10 kilometres, he’s quality. I picked up a lot of my close friends this way.

I was lucky to belong to such a good club – Woodford Green has produced loads of brilliant athletes, including Sally Gunnell, who won a gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. There are so many great coaches and runners there, and they have contacts with runners all over the country. They put me in touch with a bunch of lovely fellas. I was just about to go up to Telford for the UK Championship, so I asked Terry if he could help me out.

‘I’ve got Chris Davies in Telford,’ Terry said. ‘He’s done 10 kilometres in 28.37.’

‘You’re havin’ a laugh, aren’tcha, Tel?’ I said.

‘No, you’ll be alright with Chris. He’s a lovely fella.’

Chris was Terry’s hero. Terry said: ‘Oh, there’s a good club in Telford, and Chris Davies will meet you for a run with a group of people. He’s the bollocks.’

So I got up there, and a woman called Claire met me. Then we walked round to the house and I met this fella – massive legs but a tiny body. I thought, he can’t be a runner. Most of them have skinny little legs. As he was talking I thought, blimey, he must be Chris Davies, but he can’t be, he looks wrong. Then we started to run, and I realised it must be him.

We ran through a forest and then a thing called the Wrekin, which is a legendary hill that can pass as a mountain. Apparently, from the top you can see 15 counties, and it inspired Tolkien’s Middle Earth in
The Lord of the Rings
. Awesome. And that’s where they did their Sunday morning long run.

‘Look, I can do about nine miles,’ I said, ‘but I’m playing today so I don’t want to go mad.’ I got up the hill quite comfortably and then found Chris Davies running alongside me. So I thought, I’ll up the pace a bit, not run as fast as I can, but just
put it in. So I gave it a go, and I thought, this geeza ain’t even out of breath by the end. I was blowing out of my arse, and he was just casually chatting away. He was on another level.

Chris ran in the Commonwealth Games, and he was a postman. They’ve moved from Telford to Stoke where his in-laws live, and he trains up there now. The whole family runs – his brother-in-law does 2 hours 20 for the marathon, his girlfriend runs 35 minutes for 10 kilometres, his other brother-in-law, David Webb, runs 2 hours 15 for the marathon and competed in the last World Championship. And his other sister, Sian, runs 34 minutes for 10 kilometres. Imagine that little family setup. Mad. But lovely people. They’d come and watch me play – Chris, his dad, Claire, and another runner – but they weren’t really interested. They were just there as support, which was great. Then we’d go out for dinner, have a Chinese and talk about running. We were all running bores.

There seemed to be an inverse correlation between how well I was doing in my running and how well I was getting on with Jo. The more time I gave to running, the more our relationship suffered. She thought it was self-indulgent, and she probably had a point. But I’d made such great friends through running – normal, decent people who weren’t into all the celebrity crap – and I wanted her to realise how special they were. But it just didn’t happen. It didn’t help that I was no good for anything after exhausting myself while I’d been away.

Jo was the nicest person on the planet when I felt shit. I’d ring her up, tell her I was depressed and she’d be so supportive. But if I’d just won the World Championship, we couldn’t seem to be happy together.

I was often at my happiest when I was running, but running became a running sore between me and Jo, if you’ll excuse the pun. She thought when I was running I should be with the kids,
or that I spent too much time with my running mates. When we rowed it was often running-related.

After a while I had a runner in every port. There’s Jason Ward in Sheffield who is an absolute legend. I was going to the World Championship and I was in the best shape of my life. I’d won the five-kilometre race in Epping, and this was when I got it into my head that I wanted to run for Essex, and that I’d happily give up snooker if only I could achieve that – even though there would be absolutely no money in it for me. It was a mad pipe dream.

I’d just come 180th in the southern cross-country league on Parliament Hill. There were 1,200 people competing, pretty much all of them decent runners. There were a few plodders, of course, but 1,000–1,100 of them would have been serious 35-miles-a-week people, and then you had the top boys who were running 27–28 minutes for 10 kilometres. They were flying machines – the best of the best. Well, I was never going to challenge them, but I’d just done 35 minutes for 10 kilometres and I was in good shape. I’d come 27th in the Essex cross country. So I’d got sharp, super-fit without really realising it.

It was 2008, and I said to Terry, get someone for Sheffield because, if all goes well, I’m up there for 17 days. Terry’s on a website called Eightlane, which is for all the people who are into running, and he knows all the decent runners in the country. Terry was a good runner in his day, but now he just takes the class at the club on Tuesday nights. So it was Terry who got me in touch with Jason.

‘I’ve got you a really good guy up there,’ he said. ‘He’s called Jason Ward and he runs five kilometres in fourteen minutes.’

‘Fucking hell, Tel, you winding me up?’

‘No, class athlete,’ he said. ‘But you should be alright with him. You were alright with Chris, weren’t you?’

‘Really?’ I wasn’t so sure. With Chris, there’d been a few of us running. I was daunted, intimidated by him. So I phoned him before.

‘Alright, mate, it’s Ronnie here.’

‘Yeah, I’m alreet,’ Jason replied. ‘I’ve just done five kilometres in fourteen minutes.’

‘Fucking hell, you’re on fire,’ I said.

‘Aye, not bad, not bad. Good race, decent pace.’

I was terrified.

So I got up there and texted him, and he took me on this route. We drove just out of Sheffield where he does a lot of his runs, and we ended up doing about nine miles. I was so fucked. When you’ve got a good runner you worry that you might be slowing him down; you don’t want to ruin his run. I went as fast as I could so he’d want to run with me next time because I liked the fella. If I was blowing out of my arse, I’d tell him: ‘Look, Jase man, I’ve got to slow down’, but at the time I was fit. I could have gone out with anyone in the world at that time and given them a good, steady run. Anyone in the world is happy to run at six-minute miling. Mo Farah? He’ll say, six to seven miles at six minutes will suit me down to the ground. At the end, I got in the car and thought, Jesus, that was a run.

The only problem was I had to play in the World Championship in a couple of days and I was already knackered. I got back to my hotel room, had a shower and just lay on my bed for an hour and a half. I was gone. I thought, I’ve got to go to do some practice now, but I couldn’t.

Running had taken over my life. I knew straightaway that Jason was a nice guy. We chatted loads about running. I’d ask him where he ran, who he knew, what courses he’d done, what mileage, what sessions. I was a running junkie and a running
information junkie. I could talk all day about running. I was your ultimate running bore.

When Jason isn’t running he’s one of the area managers for Iceland. He’s got a good job, and it suits him down to the ground because he can run to work, run home. He said he could have devoted himself to becoming a full-time athlete, but he had a good job, and you wouldn’t earn much as a top athlete unless you’re Mo Farah. Jason is a pacemaker for the London Marathon – so you’ll get the top guys going for 2 hours and 16 minutes, and Jason would have set the pace for about 20 miles for this lot.