Song 10

I was rubbish at PE at school. Something marked me out, quite early in primary school, as being very definitely substandard. I couldn’t run fast enough, couldn’t catch a ball, and as for hitting anything with a rounders bat – well, forget it. When it came to picking teams, I was either last or next to last. And even though there were some kinds of exercise that I liked – walking, and horse riding – these weren’t the kinds of things that counted at my school, where if you weren’t good at netball or hockey or athletics, you were marked out as a target for all kinds of scorn.

It took me a long time to get over my crap-at-PE funk. I started hillwalking, in my early 30s, and walked in various bits of eastern Europe: The Husband and I did the Yorkshire Three Peaks the year we turned 40, and a year later we did the Hadrian’s Wall long-distance walk with The Dude when he was nine. Then, suddenly, everyone was running. Even the unsportiest people I knew were running. They were doing Couch to 5k and loving it, and then they were doing Parkrun and loving that, too. So I bought myself a pair of running shoes, and before long, I was running, too. I signed up to Parkrun; I did the local 10k and ran all the way through lockdown. I led a Couch to 5k group for staff at school. And then it all kind of fell apart.

It wasn’t anything dramatic. I got a few niggly injuries; I had a run-in with plantar fasciitis and a dodgy ITB. I joined a few Facebook groups for women runners and started measuring myself, a bit too much, against what other people were doing and judging myself, again a bit too much, for not being able to do the same. I  listened – yet again, a bit too much – to people who heaped scorn on runners who needed to take water on anything less than a 10k run, and who looked down on Parkrun because running 5k wasn’t all that much of an achievement to them. I never actually stopped running. I discovered something called jeffing, where you run and walk in measured intervals – one minute running, thirty seconds walking – and kept going, like that, for the best part of three years. I covered hundreds of kilometres, that way. But I still felt like the kid who was rubbish at PE, who couldn’t run without taking a break.

The last couple of years have been busy. I’ve written an entire actual book as well as teaching full time. There have been times when running has added to the mental load rather than offering a break from it. I’ve snoozed all the Facebook groups: when I’ve been to Parkrun, it’s been to volunteer rather than to take part. But a few weeks ago, I set myself a target. Run 5k again, without stopping, for the first time in over three years. I built up from ten minutes, to fifteen, to twenty. Yesterday, on the treadmill at the gym, I ran for thirty-one minutes. I had to cover up the display that told me how far I’d gone and how long I’d been running for, and just unhook my brain and let myself run. And then, this morning, I told myself that if I could keep running for ten songs on Spotify, that would be enough.

I can’t remember what all of the ten songs were. There was definitely some Gloria Gaynor. There was Birdhouse In Your Soul by They Might Be Giants, which I remember my friend Dermot playing over and over again to irritate people in the sixth form common room at school back in the spring of 1990, until someone took the tape out and threw it at him. My heart lifted when Amy Winehouse came on, going out by herself and looking out across the water. It would have been appropriate if there had been Belle and Sebastian’s Stars of Track and Field, but the stars of track and field weren’t showing up at my particular gym on a Bank Holiday morning, so I had to do without. I flagged a bit, and swore a lot in my head, and then I must have had some weird access of energy or something, because by the time Song 10 came on – Monkey Gone to Heaven, by the Pixies – I knew I’d be okay. By then end, I’d actually done five and a half kilometres, and to this unsporty kid it felt like a bloody triumph.

Were you, too, scarred by school PE in the 1980s? Come and join my gang.