Running with the Pack Page 5

  This was a morning alive, wriggling, with possibilities in a way that is true only of the mornings of youth: a fine, powdery dusting of prospects, options, risks and opportunities. It must have been late spring or early summer. That is the best my memory can do in locating this day in time. But I know it was a Saturday, and I remember that school was still in session. So May or perhaps early June would be my best guess. If it had been April, the mountain would still have been frosted white at this time of the morning.

  The Saturdays of my childhood were largely filled with the playing of sports. Sometimes these were the formal team sports of my school, mostly rugby and cricket, and if by any chance there was a Saturday where there was nothing formal arranged, my friends and I would fill it with informal pick-up games of soccer. Free Saturdays — Saturdays when there was absolutely, positively nothing arranged — were few and far between, and if one did materialize, the chances were I just wanted to take off on my own. Or not quite on my own — flying out of the door with me this morning, breakfast barely settled in our two stomachs, is Boots, the huge, pale, almost white, Labrador of my childhood. We started walking: down Chapel Lane, past the Bluebell Woods, Boots bouncing along beside me. I decided to start running, a steady jog. I wouldn’t say I had been a fat kid, but I was far from svelte — fattish wouldn’t be far from the truth. But this last year or two had seen me lengthen, and thin out, dramatically, like a chubby wad of liquorice pulled out into a string. If I had known that was the last of the lengthening I was going to do, I might have cherished it even more. That’s the way life goes sometimes. But on this day I remember our shadows. Boots — a squat ball of muscular energy. I, my profile newly effaced and elongated, projected onto the rooted and stony banks that ran beside us; my newly long hair — a triumph of deposition over my mother’s thirteen-year reign of short-back-and-sides terror — bouncing in the sun to the beat of my stride.

  I ran, and Boots ran, not for any real reason: you don’t need reasons to run when you are a kid or a dog. Then, running is a perfectly reasonable option for transporting yourself from one place to another. You no more need a reason for running than you need one for walking. Indeed, sometimes it is positively uncomfortable not to run. My life was a patchwork of events, occasions and obligations, and running was the thread that held it all together. School was a mile and a half away: I would run there in the morning and run home in the evening. Sometimes I’d make the round trip at lunchtime too. That was already six miles; and it didn’t even occur to me to think of it as exercise. After school, three nights a week, was rugby training: two hours spent largely running. Then I’d run home to eat, do my homework and after that the hour of enforced piano practice insisted upon by my mother — a necessary counterbalance to the thuggery of the rest of my life, as she saw it. On Monday nights, when there was no rugby, I would sometimes run down to the boxing club for some training. When I arrived, they would usually send me out on a five-mile run. There would be a school rugby match most Saturday mornings in winter. And in the afternoons, I’d sometimes pick up a game with the youth team, run by the local rugby club. When summer came, things were slightly different. I’d play cricket for the local club instead of rugby for the school. There was less running involved. But I was a batting all-rounder, so there was still running aplenty, and club cricket took up all the weekend rather than just Saturday.

  Things are different now, and the world is a different place. I gather that kids are driven to school, and they play computer games when they get home. I suspect I would have been climbing the walls if I had grown up today — a ‘problem child’. There is a certain type of boy — I can’t speak for girls, but I don’t immediately see why they should be fundamentally different — who needs to run. And if he doesn’t, then life is going to be a painful and confusing place. I was a boy like that.

  To reach the top of Mynydd Maen — crowned with a tall radio mast — involved a steep, steep climb, in parts a scramble, of around three miles. When Boots and I arrived there, I was astonished to see my watch telling me that it had taken barely over half an hour. Even now, I think I must have got it wrong. Perhaps we set out earlier than I remembered? But, whatever the truth of the matter, when we arrived there, we just kept running, because it never occurred to us to stop.

  The mountain-top was by no stretch of the imagination a treacherous one. There was the occasional sheer drop, and a few bogs sprinkled around. So you had to take care. But I knew this mountain well. I’d not brought water, but there was no need. You wouldn’t want to drink from the brooks. Mortality among mountain sheep is high, and if you drank from a brook, there was a more than negligible chance you’d find a dead one in the water further upstream. But I knew where the springs were; where crystal-clear, ice-cold water bubbled magically out of the ground. Me first, then Boots: I didn’t fancy the slobber. Boots and I kept running.

  This was a little hard on the dog, you might think. Boots was no longer young. He would have been around eight years old at this time, and that is getting on a bit for a big-boned Lab. But as the children of yesterday spent their lives running, so too did their dogs. I had no worries about Boots. For two hours or so of every weekday evening of summer — when the demands of rugby and boxing had gone into their seasonal hiatus — we would play cricket. Bat in hand, I’d throw a ball — a hard, bouncy power ball was ideal — against the garage wall, and Boots would chase it off my bat and then bring it back to me. The grass beneath my feet had worn away to a dusty dirt patch. The ball, sopping wet from Boots’s saliva, picked up the dirt, and the wall, once gleaming white, had slowly transformed over the years to near pitch-black. Two hours every summer evening of chasing; hunting down the ball, and only reluctantly being coaxed back into the house when it was too dark to see any more. Boots could run all day. And apparently, on this day, so could I. On we ran, tramping the wiry mountain grass and springy heather.

  A couple of hours later, we arrived at Twmbarlwm — the remains of an Iron Age fort that once stood guard over the hills that gaze down on where Newport is today. All that remains of the fort is a conspicuous mound of earth on the ridge of the mountain-top, clothed with thin grass. Later in life, whenever I arrived back to visit my mum and dad, I would see Twmbarlwm — ‘the tump’ — as the train pulled into Newport, or later as I drove down the M4, letting me know that I had come home.

  Then, we turned around and ran back because we still couldn’t think of any reason not to. We arrived home from our day on the mountain at the beginning of the long twilight, in time for supper.

  ‘Where did you go today?’ asks my mum.

  ‘Just up the mountain.’

  I didn’t bother to add that we had run the better part of a marathon. Boots was soon pestering me for an evening game of cricket — before it got too dark.

  In some respects, this day anticipated certain themes that would dominate the runs of my later life. But in other respects, it was entirely unusual. The way I remember this day, it makes me sound like I was the Haile Gebrselassie — the great Ethiopian distance runner — of the eastern valley. But I really wasn’t very good at running, not compared to many of my friends. I may have spent a large portion of my young life running places, but so did they. And many of them were much better at it than I was. I remember well the unqualified ignominy of my first cross-country run. This was an annual school event, and my first one took place only a year or so before this run along the Mynydd Maen. To describe myself as a jock would, probably, be anachronistic — the expression certainly hadn’t reached the shores of Britain at this time. But I suppose that is what I was, anachronistically or not. A central figure in the rugby team, and captain of the cricket team, I’d expected to do well in this race — I don’t remember how long it was, but somewhere around five miles would be my guess. But little skinny kids, some of whom were my friends, some of whom I barely knew — but all of whom were not fit to lace my rugby boots — blew by me as if I were standing still. I finished in the middle of the pack — an
d that is only if we assume the pack had a large middle. As a consequence, I developed something of a love-hate relationship with running. I still did it all the time, of course. Running to school day in day out, or even running with Boots on that mountain, I never regarded as running. It was just part of life. But events — races — I did my best to steer well clear of those.

  At least, I steered clear of them if they were above a certain distance. I did not mind the short stuff, largely because I was moderately good at it. I was on the track team in high school. That wasn’t quite right either. ‘Track team’ is also a transatlanticism that seems to have insinuated itself into my thought patterns. We didn’t have ‘track teams’ in south-east Wales in the 1970s. If there was a schools’ athletics event coming up at the weekend, one of the sports teachers would say something like: ‘Rowlands, you’re quite fast. Go to the stadium on Saturday and run in the hundred metres.’ Not fancying a Saturday spent hanging around the stadium waiting for my race, I would reply with something like:

  ‘What about Parkesy, sir? He’s faster than me.’

  ‘He is away this weekend — you’ll have to do it.’

  Cwmbran had an athletics stadium — incongruously well equipped, given the ill-equipped state of Cwmbran as a whole. As a result, most athletics events in Wales were held there. So that is where I unenthusiastically found myself two or three weekends a year. I seem to remember I was once placed third in the Wales Under-15s One Hundred Metres Final — though I suspect there were lots of David Parkes’ missing that day.

  The hundred metres was my, somewhat reluctant, speciality. And that’s only because there were not any shorter events on offer. I could do the two hundred metres at a pinch, but never the four hundred — in my view, that’s an event reserved exclusively for masochists of the most twisted kind. You have to run pretty much as fast as you can for four hundred metres! How anyone could enjoy that is beyond me. Even the hundred was far too long for me, really. I’m Mr Fast-Twitch. I’m at my best for the first five metres or so, and after that it all starts falling apart. If there was an Olympic event called ‘Out of the Blocks’, I’m convinced I could have gone a long way (to the extent it makes sense to talk of ‘going a long way’ in such an event).

  In Why We Run, Bernd Heinrich, one of a vanishingly small number of people who managed to combine being a world-class biologist and a world-class distance runner, outlined the general anatomical characteristics of someone suited to distance running: ‘Distance runners have one common trait — the good ones are skinny. The distance runner must fairly float along the ground, sometimes for hours on end. Ideally, he has light, thin bones, and long, thinly muscled legs, like a bird.’ If that is the distance runner, then I am the anti-distance runner. I don’t float, I thud (I have what’s known as a very hard strike — apparently it’s a problem, the source of many injuries down the years). I am far from bird-like. I have short legs, big bones and I’m broad. I like to think of myself as a mesomorph with endomorphic tendencies. More realistically, I am probably an endomorph with mesomorphic tendencies — assuming there is a difference between the two. At my best, if I’m training hard, I’m big and heavily muscled like a sprinter. At my worst, I’m a fat boy.

  There are two basic types of muscle fibre — slow-twitch and fast-twitch. The successful distance runner’s leg muscles are made of between 79 and 95 per cent of slow-twitch muscle fibres. The muscles of an average person’s leg contain a fifty-fifty split of fast- and slow-twitch fibres. For an elite sprinter, the ratio is more like 25 per cent slow-twitch against 75 per cent fast-twitch fibres. Slow-twitch fibres burn fat, and can operate only with a continuous supply of oxygen. They work aerobically. Fast-twitch fibres burn glucose and operate without oxygen. That is, they operate anaerobically. The lactic burn you get in your legs when you sprint is the byproduct of the anaerobic operation of your fast-twitch fibres.

  The way you exercise has been shown to have a small effect on the ratio of slow- and fast-twitch muscle fibres. Gollnick and colleagues, in a classic 1972 study, suggested that rigorous aerobic exercise — he had his subjects run on a treadmill for one hour a day for four days a week for five months at 85—90 per cent of their maximum aerobic capacity (talk about earning your volunteer research subject stipend!) — could, at most, result in a 4 per cent rewiring of fast-twitch to slow-twitch fibres. This figure has been more or less borne out by subsequent studies.

  Fast-twitch muscle fibres have, more recently, been discovered to divide into two sorts: FTa and FTb. FTa fibres have some of the characteristics of slow-twitch fibres. As fast-twitch fibres, they can work anaerobically, by burning glucose but, like slow-twitch fibres, they can work by burning oxygen too. The average person’s fast-twitch fibres are split evenly, roughly 50 per cent of each sort. Hard and consistent exercise is more effective in transforming FTb into FTa fibres than it is in transforming fast-twitch into slow-twitch. Elite marathoners end up having almost no FTb fibres. I’m pretty sure that is not something I could emulate. More than that, I’m not sure I would want to.

  So I suppose the most important and obvious fact about me as a distance runner is this: I am not very good at it. I have little aptitude for it, and I suspect this lack of aptitude is grounded in certain features of my biological make-up. I don’t know what happened that day on Mynydd Maen. Then, I could not, for the life of me, see any reason why my legs should stop doing what they were doing — why they couldn’t keep going like this all day and through the night. But no matter how much I would like to, no matter how much I’ve worked and trained to do just this, I have never since quite been able to replicate the sense of freedom and power that I felt that day on the mountain of stone when I was somewhere between a boy and a man.

  I suspect the iron bonds of inevitability hold us all, young or old. But when we are young, and on our good days can barely contain the power that sings inside of us, our chains seem so much lighter. I ran that day with the freedom of youth, a freedom that could think of no reasons to stop, and so for which there were indeed no reasons. The freedom of youth is the freedom of a life that is overflowing, of a power that can only with difficulty be contained within the bodily vessel. When you grow older, this feeling inhabits you less and less. You come to understand all too well that there are many, many reasons to stop: reasons that thrust themselves upon you vociferously — and the more tired you become, the more insistent are these reasons. But if you are lucky, if you are very lucky, you will one day come to understand that these reasons — no matter how savagely they snarl — have no authority over you. That is the freedom of age.

  The appeal to bodily constitution — bodily ‘facticity’ as the French existentialist philosophers sometimes designate it — is it perhaps just an excuse? After all, I’ve never had a muscle biopsy done. Perhaps if I did I would be staggered to learn that I have the muscle constitution of a world-class distance runner, 80 per cent slow-twitch fibres with virtually no FTbs. But I doubt it. Connected with my lack of biological aptitude is another feature of that day’s run that became a recurring theme of the runs of later life: it was completely unplanned. When I woke up that morning, I felt like taking off for the day with Boots, that’s all. I didn’t plan to run up the mountain. I didn’t even know I was going to the mountain. I simply found myself running there. Sometimes I say I don’t like running. Sometimes I believe it too. But I doubt this can really be accurate. I’ve been doing it for so long that, on some level at least, I suppose I must like it. But it is certainly true that I hated the thought of running. Until very recently at least — things have changed now, and there are reasons for this — if I wanted to go running, I had to make sure I didn’t think I was going to go running. I had to sneak up on my runs.

  If you read running magazines, they’ll sometimes offer advice on how to motivate yourself to go running when you don’t feel like it. For the businessman or woman, for example, the advice is to schedule your runs like you schedule a meeting, and then feel proud afterwards as if it
was a job well done. For me, for a very long time, there was only one way I could get myself to go running and that was to convince myself that I wasn’t going running. There is a British film of the 1960s, Village of the Damned, based on the John Wyndham novel The Midwich Cuckoos. It is about some aliens who take the form of children. They have some rather nasty telepathic powers and apparently plan to take over the world — the usual alien stuff. At the denouement, the hero, who has planted a bomb, is being telepathically probed by the alien children, who suspect he is up to something but are not quite sure what. He must, at all costs, not think of the bomb. That is how I used to approach my running. No, I’m definitely not going running today: no sir, not a chance. I’ll just sit here and write. And then I’m up in a flash, tearing across the room: shorts on, runners on and out the door, one or more canines in tow, before my body has a chance to realize what’s going on and put together the usual objections or obstacles — a feeling of enormous lassitude is its usual strategy.

  This hatred of the thought of running — not running, the thought of running — continued through my twenties, thirties and some of my forties. I’m very different now. Now I can’t wait to get out on the road. Perhaps it is because I now have two young sons: and, believe me, compared to spending a few hours with them — which, don’t misunderstand me, I love doing — running twenty miles is a relaxing break. Or perhaps it’s because I am starting to understand that, in all the injuries, niggles and general persistent low-grade pain that goes with the approaching half century, my life of running does not necessarily stretch out into the indefinite future. I have a sell-by date, stamped quite legibly on my dodgy knees, a rather boorish Achilles tendon, a questionable back and recidivist calf muscles. And in the light of this, I have come to understand that running is not just something I do. It is not even something to which I have a right. It is a privilege.