Full Of Possibility...
My friend Wendy, who I met at nursery school aged four years, has kept a postcard from me which I sent to her twelve years ago... I was in Spain, I was taking a sabbatical from my work, and I was writing 'Running to Learn'. I had flown to Spain alone, but my friend Ian lived there and we met up occasionally to go to the gym and for cafe Philosophique...
This is the post card; and this is what I wrote...
'Hello! Well - Here I am sitting in the sun on the beach! I am loving my time here. It is very silent and contemplative, although I've seen Ian occasionally which keeps my hand in with socialising!! My dream life has always been to be writing a book in cafes in the sun and running in the sun - And I'm living it !!....'
And now twelve years later I am living that way again; my heart has always yearned to live like this and it has been a gradual movement towards it that escalated when I met Anadi; or maybe the reverse is true and I met Anadi because the process was accelerating within me...
I have always travelled abroad to run, and when it stopped happening through being an international runner, I created it again for myself... I went on my own trips abroad to run a race; and sometimes I travelled with 'Running Crazy', which is the brainchild of Malcolm Hargraves... Weekends away with the Running Crazy crowd were always great fun.
I remember interviewing my friend Chris. We were making a podcast about his plans to run across Kenya, and about his project 'Hear our voice'. Chris was encouraging the street children and abused women to write their stories down and and perform them and to read them out loud ... His work with these people was having a huge healing effect and his next plan was to run across Kenya, and as he ran to deliver his model to all the centres which supported the street children.
I loved the interview, I loved his plans... And as we spoke together, I felt a slight stirring of envy within me. I have always seen envy as a signal to look inside and see where I am not honouring a desire within... And then to take action to put in place the wherewithal to create it for myself...
I have discovered then that in the place of envy, inspiration can emerges through the actions and words of another... And so I was inspired by Chris and his courage and spirit to follow his heart and his dreams...
At that time my great friend Fi become the editor of Running Free magazine and I she gave me the role of her 'Roving Race Reporter...'
Each month I travelled to a different country and ran a race, which I then wrote about for Fi... It was great fun; I became a 'frequent flyer' so much so that one day when I was returning through passport control and asked where I had been, for a moment or so, I couldn't remember...
One of the trips involved travelling to Kenya to run the penultimate leg of Chris's journey across Kenya with him...
I only managed to 18 miles or so of the leg before collapsing with dehydration, terrifying Chris, alone with me on the Mombassa road.. 'But this oh best beloved...' as Rudyard Kipling says ' is another story...
My friend Angela who sponsored the making of his film 'Across Kenya' and I flew to Nairobi. We spent the night there and the next day we drove for 11 hours down the same Mombassa road to find Chris... It should have been a shorter journey but my map reading skills meant that we left Nairobi at 6am bright and early and drove for an hour and a half in the wrong direction... Arriving back where we started at 9am!
And so I keep following this road, to run, to write to travel far and wide and always trust that the way is revealing itself as I journey....
Today has rained all day long, all last night too; there have been little when the sun has filtered through, although being out in the elements here is very beautiful, the warm water cascades down ....
This morning the sun was shining in a small gap between downpours, so we went for a short pre breakfast beach run... And later on we jogged to the roads near the beach, that are flat and traffic free and lend themselves to running fast....
My plan... To run 5 x 3 minutes, fast, with one minute rest... A return to something approaching one of my regular routines...
10 x 3 minutes has sustained me over the years, a standard session. It has brought me to race fitness, and although I am as far away as I can remember from race fitness, the running felt good,
My body remembered and I was joyous, 'I loved that' I said 'I really loved that...'
'I think you love interval training more than me', Anadi laughed...
'I think I love that it feels once more that my running is full of possibility...'