Fast In My Fifties...
'Right' I said, having been lying listening to Deva wake us up with the Gayatri mantra, I wriggled away from Anadi, as it is all too lovely cuddling in bed, with a mantra playing at 6.30am... 'Right' I said again.... And I was up and out of bed... 'Are you coming...?'
My friend Andy, aka 'doctorpod' who edited my podcasts in the past, which then evolved into us co presenting, was the first person who alerted me to my propensity to say 'Right..' As a way of propelling myself to the next 'thing'...
He took to modelling it in his own life, and added in a hand rubbing action too, which he discovered added even more forward motion...!
Another 'Right', and we were in running kit, and out into the slightly cool, grey June morning...
The park is easy to run around, and lends itself to the rhythm of the run...
'I understand more deeply what happened four years ago now...' I said to Anadi.... 'Visiting Paul, the osteopath, last night has uncovered another layer...'
I went on to tell Anadi, of how after I had trained for, and run the Edinburgh marathon in May 2011, my left hamstring was tight...
The last five miles of the race were into a head wind and I'd felt my leg tightening up... But Edinburgh had been the completing of something anyway...
Twenty five years previously at almost the exact point where the 2011 race finished, was the same spot on the road - the twenty mile mark then - at which I had had to drop out of the Commonwealth games Marathon in 1986...
The circle was complete... I had run fast in my fifties with far less tension than in my twenties....
However, the hamstring stayed tight and a month later when I was running along the seafront in Eastbourne - almost exactly four years ago to this very day - doing number 7 of a set of 8 half mile intervals, I felt a sensation in my left knee, and then... I heard a sound like a pistol shot!
I turned on a sixpence, and went from running at 6 minute mile pace to sitting on a bench....
No one was about... I sat there in the drizzle...
'Okay this might be the end', I thought, 'maybe I have just shot myself right off the running path forever...' After a few more minutes of sitting, I got up to see if my knee would work... It wouldn't...
It took about 6 months to get running again... But that 'O best beloved...' is another story.
The part that is resonating for me now, is that I can feel the layer that I looked under back then, and even started to peel back... Has been completely removed... I have let go of running.... Let go of running defining me; within me anyway...I am not unaware that others might well still define me as a 'runner'!
After I hurt my knee back then, for six weeks I did no cardiovascular exercise, no gym visits, or cycling, or even swimming...
I simply went into the sea once a day, twice if I could bear it, in my aqua vest. I 'ran' on the spot (not with any great effort!) for as long as I could bear the cold!
I loved bobbing about in the ocean, I had the feeling of being 'but a speck', especially in the windier colder days, when no one else was venturing out... A speck in the universe, and I felt that I could just melt back into it all....
One day, I was walking up from the sea, the sun had come out which had brought many people, and big groups of children on summer camps, out onto the beach....
As I walked, I had one of those deep inner knowings....
'This injury is about letting go... Letting go of running...'
Four years on, and my visit to Paul the osteopath, has alerted me again to the tight medial left hamstring. He talked about the 'ducks foot' which leads into the knee, which Professor Nick Webborn showed me four years ago... Demonstrating how the tight hamstring pulls on the knee...
This is still where the pain of the right hamstring shows up in my body... There is nothing wrong with the knee, it's all related to the right hip/ hamstring... All the unravelling of my tighter left side, that I have been working through over the years....
As we ran, I said to Anadi how now that I have let go, I can see where I was still holding on...
And letting go isn't about not going running... If I didn't go running, paradoxically I may have felt some relief, but the tension would simply have hidden itself away...
It is about letting go, so that I can run free, like I did when I was a child and in my early teens....
Before I picked up the bags of tension...
