Bucko's World

I sit here with calf muscles tighter than a Scotchman’s chuff and wonder why I put myself through it. I’ve just got back from a four mile run and my permanently fucked right knee is on fire, I feel like I have appendicitis and to top it all I don’t think I even enjoyed it very much. The pavements were slick with sodden leaves, marble-like acorns made every step just one away from casualty, and ankle breaking conkers fought for your attention, thus distracting you from a pavement more uneven than crazy paving laid by a cowboy builder in a hurry to get to his tea break. So why do I do it? Because in six months time I hope to take place in the greatest running event of them all, The London Marathon.

Unfortunately, being forty, fat and unfit does not appear to be the ideal place to start preparations. A friend of mine, who shall remain unnamed to protect his identity in this public place, but for argument’s sake we’ll call him Paul, once said to me “Bucko, running isn’t for you and me, we’re carrying too much timber, we’re too tall and quite frankly, we’d both rather be in the pub.” Or the curry house. The thing is he’s right. I’m an any-excuse-not-to-go-for-a-run type. Sometimes I’d even rather work, but other excuses such as “the gym is too busy on Monday”, “I’ll run when I get home tonight” to “oh, I forgot my walkman and can’t run without it” all feature prominently in my no run handbook. Well, now I can’t use those as excuses anymore it’s time to put my money where my mouth is….

So last Friday, the first day of my “Redundancy consultation period”, that weird Limbo between being a full time employee and a corpse on the corporate scrap heap, I had to drop my car down to Leeson’s Hill for a service (at least one word in that last sentence should be carefully borne in mind) and being the virtual pauper I am now, I decide rather than bus it back I should make it the first run of my Marathon preparation. It’s raining, it’s brooding grey and thundery, and I’m cursing the stupidity of the whole idea. But with no other way of getting home (the Oyster Card is currently gathering dust on the sideboard) I fire up the GPS, press start on my watch and get to it. Three minutes later I want to die. Leeson’s Hill you see, succeeds in climbing 250 feet in just a third of a mile and unfortunately it seems that I don’t. Somehow, 33 minutes, 33 seconds and 33 hundredths (hey, it looked good on the watch) later am home, drenched to the skin, legs shaking like blamanche on a turntable and wheezing like an asthmatic pensioner who’s forgotten their inhaler. 4.1 miles under my belt but more importantly, £1 bus fare saved, so who cares if I collapse through the front door and lay in the hallway for ten minutes rattling like John Merrick after a particularly gruelling sentence?

I point out to another friend my pathetic attempts to prepare myself to get 15 stone round 26 miles of London's streets on a knee and a half and no discernable talent for the sport. He too shall remain nameless but for arguments sake we’ll call him Tone. What Tone said was this “15 stone today, but after a month of training 4 miles a day, uphill, through rain and sleet, fog and frost you’ll be down to 14.5 stone.” I have, possibly incorrectly, taken this to be some form of encouragement.

And so to this morning. It’s grey and damp but not actually raining and so I head out, and despite the pavements underfoot being greasier than a New Labour spin doctor the first couple of miles go pretty well. It’s when I hit Lower Camden, a three quarter mile straight, level and therefore supposedly easy piece of road to run on that I hit a problem. That problem is another runner who I can see about 150 yards in front of me. Now this might not seem like a problem, but it is. See, I’m running at my pace, and he at his, but the instinct is to try and catch him up. This is bad. I try and pace myself carefully as my run ends with a long uphill grind and if you do the easy bits too fast the hill becomes a nightmare. I’m catching him with every step but is this just that I’m running faster than him anyway, or has that instinct to catch him up cut in? The seemingly obvious thing to do would be simply to match his pace but this could compromise mine and screw my run up. Even consulting my super chronographic steroidal GPS enhanced watch is no good. Although it tells me how fast I’m running it’s buried under three layers of clothing so hasn’t been consulted during my run so far, so the pace it’s telling me now won’t help. So I simply catch him pass him and continue on my way.

I then come to the next little problem. As I run under the Railway bridge the main road swings to right with the turning off being straight ahead, through some barriers. This is a really wide piece of road at the junction, and as you can’t easily see back over your shoulder to see the traffic, I run straight ahead and wait till the road narrows before crossing. Well it’s a good thing I did. As I step out in to the road a Saab roars under the bridge and without signalling comes straight on and I only get out of the way in time because of my forethought. “It’s comes with indicators you fucking dickhead try using them” I scream after him. Seeing him smash a wing mirror on the six foot barriers when he tries to negotiate them without braking is some consolation.

My final problem is that Elmstead Lane lies ahead, one mile all uphill to finish you off. And it does. My pace obviously picked up earlier despite my best efforts and I am reduced to jogging pace as the hill takes its toll on my legs. To cap it all I then end up with the letters VW tattooed permanently on to my arse when some wanker decides to pull blindly off his drive and almost straight into me. It’s only the cat like reactions, the John Travolta like moves as it were, that prevent me from being mincemeat under his wheels. Well once again I can console myself with the knowledge that at some point today, at least one of the two pre-school age kids who were in the van with him will ask “Daddy, what is a stupid fucking cunt?”