I tear through familiar foliage. Off the path, past green bowls nets, through an ivy-framed fir-fringed portal, and out onto the wide planes of Primrose Hill, BT Tower glittering through the mid-morning mist. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s narration of Anna Karenina, not the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation splayed open at page one-hundred-and-fifty back on my bedside table, in my ear. The past three chapters masking the rhythm of my breath, normally so well accompanied by Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, a perfect soundtrack for running (particularly ‘The Chain’).
Things were so different at the beginning of the year. I couldn’t listen to a story, even one that threads as rivetingly into one’s soul as Tolstoy’s masterpiece, whilst running. I could huff. I could stagger. And I’d get a quarter of Hyde Park lapped in great pain only so long as my classic rock playlist was deafening enough to make me almost forget what I was doing. There was no meditation in motion. The grand schemes would be hatched in a month or two when I would really become a runner. But turn of the year and I barely even knew how to lace up my shoes. All I knew was a gorgeous blonde with whom I was falling deeply in love had mused upon the idea of a marathon.
‘It’s just so much time,’ she said, finishing her Hibiki whiskey. ‘I’ve got work, school, now you, and when you get into the final weeks of training you have to commit so much time. The long runs get up to two or three hours. That’s every week.’
So we started clocking those long runs. Hyde Park was the training ground because you could run around the perimeter and that would measure roughly four miles. Do that three times over and you’ve almost done a half marathon. We got to the stage of training that called for a weekly twelve-mile run, along with two three-milers, a five-miler, and cross-training during the week, and then the world said, ‘No more.’
‘Marathon’s been cancelled,’ I said.
‘Postponed,’ she corrected.
‘It’s cancelled.’
Back of a cab, rattling through London’s abandoned streets, just turned away from the theatre on account of the virus. We returned to our pre-drinking lounge, a delightfully decorated gin cocktail establishment called Mr. Fogg’s Botanicals, where we ordered three large ones and consulted our crystal ball.
‘How do you train for a marathon when you don’t know it’s date?’
How you run when your calendar is marked and how you run when those little dated squares lie blank for the rest of the year is completely different. One requires timing, planning, peaking, and pushing yourself to the point of overtraining. When you have twenty-six-point-two miles waiting for you in Edinburgh just two months away, you push through plantar fasciitis, brush aside peroneal tendonitis, and laugh in the face of extratropical cyclones. All that matters is the mileage. Early morning road work, weekend steady-states, evening hill sprints, treadmill intervals. You track, tweak, and test, always aiming to hit a new personal best. Remove the deadline and your training dies. You’re like an archer without a bullseyed boss, a canvasless painter, a clayless sculptor. Do you still run three miles on Wednesday? Is the Sunday long run still on? And do you ratchet up the miles the week after next?
It’s like with writing. One day you’re humming along, working to a quota of ten pages a day, and the next you decide the book’s never going to get published, especially not in August like you thought. You stuff the manuscript in a drawer. You decide not to write the next day. Then you decide you’ll write when you feel like it. A few weeks pass, you’ve not felt like it a whole lot, production plummets. One day you wake up from a dream where your fingers flew over the keyboard and you realise, with a tear-choked lump in your throat, that you forgot you used to be a writer. But you hear the songbird in the eaves outside. You hear a wailing fox at play. You hear the patter of raindrops. And you know you weren’t created to not write. Deadline be damned, you’re going to write today. Marathon be damned, you’re going to run today.
Maggie Gyllenhaal finishes chapter three of part two of Anna Karenina. I take my iPod out of my running belt, slow my pace just enough so I can get Fleetwood Mac playing, and sprint the last leg. As I pound the cobblestones, past bobbing canal boats, through Little Venice with its artisan eateries and queues of patrons patiently waiting two metres apart for their coffees, Stevie Nicks sings in my ear: ‘Never break the chain.’