Why I run (when I can)

The last few weeks have been tough as far as training is concerned - not because I have upped the volume, added quality workouts or pushed myself harder, but because I have not been able to run at all - save for the odd jog to confirm this sad fact.

I am still training - working on my core strength and upper body power in an effort to not lose sight of my goal, which is to stay fit and - one day - run well.

The year is coming to an end and this is not the way I had hoped to go out. I feel a bit down and very frustrated. I feel, frankly, that it is all a waste of time and that given the weakness of my body I would be better off embracing it and avoiding situations that lead to pain and frustration. What's the point, really?

It is a horrible question but one worth looking at from time to time. What's the point of running in excess of 70 kilometers a week, of finding the motivation deep inside myself to do something that requires a huge amount of discipline and dedication, when I know that injury and frustration are absolutely guaranteed, while success - however it may be defined - is rare and fleeting and in no way satisfying if achieved as planned?

This is the thing. I started to run back in about 1995 - I am always very shaky about dates, not really finding them easy to remember. I was around 28 years old and fat and soft and I realized I had done no serious exercise for a decade. I stopped working out and running when I was 19, the day I was told by a Royal Marine's Colonel that I had not been successful in my attempt to get on their Officer training course. It had been a long selection process and I had started off in a group of about 1,500 candidates and when I got this news - that I had failed - I was down to the last 20-odd people. Three were successful that year. "I don't know what you are going to do in life but I am sure you will be successful - just not here." If those are not the exact words, they are the way I remember them and the spirit is accurate. If I were to look back and say where my life had at various times changed profoundly, that would be one of the key moments. As of that day I had no idea what to do with life. I often joke about this but I am really being serious when I say I do not want to do anything, much. I am quite happy just being.

The thing about just being is that it is an invitation to just doing nothing. I am 50 years old and look back on those years lived with a feeling of some satisfaction, remembering the way life has challenged me and the solutions I have found or had imposed on me. It has not been easy and neither has it been terribly difficult. It has been life and you know what I mean. Life is hard, especially if it is interesting, but it is hard for everyone and we cannot complain just because we have to make a living or deal with idiots or find a parking space or pass an exam or any one of an endless list of tasks that can seem daunting at the time but on reflection are nothing at all in most people's lives.

I always wanted to be a big success, just so I could shrug it off and say it was nothing. It's the way I am. I listen to and read a lot of interviews in which people - mainly sports stars and businesspeople - talk very earnestly about how hard they work and how much they deserve their success (which normally just means 'money') and they make me feel sick. Everyone works hard. Everyone struggles. Life is generally awful and it gets worse as friends and loved ones die off around us, presuming we survive long enough - and that's another lottery, of course. I detest people who are successful (rich, let's be unambiguous) and who will happily talk at length about how much they deserve it. They do not, no more than anyone else. The vast majority of successful people have nothing more to crow about than simple good luck. This fortune takes different forms and I am not simply talking about being in the right place at the right time - I am talking here mainly about the lottery of life, meaning a person's starting point in terms of parents and family background. Yes, multitudes of great people have dragged themselves out of poverty and the most hopeless of starts in life but no one has ever done it alone. There is always an element of luck and it is a key element without which all else would flake away into nothing.

My successes have been discreet. I am not going into them here but I do recognize them. They are not, however, the kind of things that other people could easily observe, much less admire. I am not a wealthy man, for example, and do not live in an expensive house in the best neighborhood and so on. I am a modest success but that is enough, especially considering the raw material I have to work with. Most things in the world are a mystery to me - I am not at all scientific, for example, meaning that all technology is essentially magic in my mind. It's a tough place to be, this world, for someone like me, with my aptitudes. I have been lucky to have found a way to make a living and hold the stuff of life together but there is not much to shrug off in that nonchalant manner I daydreamed about.

After beginning running way back when after a good decade of sedentary living I realized very quickly that there was a huge gap between the way I saw myself and the actual capacity I had to perform. I am short and stocky, for a start, and no one would ever mistake me for an athlete of any description, much less a distance runner. This didn't stop me because I quickly latched onto the fact that when you start from zero you can improve rapidly. I was measuring myself against myself, in other words, not against anyone else. This is the single most important lesson I have learned from distance running. Winning races, setting records and so on is wonderful but clearly only for such a small sample of the population that it makes no sense to think in those terms for most of us. Winning is not everything, it's nothing. The best that can be said about winning is that the winner fulfilled the potential they were lucky enough to be granted at birth. They fulfilled an obligation, if you want to be harder about it. So, I learned that success takes many forms and is fluid. There are days when I run so well I find it easy and set a personal best without much suffering at all. These are rare days and in my experience impossible to plan into my life - they just happen. Much more common are the runs that hurt and make me want to stop almost before I have begun. They can be slow and painful and grueling and just doing them at all is a success. The whole concept of success in distance running and training has to be constantly reassessed. I see no difference in life itself. We have good days and bad days and in my experience the bad far out-weigh the good. Success is rarer than failure, which is what makes it special, but success is also not so easy to assess and nine times out of ten only we ourselves know for sure whether we succeeded or failed, or - most likely of all - just fulfilled an obligation.

Having not become a conspicuous success in the world we all live in - the world of appearances - I subconsciously recognized running as something I could be proud of - and something I could then shrug off as nothing more than the fulfillment of an obligation. I desperately want to succeed but whenever I do, I dismiss it as nothing. I ran a 15 km race on October 1 this year so fast I could barely believe it (by my standards, as I am sure you realize now). Did I feel ecstatic? No. I did feel satisfied for a while as I walked to get some water and fruit but soon after I realized I had been underestimating myself before the race and during training and therefore had not pushed myself hard enough and could and should have done better. It's just the way my brain works.

Is this fun? No, not at all. But I am not doing it for fun. I do it because it makes me feel successful when it works - just briefly, just moments before I change my parameters and adjust my targets. It is that fleeting sense of satisfaction that I am always after.

And now I am injured. I have a stress fracture in my heel and a hamstring injury caused by the mild limp I was suffering as I ran on the fracture. My body finally did what my mind could not and I had to stop. It will be some weeks now before I can run again, and that is hurting more than the pain of the injuries. I feel frustrated. Frustration is a big part of life and I have never found a good way to deal with it. I am doing my best - going to the gym on my motorbike, to save my legs, and attacking the weight machines with the energy I can't put into an hour's running. It's not great but it's not that bad, either. I can shrug it off.