A little over a week ago, I represented West Wales as one of 15 runners selected for the Men’s Veteran 55-64 age category in the Welsh Athletics Inter-Regional cross country championships in Newtown.
Well, ‘selected’ is perhaps putting it a little strongly. I couldn’t take part in the qualifying event last month as I was running the Great Eastern Run half marathon in Peterborough, so I responded to an open invitation to be considered for one of the six vacant places left unfilled. I think I may even have kept a stronger runner out of the squad by failing to notice an email from the team manager checking I was still available until after the deadline for entries had passed.
I have participated in this competition once before, in 2021, when to my surprise I found I actually had qualified formally and officially for the MV45 team. I hadn’t even known the Gwent League Cross Country fixture in Cardiff was a qualifying race, or indeed that the Inter-Regional contest existed. On that day, still carrying some latent fitness from running London Marathon the month before, I just sneaked into the qualifying positions. Then, when I ran the Inter-Regionals at Aberhonddu (Brecon). I was 13th of the 14 West Wales MV45 finishers, and 166th out 171 in the total field of runners (the categories from Senior men up to MV55 all run together).
So how did my performance on Saturday compare? This time I came 14th out of 14 finishers in the MV55 category, and <cough> 182nd out of 183 finishers overall. It seems important to point out that that there a full 15 member MV55 team were at the start line, but that as I closed in on one of my team-mates early in the second of four laps, he fell and withdrew from the race. Perhaps he realised I was coming and threw himself into the mire to avoid the ignominy of being overtaken by me. Far more likely, he just fell, it being exceptionally muddy and moderately treacherous.
All of the above is undoubtedly to most people quite dull and uninteresting, so perhaps I should delete it and conjure instead some gripping evocation of the visceral sensations of pushing a body gripped in the tension between sporadically increasing fitness and fitfully declining strength through the windswept mudbath of Dolerw Park. But that would not be moving in the direction of the truth revealed by the somewhat deflating and lonely trudge through the mud of a largely featureless course as I primarily experienced it at the time, or the fine comparisons with previous performances while poring haphazardly over Strava and Runalyze data, and my hopes for incremental improvement without targeted planning or sincere resolution that have characterised my reflections since, .
It had taken the best of two and a half hours to drive there, and would take me, in the dark, a little longer to get home. In the hour or so I was hanging around before the race started, I briefly chatted with a couple of acquaintances, but mainly wandered about on my own, feeling that sense of mild awkwardness that attends most of my forays into social milieux.
Later, my wife would ask if I was glad I had gone. I answered, without hesitation ‘yes’. Was my lack of hesitation, unconvincing, even to myself?
I don’t know.
So why was I glad I had gone?
I don’t know.
And I don’t know if ‘glad’ is quite the right word anyway, but I certainly didn’t wish I hadn’t gone.
What satisfaction do I get from running? Why do I now run where I used to cycle, and why has one completely overtaken the other, when I used to spend much of my time reading and thinking about cycling (and about buying biking gear)?
I don’t know.
But running is what I do now, albeit without passion, without much in the way of dedication, without even the intrinsic resolution that would get me out of the door on my own for the almost daily mix of long slow rounds and tempo efforts that characterised my first flush of enthusiasm for the sport and the rapidly developing burst of fitness it brought when I first started ‘parkrunning’ and more six-ish years ago.
And why? As with most things, from the quotidian to the transcendent, I don’t really know?
Yet, occasionally, intuitions puncture the unknowing, and a sense of some fumbling towards meaning will emerge from don’t-knowingness. Sometimes I will read or hear words from someone else that seem to sublimate the can’t-be-botheredness that too often attends the difficulty of wrangling such intuitions into conscious and coherent thoughts and thence into into (possibly) intelligible words.
Finding such words elsewhere is double-edged. There is the immediate delight of minds touching across time and space, that moment of ‘yes - that is how it seems to me too’. But this is too easily followed by a deflating, ‘why couldn’t I have come up with that?’, and ‘given that I didn’t should I quote it direct, or adapt it a bit and pass it off as my glistening insight?’ I’m choosing honesty, so…
As a sort of daily devotional (of the significance of that word, perhaps more, at some point, since ‘church and chapel’ was a subject matter suggestion from a commenter many months ago) I am reading Resurrection is Now by Dom Aelred Watkin, and the day after the cross country I found these words resonant, despite the minimal and mundane nature of my ‘achievement’ in the West Wales vest:
Again, we experience this [sense of something that transcends time, alteration and death] in moments of achievement. We have striven and we have attained. We have wrested events into a pattern beyond themselves, we have in some measure made the passing endure. Our will has burst through the bonds of circumstance, just as our intellect has seen the universal beyond the particular and love has known that which lies beyond alteration of mood or fluctuation of response. In short, there is that in us that reaches out to the universal, the enduring and the absolute.
Running, the act of a body made for, but not, chasing down prey, or racing from predators, is where, most simply, my will bursts through the bonds of circumstance. I could have not gone to Newtown, but I went. I could have not made the effort to catch the antepenultimate runner, but I picked the pace up to close that gap. And when he fell, leaving an insuperable gap to the next runner, I could have obeyed the lactic acid in my legs and slowed to a less uncomfortable pace, allowing the last man to close me down, but I pressed on, beyond — if not so far beyond — the bonds of circumstance.
None of this mattered in the context of the competition, but somehow, the very functional purposelessness of such effort, its very particular and heightened pragmatic pointlessness, yet defiance of inertia, points towards such a reaching beyond. In the terms of my ‘native religion’ (a concept I recently came across in an episode of The Sacred podcast), I might even begin to think of running as an act of prayer.
You finished, and you were not DAL (dead ass last). Respect.
But you do it Ant, and look pretty good in the process (I have photographic evidence from the Great Eastern). For many years, in your youth, you avoided anything that could result in failure; so I see it as a sign of great maturity that you are prepared to trudge through mud with very little prospect of glory.
Is your glory now something more personal? Beating back the ravishes of time on your body and mind to find the mental and physical strength to go again and again, so that you can glory in the small achievement of not coming last, while proudly sporting your West Wales shirt.
Whatever your motivation, running tends to lead to a blooming good read, so I am so very happy for it.