Yesterday, after returning from the Run24 24-hour race near
Reading, I had a pain in the neck such as I’ve never experienced before. The
slightest movement, left or right, up or down, sent paroxysms of pain shooting
through my body as bad as anything I’ve ever endured, from broken bones to waking
up from the gas while having four teeth extracted. It eased overnight, with the
aid of an off-prescription opioid stash – now it just feels like I’ve broken my
neck – but for a time I thought I was going to spend the next few months on my
back in a body brace.
I’ve been here before (not in the body brace), though
without the pain. A little over ten years ago I went to stand up and my left leg
gave way beneath me, insensitive to all feeling below the knee. I thought it
was pins and needles; it turned out to be a crushed nerve in the lower spine.
For a few days I couldn’t walk at all; for a few months I couldn’t walk unaided.
When I did, every step involved a tentative placing of the foot on the ground,
trying to make sure it was straight enough to provide balance, and that I wasn’t
doing unknown damage in the absence of any sensation to warn me otherwise.
One of the consultants I saw was almost gleefully
pessimistic. When we were discussing the possible causes of the problem and I
told him I played football regularly, he said only part-jokingly that ‘there is
no excuse for grown men playing football’ and complained that it was the cause
of more unnecessary injuries than anything else the NHS had to deal with. On
the subject of running, he said that if God had intended human beings to pound
up and down the pavements of London he’d have given us pneumatic tyres. His
general theme was that my chances of a complete recovery were slim and that any
activity more vigorous than Zimmer-framing it to the shops (and then only if I
kept my spine firmly upright and didn’t twist it) risked total paralysis from
the waist down.
But slowly sensation returned, and eventually – with no
small sense of gratitude for being given the full use of all limbs again – I
returned, among other things, to playing football and running. Yesterday, for a
while, I was reminded of what a blessing it is to be fully mobile and pain
free.
That sense of blessing was all the stronger for the fact
that Run24 had gone like a dream. I’d entered it at the last minute, largely
because I felt I needed more miles in my legs before attempting the Lakeland
100 in four weeks time. Because it involved five-mile laps around a fixed woodland
circuit, I’d not only be able to do as much or as little as I felt up to on the
day but I could do it without carrying a pack, leaving anything I might need at
the start. And because it would be relatively flat (at least compared to the
Lake District), on tracks and paths that are reasonably suitable for running,
and without any element of self-navigation, I’d be able to go a bit faster than
I normally can over ultra distances. I had my eye on doing 100 miles inside the
24 hours.
My race strategy, if you can call it that, was to aim at doing
12 laps – 60 miles – in the first 12 hours, leaving a further eight laps to
cover in the next 12 hours. So every lap done in under an hour would be time in
the bank towards that first target. I figured that I would slow down dramatically
as the race went on anyway, so I may as well cover as many miles as possible early
on.
I did the first 25 miles in under four and a half hours, the
first 50 in 8hrs 55mins, and reached 100 in 22hrs 3mins 17secs. With almost two
hours still remaining, I then embarked on a personal lap of honour, walking
virtually all of it and saying my thankyous and goodbyes to the marshals, trees,
shrubs, puddles and ruts that I’d become so familiar with. There was still time
left on the clock to start another lap when I finished that 21st circuit. If I’d
done it, I’d have finished second overall but I just didn’t have it in me. I
was delighted with my times, with the distance covered and with a fourth-place
finish. And I dread to think what my neck would have been like if I’d put it
through another five miles.
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