Running for all seasons

One of the best things about running is that it’s never the same twice.  Funnily enough, that’s one of the worst things about it too.  You can run exactly the same route in exactly the same gear, at exactly the same time of day, and the experience will be completely different.

There are days your legs feel like lead.  Days your brain has had to do a serious “mind over matter” job to even get you out of the house.   Days when if you don’t run you feel you’ll explode with anger.  Days when you just can’t be arsed.

There’ll be rainy days, sunny days, days when you’re too hot, too cold, too wet.   Days when you’re running into a gale and days you’re running downhill with the wind behind you.  And whatever the laws of science say, the same hill can be steeper or flatter,  and the same distance can be twice as far.

But there’ll also be days when everything comes together in some cosmic act of rejoicing, and body, mind, soul, weather and music surge together in a glorious experience that makes you so glad you’re alive, and so glad you made it through all the other days.  These are the days you want to bottle and keep and repeat every time you run.  But maybe part of the sweetness of those days comes from the fact that they’re not always there.

The point is that the experience of running is not uniform and never should be.  And that’s yet another of the great life lessons of running.

We expect so many things in life to always offer us the same experience.    We expect our relationships to always make us feel good not bad; our moods and health to be identical every day; our work lives to always be tolerable and never too challenging.  We have ready meals that we can microwave to the exact second and will always come out just the same. We even expect our fruit and veg to be of uniform shape.

Running gives the lie to all that. It challenges the concept that the restaurant of life should always offer exactly the same menu.

If you zoomed in on the same runner’s brain at the same point on the same route, but on different days, the following thoughts might be whizzing around:

I hate this

I love this

Why on earth did I take up running?

I want to run more

I’m packing this in

I’m going to train for a 10k

What’s for dinner tonight?

What am I going to do about Freddie/Mum/Aunt Esmerelda?

And so on.

But the big picture?  I’m running! I can do this! I’m lapping everyone on the sofa! I’m fitter, faster, stronger, less stressed, less angry.

Take a snapshot of running at six-month intervals, rather than every six days, and the picture comes beautifully into focus.

Love running in all its moods – because for every day your legs feel like lead there’ll be one when they feel strong, and for every day of running with the rain streaming down your face there’ll be one of sunshine.

And maybe running can teach us to love life in all its moods too – that our relationships, jobs, families and life in general will bring days that we hate and days that we love.  It doesn’t mean we’re in the wrong relationship, job or family. Uniformity of experience is no more part of life than it is part of running.

I’m dragging myself out for a run now on a day when quite frankly I can’t be bothered.  But whatever happens, I’ll add it to the mix of running experiences and be glad I can be out there at all.

How to save a life, Colson style

The man who changed my life has died.  I never met him and he would not have had the slightest idea that I existed.  But he changed my life when I was 19 and I have literally never been the same again.

His name was Chuck Colson, and he was one of President Nixon’s head henchmen.  He was nicknamed the Hatchet Man, labelled by colleagues as an evil genuis, and reported to have said he was would “walk over his own grandmother if necessary to get Nixon re-elected”.  He was jailed for his role in the Watergate scandal.  Not great raw material for a life-changing man.

The story of how Colson changed my life changed actually began with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.    I was a cub reporter, fascinated by the scoop to end all scoops – Watergate.  I’d watched All the President’s Men more than once.  It was, well, complex.  Despite the handy catchphrase “follow the money”, I was completely baffled.  One Christmas I watched it again and commented to my sister that I still didn’t get it.

“I’ve got a good idea,” she said.  “I know a good book about Watergate.”  Clever sister.

The book was called Born Again by Charles Colson.  It described his journey from crooked ruthless henchman to prison evangelist.

Like many men brought down from glittering height by circumstance or their own folly, Colson despaired.  But through conversations with a Christian friend, he embarked on a journey towards faith.  OK, so this might have been the political equivalent of there being no atheists in foxholes.  If his life hadn’t been disintegrating, perhaps he’d never have written down the simple question “Is there a God?” at the top of a notepad, and never have read CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity. He’d never have been confronted with his own conduct, never have experienced the powerful Hatchet Man being called to account.

As it was, his shattered life turned around. He served his time already a changed man, and devoted the rest of his long life to working with other prisoners.

What I remember most clearly about his book was the description of a God at work, here, now and powerfully.  I’d grown up on a wholesome diet of Bible stories, of Jesus doing good stuff, but all of it 2,000 years ago.   That wasn’t much use to a teenager trying to change the world in the late 20^th century.

Chuck Colson’s book was the first place I read about stuff happening today.   To quote the UK’s own dear current Home Secretary Theresa May, he wasn’t making this up.  This was real stuff, intelligently told. This was truth, or it was madness. I decided to find out which.

The quest for truth was what had led me into journalism in the first place.  At work they still chuckle when I raise the question of whether  the facts in a story are true facts.  OK, so I know it’s technically tautology, but many statements, plausible and neat, turn out to be only masquerading as facts.

Some truth is very hard to get at.  One man’s version of an event will be different from another’s.  Sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, truth is twisted.  Truth is a tricky customer.

I became convinced that what Chuck Colson had found was an objective truth.  I finally put it to the test, prayed to know this God for myself, and to receive his Holy Spirit.  I still remember the overwhelming sense of light exploding in my head, of a life changed, of theoretical objective truth becoming a known fact, and of a theoretical God becoming a known God.  I still believe that today, and 30 years of the ebb and flow of life has not changed it.

Here there is truth: central, incontrovertible, objective, embraced by men fallen from high places like Colson and by spotty teenagers like me.  I still don’t really get the complexities of Watergate, but I’ve ended up with a much better truth.  There may be something about Mary, but there’s something much better about Jesus.

How to grow your own water

This year’s first harvest on the allotment has been plentiful.  I’ve collected it morning by morning and loved watching the stocks of it grow.   It’s a new harvest, one I haven’t tried before, but it has been growing beautifully in the current splurge of April showers.  I’ve collected it in the spring sunshine which has popped out between the showers, to the sound of birdsong and my own free-range thoughts.

The harvest is water.   This is the dampest drought there ever was, but drought it is.  The allotment water butts ended the winter barely half full.   So what better way to top them up than by harvesting some of the generous amounts of rainwater currently being supplied by the Allotmenteer-in-chief?

Partly inspired by the genius Rainwater Collection Thingy invented by fellow blogger Val, I’ve tried to create a system of mini dewponds using surplus pond liner.  This is in line with Rule Nine of Allotmenteering: that the spirit of Heath Robinson must live on.

The pond liner had already been laid across undug areas of the allotment to keep the weeds at bay, but with a bit of gentle rearranging and scooping out of soil from underneath, it’s been possible to allow the rainwater to collect into shallow pools.

Like a child with a bucket and spade at the seaside, I’ve loved the task of scooping out the water from the pools and filling the four large water containers scattered around the allotment – one of them a re-homed London wheelie bin without a lid.   My method has evolved from the simple but slow “Scoop, Walk, Pour” method to the advanced Two Container System: An upturned watering can is used to scoop the water into an empty chicken manure container which is then upended into the butts when full.

It’s basically It’s A Knockout with a purpose. Childish but great fun.

Of course every silver lining has a cloud, and all this lovely spring rain has given slugs and weeds a good excuse to multiply too.  But in about 10 days of rainwater harvesting, the butt levels have risen substantially, and it’s provided good exercise as well as the usual benefits of absorption in a task.  And it’s given time to remember that for millions of people elsewhere on the planet, drought is a matter of life and death, not a pre-work game to be played with buckets.

Oddly enough, my water resources have been boosted even more dramatically by the year’s other bountiful harvest: rhubarb.  I planted three types – Victoria, Champagne and Timperley Early.  Champagne seems to sulk and run straight to seed.  Victoria gets her act together in the end.  But Timperley Early is the gift that keeps on giving, and so far three allotment neighbours plus family members have benefited from its bounty.

The last allotment neighbour to receive some waved an elderly hand at his extensive collection of interlapping water barrels and uttered the beautiful words: “If you ever need any extra water, please feel free to help yourself.”

It was a moment straight out of  Jean de Florette, Marcel Pagnol’s heartbreaking story of graft and greed and water in the parched south of France.  For any man to offer  to share his water supplies is a precious thing.

“But,” I protested,  “water’s a scarce resource now.  I wouldn’t want to take any of yours.”

“You haven’t got much,” he said.  “And it’s tit-for-tat isn’t it?”

So the new currency in drought-stricken, damp Englandshire: rhubarb.  I’ll keep harvesting the rhubarb and the rain, and I’ll love knowing that I’ve also managed to turn one into the other.

From dreams of Eden to death on the Titanic

In all the fanfare surrounding the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, my thoughts will be about just one person.   He was a teenaged lad from a cottage in a country lane in Hampshire – a red brick cottage with a well in the garden, backing onto the beautiful heathland of the New Forest.  He was born in 1894 into a family which ran back through many generations in the same tiny village of Bramshaw and had lived in the same red brick cottage since the 1700s.

This teenaged lad was called William Dibden, and as a child I remember meeting his sisters.   We were distant cousins.

William Dibden was one of 1514 people who died on the Titanic.  His body was  never found or, if it was, was never identified.

He had already lost his father by the time he decided to set sail for a new life in Canada at the age of 18.  It was only 11 years after the death of Queen Victoria.   I imagine his life in Victorian rural England would have been tough and hungry: his father, a pork dealer, had died when William was just  seven years  old, and his youngest sister Hester was a baby less than a year old.   I have no idea how their  mother, Eliza, would have coped emotionally or financially with the loss of a husband and breadwinner, and later the death of one young daughter Mary to cancer and  her oldest son William on the Titanic.   

What seems  particularly cruel for the teenaged William Dibden is that he wasn’t taking a rash gamble on a new life that may or may not have existed in reality.   He had listened to the advice of another local man, Leonard Hickman, who had emigrated to Manitoba five years earlier, and had found such a good new life that he returned to the New Forest to recruit other young men to join him.

So seven of them set sail: William, two friends from his village Charles Davies and Ambrose Hood,  Leonard with his brothers Lewis and Stanley, and Percy Deacon.  All were from the same parish.  Some were teenagers, some in their 30s, some were newly married; all had been convinced by Leonard Hickman to join him in a new life in Canada.

More cruelties exist in the story: they weren’t even supposed to be on the Titanic.  They’d booked their passage – steerage class – on another ship due to sail on 6 April 1912, but that sailing was cancelled because the Titanic had bought up all the available coal.  So the party of seven was transferred onto the Titanic, upgraded to second class, all travelling on one ticket priced at £73 10s.  I can imagine they were thrilled at their good fortune – going from steerage to second class, and getting to sail on the brand new liner that must have been the talk of the town.

The final cruelty: the place they were heading for was called Eden.

I have been wondering many things since learning a little more this week about William Dibden’s story.  Had he even seen the sea before he set sail on the Titanic?  Southampton was only 13 miles away, but in those days people travelled only short distances in their rural areas.  Did his mother and sisters  and brother wave him off down the lane or did they travel with him to the docks.

And how did he travel to Southampton?  The three Hickman brothers, whose loss must have brought unimaginable pain to their parents,  were apparently taken to the docks by horse and cart. So maybe that’s how William got there too.  

Was he living in such poverty that he thought the new life in Canada had to be worth a shot? Or did he have the pioneer spirit that meant  he would have loved to go and start a new life, and didn’t need a hugely strong “push” factor to get him on the ship?

Either way, I hope he loved the start of the voyage – he would have seen France for the first time, as the ship sailed into Cherbourg, and then Ireland.  I’m glad he was with his friends, and I hope they had the time of their lives on the first four days of the voyage.

If he’d chosen a different path and stayed behind in Bramshaw: well the horrors of World War I were only two years away, and he would have been 20 by then – a prime age for being sent to the front line.  So perhaps all those village lads would have endured far greater misery if they hadn’t tried to get to Canada.

In every generation there are those that stay and those that go.  Even today, people are dying every week in the Mediterranean trying to get to Europe to start their own new lives – I know there are no direct comparisons because of the illegality of what they are doing, but the young men who are dying now share the dream of a better life which lay in front of William and his six companions.

So as the world remembers the Titanic with an extraordinary extravaganza of TV programmes, films, and memorial services, the tragedy for me will be brought home most poignantly by two thoughts.  One is the memorial to William and the six others in their local church, under the wording from the book of Revelation in the Bible: “And there shall be no more sea.”

The other, personal to me, is the thought of his two sisters, Bess and Hester, waving off their big brother and never seeing him again.  By the time I met them they were wizened and elderly, but living in the same red brick cottage in the same lane in the New Forest , with the same well in the garden. 

To us as children, visiting them was like something out of a fairytale.  But they had lived through their own nightmare, and it’s them and William I’ll be thinking about today, on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.  William: I’m sorry you didn’t make it to Eden, but I salute your courage in trying to get there.

Running with the skylarks

The last two mornings I got up, put on my running gear, had the obligatory pre-run cup of tea and chocolate Hobnob and… well, that was it really.  I stayed indoors.    It was raining, and despite a good 49% of my brain telling me to just get on with it, the other 51% just wouldn’t listen.

To be fair, it wasn’t just wet rain, it was cold wet rain, but I did feel a failure.  My running is off schedule at the moment and with a few days’ slippage here and there, before you know it you’re way off the pace and struggling with routes that used to be easier.

So today, for the third day, I got up, put on my running gear again, had the  traditional tea and chocolate Hobnob –  and to misquote the late great Charlton Heston, I did it, I actually did it.

Waiting those two days meant that instead of gritting my teeth, ruining my hair (!) and ploughing through the rain and wind, I was running in glorious spring sunshine.  It felt so good that at the outer reach of my normal loop I just kept going, tracking along the side of the giant millpond, past the boathouse and up across the wide open meadow.

Halfway across the meadow, Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army fell silent, and I was just stretching out a hand to restart the music loop when I heard the skylarks.  Their twitterering wittering song of sheer joy as they rose into the clear blue sky was enough to take my breath away, if I hadn’t already been gasping.  The morning sun was on my face and the grass still wet from the overnight storms.  But this was sheer joy: running in sunshine to the sound of skylarks ascending.

In all, I added  a couple of extra miles to the circuit (OK so a teensy weensy bit of trespassing was involved but I know a really good prayer to cover that one… ) I ran for nearly an hour –nearly double my normal route – and returned home with soggy feet and a great feeling of achievement.

So a big thank you to the wise friend who answered my Facebook confession of two days of failed running with a top tip:   Stay on the sofa with a cup of tea and enjoy what the rain is doing for the garden and the allotment.

The point is that sometimes waiting is better than ploughing on.  There are of course times to train in all weathers: there’s a glorious freedom in getting soaked, and a glorious quality to the cup of tea afterwards.  I remember once setting out in freezing conditions and lashing rain and passing the local GP coming the other way, already back from his long circuit – we joyfully exchanged the look of crazy runners, who know the benefits of wet-weather running.  But runners I think can be quite driven, obsessive people, who sometimes need to learn to wait as well as to plough on.

So this has been a great lesson for me:  Sometimes it’s better to wait out a couple of days of gloom and on the third day something glorious might happen.  In Easter week of all weeks, it’s a lesson I’ll  try to remember.

Going to see the Messiah

“I’m going to see the Messiah tomorrow,” I confidently announced to my colleagues at work on Thursday.

Ah, how they laughed.   There was a brief debate on my mental health.  Had I finally lost the plot?   No, I insisted,  I really WAS going to see the Messiah, and at the Royal Albert Hall too.

Anyway, see the Messiah I did, a fantastic rendition of Handel’s classic oratorio.  The massed ranks of the Royal Choral Society were swelled by the City of London School for Girls and the effect was stunning.

This was London at its finest, but also at its crowdedest.   I had visions of a relaxed Boris Bike journey from Victoria Station to the Albert Hall, freewheeling through Hyde Park in the spring sunshine.  The surprise disappearance of the Boris Bike station near Victoria put paid to that.  No problem, I thought.  Shanks’ Pony will do just as well.

But even travelling on foot proved stressful.  The streets outside Buckingham Palace were crammed with tourists and virtually impassable.   Police on foot and on horseback were shouting at people to stay behind crash barriers on the packed pavements while the vast empty space of the roadway beckoned behind them.

In Hyde Park, there were hordes more people of every tribe and nation enjoying the Bank Holiday.   Some were playing a football-type game with a frisbee, others were playing a tennis-type game with a football.   There were runners and cyclists, whole battalions of Boris Bikes, footballers, families and sunseekers.

Huge groups of foreign tourists were being shown round by foreign tourist guides.  Foreign coffee-seekers were being served coffee by foreign coffee servers.  It struck me that a huge part of London’s economy now involves foreigners paying other foreigners for stuff.  Hopefully some of it ends up in George Osborne’s coffers – otherwise the nation is gaining little except blocked pavements and raised blood pressure.

Eventually through the budding trees of Hyde Park came the welcome sign of a golden Prince Albert glinting in the sunshine from high up on his memorial.  His hall came into view soon afterwards.  Thousands of people were making the same journey as me, by tube, bus or bike, quietly honouring a Good Friday tradition that has continued unbroken for 134 years.

It dawned on me that 34 years before the Titanic set sail, the Albert Hall Good Friday Messiah was already under way.    It remains a stubborn survivor in the world where the Easter Bunny seems to have displaced Jesus as the main focus of Easter.

This morning, one day on from seeing the Messiah, I woke up to find my not-favourite Cardinal Keith O’Brien telling Christians they should all wear crosses.  I seem to remember Jesus saying people should recognise his followers because they loved each other, not because they were wearing a religious symbol.  Isn’t the point of Christianity that it’s about relationship not religion, that Christian beliefs are written on people’s hearts, not worn round their necks?  They obviously teach you something different at cardinal college.

His latest utterances brought to mind a friend theorising a while back that you should have a Christian fish symbol on the front of your car but not on the back, so that when you let someone out into traffic they’ll know you’re a Christian, but when you cut them up they won’t.  That’s more like it!

Anyway, cross-free, and munching my French stick, I discover further on in the Guardian that an Anglican bishop has warned that the Church of England is being seen as “at best, the guardian of the value system of the nation’s grandparents and at worst a den of religious anoraks defined by defensiveness, estoteric logic and discrimination.”  Go for it, Bishop Alan Wilson.  I can picture Jesus saying that.  I can’t imagine him telling everyone to wear a cross (just to carry one).

So, yes, oh mirthful colleagues.  I did see the Messiah at the Albert Hall.   My mental health remains intact, or just about anyway.    Happy Easter, whether you’re waiting for “Messiah 1” as devout Jews are, “Messiah 2 – The Sequel” as devout Christians are, or no particular Messiah at all, as most people are.

Someone I know once summed up the Easter story as “Dead. Alive. Good.”  I think that’s pretty cool.