Grief and Running

Why I Started to Run

The man returned to the back of the van to unload the fifth and final crate of beer to the corner shop he had run for over 20 years. As he gripped each side of the case and lifted, the bottles sagged into one another, with a glassy jangle. His breath had shortened with the exertion of going back and fore from the van to the shop door, and despite the chilly day, he felt the heat of his exertion rising up in him. It was hard work.

As he pirouetted around to face the curb, the heat gripped first his sides and then his back. He set the crate down, with a more violent clink of bottles, on the pavement. The heat had crept up his back and held the sides of his face in an increasingly unbearable vice. He lowered himself down to sit on the curb. His brow had started to bead tears of sweat, and his brown skin had started to flush like a bruise. The air was getting thinner now and he lay spread out on the ground, as though opening himself up to grasp at as much air as he could. Each deep drag on the chilly morning air returning less and less. 

The heat of the vice firmly gripped his chest; rigid, sharp, unbending tendrils tugged deep within his heart. His sight had become speckled with flecks of static, growing whiter and whiter, bleeding into the frame, until the whole world was blotted out. As he stared up at the pale blue sky, the world of possibility closed its door.

This man was my father, and on the 10 November 2006, he passed away from a massive cardiac arrest. He was 54, and I was 17 at the time, and although outwardly I seemed to take things in my stride (and appeared that way to myself to some degree), I had been deeply affected by the fact of the event. 

Robert Frost once wrote a poem about the intransigence of following a path. A death like my father’s ripples in many ways through a person. One finds themselves on the path less travelled, and many years later looking back with a sigh. Things change with a death like this, but there is no awareness at the time, the urgency to keep ploughing onwards becomes internalised. I adopted a strange unfeeling in myself, parts of me froze, and although I wasn’t so aware of it as you might expect, I became an unhappy person.

The next five to six years had an aimless quality to them; always achieving, but never engaging; being aware, but never present. I had the deep, deep feeling that life was running away from me, and that my dad’s death had shifted the course of my life to something I had no control over.

For me, running has been the thing that has changed that. It’s difficult to put my finger on any one aspect that has done me this good. Perhaps it is the communion with the body, lungs being strafed by chilly autumnal air, each breath synchronised with the patter of feet on concrete, that engages me with the path less travelled. The aimless ploughing is re-framed as intentional striding; each time clocked a small monument to the intransigence of the self, and that dense, unwilling part of us that cannot give up. I believe that we should all run sometime

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