An act of defiance.

This isn’t actually what I want.

The thought shone like the moon in front of me, taunting me with its brightness after a fraught journey mincing my way down 2/3 of That Grim’s Ditch, guided by nothing more than the torch on my phone and the raging fire in my guts.

The thought came, firm and certain, at That Junction. 

That Place Where My Wheels Keep Falling Off. 

But this time the wheels had gone 27 miles earlier at Wendover from a blown IT band. It was there I’d already known it was game over. For hours I knew. 

Maybe even weeks.

Because maybe it was over when I fell for the third time in as many months on my already trashed left shoulder, making me tweak my training to avoid swinging the arm too much? 

Or it could have been over when the race cut an hour off the closing time of the first checkpoint a month out – that hour which was to be my cushion to avoid typical mid race anxiety. That loss giving me only a month to work in a pace increase from 16 minute miles to 14:30 for the top ten. 

Keep it boring til Goring, my ass. Hold the hour or forfeit the head game.

Perhaps it was over when I lost the buyer for my house ten days out? Or the third time my year long childcare plans fell apart? Or when the train strikes screwed up my logistics? 

If none of these was the death knell, then surely it was over when I contracted a throat and sinus infection two weeks out, which left me on antibiotics and dizzy until the night before. My taper had evaporated. My hard earned fitness largely erased.

But strangely, my head game was still all in. The entire outing had become an act of defiance. In a sea of blows, I’ll have this win. Watch me.

That nerve-wracking dark descent was accompanied by an incessant urge to just beat this fucking race, and the sound of my own voice belting out Biko to the trees – those silent witnesses to an entire field that passed before me. Despite their pace, none will have my drive for this route. None will have my reason. This is beyond contestation. Try me.

You can blow out a candle, but you can’t blow out a fire…

I’d hoped I’d have reached my crew and headlamp well before sundown. I was wrong. As the dark wrapped its prickly arms around me somewhere between the golf course and the jaunty wave I flung in the direction of the Nuffield checkpoint crew as I hurried off in search of Light, it was Light which had sunk below the horizon, dragging my dream kicking and screaming and cursing along with it.

Seems you can blow out a fire after all if it’s the sun. Better run run run run run. Oops can’t run it’s bloody pitch black in here. 

Hurry, hurry, time’s a-wasting…

Spat from That Ditch having been rescued by Crew Kat and the Mighty Headlamp, I’d been sat in that camp chair a few minutes, watching my well trained legs shaking as if I’d never run more than a mile in my life. What the hell was happening? How was I so broken at 37 miles when I had never been so ready in. my. life?

But I started to realise something was wrong with the whole thing. Not just the fight I had to make to actually get here this time, but this journey. This wasn’t right. This journey wasn’t right at all.

And then I said it aloud, making it real. 

Kat.

I don’t want to do it like this. Why am I doing this? I’m killing myself pushing against some random clock and if I somehow manage to beat it, no one will actually even care. I want the journey, I couldn’t give a shit about the time.

I recall agreement. Quiet reflection. Total understanding. Sisterhood. Compassion. Camaraderie.

I was in the presence of the one person on earth who could understand exactly what I was talking about. Where I’d been the past few years with the effort, the life journey and the running journey. All of it. She’d witnessed it all and was there at the very moment when everything became crystal clear. 

In a moment of total despair, Fate had put me in the presence of the only way I could survive it.

This is not why I run.

Tears came then. Not many, but they’d been brewing. They nearly came when my entire soul dropped along with my shoulders coming up on the fabled Ridgeway Field of Dreams. I expected to see a beautiful autumnal honey hue in the fading sun, but to my horror I exited the wood that preceded it to find it entirely black. Charred. Dead. Empty. 

Hi, Pop. Ok…ok.

The shock shifted and despair was fleeting then, because I was in too much of a hurry to identify whether I’d been smart enough to carry my ‘b’ headlamp. Well, you know how this story goes–it was yet another blow despite that year of planning. It wasn’t there. 

I tried to jog down the first descent of the field and the knee wasn’t having it. So I just put the Terminator face on and power walked for all I was worth. I didn’t know if the pain was worse in my legs or in my heart.

And then those thoughts came like Catholic confession.

Three summers gone. Three, Maxine. Three. 

Avoiding people like the plague…because of The Plague, not wanting to get ill, spending more time training than taking my son out and being his Mum. For this ghost. This burnt out ghost, hurrying me along the most beautiful of places, on someone else’s time, year after year, chasing chasing. Hurrying, moving fast because that was the only way to—

Hang on.

Just. Hang. ON.

I let the side down.

Under that tittering moon, from my perch in a camp chair, that thought was like a kick in the chest.

I let the side down. How can I rail against pace and let the side down like this? I advocate for my own child and tell people it does not matter how fast you go. But here I’ve laid all my hopes and dreams on something that requires me to move faster than I want or actually need to in order to succeed in the thing I actually want. 

I want the route. I want the achievement. The rest is nothing.

But YEARS. I’ve wasted years chasing a clock. I have let the bloody side down.

This one stayed in my head but it was everything. And it was the reason the next thing came out.

I’m going to slow down. I’m probably going to time out, but we’ll keep going.

And everything that had been banging around like entropy in my head for the better part of four years got sucked into this massive vortex of understanding and tamped down into a tight little plan of action. It reminded me of the technique I use to get myself to fall asleep – walk through an imagined white door into a clean slate, empty of the chaos, leaving the noise behind. Close it. Start over.

That was not why I run. 

I finished my checkpoint routine. It would last over an hour, during which time the sweeper who came to find me blew past us at the junction and disappeared into That Ditch Part 3, without realising it was me she was looking for. I would pick up my trekking poles and sweep her at That Trig Point, and power walk us to time out some 36 minutes past the cutoff.

I timed out. This is a huge triumph. I did not quit the race.

I timed out.

I and my crew had every intention to finish the route, to conquer the ghost, to realise the dream.

Until I realised that wasn’t my dream. 

After a final sit down for a few hours in the middle of the night on a kerbside in Goring, I realised that it would be foolish to continue on the back of that illness, lest I invite Winter 2022, Redux. I’d ground out 45 miles in a huge amount of pain, beating a huge number of odds.

But I didn’t do any of it aside from the last eight miles on my terms.

With a solemn nod to Kat, I took a deep breath and stopped the timer on my watch. My race was over.

The runner who started it didn't exist anymore. The one I became has different dreams. 

After that last segment I realised it was more important for me to do the route than it was to finish some race with arbitrary cutoff times. I still believe I'm entirely capable of achieving my 100 mile route when the fitness and health are in order, and when the pacing is none but my own. I actually think I can even do the first 86 miles within the race total cutoff time of 28 hours, paced evenly across the entire route. It’s entirely reasonable, but even more so, without a ghost and some random need for speed breathing down my neck.

Speed doesn’t matter in my world. It never has. 

I have an awful lot to say about it and that will come in time as many people already know (That Book!) For now I will say I may have timed out of the race, but the fat lady still can’t find the opera house. 

And she never will. 

#relentlessforwardprogress