5K to Couch

 “5K to Couch”- Sporting Rise and Decline

 

We all live, some of the time, an internal life in which we are timeless entities – the same person, young, middle, and old. This is the person often active in our dreams. 

 

But there’s one sphere where the record, be it memory, written, or current experience refutes this self-delusion. The sphere is that of physical activity, especially sporting activity.

 

I liked sport when young. There was no game at which I was outstanding, but I was not an embarrassment: a reasonable enough practitioner in a team or individually. There were one or two exceptions – swimming (I was hopelessly slow) and my nemesis, rugby. In my schooldays I was tall, skinny and underweight, and couldn’t sprint very fast. This was, on all points, the least desirable set of attributes for the game: not butch enough for the scrum forwards, not fleet enough for the backs. Besides, I was either a coward or a sensible shirker of vigorous and potentially painful physical contact. I perfected a strategy of arriving a fraction late at any grunting melee, looking busy at the fringes. As for tackling some large or colossus-thighed opponent in full pelt, a heroic dive, just missing, was another skill.

 

But I loved football (although my junior and senior schools played rugby), basketball and long runs (not good enough for any athletics teams).

 

In my 20s and early 30s, I played “park football”. This meant playing for vey lowly teams, sometimes in strange urban leagues, sometimes teams put together ad hoc by friends or acquaintances. At one point, improbably, I played for a team nominally that of Peter Dominic, a now defunct off licence chain. Finsbury Park and Hackney Marshes were the venues got to on Sunday mornings on a moped. There was also a stint in the London Legal League, playing, appropriately enough, under the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

 

Whenever I was in a match against a side that had been properly coached (for example, an Old Boys team of a football playing school), we were outclassed and thrashed. I knew my place.

 

The early years of parenthood largely brought an end to my haphazard but enjoyable football career. I was in my mid to late 30s.

 

At the age of 41 or 42 I started running regularly. I joined a local club, which organised cheerful “all levels” runs on Sunday mornings (Hampstead Heath) and a weekday evening. At work, I ran at lunchtime, along the Thames or the Regent’s Canal. I got fitter, and faster. I entered 10k races. My time fell to the low 40s – about a very respectable 7 minute mile pace.

 

In the mid 1990s I adjusted my goal and entered the London Marathon. My place secured, I trained assiduously and as advised, slowly increasing the miles. Then, as it does for many marathon entrants, progress and hope evaporated with a knee injury, impossible to run off, and too slow to heal (it still niggles).

 

However, like any dead person that still manages to vote in an election, I did not let my entry go to waste. In short, I arranged for a keen colleague to personate me. Under the Marathon’s rules this is an offence attracting a lifetime ban for both parties. But I am now not bothered by the potential sanction, and my personator remains anonymous. So, there is a formal record of my successfully completing the relevant Marathon. This has been my only sporting fraud.

 

I was in the athletic doldrums for a few years, cycling to a great extent replacing running. But then, in my mid 50s, a friend introduced me to triathlons – and another enthusiasm was born. This also coincided with more running, more 10ks, even a 10 miler along the coast near Margate. (But I never regained earlier speed.)

 

Once more I trained assiduously, swimming innumerable and boring lengths of various pools, cycling strenuously around Richmond Park. I rebuilt my running so as to successfully, without personation, complete a couple of half marathons, one after turning 60.

 

My triathlon career comprised several Olympic distance events in the London Docks and many shorter events at Blenheim Palace. The last of these, a relay in which I took the cycling leg, was in 2019.

 

All the while I have continued to run, jog rather, at diminishing speeds. My regular distance is 5k, with the occasional 4 miles, or rarely 5. I am slow, and one paced. Hills of any steepness are no longer a challenge to be eagerly accepted, but are grimly intimidating.

 

At some point, not all that far off, my 5k time will equal my best 10k time (low 40 minutes) of my early 40s. At that point, perhaps, the Couch will offer itself irresistibly, and I shall subside into post athletic indolence.

 

As they say, “5k to Couch..”.

 

Jan 2022