… is to win - as an individual … anybody who reads the blog of my gorgeous wife at Swandives will soon realise that running is very much part of our life. For me it’s what I do. I’ve always run. Ever since I was a kid. There have been times when I haven’t - the hippy phase (too stoned to, couldn’t give a stuff), the trashed journalist phase (too pissed), the fatboy phase (coke and donuts — ooh yeah, brothers and sisters), but most of the rest of the time I’ve run.

For the last year we’ve been running to get fit, lose fat and maybe set some personal bests. The City To Surf came first in August - 14km. It’s, as Olympic marathoner Steve Moneghetti says, the hardest fun run in the world. He isn’t kidding. I set out to run it in under 80mins and came in in 78:16 and 8785th out of 61,500. Quite blew me away it did. And a PB by more than 30 secs. The better half had her problems including bad blisters and an electrolyte reaction to something she drank yet still finished only 2mins outside her PB in 107:23, quite an incredible effort. So brave!
The Bridge Run, just nine days ago, was a mere 9km on a beautiful flat course. I hoped to run under 49:30 which is 5min 30 sec/km, I ran 44:16, under 5mins/km, and finished 66th out of 337 in my age group and 1291st - those are finishing line positions not Net result positions though, so I actually finished even higher. Talk about excited. A PB by 4:20!. My awesome wife smashed her own PB by more than 7 mins to run 62:24 to cap a stunning morning for us.
That all sounds pretty dull I’m sure but consider that it was the end of 459km of outdoor training and race running in just over 4 months. It’s a lot of pain so you need some gain at the end of the day. The results plus losing 15kg in that time are reason aplenty to do it - outside of the simple thing of running.
Sometimes, and only sometimes, running is freedom. Nothing is more free. When you are in tune with your body and everything is in sync, it’s perfect motion, it feels meant-to-be, it feels awesome. And it’s also about the head, about getting over hurdles like my lady did in the City To Surf - it plays hell with your mind, and there’s a strength to be gained by beating that and learning how to deal with it as well.
So I run. And I’ll keep running until this middle-aged body says ‘no more’. Right now, it’s a couple of weeks off to let the head and body heal and then we’ll be back into it. Summer’s coming and summer nights are meant for running. Yeah. I run.