The Fat Bloke Diaries

Episode Twenty-Seven – All Fall Down

I must be a proper runner now. Bits of me are starting to hurt.

I’ve had shin splints. I didn’t like that one but it was a valuable lesson about the importance of stretching. Not that I’ve really liked any of the niggles and aches that have come my way since I set off on this voyage of painful discoveries. They’re all unwelcome in their own special way but weirdly they’re all also rites of passage that all runners must go through. Again and again in some cases, I hear.

So currently I have mild aches on the inside of my knees, a little throbbing in the small of my back, a gentle pain in my hip and a bout of stitch that comes on regularly towards the end of my training. They’re becoming firm friends now, and I wear them like shiny badges of courage.

Of course my naturally thin and healthy Beloved carries none of these ailments. She runs as long as I do (but much faster) and doesn’t break sweat or appear out of breath. She’s a non-sickening pleasure to run with. But sometimes it’s nice to be out alone too, just me and the elements. Even in the grimmest ‘oop North’ parts of Barnsley it’s not too difficult to find fields and country lanes.

On the occasions that she sensibly declines my kind offer of running with me (usually because it’s raining, or too cold, or there’s a ‘Y’ in the day) I have to resort to other more tuneful but less shapely company.

The groovy tunes (I’m old) that have accompanied me through my life to date now carry me through my training runs. I strap my MP3 player to my arm and off I waddle. It’s a wonderful machine: small, loud and clear in delivery. If it were an actor it would be Danny DeVito enunciating Shakespeare. It’s technically better and far cheaper than the ubiquitous sexy i-machine that I deliberately avoided because I’m not in any way ‘trendy’. I’ve never been a victim of fashion and this instance is no different. My music maker clips to my arm and takes my head to places that my feet can’t, like 1973. I pound the tracks and the tracks pound my ears, each song chosen for its tempo, familiarity, uplifting theme and, above all, its complete lack of new-fangled dance music bum-tishery. I’m a fat bloke of the sixties, after all.

So the other day I had the armband on so tight that I was waiting for a doctor to say “one twelve over seventy”, and was happily shuffling along to Run to the Hills (Run? Hills? That’s not scheduled on my training plan for weeks yet!) by that popular beat combo Iron Maiden, when suddenly something small and black flew in front of my face. I thought it was a tiny bird at first, but then it shot back in front of my eyes in a sort of strange swinging motion. It was my precious little MP3 box. My erratic footfall had jostled it free from its arm clip and sent it hurtling around on its cable.

Stupidly I never thought to stop. I guess I was swept along by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (there’s a proper old NME term for you), or perhaps my very small brain was simply too busy forcing my burning lungs to contract and expand to think about it. I ran on, the minute player swinging like a lasso around my head and Bruce Dickinson bellowing with all his might in my ears. I fully expected the sounds to stop at any moment and to see the little machine fly into the distance but it, and apparently Iron Maiden, are made of sterner stuff. The cable is quite long and has a clip that I attach to my shirtfront. This clip held and amazingly so did the jack plug. Still the player played on and I jogged on.

Something had to give, and inevitably it was good old faithful gravity that brought a halt to proceedings. It overcame the centrifugal force of the flying yet tethered sound box and brought it curving down in a graceful loop around my legs. I didn’t really have time to appreciate the pure mathematical beauty of the arc though, as I came perilously close to doing a passable impression of an Imperial Walker downed by the entangling cable of a Rebel Snowspeeder. What, am I the only Star Wars fan here?

And of course with perfect comedic timing that was the moment that the group of ramblers appeared, doing their sniggering best to avoid the sweaty aging rocker with the bondage fetish.


© 2009 Shaun Finnie

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