The Fat Bloke Diaries
Episode Thirty-
I’ve been back to my local running track
this week. I pounded the oval and ran my longest distance yet: two and a half kilometres.
That sounds so much longer than one and a half miles, don’t you think? Either way,
it’s around a quarter of the distance that I’m obliged to travel in September’s Great
Yorkshire Run.
And my Beloved came out with me this time too. I left my MP3 player
at home, safe in the knowledge that we’d keep each other going. It was lovely to
have her with me, and it would have been great to have someone to talk to, if either
of us had been able to talk once we got going.
We started off well enough, running
the first 300 metres together, but then she felt that I was holding her back – or
was it that I couldn’t keep up with her? – and we both settled into our own natural
pace. It wasn’t long before she was half a lap in front of me but I knew I’d catch
up with her soon enough. She has speed but no stamina.
And so it proved. Pretty soon
she slowed to a walk, gasping for breath. My gentle plod wasn’t fast and it certainly
wasn’t pretty, but it was eating up the ground between us. I had a vision of an old
Bugs Bunny cartoon in my head, with me playing the role of the tortoise. I gradually
closed the gap until I could almost reach out and touch her, and then… and then she
got her second wind, streaking away into the distance. Well, not streaking exactly,
but you know what I mean.
We repeated this pattern several times. She shot off around
the track, I fell behind at a steady rhythm until she ran out of steam and walked
for a while, allowing me to get nearer and nearer until she took to running again.
I got angrier each time this happened but daren’t increase my pace for fear of burning
all my energy. Perhaps I should have taken a pork pie with be to give me a boost
halfway? I finally caught up with her at the end of our agreed time as she stood,
hands on hips, taking in huge gulps of air and waiting for me to finally finish.
That’s when I did ‘the man thing’. I stepped up several gears, slapped a stupid grin
on my face and shot past her, high stepping and pumping my arms in full-
The problem with her being with me but not staying with me was that I had nothing
to take my mind off the tedium of running. No Beloved chat and no much loved music
meant that I had to resort to listening to the tunes stored in my head.. This would’ve
been fine apart from the fact that I had one particular song stuck in there that
I couldn’t shift. Yet it was precisely the correct beat to keep my legs pumping consistently.
And so it was that I circled my local track while mumbling my own incomparable and
incomplete version of Bela Lugosi’s Dead by veteran goth rockers, Bauhaus.
I don’t
know if you’re familiar with this particular number but I’d be willing to bet that
it won’t feature on many runners’ list of inspirational training tracks, and especially
there won’t be many runners breathlessly singing their own badly remembered version
from 25 years ago. I haven’t even heard it recently, but I do recall that it has
a relentless driving drum track and very little else. It’s a sparse, gloomy number
that fills much of its nine minutes by simply repeating the title. Or at least my
version did as it carried me around the track. There must be other words, but at
the time ….
‘Bum-
You could see how
encouraging that would be, I’m sure.
The annoying thing was that my beloved had a
list of things that she’d noticed and wanted to discuss on our cool-
We went home, stayed in with a bottle and put a film
on. I saw no irony whatsoever in watching Run Fatboy Run with an icepack on my knee.
© 2009 Shaun Finnie