running

Recession Runner

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If, like me, you’re subscribed to Runner’s World (other running magazines are available) and your email address is on several running shop mailing lists, you probably can’t get through your front door of an evening without wading through pullouts full of offers on sexy new running kit.

“Christmas is coming! Gadgets! Brightly coloured running jackets for half the cost of your monthly mortgage payments! Christmas! Buy these funky new shoes, even though the old ones don’t need replacing yet! Christmas! A little pouch to hold your earbuds when you’re not using them, that you never knew you needed! CHRISTMAS!”

Is it Christmas, is it? Blow me sideways.

I’m by no means living on the breadline, but since the coffers of QPR have monopoly on my disposable income I have to be pretty frugal about my running habit. I waited a year to be able to afford a Garmin (it lives in a glass case like the rose from Beauty and the Beast) and I upgrade my running shoes every birthday – if they wear out before then I get wet feet and that is that. I’d love to just pop into Sweatshop like it’s the corner shop and pick up a new pair of merino running tights every week, but the price of one new pair of Nike strides buys me match tickets to both Doncaster and Yeovil including the booking fee. So I make do.

Of course, if you’re serious about running you need to invest in the proper gear, and those merino tights will pay for themselves. If you’re that serious, you probably don’t go to Doncaster and Yeovil every weekend to watch QPR pass the ball around midfield until everyone dies of boredom. But if you’re just starting out, you don’t want to spend a lot of money on kit only to find out you’re really not the running type. You want enough money left for the bottle of wine you’ll deserve later.

That being said, you don’t mess around with running shoes – if you’re going to spend money at all, spend it here. It’s cheeky, but you can get yourself gait tested for free at all good running stores without an obligation to spend, and it’s worth doing every time you buy. I’ve always had fantastic service at Sweatshop, while a friend of mine keen on barefoot running raves about the London Victoria branch of Run and Become where they do your gait test outside in natural conditions rather than on a treadmill. You can be recommended a pair of running shoes that suit your style but then go online to get them cheaper from sites like Wiggle or Sports Direct, although is worth noting that the shop will stock mostly new styles and it doesn’t necessarily follow that two generations of the same model of shoe will wear the same. I’ve been caught out by this before, falling head over heels in love with the Asics Gel-Cumulus 12 – when they finally wore thin I wanted to get exactly the same ones, but they’d been discontinued and replaced with the Gel-Cumulus 14. Assuming they’d be the same but with go faster stripes I bought them without ever trying them on, and my shins have never been the same since. Investment doesn’t necessarily mean expense though. Shop around, find a bargain price for a good name brand, and you’ll be starting out on the right foot. Ha ha.

This next paragraph is something only 50% of you will be able to relate to – how to keep the ladies in check. To get this right, I would say try on as many sports bras as you can lay your hands on and find out what sort of style suits you most – some have support on three sides, some are more like crop tops, some use compression technology (for which read: basically gaffer taping them to your ribcage). You will find that there really are only a handful of designs and it’s possible to get something similar to the big brand bras for around £10 from the sites I mentioned earlier – not as durable, but not bad to begin with. Of course if you’ve got the coin you can buy a good Shock Absorber and never again suffer the ignominy of two black eyes, but let’s face it, who can afford just one of those, let alone enough for a rotation? I run four times a week and wearing the same bra twice is as acceptable as turning one’s underpants inside out to get another day’s wear. Boys: that means it’s NOT acceptable. Just FYI.

From then on, it’s pretty much a case of taste. The important thing is to feel comfortable, so it goes without saying don’t persevere with fashionable hi-tech tights if they make you feel vulnerable or hip-skimming short shorts even Miley Cyrus would think twice about going out in. But that doesn’t mean you’re destined to slink around in paint spattered cotton tees and your dad’s old joggers hoping nobody sees you.

Personally, I swear by Primark‘s plain £3 leggings. Heresy, I know, and no comparison with technical wicking fabrics, but they are comfortable and easily washed, and cheap enough that I can have 4 pairs on rotation. They only have a shelf life of a few months before the seams start to pull but that should be enough for a new runner before upgrading to those merino strides. If tights are a little too budgie-smuggler for you, good old Sports Direct has never let me down for shorts – look up football shorts too as they can often be cheaper than running ones. I also find that the men’s shorts are cheaper than the women’s and fit me much better too – I don’t know who they design girls’ running shorts for but it certainly isn’t Mediterranean curves…

With the popularity of exercise on the rise, and particularly in the post-Christmas stuffing/New Year’s Eve resolution period, you will quite often find the cheap and cheerful seasonally stocked stores, like Primark and (oddly enough) Lidl, doing a range of affordable sports clothing. It’s purely a matter of chance what you find when you’re there, and their ranges are often short-lived, but they’re always worth a snoop. My mum is always picking up jackets, tights, tops and other random accessories for under £15 (often less) but you’ll be hard pushed to go in twice and find the same thing, so treat them like you would thrift shops and grab a bargain when you can. Of course, they can be a false economy so be careful not to end up buying a load of crap you don’t need – armbands with tiny flashing lights that last ten minutes, I’m looking at you – but go in with an open mind and you’d be surprised what you can come out with.

A particular favourite haunt of mine is good old eBay. The trick is in using the right search terms – although the function is much more sophisticated than it used to be and often knows what you mean better than you do, you don’t want to restrict your options too much or go on a wild goose chase chasing the wrong item. So, if you are looking for a ladies’ grey running top in size 14 don’t search “ladies grey running top size 14”, because you’ll end up with listings made by thoughtful eBayers who entered loads of detail into the title, but miss out on those people who wanted to get rid quick and just entered “running top” and a blurry iPhone photo taken in the dark. Bit of a risk, but chances are the second listing will go for much less. Especially in January, when Christmas rejects find their way on there – in fact this year eBay is running a promotion for sellers for exactly this purpose, making it cheap and easy to shift unwanted gifts. Later in the year you may also find event branded T-shirts that have languished in the bottom of someone’s drawer for years until the summer wardrobe rotation – the finisher’s tee from the 2003 London Marathon was a trophy once upon a time, but Dave isn’t exactly wearing it to the pub these days. Straight onto eBay it goes. Cynical, yes, but then one man’s trash is another man’s treasure 🙂

So you’ve got your shoes from last season, your butt-skimming shorts and your ‘Flora London Marathon 2003’ running vest. All you need now is motivation, and no amount of money can buy that. If you own a smartphone however you can download any number of GPS-enabled running apps for free. I have used RunKeeper in the past which allows you to track many different sports, and which links to diet apps like MyFitnessPal and social networking like Facebook an Twitter accounts. There’s also Map My Run, which also tracks calorie intake, or Strava which rewards you with trophies for various achievements both for beating your own records and other people’s – almost everyone at work has this, I can’t tell you how violently competitive it gets when two people discover they run the same stretch of road. And for those needing a little more stick than carrot willing to spend a whopping £1.99, you’ve got to try Zombies, Run! – a principle that’s kept me motivated for years – where the sound of zombies chasing you through your earphones gets the heart rate going either way.

I’m sure you’ve worked this out by now, but this isn’t an article full of links to current deals and offers. There’s two reasons for this: firstly, those sorts of articles are only really helpful for about a fortnight, until the product sells out or the price goes back up; and secondly I’ve got better things to do than shop around for other people. Far too lazy for that. No, this is just me sharing a few helpful principles for making your running budget go further and ideally it’ll be something you can come back to again and again without losing relevance. It’s also worth pointing out that I am by no means endorsing the use of improper gear that doesn’t provide the correct support in the long term. If you are serious about running and can afford to invest properly, then for God’s sake do. I’m just pointing out that you needn’t remortgage the house to buy running kit if all you do is Parkrun once a week, or be alienated by the prohibitive cost of what should be a free sport and stick to the sofa instead. Running is for everyone. Even Championship football fans.

Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire

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This time last year, my mother and I had been rejected for the London Marathon, and fearful that we wouldn’t be able to raise the minimum amount required for a charity place, decided instead to enter Edinburgh. Although mum had run London in 2000 (13 years younger and 5 stone lighter, as she reminded me regularly) it would be my first marathon and the longest distance I had run beyond a half.

We arranged regular weekly runs together, we calculated the miles we would need to cover, we looked up training plans and exercises and advice on form. We tried carb gels and energy drinks and protein bars and identified which ones made a difference and which ones inflicted us with Montezuma’s revenge. As we upped our running distances each week we tried all sorts of weird and wonderful kit until we found what we were most comfortable in (as it turns out two bras, two bumbags and a brand loyalty to Asics). And finally, having planned a run/walk strategy that we could both deal with, we plotted a 24 mile walk up and down the Thames path one sunny Sunday in May so we knew what it felt like just to cover the distance.

We forgot one thing. Any guesses?

The Thames path is my favourite running route for many reasons. It’s like a cross section of London, carrying you alternatively through both affluent and poor areas, historical sites and new developments, industrial concrete grey, warm fiery brick and fifty shades of vibrant green. Hugging the river’s edge is like having a Sherpa with you every step of the way; not one of those fishwife GPS trackers you get in cars that shout at you to U-turn, more like a St Bernards gently nudging you in the right direction when you’re too tired to care. Depending on where you pick it up from you can follow it as far as your feet will carry you, and yet never be far from public transport if that turns out not to be anywhere near home.

Our hike that day was due to start at Embankment, where we would track the Thames going west along the north bank all the way to Kew bridge, and then over the bridge to the south bank which we would follow back to Wandsworth and eventually home. Literally bouncing out of the station like a pair of joeys (to the surprise of some hipsters doing the walk of shame), we cheerfully zigzagged around the Houses of Parliament and the evergreen gardens of Chelsea and in no time found ourselves alongside the peaceful Fulham Palace Park. We were still pretty fresh, not to mention feeling smug about our healthy breakfasts and our energy bars, when my mum look wistfully across the water at an ice cream van parked outside the Star and Garter on the Putney side.

“I want a proper 99. Haven’t had one in years.”
Like the sort of white lie you tell a child to avoid a tantrum, I said something I didn’t really intend to honour. “If he’s still there on the way back we can get one.” I stopped short of raising the fact that would be in something like 18 miles time.

Next up was Hammersmith, a prime example of schizophrenic London. Only a few hundred yards inland you can find your standard rough looking estates, chicken shops and graffiti. The strip along the water’s edge however is like something out of a costume drama – all picturesque pubs and impeccably groomed bankside gardens. We planned which of the gingerbread houses we would buy when we won the lottery and where we would moor our modestly furnished longboat. And then we smelled food. Delicious, gastropubby, hot, nourishing food. And then we looked at our Powerbars, and realised they weren’t going to cut it.

Not yet being even halfway we didn’t exactly panic, but it was a bit of a dampener on our otherwise bright mood. Either the psychosomatic effect of the smell or the fact that we were actually getting hungry started to hit us, as the needle on our fuel gages brushed the red line. By the time we passed Chiswick Eyot and lost sight of a bridge in either direction, mum was flagging hard. The energy bars rationed for the whole journey were almost through, and I could tell her temper was shortening. To make matters worse, I had optimistically spotted Kew Bridge two bridges too early, meaning that after three times declaring us nearly there she was inclined not to believe me when we did reach it.

And as the path leading up to the main road and the bridge crept into view, so did something else. Probably the world’s most expensive sandwich shop.

I can’t say it was worth nearly ten quid for two sandwiches (handmade in a mere HALF HOUR and lovingly packaged in chic little origami parcels, which we immediately and unceremoniously tore off) but if you’d given me a scabby donkey wrapped in a poncho right then I wouldn’t even have stopped to ask for salsa. How did we forget food? After all the planning we had done – lists of accessories, hours agonising over whether to wear shorts or tights, hiding bottles of water all over our persons – how did we forget the only thing a person can’t run without: fuel?

I can take a stab at a couple of reasons for this – for starters both mum and I were still a little preoccupied with losing weight and somewhat foolishly were concerned with taking on too many calories, rather than concentrating on taking on enough. In worrying about overeating we had massively underestimated how many calories it takes just to walk that far. It’s not that we didn’t know that you need a lot of fuel to run, we just assumed that walking used a lot less. Lesson very much learned. The whole point of the walk was, after all, to find out what we would need to cover that distance; what we learned is that staying on your feet for that long requires fuel, even if you are only walking. I don’t know why even I assumed walking would take a small fraction of the calories required for running – just existing means a minimum of around 1300 calories each day for me. Fundamentally though, I don’t think either of us are at the stage of thinking of food as fuel. We started with what we liked and then chose the items most likely to help, not the other way round. Hence forgetting to take on some slow-burning carbs and mincing around with fashionable pods of glucose instead. What a pair of wallies.

And we still had 10 miles to go. As soon as the last bite of her tuna sandwich was gone my mum’s mood picked right back up and even the prospect of another 3 hours of walking didn’t immediately dispirit her. We were going back the way we came on the south side of the river now now though, even less populated than the north, and being overtaken by the same dog running rings around us put her a bit on edge. I had the Runkeeper app going on my iPhone, tracking our route and pace, and I could see our mile timings were getting slower and slower. I know from experience that when your feet start to weigh heavy is when you need to get a bloody move on to avoid the psychological wall, and that the longer spent on one’s feet is less time spent relaxing them, but in seeing how far we’d come on the other side of the river mum was struggling with the constant reminder of the distance left and we slowed. To make matters worse, what should have been a wonderful inspiring view became endless miles of GREEN GREEN AND MORE GREEN. Almost every day I marvel how lucky I am to live in a city and still be surrounded by nature. NOT TODAY.

When that bloody dog finally scampered off ahead – not sure if I was more pleased it was gone or annoyed that it had overtaken us – we were almost as far as the first of the rowing clubs that populate the south side, and finding a dry concrete bank used by the rowers to drag their vessels to the water, we decided to rest for ten minutes. By this time every little niggle was a nightmare, and mum had to switch to my spare pair of socks to alleviate the pain of a blistered heel while I basically bathed in Tiger Balm and stretched. The break seemed like a failure to keep up the pace at the time, but in retrospect we should have planned one much earlier and restored our energy instead of plodding on at a soul destroying speed.

Only a couple more miles to Putney, I thought, if that. If we push on we’ll be back in Wandsworth and turning into Garrett Lane in time for dinner. My optimism did not help mum. I was told to shut up.

So, we hadn’t planned our fuel properly, or our rests. Rookie errors. We’ve learned a lot about intake of carbs and effort levels since then, and if there’s a running magazine or training plan we haven’t read between us in the last year, I wanna know about it. But what we stumbled upon next was something I can’t ever imagine Runners World recommending.

Approaching Putney Bridge the pubs became more frequent and the ducks less so. The path widened to a pavement which became a road, and on that road was parked… the ice cream van. I’m telling you now – however much fuel your body needs your soul wants its fair share too. Like a pair of Enid Blyton characters we skipped up to the window and ordered two 99s covered in red syrup with two Flakes in each. I can’t speak for the nutritional value of a double Flake 99 but I can confidently speak for the morale boost (not to mention rediscovered sense of humour) it gave us on our final three miles home. Of course we had deserved it, but I don’t subscribe to the carrot and stick approach to exercise because it’s a system too easily duped, so I didn’t see it as a reward. Fairly obviously, it was no longer a fuel issue either, unless the E numbers in the optimistically named “raspberry syrup” are some kind of superfood. I saw it as a symbol of pure childish joy, the thing that makes me enjoy a sport I am so totally uncompetitive at. I run so I feel like I’m 4 again. I run so I can still tear about with boundless energy, like I did when I didn’t care about grownup things and wasn’t afraid of zombies. I run just because I can.

All I remember of the rest of the trip was openly and hysterically giggling at a man in tight stonewashed jeans pulled up so high he had a full-on camel toe. 29 and 55 years old respectively, and that amused us for a good forty-five minutes. For all our diligence and earnest, the camel toe and the ice cream are what we always talk about when we talk about that walk. I checked the estimated calories spent when we got home – 2,316 according to my Runkeeper, set to my height and weight. 150% of the calories I usually use in a whole day spent in one walk. No wonder we were so crotchety until we got that sandwich and ice-cream. I introduce you, dear readers, to the definition of the word hangry.

So what did we learn? What we knew all along – that in life, a person needs food, water, and a little bit of joy.

Leatherhead Fire Station 10k

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The Leatherhead Fire Station 10k on Remembrance Sunday coincides with the anniversary of the running club I belong to, Clapham Chasers, and is often well attended by the club members. This year was no exception, with a staggering 88 of the 338 registered to run wearing the blue and green strip. Although I’ve been with the Chasers on and off for 18 months now, it was the first time I’d entered a race wearing the strip and travelled with the club. What an occasion to choose.

Leatherhead medal

The race itself is charmingly unfussy, impeccably run and set against a stunning backdrop of the Surrey countryside. Picture postcard thatched houses snuggling up against the still green hills, all backlit by a bright, low winter sun. It’s probably no more remarkable than any other pocket of suburbia but to a perennial city-dweller like me it was breathtaking.

Organised by the fire station where the race begins and ends, there was a feeling of being in very safe hands. In comparison, I’d managed to make a complete mockery of the word ‘organised’. I’d been forced to unpack and repack my bag about ten times the previous night, spooked by a last minute weather forecast check which had the temperature during the race as low as 3 degrees. And I still managed not only to leave important gubbins behind but also to end up with a bag too small to hold my warm clothes while I ran. Having been focused on marathon and half marathon training for most of the year I had all but forgotten how to pace myself for the distance, and it was also the first race since I short-sightedly threw out my old long sleeved running tops in a tidying fit. Ice that cake with the fact that South West Trains weren’t running between Clapham Junction and anywhere useful to me, and you’ll understand why I was so jittery.

The race started a little after 10am with a minute’s silence for Remembrance Sunday. A couple of parish notices about a car that was blocking the path and the arrangements for the race start were delivered by one of the firemen calling down from the top of a tower. No PA systems, no cheerful pop songs I don’t recognise or poorly balanced dance music, no sponsor’s messages – just a gentle hubbub and birdsong. Wonderful stuff. Other race organisers take note: Radio 1 wannabes spouting hyperbole might stir up a bit of last minute adrenalin in some runners apparently not excited enough about a 10,000m race, but they don’t do it for me. On the other hand, if a firemen tells me to start running I run. I don’t even wait to find out which direction to go.

The Arctic chill I was expecting never really materialised – in fact I’d go as far as to say it was perfect running weather. Lovely bright sunshine in a clear sky (definitely needed the sunglasses more than the earwarmers), crisp cool air and not a raindrop in sight, it was the sort of weather that smells cold but doesn’t really feel it. Within half a mile I’d relegated my thin running jacket to my waist and by halfway my hands, usually bereft of circulation even at the height of summer, were too warm in my light gloves.

We’d been warned that the course was pretty much uphill for the first 5k, and after talking to a couple of people who’d run it before we had to abandon the hope that that was an exaggeration. The first time someone asked me what time I thought I’d do, I gave a tentative “56 minutes would be nice”. The second time I’d downgraded it to “Erm, I’d take 58 and change.” The third time – well, I’d given up on finishing at all and just asked that my remains be returned to my loved ones if I dropped down dead by the side of the road. For God’s sake, I even filled out my next of kin info on the back of my race number.

Either because I was expecting Kilimanjaro, or because of the hill sessions I’ve been doing with my mum, the treacherous terrain turned out to be pretty manageable. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not lying about the hills; but by starting on them you are forced to take a steady pace and are more likely to end up with a negative split overall. The second main incline – I don’t know why I’m differentiating, it’s just one enormous incline that gets steeper faster instead of levelling off – was so severe at one point that I actually resorted to marching up it, and in doing so went faster than I would have running. A tactic to remember for future races.

Then, rather wonderfully – and I really think this was the psychological turning point – we went back down the hill. Sounds obvious, and it stands to reason that on any course set in a loop what goes up must come down, but I have run races where the downhill travel after a steep hill gets somewhat absorbed into a longer, shallower, less satisfying descent and you end up wondering if you’re on that optical illusion spiral staircase, destined always to climb. Not here. Despite being mostly solid ground underfoot it felt very like fell running, where the art of the descent is in retaining enough control to land safely on uneven ground – less like running and more like tumbling. I tend to run hills according to effort rather than speed, meaning I plod going up and freewheel on the way down like Phoebe from Friends, keeping my heart rate as level as possible. It’s not necessarily the most sensible tactic but in this race it worked just fine.

In keeping with the no frills nature of the event, there was just one water station (trestle table) just after 5k, manned by two dedicated and no doubt freezing souls handing out plastic cups. Even with the narrow lanes there was no crowding and it was incredibly easy to pick up a cup of water, swallow a few gulps and drop the cup in a bin a little further on. No fear of tripping over hundreds of bottles or skidding about in a lake of Highland Spring.

From then on the course largely flattened out, save for a couple of hillocks and the odd bridge, and after levelling out the effect of first trudging up a hill then falling down it, it was easy to fall into a nice regular rhythm. Your classic race of two halves, to borrow the football pundits’ favourite cliché. Which set me up for a massive surprise – and a fit of nerves – when I did a bit of mental arithmetic and arrived at the conclusion that I was on course for closer to 55 minutes than 58. It didn’t seem possible given the slow start, but I was surprisingly comfortable in an 8:15ish pace and unwilling to let a runner from Wimbledon I’d spotted just ahead of me leave my sight so I stayed with it. Before long it turned out I had peaked a little too soon, my breathing suddenly so ragged that I failed to notice a marshal helping people cross the road up ahead and instead blundered out into the middle of three lanes of traffic where I had to wait a good 30 seconds to be let across. Slightly startled by the incident and about to succumb to the jelly legs I usually get when I reach the end of a race, I didn’t realise I was on the final stretch until I saw a clutch of supporters cheering me on with the blue and green flag of Clapham Chasers, and gave a bit of a sprint kick to prove I wasn’t giving up. And then I saw the clock – just ticking over 55 minutes, knowing that I passed it about 30 seconds after the start – and stunned, wrung out the very last of my breath to get across the timing mats. Thank God there wasn’t anyone taking pictures at the finish line – I must have looked like Munch’s The Scream.

We were greeted at the end by off duty firemen who took our timing chips and gave us our medals. There was no goody bag but frankly all that meant was that there would be less crap for me to take home to my poor long-suffering boyfriend and our full-to-bursting spare room. I’m a big fan of the less is more approach – so there weren’t any free granola bars or post run massages and the roads hadn’t been closed, but they were well marshalled, I got my nice shiny medal (I’m such a magpie), and I got a nice warm changing room which is a luxury in itself. The £15 entrance fee was very fair, and the small field made it very friendly to a crowdphobe like me. All in all a pretty idyllic race I would heartily recommend, and will definitely be running again.

My Garmin and my official chip time agreed on 54:45, which is the second fastest 10k race time I’ve ever done and the fastest in over two years, last set on a much flatter course. My achievements turned out to be nothing in comparison to those of Clapham Chasers as a club however; prizes for second and third men and the top three women all went to Chasers, as did the men’s team award. I’m more determined than ever to make up for the training time I lost when it was too cold or too wet or too dark to join the Chasers for the weekly social run, since my improvement rate when I run with them is unquestionable, and I will no longer persuade myself that I’m “just not a fast runner”. I’m not the fastEST runner, but if was 3+ minutes wrong about how fast I could go on this race then who knows how much more wrong I could be next time?

Leatherhead elevation

Running and Zombies

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To talk about my love of running, first I need to talk about zombies.

I have to explain that I am terrified of people. Not individual people; not Dolly next door or Harold Shipman or a hooded youth in a dark alley – I’ve been taught Muay Thai by an undertaker so I’m pretty handy – because I can gauge the danger posed by any given individual. Crowds on the other hand are a different beast. Crowds move as one organism despite being made up of many; crowds are unpredictable and move without purpose, are collectively half as intelligent as the least intelligent being within them, are always between me and the nearest exit to safety, filling all available space like an unconstrained liquid. To me, crowds look like hordes of bloodthirsty zombies.

I have a number of coping strategies for getting around every day, like waiting for a train to arrive that isn’t packed like a sardine tin but spending twice as long getting to work, or taking long-cuts that I know are less populated, or avoiding invitations to anywhere I’m unfamiliar with by pretending to be tired/ill/washing my goldfish. These are eccentricities at best and sticking plaster solutions to a bigger problem at worst, but they’re how I get by.

Luckily for me my good friends think is this more funny than sociopathic; the really good ones know when I need kid glove treatment and when I just need my socks pulling up. As well they should, it’s ridiculous. It is a ridiculous way to live my life. I live, work and socialise in the middle of London, and spend almost every weekend at the football, all home and most of the away games. You want to see zombie hordes? Try making a swift exit from the Ellerslie Road stand at Loftus Road at full time. It’s like Shaun of the Dead.

Back to the running. Two and a half years ago a work colleague persuaded me to come running after work; it turned out there was a small group of joggers who did laps around the Thames between Lambeth and Blackfriars bridges and you could go as fast or as slow as you wanted as long as you knew the route. I couldn’t run to catch a bus – something which was proven to be literally true on a number of infuriating occasions – and it took a lot of cajoling for me to eventually join them one day. Just as far as the end of the road, maybe 500 metres, then I had to stop and walk back. Same again next week, a little further the week after, until finally I managed a whole circuit, around 4.5k. My muscles shrieked, my fingernails tingled and my breath was ragged, but I was happy. It felt like bits of my body were finally roused from hibernation. I ached in places I didn’t know existed. But I still wouldn’t say I was a runner.

Then we were persuaded to sign up for a 10k in June. I had to try to make it a little further each week, be sure that I could cover the distance at the very least; not finishing was an embarrassment I could well do without. I started running on my own at weekends. I had no fancy GPS tracker or even a stopwatch, but I designed a quiet route near my home that I knew covered 1k in a loop and kept upping laps until I could complete ten. I kept up the midweek runs with work too, despite the increasing volume of people lured out onto the riverbank with the approach of summer. Without knowing it I was training, thinking about distances and speeds and getting proper running kit. Without realising it I was spending more and more time in the company of the zombies and I was doing fine.

I’m embarrassed to admit it was nearly a year before I realised the correlation between running and escaping. As I got faster and less ungainly each step I ran began to feel like the moment before a plane takes off, and I imagined myself lifting my heels high enough to leave the ground altogether and soar above the heads of the hungry hordes. Childish, definitely, but enormous fun. I found practical improvements in my state of mind too. When you’re hurrying along a busy pavement and you look for gaps in the crowds to dart in and out of you become accustomed to judging the length of time it will take you to reach that gap at your walking pace, and whether or not it will still be there when you get to it or if it will be consumed by the fluidity of the crowd. When you’re running along that same pavement, you have to think a lot quicker. Missing that gap at walking speed results in brushed elbows and mild embarrassment. Do that at a target 8.5 min mile pace and you might as well have St John’s Ambulance on speed dial. It does wonders for your mental acuity.

I choose to live and work in the middle of one of the busiest cities in the world. I choose to spend my spare time travelling up and down the country to increasingly packed stadiums, and throwing myself into packs of PB-chasing pavement pounders for anything from 30 minutes to 6 hours at a time. It would be too easy to lock myself in my front room 24 hours a day and simply avoid any possibility of confronting crowds, but then I wouldn’t experience that Olympic-final feeling every time I break a new personal record, or even complete a run I didn’t think I could start. Frankly, there are times when the front gate seems like the end of the road on that first outing to Blackfriars bridge, and I despair that I’ll never reach it. But then I remember: nothing will ever feel quite as wonderful as outrunning a zombie.