IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:Running a half marathon was not the ego boost that it should have been, writes ADAM BROPHY.
I’M AFRAID I’ve hit my chronological tipping point. As you move through life, bumping into things, breaking them and sticking them back together, you find that, with application, you improve at disciplines at a certain rate in direct proportion to the effort put in.
Because it is your rate and your effort, you have a lifetime of experience at gauging your own personal improved performance based on your endeavours.
This curve is built around awareness of your natural ability combined with some personal insight into your attitude to work compared with others. In my case, in relation to most matters physical, I can predict athletic performance by accepting that I have little or no sporting prowess, but am in possession of a grim determination that usually sees me right when I put my mind to things. Not any more it seems.
I run. Not like a gazelle, like a just-shot giraffe making for the horizon, tongue lolling and, at longer distances, eyes rolling. I started late after devoting my 20s and early 30s to playing chicken with cardiac arrest and diabetes, but when the elder child began to think the extra flesh around my middle was there for her amusement I decided it had to go.
The missus wrestled the carving knife from my hands. I hit the streets. The missus convinced me nobody would take me seriously as a streetwalker, never mind pay me. I bought a pair of running shoes and away we went.
I started slow and never got much quicker. But I found that I could predict accurately my time in most distance races from 10k up to marathon, based on training schedules. I’d set targets, not ambitious ones, and make them. I figured improvement would continue with a maintenance of regime and a modicum of effort. Now, I’m getting slower.
I ran a half marathon last weekend, four minutes slower than the same race last year. Four minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is. It’s seismic. Worse, I was easily outpaced by my much younger sister-in-law.
The training had gone okay, it suggested the race would go much has it had done the past couple of years. That I’d rumble along for the first half, pick up the pace from mile seven and sail through the last mile at a gallop, finishing with a smug smile on the old visage.
Nah, it was all rotten. Everything hurt and refused to work smoothly, never mind increase tempo. For the first time ever my lungs piped up and demanded I give up the cigs for proper, stating that “having a couple with drinks” doesn’t wash as an excuse anymore for chugging the nicotine.
Then the rest of the body chimed in and asked me to consider forgoing the few drinks as well. For a time it felt that all my good friends wanted to leave me.
By mile seven we had made the top of the hill and I waited for my Samson strength. In the distance Delilah scampered away with shears in hand, safe in the certainty she could easily outpace me.
My family awaited at mile 10. Mother, wife and daughters. Three generations at the roadside, hoping to up the spirits. Mother and wife were tactful. Eldest daughter asked, “Why are you so far behind Joey?”
The younger one peeped me a shy smile, but I could tell she was ashamed of me, not only for my ridiculous shorts and bony knees, but also for my humiliation at the hands of the next half-generation.
Head down, I hurtled further up the track. I wanted an Ovett burst, I got a John Hayes rumble, only much, much slower.
At the finish, exuberant sister-in-law Joey waited. We complimented each other on completing. She bounced from one 24-year-old foot to the other. My feet welded to the tarmac. Mother, wife and kids arrived.
“Did Joey beat you, dad?” asks inquisitive elder, sniffing the first hint of mortality.
“She did, all right, no bother to her.”
“Ah well. Can I have your Mars bar?”
My one token from the finishing pack is taken and wolfed. With that she squeals off with her cousins. I don’t know if she thinks my superpowers are gone, but I know they are.
People always say to you at the end of races that the time doesn’t matter, completing the thing is what’s important. These people are obviously off their heads. I don’t go running round like an eejit for the good of my health. I do it to boost my ego. Major reconstructive surgery is now required to achieve ego boostage. Starting with a Tonya Harding style iron bar to ever-so-bouncy, young sister-in-law’s shins.