The tunnel

Who would have thought that a bit of running could be so profoundly all-consuming? Training three times a week since October, for 30 minute to four hour runs, when dawn was cracking, between school pick ups, after work and through rainy, sleet ridden and some time snowy weekends.  There I plodded.  Incessantly.  And now I am out the other side, with a little time to write my bloggings again and start fresh things…  My body creaks, my brain is sludge and my feet are irreparably wrecked.  Hey ho.

I have come to realise in the last few weeks that I have been up to my long old neck in sand.  Hiding, postponing, avoiding reality by keeping ever so frightfully busy.  Whether it’s with Mental Health Mates walks, or school festival organising or trying to smash it at a fitness business, never mind the running, the running, the running, I am ever distracting myself from last summer.  And how impressive is that?  Not so very much.  How utterly delusional and awesomely good at real life avoidance am I?  So completely A Grade.  But as they say; “this too shall pass”.  And it is doing so, and life is slowly slowing down.  The dust is settling and the black dog is collaborating.  I am clanking over the ruts of the rollercoaster right at the end, when you’re just about done with the loop the loops of it all because your eyes and neck hurt.

And what was the toughest things over the last few months?  That running.  Or to be more accurate, the fundraising for that big run at the end.  That kept me awake at night.  That made my children call me twice, three times, before I answered, shifting back on to the present.  On reflection I may have put a teeny bit too much pressure on myself.  Why did I think it was a good idea to promise a charity to raise them a ton of money?  Oh yes.  Because when I promised this stuff I was swimming in the blackened waters of grief and was desperate to do something, anything for our charitable saviours.  But asking for money from friends and strangers is fundamentally unBritish, unfeminine and unpolite.  So after the initial wails, the cake trails and the car boot sales, I realised the only way to raise some pounds and stop feeling uncomfortable was to go to the polar opposite state and allow all awkwardness to elevate.   So my six-year-old and I hatched a plan to do just that.  The hook was to allow my children (including the toddler) to dress me as they wished for a few days, so that I could do the school and nursery runs, my errands, and life in general as a stay at home, sometime working mum, dressed in the most ridiculous, garish, glitter bombed garb possible.  All to drum up some cash and enthusiasm and awareness.

And it bloody well worked.  I was suddenly a grand up and I’d reached my fundraising target in order to run in the London Marathon.  Whooped-dee-do.

So you may have heard about that day.  It was the hottest the event had seen in a while.  Trackside it was 30 degrees C when a few weeks prior to 22nd April every last competitor, except maybe those elitist at the front, had been running in Ol’ Blighty’s worst, longest, crappiest winter in memory.  It was a cocktail for disaster, and indeed disaster stuck.  As well as a tragic fatality, I witnessed people dropping to their knees left right and centre, from Mile 6 to 26.  It was horrible.  It was hard.  So hard.  But I kept on plodding along, with my comrades in arms, the other 40,000 people out in the thick of it.  With our feet burning from the tarmac, and our shoulders roasting in the sun.

As well as seeing my family and friends along the way, and the sprint to the finishing line with Mud’s Tiger Feet blaring in the background to remind me of why I was there, my number one take away from the entire experience was just before I hit the 24th mile.

All the support from the crowd was amazing.  People calling your name, shouting encouragement and Godspeed was breathtaking, quite literally at times, and towards the end it was overwhelming.  Every runner I saw was shattered, physically and emotionally, and then, just before the 24th Mile marker, we entered the tunnel under Blackfriars in London, where no crowd was allowed to enter, and even staff members were scarce.  It was a dank corridor of solitude.  And in this unexpected sanctuary from the noise and the craziness, I saw true human brilliance.  This was my favourite moment of the entire day.  People stopped, took stock of each other, walked, embraced, held hands, sobbed, shouted, and just breathed.  All in the quiet and the privacy and cool of this tunnel, which I had whistled through in cars so many times before, which was suddenly like a cold cave of refuge.  This is where we relaxed, took a gulp of air and said a few words to each other to spur us on to the end.  Thank goodness for that tunnel and the talking I gave to myself ahead of the last push, tears streaming down my face.  If it hadn’t been for that moment of privacy, away from the spectators, in the refreshing and the recharging hush, I may well have passed out and not finished.  No joke.  But with the pats on the back and the war cries of the crowd, the drums beating and pulses of cheering to meet us, on went the smiles and the intakes of breath.  The show must go on all the way to the finishing line.

I worried as I approached that finishing line whether my grief, thus far stopped in its tracks by my continual busy, would resurface and take its grim hold.  But I am pleased to report that it doesn’t seem to have reared much of its skulking head, and now the summer is stretching out its golden arms.  Perhaps if it does I’ll remember that tunnel.  The weirdest of places to bring me comfort in a time of strife.

But for the moment, positivity and brightness are my middle names baby.  No dark tunnels today.

Before, during and after, some five and a half hours later…