running widows, neglected friends,
sporadically orphaned children and anyone
and everyone who has been denied our time and energy by our
relentless – and, perhaps to you, unfathomable – obsession
with putting one foot in front of the other. Capitalising on a
brief window of self-awareness and remorse – and a rare
gap in my training diary – I’d like to beg forgiveness for
the transgressions of all runners. We’re sorry. We’re not
bad people, but we know we have done bad things. We
are just runners.
So this is an open apology and thank-you note to
all the long-suffering partners, friends and family who
have put up with our absences and abstinences, the early
mornings and early nights, the chat about lactate threshold
and elastic energy return, the pervasive hum of our sweaty
kit and the cupboard-space land grabs of our ever-expanding running-
shoe collections. A series of apologies, in fact, but more of those later.
First, a word on the runner’s condition.
To be a runner is to lead a double life, our running and non-running
lives locked in a battle for our resources. Being a runner means continual
negotiation between indulging our time-consuming passion and not being
a terrible human being to everyone in our non-running lives. It may not be
loaded with the emotional betrayal of an affair, or the physical and mental
ravages of an addiction, but, at its worst, it can drive us to selfishness
and sneakiness, skewed priorities and regrettable decisions,
all in pursuit of time on our feet.
et’s start with the obvious: all the times when
we’re not there. Those Sunday brunches with
friends, after-work drinks, kids’ football matches
and tennis tournaments, anniversaries, birthdays,
weddings, bar mitzvahs...every occasion missed
when the entry in our training plan trumps the
entry in our non-running diaries. To you, it may seem
like just another run, but for us it is a vital piece of
a jigsaw we’re painstakingly piecing together
to complete a picture of us crossing a finish
line or achieving some other milestone that
SEPTEMBER 2019 RUNNERSWORLD.COM/UK 059WRITTEN APOLOGY