Monk Quixote

One of the nice things about Fetchev­ery­one, the run­ning com­mu­nity and per­fo­mance record­ing web­site I belong to,  is the cer­tainty it can bring to spe­cific state­ments — like ‘Prague is a minor city in Wim­bleshire’, ‘*User­name deleted*  (who I have still to meet) is, or at least was, a twat’, or ‘I ran my fastest marathon at a faster pace than 90% of all my other runs in 2008′ and that kind of thing.

Too much lemon septus

So today I can say with sat­is­fac­tion that I ran fur­ther than I have since Oct 3rd last year. I even ran an extra mile because I found that the tow­path remains shut on the other side of the Thames (I sus­pect the Barnes Social­ist Mud­dy­fun­ster Front is enjoy­ing it’s splend­ing iso­la­tion from those orri­ble Mort­lakeians and Kewia­ia­ni­a­ni­ans and so they have extended the ‘none shall pass, not even read­ing Vogon poetry’ period until after the elec­tion. I don’t believe their ‘it was wet’ excuse.). So I had to run an extra mile dou­bling back on myself

I was passed by at least two V50s, out for their Sat­ur­day con­sti­tu­tion­als. One of them waved after he ambled past. Chee­rio, he waved, with­out real­is­ing the homi­ci­dal mael­strom in my head at that moment. I was lis­ten­ing to an audio­book — Tran­si­tion by Iain Banks. It con­tains scenes of extr­reme tor­ture and gra­tu­itious for­ni­ca­tion. It is about the bank­ing melt­down, moral­ity, and respon­si­bil­ity. I have to take my head­phones off when ‘The philoso­pher’ bits come on, and lis­ten out for the change of accent that sig­ni­fies a new nar­ra­tor. To say it’s grim is putting it mildly. It’s a bril­liant book, and bril­liant con­cept, it’s just that for a remark­ably mel­low man, Mr Banks has a really nasty streak.

Really. Nasty.

But despite this extreme provo­ca­tion, I did not string the V50s up by the goolies, and cover them in paper cuts and lemon juice. Or attach elec­trodes any­where. Funny that if it were a film or a game, this story would almost cer­tainly be banned.

Any­hoo, run­ning. It’s a beau­ti­ful day, and it’s my first proper week back run­ning for a long time — five times this week. Each time I stop I for­get in my head, and each time I start I remem­ber in my mus­cles. I love plod­ding longer dis­tances. I love the ups and downs of the endor­phins and glu­cose in my sys­tem — the odd, almost orgas­mic highs where your whole body tin­gles and cur­rents wash up and down your ner­vous sys­tem, fol­lowed inevitably a mile or so later by a sugar low and feel­ing like death. And then real­is­ing your not going to die, and build­ing up to another, smaller, peak of exhil­a­ra­tion, until again, that fades, and you’re sink­ing again.

It’s funny to be aware that your head’s not in con­trol of this. Nei­ther is your heart, or your lungs. It’s mus­cles and nerves — fibres twitch­ing away inside what­ever skin bub­ble you inhabit. Twitch, twitch, twitch. And the con­nec­tions that form, again and again, no mat­ter how many times you’ve done it before, or how long since the last time.

A mem­ory — a mus­cle mem­ory. Eupho­ria, fol­lowed by pain. Addic­tive, and destructive.

Bliss. Bal­lar­dian, Banksian, bliss.