Running Like a Girl: Notes on Learning to Run - Hardcover

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Alexandra Heminsley is a journalist, broadcaster, and ghostwriter. She is the books editor for Elle UK and a contributor to the BBC. She lives in Brighton, UK.

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Running Like a Girl

1

Not Born to Run

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

—Robert F. Kennedy

I don’t remember making the decision that I couldn’t run; it was simply one of those things that made me me, like my love of cheese or my distaste for men in turtlenecks.

My certainty that I couldn’t run was absolute, my envy profound of those who could, and my admiration for my flatmate boundless. She would appear at the front door, glowing from one of her regular routes around Regent’s Park or Hampstead Heath, and I would welcome her enthusiastically. We’d chat about what she’d seen, while she leaned at the kitchen counter sipping a glass of water and I sat on the sofa with my laptop propped on my knees like a windy baby.

“I wish I could run.” There is a certain comfort in saying it aloud. “It looks like so much fun,” I’d say, sighing, as she took off her running shoes. I felt a twinge of sadness, knowing that it was too late for me to start. I would reach for the TV remote with resignation.

As I watched my flatmate’s running clothes circulating hypnotically in the washing machine, I never questioned the casual lunacy of my conviction that I couldn’t run. I remember being six or seven and running being what I could barely wait to do during break time at school. And I remember being thirty, having total confidence that running was utterly beyond me. The change had been cumulative, something that I let happen to me, a state of affairs I succumbed to without question.

Somehow I had forgotten the itch in my legs when I was in school, looking up at the clock, back at the teacher, and out of the window. Soon. Then, the very second the bell rang, we would grab our coats and head outside to play whatever game we could think of, as long as it meant running around. We didn’t call it running at that age, because running was how we did everything, mittens trailing from our sleeves and braids whipping at our cheeks. We were just children doing our thing. We ran and we laughed. They were one and the same.

As a ten-year-old, I stood daydreaming at the start of the four-hundred-meter circuit. In the warmth of summer, I watched the sun shine through the pinprick holes in my navy blue shirt, noticing how it browned both my arms and the grass of the track. I would merrily run round it for as long as I could, sometimes straight across the middle if I fancied a change, until we were called back to lessons or until someone else needed the track.

Twenty years later, it was as if I had never run. It didn’t occur to me that I could. I wasn’t a runner, and that was that. Somehow I had lost sight of the fact that not being a runner and being unable to run were not one and the same.

I wasn’t the sporty type. It was as simple as that. I was a curvy girl with little or no competitive spirit. I rarely made a connection between bat and ball during games at school, and I neglected my body almost entirely for three years at university. Perhaps I broke into a run that time I was pushing my friend Clare down Cotham Hill in a shopping cart, and I know I danced on a podium a few times, but those were definitely the sum of my collegiate athletic endeavors.

Then I moved to London and joined the eternal treadmill of private gym membership. Each time I looked round a new venue, I told myself that this would be the one. This would be the gym that would make me fall in love with exercise. They never did. Once the oleaginous buzz of viewing the facilities, being given my workout profile, and trying the steam room for the first time was over, the magic faded and I returned to fleeting, guilty glimpses at my bank statement as I realized each visit was costing me more and more.

Back then I didn’t know that the gym was just sticky methadone to the heroin of running outdoors. How could pounding along on the treadmill, going nowhere in front of a wall of relentless rolling news, compare to the freedom of running along the seafront, looking up at a hovering seagull and finding yourselves neck and neck for a moment? Still I continued. Next came the (Madonna-influenced) yoga phase. Relaxing, but only as relaxing as it could ever be to race across the city and part with more money than I’d spend on three weeknight dinners for the sake of ninety minutes bending and sweating in front of myriad freelance Web designers and stressed-out fashion editors. Then came Pilates and even a flirtation with meditation.

Finally, after a summer of heartache followed by almost crippling depression, came the walking phase. After a hectic routine of lying under my coffee table weeping, I had reached a point where I had to get outside and see daylight. I wanted to feel the breath of warm air on my skin; I yearned to feel my blood circulate round my body again, and I needed to do it with a view that was not just that of a ceiling tile or a yogi’s tatty three-week-old pedicure. Half-deranged by weeks of erratic sleeping—nights spent enervated and panicky followed by sluggish, heavy-limbed days—I decided in desperation that physically exhausting myself might make the nights seem a little more welcoming. I longed to long for my bed, instead of seeing it as a sleepless battleground. I yearned to yearn to lie down at the end of the day, legs aching from use rather than the anxious jiggling they did under my desk for hours on end.

Thus began my walking phase. One day I up and left the house and didn’t return until nearly dusk. I began walking for hours at a time. Hampstead Heath, Regent’s Park, Hyde Park. I would leave the house on a Sunday morning and not return for three or four hours. Often I could barely remember the time I had spent away, as if the repetitive quality of my strides had hypnotized me. I would begin full of fire, longing to get away from the dirty streets, the dawdling pedestrians, the local shops whose owners had seen me tearstained and bedraggled during my summer of agony and bad eating. As the parks opened up before me, I would feel my spirits lift. I would romp around the heath, deliberately getting lost in a wooded area I didn’t recognize. I would stroll through rose gardens, wondering about the stories behind the blooms’ names. A tiny part of me I thought I had lost started to wriggle back to the surface.

I arrived home from my walks exhausted but noticeably lighter of spirit. My head felt as if someone had popped in and run a duster around it. I formed a truce with my bed. I cherished my time off the grid, uncontactable and alone. The coils that had spent endless nights tightening in my mind loosened a little; my imagination wandered toward the positive rather than the self-focused disaster-movie scenarios it had devoted itself to. I remain convinced that those walks in the summer of 2006 saved me. Not just because they restored my ability to sleep but because they delivered me that first germ of physical confidence. If I could walk for four hours, what might happen if I sped up . . . and then sped up even more? My heart had begun to believe that anything was possible. I had even let myself entertain the notion that maybe, just maybe, I was capable of going for a run.

It was this expansive spirit of optimism that inspired my first run to Queen’s Park a year later. If my heart could survive the pummeling it had taken, my legs must have more to give. I’d been taking three-hour walks regularly for about a year, so I figured I might be ready for a run.

That was it. I was going to run round the block. I had high hopes: the ass of an athlete, the waist of a supermodel, and the...