RUNNING SOLO

Last summer I joined a running club.

Given my long-held view of runners as vaguely irritating individuals with a habit of bouncing up and down at traffic lights, the move was something of an about turn.

I wasn't in it for the unsmiling lycra and the triathlon chat. I am half jewish after all. But I liked the idea of the wind at my back and of exercise under the sky in the removed stillness of a London park. At the very least it would be putting one foot in front of the other.

Admittedly, as for many of my undertakings of recent years, there was the 'this may be a way to meet a man' angle, which is at the heart of my ventures and which stops them from having a heart. It has found me scaling the rocky terrain of Patagonia (courtesy of a TV personality who someone told someone met her husband on a similar venture), trekking in Thailand (because I didn't know better) and was a part of what had me signing up to swim between islands. But that is a different story.

'The key is to do what you enjoy', I am told. But I enjoy lying on my sofa holed up watching the kind of Bette Midler schmaltz I can admit only to close girlfriends (and selected ones at that). I enjoy staring at the white light over my river, from my sitting room. I enjoy McFlurries and the hollow tubular long spoons that come with them. Somewhere along the way my tastes and my goals fell out of sync.

'Plenty of men run...', I am assured, by those in and out of the know. And so they do. They are varyingly serious about their endeavours, one end of the scale having 'done the 5th tri.. Box Hill?', the other tending 'to come along when work permits'. With both it can feel a little as if, faced with a flattish stretch of ground, there is a male-perceived need to cover it and then do something that is not as much fun.

There are those who talk the entire route. So far, flirting opportunities do not abound. A commitment to engage 3 men in conversation didn't produce optimum results: the first taking a call to his mobile in which he described a recent marathon as like the (even more) recent birth of his first child, the second seeking only to explain how a severe injury had brought him to my speed and the third..well the third was a woman. I think she may be a new friend. But I can't run and talk. It does justice to neither.

Gingerly, I've started to use terms like 'shin splints', not knowing quite what they mean but feeling that bit closer to legitimate in adopting them. Stylistically I vary. At best I am streamlined and running towards a future. At worst I complete the entire route with tracksuit bottoms back-to-front and a nagging sense they may be dragged down entirely at any stage. I still wear the t-shirt of the uninitiated and I look around me.

But I now count the shared Wednesday evening hour of the thwack of trainer on pavement and of the pat of shoe on grass as a happy one. Breathing in unison brings back the tandem of mountain walking and distance covered by small steps, side-by-side.

Saturday mornings are another pace. The meeting is at 9.45 a.m. sharp and it's fair to say a degree of humourlessness hangs in the pre-lie-in air.

'Chariot versus baby jogger' has just appeared among my emails..courtesy of the club's discussion forum of which I am unwittingly part. I rest my case. It seems I am not entirely in the club yet.