THE BRITISH 10K LONDON RUN
(Chip time 00:57:58)
Yesterday I ran 10 kilometres, in the mutually supportive company of 25,000 others. It was a personal first.

‘The British 10K London run’ does exactly what it says on the tin. It celebrates its city, and there’s queuing at the start.

For a first-timer, the weeks of technology preceding a major race day are pleasing. A fat pack arrives in the post. In tandem the related website displays a 3D route on which a turquoise disk whisks its sleek way between historic landmarks, along the roads to be run. It is the stuff of hypnosis. It comes close to precluding the need for participation.

The day came. At a Sunday morning hour at which, ordinarily, I would not be conscious, I was at Embankment tube station. The area was a configured star of veteran and one-off athletes replete with sport-top water bottles and mobile phone wielding relatives, dividing at tangents in the quest for loos and coffee stalls.

Safety-pinned sheets of A4 (on the reverse of which emergency contact details were penned for the event of collapse) displayed race numbers while red electronic chips sat proud of trainer laces, ready to register the time at which each person passed the start and finish lines.

The runners did not come in a standard shape. For every sinewy biology drawing physique there were angry curves. Charitable causes painted the crowd fluorescent: OCD and Alzheimer Society text alongside the somehow more emotive photographs of lone individuals in whose name the race was undertaken. A weather warning (extreme heat) had stipulated no fancy dress, tempering that very British need for the hairy to put on a tutu.

It was not, for me, an altruistic enterprise. The instances on which I have asked my friends to show their support for a selected cause with money seemed too recent and too many. I am stowing brownie points for a Channel crossing. This was a question of whether I could do what I had set out to do.

Ploddingly slowly, batches of people were ushered towards the arched start on Piccadilly. The ‘gun’ and we moved. A shot of elation carried me along Pall Mall, an element of nodding to the crowds, inner dialogue telling me they were there for me. The relatively small proportion of their time which would be spent with their runner in view lent this credibility.

‘Muscles have a memory’, my pacer had told me. Did mine know, half way along the Embankment, on the return lap, that this was distance unremembered? We were in a tunnel which swallowed the available air. 7k and my legs were buzzing with the need to stop but not enough for me to fail to appreciate the novelty of throwing an empty water bottle to the side of the road. In a society in which anything thrown is known there was a freedom to this. The discarded plastic crunched underfoot.

As we approached Parliament Street 'Chariots of Fire' blared from unseen speakers. 'I vow to thee my country' segued into a more buoyant 'Land of Hope and Glory', confirming this as an event neither for the nationalistically self-conscious nor anyone who can picture Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams.

Where did the final sprint come from? The finish in view, something in me remembered.

Much red, white and blue razzmatazz at Trafalgar Square and Horse Guards Parade. I felt proud, the 'goody bag' and primary-coloured medal small beside the achievement.

At the post race meeting point, my wonderful mother met me. She thinks I should be a year younger than I will be on my next birthday and doesn’t know where the time has gone. I don’t know where it went either. I trap morsels of it in hours in which I do as I did yesterday.

This is my year for sporting feats in which the muscles remember and the memory follows.

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.