My New Life Gets Off to a Running Start

I blame the sneakers. I ought to have known it was a mistake to buy white ones. (What an awful word ‘sneakers’ is! In my youth we had plimsolls, spikes for athletics, and soccer or rugby boots, but never ‘sneakers’. Not even my friends shod in thick crepe-soled shoes called ‘brothel-creepers’ would have worn something as underhand as a pair of ‘sneakers’.)

Anyway, this morning, at about five-thirty of the clock, I lay in bed wondering what to do as for the first time in seven years I had no pressing need to get up and check my inbox to see what urgent news had to be announced on The Salvation Army’s international website, what emails were eagerly awaiting my response (I was five hours behind my UK bosses) or what messages needed to be forwarded to whomever the person using the website’s contact form meant to reach. So, in a word, I felt lost. Then I noticed the white sneakers lurking at the bottom of my side of the closet (lazily, I had left the mirrored, accordion doors slightly ajar when I hung up my clothes last night). Had they been dark, I would never have seen them, so poorly lit was the room at that hour.

So with half an hour before my wife got up to take the dog for her habitual six a.m. walk with our friend Judy, the thought popped unbidden into my head, “Why not go for a run” I knew it wouldn’t take long, and I would be sure to be back, if I came back at all, before six, so I got dressed and put on the odious sneakers, track pants (or tracksuit bottom), thicksulate undershirt and Thinsulate vest, and left for my first run — ever! I tell you no lies: I had never, ever, embarked on a run with no purpose other than to, well, run.

Of course, it wasn’t much of a run. I would even be flattering it to call it a morning ‘jog’. More of a ‘jalk’, if I can coin a word to describe the alternate jogging and walking that I resorted to after the first fifty yards or so. My plan was to jog over to the track in the open playing field behind Father John Redmond’s eponymous high school in Colonel Sam Smith’s eponymous park, there to run a brisk four laps (one kilometre?) and then jog home to cool down. In the event, I jalked to the track, rested to get my breath back and inhale some salbutamol, alternately walked, jogged and stumbled (“waljombled”?) two gasping laps, and limped home on jelly legs a quarter of an hour after leaving on legs of spring steel. There, I caught my breath, inhaled more salbutamol, and climbed (read, crawled up) the stairs to announce to my wife that I had just returned from my morning run…

To give her credit, she took it in her stride, as it were. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to go for a run with her. Or maybe a “jalk” — as long as I can do better than a “waljomble”. It might be fun, although on this morning’s showing it is a long way off.

It is now four hours since my morning excursion and, having dropped our daughter off at school, I am enjoying a pot of Darjeeling at Java Joe’s at Islington and Rathburn, as the strength gradually returns to my pins and an unaccustomed feeling of modest accomplishment introduces itself to my mind. Now I have to think about what I am to do with the rest of my life. My new life.

Retirement is not an option for me, but for the first time in my life I feel I have the ability to decide for myself what I am to do. I have already decided that this will include working more closely with Dorothy-Anna, my wife, as she develops her business and expands her interests in corporate financing. She is a portfolio manager (orserneuhaus.com). I did spend a number of years in marketing with Schneider Foods, but this is quite a new direction for me. As for other projects more closely related to what I have been doing in recent years, I have several things in mind. I hope to be sharing my plans with you in the next few days on this personal blog.

Right now, I am going to enjoy the weekend and bask in my newly discovered geriatric athletic prowess.