Shaun

“Fancy a run?” would certainly not have featured as one of my chat-up lines in my youth, though it might have done if I’d ever acquired the E-Type I hankered after. No, I was into the London nightlife of the sixties when at home and during seventeen years in the Merchant Navy I didn’t even run for a bus…. I then became a marine pilot in Africa, mostly Nigeria, where the only time you’d run was when the local youth ‘charity’ collectors, machete in hand, were approaching. Consequently, by the time I reached my forties and settled into a career of marine management, which was just beginning to involve lots of time sitting at a desk wondering how to use those new computer things, my waistline indicated that I was no longer the dashing young fellow I thought I was. Happily this coincided with an inexplicable public urge to run marathons, particularly the London one, the city of my birth. I decided to have a crack at it and at the time was managing a marine operation in the bight of Benin close to miles of soft, sandy beaches with temperatures in the eighties and nineties – a great opportunity to get fit and lose weight! I ran a few half marathons in ’86 but didn’t make the cut for London, so ran the Bedford instead: I was doing fine for a forty-six-year-old, that is until I hit the wall at 22 miles! An amazing experience, one minute you’re breezing along and then suddenly your legs turn to lead and you can hardly walk! I staggered on for a while, then found I could jog and eventually discovered I could run again. Two years later, in ’88, I was accepted for the London Marathon and completed it in 3.45, which was a nearly half-an-hour longer than the Bedford took but in those days they only had one mass start and after the gun went you had time for a cup of tea before you could work your way through the Greenwich park gates at the start line. I then ran the Amsterdam marathon two weeks later and started with the half-marathon runners, ten minutes behind the marathon runners, who I had taken to be the elite field. (I don’t speak any Dutch…) It was a great race and I did catch up with the marathon runners but then had the distinction of coming last – they closed the race after four hours and I was in at 3.59.58! The Dutch take their marathons seriously – no men wearing tutus or jogging along dressed as a Hippo over there! Learnt a lesson or two as well – if you want a decent marathon time try and start with the rest of the field and preferably not just two weeks after your previous marathon. (Note - We didn’t have timing chips or wear stop-watches in those days!) That was my running for a while – my work involved a lot of travelling to various parts of the globe at the time and though I went for a jog here and there I wasn’t able to train consistently. I finished my career with a few years based on an offshore oil installation – the only place we could get a bit of exercise was on the helipad, at night, where half-a-dozen of us would gather for a few circuits. The rest of the crew thought we were mad… After retiring I had the opportunity to run again – and so began my association with the Hay Hotfooters. I had never been in any sort of athletic club before, because of working overseas, and the nearest I got to any advice was a subscription to “Running” magazine, which was a help but not as good as actually running with others, enjoying their company and learning from their experiences. I had thought running clubs would be full of competitive athletes, introverts obsessed about knocking 3.5 seconds off their 5K PB. I couldn’t have been more wrong, for what I found in Hay was a group of friendly and like-minded people, from all ages and backgrounds, who enjoy running and, probably as a result, enjoy life! I would now advise anyone, of any standard, who wants to improve their fitness, waist measurement or running ability to join a club. There is another advantage, to me, in that the club and the friends I run with provide the incentive to keep going when it gets hard, and now in my seventy-first year it does get hard at times – but I love it. Am I a runner – or just a masochist?

Shaun.