Cramp

Published by Like The Wind (Print: bit.ly/ltw-mag)

Black text on swirled white and sky blue in Bethnal Green underground station:
‘Grand ma loved being carried up the escalator into the naked light’

Flick the loops of my mask over my ears. My Highland Hill Runners vest: blue with streaks of tartan in the vents, the red claymore badge. To Stratford, to the marshes. Twelve thousand making their way to Hackney’s half marathon.

Lilac flags flutter on the breeze by wide paths. New flats beside the Olympic Park. Then Hackney Marshes - eighty football pitches here. Dozens walk silently to the race - the flint silence of transport lines in this city. 

Drop your bag with a volunteer. That was my job once: our Scout group had the contract for the Edinburgh marathon.

Herd into pens waiting for the gun. 9 am, already muggy.
Pass beneath the starter arch. Padding of a thousand soles on the road out of the park like rain on a roof. Like mackerel now - be nimble in the shoal. Air moves cooling across the skin. Stay on Eoin’s tail - he knows the pace.

Train with the Midnight Runners by St Paul’s. 7 pm on Tuesday. In a hurry, take a handful of Gordal olives before leaving the flat. Your mouth will be dry. Eight kilometres beside the river, eked out to fourteen with a loop home for beigels in Brick Lane. Back to the flat by 11 pm.

Things overheard dodging pedestrians by the Thames:
‘What are you running from?’ (called from a pub)
‘Wooooo!’ (called from the path)
‘I hate runners’ (muttered by a woman in pearls)

Crowds in East London uniform call me back: acrylic frames, Doc Martins, short trousers, T-shirts with rolled sleeves, tote bag, vape. A placard: Callus Your Mind. The man beside me: grunt, grunt, ‘Oh God!’ - every few steps. That can’t be good for him.

Muscle bellies begin to cramp and balk - soleus, gastrocnemius, biceps femoris, gracilis.
Call an old medics football chant: ‘Stand free, wherever you may be…’
Lift your knees. Pick a heart rate to run to: 190. Steel bands play below flyovers. Blisters begin to bloom. Your mind goes slack - the quarry, the woods, the mast of Craig Dunain hill. Carry your whole life with you in your toes.

Call the song you blinked awake to at 6 am:
‘And I was lifted above all care as the swallow swung through the salted air
Come from savannah and desert and sea, to mark another year for me’.

Call the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, where there is a desk upon which people leave prayers on post-it notes to be placed on the altar the next day:
‘Dear God, thank you for all things, amen. Ava, age 6’.
‘I pray for the circus’.

Call also the sculpture by Antony Gormley: a body, 210 centimetres long, made of iron nails from the roof of the southeast transept. The artist explained: ‘The body is less a thing than a place. A location where things happen. Thought, feeling, memory and anticipation filter through it sometimes sticking but mostly passing on…it is our house, instrument and medium’.

Milk light comes scudding through the trees. Hackney Wick, Haggerston, London Fields, Dalson. New ground to me. I’m warming to it.

When last I walked by the River Ness I saw a patient: a gentleman with schizophrenia. Well again, he waved. 
I inclined my head, smiled, told him:
‘I won’t see you here again - I’m moving to London’.
He paused.
‘That will be good’, he said, ‘because everywhere is good’.