Us
By: Craig Wilson
Tags: Life, Running, Health, Friendship

The end of the year in running is usually accompanied by a whole bunch of facts and figures. How far you have run, how fast you have run, where you have run, where you have run the most, how much elevation you have run up, how many miles you have run in your shoes and so the list goes on.

But what this deluge of digits fails to illustrate is what the year has meant to you in terms of running. One thing about numbers is that if you analyse them you can always find someone who ran further or faster or any of the other measures you want to place on those bald facts and figures. However, no-one else has had the same running experience as you, and it is that experience which I think is so important to hold on to, to focus on, much more than what your watch or running app tells you.

In order to explain more of what I mean, I am going to use some photographs and only one statistic. The number sixty five. But I will come back to that in a bit. If this year has taught me anything, it is about valuing what I have and recognising what I miss.

“I just miss things being boring”

I value my friends and family more than ever. I miss them more than anything. But it is more than that. I also miss so many things which seemed so ordinary; the ability to just go and do something without really thinking about it, or having to take some many factors into consideration. I just miss things being boring and normal.

One thing that has not changed this year has been the beauty of nature, and in January I was treated to the most spectacular sunrise I have ever had the pleasure to enjoy, while running early one Sunday.

The other thing about that morning, was that I got to share that incredible view with two of my best running friends — Cara and Susan. They are the friends I have run with the most in the course of the year, but even now I cannot run with them both together at the same time due to the Covid restrictions here in Scotland about household mixing.

With Cara I got to share the experience of helping her round her first ever half marathon, in Inverness back in March. None of us knew at that point, that that would have been the only real race I would get to do this year. It was an emotional day, for many reasons, but getting Cara to the finish line meant a lot to me, and this image from the finish line I think perfectly sums up just what that kind of achievement can mean for running friends. The time is irrelevant, it is the accomplishment which truly matters, something which can never be taken away from you.

The weekend before I had been in Paris for the half marathon there. This was when Covid had its first real impact on me as the race was called off just hours before the start. I was due to run the race with frends from work and disappointing as that was, it did not deter some of us from going out in the morning anyway and running around the city, in fact achieving the half marathon distance. And this is probably my favourite photo of the year.

I had run with Rob previously, in Phoenix in Arizona in the United States, when we got up hideously early to run up the steepest hill I have ever seen in my life to see the sunrise from the restaurant close to the hotel we were staying at. We were joined there by Jon, another great running friend, and enjoyed the sight together.

If all of this is proving anything, it is one simple thing. The need for human contact and the enjoyment of a shared experience. And that then brings me to my statistic. Sixty five. Sixty five is the number of runs I did on my own during the first lockdown in the UK through March, April and into May. Sixty five times I laced up, got out, often in the dark in those early days — dark in terms of daylight, also dark in terms of how things looked — and focused on something else that was not the crisis we were facing or things about work. Running as a break. Running as therapy.

Through the summer I was able to run with Cara and Susan again as some restrictions were lifted — it was with them that I ran after my sixty five solo efforts — and we established a regular Saturday routine of running together. It was with them when I passed one thousand running miles for the year on an absolutely perfect morning. The distance of our weekend runs did not matter. What mattered was just the chance to catch up. The fact that we were doing it and running at the same time was almost coincidental.

As lockdown eased and the weather improved, I then somehow signed up for a virtual marathon. I had no intention of running a marathon this year, but as race after race was first cancelled and then some turned into virtual events, I committed to running the Dublin Marathon. My friend Jeanette was training at that point for the Amsterdam Marathon, so almost by accident we began running long every Sunday morning through late Summer and into Autumn. As Amsterdam then fell by the wayside too, Jeanette also signed up for Dublin, and we completed the race in Aberdeen at the end of October.

On the outside, if you look at our training, everything went really smoothly and on the day itself, we both got round together. That is what the facts and figures prove. Only Jeanette and I know how it really went. Only we have that shared knowledge of the times we struggled, of the days that were rough, of the runs where the last thing we wanted to do was run up that final hill to get home. Numbers tell you one thing, emotion tells you everything else. And that emotion is yours and yours alone.

This weekend I was out running on my own and I came across Cara and Susan out running together. It was so great to see them both, but it brought home to me how much I miss the three of us being able to run together at the same time. The laughs, the jokes, the swearing going up the hill, the relief of the finish, the chat.

What these images illustrate is not the distances I ran. It is not the time. It is not how fast or how slow I went. It is not what gear I wore. It is the shared spirit we all felt. It is the emotion and experience of being together. Yes, it can be about going through the pain. Yes, it can be hard. But it was more than that. It was about us.

We all have had a shared experience this year, such has been the nature of the past nine months or so, but all of us have had unique experiences too and we all need to recognise that. We cope in our own way. Facts and figures spell out one element of my running life and they do mean something to me. But what means much more is what is summarised in these pictures. Friendship, cameraderie, companionship and caring. That is what gets us through a tough run together. It is also what helps us through life.