What Does a Runner Look Like?
I am not most people’s idea of what an ultra runner looks like. In the three years since I started running extreme distances, I have enjoyed the way I can see people doing a double take when they look at me. Last summer I had the privilege of doing a full page photoshoot for Runners’ World and, again, I loved the ways in which I was challenging the stereotypes people have about runners — I was there because of the way I could make people question their stereotypes about mind and body: I was running 100 kilometres but I was also about to defend my Creative Thinking World Championship (the magazine came out 2 days before that event, and I picked up my copy on the 5k run from Marble Arch to the J3 Centre that had become my daily routine for the duration of the Mind Sports Olympiad. But I was also there, on the page, making that same, unmissable statement about what a runner looks like.
In many ways I have spent the past two or more decades posing these same questions — what does a … look like?” What does a runner look like? What does a researcher look like? What does an activist look like? What does a disabled person look like?
I have always been ambivalent about these questions. I love making people stop and rethink things. The lazy thoughts we all fall into are and have always been my enemy number one. On the other hand when you look like me (not the fat bit, the white, middle class read-as-male bit), you are (or you should be and if you’re not see the previous point about lazy thoughts) always aware that you are walking a line — on the one hand there are many ways in which my life is not what you would imagine of someone who does the things I do (mental ill health and breakdown, neurodivergence, bad at sports throughout my childhood and a lifetime battling with my weight); on the other hand I am very much what you would imagine someone who gets their share of attention to look like, and without putting too fine a point on it we could do with fewer white guys jostling to the front when it comes to visibility. It’s a tightrope I’ve thus far walked by trying to focus on those areas where I lack privilege while trying to acknowledge as fully as I can those where I have it.
But recently I have become aware that the body that was “not like a runner” when I started running is still “not like a runner.” And of course that’s fine, and it is still challenging stereotypes that need challenging. But also having the body I do is exhausting me. There are things I really want to do before I cross the “too late” point — serious climbing, for example, with its emphasis on a power to weight ratio that today’s weight of 18 stone 2 (254 lb, 115 kg) simply won’t permit whatever the power. And I can train less because my joints hurt more, and speed drops with every pond I carry. And it’s harder to buy affordable clothes that don’t hurt.
It feels like it’s time to listen to my body and my mind and start to take my eating seriously as part of my training, and stop feeling the self-imposed pressure to be “inspirational.” Which is really hard, and comes with a huge amount of attached guilt. Body shaming is so rife in our society that I feel the need to counter it incredibly strongly.
But I’m also aware that this is part of not making the progress I want to make. I don’t know if I’d call myself naturally competitive but doing the best I possibly can at the things I feel passionate about matters a great deal to me. If I love something I want to suck the marrow right out of it and I won’t aim to be the best I can be but the best it is possible to be (even as a 46 year old 150+lb unsporty type, yes!). I think that’s because I’ve always got more pleasure from something the more fully I immerse myself, the more I push myself, the more I’m constantly on the edge of what these days people would call “deep practice” but what I have always just thought of as “making things ridiculously hard for myself.”
Guilt aside, there are many things that will make the “next step” in my ultra running journey really hard. But I hope that writing about them now and then following them over the months to come will help my ramblings serve some purpose other than self-indulgent solipsism, and maybe help people to see that for me while I want to be the best runner I can, that is integrated into a wider goal to lead a life outside of traditional categories. Running is just part of what it means to lead a full and creative life, a life that is fulfilling and rewarding but most of all a life that helps me to empower and enable other people to be more creative, to focus their energies on goals that will not only make their own lives better but make the world better.
So this is a list of the obstacles I need to overcome. As yet I have an open mind as to how to overcome them, and part of what I want to keep a record of is how I go about overcoming them, what works and what — sometimes, I am sure, spectacularly, doesn’t.
- Being interested in everything. It’s what has enabled me to become Creative Thinking World Champion. It’s also wat makes it very very hard to put in the single-minded focus necessary to truly excel at one thing. But beyond that, it leads to exhaustion — having one all-consuming interest as well as a day hob is one thing. Having four or five — well… This one, though, I have a feeling is one where there isn’t a workaround. For me I have always got the most out of something when I both focus on it with absolute intentness for the periods when I engage with it and am able to go and do something else when the mood takes me. Working out how to do everything seems like the less painful option than working out what not to do.
- Willpower batteries. Research shows that our willpower reserves are limited. If we exert it in one area we are less able to exert it in another. It’s almost a zero sum game. And when you do all of the things, having willpower to dedicate to what I eat means precious little is left for elsewhere.
- Limits and plateaus. I have always struggled with this when it comes to exercise. I used to be a powerlifter, something I loved, but no matter how much I trained, and how smartly I trained, I would very quickly reach a limit I couldn’t break through, not because I couldn’t do it with my muscles, but because I couldn’t get around the fact that “200 kilos is what I can squat”, for example. I have the same with running. Not with endurance — I can push and push how far I can go and have yet to find an upper limit, but for anything over 2k I can’t go quicker than 6 minute kilometres (I know that’s really slow), not because my legs won’t — I have tried every trick in the book with interval training and threshold training, but because somewhere in my head that is the limit.
- Food. My history with food is every shade of checkered. The earliest incident I can remember was when I was 6 years old. I had been in hospital with a virus in my hip, and it was time for me to go home. Made a deal with my parents — “If I come home can I eat 13 roast potatoes?” I’ve no idea where the number came from but the deal was done, the potatoes were eaten and the pattern was established. Because I had no idea how to make friends, I used my ability to eat gigantic plates of food to gain attention, like the time at a bridge tournament I ate 23 slices of pizza. Then there were the obsessive dieting times. My adult weight, as a 6 foot biggish boned person, has fluctuated from 9 and a half to 19 and a half stone, and rarely been the same two weeks running. Throughout my depression and mania food has been the go to for self-medication — letting myself have no willpower with eating has sometimes been the thing that gave me the willpower to stay alive; at other times obsessing over food has done the same. I can probably count on the fingers of a mitten the days I’ve had a regular relation with eating.
So there we have it, the framework for the months to come. First up, mid July, is my 4th assault on the fabulous 100k Race to the Stones.
