Running To Redemption
How RW columnist PAUL TONKINSON’s quest for a marathon personal best became a journey that helped him to conquer his demons and find redemption and forgiveness waiting on The Mall
A powerfully emotional excerpt from the new book by RW columnist Paul Tonkinson
SCARBOROUGH, 1981, THE FIRST RUN
IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the summer holidays. I was 12, having completed my first year at secondary school. At a loose end, in an empty house and with no tasks at hand, I thought, I could just go now, I could leave this, just go for a run. It was a delicious prospect. Why not just do it?
So I did.
Scarcely able to breathe, such was my excitement, I hurriedly strapped on a pair of white Dunlops and took to the streets.
It was a gentle downhill mile or so down the wide Esplanade, bordered with freshly mowed grass lawns, ornately landscaped for the tourist crowd. The weather was baking as I weaved through, my plimsolls slapping the smooth grey paths as I descended across the Spa Bridge, turned right at the Grand Hotel and then quickstepped down the steep steps onto the beach at the height of summer season.
I remember feeling increasingly calm as I found my rhythm. Amid the kids screaming, the crying of seagulls, the twirling cascades of arcade machines and the ruddy-faced fisherman selling mini pots of shrimp and touting for harbour trips out on the bay, it felt good, as if something was shifting inside me, dissolving. In the effortless turning of my legs beneath me, the pumping of my thin childlike arms, a startling peace was opening up within, a fantastical lift that sent me soaring through the sweet shops on the front, gliding past the Futurist theatre advertising Jimmy Tarbuck, Jaconelli’s ice cream parlour, the donkeys and the ghost trains; propelled me away from that, up onto the Marine Drive.
I’d found something, a sweet spot, a new vantage point from which to view life, and wanted to extend it. I plunged on recklessly in the heat, burning myself under the relentless sun, greedily sucking in air as the clear North Sea lightly sprayed my face. Reaching the end of the Drive, I paused for a second. The sense of freedom was utterly intoxicating. I could go anywhere now; I didn’t need anyone or anything, only the wit to depart and the fitness to carry it off. I could claim this, make it mine. I turned and launched myself back, loving every second; the tiredness in the limbs, the dry thirst in my mouth, the honest sweat caking my shoulders and back.
I was slowing a bit by now, excitement had faded. But I had found something, of that I was certain. Life had irrevocably changed. It was the B of the bang of my life as a runner, which continues to this day. At 12 years old, the last piece of my emerging identity had clicked into place. On some profound level, I had found both escape and salvation, I felt that very clearly – but as home came closer, a familiar dread was descending. I’d been out a long time without permission. Although unquestionably right for me, it was hard to defend.
As I turned the last corner homewards, I knew I’d shortly pay the price.
My hands trembled involuntarily as I opened the front gates; a creeping numb sensation ran up into my throat. Maybe it’d be fine, was the house empty?
No.
As I went round the back, I sensed movement indoors. Then, the insistent thudding of clogs firing off the kitchen floor. A familiar form marched past the window. I reached for the door but, before I got there, with a sharp click, it flew open.
TEENAGE KICKS
within weeks, running went the way of football and tennis: an activity denied. So, faced with this, and with the determination and courage of youth, a plan began to form in my mind.
In the cupboard under the stairs, I had a pair of old army walking boots, given to me by my grandparents. Because they were off the usual rota of shoes, they avoided the daily inspection and cleaning process. I figured if I could get hold of them, they’d be perfect. The only question was: when could I get them?
The only answer was: in the morning, before the paper round. That meant setting the alarm for 5am, stealthily sneaking out of the bedroom, across the landing ever so softly, down the stairs gently, into the cupboard under the stairs, get the boots, tiptoe through the kitchen and out the back door, clicking it shut as quietly as possible. The whole escapade was like a burglary in reverse.
I’d creep out the front gate and set off into the dawn, released, free at last to rampage round the clifftop paths and gardens of the South Bay. The boots were heavier than trainers, of course, but that added to the drama. I wouldn’t have time to run far, just 30 minutes or so in the clean cool air of a coastal morning. It was an incredibly risky thing to do, I can’t imagine the drama if I’d been caught, but in a life when so much was out of my hands, it represented a reclamation of power, a moment that was purely mine.
Back in the house, I’d snake my way back through the kitchen, return the boots to exactly the same place and tiptoe back to my bedroom. Twenty minutes later, I’d be feigning sleep and she’d march in and snap the curtains open.
THE JUICE
I’d like to refer you to the
at this juncture title of my book: 26.2 Miles to Happiness. Slightly overblown, I admit, but containing a kernel of truth.
Is it really that simple? you might ask. What is its great secret? you implore, reaching for the biscuits and putting the kettle on.
I COULD GO ANYWHERE NOW; I DIDN’T NEED ANYONE OR ANYTHING
Well, obviously there’s loads of physical stuff. Running a marathon makes you loads fitter, physically and mentally. But I’m also talking beyond that. There are other reasons. In a chaotic world, it offers order. In an occasionally unjust world, where honest endeavour often crashes on the fickle rocks of reality, it gives you a direct correlation between effort and reward. Indeed, the more you submit to its demands, the more you get; it’s a sliding scale of mental and physical transformation. You act yourself into a different person; different habits embed themselves and change you.
On a personal level, where you might feel anonymous, passed over, not valued, the marathon is an event that gives you a day of guaranteed drama with you as the hero. It’s fun and tough in all the right proportions. It’s a private drama played out in public, an orgasm of aerobic fun. It allows you to express anger or frustration in a safe environment without having to pay out to punch cushions.
I’m going to go one step further now, so brace yourself. I also sincerely believe the marathon offers the very real hope of personal redemption, a defeating of personal demons.
The kettle’s boiled now, this is a moment that calls for your favourite mug. Lean back, put your feet up. I’m away again, off-piste, skiing haphazardly down the black slope of the human psyche with only the most rudimentary of snow ploughs at my disposal.
(Deep breath.) It strikes me that most damage occurring to us in life happens at a level beyond words. This might be caused by words or action, but they affect our brains, behaviour and thoughts on a cellular level. Possibly as a result of this, there seems to be a limit to the usefulness of purely talking therapies.
This is not to say therapy isn’t useful. I reckon it is, profoundly so: it helps you relate to your life with more awareness; it can help you view yourself, and others, more compassionately. There are skills to be learned, insights gained on the chair with those wonderful people who devote their lives to helping others. I’m all for it. Religion, too. Whatever gets you through the long night and helps you face the morning. •
So I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from going: pain spreads its wings far and wide, carrying problems infinitely more troublesome and traumatic than my load. It’s just that I saw an end to it – and at the end, not much was solved. Because there are moments in life that point out who you are, little episodes, and they told me that despite all the talking I’d done to escape and get over my past, I still carried the memories of violence with me. They’d been encoded, internalised. Triggers remained in my psyche.
Round the house, if I heard quick footsteps upstairs, I’d be transported back from my perfectly safe house in North London to Scarborough, where I was a quivering 13-yearold cowering in the corner as her clogs fired off the kitchen floor. Those sense memories are hard to erase.
Every now and again, as I settle into an evening at home, I am flooded with an overwhelming feeling of relief when I realise on a fundamental level I am safe here. It’s like a little bugle of victory sounding in my heart and is often accompanied by the urge to go to Oddbins and begin celebrating. This shizzle goes deep, bruv, and no amount of talking can get you through it.
It seemed with the marathon I had stumbled upon a solution. If the problem was beyond words, then, surely, so too was the answer. It had to be something I did, an action.
(Still with me? Grab a biscuit, chocolate Hobnob if you’re not training. If you are training, maybe a plain digestive or an oatcake.)
People swim the Channel, cycle across Europe, climb mountains. In doing so they are receiving something from the experience that helps them. Amid the demands of the exertion, they have found something intrinsic that puts them back together again, however momentarily, in a life that is increasingly fragmented.
Part of the reason I like marathon running is its accessibility. Anyone can do it. No real kit is necessary beyond a decent set of trainers, no travel involved. All the means are literally on your doorstep. Running, that most natural and elemental of activities. The marathon is an immense struggle but achievable. It might not have the outdoorsy appeal of climbing mountains – which is a drag, because I love nature – but what it does have, especially a big one, is people, lots of people. And people are nature. And I love people.
As I ran marathons and came up against The Wall, I began to really wrestle with the question: what did the marathon mean? As I focused down into proper training – being inspired by club mates, considering pain and how to deal with it, matters of mental fortitude – I began to see The Wall not as a force that rendered me powerless but rather as something that I could do battle with. To do this, I knew that I was going to have to get determined, angry even. This troubled me.
Maybe because I had witnessed and been victim of so much anger growing up, I had gone to great lengths to avoid it as an adult, both my own and others’. When out and about, my senses are primed to any suggestion of incident. I see the problem before it happens; my vibe detector is incredibly acute, and I pick up very quickly on changes in atmosphere. This can be very useful. It means I tend to avoid confrontation, but it can also get a bit tiring, and sometimes I might overreact. Some people are freer with their anger, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Therapy had unwittingly fed into my antianger crusade. I’d spent a lot of time working out how to forgive people – or rather, the person who shall remain nameless. I’d accommodated her behaviour, rationalised it. We are after all, at some level, always doing our best with what we’ve got. We all come from and are a reaction to events over which we had no control, and I spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand why she might have acted like that. Perhaps in all of this rationalisation
I’d never allowed myself to get angry that it had happened in the first place.
Even while it was happening, and at an age when I could have resisted, I retreated into myself, acting like I was untouchable, not talking much. It was a form of very silent revenge. I’d become unresponsive as a way of protecting myself and getting through it all, incessant as it was.
As I grew up and my life changed, I carried aspects of this stuff with me. A lot of it was positive. I was and am a pretty chilled-out character. I live and let live, try to understand people, and generally be a force for peace, but in the process I had denied a part of me. In my effort to understand the world, and people in it, I had perhaps closed part of myself off, becoming an unreasonably reasonable man. And underneath it, there was an anger that I had never recognised, which bubbled over in odd places: the car; round the house; on the football pitch.
This is not to say I was a psychopath. There was just something in my make-up that wasn’t
ringing true. Outwardly, I was the uber-chilled, do anything for anybody, Northern bloke around the village – but sometimes, I’d see myself in the mirror and my resting face was a bit scowly. Or I’d find myself lost in violent fantasy over an innocuous road rage incident that had happened months previously. On social media, I’d find myself having a row with a stranger before I’d even got out of bed on a morning. These weren’t the actions of a man of peace!
Something was gnawing away at me that needed attention. There was, it seemed, a rage within that I’d never given voice to or found an outlet for. On a very simple level I’d never expressed anger at the years living with she-who-cannot-be-named and what had happened. I’d internalised it all – and it came out at traffic lights, imagined threats to my family or at 50-50 challenges at football. (May I take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who has played football with or against me, particularly between the years 2004 and 2010.)
Is it a stretch to say that we live in a fairly angry society? On the roads, on social media, there’s a lot of simmering rage about. Mostly suppressed, but even that effort seems to be resulting in lots of substance problems, antidepressants, boozing and bingeing.
For me, running helped. As I ran more and faster, I began to see it as a harmless channel for residual and undefined rage from childhood. It could give me permission to fight back and said it was OK to run hard. It also had the advantage that I was only hurting myself; running was selfdirected, cleansing even. Football had broken my own wrist and other players’ ribs and fingers.
As I examined it and really looked at the marathon, The Wall emerged as a formidable adversary. But like all adversaries, it carried within it the potential for my redemption and self-knowledge. As the marathon approached and my goal of a subthree clarified, I began to see The Wall not as a purely physical entity. It became a physical manifestation of the internal voices in my mind. Voices that had stemmed from she-who-cannotbe-named. The Wall became my stepmum, the stepmum became the Wall.
(Final dunking of the biscuit now.) I reckoned that maybe it was time finally to fight back. To show myself. Put a flag in the ground and slay this demon once and for all. I had to end this nonsense, put this drama to bed. Battle with The Wall, break through. Defeat it and her.
In order to do this, I knew I had to train hard and remorselessly, eradicate every physical and mental weakness in my make-up. It was as simple and as beautiful and as easy to understand as that.
Finally, I had found my Why. The hero must defeat the monster.
THE MALL, 2019, THE HAPPY ENDING
The Mall is shorter than
the finish down I remembered. Not a long torturous surge, more of a quick dash. I put my head down and go. My breath’s an urgent, continuous gasp, I’m driving into every stride, pumping my arms as much as possible.
With 30 yards to go, I look up… 02:59:15 ... 02:59:16.
I clench my fists, swearing with joy, and realise that I am in a bubble of runners, men and women of about the same age doing exactly the same thing. We’ve done it. We’ve all done it.
I cross the line. 02:59:21. It’s over, all of it. I’m tired, but it’s the cleanest tired in the world. It’s the tiredness of a summer’s evening in childhood, running home absolutely famished after a day’s footy on the beach, the sweat turning to salt on your neck.
I’m floating around like a slightly dehydrated Jesus, there is absolutely no distance between me and the rest of humanity. I’m chatting to everyone. Open. To be grandiose, not for the first time, I am suffused with a deep and overwhelming peace, a resounding and ultimate inner Yes. My work here is done. I have run to the end of running. It has nothing more to ask of me and there’s nothing more I can give. I am as beyond stress and anger and misdirected anxiety as it is possible to be.
Compassion spreads in all directions to everyone I’ve ever met or will meet.
Everyone. She didn’t mean any harm.
Let’s face it; I couldn’t have done it without her. It wasn’t all bad anyway. A brilliant cook, her spaghetti bolognese has never been bettered and her rock cakes were to die for. She’d take me out on her motorbike up on Oliver’s Mount. How exciting it was to hold on to her as she whizzed round corners; how dangerous and new and different she was to other mums, exotic in her way, a leather-clad Boadicea, cranking up the volume on Diana Ross records on her days off, just a lass from Whitby making her way in life who’d taken the wrong turn. I remember her crying hot tears on her 30th birthday on being so old. She made me tough in ways I wouldn’t have been without her – and God knows what her childhood was like. What merry hell was she repeating?
She won’t read this, but if she does, I’d like to say: It’s over now. All over.
I wish you every happiness.
Whatever this is, has ended. I’ve drawn a line in the sand. Whatever I wanted out of it, I’ve got. Undeniably.
Then I’m on the phone to Ra and Rudy. It’s the last picture of the day that I’ve painted in my head. I wanted so much to do this, to beat three hours and come back down The Mall and find them here, amid all the thousands of runners chilling out post-race. And then I see them, peeking out from behind a tree, my wife and youngest son, dear Rudy, walking towards me.
FINALLY, I HAD FOUND MY WHY. THE HERO MUST DEFEAT THE MONSTER
WHERE Malham Tarn, Settle, North Yorkshire, BD23 4DJ // DISTANCE 6.3 miles (10.2km) // ASCENT 613ft (187m) //
TERRAIN Trails, moorland and fell
THE MALHAM ESTATE, deep in the Yorkshire Dales, covers a dramatic, open area of limestone pavement and grassland, rugged high peaks and rocky outcrops. Nestled within, the gleaming scoop of Malham Tarn reflects the weather day by day: serenely calm one moment, windwhipped and brooding the next.
This run begins by the tarn and follows the Pennine Way around its shore, then heads across stonewalled fields and up onto high, open moorland, offering beautiful views across the Dales. After joining the Pennine Bridleway, the final stretch descends back into the valley to return to the tarn.
THINGS TO SEE // It’s a great place to visit to watch birds; from the hide, just off the boardwalk section of the route, you can see great crested grebes, tufted ducks, pochard, wigeon, teal and goosander. There are also a number of species of bat; expert-led bat walks with National Trust rangers start at Malham Tarn House. Within running distance of the tarn are the waterfall at Janet’s Foss, the scramble up Gordale Scar and the limestone pavement that tops Malham Cove,
once a waterfall and now a rock-climbing destination.
THE ROUTE // START/END WATERSINKS CAR PARK // 1. Join the Pennine Way and head north towards Malham Tarn. The path continues to the overflow of Malham Tarn before joining the track to Tarn House. Continue along the track, passing Great Close Scar and Malham Tarn House Field Centre. 2. (1.7 miles) At Sandhills Cottage, leave the Pennine Way and follow signs to the Nature Reserve, following the
boardwalk through the woods. 3. (2.1 miles) Where the boardwalk ends, join the road, turning left and following the road, bearing left at the junction. At the crossroads, take the footpath diagonally opposite and follow this across fields to reach the Pennine Bridleway. 4. (3.7 miles) Turn left onto the Pennine Bridleway and follow it, crossing a road and descending into the steep valley to reach the Pennine Way. 5. (5.7 miles/9.1km) Turn left onto the Pennine Way and follow this back to the car park. •