I Need A Pacemaker

Warming Up

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First Park Run for five or six weeks and last time I did it, I quit at 3km and throughout March my times were around 34 minutes. I’d run 1km on Wednesday and then had to walk home, so I wasn’t particularly confident about finishing this morning, especially as it was already pretty hot and the sun was beating down on us. Stop beating sun. Be more gentle. We’re already in awe of you. You don’t have to be so needy.

Probably upset that fewer people worship it these days. You’ll have your revenge.

There were pacemakers today, which was annoying as I wasn’t trying to beat any records (unlikely to ever get down to the sub 25 minutes I did 5 and a half years ago to be fair), but at least it would give me some idea of how I was doing. I found myself behind the 30 minute pace maker. For about half a kilometre. But I wasn’t being overtaken by the 32 minute pacemaker. Which surprised me.

As I got to the 4 km mark I felt my legs get heavy. I knew I’d be able to run one more kilometre, but it felt like it would be tough and slow. Although I was wearing my headphones I heard someone talking to me to my right. I turned and it was the 32 minute pacemaker. “Stick with me and you can get round in 32 minutes,” she said. I don’t know if she could see that I was struggling or if she did this to everyone. “I’ve left a 25 second cushion so you can walk up the hill at the end.” The course ends on quite a brutal incline. I never walk up it though. I wondered if I must look like a flailing old man who couldn’t possibly manage the last five minutes of this run.

Yet her intervention did the trick. I forgot all about my legs feeling heavy and pushed along with the only 32 minuters. I confess I had had hopes of doing it in under 31 once I’d seen my time at 4km. Maybe I could still do it, if I didn’t walk up the hill. I found myself pulling away and did NOT walk up the hill and finished in a very surprising 30 minutes and 56 seconds.

Given I had doubted that I would finish I was very pleased with this. Six minutes off my personal best and 90 seconds over the best that I’ve done this year, but maybe I can get back to sub-30 minute Park Runs again.

It was mainly thanks to that pacemaker and her blend of encouragement and underestimation of me. So I am very thankful to her for that. It felt very good to have done this today.

Sometimes the Universe sends you a little help or reassurance, like the time I was standing on Edinburgh’s North Bridge, feeling depressed about my Fringe and my career and not-very-seriously wondering about throwing myself off and Daniel Kitson emerged from the fog and when I said I was thinking of packing it all in, said “Or you could just carry on.” Or something like that.

Or when I was in Montreal and had done a horrible gig full of hack comics at a comedy club across the city and then walked back to my hotel and thought maybe it was time to pack in and then Billy Connolly got in the lift that took you the one floor from the street to the hotel lobby and started riffing on what a stupid lift it was and was funnier in 30 seconds than anyone I saw in the whole festival.

If there are angels, then surely this is most of their job. Just coming down to a beaten down mass of humanity and encouraging them very lightly not to give in.

Maybe I am one of those angels. Maybe you’re reading this thinking it would be easier just to stop doing the slightly annoying, but possibly ultimately rewarding thing you’re doing and I am here to say, “Yeah, or you could just push onwards and see what happens.”

It’s not like my angels got me anywhere particularly special, but they got me out of self-indulgent holes. Even if Daniel Kitson isn’t an angel (which seems unlikely now I think about it), he’s still capable of inadvertently giving hope to someone, just as we all are. And just as we all should be doing.

So go on, pick up your feet. You can walk up the hill at the end if you want. Though I know what you’re like and that me saying that will just make you swing your arms and get up there faster.

There’s nothing much at the top of the hill. Just a slight sense of your own worth.

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I am a big fan of Windmill Hill Park in Hitchin. It’s a steep incline that I sometimes see people running up, but which currently leaves me out of breath if I walk up too quickly. There’s a rainbow bench at the top and you can look down at Hitchin’s main thoroughfare Hermitage Road and then or up at the surrounding countryside.

I can’t say too much about it yet, but it may get a mention or two in the Pottery show I am doing and every time I am up there it makes me want to draw stuff. I know so little about art that I wouldn’t even know what medium to do the art in. I use words and occasionally clay.

I am not good at art, or at least have always felt that way because I wasn’t in the top two or three at it at school. When I got my art folder back from middle school, I took it out into the garden and burned everything in it (including the folder). It stood for failure and my only recourse was to attack it with fire. I mean it says so much about me, that I hardly dare unpack that any further.

Having done the pottery show and also not being eleven any more, I have come to realise that it doesn’t really matter how good you are at creating stuff - it’s still fun to try. The pottery show was very stressful indeed, but also it was weirdly relaxing to give up hours of your day doing something that you would never usually do and just doing the best you could.

So anyway today I was looking down at Hermitage Road thinking about how I might capture it in art, if only I had some pens, pencils, paint, pastels and some sketch pads, when I spotted something a bit weird. Can you spot it?

Let me zoom in.

A little closer

Sitting on a ledge above the estate agent was the figure of a small child. It’s obviously not a child as it’s entirely white and featureless and is clearly a mannequin. It is possibly missing some of its legs (though that might just be perspective) and it looks a bit like one of the plaster cast figures from Pompeii. Though I don’t think Hitchin was ever hit by a volcano and it would be a weird place for a child to end up if they were trying to avoid the ash and lava.

It’s like a Doctor Who monster impinging on my sleepy Hertfordshire home.

But who put it there and why? And why hasn’t anyone made them take it down?

I think I did spot it a few months ago, but had pretty much forgotten about it. So it’s been there a while. Just a slightly threatening and weird thing hovering over the largely oblivious people of Hitchin. Perhaps it’s an alien. I can’t say.