The Route Clutterer

I apologise to all those real runners out there who are training for this Marathon, talking about sub-four and sub-three and if-you-manage-x-you-can-start-with-the-elites-next-year and knowing what you’re supposed to do with those little sachets of stuff they give out with the water later in the route. But running is boring. I get bored. And I’m not very good at it (I suspect those two may be related). I know that if I am to complete this Marathon I have to do a lot of it, and I really am trying. But I’m not a real runner. I’m a well-intentioned wife, mother and unpublished novelist trying to do something for a charity that means – well, everything, really. James was diagnosed early and lives a full life. David was not diagnosed and died. We need nice people in this world. We can’t have them keeling over and leaving widows and widowers and fatherless sons and daughters simply because no one’s heard of Wegener’s granulomatosis. And we can’t keep blasting suffers with ghastly chemotherapy simply because we don’t know what else to do. Awareness must be raised and research must be done. It’s such a rich area for research – at the last Wegener’s trust meeting, the PhD student the Trust is funding presented some of her research, and it was so exciting to see the progress being made and the ideas that are bubbling to the surface as a result. One of those bubbles, properly nurtured, may become a more targeted treatment. An accurate tool for diagnosis. A cure.

And so I get back on the machine while O and T are at school and nursery and A and E are napping. I get on it when my mum comes over to supervise the children’s tea, and if neither of those scenarios have been possible, I get on it when the children are in bed and the dinner is cooking. I would rather be doing almost anything else. And I’m increasingly worried that what I’m doing isn’t enough – that I won’t get round the course – that I am just not runner enough to make it.

My Proper Runner friend won’t do the London Marathon, because she loves running and there are too many amateurs cluttering the route. I cling to that. I’m no good as a runner, but I reckon I’ll be a pretty effective route-clutterer.