I am a runner. Not the fastest. Not the strongest. Not the most graceful. I am a runner, though, and I share one thing with all runners - fast or slow, experienced or novice, amateur or professional. Before we set out - on the trail, on the track, on the treadmill - before we run, before we race: we lace up.
This has been the year we found ourselves before we realised we were lost. As the world locked down, we opened up - to new possibilities, to a different view of ourselves, to a new understanding of our limits and capabilities. Lockdown and the ever-present threat of Covid-19 is something that was unimaginable when we broke the seal on 2020, so many months ago. If you had asked me then how I would have ridden out the wave that hit us in early March, I would have said writing. I can wrap myself in words, mine or someone else’s, and for a while I live in a borderland that pulls inner and outer worlds together to create a new place where I’m free, just for a little while. It’s a place where rebuilding happens, filled with bricks of limitless shapes, each one ready to be laid in the cracks that have formed, to remake a whole that is broken.
This year I didn’t read.
This year I didn’t write.
This was the year I laced up.
I have run for almost 15 years, always erratically depending on what life threw at me at any given time. I have been fickle, letting work and life trip me up. I have paused to become a parent. I have stepped away to fix damaged parts of me. I have run alone. I have run with friends. I ran my way through my PhD. I ran to raise money for causes I believed in. I ran alongside people because I couldn’t run them healthy again but I could show them that as long as they needed me, I would match them step-for-step.
For 15 years, I have laced up.
I weave my laces. Into each one, I put a part of me. For every run, I add a thread. In the beginning, the threads were stubborn and tough to twist together. I wasn’t used to weaving. A work colleague and friend gave me the first one when he printed out a Couch-2-5K program and asked me to give it a try. I had forgotten that I knew how to run. It was a long time since I had raked around the village as a child, never questioning my ability to put one foot in front of another at speed. I don’t know if he realises the worth of the gift he gave me but that golden thread has held strong for all these years and there is a part of his kindness that keeps my footsteps true even now.
My favourites are the blues and greens - these I weave together for every run I use to find a measure of calm in a busy world. I have a store of them to hand. My drawer at work is full of them. I keep a box of them on my bedside table. I find them tucked away in the door pockets of the car, in cupboards behind the cereal boxes, tucked inside my wallet or marking pages in books as yet unread.
Once in a while, the blue-green seascape of thread is broken by a bright line of red. These are the threads I weave when I run in anger. They are fragile and easily broken. Often, they have turned to dust and blown away before I return home and take off my shoes. The motion of my footfall is enough to shatter them and I can never quite remember why it was so important to add them when I look at the laces the next day. I prefer the blues and greens.
2020 is the year the world closed. I am still weaving my laces but it’s harder to find the coloured threads. This year, my laces look dull. I think it’s because they are carrying more black. I twisted the strands in while I ran for my oldest friend’s dad on the day she attended his funeral. I couldn’t stitch her back together. Humans mourn collectively but this year, Covid-19 changed that. I could only mark memories through footfall. I have added more than one black thread this year.
For as much as this year has been hard, so it has also been amazing in many ways. Life is complex. I have found a community of thread-weavers who gave me handfuls of bright neon strands to add to my laces. Now, as I run I leave a glowing line of colour in my wake, like a sparkler-trail in the dark. I love this so much that I keep adding more and more miles on the trails, just to watch them shine. Sometimes, it makes patterns that make me laugh out loud. These thread-weavers are my running tribe.
They lace up.
I have spent a lot of time talking to groups of runners over the last 15 years. I look closely at their laces. Often, the laces are woven with harsh steel threads that will cut you if you aren’t careful how you handle them. The runners spend a lot of time polishing their threads. They shine with a cold kind of brightness. When I run alongside them, they sneer at my brightly coloured laces and disappear down the trail ahead on their own, absorbed with their shiny grey strands. I don’t chase them.
My running tribe are different. They understand that when we lace up, we are tying together pieces of ourselves and that our brightly coloured laces are what hold us upright as we run. It’s the colour that lifts us to run further and faster than we imagined we could. We admire each individual warp and weft thread. Our laces hold the strongest threads of all. They are the strands that are spun from kindness. Sometimes, someone’s laces snap and then they aren’t long enough to fill all the holes and pull them tight enough to hold them up. It’s OK though, because between us there are enough laces. We pass on our laces, tying them all together to make sure everyone can stand tall and cross the finish line.
In the end, we run as one.
We lace up.