Over a month since I posted here, I see, so let’s start with this evening’s run, two and half miles through the windy banlieus of Seaford. This run was distinguished from others in that I spent much of it touching my bottom. This was not an auto-erotic practice I’ve acquired since working in Brighton, nor the result of Sunday's undignified fall in the churchyard of St Peter ad Vincula in Folkington, whither I had gone to visit Elizabeth David’s grave and admire these statues which show the Long Man of Wilmington as a Ur-version of a Nordic walker or, if you prefer, the Naked Rambler. It was instead because the zip on the pocket at the rear of my shorts, just about where Edward Carpenter’s boyfriend George Merrill touched E.M Forster above the buttocks in 1912, had broken and I feared that the house keys might fall out.
How has the running been? While Mo Farah prepares for London, people speculate about sub 2:00 marathons, and we prepare for the first every Moyleman Lewes Marathon, I’ve been taking an hour to run five and a bit miles. I have ibuprofen and knee exercises, but it hurts. Tonight the pain started at around two miles, which is precisely when my breathing starts to sort itself out. Possibly, if I kept going to the twenty-five mile point, I might find that everything resolves itself. There are two half-marathons in the offing, Eastbourne and Hastings. I think both are possible, though my times will be poor.
It all goes back to that knee injury sustained during a conference run in Glasgow in 2012. The same conference takes place again this year, in Oxford. I shall run there again, or perish in the attempt.
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