The fortnight life won

Gone ten at night. Hottest day of the year, the kind where the house holds the heat like a grudge. And I'm face down on the garage floor, sweat pooling on the gym mats around me, doing split squats.

Because I told a robot I would.

That morning I'd driven to Harrogate and back to say goodbye to my cousin. A round trip, a funeral, the sort of day that empties you out in every way a day can empty a person. By the time I got home there was every reason in the world to leave the session. Nobody would have said a word.

Ted doesn't do reasons, though. Ted does the plan.

So I did it. Down on the floor at ten o'clock, sweating through the hottest evening of the summer, running on nothing. And here's the daft part I didn't see coming; the satisfaction of getting it done was unreal.

My cousin was ten years older than me. One of those people I looked up to my whole life without ever quite getting round to telling him. It was unexpected, and it was a shock. The funeral was a celebration of his life, which is exactly the send-off he deserved, and the rest of it I'll keep with my family, where it belongs.

I lost my brother last August. Grief, it turns out, doesn't queue up and wait its turn. The new one reached back and reopened the old one, and for a while there the two of them just sat together.

And then, that same night, I did split squats on a garage floor.

I won't pretend the two things are joined by anything tidy. But doing a hard, pointless, deliberate thing, on a night the world has taken everything else off you, is maybe not as pointless as it looks from the outside.

Right. The running.

No time trial this fortnight, or rather, none I haven't already told you about. The big one was the birthday 5K, the 29th, which I'd fast-tracked as a little homage to turning forty-three. You watched that unfold in Split 01, horse and broken bridge and all: 24:36, four minutes and thirty-seven seconds the wrong side of the dream. So the number's already on the board, and it hasn't moved. This isn't a Split about the number.

This is a Split about the state I was in around it.

Because here's how a taper is supposed to go. You back off in the days before the test, you bank some rest, you turn up fresh and fast. Textbook. And here's how mine actually went: the fatigue I'd been outrunning finally caught me, all at once, and "deload" quietly rebranded itself as "do-nothing."

The evidence, if you want it, reads like a charge sheet.

The 23rd: fell asleep putting my daughter to bed, lying next to her, and woke up with the evening gone. The 24th: too hot to move, and honestly the rest felt like the wiser call. The 27th: a long day at uni, then straight into my niece's birthday BBQ, and any window for a run escaped out the back door while I wasn't looking, real fatigue sitting where it had been. The 1st of July: rundown, and in genuine need of proper rest. Add a funeral and the hottest week of the year to that, and you have a fortnight that had absolutely no intention of going to plan.

Life had a fortnight going spare. Life won.

And yet.

Here's the thing I keep having to relearn, apparently. It bent. It didn't break.

The strength session after the funeral still happened, at ten at night, and I've told you how that one felt. The 400m intervals held together better than I had any right to expect: five reps, no fade, and the last one clocked 3:53 per kilometre, which matched the quickest of the lot. On the 3rd I got out for a threshold run and it just felt good to be running again, the kind of good that reminds you why you started. I even stopped to take some photos. Winsford, but not as we know it.

And when I actually went back through the log, the fortnight I'd airily written off as a lazy, do-nothing wash told a very different story. The intervals. The time trial. The threshold that felt so good to be back out for. A couple more easy runs on top, and a daft lunchtime football I'd forgotten I'd even played. I'd convinced myself I'd done nothing. The log, as ever, begged to differ.

Now. The robot.

You'll remember Ted is the coach I built, the one who emails me at half seven every morning with firm opinions about my legs. What I maybe undersold is how much of my life, currently, is spent quietly fixing him. This fortnight served up two beauties.

The first was a scheduling row. Ted told me, in the morning email, to go for a run. So I went for a run. Model citizen. And then that evening, reviewing the day, he told me off. Not for the run. For skipping the strength session. The strength session he had not, at any point, mentioned. I had followed his instructions to the letter and still ended up in trouble with my own software. All sorted, in the end. Another bug filed and squashed.

The second one I'm still a bit fond of. I'd noted in my diary to Ted that I was staying up to watch the football. Fine. Reasonable. And the next morning he emailed to check I'd enjoyed the tennis. I don't watch the tennis. I have never told him I watch the tennis. Somewhere in his little electronic head, football had become tennis overnight, and he'd served it back to me with genuine warmth. Another bug, fixed before nine.

His verdict on the fortnight, once the dust settled? Another deload. Strict orders to be in bed before midnight. The robot, it turns out, can read a tired man better than the tired man can.

The best evening of the lot, though, wasn't a session at all.

Another cracking evening out on the trail, the light doing that thing it does in early July. And then, up ahead, a fox. An actual fox, stood on the path like it owned the deeds. Bernard clocked it roughly half a second before I did, and the fox, being no fool, was gone before it became a conversation. Then, further along, a cat. Fox and then cat, in a single evening. All that was missing was a squirrel to complete the set and crown the whole thing the perfect storm.

It never came. Just short. And watching him scan the treeline afterwards for the squirrel that owed him an appearance, I have never seen a dog so close to greatness and so quietly robbed.

So what did I learn, in the fortnight life won?

That the plan is not the point. The plan is a stick to aim at, and life is allowed to knock it out of your hand now and then, and stacking up the runs I somehow did through a fortnight like that one is a win by any honest reckoning. I'm learning to let the plan bend without treating it as a failure, which for a man who set a target of nineteen-fifty-nine and meant the fifty-nine, is no small thing.

And the honest kicker, the one I can't dress up: I slept woefully this fortnight. Some of that was the heat. Some of it was grief. And some of it, if I'm being straight with you, was lying awake at stupid o'clock getting obsessed with this blog. The very blog meant to keep me sane. There's a lesson in there somewhere. I'll get to it once I've had some sleep.

Next fortnight, then. Another deload, bed before midnight like I've been told, and then back to the real work: Tuesday intervals, Friday tempo, the slow business of turning 24:36 into something that starts with a nineteen. My cousin knew how to play the game. I'm still learning. But I'm out there, most days, trying.

And as of this week, I've got a reason to be out there that I didn't have a fortnight ago.

It began, as these things now do, with a WhatsApp group. Three of us, me, Dave and Gilbo, conjured into existence one evening out of absolutely nowhere. No warning, no context. Which is a very Dave way to start a thing. Dave McDave: an old friend from up in Scotland, the kind you don't speak to for the best part of a year and then pick straight back up mid-sentence. And he'd had an idea, which where Dave is concerned is always cause for mild alarm. There's a triathlon in September. The three of us did one together the best part of eighteen years ago. He reckons it's high time we did it again. And, he announced to the group, he's getting in shape for it.

It has a 5k on the end.

Now here's the part that's been rattling round my skull ever since. That triathlon, eighteen years back, might be the only time in my entire life I have actually run a sub-20. Might be. Because here's the catch, and long-suffering readers will enjoy this one: I have no proof. None. No watch, no Strava, no record of any kind. Just a hazy memory, a number I'm not altogether sure I'm allowed to believe, and two witnesses, Dave and Gilbo, neither of whom I would trust to remember a shopping list, let alone a 5k split from eighteen years ago.

And here's the genuinely annoying bit. At the time, I didn't think the sub-20 was any kind of achievement. Barely registered it. It was just the run leg of a triathlon, and in my head I had far bigger fish to fry. What actually bothered me, what I stewed on for days afterwards, was that I'd gone too soft on the bike, and that halfway through the swim I'd bottled the front crawl and switched to breaststroke like a man quietly conceding. Twenty-five-year-old me ran the exact number forty-three-year-old me now lies awake chasing, and spent the rest of that day cross about his swim technique. If I could reach back through eighteen years and give him a shake, I would.

So there's really only one option, isn't there. Go back. Do it again. On the record this time. And beat the ghost of my twenty-five-year-old self, who is, I'd remind you, the very same smug article still convinced I'm built for this sort of thing.

And beat Gilbo and Dave, obviously. The very same two witnesses, now doubling as the only two men standing between me and doing it all again. That part is not up for discussion. Although, in the spirit of the honesty this blog runs on, I do have a concern about Dave's "getting in shape." By my reckoning, our Dave has not meaningfully exercised in at least ten of the last eighteen years. He'll do well to turn up at all, let alone finish. He's enjoyed his Tennent's, bless him. Whatever base he's building from, it is a low one.

September, then. A finish-line 5k, a couple of old mates, and a personal best I might already own and cannot prove.

See you at the start line…

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The Lockpick

• Current 5K form: 24:36 (birthday time trial, 29 June)
• Lifetime PB: 20:15. Target: sub-20:00 (~3:59/km). Gap: 4:37
• This fortnight's win: turning up anyway. Intervals, the threshold, and more besides, in a fortnight that deserved none
• This fortnight's stupid obstacle: the heat, the fatigue, and a robot who thinks I watch tennis
• Ted's verdict: another deload, bed before midnight, no arguments
• Bernard's verdict: the fox, the cat, and the squirrel that never showed. Just short of the perfect storm
• Next test: a triathlon in September, eighteen years on, with a ghost to beat. But first, sleep.