Confessions of a Runner Martina Reilly Bless me father, this is my confession. I did not take up running to be healthy. I did not take it up for the good of my heart or to lower my blood pressure or stave off cholesterol. I did not do it to make friends or win races. I did not do it to get head space. I took up running for a far less noble reason. My thighs wobbled. Yes, the initial spur to don a pair of tattered runners and a mis-matched tracksuit was because my eight-year-old daughter had caused a cataclysmic crash in my confidence when she remarked delightedly that my thighs reminded her of jelly whenever I wore a pair of shorts. “That’s just the way the shorts are,” I told her. “No,” she said. “That’s just the way your legs are.” Out of the mouth of babes…. And so, one dark September night, over ten years ago, I ventured down to the Le Cheile Athletic club in Leixlip. I had high hopes for myself. I had always been a sporty child, I had even run in the schools’ competitions when I was in my teens. And so what if my legs hadn’t seen action in three decades, they’d soon be fit and trim. Wasn’t it all muscle memory? Plus, I knew all about nutrition and had eaten a grand dinner of Spaghetti Bolognaise a couple of hours beforehand, for the energy. I was wearing my well used, broken in runners to guard against blisters. My first inkling that maybe all might not go to plan was when I saw all the other runners in their jazzy apparel - cool tracksuits, skintight strides, headbands, colourful sweatshirts. They were the business. I, on the other hand had gone for 24
the ‘mis-matched, baggy stuff in the back of the wardrobe’ look. Still, it was all about the runner, not the clothes. Bring it on, I thought. The session that night started with a bit of hopping and jumping and I hopped and jumped with abandon. I hadn’t done that since I was about four. It was tremendous fun. After that, we were instructed to run around the four-hundred meter field. Twice. As I came in, breathless and feeling a bit sick, I thought to myself, ‘Martina, you still have it!’ Images of the glory days of my youth, belting up a hundred-meter track, strutted in front of me. If I kept this up, my thighs would be toned up in no time! The whole night had been a huge success. I was pulling on my jacket when I heard: “And now that we’ve finished the warm up we’ll go out onto the road and do a loop.” What? There was more? And what exactly was a loop? I watched with unease as everyone began jogging towards the entrance of the track. With my confidence sinking quicker than Fine Gaels vote, I discarded my jacket and my sweatshirt, exposing my tattered tee-shirt, which announced that I was an ‘eight-legged groove machine’. I could have done with eight legs because the two I had were now in shock. The ‘loop’ took on the nightmarish quality of a Forest Gump run, on
