sticks

"What, lost our skis, have we?" "Bit warm for that, isn't it" It's odd that I can't remember more of the taunts from the days on sticks. It was a daily experience for nearly two years.  I clanked. There was a time when I thought I would never forget, for the simple reason that the days of clanking along seemed to unroll endlessly before me, without hope or explanation or variation.  I don't give it much thought these days.  I step out the door and down the street with my mind on other things.  Even once the sticks were history, it was a long long time before I turned my back on the front door without some small half surprise to note that my hands were free and empty, free to carry the groceries home, free to shove in my pockets, free to flag down a taxi or a bus without accidentally poking a passerby in the eye.  It is entirely correct and right to forget those times, but it is also right for me to tell you some small bit about them so that you can also forget them.  Somehow, it is better that you should join me in forgetting them than never know whence came my forum name of Stickless.  

It is ten years since the husband read about Les Foulees de la Soie. It puzzles me still what attracted him to the trip.  He was the runner in those days, though in earlier years I had trotted around a few half marathons.  But he hated running in the heat, or up hills.  So why go all the way to China in search of those conditions?  And what was I supposed to do while he was trotting around the desert or the mountains?

Those familiar with domestic negotiations will recognise all the symptoms: of course we signed up.  Alan got stuck into an impressive training routine, and I, with doubt in my heart, bought myself a book entitled "Learn Chinese in Three Months" - complete with tapes. That was fine, it was January that we signed up, the trip was not until the beginning of August, twice the required amount of time, should suit even a slow learner.

The snowdrops came and went, the crocuses followed. I could say my name and say that I was a student/translator/secretary in Chinese, which wasn't quite the truth. The broadbeans got their heads up, the potatoes grew, and as they grew, so did my misgivings, thriving in the rich soil of my gloomy imagination, bursting full flowered into troubled dreams by night and royal Worry by day.  

What, you may ask, could be so terribly worrying about a holiday, even if it was a running holiday, and I was not a runner, even if it was to a foreign land, where I spoke all of six words of the language, even if the tour company spoke another language (French), that I had not thought about since I left university.  Well maybe there is a little to worry about there.

But the greater problem was the sticks.  Sticks per se are not so bad, it's what the sticks stood for, what the sticks meant, and what they meant for me.  In spite of extensive testing, no organic explanation for my deteriorating mobility had been found.  The medical euphemism of the day was that it was a "functional" problem.  "Functional" has a variety of translations into plain English, for the layman, for the colleague, and worse, for myself.  It gets translated as "malingerer" or "idle" or "pity-seeking" or "neurotic" or "doesn't want to walk".  I could have lived with others thinking this of me, but so often had the verdict been given, that however solidly I believed myself innocent of these charges to begin with, the years of testing and null results had forced me to consider the possibility that the accusation was just.  The sticks had malingerer printed in large letters on them, and I couldn't walk to the post-office without them.  I had to grab them in both hands and accept the implicit accusation.

Moreover, sticks in and of themselves have an effect that goes way back in time, to the days when we ran about on all fours, chased our lunch while others chased us for lunch. Those with visible infirmities were first on the menu.  The instinct Not to be seen as easy meat is a strong one even after millennia of civilisation has made such fears no longer a realistic threat.  

Oh yes.  I was looking forward to my holiday.  With considerable trepidation, which grew as the inverse of time till departure.  Ten years have kindly erased the details.  I do remember that there was a system go slow that resulted in half of the flights from London to Paris being cancelled, including ours.  I remember seeing another man - large, grey haired and kindly looking sporting a Foulees t-shirt - and then lost sight of him as we galloped through the airport catch the earlier flight which was not cancelled, and which was in its final boarding.  I remember struggling through Charles de Gaulle airport, minus our luggage, and trying to explain that others of the team would certainly be delayed.

Shanghai was a thunderstorm, that much I do remember.  Our view from the 30somethingth floor was of a city obscured in mist, only fellow skyscrapers rising above the fog, superior to the obliterated city below.  The thunder growled all night, was still growling at 4:30 in the morning, when the call came to rise and shine, to pin a number on our fronts, and join in the race - the Prologue - through the city streets, at the fashionable start time of 5:30.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to pin a number on your front, when you're an unnatural quadruped in competition with greyhounds?  I can't believe I'm doing this.  I'm not doing this. This is absurd.  People on sticks don't take part in races.  Yes there were others walking, not many, but there were no others clanking. This isn't happening.  I'm not doing this.

I did it.  I really did pin the number on my front.  We got down to the lobby late, and I found a dark corner until we all moved outside to meet our day's running companions - members of a senior citizens running club.  I cowered at the back.  It was conveniently dark, and most of my European colleagues were at least at the front, and only Chinese runners were milling around where I was.

Then one ancient Chinese man came towards me, a tiny shrunken man, who came up to perhaps my shoulder - I could easily look down on his silver head.  He pointed to the sticks.  I pointed to my legs.  "Bu hao."  The little man leapt up and down with delight, gesticulating wildly thumbs up.  The horn went and called us to order.  I was last and lost within three minutes, alone to wander the streets of Shanghai unfolding in the rain.  

Somewhere inside me an ice-block of accumulated resentment cracked and the thaw began. To that little man I was a runner.  He saw the sticks and didn't see the evil writing on them.  He saw the number on the front and saw the runner.  Because he could see the runner, I too glimpsed that other image of me, as if in some mirror that reflected the runner and not the sticks.  Or, the sticks were there, but were no longer the emblem of shame; the number on the front transformed them into a symbol of defiance.  It was a beginning.

Over the fortnight we travelled together, little things happened which were Big things to me.  It was from the start the habit of the walkers to stand aside on narrow paths and cheer the runners as they passed by us.  Within days, the runners were yelling encouragement as they passed me.  At the end of the races, there was a podium for those who had placed in the day's race, both for the runners and the walkers.  Towards the end of the week one of the runners came to me and said "if there is a podium today, if I am on it, you are coming with me."  There wasn't one, and she wouldn't have been on it had there been one, but that didn't matter.  I required no further proof that I was a runner,cast in the same spirit with all the others who pinned numbers on their chests.  It was enough.

The story should go on to read that from that day forth I got rid of my sticks and walked, but of course it didn't happen that way.  It was another four months of steadily decreasing powers before a radical change of diet and the right anti-inflammatories set the course for physical improvement.  But my head was free of the curse of sticks even as I grew more dependent on them over those four months.  It will come to you as no surprise that my resolve to return to run Foulees de la Soie dated from the first day I walked without the sticks, which (you will not be surprised to learn) was also the first day that I ran.  It took three years to get there, but I got there in 2004.  It will also not surprise you that even now I have very little difficulty finding the motivation to lace up the trainers and get out there and run.