I've already stopped at the petrol station I always used to go after a run and got a take away tea and driven up here. There are two other cars in the car park and then one.
A version of me is still out there running on The Downs. A younger version.
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| Low cloud and rain. |
There is the first version, when I first seriously tried to run a distance 9 years ago with my father, a rucksack on my back, I think it was 30 or 35k. I got lost, and it hurt, I finished it, and had that classic feeling of my legs seizing up driving back, and the next day it hurt even more.
Now I can run these trails from sense memory. I know the markers for 10k and 12k and 20k, I know the ground. The topography is etched on me.
I think of all those other versions of me still out there running, those versions would not be able to picture the older, greyer, version of me sitting here now thinking back. The younger version of me doesn't know this moment, here and now, is coming. He doesn't know how far he will run, or that he will go to terrain that scares him and run across it for days. He doesn't know about the mountains, and the trails and breaking down crying from exhaustion in tents, he doesn't know the exact moment this journey will end. He doesn't know how strong he will get and how weak he will become.
There are versions running in hail and rain. Another version is running in the early morning mist as the sun breaks through and horses run across a field, and that version smiles at how perfect the moment is. There are versions running in heat, and wind and night. There is a version trying to run the big 50 in training, with his partner waiting in the car park. There are versions running alone and seeing no one, shouting at the top of their voice and there is no one to hear. There are versions running on summer days, with the car parks full, and daytrippers and mountain bikers on the trail.
Echoes of long lost conversations. There are versions of me in the car park talking to my brother and father about GPS watches, and energy gels, and Tarahumura indians, and before ultrarunning became a thing.
I ran to break myself. And one day I broke. Broken, frozen, soaked to the bone, sitting in the car, with my heart beat banging in my ears.
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| Under repair. |
I can't run those distances anymore. I'm afraid of those distances now.
Afraid of early mornings, sleep deprivation and creatine kinase. But maybe that version will pass into history too.
There is a future version of me that will come here with my son. We might fly a kite, like the child version of me that came here years before and remembered seeing that. My son wont know this version of me, he wont know that version of me out there running on the trail. But that ghost is out there always running.
Maybe ghosts are versions of ourselves we cross paths with sometimes, trying to teach us a lesson from the past or future.
There are earlier versions of me out there everywhere running. One is running a 5 mile fun run as a kid. Another is running from the old house to the farm, the classic out and back, he's not even a teenager yet. There's another in one of those northern towns running through an endless winter in a park next to a university, running just to run, no idea of time or distance. There's another running up that hill to the apartment in the heat to prove he's still got it and he's not even 30 yet.
There are earlier versions of you out there too, they live in memory, they are captured in landscape. There are versions of the people you meet now, you will never know them.
'What did you do up there... read a book?'
No, I didn't. I started to write one.
I thought about that version of me that will always be on that trail, the one who stepped on this trail 9 years ago.
I start the car. The windscreen wipers grind. I head back towards the towns.
