Running Adventures in Yorkshire (Episode 2)

I won. This is not something I get to say very often, if at all, in any area of my life. I share my home with a woman who missed out on her true calling to be a Crown Court prosecutor and against whom I have not won a single argument in thirty years. In what some people might humorously describe as my ‘career’, I have a couple of jobs but I don’t pay tax. This could be because either I earn so much that I can afford to pay a firm of accountants who filter my millions back to me through a complex series of offshore tax avoidance schemes OR because I currently earn less than I did thirty years ago. The latter proposition applies.  In my sporting life, until now, I’ve never won a damn thing. A winner, I am not, but nor am I a loser. I normally finish mid-pack with the other slightly overweight grey-haired veterans. Mid-pack is not a bad place to be. In terms of our shared evolutionary history, being mid-pack meant that you may not get to sample the tastiest bits of what the front-running beasts had killed but it also meant that the hyenas would not get to feast on your innards whilst you lay looking up nonchalantly into the East African skies. Mid-pack was safe. Okay, you had to eat a nostril or an anus but at least you were alive. In the 21^st century, mid-pack translates as mediocre and I am happy to admit that I excel at mediocrity not only as a writer (self-evidently) but also as a husband and father, an employee and a runner. Recent events, however, have challenged my belief in my own running mediocrity because I WON.

The thing that I won was the Thortle-in-Mossdale Annual Village Fun Run and I won it by a country mile even though the course was only 3k or six times around the village recreation ground. The Whippet, the 11 year old local lad whom disgruntled villagers muttered would end my domination of the local Run in the Park, was a no show. Apparently, post-SATs, he had been hitting Fortnite very hard and had been unable to raise himself from a heavy night of murder and larceny in virtual reality. Therefore the victory was all mine although I shared some of the glory with my 25 year old daughter who trailed behind me in second place. Third place was a septuagenarian in jeans. The temperature on the day reached almost 30 degrees Celsius but the jeans stayed on all morning even during his free post-race massage. Besides my daughter and the denim-clad grandad, the field over which I triumphed also included several adult club runners. Fortunately for me though, they were all tethered to their tottering offspring. As I lapped them, I felt their looks of resentment burning into my sweaty back and heard them having to agree with their drooling progeny through gritted teeth, ‘Yes, that man is running very fast.’

Apart from the glory, winning the Throttle-in-Mossdale Annual Fun Run earned me nothing other than the cheap medal and the ‘goody’ bag of health-promoting literature that all competitors received. The organizers erroneously thought that the adults in the field would concede defeat to the children and had only acquired child-appropriate prizes. I would have happily accepted a Peppa Pig effigy bearing a trophy but it wasn’t offered to me. I also would have been very pleased with the Rising Star award, featuring a plastic rainbow with a grinning star face at its zenith but this too was not forthcoming neither to me or to my daughter who legitimately finished in the position of 'First Girl' in her first competitive race. Instead we were promised free Magnums (or Magna) but in a travesty of justice(cream), we never got them.

However, I did quit the field a winner. I had emerged from the middle of the pack and had come first, for the first time ever and probably never again, until next year's Throtle-in-Mossdale Annual Fun Run.