Load Up On Carbs and Bring Your Friends

My 11-year-old son, Noah, plays football four times a week: Tuesday and Thursday evenings, Saturday and Sunday mornings. I bring him to Moyola, wait around for somewhere between one and two hours, then bring him home again. And I love it. It’s one of the nicest things I’ve ever done – watching my son play football, travelling for an hour with him, hearing his chat before and after. It will, I hope, give us a bit of a foundation of affection and communication for when he very shortly becomes a surly tutting teenager and I become the surly tutting dad of a teenager.

However, it’s a lot of standing around and I kept thinking that there had to be a better way to use the time. Which is when I thought of running.

Getting Started

So I started inconspicuously: grinding out 2km along a country road, while wearing probably all the wrong stuff and looking like I’d been standing close to an explosion at Sport Direct’s reduced-to-clear rack.

Everything hurt. I could hardly breathe. And there was chafing.

But I kept at it. I got used to waking up feeling like I’d been in a car accident the night before and that after-effect soon that went away. I got myself a pair of good running shoes and a pair of Apple Airpods Pro (which meant I could listen to music but also hear traffic at the same time), and both of these were game-changers. And I increased my distance.

I ran through warm sunny evenings, through rain and snow, and I came to love it.

I’m still not very good, I need to be clear about that. When I start off on a run, all my bones and muscles still creak and scrape and ping for the first few minutes. I do not move like greased lightning. But my breathing has improved (my VO2 Max has gone from low to high in a year and a half) and I can run 5k in 27 minutes (or 10k in 55 minutes).

Routine

This is my routine: 5k on a Tuesday evening, 5k on a Thursday evening and 8-12k on a Sunday morning.

The evening ones are a bit of gallop so I can get back to see the final half hour of Noah’s training. I run, come back, get a protein drink and chat to the other football parents while we watch our kids train.

The Sunday morning is the one I love the most. I start off very gently for the first few kilometers, running from Moyola to Magherafelt, then try to speed up on my way back. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, I just take it nice and easy, working on my breathing. Then I get back to the car at Moyola, drink a protein drink, get changed for church and watch the last half hour of Noah’s training.

What’s To Love

There are a number of lovely micro-events which have arrived to accompany these routines. My wife and some of our church friends meet in a local coffee shop while our kids are at Sunday School, so she waves out at me as I go past. People in cars have started to wave and beep as they drive past: friends, people from church, my kids’ teachers – it’s really nice.

But the best thing by far since I’ve started running – and a friend and I were talking about this very thing tonight after we’d been for a run together – is the extraordinary uplift in mental wellbeing. My mood improves significantly after a run, whether it’s short or long. The long ones, though, are an amazing place: where clarity of thinking becomes immediate and accessible. I use these runs to pray, solve problems, parse worries, plan, and generally to get my thinking to straighten up and fly right.