Jenny
Parkrun is back in Northern Ireland, a rare example of us leading the way. It is among the many things I have missed quite desperately in the pandemic, but I’m endlessly grateful for the Saturday morning habit it formed in me.
I’m still in the habit of thinking of the London parkrun I used to do as my “home” one, and that is where my heart is a lot of the time. It has been odd these last two weeks to have to remind myself that my friends there weren’t running and volunteering too, connected with me by the shared time – give or take half an hour – and experience. I think I’ve been looking forward to that as much as anything.
My new “home” parkrun is a new parkrun. It only got going a few weeks before the virus took hold, so there wasn’t time to establish much in the way of normal. There was already hand sanitiser and a sense of dread, but it was still a more innocent time. I feel sad for all our past parkrun selves stuck back there together, still hoping for the best.
There is still hand sanitiser, and there is social distancing. Runners and walkers naturally fan out on the first hill, but at the start and finish, it’s more noticeable. I used to like standing in the middle of the crowd, and I’d forgotten about the different sort of closeness that went with the ritual of gathering up and dispersing. Something about the rhythm of it, and the timing when it came at the end of a long week, made for an easy openness, or at least the sort of candour that comes with exhaustion, and a fast track to unforced friendship.
Some of that is back, even at a distance. Parkrunners are uniquely sympathetic to other parkrunners’ triumphs (going out after work on Friday night) and disasters (shin splints), and now there’s the bond of what we’ve all been through, albeit that anyone still running or volunteering has been leading a charmed life. But I think that the pandemic has separated us mentally as well as physically.
During what I naively thought of as the worst time – the brutal full press of the death rate and desolation – when I dared to think about parkrun returning, I imagined a Mexican wave of emotion and celebration. In the event, I found it a much quieter and more subdued affair, not only because of the physical restrictions and restraint but because of the psychological distance between then and now.
What can we say to each other about it? Where do we start when we’re talking not about last week but about the year before last? Maybe it’s meaningful enough just to be grateful to be back together, hoping for the best again. Eighteen months is a long time in any runner’s career, and a long way to go, alone, in anybody’s head.
Things to remember: the sun shining at the right time, the end of term, the open cinemas
Things to forget: the endless television reruns of 6 January, the memory of the freedom of anonymity, the manifestation of my ultimate typo: the Untied Kingdom
mehrunnisa
it is past ten o’clock and night is yet to set in. the sky (where you can see it through the clouds) is still blue, the contours of the lake apparent through a ring of lights. i am in zurich, a pretty city with the soul of a village and a heart of water coloured by the state of the sky.
summer is being uncooperative. it is neither hot, nor cold. it is humid too. the day after i arrived my throat went from scratchy to sore. aside from the conundrum of whether it was a cold or covid, i was desperate not to get a cough, prone as i am to dry ones that linger. my pediatrician labelled it the dog’s cough. my sister-in-law has named it guttural. an excavation of the nasal passages (twice in the same week) proved that it was a cold. and fortunately, guttural remains at bay thanks to a cough suppressant.
now that i am recovered, i want a summer unqualified by rain, hail and drops in temperature. i want to swim in zürichsee again. to feel the water under me, to submerge myself in something outside of myself. where motion is the only thing that matters. where thoughts are kept at bay because all that is relevant is what lies ahead, a luxury that this time has taken away. these moments of abeyance are few and far between.
it feels as if the structure of time is rendered useless. the clock journeys through, its machinery faithful to movement. yet, it feels like not much has changed. it is odd, all this talk of post-pandemic living because it merely feels like a new chapter in an old story. the title would be the pandemic with vaccines and the variants that keep coming. the westminster government’s decision to abandon all restrictions and move to personal responsibility is terrifying. sometimes, i wish that it was the scientists who were running the country through this time. but that of course is the wishful belief in consensus, that there is one concrete solution. the idea of letting infections run their course is as crazy as that of zero covid. both ends of the pole are absurd. each day presents a new set of data and discoveries, mostly worrisome and offering little certainty. even with the marvel of scientific development, it seems that ultimately, the history of this time will echo that of the pandemics of the past.
the only way i can make sense of time right now is to live fully in the lull. the lull being the space between peaks. it was in this spirit that i went back to spinning at digme in london last week and spark cycle in zurich this week. everything from the sound of cleats clicking into place, the music and movement coursing through the body, the intense sweat and the muscle soreness was pure joy. i had so missed the experience of working out with strangers in a space that is just about movement and motion.
things to remember: not needing a single pause in spin class even after more than a year of not doing it, reading trethewey’s incredibly moving and beautiful memoir titled ‘memorial drive’, being able to concentrate and actually strike things off my ‘to do list’
things to forget:the danger and derangement of the westminster government, the pakistani government’s deranged response to enacting laws against domestic violence, the little knot of anxious feelings at the base of sternum