Training

This is another of the spontaneous writing things. I've used 'we' because in my creative writing lecture she made us write in the second person plural. I don't really get why; it seems too limiting, having to keep the voice as a group the whole time.

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We have this ‘do and die’ attitude, this endless well of machismo, which drives us to batter our bodies into heaving, crumpled heaps, legs and lungs burning and hearts pounding. After it’s over we curl up on the track as if praying, and it feels like we’re trying not to die. Sometimes we vomit as our bodies go into recovery mode, central nervous system fried, but we are not in the least bit embarrassed. We’ve seen it all before.

Running – sprinting, specifically – scratches some sort of itch that we all feel deep within us. It must be an addiction of sorts: even though Tuesday nights always seem to be cold and wet, we nevertheless turn up and batter ourselves for an hour and a half, then depart, feeling exhausted but satisfied. Purged even. This ritual is repeated three further times each week (excluding gym sessions). Strangely, the more you commit the stronger the hold it has over you; it feels inescapable. Everything comes second to training – university work, our social lives, holidays, everything – but unlike recreational drugs the mental pleasure we get from sprinting never diminishes.

I often wonder if any of my peers have any notion of what I put myself through; any notion of what it’s like to have exhausted yourself so thoroughly that you are able only to stagger like a drunkard back to the start for the next rep; to be overcome by nausea and puke on the grass; to wake up the next day with muscles that cause you agony with every movement. And to enjoy doing this, to suffer alongside friends, to savour the morning after’s dose of muscular pain because you know it is the pain of improvement. My housemate greets me, ‘Oh hi, Malcolm, how was training?’ ‘Yeah, alright, got soaked again’. She has no idea.