Fall on my enemies

I was in Costa on the second of January waiting for coffee while my kids, two of them now old enough to be left alone in a store, bought donuts in the shop two doors down. A man, an older man, was asking to see the manager in the queue ahead of me, and we all watched as the manager came out of the back, a man younger than me, but tired looking, and he listened across the counter, nodding and eventually shrugging. Whatever it was, the attitude of the person who had at the counter, or the thing that he wanted which wasn't available, could not be solved. The older man sat down with a woman who must have been his wife, who was also tired it seemed and I wondered how many times she had to sit, waiting for him to talk to the manager. She must, in some way, also be on his side. She must be — how else can a relationship survive.

Since my running through the cemetery in Germany in November, my knee has been full of doubt. I worried, when it was at its worse: perhaps I have bottled it, all my plans of running this marathon in Wales in April, shot on my overeagerness to get stronger. Every morning that I set out on it, I felt the sort of pain that makes you wonder if the knee will give out entirely. Of course, it won't and you can read all about your patella and the pain you might feel in it from overtraining, or undertraining or whatever. Luckily, it's the kind of pain that you can run through and the kind of pain that diminishes if you keep running, but are careful to not run too much or too hard. After six weeks, as I pushed up the hill to the house on Victoria Road and I thought about how much weight I must have gained over the holiday, the knee was remarkably absent in my narrative of failure and that itself is a kind of middle-aged success. At least my body has not entirely failed me.

The miles or kilometers stack up, depending on how you count them, and I managed to finally talk myself into something about running I have been trying to learn for years and years: you can't always run as fast as you can. That in fact, most of the time you need to run slow or you won't be able to run fast when you need to run fast. You need to run slowly to build your capillaries in your legs, to get the oxygen throughout the whole body. You can breathe as deeply as you want — if the oxygen doesn't move through you, you can't use it. I kept running one day even though my watch had failed and when I came home and checked my time, I had run as fast as I needed to without knowing it. You only need to run fast on race day.

The girls did get their donuts, the vegan ones that Greggs is doing now and we wandered around the British strip mall, me staring at my phone — news of the world burning or drowning or war and the girls sorting through clothes and cards. We bought pasta and made it at home, Naomi and me. I was terrified of being a father when I became one, when I was twenty four, but it's twenty-twenty now and I am thirty eight and I own a home and will have a teenager this year. Naomi made sauce from scratch and I watched and helped boil the pasta feeling elderly, a sliver of my future. Is the pasta done, I asked, and we each pulled one out, ate them and agreed they were done.