Every long run this year has found me caught out in the rain and wind — this is the peril of training in February in the UK. The other day I got up too early on a Saturday morning to run twenty miles, the peak of the training schedule which you hit twice in this particular plan. You pull on your shoes this early in the morning and you set out alone, but you can't think about it too much. You can't think as you huff up Victoria Road, you can't think that you have almost three hours of this ahead of you. You just have to go.
This run went well until mile thirteen where I may or may not have hit the wall, but the real problem was the torrential downpour that started right as I came back through the city centre and was trying to cross a bridge. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was wind and big, heavy drops of rain and I lost a minute on mile fifteen and then sixteen and then seventeen and then up the hill back to the house eighteen and nineteen. I got home and my hands were frozen, and I spent the next hour reliving it in my mind, looking at the data my smartwatch had recorded, thinking about heartrates and race pace.
I was alone during the Chuetsu earthquake in 2004, the year before I met my partner and wife and everything changed. I was watching Magnolia on a VHS tape and sitting on a used sofa, in my apartment on the Agano River and I remember wondering what to do. Should I go outside. Should I shelter under the table. I wanted to call someone, but there was no one to call, I realised. I just sat through it, feeling the building shake and thinking it was too much like an amusement park ride. It felt fake. And then it stopped. My apartment building — Heights Riverside, spelt in katakana haitsu ribasaido — which was old and rusting, stayed standing and I looked out the window into the night to see if anything had changed and at least in that small fishing village on the edge of Niigata, nothing had.
Everything in that apartment was used or had been given to me. A woman from my company, Mrs Nunogawa, took me to some house where she was helping a friend move and she gave me flatware and something to hang my washing on. She found me a car, a Nissan Alto, for 50,000 yen that needed snow tyres I couldn't afford, and which had a load of VHS porno tapes stuffed in a paper bag underneath the driver's seat. I was still faithful then, still worried about things like purity, and when I put the first tape in and saw what it was, I shut it off immediately and threw it all out, feeling guilty and afraid and excited.
I keep trying to remember that year, 2004, 2005, remember what I was feeling without fifteen years of everything that's happened obscuring it. I was alone a lot wasn't I. I was wandering around the back streets of Niigata on the weekends, trying to get out of the debt I took on moving there. I had been teaching English at a church in Fukuoka and I felt like Jonah, but without a call I was running from. I was starting then to realise that terrible yawning black hole thatbwould eventually swallow me: there never was a call was there. Whatever I had planned, whatever future I thought was in front of me when I was so certain and so young, had been an Evangelical fever dream. None of it had been really real. And now, in the absence of that, there seemed to be nothing left to lose, I thought I had lost it all.
You remember yourself fifteen years later and wonder how you could think that, but that's it, that's what I was thinking. I was twenty-two.
I have my students define love sometimes because it's hard and it makes the point that useful concepts are difficult to articulate, that words are a mirage. What is love. You think about this when you're on a long run and you've filed through whatever backlog of thoughts you've had for the week, the arguments you need to avoid, so you have them in your head. When there's little left to think about, when you've been alone for two hours on an empty canal towpath outside of Birmingham on the other side of the world from where you started. You're shaking out your mind like a piggy bank, trying to make that last coin align perfectly and come out in your hand. That perfect truth, whatever it is before the rain starts up again and your body takes over.