At the beginning of this, the first week I’d run sixty
miles, I had pain in my left testicle or groin or upper leg, a pain that
I couldn’t quite place, but over the days, it had settled in the testicle and it became clear I needed to go to the doctor. Given the timing,
the Covid spike again, I called first and spoke to the GP who said I needed to come
in and get examined, which I did in my mask. He did the exam and ended it abruptly,
saying I could pull up my jeans, and washing his hands, asked, ‘Where are you
from?’
He wasn’t concerned, he assured me, but I need to have an
ultrasound just to double-check, but because the hospitals were rammed with
people from Covid, it might be six or eight weeks, and I acted as though this was
fine because I'm good socialist and think that of course, the people with the
most need should be served before me, despite my unsettled feeling when I sat
on the sofa that I could feel, if I thought about it, a growth, even though I
knew it wasn’t.
The ultrasound came sooner than was promised, and I went and
sat outside of a window called ‘Ambulatory Care’, a term I had never heard before, and a young
woman who pronounced my name correctly called me back. The ultrasound technician
was a middle-aged man, but the nurse and another young woman would be there
with us, he said, as chaperones. I thought about how that word made me feel
foreign, like I was a high school dance and someone was watching to see where
my hands were when I was awkwardly dancing.
I didn’t, of course, have cancer, and I pulled up my trousers
and walked out of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital thinking that this was, whatever
the outcome today, my future: finding lumps and having pain in new places and
tests that would mostly be okay until some time when they weren’t
okay. Thirty-eight is a strange young age, that’s still young, but not that
young, and your body begins to feel less precious and sexual and mysterious, and
franker. Here is my body, me pathetically holding a paper towel across my
stomach while three people look quizzically at a computer monitor and we casually
discuss the reasons I got a vasectomy, what, ten years ago now, is it.
My dad likes to remind me of one time I said that runners
would rather talk about running than run, but when he reminds me of it, I think condescendingly about myself then.
I can’t describe running as something I want or don’t want to do anymore; it
feels more like a responsibility, or impulse, or inevitability. When it isn’t
in my life, it leaves an absence. It's like marriage: I don't choose to run every time I run, I chose to run some time in the past. The sun came up this morning and my body felt
good, if tired, and I thought about inevitability and how the road seems to narrow the older you get, but how you can run faster and further and steadier when the path is narrow. You don't have to follow the line, the line is the path. The end might be coming, eventually, in the future, but for
now, for this season, the thing in front of you is long and straight and clear.