The Woman who liked to run
The woman who liked to run liked to run for all manner of reasons. Firstly, she had discovered, late in life – or, at least, later than might usefully have been the case – that she ran very well. She could run very long distances without tiring and quickly developed the habit of running anything up to fifteen miles over the Mendips before breakfast. Secondly, exercise on this scale kept her in the kind of shape that was much admired by men and, while this wasn’t a primary consideration, it didn’t displease her that male heads turned with extraordinary predictability whenever she ran past in her lycra shorts and a vest that revealed a good six inches of very flat stomach. And thirdly, running provided her with an opportunity to escape for a while all the demands of running a household of six children, none of them yet in their teens, a puppy who was proving to be untrainable in any meaningful sense of the term, and two large rabbits. The childrens’ nanny, whose presence in the house allowed her to go on her early morning runs, was not a morning person and rarely appeared until after she had returned and showered. Increasingly she was not an afternoon or evening person either, and as a result the woman who liked to run found she had more and more reason to run and more and more to run from. These are some of the things she had to run from: the untrainable puppy, whose interest in defecating outside the house was minimal, invariably deposited pungent brown turds at strategic intervals around the kitchen during the night and cleaning these up was no way for the woman who liked to run to start her day on a regular basis; the nanny – whose name was Elspeth but liked to be called ‘Els’ – interpreted her brief in the narrowest of terms and was at pains not to be accused of any excess of zeal; while the children were just too many. As to the absence of any man in the house, the less said the better. And as to the challenges presented by two large alpha male rabbits who very definitely did not get on – ditto.
The woman who liked to run had run at least seven and a half miles one morning in early January – at which point it was her habit to turn back with thoughts of a hot shower and a bowl of museli – when something happened. She was not, of course, remotely tired. Two male dog-walkers had paused to sneak a rear view as she passed them (one late thirties, handsome in an obvious kind of way, with a Jack Russell; the other sixties, short and grumpy-looking, with some kind of mongrel), which had not gone unnoticed. And she was feeling a sense of joy, a sense that increased as the distance between her and home increased. On she ran, on, and on, and on.
Page(s) 35
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