“You must love running,” people often comment when they hear I’ve signed up for another marathon or see me leaving the office for a jog along New York’s Hudson River path. There are certainly many who do. Tim Chichester, a teacher who has just won a leg of the world’s biggest corporate race in Rochester, New York, has no hesitation when I ask what motivates him. “I love it,” he says emphatically.
For the briefest of moments, standing in the tunnel under Rochester’s minor league baseball stadium where the three-and-a-half-mile race finished, I envy his unadulterated enjoyment more than his ability to knock out a three-minute kilometre. Despite having completed more than a dozen marathons, I don’t “love” running in the straight-forward sense. It’s closer to my relationship with writing — I love having run.
From 30km in a category-5 typhoon across Hong Kong island, to 30 minutes on a sweltering Dubai evening, and all the runs where things just haven’t clicked, I have never finished a session and wished I’d never set out. But there were countless moments of pain, frustration and general misery too.