What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I sat
on the beach and looked around surreptitiously from under my twenty Euro shades.
It was truly a phenomenon. Not one person
here has my body type, I thought to myself.

I
squinted, twisting my body to look at the twentysomethings
rolling their cigarettes beside me; the mother playing with her toddler
down by the waves; the group of students behind me.

Every woman’s legs go straight
up-and-down, with no bulging at the tops of the thighs, I thought.

All of them have necks like swans, and
they all accentuate them by wearing their beach hair piled, carelessly but faultlessly,
on the tops of their pretty heads, I marvelled.

Nobody has belly fat; they all have
2-dimensional tummies that manage to be flat and soft at the exact same time, I gawped, head shaking.

Going
to the beach in Italy is about as much fun as a frontal-lobotomy performed by
Ozzy Osbourne on a good day, and enough to push a girl to three rounds of therapeutic
gelato whilst resolving never to eat pasta again on a bad one.

(As
is, I learnt quite recently, drinking vodka enough to mentally self-approve of
midnight skinny-dipping with the Mediterranean bastards, too. Sometimes you
have to feel the limoncello and do it
anyway, but my God that’s one hell of a bad decision hangover come the
morning.)

I sat
on the beach one afternoon and played my new favourite game of destructive self-loathing,
wherein I compared my body to all the other thinner, darker, better ones on the beach. My esteem drifted
out to sea. I was fat and pale and undeserving of love, or attention, or
happiness, and probably I wasn’t as intelligent as I thought, and what about
what I said to that girl at work today? I bet she’s talking about me right now,
saying what an awful person I am. AND MY PARENTS! THEY MUST HATE ME TOO! I HAVE
NO FRIENDS AND NO HOME AND MY EYEBROWS ARE WONKY AND, AND, AND!

AND IF
ONLY I LOOKED LIKE THESE OTHER GIRLS I WOULD BE WORTHY! WORTHY, I TELL YOU!
WOOOOOORRRRRTHHHHHHHY!

Finally,
I saw a woman about my age and I thought to myself, oh. Okay. She has a body type like mine, and she’s kinda cute.

That
woman stood up, and Internet? SHE WAS PREGNANT.

And
so that tale of eroding confidence about how I look, to which every woman, no
matter how much she declares otherwise, is prey to, is how I came to reading What We Talk About When We Talk About
Running. It’s a tomb I idly
picked up off of my friends bookshelf because the title is taken from my
favourite ever short story collection and I wanted to see who would so brazenly
plagiarise the God that is Raymond Carver.

The
answer: Haruki Murakami, Japanese writer and ultra-marathon competitor.

And I’m
glad he did, because it’s dead good.

I’ve
run on and off for a couple of years now, and whenever I start again after a hiatus,
I always admonish myself for ever having stopped. When I run I feel strong, and
powerful- like wonderwoman. But then, that is often how I find myself: doing
something intensely and powerfully and with all the best will in the world, and
then not at all.

See:
boys/money/blogging/learning to be a responsible adult.

I
started running again because spending a summer by an Italian beach means by
default extreme exposure to those Italian Supermodels, and there is no SPF high
enough to block out the rays of their physical superiority.

But it
took me three days of pushing my body to its limit before I remembered that I
don’t actually care that I do not look like Giselle.

(Okay,
if you had a magic wand and could make me look that way with zero effort, fine.
Maybe I’d consider it. But putting down the buffalo mozzarella? Fat chance.)

I
picked up What I Talk About When I Talk
About Running as thinspiration. I’m
not proud of it, but I did. Some part of me thought that I’d be happier if I
was thinner, and if I ran, I’d somehow be better at life. Nothing to do with
health, or well being, but instead, weight.

I’m
embarrassed by myself, but for a moment there my imagination was telling me
that thin = successful. Successful at what? Urm. My brain didn’t get that far.

I
genuinely believe in the serendipitous nature of books- that they come to you
when you most need them- and this just served as further proof because out off
all the books in all the world, I got this one last week. I got inspiration, by the pageful, because
Murakami writes that for him, as a writer who runs, being active everyday makes it easier to hear that inner voice, AND
AIN’T THAT THE TRUTH MR MOTIVATOR.

My
inner voice doesn’t think any of the things I let my indolent mind wonder that
afternoon at the beach. Not one little bit. I’m not fat. I’m not repulsive. I’m
a woman, with boobs and chins and rolls and bumps AND THE BEST ASS YOU’VE EVER
SEEN.

Ironically,
though, I had to remember to use my
body in order to remember to be okay
with my body. I run to feel strong and capable, not to be Lauren Conrad.

Murakami
says, no matter how long you stand there
examining yourself naked before a mirror; you’ll never see what’s reflected
inside.

True
enough, Murakami. But what I can guarantee is that whatever is inside of me?
It’s about two and half times the size of what’s in an Italian woman on a
Riviera beach.

And
actually, that’s okay.

No.
Really.

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