The Thames from Richmond Hill

It’s one of life’s hilariously cruel ironies that the times when you need to run most are always the times when you want to do it the least. Hangovers often see me clawing at the carpet as Lazy Boy or some other good-intentioned person tries to shuv me out the door with the words ‘You’ll feel better after you go for a run’.

But that’s the last thing I want to do and the last thing I want to hear. I want to hear ‘You’ll feel much better after another hour of sitting in your pajamas drinking chocolate milk’. But chocolate milk doesn’t work, running does.
On Saturday morning, my fingernails were firmly secured to the doorframe, but there was nobody to try and push me out for my run. And it wasn’t a hangover I was up against, it was a week of rubbish and nonsense. I knew that I had two options for making myself feel better: get drunk or go for a run.
Once my procrastination had pushed me into the PM, getting drunk was looking all the more likely. But then I thought about what my heros would do. What would Rosie Swale-Pope do? She’d start running and not stop until she ran out of road having literally run around the world. So I ran.
I ran to Richmond Park and after about a mile the huge scabs on the back of my achilles broke off and were, I could tell, not in a good way. I could turn back, go home, put my feet up – but Rosie wouldn’t. A stress fracture didn’t stop her running round the world, so I carried on.
After 4 miles I felt sick. After 5 miles I felt even more sick and by the time I got to the top of Richmond Hill at 5.5 miles I realised I had hardly eaten all week and that that was the reason why I was feeling unwell. I had two things in my pocket: an Oyster card and a Visa card. I could get the bus or the tube back home – but what would Dean Karnazas do? He’d order a pizza to the middle of nowhere and not break his stride while he ate the whole thing.



= 5 miles

 

So I carried on into Richmond and I stopped at Starbucks for the appropriate reward for running 5 miles – you may remember that this is universally acknowledged to be a cinnamon swirl and an iced latte. I ate this on Richmond Green and then carried on – along the Thames to Kew.
By the time I got to Mortlake I’d run 12 miles and was starting to feel a bit light-headed. There was nothing but towpath and river in either direction, but one of my few talents is that I can sniff out a corner shop from a mile away. A quick pitstop for a bottle of Lucozade and a packet of prawn cocktail crisps and I was back on track.
I did wonder how long I could carry on with this pattern of running, stopping and eating. Could it go on indefinitely? No, it couldn’t. After 16 miles I came to Putney Bridge and ran out of towpath. So I got myself a banana milkshake, picked up a pizza for tea and ran just one more mile before, with the help of a well-timed bus, I was back on the sofa, exhausted.