running - Debbie Young's Writing Life

Writing On The Run

Posted on April 27, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

somerset monument, hawkesbury upton, glouceste... — Image by Synwell via Flickr

Sending a text on my mobile as I jogged past Hawkesbury Monument the other day, it occurred to me that I was only a stone’s throw from writing my blog on the run. So many of my friends update their Facebook status from iPhones and Blackberries that I’d been thinking about investing in a smart phone myself, so that I could post to my online blog while away on holiday.

It’s not the first time I’ve hankered after equipment to help me write while travelling. Years ago, long before the rise of the internet or the miniatiurisation of the mobile phone, there was a clever little gadget on the market. A bit like a miniature version of the shorthand machines used by courtroom stenographers, it was like a tiny typewriter but with just four keys, one for each finger of one hand. You tapped the keys in a different combination for each letter of the alphabet. Even in a shaky commuter train, you’d be able to write legibly, because when you got home, the machine would spool out what you’d typed in normal letters. One of these devices would have made my daily commute across London suburbia more productive, but my salary as a lowly editorial assistant wouldn’t stretch to one.

Another reason I wanted it is that I’d never learned shorthand. Several times in my teens I had bought teach-yourself books, but even with daily practice, I knew that it would take a long time to master. With the short-termism of the typical teenager, I couldn’t make the commitment. Every year or two after, I would think to myself “If only I’d stuck at it, my shorthand would be fluent by now”.

So if I do write my column on the run, I’ll have to use an even more old-fashioned device to record it – my brain. I just wish my head had a USB port so that I could back it up with a memory stick.

(This article originally appeared in the Hawkesbury Parish Magazine, May 2011.)

Family, Personal life

Keeping Up with My Sporty Daughter

Posted on April 4, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

“What’s your favourite sport, Mummy?” asks my small daughter on the way to Brownies.

I rack my brains, trying to think of which sports I can actually claim I do.

“Running,” I reply, from my list of one.

“What about badminton? Or football? Or tag rugby? Or tennis?”

She reels off some of the many activities she’s tried at school since moving up to the Juniors in September. At the small village primary school that she attends, her class has a PE rota, enabling the children to sample a different sport for three weeks at a time.

Her after-school schedule is equally varied. In the last couple of years, she’s tried ballet, tap, modern, country dancing, street dance, karate and gym. With a trampoline de rigueur in every modern child’s garden, she does quite a lot of random bouncing, too. Then there’s roller-skating at the leisure centre on Saturday nights with friends, swimming with Daddy at whichever local pool currently has the warmest water, and ice-skating whenever we encounter a rink. (She’s skated outdoors in Paris and Amsterdam so far.)

On this evidence, I don’t believe the newspaper hype that our children are growing up fat and unfit – not round here, at least, where we have so many open, safe places for them to play.

My childhood experience of sport was very different. For baby-boomers like me, PE in the Infants meant pretending to be a tree to the sounds of “Music and Movement” on the radio and learning to do bunny hops over benches. In the Juniors, my only real sporting memory is of the obstacle race on Sports Day, even though in the first year we were lucky enough to have a former national athlete as our class teacher. Mrs Stocking, formerly Patricia Kippax, had sprinted in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and a few years later, there she was, letting us chase her round the school field, much to the amusement of other staff.

At secondary school, the PE teachers were only interested in the naturally talented few who might make county standard. My best friend and I jogged round chatting at the back on our cross-country runs past the graveyard, trying to conceal American Tan tights kept on for warmth beneath our hockey socks. In the hockey season, I’d always volunteer to be goalie as I reckoned it might require the least physical movement.

Whenever the Olympics came around, the events were so alien to me that they might just as well have been on Mars. I did recognise I was witnessing history being made as the American swimmer Mark Spitz secured his seventh gold medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics, but only because my teenage sister had a crush on him and she made me watch.

But next year, when the Olympics come to London, for my daughter, as for so many other local children, the sports will seem real and tangible, because they will already have tried out so many of them for themselves. She’s won a few medals herself already for sporting activities, for reaching a certain stage in her gym club and for completing some sponsored walks and runs. She will watch the games as a fellow sportswoman. She will see herself as a contender.

And I bet when hockey comes up on her rota next autumn, she won’t be keeping her tights on.

(This article was originally published in the Tetbury Advertiser, April 2011)

Family, Type 1 diabetes

Run, Rabbit, Run

Posted on January 24, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Year of the Metal Rabbit — Image by OnTask via Flickr

January 1^st was a rotten time to make New Year Resolutions. The excitement of Christmas was over, the decorations were losing their charm, and the mornings and evenings seemed darker than ever. Relentless advertising for the post-Christmas sales rubbed in the fact that it was an awfully long time till payday. It’s no wonder that January 24^th was officially designated the most depressing day of the year. This January had only two highlights for me: the opportunity to write cheques dated 1/1/11 or 11/1/11 and, a week later, my birthday – though, goodness knows, the novelty of birthdays wore off for me a very long time ago. So this year I decided to be realistic about New Year’s Resolutions: I resolved not to make any.

But then, a few weeks into the New Year, something wonderful happened: I looked up into the sky at 5pm and realised it was not entirely dark. A tiny tinge of blue was still hovering behind the impending night sky, a promise of the spring to come. It was enough to make my personal sap begin to rise. Then I spotted in my diary the fact that we’re on the brink of Chinese New Year. We’re entering the Year of the Rabbit. It wasn’t too late to make those New Year Resolutions after all! Before I knew it, I found myself signing up to run the Bristol 10K. A leaner, faster, fitter new me is just around the corner of 2011…

But it won’t only be me that benefits. I’ll be fundraising for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Every £60 I raise will pay for an hour of research to find a cure for Type 1 Diabetes. This horrible disease has blighted the life of my husband and my small daughter, through no fault of their own. (Type 1 diabetes is not related to lifestyle choices). 100 years ago, their diagnosis would have been shortly followed by their death. Decades of research has made it possible to live with diabetes, provided you submit to constant and costly medical intervention, including multiple daily injections or the use of an infusion pump 24/7, plus half a dozen or more blood tests every single day. The next ambition of researchers is to make it possible for Gordon and Laura and millions like them to live without it. At present, there is no cure.

So, with my resolve strengthening as the daylight hours are lengthening, I’ve signed on the dotted line for the 10K charity run. I just wish I had a Chinese bank account. Because then, when I write the deposit cheque, I could take enormous pleasure in dating it for the first day of the Chinese New Year: Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits / Rabbit.

(This post was originally written for the February edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News.)

Family, Personal life

Young Runners

Posted on July 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

We did it – and we’ve got the medals to prove it!

My seven year old daughter Laura asked me last summer whether she could join me on a Race for Life, the 5km fun run in aid of Cancer Research. These runs are held all over the country and I’ve run one every summer since Laura was born. There are many venues. At Lydiard Park in Swindon I ran through mud in pouring rain. On the runways of Kemble Airfield there was a cold fog, and I kept my fingers crossed that someone had warned air traffic control. But on Clifton Down in Bristol, there’s always scorching sunshine, and I have to pour my water bottle over my head to keep cool.

So I was delighted when Laura showed an interest in taking part, and not only because it would provide a good excuse if my finishing time was a bit slow.

We did a little bit of preparation. Hearing the bell ring while we were still half way to school, Laura would break into a trot and pipe up “This is good training”.

Even more important than training is making sure you have a pink race outfit. (Well, this is a women’s only event.) For any man standing on Clifton Down on Race Day, it must be intimidating to see ten thousand pink clad women converging purposefully on the starting line. It’s like a very camp episode of Doctor Who – the Pinkonauts. Though not quite as scary as a 10k race I did pre-Laura, at the Moreton-in-Marsh Fire Services Training College. That route included startlingly realistic plane crashes, train derailments, motorway pile-ups and burned-out office blocks. Running that race was like fleeing from a holocaust. I’m sure the dramatic scenery triggered an adrenalin rush, so we all finished that bit faster.

One other key point on the Race for Life dress code is that every runner puts a pink sign on her back by way of a dedication. This makes for an emotional run. You oscillate from hope to despair and back again, running behind “Me! I survived!”, “Dad, who lost his brave battle”, “my five-year-old son, now fully recovered”. For a little while we ran behind someone who had her mother’s dates on her back, as on a tombstone. I realised with a start that she had died the day before the race. Yet knowing we were raising so much money, that we were united, that we all cared, so, so much, made it on balance a life-enhancing, uplifting occasion. Girlpower, indeed.

But as with any race, there are those that treat it first and foremost as a competition. Laura was initially disappointed to learn that I’d never actually won a Race for Life. I thought she’d taken on board my explanation that taking part and raising money for Cancer Research was the point until half way round she declared “You know, Mummy, I don’t think we’re going to win.”

5km is a long way when you’re 7, and for the second half of the run, it took a bribe of a Love Heart every half kilometre to lure her to the end. I was proud that she rose to the occasion and managed to produce a dramatic sprint for the last few hundred metres. We crossed the line hand-in-hand, beaming broadly. We definitely earned our medals and I was as proud as she was. I wore mine to the supermarket that afternoon. And as for the pink goody bags – well, as the sponsor likes to say, every little helps.

(This post originally appeared in the Tetbury Advertiser, July 2010)