Cross-country

I hate football. I've always hated football. Not the sport per se: I see the skill, the athleticism, the teamwork. But in Lancashire, in the seventies and eighties, it gave licence to break-time bullies and playground psychos. Every lunchtime someone was being pinned against a wall and asked what team they supported. The wrong answer meant a beating or a boot up the backside. Every answer I gave was wrong.
My dad didn't follow football. Nor did his dad before him. I come from a long line of football avoiders. So I avoided it at every opportunity. I didn't play football at school. I didn't play football at home. I didn't talk about football, ever. And neither did my dad.
At primary school I hid when teams were being picked. If I was picked, I'd run around the pitch energetically in exactly the opposite direction to the ball. Sometimes I feigned illness and my dad wrote a sick note. Secondary school was all boys, and very football-focused. Three teams a year: a first, a second and a third eleven. By the second year the sick notes were more elaborate:
‘Dear Mr Pickup, Simon can't play football today as he has developed an allergy to hard spherical objects being kicked, dribbled, or otherwise projected, at him.'
I was rationed to two a term. Dad made that quietly clear. At sixth form college, in Accrington, I assumed games-dodging would be easy. But, as Dad taught there, it became harder for him to sanction my skiving. Especially as he shared a staffroom with Mr Monk, the games teacher. I had to turn up at least. It was only one afternoon a week. How bad could it be? As it turned out, only the super-sporty actually went to games. All twelve of them. And me.
Mr Monk suggested indoor five-a-side, which sounded harmless enough. I lasted twenty minutes. Nineteen running from the ball, one lying flat in front of goal after having it kicked in my face from two yards.
'Well stopped, that man,' shouted Mr Monk. I saw stars for a full minute. I wasn’t stretchered out. There was no stretcher. So I crawled. That was it for indoor five-a-side.
Another option was cross-country. It wasn't football, so I took it, though no one else had in two years. I'd be on my own.
For the first four weeks that suited me fine. I'd jog across playing fields, down a ginnel behind a terrace, amble over the by-pass, then up a zig-zag path to the foot of the fell above Accrington called The Coppice. A fell, for the uninitiated, is a northern hill: bleak, exposed, and always steeper than it looks. Often with obstacles like scree slopes and cattle grids. On bad weather days I’d bring a bobble hat. A cagoule. Always my roll-ups. From up the Coppice the town was laid out below me. Rows of red brick and slate, punctuated by mill chimneys, the canal cutting through, the viaduct running over. I walked back to college at a leisurely pace, first into the changing room every week.
Mr Monk asked how long it took me. I didn't know. I'd walked most of it. So I made up a time.
“Twenty-two minutes.”
“Not bad, lad. Aim for under twenty.”
The next runs were well over twenty. But that's not what I told Mr Monk. I made up ever-decreasing times, week after week. He was so impressed that in March he entered me in the County Trials. I didn’t stand a chance. But I couldn’t tell him that. I came second-to-last. A boy ahead went over on his ankle with sixty yards to go, and I sprinted past.
Mr Monk put my position down to nerves. All I needed, he said, was race practice. So a month later he entered me in the Hameldon Fell Race: open to all serious runners. And me. Of the three fells: Coppice, Moleside and Hameldon, I’d staggered up one. How much harder could three be?
The day before, at dinner, my dad said, “Monk says you ran the Coppice in under twenty.” He didn't look up from his food. “I know you walk it.” Of course he did. He taught geography two corridors from the gym. He knew the fell better than Mr Monk. And what I was capable of in twenty minutes.
“You’ll run it properly tomorrow,” he said, and left the table.
The first mile was tight: jostling elbows and cheering. Once over The Coppice the pack thinned out, and Moleside End loomed. Beyond that, Great Slack and Snipe Rake and up onto Hameldon. Round a cattle grid, crooked crows hung from barbed wire: a farmer’s trophy. I couldn’t hear runners. Just my breath and the squelch of feet in brown bog water. As I reached the last brow of the last fell, low cloud was closing in. A sheep skull with a fringe of wet grass: a comical green wig.
My breath slowed as the ground levelled. A distant trig point. I saw runners rounding it through drizzle. I couldn’t feel my legs. Mud caked my shins. I turned the trig and faced, not a panoramic view, but a wall of cloud. Runners melting into it. I stopped, hands on hips, breathing hard. A wiry figure sprinted towards me. His energy said twenties but his wrinkles said sixties. He grinned as he passed and slapped my back.
“Don’t worry lad, it’s all downhill from now on.”
I could barely stand. My legs wobbled.
My Dad said nothing more about it. To me, or to Mr Monk. He let the cat stay where it belonged: in the bag, with me. He knew, and I knew, and I knew that he knew. That was enough.
I still run a mile from a football, like my dad. But these days I walk up fells.