Coughin’ dodgin’
Warning: vaguely sincere / emotional piece below…
On 2nd August 2025 I started coughing. I didn’t stop for seven months. In fact, even now, I still spend the first few minutes of every day hacking up something that would make Bear Grylls question his faith.
On first contracting what was probably some nasty strain of Covid, I was confidently told by an Irish friend that it was “a 100-day cough”. Unbeknownst to me, that crazy optimist was wildly underestimating the ordeal. It’s now 310 days and counting.
So, earlier this year, I reached the rather disturbing conclusion that, thanks to my inability to train for such a long period, my subsequent struggles to cope with a brisk hill walk and my advancing years, my 2025 1 hour 48 minutes PB for a half marathon would undoubtedly be the fastest I would ever run. It was the first time I had concluded that my life was now destined to be a ‘study in decline’; that my fittest days were behind me and, without being too melodramatic (well, perhaps a little) that death was hitching up her skirt and beckoning me towards her chilly abode. A sobering assessment for a 53-year-old.
I mentioned this rather gloomy epiphany to my wife, who looked at me as though I were a simpleton. She told me that with a positive mindset and a little bit of graft I would smash my personal best. To cut a horribly Californian life-affirming morality tale short, last Sunday I beat my 2025 PB by over 4 minutes and now plan to beat this new PB next year.
It sounds like it’s time for some greetings-card aphorisms… so, here goes: you don’t have to live in California to realise that often the biggest limitations we face are those that we impose on ourselves, that we can all achieve some vaguely impressive shit if we put our mind to it and that a positive can-do attitude is the key to living a fulfilling, happy life…
… and, of course, most importantly, that you should always listen to your wife.
My new book How to Con Friends and Manipulate People is published on 2 July — you can pre-order it here: https://geni.us/YsMum
Perfectly said, the show isn't over until the fat lady/fate her damn self sings!
Personally, I think running is some sort of holdout from humanity's earliest beginnings as we ventured from the forest into those wide open plains, but it quickly became unnecessary once we invented arrows and other useful objects to outstrip our ability to run at all.