The joys and travails of running

A change of time and place can completely alter one’s perspective. I wrote the following two pieces about my experience of running with Parkinson’s less than a week apart.

Sunday 17 June 2018, South London

Twenty-nine minutes of torture

My chest is tight. My breathing is heavy. My right foot is starting to feel uncomfortable. My legs are screaming at me to stop.

I have run a mile and reached the park entrance. I still have a little over two miles to go.

I look at my stopwatch: if I can hold a pace of 6 minutes per kilometre, I will finish my 5K run in under half an hour.

6 minutes per kilometre.

The thought strikes me as utterly absurd. In my prime I could run 10 miles (16.1K) in under an hour, a pace equivalent to 3 minutes 40 seconds per kilometre.

Stubbornly I press on. There is no longer any pleasure in running; only suffering. The tank is empty and there is no life in my legs. The weather is mild and I am already sweating in my shorts and T shirt.

I go into marathon mode: just keep putting one foot in front of the other to get to the next checkpoint. 

2K. Through my peripheral vision, I see other runners in the park but I keep my head down and stay focussed in my own world.  

2.5K. Halfway. Now my left leg also feels heavy and sluggish. Is this because I have reached stage 2 of Parkinson’s so that it affects both sides of my body, or is my left leg taking more strain because of my lame right leg?  Difficult to tell.

3K. A young girl on a scooter zips by perilously close but I don’t have the reactions to manoeuvre out of the way; fortunately, she swerves at the last second. I head past the ice cream van towards the park exit.

4K. I run past a local school playing field where there is a cricket match taking place.  A spectator, a grey-haired slightly portly man with a ruddy, jolly face plays some sort of chasing game with a boy, presumably his grandson, just outside the boundary. He seems more athletic than me and for a moment I feel a tinge of disappointment. But the emotion soon passes as I muster the motivation for the home stretch.

4.5K. I approach a set of traffic lights near my road. In days gone by I would hope for the green man, so as not to interrupt my fast pace. Now I will the red man to appear so that I have an excuse to stop for a few seconds.

Annoyingly it’s the green man and I press on over the last few hundred metres to the finish line.

I stop my watch. As I walk to the front door I read the time: 28:47. Smashed it.

It was twenty-nine minutes of torture. But at least I can still run 5K.

Saturday 23 June 2018, St Ives, Cornwall

The joys of running

It is hard work staggering up the steep narrow wooded coastal trails but I am rewarded with red fuscias and purple foxgloves. The air is heavy with the scent of summer bloom, or so I imagine. I can feel a heaviness in the atmosphere as I breathe but I can’t actually smell anything. Nevertheless the wild flowers do look exquisite.

I cross over a railway bridge and catch a glimpse of Carbis Bay far below. With the tide out, it is a glorious stretch of sand, shimmering in the 7am sun, and I know I have to experience it close up.

I run very slowly, taking care down the steep dowhill stretches, but eventually reach the beach, dotted with a few dog-walkers and kayakers taking advantage of the early morning calm sea. I jog down to the water’s edge.

And then I immerse myself in the moment. For a couple of precious minutes I am Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, striding across the gorgeous firm sand. Lungs full of sea air, wind in my hair, radiant sun on my face, the swoosh of the waves breaking gently by my side. My body tingles with energy as I stretch my legs, relax my shoulders and push out my chest.

I have a feeling of déjà vu: I have not been to this beach before and yet it feels familiar, as if I have run along it in my dreams. 

My legs can’t sustain the elevated pace for long and I pause by the barnacle-coated rocks at the end of the bay to recover.

It will be a bit of a slog to get back to our hotel in St Ives, but it will have been worth the effort. Clara will likely still be sleeping when I return; I wish she could have shared the experience with me.

I have rediscovered the joys of running. 

Now I must find a way to bottle them, so that I can sip a little of their sweetness in the difficult times.

What happens after we die?

Thursday 21 June 2018

My apologies: yes, this is another post about death. But I promise it will be the last one for a while.

Yesterday my mother-in-law, Maria, was buried. It was a traditional Catholic burial, just as she would have wanted, her body interred near where she lived most of her life, in a short and simple ceremony.

Earlier in the week there had been a small but moving funeral service, complete with a professional choir performing excerpts from Fauré's Requiem. Clara, who organised most of it, had done her mother proud (see previous posts the call and a peaceful passing). 

In truly morbid self-indulgence (or, as I prefer to view it, forward thinking pragmatism), all this ceremony got me thinking: what would I like to happen to my body after I die?

Aside from somewhat impractical alternatives, like the Zoroastrian tradition of leaving the corpse on top of a hill to be devoured by vultures, these days there are normally two choices of what to do with the body of a deceased person: burial and cremation.

Often this is a religious decision: in Judaism, Islam and many Christian denominations, burial is traditional. In Buddhism and Hinduism, cremation is the norm. For those who are not especially religious, plus many modern Christians, cremation is popular: it's certainly more practical in an increasingly crowded planet, and an urn of ashes is more versatile than a coffin.   

So which option do I want?     

I prefer a third option: to donate my body to medical science. 

I’ve been an atheist since about the age of eight and a little thing like Parkinson’s isn’t going to change my views that easily. I remember the epiphany... sitting cross-legged on the hard wooden floor in morning assembly at primary school, we were singing Lord of the Dance when a thought suddenly occurred to me: what if God, like Father Christmas, was created by people, rather than the other way round?

Given that I don’t believe in life after death, that I have an incurable disease of the brain and that I have already benefitted much from medical science, I feel it is the least I can do to give something back.

Maybe my brain may be used for cutting edge research into Parkinson’s. Or perhaps my body will be butchered by some trainee doctor practising her scalpel skills.  Either way is fine by me. I don’t believe in a body having any higher value after death so it may as well be put to some earthly good. 

As is my habit, I started doing a bit of research into the subject. 

It turns out that, in the UK at least, it is not so easy to just say in your Will that you want to donate your body and then for it to magically happen.       

The basic problem is that by the time the Will is read, it's often too late to be able to use the body. Instead, it's necessary to make arrangements in advance with a local teaching hospital who may even ask for the donor to bear some of the cost of transporting the corpse. In my case, brain donation is also a possibility, leaving my grey matter to a neurology research department.  It's all overseen by the Human Tissue Authority, if you're interested in that sort of thing... 

After trawling the Internet for a while, I decided it was all getting a bit too complicated and instead took a simpler alternative: I registered for organ donation and chose to leave it at that for the foreseeable future. 

As I've said in this blog, life is for living, and certainly not for obsessing over death.  I will defer all the practicalities of body or brain donation to a much later date. And I'll stop blogging about death and start focussing on life for a while.

As for Maria, her body now lies in the ground but, in her world view, her soul is already in heaven. 

At her funeral service there was a beautiful rendition of In Paradisum from the end of Fauré’s Requiem as her coffin was carried from the solemn interior of the church out into the brilliant midsummer sunshine. Sung in Latin, the words translate as: 

   May the angels lead you into paradise:
   may the martyrs receive you at your coming, 
   and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem. 

   May the choir of angels receive you, 
   and with Lazarus, who once was poor, 
   may you have everlasting rest.

Sometimes I wish I were a believer...

May she rest in peace.

Copenhagen

Friday 8 June 2018

This week I went to Copenhagen for a day to pitch to a prospective client.

As often happens when I am nervous, my right hand began shaking uncontrollably when I started speaking across the table in the grand wood-panelled meeting room. I have a simple solution in these situations: I sit on my right hand and let my left hand do the gesticulating. Once the nerves settle and I get into my rhythm, the right hand then gradually reappears. Hopefully my audience remembers the smooth ending rather than the shaky start.  Though unfortunately this trick doesn’t work so well in stand-up presentations.

Overall, the meeting went reasonably well and afterwards I had a late lunch with a Danish colleague at a small café in a side street near the Royal Danish Theatre. We sat outside in brilliant early summer sunshine watching the world go by while I enjoyed a traditional Scandinavian open sandwich – a delicious salmon and avocado creation on rye bread.

The pace of life is slower in most European cities outside London. In particular I noticed how calm and relaxed the Danish cyclists were. In comparison, cycling in central London is an aggressive, and somewhat dangerous, pursuit: everyone is in a hurry, and many people seem full of testosterone fuelled anger. Even the dedicated cycle lanes are not a place for the faint-hearted rider. I never cycle in London, mainly because I don’t have a bike and I’m rubbish at cycling, but also because the death and serious injury toll amongst London cyclists is so shocking.

As I sat watching the Danes calmly going about their business, I reflected a little on my own life in London now that I have Parkinson’s. Much as I like my house and job, the burdens of the daily commute and the struggle to get through each work week, coupled with the noose round my neck of several more years of mortgage payments, are inevitably taking their toll. I must admit that I envy many of my Parkinson’s friends who, with mortgages paid off and kids grown up, have the luxury of being retired. I long for an easier life and a more relaxing place to live.

Of course, it’s not all about me. Clara also works full time in central London and enjoys much of what the metropolis has to offer. So we discuss ideas and options. Given that her Dad still lives across the road, and that Rosa will still be at school for four more years, we are most likely set to stay where we are for a while.

But, it seems increasingly likely that, rather than slog away until I am 55 or 60, at some point in my early fifties we will sell the house and downsize, thereby discharging the mortgage and allowing me to switch to a less demanding occupation or maybe even to retire early. By moving further out, though still within easy access of the capital, I should be able to have a much better quality of life, whilst Clara continues to work. A compromise, but hopefully one that works for both of us.

Regular exercise is important for people with Parkinson’s, so who knows, I might even be able to take up cycling. Though this would not be London-style cycling; it would be cycling of the leisurely kind – like they do in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.

A peaceful passing

Sunday 3 June 2018

(See also previous posts the in-laws and the call.)

Maria passed away unexpectedly at the age of 85.

Clara’s mother died the way many people, myself included, would like to go: quickly, quietly, painlessly and at home.

Laughing and chatting with her carer in the morning there were no signs of the brief heart attack that would take her life in the early afternoon. Although she had Alzheimer’s and understood little of what was going on, physically she had appeared to be in good health. The sun was shining, and the small suburban garden that her room overlooked was in the full bloom of late spring.  Maria’s life ended on a happy day, rather than in the gloom of mid-winter. Good for her.

Clara very sensibly moved her parents into a flat across the road from us last year so that they could much closer to their three children, who all live in London. As a result, they all got to spend a good amount of time with their mother this year. I had last seen her about a week earlier when I went round to change a lightbulb; she had certainly seemed fine to me then.

Maria was a geography teacher through her working life, teaching at a variety of secondary schools in the North West. She was a committed Catholic, with a strong sense of duty that she passed on to Clara and others. After retirement, she was pillar of the local church, playing the piano at every Sunday service for several decades.

She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about five years ago. I had planned to write about it in this blog: about how the fog of dementia gradually descends, slowly and cruelly taking away the person you once knew.

But now that she has passed away, Clara and her siblings quite rightly prefer to remember her as the person she was before then: an energetic, confident and decent woman, and a loving, caring mother.

There are funeral arrangements to sort out and then attention will turn to Clara’s dad: so far he has taken the loss of his wife of nearly 60 years as well as can be expected. Once the turmoil settles, we all want to help him enjoy his remaining years, whether they be many or few.

But for now, we remember all the wonderful things about Maria.