My Own Great Court Run...

Joy here...When I was little, I curled up on the couch one weekend to watch the Chariots of Fire with my mom.  I don't remember how old I was, but I remember being glued to the screen as the young men raced on far-away beaches and in awe-inspiring university settings.

I knew nothing of running then, and Cambridge was a fancy place in far-off England, a place of culture and learning that even at that early age I was drawn to.  The music pulled me in and the era of sportsmanship excited me, just as the anti-semitism shocked and appalled me.

The first 100m, turn L at the palm tree!

Fast forward some 30 years, and I now have visited both Oxford and Cambridge; I hold a Ph.D. in English literature, and I have taken up running myself.  But I have yet to rewatch Chariots of Fire.

Now that I've settled in far-off Malaysia, a place even more remote from the hallowed halls of Trinity College than even snow-bound Winnipeg where I was born and raised, I find myself running and thinking of those men from yesteryear running and running their hearts out around the great court.  For here in my taman, I have my own, little court.

The internet informs me that the Great Court Run at Trinity College Cambridge is 341m, and my little loop around the taman is 475m.  So as I ran yesterday, I heard that music playing in my head, pulsing out a rhythm for me to run with.

I started my 5km run (over 10 loops of the taman), and felt good and fast.  The music was strong in my ears, and my feet felt light.  I turned at the first 100m, with houses to my left and jungle to my right, I felt strong.

The turn at 200m, right by the abandoned house!

Then I reached the 200m turn and kept on going, faster and faster; at 300m there is a slight kick up and a false flat, which is really a slight incline.  Whenever I hit this portion of the loop, I always feel fat and out of shape.  It's simply unavoidable.  Yesterday was no different.  Flanked by houses on either side, dogs barking as I ran by, I slogged my way up the tiny incline, feeling like it was time to throw in the towel, only to reach the final turn in seemingly no time at all and be back to normal, fresh legs and music in my ears.

So again and I again I ran my little loop - turn right at the palm tree, left at the abandoned house, left at the guard house, up the slight hill for the finishing straight, and turn at the sign for the apartment, and then do it all over again - with each loop seeming easier and easier.

The final 100m, slightly uphill with the
guard house behind me.

That is, until around the 4km mark.  Just as I finished that finishing straight up the slight incline towards the apartment and heard my watch ping to mark the 4km mark, I felt like someone out there unplugged my batteries.  I was deflated and wasn't sure that I could finish the final kilometre.  And what always happens to me at this point of any run is that my little running demons show up.  They appear and tell me that I've run enough and it's time to take it easy.  They whisper in my ear that I don't need to finish the workout as planned.  They drag at my legs and make me feel flatfooted.  And most frightening of all, they begin a chorus of worries about the damage I may be doing to myself.  My feet, ankles, joints, and internal organs are all picked out as being under fatal threat by these running demons, and so I began to worry.  I felt slow and heavy as I battled not just my body, but my mind that is dead set on sabotage of the worst sort.  "No!"  I screamed inwardly to these voices urging me to throw in the towel.  "Shut up!"  I demanded of them, to no avail.

The start/finish line of my little loop.

Those voices are loud and insistent, and yesterday, all I could do was turn up the soundtrack in my mind from the Chariots of Fire to drown them out.  The final loops of my run turned into the quadrant at far away Trinity College, and the jungle around me melted into stone and brick buildings, the leaves above nothing more than the imagined archways that countless runners have raced through in the hopes of beating the tolling of the bell.  And as I built that great court, brick by brick, in my mind as I ran, I turned for the last time at the guard house and aimed down the finishing straight, heading slightly uphill and pumping my legs for all they were worth, and in my ear rang those defeatist voices, but over them, reaching a crescendo rose the magical music composed by Vangelis to score a 1981 movie about two 1924 runners that inspired a small child from Winnipeg who, decades later, finally learned to run and needed some help on a hot 5km run around her own Malaysian great court.

The great court at Trinity College.

And, you know what?  It worked.  I finished my final km and began my slow walk through the 'hood that recomposed itself into a tropical neighbourhood in a world-class city as the shadows and echoes of the song and the imagined setting faded into the background, along with those pesky voices of my running demons.

Over and out,
Joy

Run stats:
Ran 5.01km for 26:22 with an avg. pace of 5:16min/km.