I sit down at prose and rebell, stubborn,
no desire for its syntax: the day's events
go unrecorded, apart from a few numbers
in my training log - 8km,
thirty-eight minutes - and a blister.
I think I really started running in about 2003, over the Chinese New Year. Although at first it was just long walks.
When I was 17, in 1977, I was ill over the Easter Holiday, a mystery illness that didn't go away. They, T-medical-PTB, thought that it might be glandular fever, and I went to see a specialist. He didn't have a clue and told me to eat more dietary fiber.
Of course it was Chronic Fatigue, and for 25 years, once or twice a year, I would be just so exhausted. I don't think I had it badly, but there was something not right. I didn't go to doctors, trusting more in living slowly for a few weeks when I had to.
And then in 2002, my second year in China, in Hainan, the university gave us, the foreign teachers, computers to use, and I had the internet. Wow.
So I started to read, follow links and eventually found a model of what was happening to me that made sense: as far as I remember, it involved a chronic infection that would lie dormant for most of the time, until some stress caused it to mess with the blood. I noticed that if I walked a long distance - 10km - the moment I felt an attack coming on, I had a fair chance of not falling into lethargy.
It got me one time, in the autumn of 2002. I remember struggling up to the fourth floor to teach a class. Then on the actual eve of the Lunar New Year I felt it again. I have been invited to spend the next day with the family of a friend - we used to play Go in the afternoons - but I phoned up and cancelled. A day of sitting around, over-eating, and all that, would have left me struggling for days.
I walked my 10km through the rubber plantations, and then again the next day, and I don't think I've had an attack since. The walking slowly turned into running, and by 2009 I was running five or six times a week. I sweated it out. South China is a good place to sweat.
Then in 2010 a tendon in my left knee started to heat up.
I really would like to start again.
