The rickety runner

“Rickety Runner” is a fun bit of alliteration. It sums me up as a 74-year-old, long-ago twinkle-toed marathon rank-and-filer.

My running story is a serial of rejigs, the latest chapter still incubating. 

For 40 years, in New South Wales and North Queensland, my greatest kick was racing.  Beyond the buzz of the chase, Saturday or Sunday club events had fringe benefits. For example, 5km training before brekkie left me unflappable at work. And I traced my niggles in hips and spine to daily craning over a monitor, punching out purple prose with two fingers (Oh, no! that’s what I’m doing now). Sitting stiff was worse than skittering about, for sure.  Cross-training rejigs included yoga, Pilates, learning to swim at 55, pushbike commuting, bushwalking and trail running epics such as Scotland’s Ben Nevis race. In quest of fanciful goals, I got a liking for carb-loading, lentils, broad beans and brown rice and tried rationing caffeine, alcohol and refined sugar.

But the greatest pleasure was the flow of new, enduring friendships, from 1981 to 1996, in the Goulburn Distance Runners and 1996 to 2015 the Townsville Road Runners. On long, slow mornings in the midst of a mob, the hills shrank into ant heaps and straights vanished in yarns about anything from blisters to the Ebola Virus. Sharing these magical mystery tours yielded good results. In 2018, my wife Diane and I prepared together off road for a fantastic Chicago Marathon. Nowadays, I train with old friends once a week for our favourite Saturday morning Park Run, at Aplins Weir, Townsville. That 5km course is still a gem after more than 200 repeats.

My only small regret as a rickety runner is having outlived some great training partners and getting too slow for new ones. But I’ve entered the Townsville Running Festival’s half in August as a fund-raiser for the Australia Skin Cancer Foundation, see https://fundraise.australianskincancerfoundation.org/sponsor?kw=ianrazer

Must be time for another rejig, wait for me, Pete’s Mob.

Pete Neimanis and me, back row, second and third from left, with other Sunday Long Runners, after a dip at Townsville’s Riverway pool in 2011