On Running

Why running is sexy and I am not it...

Early evening, late summer, and all the runners are out. Pounding pavements, firm calves, slick with sweat and resolution. There is something sexy about running. It’s not the bodies or the gloss or even the act. It’s the attitude. To be so full of life that you would just chuck on your shoes and leave the house, welcome the air into your lungs and revel in the fast beating of your heart. No previous hour spent on the sofa contemplating the pros and the cons of it, how it will be hard and it will hurt and it will remind you of all the things you can’t do. No shadow of it looming over the whole of your day, the thing you should do, the thing you must do, the thing you don’t want to do. No convincing yourself that you need a rest anyway, that cardio is but a ghastly tool of diet culture and engaging in it is to hammer yourself back into the dust covered eating disordered hole that you all too recently escaped from.

That fact that I am not the kind of person who rushes out of the door, wind in her hair, content in the rhythmic tapping of trainers on tarmac is, in some ways, surprising to me. I am frequently excited by life, really do stop and notice the little things. I’ve realised recently that I’ve become prone to saying things out loud when I’m alone. Not just alone at home, but alone out in the world. Only today on my bike ride home I exclaimed ‘that is so good!’ as the cycle lane took me to the left of the bus stop rather than cutting right through the pathway of awaiting passengers. It’s not anger or frustration or bitterness that gets me talking. It’s joy and fascination and delight. At a cycle lane! At a bus stop! And I don’t care who hears. I am not embarrassed to be enthralled.

I used to be. Once, about a decade ago, I went on a date with A. He was already my ex boyfriend at the time, we had been together at school, but hadn’t seen each other for a good four years. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to meet up with him again, couldn’t let the sleeping dog lie. We had a perfectly fine time, kissed each other for old times sake, but the chemistry was jaunty. We went to a bar where he knew the barman. We ordered a drink and I realised I could use my contactless card for the first time - one little tap and it’s all done! As I mentioned my woozy thrill at this, I saw A and the barman share a glance. The glance said this girl is crazy. This girl is mad. At the time, I felt flustered and a little bit ashamed. I knew that I’d misstepped. Crossed over the line of acceptable enthusiasm . But now, I think fuck you. Fuck you for reviling joy in the little things, fuck you for rejecting a bit of beauty in the mundane. Fuck you for making me feel embarrassed for exciting easily, for never having to feign my fervour. 

And so I am, as we all are, a confusing mix of two (or three or four) contradictory things. Unashamedly enchanted by objectively ordinary aspects of living, yet unable to connect with the uncomplicated, unfussy, unbounded joy of moving in nature.

But I think I have discovered it. The barrier. The blocker.  And it is that I am not sexy. I know it and I have always known it and, I don’t doubt, I will continue to know it too. It is not sexy to say ‘YAY’ out loud when you feel the sun on your face (or maybe to say YAY at all), it’s not sexy to sing ‘why does it always rain on me?’ on your bike as you cycle home, it’s not sexy to be the kind of girl who people say ‘she doesn’t need to have a drink to have fun’ about. It certainly is not sexy to say ‘OH COOL’ when you use a contactless card for the first time, and that is what the barman knew. 

And running is sexy and I am not sexy and therefore I am not running. I think the barrier between me and sexy is that I find it so hard to take myself seriously. It is another little nuance, another little conflict, to say that I am both self conscious and at the same time not at all. I have hated my body, hurt it and starved it and violently fought with it, but at the same time I find it lightly comical. I can be naked in front of people with no qualms. I really don’t care if the person across the street can see me through the window, that I haven’t put my bra on yet. The amount of times my husband has shrieked ‘someone will see!’ as I get my arse out while the curtains are open, and the amount of times (every time) I have replied with ‘who cares?’. 

And who does care? I don’t and I guess my presumption is that you or he or they don’t either. To see how I interact with my body, tits out on the beach, top off on the sofa, drunken arse flash still one of my favourite past times, you could easily be fooled into thinking I am carefree. I could be easily fooled too. But I think, in fact, I am careless. It is disregard, perhaps even neglect, not liberation. The constant exposure erases any of its power; a sexlessness created by its relentless presence.  I feel like maybe if I held it in higher regard, protected it a little more, pretended it was something worth hiding, worth seeking, then maybe it’d be sexy. I’d be sexy. 

I know that I am not carefree because in May I cried in a Japanese sex shop. It was a tourist attraction, the guide book said, so weird and wacky and wild. All the images were of women so not like me, not just in their bodies but in the inhabitance of themselves. And all of a sudden I felt clammy and cumbersome. The slapstick humour I associate with my own nakedness felt clown-like and immature. I felt deeply and intrinsically unappealing and the realisation filtered into the bones of myself until we had to leave and isn’t that embarrassing, to cry in a sex shop?

Lately, I have been wondering if this unsexiness of mine is somewhat deliberate. A defence mechanism, crafted from within the depths of me. If I don’t take me seriously then you don’t have to either and then if you weren’t going to anyway, it’s ok, I beat you to it. I downplay myself and I laugh at myself and there is a line isn’t there, because it is fun to be fun and it is good to be light and life is full of serious people who make themselves suffer. But what about when you like doing something, and maybe you’re good at doing it, but you don’t let yourself do it or you don’t let yourself dream it because that’s not the way that you are. So maybe this isn’t about being sexy at all, or maybe that’s only part of it but the deeper part, the underlying part is that you won’t let yourself try.

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