The thing that happened a day before run club
After the accident, there were many moments when Max thought he had reached rock bottom.
The time he woke up one morning on a bench on Clapham Common, not having made it home, a dog sniffing around his feet, the owner pulling them away.
The day Emma had told him it was over between them because she couldn’t do it anymore.
It was too hard being with him, seeing him like that, and he needed professional help.
Being called into a meeting at work, and given a final warning about his time-keeping and general attitude.
They understood what he was going through, and they wanted to support him, but he couldn’t keep showing up late to work and hung-over.
The day he had gone to his parents’ house in St Albans, and cried for so long that he had made himself physically sick.
Sleeping in his old childhood bed in the foetal position, and then smashing plates on the kitchen floor.
The last eighteen months had been a blur of alcohol, of late-nights, unhealthy, self-destructive habits, and pushing everyone but Robbie away.
On that Monday morning, as he walked into his local coffee shop in Clapham before work, his mind foggy and trying desperately to wake-up, he was waiting for his flat white when he browsed the noticeboard.
They had a cork board where people could put up signs for services offered, missing pets, groups, and flats for rent.
It was mostly rooms to let in shared houses with phone numbers and names scribbled below, but hidden among the pile of notices, of small slips of paper and card, was one that stood out to him. He leaned in closer, and read it.
Common People Run Club. Running from something? Feeling lost? Stop running away from your problems and start running!
The moment he read it, something clicked in his mind, like a long-lost key that was finally placed and turned in the right lock.
Maybe it was the name, which sounded warm, inviting and he had always loved the Pulp song of the same name, or whether it was the fact that he had been running away from his parents’ death for the last year and half, but it resonated with him in a way that nothing else had.
Which was strange because it was just a card on a noticeboard about a run club, and Max definitely wasn’t a runner, but it felt like they were speaking directly to him.
Was it a sign from the universe? Before his coffee arrived, he took out his phone and snapped a quick photo of the card.
Then his flat white arrived, and Max headed off to work, putting the thought away while he sat on the tube that would shoot him from Clapham to Oxford Circus in about twenty minutes, before the five-minute walk to Broadcasting House.
That night, on the sofa, idling watching The One Show while devouring a plate of reheated tuna pasta from an old Jamie Oliver recipe he had learnt at university and continued to make most weeks, he thought of the card from the coffee shop.
Common People Run Club. He took out his phone and looked at the photo again.
They met every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 p.m. on Clapham Common by Temperance Fountain.
Although rather ominously there was no end time.
‘Robbie?’
‘Aye,’ replied Robbie, who was getting ready for work. He had a shift at the pub until closing time. They also had a comedy night on Mondays that went until midnight, so after closing and having a few drinks, Robbie wouldn’t be home until gone one.
‘I’m thinking about going to a run club.’
‘Oh aye, why’s that then?’ said Robbie, who was standing in the lounge, preparing himself to leave the flat.
Robbie was tall, slim with dark curly hair that he had recently had cut into a fashionable modern mullet, and he was sporting quite a fetching moustache.
Robbie was the sort of man who could pull a moustache off.
‘I don’t know, but I saw this notice on the board in the coffee shop this morning, and it really struck me. Common People Run Club. Feeling lost? Stop running away from your problems and start running! What do you think?’
‘I think it sounds like a grand idea.’
‘Yeah?’
‘There’s just one wee problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You dinnae run, pal!’
He had a point. ‘I mean, yes, I don’t run now, but I could start.’
‘Aye, you could.’
‘You think it’s a good idea?’
‘I think that whatever helps youse get out of your head, is a good idea. Unless youse end up dead of a heart attack.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Right, I have to go. See youse later, pal.’
‘Have a good one,’ replied Max, but his head was already a million miles away, thinking about the run club that was meeting on Clapham Common tomorrow night at six o’clock.
Max had a look through his wardrobe, pulling out all his running gear.
There had been a time before his parents had died, when Max had joined a gym and was going to get in shape.
His then girlfriend Emma was a bit of a fitness fanatic, and he had felt inspired to get healthy too.
In reality, he was feeling a little insecure about getting left behind when he saw the sort of gym men she was hanging out with.
So, one Saturday afternoon, he had gone out with Emma and spent a small fortune on workout clothes.
Gym ready outfits and running trainers were all purchased, but within a month his parents had died, and Max had stopped trying to get fit, the clothes tossed to the back of his wardrobe.
They hadn’t seen the light of day since.
As Max took out all the tops, shorts and the Nike trainers, he felt a wave of sadness envelop him.
They reminded him of that time, of Emma, his parents, and how eighteen months later, he had lost them all.
He hadn’t been good to Emma, and understood why she had no choice but to leave him.
Although at that time as he had spiralled from one destructive decision to another, it hadn’t felt like he had any choice in the matter.
He sat on his bed for a moment, surrounded by workout clothes and memories, and thought about whether to go the following night.
What if they were all far fitter than him, and he looked like an idiot, and while everyone else was ready for a marathon, he was throwing up on the side of the road, muscles crying in pain?
There was also the social element. It had been a long time since he had put himself out there.
He had his job at the BBC, which was often social, and he would sometimes head to Robbie’s pub and hang out, but this felt different. This had first-day-at-school vibes.
After he had tried everything on, realising that the tops were all quite tight now, and he would have to nip out during lunch tomorrow and get new ones, he retired to the living room.
In the past, he would have had a drink, a glass of red or a beer, but if he was going to get in shape, and change his life, he needed to stop.
He had also promised Robbie he would stop drinking and try being sober.
So, instead he made himself a cup of tea and settled in to watch some telly.
Max finally felt ready for a new start. It was time he stopped wallowing in pity and grief, and got out there again.
The problem was, after all this time, he wasn’t sure what sort of life he wanted anymore.
Before the accident, it had always been so clear to him.
A career in media, a brilliant girlfriend, then wife, eventually a house, kids, travel, a creative life in London, surrounded by other creative people.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want any of that anymore because he did, he just wasn’t sure if he was still the sort of person who was capable of having it.
Like a parent returning to the workforce once the kids had left home, years after a once promising career, he felt the nerves and the question that kept him awake at night, coming to him in the early hours when he couldn’t sleep: Are you still good enough?