Water, Water, Everywhere.......

I have been called many things in my time. I don’t mean nicknames as such; after all I’ve had plenty of those over the years from school upwards (Four-eyes, Joe 90, Brains, Pickles, Duracell, Trevor, Terence Trent Hayward, Brig, etc). I mean descriptions.

One Maths teacher wrote in my school report that at times it appeared as if I had my head on backwards.  This was actually a clever way to describe both my erratic mathematical abilities and the fact that I used to spend most of the lessons talking to the girls in the row of desks behind me. This is why I know little about quadratic equations and quite a lot about late 1980s popular culture.

Well, when you’re faced on one hand with a bearded Maths teacher wearing a pink bow tie and, on the other, a row of pretty faces, what else is a teenage boy with raging hormones to do?

What I’m labouring manfully to get at here is that I’ve never been described as practical. When I was a small boy my Grandfather wisely declared one day that when I get older I was inevitably going to end up in a job where I don’t get my hands dirty. I wasn’t sure whether this was a sign of disapproval or not but being brought up in a family of manual labourers I did appear to be somewhat of a square peg in a round hole, but that’s another story altogether.

So on Saturday, there I was sat minding my own business in the privacy of the loo, pondering which pizza I was going to order from the takeaway menu that evening (I didn’t take it in with me, I know it off by heart), when I heard a dripping sound from somewhere nearby. My investigations led me to a small tap underneath the sink which had created a bit of a puddle. I decided to manage this developing situation by turning the tap off.

“There”, I thought, “that was easily sorted, another problem solved by….oh”.

Unfortunately my intervention hadn’t had the intended result of quelling the annoying drops of water which now started to drip in earnest.

A practical man would have known what to do in an instant. In fact a more practical man would have known what this tap was for in the first place. All I knew was that it was leaking and there was water all over the floor. I decided to break the news to the present Mrs Hayward.

She was not thrilled with this turn of events and entered the bathroom, investigated the pool of water, uttered a few loud profanities and, before I could say a word, she had removed the floor covering, some sort of modern lino, to reveal more puddles of water.

I was shocked by this discovery and knew that, as the man of the house, decisive action needed to be taken, so I confidently instructed Mrs Hayward to call her father.

My father-in-law is a much more practical man than I by quite a margin. He was brought up in an era of ‘make do and mend’ and can turn his hand to most DIY based tasks around the house regardless of whether he has tackled the job before.

Some of his methods are unorthodox. He once tried to remove wood chip from our walls with a blowtorch and he seems happy to tackle electrics without first turning the electricity off.  

Unfortunately this job was beyond him. All he could ultimately do was turn the water off so that our smallest room didn’t become a (very) wet room. Don’t get me wrong, he tried in vain to rectify the situation. I can’t say that I really helped though. At one point he asked me where the outside stop tap was and my response was to look at him blankly as if he’d asked a complex question about nuclear fission.

Being the Sherlock Holmes of DIY he deduced that it was probably somewhere near the water meter and some elaborate tool was brought into play which is still sat in our bathroom as I type, just in case I need it. I’m not sure what I will need it for or how it will be of any use to me, other than to smash the window to escape the inevitable flood, but cometh the hour….

What I established here was that being practical isn’t all that. I don’t wish to denigrate his abilities but sometimes the mettle of a man is in who he knows. Whilst Mrs Hayward was hastily scanning the local free magazine for emergency 24 hour plumbers I calmly flicked through my phone to call a nice chap called Simon, who’d installed our shower a couple of years ago.

He’d come as a recommendation from another chap called Mark (whose sister works on the telly you know, but this isn’t really the point). He explained that, as it didn’t sound like we were about to be swallowed up by an impending tsunami, we should just turn the water off and live with it until Monday morning whereupon he’d come out and sort it for us. 

He explained that there was really no point in him coming out now as he wouldn’t be able to get the relevant parts as the traders were now shut and, in any case, it would cost more for him to come out on a weekend. 

Of course what he really might have meant was that it was 5pm on a Saturday afternoon and he just wanted to have a beer in front of the football rather than crawl around on our damp bathroom floor but his sage advice made sense to my little brain and I could now take charge of the situation in a sort of supervisory way.

So, with traditional British spirit, the availability of shower facilities at the in-laws house, and 10 litres of Tesco Value Still Water (17p for 2 litres – what a bargain), we coped admirably with the lack of water until Simon arrived on Monday morning as promised, sorted out our dripping issue, and charged me a modest £20 for the trouble.

My point here is that sometimes it’s not what you know but who you know. I may be a DIY ignoramus but if you know someone whose sister is on the telly who knows someone else who’s handy with a spanner then ignorance is bliss.  

The Finishing Line

It seems hard to believe that nearly two weeks have elapsed and I’ve only just regained my breath, and indeed my wits, to put digit to keyboard.

After several months of complaining that it’s all too difficult and my feet hurt the moment of truth had finally arrived. The day of the Great Eastern Fun Run. In front of me was 4 kilometres (2.5 miles in old money) of chafing and sweat.

So there I was a week last Sunday, up at an unfortunate time of the morning for the so-called day of rest, although the Japanese Grand Prix was on so I had some entertainment to take my mind off things, pondering what I was going to eat. In the day or so leading up to the race this had become a pressing issue for me. Should I eat porridge or poached eggs on wholegrain toast? How, for that matter, do I poach an egg? I normally fry or boil them. In the end, the present Mrs Hayward suggested I just eat what I normally would so I decided upon a couple of slices of toast (plus some peanut butter I found in the cupboard) and a banana. To be fair I didn’t need the banana. 

Fuelled on this cocktail of peanuts and phallic shaped fruit I left the house with Mrs Hayward and my father-in-law in tow for support. Mother-in-law was indisposed with a stinking cold so she was let off. 

I have to say that taking my father-in-law was a risk. The man is just about to turn 65 but is probably fitter than I am by quite some margin. He’s always on the go and when Mrs Hayward did the Race for Life a few years ago he found her on the course and then ran ahead of her at some speed so he could see her cross the finish line. She was most embarrassed that her father who is some 30 years her senior was showing her up with his surprising fleet of foot.

I have to say that, somewhat surprisingly, it didn’t feel weird being stood in Cathedral Square surrounded by people in shorts and fancy dress, after all I go to the Peterborough Beer Festival every year and there’s some rather bold fashion statements made there, although there are many pints of fine real ale on hand to numb the senses. 

It wasn’t even that weird when former Olympic athlete Sally Gunnell wandered past me. When it properly got weird was the moment I found myself about two rows from the front at the start line. Well, I got bored with the whole warm up thing the DJs from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire (bless their cotton socks) were trying to get us to do in Cathedral Square and they were generating far too much whooping and excitement when I was more concerned that the banana I’d recently ate was going to make a dramatic reappearance during the race.

Funnily enough my friend who was attending in her St John Ambulance role later told me that the majority of cases heading her way were not sprained ankles or broken legs but people incessantly vomiting. Oh and there were a couple of runners who should have stopped and done a ‘Paula Radcliffe’ by the side of the road but instead kept going, which is just dirty.

I stood on the road, watching the time tick down and it was all a bit of a blur from there. There were kids jostling around me, a blue dragon thing was on the podium to my right, followed by a woman dressed as a fairy (something to do with a local charity) and then, bang! The start gun went and we were off. 

I had decided before I got there that I was not going to be out of the traps like a Greyhound or else it would be all over for me before I even got to 100 metres. This was the case for a lot of the excitable kids around me who didn’t get very far at all, including the ginger chubby one that had barged past me. Maybe that was just my reflection; it was hard to tell in the mêlée.

My main objective from thereon was just to keep going. I found it useful to identify a fellow athlete in front of me who was going a pace I liked and stick with them, until they either stopped or sped off into the distance. In the end I followed a guy in an NSPCC top who was doing a reasonable pace and was with him until near the end.

My concern had been that I would be overtaken by someone dressed in some sort of animal costume and these concerns were well founded. At the 2 kilometre mark I was overtaken by two guys dressed as parrots. To be fair to them they must have been fit as they were not showing any signs of being hampered by wearing a heavy felt costume. They were part of a group who were running as part of a pirate theme. I met the Head Pirate himself just before the end and he told me he regretted that he’d worn a hat to run in. I was impressed that a) he was running at all and b) that either of us could speak at this point.

Fuelled by a heady mix of adrenaline and peanut butter I kept going and going and going until suddenly I could hear the sound of the tannoy at the finish line. This was the first time my legs started to tell me that they thought we’d had enough, but my brain fired off a terse memo that read ‘Keep going you fools’.

Before I knew it the end was in sight as well as sound and even though by that point I’d just run 3.80 kilometres the last few metres seemed the longest. It didn’t help that the run up to the finishing line takes you off the firm concrete path and on to the undulating terrain of the Embankment but I managed to avoid any embarrassing trips or falls, and as I crossed the line I heard the tannoy announcing the safe return of “…number 57, Terry Hayward…” and I knew it was all over.

I quickly got ushered through a marquee, stripped of the timing chip attached by Velcro to my ankle and handed a cloth bag (which I initially thought was an apron, but having never done anything like this before I didn’t express surprise), some water which was well received, a medal, and a banana. My stomach sent a memo this time to say that quite frankly it had seen enough of bananas for one day so I put it out of sight in the bag.

I was met outside the finishing zone by Mrs Hayward and my father-in-law who hadn’t got down to the finish in time to see me triumphantly cross the finish line and so we consulted our watches. It wasn’t even half ten so I knew that I must have got round relatively quickly for me. 

As it turned out I ran it in 24 minutes and 40 seconds. This will serve me in good stead the next time I go out for a drink with my good friend Ned and he suggests we go to another pub some 2.5 miles away with half an hour to go before closing because it has a rare ale on that we have to try. Trust me, this is not an unlikely scenario.

And so, before I knew it, it was all over and I was off, medal around my neck, heading back to the car. My moment of glory was over. 

When I returned home I had a bath. This is not normal for me. I don’t really like having a bath; I’m more of a shower man. I feel uncomfortable in a bath and usually just sit bolt upright looking quite uncomfortable. However it felt like the right thing to do and so I found myself slipping into the bubbles (come on, I had to have bubbles, do they still sell Mr Matey?) and relaxed.

So, that is one of my New Years Resolutions done. Ticked off. Completed. Oh, and thanks to some very generous people (you know who you are) I raised £423.00 for The Stroke Association. Me and my tired legs say thank you.

It has inspired me to do something else next year. I keep being asked if I’m going to do a half marathon, or a full marathon, or even the Olympics, but I’m wondering whether it’s time to hang up my trainers and just run for fun.

After all, there’s so much else I could do. I’ve never abseiled, or bungee jumped, or walked over hot coals, or climbed a mountain, or jumped out of a plane, or chased some cheese down a hill…..

The mid-life crisis continues.

Final Thoughts

I remember back at the beginning of April I went for a run. It was early days and I was just starting to build up on the distance I could run before my chest felt as if it was about to explode over the pavement. Whilst at the time I was impressed that I was improving, I also had concerns about whether I’d ever have the level of fitness to make it to the required 4K.

I wasn’t too worried at the time though as I knew it was a good six months away. In fact October seemed so far away that it may as well have been another country. Not a distant country like Australia. It was more sort of Northern France. So now, here I am, stood on the passenger deck of the ferry, with Calais in sight, hardly believing that it’s come around so soon.

Am I ready? I guess so. On a good day I can run 4K. Not necessarily with ease but then, as the present Mrs Hayward once told me, if it was easy everyone would be doing it. What it has done is to give me great admiration for those who run marathons, or even half marathons. I have friends who can do this, some even combine it with swimming and cycling although not necessarily at the same time, and this is impressive when I consider that on a bad day I struggle to run at all. Curse my weak shins.

Sunday will be very surreal though, not least as there will be other people around me who are also running, and some others just staring at me.  I believe the latter group are called spectators. When I’m out and about in Bourne I tend to speed up when I see an actual person so I have no idea how I’ll react at running in the presence of so many people. Perhaps I’ll get around the course in record time but I’m not holding out much hope. 

My main ambition is to finish without prematurely expiring during the race. According to a friend who will be working at the event on behalf of the St John Ambulance, three runners died during last year’s event. This makes the whole thing seem much more dangerous. Perhaps there are minefields or crocodiles en route that I was hitherto unaware of. I’ll let you know afterwards, if I still have my arms.

Either way, there’s no going back now, and no matter how surreal it will seem at 10am on Sunday morning, with a number on my chest and a chip around my ankle to record my time, I know at least that any pain or embarrassment is for a good cause.

The last time I did anything for charity I had my legs waxed, again this was another idea that seemed good at the time after a few beers in the pub. That, if I remember rightly, was for Comic Relief. This time, when I decided to enter the race, I decided to do it for The Stroke Association.

It’s hard to pick a charity to support as each cause can touch a person in one way or another. Normally I would have picked one of the many good cancer charities as that hateful disease has affected so many of my close family and friends. However I had The Stroke Association suggested to me by Mrs Hayward and I’m glad that she did.

My nan had a stroke many years ago. Prior to that she was so fit and active that she put us all very much to shame. She lived for another six years after her stroke but she was never able to walk again and spent the last few years of her life in a rest home, and I know that she was intensely frustrated at her lack of mobility.

Last summer my mum suffered a stroke. For me it was the first time I realised that she was unwell. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn to say that my mum could have a tendency to be a little bit of a hypochondriac. I used to joke with her that she had a season ticket with the doctor’s surgery as, even when I was little, she seemed to have an appointment most weeks about something or other. 

So when she used to tell me about her various medical complaints I, like a lot of people who knew her,  probably took it with a pinch of salt as that was just who she was. In the past nothing serious had ever come of these things.

After the stroke she became frail and visibly started to look much older. Before and after the main stroke that saw her hospitalised for a few weeks in June she suffered a number of ‘blackouts’ or ‘mini-strokes’ as the doctor called them. 

On reflection it came as no surprise when she had another heart related episode a few months later. However this time her heart stopped for a number of minutes and despite the ambulance crew resuscitating her and a few days spent in intensive care it was clear to the doctors that she was never going to regain consciousness. She was taken to a ward to, as the medical staff tried to delicately put it, let nature take its course.

I have no idea whether she had any idea what was going on. Her brain was virtually dead. However she obviously had a tougher constitution than even she would have imagined as without the aid of equipment to keep her alive she survived for another six days. They were the longest six days of my life.

For a week, I, my wife, and my Dad made the daily trip to sit in shifts with my mum as she lay dying. There was no hope that she would recover, we were just waiting for her to die and to be with her when she did. It’s hard to describe how difficult it is to spend so much time watching someone you care about, and who cared about you so deeply, slowly and visibly deteriorate. You want to do something but there’s absolutely nothing you can do.

Each day became more and more difficult to make the trip to the hospital, to sit there and listen to her breathing become more erratic and raspy, whilst normal life in the ward continued around us. There were distractions of course, when I left the ward the real world would creep back in and other family members provided some practical support during that time for which I will be eternally grateful.

I will confess to the fact that I’m scared of death. I worry about it on a daily basis. What I really didn’t want to see was anyone, not least someone so close to me, just die in front of me. Rather selfishly I had hoped that when it happened it would be during the night. However, as fate would have it I was there with my wife when my mum died. 

All deaths are different I would imagine. Some are peaceful and some are not. Having had no previous experience of death I don’t know where to put my mum’s but it appeared, when it came, to be sudden and difficult. I won’t go into details but I will never forget the sights and sounds and smells associated with that moment.

My father said afterwards that he wished he had been there when she died. I tell him that I’m glad that he wasn’t, but I don’t think that he will ever really understand why I say this. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I was there for her but in many ways I wish I hadn’t been as, in amongst all the good memories I have of the mum I remember as I was growing up, I will also carry with me the memory of that terrible week and those last desperate moments for the rest of my days, and I suspect that she wouldn’t have wanted that.

So, when I’m running on Sunday morning, when I feel like my legs are aching, and I’m starting to wheeze a little and just want to stop and have a little sit down, I’ll remember that week back in September last year and recall that if you’d given me the option then I would have given anything to be anywhere else, doing anything else, including running 4 kilometres in some ill-fitting shorts in front of a load of cheering strangers.

So, to all my friends and family in the real world and online this is my last plea for sponsorship, I promise, at least until the next time. If you can spare a few pennies or a few pounds for the good work that The Stroke Association do, then please visit my Just Giving page at http://www.justgiving.com/Terry-Hayward3

 

Anything you can give is much appreciated and you can always donate after Sunday if you’d prefer. The website stays open for donations for up to three months after the event.

Thank you.