Umbrella-ing

Most stick with the old way: it rains – you put on a raincoat.

Runners hate the rain. Spend long enough with wet feet and when the nails fall off your toes they take lumps of soggy flesh with them. And raincoats collect sweat which leads to chaffing, rashes, seeping blood.

The new way is adopted by the best – they call it ‘umbrella-ing’. The best multi-day runners in the world do it: it rains – they run with an umbrella.

The rain has eased a little.

We sit for a while sheltered beside the path staring vacantly into the dark of night, lost in some benumbed, exhausted realm enlivened only by an awareness of pain. We have run 564 kilometres in the last 7 days.

The child is ebullient, bubbling with life – the clear, lucent life that only a small girl can live. The runner is old and shrunken. They talk as equals – she dancing about him, he seated stoically, bemused by the brief respite from ever-forward movement.

It is only when she wipes her half-sucked lollipop in his hair that he speaks to her as an adult to a child:

‘Don’t put it in my hair.’

‘Why?’

‘The ants will come into my hair.’

She carries on their conversation for a moment but then dances off, obviously piqued to be so thwarted.

‘Don’t leave me here alone. It’s my birthday,’ he calls to her retreating back. And all of lost, bereft humanity echoes in his voice – aeons of loss and loneliness, epochs of separation from love crying out across bleak and empty space towards the Beloved we have lost.

‘Don’t leave me here alone. It’s my birthday.’

I pull up the hood of my raincoat and lurch out into the rain.

Barnaby McBryde