The Course Had No Teeth

The school cross-country course had been hanging around in my head for years.

Not as a great sporting rivalry, obviously. That would make teenage me sound far more athletic than the evidence supports. It was more embarrassing than that. It was a few miles of fields, lanes, breathlessness, stitch, mud, and the horrible certainty that I was not built for this sort of thing.

At school, I never ran the whole course. I barely finished it walking. By the time we were heading across the fields from the canal towards Hamp Avenue, I would usually be in that familiar state of teenage misery: lungs burning, side hurting, body loudly objecting, brain looking for an exit.

In the latter years, the course even acquired a different kind of usefulness. Once I was out of sight of the school, it became somewhere I could have a sneaky smoke.

Somewhere along the way, that course became more than a course.

It became one of the old symbols of quitting.

That sounds dramatic until I remember how much power I had given it. When I started no more mr fat guy, I could point to all sorts of obvious things that needed changing: weight, fitness, food, smoking, drinking, the general talent I had developed for turning avoidance into a personality. But underneath all that was a quieter pattern. If something felt hard, exposed, or humiliating, I had learned how to disappear from it.

The school cross-country course became the neat little map of that pattern.

The Old Voice

In 2012, when I first started running by choice, the course came back into the story almost immediately.

I had hated running since school. Properly hated it. The sort of hatred that convinces itself it is a personality trait. Then, at 43, after months of rowing, gym work, walking, food changes, and accidental self-discovery, I found myself voluntarily going for a run and, even more suspiciously, almost enjoying it.

That was the first crack in the old story.

By the time I ran the Joondalup Half Marathon in May 2013, the teenager had become a voice in my head. About 13 km in, when I was tired and exposed and the old argument started, I knew exactly who was speaking. Fourteen-year-old Gary. The one who had never finished the cross-country course. The one who wanted to stop before the evidence became too embarrassing.

I gave him a choice.

He could leave me alone, or he could sit quietly at the back and watch how finishing was done.

That helped me finish the half marathon. A few weeks later, I finished the Perth Marathon. Then I said the ridiculous Perth-to-Brisbane idea out loud. Then the Heart Foundation connection arrived. Then London appeared.

And still, the school course was not done.

That annoyed me slightly. I had run further than it many times over. I had completed a marathon. I had stood on start lines and crossed finish lines and written publicly about all sorts of personal mess. Surely a school cross-country course from the 1980s should have been old news by then.

It was not.

Some loops only close where they started.

Christmas Eve

I went back to the UK for Christmas in 2013.

It was already a strange trip because I was not returning as the same person who had left. I was back in Somerset, running in a British winter, in shorts, gloves, and a jacket, past places where I had been a child, a teenager, a young bloke, a drinker, a smoker, a worker, a nuisance, a son, a brother, a friend, and all the other versions of me that had lived there before Australia became home.

On one run I headed out from my parents’ place, through North Petherton, back through the Hamp Estate, past my old secondary school, past the primary school, down old lanes and across memories that kept appearing out of the dark. I even spotted a bloke I had gone to school with. The universe had decided the trip needed a neat little bow.

Then came Christmas Eve.

Steve Peek came with me.

That matters. This was not me sneaking back alone to stage some heroic private exorcism. It was me and an old schoolmate, two grown men going back over a course that once belonged to the awkward, wheezy, self-protective versions of ourselves. Steve and I had both been part of the nerdier, non-sporty group at school. He was a proper brainbox, which made the whole thing feel less like some athletic revenge fantasy and more like two unlikely old classmates refusing to let the course have the final word.

Now here we were in Somerset, on Christmas Eve, facing the old course.

And it was flooded.

Of course it was.

Not a little damp. Not “watch your footing” wet. Properly flooded in places. The kind of wet where running shoes are basically a decorative choice and waders start to look like sensible equipment. There were fields with standing water, cold feet, mud, awkward lines, and every opportunity to say, “well, we tried” and turn the whole thing into a funny near-miss.

That would have fitted the old pattern nicely.

We did not let it stop us.

We kept going.

And the ridiculous part, the part I still love, is that it was fun.

Not emotionally tidy. Not solemn. Not me staring into the middle distance while the soundtrack swelled. Fun. Cold, wet, slightly stupid, wading-across-flooded-fields fun. The old symbol of quitting did not become a cinematic victory scene. It became two old schoolmates splashing through the evidence and laughing at the fact that the demon had turned out to have no teeth.

That was the completion.

Not that I ran it perfectly. Not that I proved teenage me wrong by becoming some shiny new superhuman. The completion was that the old thing no longer controlled the story. The course could be flooded and awkward and uncomfortable, and I could still move through it. I could keep going. I could enjoy myself.

That was new.

The Finish Line

The same UK Christmas trip carried another strange piece of foreshadowing.

London was already calling by then. The Heart Foundation place had been confirmed. What had once been a secret dream, one of those “one day” thoughts that drifted through my head whenever the London Marathon appeared on television, was suddenly sitting on the calendar in April.

During that trip, I visited the London Marathon finish line.

That did something odd to the dream. It made it physical. The Mall was no longer just a strip of television memory, flags, crowds, exhausted runners, and other people’s lives. It was a real place I had stood in. A place I would have to reach. A place that now had a future version of me attached to it, whether I felt ready or not.

There was a lovely symmetry in that.

On one part of the trip I went back to the course that had once helped teach me I was a quitter, and found out it had lost its power. On another part, I stood near the finish of a race I had watched from a distance for years, and let it become something I was actually going to do.

One old loop closing.

One new loop waiting.

One Day

Years later, in 2026, I found out that Bridgwater has a parkrun at St Matthew’s Field.

Fair Field, as I knew it.

Part of that old school cross-country course.

Of course I want to run it one day.

That feels like the next little wink from the story. Not because the course still needs defeating. It does not. Christmas Eve 2013 did that in the least polished, most satisfying way possible.

I want to run it because running has changed the meaning of those places.

Those fields used to be where I failed. Then I went back. Steve and I kept going through the water, and one of the old symbols of quitting became a memory I can grin about.

And if I get to stand there one Saturday morning, barcode ready, waiting for a parkrun briefing on a field that once carried so much teenage misery, I suspect I will be thinking the same thing I thought at the end of 2013.

The course had no teeth.

It just took me a few decades to find that out.

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