Two Legs

“I don’t have any legs,” he said.

 

At first I didn’t understand him, we were running quite quickly and I’m not used to running and talking at the same time, but eventually my brain translated his words into their meaning.

 

“Prosthetics?” I said. “Both legs?”

 

“Car accident when I was 17,” he said, he must have made the explanation a thousand times. “I was determined it wouldn’t hold me back.”

 

I’d learnt earlier that his name was Peter. The other two runners I’d met on the Wednesday evening Cam Running Meet were called Tamsin and Ellie.

 

Tamsin and Ellie were both attractive, young and single. Exactly the type of person I’d hope to meet through these ‘Meet-up’ groups. (If I wasn’t vegetarian I’d have gone to the Meat Meet, for ‘A chance to meet some meat’).

 

I ran with Ellie for a while, who I learned was a recent graduate now doing PR for a company that makes dragons (though the river was noisy at this point and I might have misheard). Tamsin was similar, a history graduate now working as a researcher for a fabric company in Peterborough.

 

I didn’t run with either of them for long. They were attractive, yes, good company, yes, fun to be with, absolutely, but they were both really slow runners. What’s the point of ‘going for a run’ if the person you’re running with is barely beating walking pace?

 

Which is how I’d ended up running alongside Peter. He was my pace, maybe faster.

 

We ran on for a while, not talking, just stretching our legs, watching the river flow by.

 

We stopped at the 2.5 kilometre mark and waited for the girls to catch up. The meet-up had said ‘5k or more’, so this was where we decided whether to press on or turn round.

 

I hoped that one, or more of the girls would stay running, clock some serious kms. Then we could crash out in a pub somewhere, and who knows, maybe the evening would go from colapso to calypso.

 

But it wasn’t to be. When they finally caught up with us both girls wanted to turn round. “Work tomorrow,” Ellie said, as if we didn’t all have work tomorrow. Tamsin didn’t even give a reason.

 

Peter and I pressed on, almost without speaking. “Shall we?” Peter had said. “Go on,” I’d replied.

 

We clocked some serious k. We passed through Chesterton and beyond the bits of the Cam I knew. We were leaving Cambridge behind us, heading who knows where.

 

There was no reason to stop though. The last spring evenings were stretching out, like a pair of legs enjoying a really good run, we still had hours of daylight in front of us, miles and miles to go if we wanted.

 

We still didn’t speak. As a social meet-up the group had failed on every count, but at least I had a running buddy, a serious runner. And he was serious. We reached Waterbeach, which had to be about 8k from the start, making a 16k if we turned round here.

 

We didn’t turn round.  We ran on.

 

We run on.

 

At some point, of course, we will have to turn around. But not yet. The world is there, in front of us, waiting for our legs (real and prosthetic) to take us where they will, round the next corner, round the next bend, and beyond.

 

What lies beyond Waterbeach? Who knows? The future, the rest of my life. More river, the Cam apparently stretches forever, and so do my legs: left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg – running is everything.

 

Sometimes I like to think my run will never come to an end. Maybe, one day, I'll be proved right.