BENNY GREEN
Anyone emerging from Broadcasting House at dusk on a winter evening has a fair chance of being reproached by the appari- tion of his own athletic past. This visitation takes the form of grimfaced men in singlets and shorts running away from the town and the traffic towards Regent's Park like pan- theists in search of a convenient shrine. With their taped ankles, knobbly knees and the plumed steam gushing from their nostrils, they might almost make an exotic sight, were it not for those dour, unseeing eyes. You may have noticed those eyes, and been vaguely disconcerted by the way that the runners never look at you. Even if they did, it is extremely doubtful if they would see you, so totally absorbing is the act of putting one leg before the other in rhythmic sequence.
The plodding men are harriers from the Regent Street Polytechnic. emerging from that solid building in their faded hooped jerseys like so many bees leaving the hive. gliding along without so much as a glance at the statue of their founder at the southern end of Portland Place. Through the gloom they gl galumphing, with the air of men who will never return. When a man has defied convention to the extent of running practically naked through the streets, he must surely be on the verge of breaking with civilisation altogether. And yet I have it on unimpeachable authority that no runner has ever been known not to return to the fold.'
Once, many years ago now, 1 became so intrigued by the implied contradictions be- tween the sternly uncultured aspect of those knobbly knees and the imposing list of evening classes in the Poly windows. that 1 went inside the building to await the run- ners' return and see what happened to them. In the event, they took so long getting back that my powers of concentration lapsed, and their• eventual return proved so unexpected that they had disappeared .down a staircase almost before 1 was aware anything had happened. There was a fleeting impression of steam and hairy legs, and then they were tT
ganiilid try to go in purqiit, but an() 1 followed intimations of stale embrocation down many corridors, I never did find them, and ended up instead, for some reason' long since forgotten, at the back of a -crowded classroom watching the lecturer draw a parallelogram on the blackboard, which it turned out was supposed to be a diagram- matical representation of, a Henry James novel—The Golden Bowl, I think it was. This seemed to me an at of such tortuous im- becility that 1 left the building convinced that there are worse things in this world than a pair of knobbly knees.
But the technique which runners use of racing through crowded streets without ever actually looking at anybody is one I know well through having used it myself many times. In fact, throughout a highly' active adolescent running career, only once did I ever lose concentration for long enough to recognise a familiar face, and it very nearly cost me a famous victory. Coasting home one Sunday morning to a leisurely triumph, 1 turned down one of the side streets off Marylebone Road with the winning line no more than three hundred yards away, just past the CBS plaque in Fitzroy Square, when I found myself confronted at five yards goggle-eyed range, by the local siren. She happened to be the kind of girl, still not entirely unknown today. who, whenever she sees young men involved in a chase, assumes automatically that they must be chasing her, and the realisation that for once this was not so, understandably confused her. We stared at each other stupefied, which always takes up a little time, and the crisis must have cost me at least three seconds. 1 still have a yellawing certificate somewhere to the effect that on that day I completed the course in six minutes forty-five seconds, but there is surely something wrong here, because the course measured a mile and a half. This means that I was already in the. Gundar Haegg class at fifteen, which is patently ridiculous. At twenty, possibly, but never at fifteen.
It is still surprisingly easy to run in Lon- don, but surprisingly hard to run on a track. I don't know the relevant statistics, but I doubt if there is any other major city with so few running tracks per head of popula- tion. My own debut took place at Padding- ton Rec, where I was beaten before I began by the propaganda of a rival in the under- thirteen 440, who remarked, just as we were lining up, 'I lap so fast I get dizzy'. All my later running was done at the Parliament Hill track, where the attendants contributed to the dominance of America and Dussia in the field events by ejecting anyone with the effrontery to ask for the vaulting rale, the hammer or the discus.
Tim.: is one other public track in central London, but it is so forlorn and pathetic that 1 h.sitate to mention it c this context ^' all. It is in Regent's Park, not far from the Zoo, and consists in its entirety of an oval track. No changing rooms, no lavatories, no drink- ing water, not even any indication that it is a running track. At one point in my youth,
when I had decided to set a r world record for the 880 yards, and Parliament Hill was closed on the beautifully British assumption that nobody could possibly want to train in the winter, I used to use this sad little cinderella of a track, running fourteen
lap• -ee nights a week and washing, my fc afterwards in the canal nearby. ' ,ztuck it out for nearly a full winter, I remember. before becoming suddenly disenchanted with the whole business one night and de- - ciding I was getting too old for this sort of thing—being too young at the time to
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