run like hell
do we run to arrive, to escape or to understand?
running has been a faithful companion to me over the years.
it’s a fantastic partnership. i contribute worn-out shoes, stained basketball vests and the dregs of my motivation reserves. in return i receive air, endorphins and the excuse to eat an even more ridiculous amount of pasta for dinner that day.
but this doesn’t make sense, at least not to me. for years at school my identity was bound by my perceived ability for team sports. (sporting) compliments never, and still don’t, agree with me. with all due disrespect, nobody should give a 💩 about my ability to lob a ball of rubber into a hoop, least of all me. given its all I ever did, maybe it’s not a surprise i simp for the superpowers of team sports - where else in life is the sound of a whistle the difference between complete strangers and best friends.
against my better judgement, i went to serbia, alone, as a fifteen year old. i arrived to a shabby mountain resort on the pretence of improving myself over a month of intense training.
ironically the only area in which i didn’t really improve was basketball, but maybe that was actually the whole point; and might explain why my subconscious urged me onto that plane to Belgrade when all reason said otherwise.
i’d fleetingly been immersed in non-english speaking communities before, but never alone, and never as the only non-english speaker.
as *disgustingly* cliched as it may be, our common language was basketball. when language and alphabet divide you, you find whatever common ground you can to survive.
Perhaps its hyperbole, but for a fifteen year old oliver, the first days of the trip felt like a game of survival. i arrived into nikola tesla airport very late - so late that it seemed they were keeping the airport open specifically for our plane.
i had two tasks on arrival. first, get some money. second, find my taxi. i could only exchange my sterling for serbian dinar after arriving in serbia, which did my already-wearing-thin nerve no good at all. i found the exchange desk - and my heart sank. a small sign read ‘затворено’. closed.
fantastic. first task failed successfully. in a daze, i convinced myself i could pay the taxi driver in pounds if needed, that was if i could find him, mind. by the time the money exchange kerfuffle was over, the airport seemed to have emptied, so, for fear my taxi driver would assume i missed my flight, i did the only logical thing a fifteen year old would do: sprint manically to the arrivals hall.
i turned the corner, expecting to see a sign with my name. i did not see a sign with my name - i saw nothing. no staff, no passengers and certainly no taxi drivers. the clock ticked towards midnight. it took me about five minutes to realise i had a phone (when i’m stressed i don’t think straight) and so I called my contact at the basketball camp. yes, i may have awoke her from her sleep, and yes, maybe i didn’t understand a word she said to me, but it worked. with a comic timing that convinces me god exists to laugh at the non-believers, the moment i picked up, i heard a commotion from the other side of the hall.
“orleevurr. cschellow. orleevurr. oi ahm cheer,” wailed a frantically bearded serbian bloke. i guess i’d somehow found my taxi, and that my name would be ‘orleevurr’ for the next few weeks.
i was sceptical, but he mentioned the name of my contact and of my hotel, so i trusted he was legit. locked in the back of a blacked-out mercedes, ‘dragan’ the taxi driver and i started our descent of the belgrade slalom, zooming me to my hotel with alarming speed. literally, i heard about six alarms go off in his merc during the journey.
i went to check-in, asked the hotel about changing my money (which they gladly helped me with), payed money to (and received a questionable hug from) dragan and went to bed. sweet release.
at breakfast the next morning, i was happily eating my cornflakes and drinking my water when two giant russian blokes walked in in tracksuits - they sat down to demolish plate after plate of ham cheese and eggs. the contrast between me and the russians was so stark, my own bowl of cornflakes was laughing at me. i concluded they must be coaches given their size and facial hair. if they were in fact my age, i knew i was going to get literally obliterated on the basketball court.
we headed to the bus to take us to the mountains, and what an absolute pleasure it was to see that the russians were, in fact, players. we arrived, dropped our bags, laced up, and on what was still a dewey serbian morning, we met up with the rest of the camp participants.
first up - trials. basketball is a game of respect earned on the court. its very meritocratic in that sense. no matter who you are, you get a chance, but if you don’t deliver, you’re cooked. we played pick up in front of the coaching staff, five on five full court first to eleven. I was on a team with two russians, a set of armenian twins and a ukrainian giant.
let’s start with mother pоссия. one was artem, a thuggish boy whose passport promised he was fourteen, but my experiences at breakfast that morning, and his after-training chain smoking sessions, promised otherwise. to this day i’m sure he was lying about his age. unfortunately for his opposition, he’s now a professional player in the russian higher league, and trust me when i say, he’s worth every last ruble.
the other was constantin, a malnourished blonde twig of a boy who i sensed had a chip on his shoulder about his height. in my life i have never met someone more gnarly on the court - he would sooner drown trying to light a fire on the ocean floor than admit his convictions were wrong. i have no idea what kонстантин is doing now - his socials disappeared at the time of russia’s re-invasion of ukraine.
if it wasn’t hard enough to distinguish identical twins, both the armenians were called gurgen. gurgen means mischief in armenian. ok, that’s not actually true. but for the fifteen year old me who didn’t speak a word of armenian, that was the only conclusion i could draw. gurgen and gurgen attracted chaos, and seemed to have a fantastic time amongst themselves. i also have no idea what happened to them, but my naive mind occasionally hopes they became fred and george in the armenian remakes of Հարի Փոթերը.
oleksandr, the ukrainian giant and by far the best player going, was ruthless on the court. off the court, however, he was just a child like me. during our post dinner card games somewhere within the warren of ex-soviet ski resort corridors, he was good humoured, but a dirty, dirty cheat. good job i was on his team then. we had to collect pairs of cards, and he’d shuffle me a card under the table with no subtlety whatsoever. we could have got away with it if we just stopped laughing at how obvious our attempts to cheat were. in the space of hours, i went from fearing a ruthless two metre ukrainian menace, to crying with laughter with him over a pair of threes. and all with no common language.
i arrived thinking some cultures and languages did not mix. and if they did, it took extreme language skills, cultural appreciation and a life perspective unavailable to pasty fifteen year olds. but this trip taught me that preconceiving anything about another human is in fact a game for pasty fifteen year olds (see: fools). this trip proved to me, at the most formative of ages, that a common, non-linguistic framework was all that was needed to forge relationships with the enemies who i came to call friends.
that framework can be anything. cards, as i’ve mentioned. me being elected xxl chocolate croissants mule to smuggle pastries into our dorm rooms after hours (my english innocence meant the coaches would never suspect me of doing it), and as this entire article shows, teams sports.
having been exposed to such social riches, i thought it impossible to live with the impoverished individuality of solo sports. on paper i should not enjoy running. not enough stimuli, no gamification to artificially add more serotonin into my brain. so why do i now love it so?
its counterintuitive, and perhaps unhealthy, but it is the monotony of running that keeps me friendly with the raised pavements. if team sport is the morphine that numbs me to the realities of life, running is the adrenaline shot that reminds my system of the need to confront reality; to make the best of the very favourable hand i’ve been dealt. running gives me the space to contemplate life - warts and all - team sports only help me forget about those altogether, a luxury that’s price inflates drastically the older you get.
so why do i run? am i running from where i came from? yes, though i think we all are in some way, even if we’re not all wearing trainers.
is it because i want to reach the finish line? also yes. i firmly believe knowledge of a definitive end is all we need to find true purpose in life. if i have no idea how long a race is going on for, i always will hold something back. if i know how many kilometers are left in the race, however, i can give everything to win, knowing i’ll be stopping soon. i like to think the same is true, in all kinds of races. just look at chris hoy’s reaction to being given two years to live.
or perhaps i’ve got it all wrong. maybe i neither run to escape, nor to arrive. perhaps i run because i can only run in circles, oscillating jealously between sprinting from the innocent, unrealised promise of my younger self that i will never get back, and ambling guiltily towards my finish line, wherever and whenever that may be, in the blind hope that clarity on when the race ends might reveal what i am supposed to do in this life.
until then, though, i may as well keep running. partly in the fear that, no matter how far i run, the existential clarity i crave will always be a step ahead.
but partly in comfort, knowing that the concrete beneath my heels won't judge me, that the endorphins will power me, and, if i’m going to have to have a battle with the demons that occupy my mind, they’ll know that i won’t stop running from them.
if needed, i’m ready to spend a lifetime running. i will run like hell.
Brilliant