The Flamingo Diaries
H e has weeks or months, not years,’ my dad’s GP told me. The news that my father’s prostate cancer had metastasised to his pelvis was hard to bear. My husband Graham’s lung cancer also spread to his bones and he had an agonising few weeks before he died, so I knew a long and difficult journey lay ahead. The thought of my dad not being able to walk was almost unbearable: he’d run 5K a day since boyhood and I braced for the day I’d have to tell him to use a wheelchair.
After binge-watching drivel to keep my mind off things,
I remembered that my friend, Roger Robinson, had sent me a copy of his new book, Running Throughout Time. Roger is a renowned running historian whom I met at a running congress in Prague. His after-dinner speech where he described hearing the crowd chant Emil Zátopek’s name as he won the 10,000m final at the 1948 London Olympics had given me goosebumps. Zátopek’s widow, Dana Zátopková, herself an Olympian, was in attendance and we learned that, despite being the only runner to win gold in the 5000m, 10,000m and the marathon at the same Games, her husband had been stripped of his army ranking when he opposed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Forced into manual labour and poverty, the couple were so poor that Emil used his wife’s Olympic gold medal-winning javelin to fashion a broom handle when theirs broke.
I devoured Roger’s versions of the greatest running stories, ranging from the Greek mythological character Atalanta, who was raised by bears and vowed to marry only the man who could outrun her, to Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile. I learned that the Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt was where cross-country began. Their runs resembled hunting in that they followed a trail, which gave us the term ‘harriers’, meaning ‘hare hunters’, to describe cross-country runners.
But it was New Zealand runner Allison Roe’s story I found most enthralling. In 1981, she won the Boston Marath
