The Roman Running Club

A Willerby Story

Jamal did not exercise much until he was in his early thirties.

His school cared only about those who were good at it, and he wasn’t.

To the PE department successful sport at school meant football, rugby and cricket teams winning leagues and reaching cup finals. Those not good enough to be selected were regarded as annoying inconveniences to be either ignored – or worse – humiliated in lessons.

Jamal came to associate exercise with being either too cold or too hot, and an ever-present fear he’d somehow accidentally get involved and then be shouted at for mistakes he didn’t know he’d made.

In one particularly mortifying incident, some popular sporty boys convinced him he’d made the rounders team after he made a pretty good catch in a lesson. Jamal was pleased. So pleased that he even told his parents, who’d been surprised but proud.

The next day he went into the PE office to ask when the rounders game would take place, only to learn there was no such thing as a rounders team. Even the teachers laughed when he told them why he thought there was one.

Leaving school was a great relief to Jamal. For a while he thought that, beyond walking – which he occasionally enjoyed – he’d never do anything that would make him sweat again. And through university, and the first part of his career as a software engineer, he didn’t.

After Covid, however, the company he worked for went remote and he suddenly was putting on weight, a consequence of barely moving from his air-conditioned office, spending his days working and his evenings playing computer games.

Then his dad had a mild heart attack and he accepted, reluctantly, the need to make changes.

Running seemed the best bet. He already had shorts and t-shirts so only needed to buy trainers. It also seemed the least fuss, plus Willerby was surrounded by a spiderweb of footpaths and bridleways that were scenic all year round.

He could – Jamal figured – always just stop and walk if it all got too horrible.

But it didn’t. In fact, he was surprised how well he took to it.

This was because, he later discovered, he’d accidentally got his early training exactly right; he didn’t try to go too fast or too far. When he felt too tired, he walked.

Jamal enjoyed being outside, and soon he was going longer distances, quicker and quicker.

Before long he was running almost every day and missed it when he didn’t. He liked how people in the village began identifying him as a runner. He liked how the dog-walkers waved at him, and he liked it when the other Willerby runners showed him their routes.

Soon he was buying proper running equipment – a running belt, a watch and a headtorch for the winter. He downloaded training plans to improve his times. Most weeks he entered the Beckworth Parkrun and found – again to his surprise – he was usually in the top twenty finishers in around 22 minutes.

Then he hit a frustrating plateau. He didn’t seem able to get any faster no matter how much he ran.

He told Dan about it while they were stretching on a bench opposite the Green Man.

“I don’t know why it bothers me,” said Jamal. “I’ve never been that competitive, but I just think it would be nice to be really good at something - maybe finish in the top three – you know, right at the front.”

“What time would you need for the top three?” Dan asked.

“Most weeks, just under twenty minutes would do it,” Jamal said.

Dan whistled through his teeth. “That’s a league above. No good running with me if you want times like that. Have you thought about joining a club? There’s a couple in Beckworth.”

“Yeah,” Jamal said. “But both are in the evenings. To be honest, I know I wouldn’t keep it up. I like running in the morning, I just need to get up and go. Later in the day my motivation drains away.”

Dan stopped in the middle of a stretch to look hard at Jamal.

“What’s the earliest you’d do?”

Jamal shrugged. “As early as possible. This time of year, I wake up when it gets light. Sometimes I’m off by half-five.”

“OK,” said Dan. “I don’t know if this is something I’m allowed to say or not, and if anyone asks how you found out, don’t say it was from me – but next time you’re up that early, go up the hill to the old fort. A running club meets there very early. I ran with them a bit a couple of years ago, but those boys were too fast for me, and they don’t wait. They’re a bit rough but nice enough – if you can keep up with them even for a bit, I never could - you’d be going fast.”

Jamal went to find the club the next day.

Getting to the fort took about twenty minutes - a dawn walk down the street, a turn onto a footpath through the June-green wheat fields, and then a short, knee-burner of a climb up the only hill of any real size in the area. Jamal bathed in it all, his mind filled with birdsong and the light rustle of the morning breeze through leaves.

As he neared the foot of the hill, he caught the sharp tang of woodsmoke – common in the autumn and winter from the many village fireplaces and burners, but unexpected and unseasonal in midsummer. Looking up, he saw wisps of white smoke curling lazily into the blue sky above where he knew the old fort to be.

Drawing closer, he heard voices –indistinct and interspersed with what sounded like shouted instructions or commands. There were animal sounds too – dogs barking, the low rumble of cattle and a persistent, arrogant cockerel.

Jamal reached the final crest of the hill and saw that instead of the usual rolls and folds of worked earth, there was now a palisade fence of sharpened wooden stakes with a gate set into it.

The gate opened just wide enough for three men to slip through the gap.

They were wearing loose-fitting short red dresses gathered at the waist with leather belts and were barefoot. The men were pushing and shoving each other, laughing, jumping up and down, calling to one another, and taking turns to drink from a wooden flask.

This, Jamal thought, must be them.

Suddenly self-conscious in his Lycra shorts and running singlet, he walked towards them. Dan had said he’d run with them before, so he figured it must be safe enough.

The men did not appear surprised to see him – even giving a sort of ironic cheer when they spotted him. One of them – the tallest, standing well over six feet – ran on the spot, pointed at Jamal, and then pointed down the path back down the hill. Jamal nodded, which made all three men laugh.

The man pointed at himself, “Aetius!” he said, then pointed to a shorter, stockier man. “Alban!” before gesturing towards a slimmer man with a dark, curly beard. “Africanus!”

Finally, he pointed at Jamal. “Jamal?”, Jamal said.

“Jam-Al?” Aetius said, then more confidently, “Jam-Al!”

The big man’s grin was infectious. Jamal nodded and smiled back.

Then, before Jamal had a chance to ask where they were going, they set off down the track.

Initially, on the downhill, he thought they were not much quicker than him, but when they hit a flat stretch, he realised he was going to struggle to keep up. The men – just ahead of him to begin with – ran with long strides that easily ate up the ground, leaping off the trail where it was rough and uneven before dropping back onto it once it became smooth again. They laughed and called to each other, shouting what sounded like rough, good-natured insults.

Within a quarter of a mile, Jamal was breathing heavily, and they were pulling ahead. Concentrating most on staying on his feet, he had a feeling that while similar, the route wasn’t quite the same path he’d come up on. Things were different – it twisted in ways he didn’t remember and there was more wildlife than usual on his morning rounds; flushed birds exploding from thickets, a dozen or so hares running across the fields, and deer plunging away from the noise into woods that were closer and thicker than he was used to.

Half a mile further on, they had already put two hundred yards between them and him, and with each step, the gap widened. Annoyed at how quickly he was being left behind, Jamal put his head down and willed himself to greater speed but couldn’t keep it up; five minutes later, he had a stitch and dropped back to his usual running pace.

When he looked to the horizon, the runners were gone.

Jamal gave up; he moved to a jog, then a walk, and finally stopped.

Doubled over with his hands on his knees, his stitch stabbing his side and sweat dripping into his eyes, he fought to catch his breath and slow his heartbeat.

Just as they’d been too fast for Dan, they were too fast for him, but as Jamal jogged home, he was more inspired than defeated.

His defeat just meant he had work to do.

From then on, for the rest of the summer, Jamal went to the fort every morning.

The three men found him hilarious.

One time, Aetius offered him a piggy-back ride, and another morning, Africanus, to the delighted hoots of the other two men, presented him with a small tortoise which he’d named “Al-Jam.” Jamal could see the ribbing was good-natured and didn’t mind it – while he was the butt of the jokes, he was also in on them.

And by sticking at it, he made progress.

Most days he managed to keep up for longer than the day before, and soon his three clubmates were noticing too. As they saw him improve, their joshing became less mocking and more encouraging, with the three calling “Ire, Jam-Al!” at him when he, inevitably, began to drop behind.

As he started running with them for longer, he noticed more about his three companions. They were all scarred. Aetius was missing half his left ear, Alban had a long scar on the back of his neck, and Africanus’ calf was marked by a deep pit.

Also, they weren’t all the same speed.

Alban found things hardest. The first time, Jamal noticed, after a couple of miles, that he was sweating and breathing almost as hard as Alban was, and it felt like a breakthrough – irrefutable evidence at least one of the men might be beatable.

Jamal upped his training and began arranging his days around running - not just early in the morning but also longer, slower runs in the late afternoon and early evening. He tracked his times and distances carefully, recording them on a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet and becoming obsessive about what he ate and drank.

Soon, Jamal found he was keeping up for ten minutes.

Then fifteen.

Then nearly twenty. As they ran further together, he saw he was right about the route they covered not being the same as any he took without them. While the landscape seemed mostly the same shape – except for the HS2 scar and the old railway cutting, which weren’t there at all – what was on it was different. There were no hedges or fences, and the fields were not sown. There were far fewer sheep and cows, and those he did see were smaller and wirier.

Until the last time, the runs always ended the same way – the three men left him behind, and by the time he’d recovered enough to think straight, the world was back to how it always was.

Jamal’s final run was in the middle of August. It started with him waking up well-rested, following an early night after a big pasta dinner.

After his first cup of coffee, he was sure this was the day he’d go for it.

For the past month, Jamal had been more strategic than his running companions realised, deliberately dropping out when he could have gone for longer, and saving energy for more intense training later in the day.

For the last week, to the confusion of Aetius, Alban and Africanus, who’d got used to him improving, he’d deliberately quit very early and had not run at all later.

They didn’t know it, but Jamal was tapering: allowing himself to recover so he’d be in peak condition before an important race.

That last run began as all the others did. Aetius at the front, followed by Africanus, then Alban, with Jamal tucked in just behind on his right shoulder.

Jamal felt strong.

He was tempted to take the lead but didn’t, partly because he wanted to keep something in reserve, but mostly because he’d never finished the route and could lose any advantage figuring out the final stretch back if he got lost. He was confident the fort wasn’t much further than he’d been, because he’d kept up with Alban for a long enough to know he didn’t have much more in him.

Jamal’s companions noticed early on that something was different and were impressed, grinning over their shoulders at him and grunting “Jam-Al” approvingly.

The four of them neared a thicket that marked the furthest Jamal had previously run before fading away.

Jamal felt as strong as he had when setting out, but then, Aetius sped up.

This was as much a surprise to Alban as it was to Jamal, who heard him grunt what sounded like a swearword.

The runners took a turn and emerged from the treeline back into a landscape of meadows. The path widened. Jamal moved past Alban to take third position behind Africanus.

Aetius quickened again, as if he now knew this was a race.

Jamal was feeling it too – aware of his breathing and feeling the faint beginnings of a stitch in his side, but motivated by Africanus dropping behind him, he did not allow himself to slow.

The world outside his body began to fade and shrink; almost all his concentration was now on keeping his technique good, with smoothly striding legs and swinging arms. There was a lot of pain, but he’d built enough experience at running fast to know it could be managed. He allowed himself to acknowledge the burn briefly, and then dismissed it as irrelevant, reminding himself he could go at this speed for much longer with much more discomfort than he was feeling. The pain was there, but it wasn’t important.

However, that didn’t leave him much energy to think with, and it was only dimly that he became aware he was running through a village.

Woven wooden fences to his sides, the domed roofs of roundhouses behind them. Ahead, a flock of chickens broke into two parts, clucking indignant complaints. He heard children shouting and saw a group running alongside him for a few seconds before dropping away.

Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the village was gone. The path narrowed and began to climb.

They were on the hill leading back to the fort and it was just Jamal and Aetius.

This had to be the final stretch.

The pain was now breaking through Jamal’s mental defences. His thighs burned and he was breathing faster than he’d ever done before. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, hammering as if it were trying to break out of his chest.

But Aetius was going no faster, and Jamal realised the little more he had to give might be just enough.

He forced himself to speed up and drew level.

For an instant, the bigger man kept pace, but only for an instant.

Incredibly, he too was dropping back, and as he did, Jamal looked up and saw the sharpened ends of the palisade fence.

He was at the top of the hill, free and clear of all the others, out on his own.

He sped up again, the fort getting bigger and bigger as it rushed towards him until he was close enough to bang it with the palms of his hands with such force that he felt it shift.

Jamal stopped and it hit him all at once.

He doubled over, throwing up pasta, water and coffee, hot sweat stinging his eyes and soaking his vest and shorts, his chest heaving and heaving.

A second later he was on the ground with first Aetius, then Africanus and then Alban on top of him, smelling of new sweat and woodsmoke. For a moment he feared they’d taken defeat so badly they were attacking him, but before the thought had a chance to take hold, he’d been pulled to his feet and hoisted onto Aetius’ shoulders. Still dizzy with exhaustion, he found himself paraded around as they chanted his name over and over.

“Jam-AL, Victoris! Jam-AL, Victoris! Jam-AL, Victoris!”

Although nauseous and aching all over, Jamal could not stop grinning as he pumped his arm in the air and chanted his own name together with the others.

“Jam-AL, Victoris! Jam-AL, Victoris! Jam-AL, Victoris!”

Jamal always remembered that afternoon – and the moments just after – as among the best of his life. Arm in arm with his friends, he looked down the hill at wisps of smoke rising from the village below while the sun dried his shirt. Africanus presented his tortoise to Alban and everyone laughed. There were body-shaking claps on the back, fierce embraces, goodbyes—and the long walk down the hill with their chanting still ringing in his ears.

The following Saturday, Jamal – in a time of eighteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds – won the Beckworth Park Run.

Dan was there, and Sally, his wife, who was watching with their son Sammy, saw him do it too.

Later that week, while stretching on the bench outside the Green Man, Dan asked Jamal how much the training with the fort boys had helped.

“I’ve been with them all summer,” Jamal said. “I stuck with it, and the last time I was with them I went the whole way round and pulled ahead at the end. Dan, I beat them.”

“You did not!” Dan said, whistling through his teeth.

Jamal nodded, hardly able to believe it himself. “Yeah, I really did,” he said. He stopped and grinned, “Yeah. Veni, Vidi, Vici.”