XLII With Headscarf and Hasselblad in the Glens.
My former experience of lactate-pyruvate build up had been limited to
the occasional school relay event when I had been, relatively
speaking, in trim, but this race down an anonymous stretch of the
LUCA's deck, with the accumulation of thousands of those second
helpings I ought never to have succumbed to upon me, was
something I had not endured even in nightmare. For the trained foot
racer the anaerobic sprint is something anticipated and accepted in
the same way that the antelope embraces the pursuit to which it is
subjected by the felid or canid courser that seeks to devour it. Such
situations are to be compared with the urban pressures of bus
running or, at the very most, the evasion of assailants whose normal
methods of ambush and overwhelm have misfired and who turn their
skills to the fleet pursuit of the even fleeter footed herbivore they had
planned to bring down at one strike and with the minimum of effort.
The rarity of these events is controlled by the attention that is drawn
to them in public spaces, quite apart from the marked lack of
fleetness amongst such urban prey for no aggressor will single out
the evidently winged footed, and may well be limited to the pulses of
gang rage and selective bullying. Even more rarely the victim may
become the pursuer, an event occasionally witnessed in the natural
world when the mild turtle dove gives pursuit to the magpie that
carries its chick within its beak - a species of avian bag snatching Ð
which though interesting to observe may also be sentimentally
gruelling for those who empathise with the mother, but in which it is
impossible and useless to intervene unless one is both appropriately
armed (my own preference would equip me with a tournament length
fukiya or blowpipe) and a highly skilled marksman. My current pain
and fatigue levels were to be ranked with the travails endured by
those unfortunate enough to ride the tripalium. I knelt beside the
MarkVI, my forehead tightly pressed against my quadriceps femoris.
It was as if I had hit a brick wall and been compressed. Despite her
proximity I was unaware of the Amazonian trident hurler for all my
thoughts were pitched into the unbearable labour of recovery. This
was a pit I knew I would be able to clamber out of, but the pain was
momentarily exclusive of all other inductive processes. I had been
stretched on the tavolaccio of torture and now had to resign myself to
the coiled rebound in which I nursed my pain.
