Position 412 of 419

I've done a hundred and thirty-one parkruns and I have never finished in the top four hundred. This isn't false modesty. I have the emails. Position 412 of 419. Position 398 of 401, that was a good week. Once, in the snow, 287 of 290, and I put that one on the fridge. My time is around thirty-eight minutes. I'm forty-six, I've got a knee that clicks, and I run the way a wardrobe would run if a wardrobe had to. Five kilometres around Bushy Park with nine hundred people who are, without exception, faster than me. Here's what happens at the back. The front goes off like the start of a race, because for them it is. By the first bend the field is a long thin thing and I am at the end of it, with the walkers and the buggies and a man called Terry who is seventy-nine and has done six hundred of these and who I have never once beaten. Terry and I have a thing. We don't talk, exactly. We run near each other. About the two kilometre mark he'll say "warm one" or "wind's up" and I'll say "yeah" and that's it for the next three kilometres. Near the end, when the path goes past the pond and you can see the finish funnel, he goes. He just goes. Seventy-nine and he's got a kick. I watch him pull away every single week and every single week I think, next week, Terry. The tail walker is a volunteer whose whole job is to be last, so that nobody else has to be. They wear a hi-vis that says TAIL WALKER and they chat to whoever's at the back. I've had long conversations with tail walkers about divorce, and hip replacements, and a woman's plan to open a cheese shop in Kingston, which I don't think ever happened. My wife asks why I bother. She means it kindly. She means I don't seem to be getting faster and I come back in a state. I've tried to explain. It's the only thing in my week where I'm measured and the number doesn't matter. Work measures me and it matters. The bank measures me and it matters. Saturday morning a man scans a barcode and an email says 412 and I stand by the finish with a coffee from the van, absolutely wrecked, and watch the last few come in, and clap, because someone clapped me. Last week Terry wasn't there. I ran the whole thing next to nobody. At the pond I put a kick in anyway, out of habit, and beat my time by twenty seconds. Position 409. He was back this week. "Chest thing," he said at the two kilometre mark. "Doctor. Fine now." "Good." "Heard you went under thirty-eight." "Once." "Hm," said Terry, and at the pond, he went.