Elephants and elephants grandmothers
Many moons ago I lived in China.
I was teaching English and had spent one particularly tricky afternoon trying to teach the concept of Cockney rhyming slang to my class.
I’m no Cockney and why I felt that this was a good idea at the time, who knows… let me tell you, that was one afternoon filled with some very blank faces.
Mine included.
Anyway, as it happened, there I was one afternoon a few weeks later when the heavens opened. I was in southern China and when it rained, it RAINED.
One of my students, ran to the window, turned to me and said, “Look! It’s raining elephants and elephants grandmothers!”.
The concept of cats and dogs, levelled up to relate to the volume of water pouring from the sky.
Forever onwards, extra fat, heavy rain will always be that of elephants and elephants grandmothers.
Which is a lovely story isn’t it? ….. until you’re running in it.
That was last Tuesday at our efforts session with my running club.
To be honest, I’ve never seen the puddles that bad in 3 years of running that stretch of pavement. No joke.
As I led our running group in the warm up, we were there, all buttoned up, teeth grimacing, and I knew, I could HEAR how wet people’s feet were getting.
It started off vocally. I’d hear a splash behind me swiftly followed by a “eughhh” or an “awwwwww”.
It’s never nice when your feet start getting wet.
The splooshes kept coming, the noises became less frequent and by the end of the lap, it was “sploosh” and then…. silence.
That silence meant one thing.
All of our feet were now fully soaked.
They could no longer get any wetter.
And then we knuckled down and got to running.
Running isn’t about unicorn farts and skipping along on sunny days. It’s about the grind as well. Those really shitty wet and cold days when all you want to do is sit in front of the telly under a blanket.
On those days, when you go out there and do it anyway, 2 things happen.
It’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be.
You become a proper badass.
If you want to sponsor me to continue this badass attitude I seem to have adopted - I mean, we started with elephants and cute phrases and now I feel like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, then you can pop some money in here to help me dry out my socks.
Just a fiver will do!
Thank you x