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Murphy’s Lore BY SAM MURPHY
IT’S TIME TO RISE ABOVE MY FEAR OF FALLING
THE TAKEAWAY…
I L LU S T R AT I O N : P I E TA R I P O S T I
I
was out running the other day. One minute, I was tootling along a field verge; the next – to my surprise – I was sprawled on the grass. I have a morbid fear of falling, or more accurately, a dread of hurting myself as a result of having what writer Geoff Nicholson delightfully describes in his book The Lost Art Of Walking as ‘a disagreement with gravity’. But after sitting for a few moments to catch my breath, I realised I was totally fine, got up and carried on. Nearly every runner I know has taken a tumble at least once, from collisions with bollards and stumbles over speed bumps to slips off kerbs and trips over tree roots. But despite grazed palms, bruised ribs and even broken wrists, most were quite sanguine about it and seemed more concerned about their fall having been seen by others – or ripping their tights – than injury. The same was true online: I found stories of people tripping over dogs, dead badgers, horse poo and their own feet, recounted not with horror but hilarity. Some fell so often they had the nickname to prove it – ‘professional pavement diver’ and ‘legend of the falls’ were my favourites. I, too, had fallen before that day, of course. And only once – when a runner clipped my ankle as he passed me down a hill and sent me flying – did it really hurt. I still finished the race, though. Previous experiences should tell my risk-assessing brain that falling really isn’t so bad, but it hasn’t got the memo. As Nicholson says, ‘The older you get, the bigger a deal it is to fall down.’ So much so, we change the vocabulary. When we’re young, falling is an action: we fall, trip or slip. But as we age, the verb becomes a noun: ‘I’ve had a fall.’ I’ve had a fear of falling as long as I can remember. (I managed to stay upright for the entirety of my one-and-only skiing holiday, not due to skill
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but a steely determination to avoid the alarming alternative.) It must have been instilled in me in childhood. Well-meaning warnings of, ‘Careful!’ and, ‘Don’t run or you’ll fall,’ teach many of us, perhaps girls especially, that not being able to stay on our feet is a calamity to avoid. Yet falling is part of the process of learning to walk and wanting to explore our environment. Maybe we would be better learning how to fall rather than learning not to fall. The natural response to losing your balance is to stick your arms out to break the fall, known as the parachute reflex. But landing this way increases the risk of breaking a wrist, elbow or collarbone. Martial artists and other expert fallers recommend absorbing the fall’s momentum in a forward roll – but that seems ambitious for someone only just beginning to come to terms with the idea of ground contact with anything other than her feet. Still, I’ve been wondering. Does thinking about falling actually make it a bad thing because you go down rigid rather than relaxed? And even more importantly, is my risk-averse running self-limiting? When I’m running over terrain that I perceive to be ‘high risk’ (when I feel my feet slip, hit tree roots or snag on a bramble), my movement becomes tense. Perhaps the reason I wasn’t injured when I hit the deck the other day was because I felt relaxed on what I’d judged risk-free ground. I’d like all my runs to be that stress-free. So from now on, I’m going to leave my inner health and safety officer at home and embrace the occupational hazard of our sport. Just call me the Day Tripper. sam-murphy.co.uk
JULY 2022 RUNNERSWORLD.COM/UK 021
