Springing into Spring

This year, all my roads lead to Bethlehem. I stood surrounded by the crowds filling Manger Square: music pumping as lycra-clad Palestinians and others from all over the world limbered up for the 2016 Bethlehem Marathon. We were all shapes and sizes. I hadn't trained, but the worst I could do was stick my 12 year old running shoes on the bottom of my 40 year old legs and join the gang.

'Don't be put off by the young Palestinian sprinters. They sprint for the first few kilometres and then you see them gasping for breath on their knees by the side of the road,' a friend warned.

I'd set out at 6 in the morning with a Norwegian friend under bars of sunshine illuminating the morning, the air was moving with birds and bugs and full of song. All of us springing into spring together. At 40 years old you can swing your legs out of bed and wish you didn't have a little patch of veins here, some cellulite there, or just get out and use the damn things. Rashimi and J were home sick with manflu, the Lozenge had read me one of his school books about the seahorse the night before, his head on the pillow and a breadstick next to it: 'It's my emergency snack Mummy. In case I get hungry in the night'.

My emergency snack was a little three-pack of Jericho dates advertising the Right to Movement an organisation to get everyone moving, and to highlight just how far you can't move in Bethlehem, before reaching the giant slabs of concrete separating Israel from the West Bank.

We were three groups of runners: the full marathon, the half, and the 10kms like me.  I lolled over the starting line and began at a pace reminiscent of an elderly woman in L.A. without the nugget dog on a lead or the designer sweat suit.

When you run, your head runs also, with snatches of conversation or song on permanent repeat. The Lozenge reading about the seahorse was the beginning of the refrain: 'The male sea horse carries the eggs for the female, and gives birth to the baby sea horses for her.' So unfair, I thought as I stopped for a wee at a kebab shop just opening its metal slats for the day's trade.

I pictured the elegant shape of the female seahorse floating free while her mate struggled with the tummyload of eggs and wondered if maybe, just, in the next life...?

We ran up to the graffiti covered wall and flanked it for a while, before running up the main street, past the hospital where the Pea was born seven months before (will Bethlehem always be the location for physical endurance?) back to the wall again, around and through the 10k finish. It sounds easy, and wouldn't have been even achievable but for the tunes and the buoyancy aid of other people running along the road with me. The atmosphere was light and carefree, all people part of a positive gathering for which the West Bank is rarely known. No tear gas today.

The Pea was silhouetted in the doorway when I returned.  She flapped her arms up and down and emitted a high-pitched squeak when she saw me, putting down the fly swat she'd been chewing on. The follwing weekend her big day:

The baptism of the Pea. P.E.R.L Petra Edith Rosie. A raft of family and friends swept in bringing with them 4 days of joy and rather a lot of champagne, joining us for trekking in the West Bank near Ramallah, noisy dinners, big family lunch, and an enormous hug of support for a radiant pea, who thought being dunked in Queen Victoria's font at our local cathedral was the funniest thing ever.

April 10th - a baptism of a new human, and the celebration of spring.