There’s a running shop in Canterbury UK on Burgate called The Running Outlet. They stock the running socks I like and out of the back window there’s a great view Canterbury Cathedral. It’s quite novel having your gait checked and being fitted for a pair of running shoes – all up-to-the-minute ergonomic data and modern high-tech materials – while gazing at a building which has stood for a thousand years; trying to decide if you need more cushioning or less, how light-weight you want these shoes to be whilst watching tourists pottering around the cathedral precincts with their cameras, the devoted going into side chapels for services and seeing the Archbishop go past in his vestments. So many people have seen this building, used this building, know this building, and how many more people will it see come through long after these running shoes of mine have been worn out and cast aside….
The ecclesiastical theme from the back window continues at the front of the shop.
Image courtesy of The Running Outlet, Canterbury.
Behind the counter is a stained-glass panel. Originally one of a series, all created on sporting themes for the Mansfield Bar in Harwick, Rouxburghshire, for decades a regular spot for sports fans. Though the Mansfield Bar closed its doors for the last time in 2018, the stained glass runners live on in their new setting in Canterbury. The panel depicts two runners, one dark haired, the other fair. By coincidence they happen to look quite like the two owners of the shop, although they think it could be based on Steve Cram and Seb Coe at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics – with a bit of leeway for artistic license.
The shop being as close as it is to the cathedral, who’s glittering stained glass windows tell stories from the bible adds an extra element to the stained glass runners: this story, this moment in time from our sport, captured and displayed for all to see.
Questions arise: who were you watching with when Seb Coe and Steve Cram battled it out for the 1500m Olympic gold medal in 1984? Personally, I was a baby in 1984, so “watching” is too strong a word, but I guarantee my athletics-mad parents watched that race and I would have been somewhere close by.
But those kind of questions: “what’s your abiding memory of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics?” or “where were you on Super-Saturday at London 2012?” are all legitimate things to ask an athletics fan. Do you remember? Were you there? How do you fit into the story? How do I?
My answers to the above: the 1992 Olympics were all about Sally Gunnell for my brother and I, that and the Freddie Mercury/Montserrat Caballe song which we bellowed at each other repeatedly. Super Saturday? Missed it, the whole thing. In bed ill and oblivious to everything that was unfolding. But this is one of the joys of athletics; while we can’t all be the central figure, our triumphs repeated on TV or picked out in stained glass, we all share these moments, we are all linked together by the threads of these stories. We know, we remember, (or we watch after the fact). We have poured hope and emotion into these moments, and we talk about them. Even the ones we can’t remember are part of our own story because we’ve been told about them so often. It’s what links us together in the larger narrative of our sport, and way after our own running shoes have worn out, that narrative will still be there to be remembered, retold, and passed on. Just as the cathedral, which has stood for centuries is woven into the lives and stories of the hundreds of thousands who have flocked to it in the past and will do so in the future, so too the story of athletics is part of all of our own narratives, and in time it will become the narrative of those who haven’t even joined the race yet.