There’s no getting away from it, running kit reeks. Those once shiny shoes that have carried our sweaty feet for hundreds of miles, the race t-shirts we wear so proudly, they all develop a pungent aroma that screams ‘runner’, sometimes as soon as we put them on. There is a whole industry dedicated to helping us eradicate these smells, and there’s no doubt that regular washing with technical products will help for a time. But really, it’s just delaying the inevitable. There will come a point where we take a deep breath in and realise that what comes with it is the unmistakable scent of runner.
As a society, we seem to be obsessed with the performance of cleanliness; it is not enough to look clean, we have to smell clean too, saturating our clothes and bodies in an array of chemicals to prove to the world that we have indeed washed and made ourselves acceptable for the public space. And as a 46 year old mother of two boys, I fall into a category for whom this performance is twofold: I should present my children to the world in just as clean a state as myself.
There is a little bit of leeway there. Boys are still permitted to be mucky, and coming back from a trail run splashed with mud is almost a badge of honour. But ‘mucky’, with its connotations of fun, sport, and childhood, is a world away from ‘dirty’ and the unpleasantness that comes with it; unclean, unsanitary, bordering on disgusting. Yet dirty is the word that springs to mind when faced with a damp pile of stinking running kit.
So do I feel dirty and disgusting when I catch a whiff of myself during a run, or pick my leggings off the floor after I’ve peeled them off? No. Not one bit of it. What I feel is liberated, even a little subversive. When I’m in my kit, red faced and sweating, my face decorated with salt crystals, I am almost certainly going to end up stinking, and I do so because I use my clothes and shoes time and again, out in all weathers, alone or in company, running to keep myself sane. My head needs me to run; my body needs me to run. Smelly kit is a testament to all those miles, a reminder that I can do this, that I can push myself and my limits and put all other cares aside, even if only for a little while. It is a quiet but forceful refusal to consistently perform at least one aspect of ‘adult woman and mother’. The dirt and the smells prove to me that my running self has pushed all other selves aside and taken centre stage. I like that self, and I am very happy to spend more time with her, stinky kit and all.
I Run Free 