My story - part 3

One of our Commissioners gives us a privileged insight into their life. They give us the good and they give us the bad. The story helps us understand poverty a little better. Here is part 3.

My gran would have been so proud of my running.  I started when I was fifteen.  I wasn’t enjoying school was dogging a lot.  I was looking for other things to do and came across the running club at Crown Point. My teachers hadn’t encouraged me in my running; I just kind of stumbled on it.   It was every Tuesday and Thursday.  Mostly I went for the extra training to keep fit.  I didn’t think I was actually going to end up running races, but I ended up really enjoying it and the next thing I knew I was buying a set of running shoes, spikes, and that was me.  I got the taste of running.  And I was good at it.

The teachers didn’t believe in me, they thought I was a failure.  Especially one who had it in for me and said I would never achieve anything. One Sports Day I won 4 races out of 5.  I turned round and said to him, who’s the failure now? He didn’t know what to say back.  It was good seeing his face.  He could stick his failure down his throat. That motivated me more.  It made me determined.  It made me more determined than ever before.  

Running opened my eyes to being good at something.  Even though my teachers had told me I would never amount to anything - I was good at it, and I just went for it.  It’s like life, isn’t it, goals and aspirations.  Even though you feel so low at certain times, always have goals, always have dreams, always have aspirations.  Everybody has dreams, everybody has goals, and aspirations.  A year before I was sixteen, I was achieving those goals.  

I used to run for Shettleston Harriers in the old McDonalds League at the Kelvinhall, 800m and 200m, and have a lot of medals for that.  My mum still has them all in a wee box back at home.  Then I started on Cross Country.  I came second in the first race, but by the third I had come first.  I just loved running.

At the weekend my pals and I were bored hanging about the streets at night, but was nothing for the group of us to do.  We started drinking more.  It wasn’t like we were drinking every night, but it did become more and more.  We were drinking through boredom though - boredom, boredom. 

As we drank more, I started to miss a few training sessions. I would just think - I’ll just have a few beers tonight instead and go next time; it won’t matter missing one session.  I started missing more and more sessions and then suddenly I hadn’t been for a really long time.  In the end I stopped going altogether and that was it.  A few people tried to encourage me back, but I didn’t listen, I was a really stubborn person.  My own person.  I had loads of ambitions when I was growing up, but they never amounted to anything, just all these ambitions just sort of wasted away.

Watch out for part 4, tomorrow...