Running slower is one of the hardest things you will do. I’ve tried to run slower and I can’t – it feels like you’re fighting a current that’s always pushing you to go faster. It’s easier to run fast because sport is all about speed, endurance and extending the limits of human possibility.  It is a positive action. Onwards and upwards.

In triathlons, the longest events – long swim, over 100 miles on a bike and then a marathon to finish – are known as Ironman events. 

Ironman refers to the iron will shown by competitors to compete in the challenging conditions of its first course in Kona in Hawaii. It wasn’t the fastest who would win, or the most physically capable, it was the one with the iron willpower to compete through draining heat and strength sapping head winds over 12 hours of racing.

The name fitted the course – if not female competitors – and, as such, it stuck.

But it strikes me that many races have followed this template without thinking what it means for the rest of us.

While many races are named after their location: the London Marathon, The Great North Run, ParkRun. Often a race will describe the hardest aspects of the course. Slateman refers to the slate covered hills of Snowdonia. Brutalfest has a series of races that are, well, brutal.

It’s human nature, it seems, to concentrate on the worst that could happen. And to overcome it. Race organisers are no different, but wouldn’t it be nice to be offered Flatfest, The Downhill Marathon or Pretty Flowers 10K?

Despite organisers’ attempts to make me go faster and further, I have tried to run slow.  At the Dublin Marathon in 2008 I started with a knee injury. It hadn’t healed as I had hoped and it was still giving me problems in my last run before the race. “I’ll just start slow,” I thought, “and see what happens.”

But then I’m surrounded by thousands of runners, all eager and ready to start. And while I feel I’m running slower, I’ve run the first mile 30 seconds faster as I’ve been swept up in the wave and been unable to judge my pace due to those faster runners around me. I thought I was slowing, I wanted to be  Sunday driving but I was going F2 speeds in an F1 race. Running slow with other people is hard, unless those other people are running the pace you want to run. 

Running slow when alone is tough. It can feel too easy. It doesn’t feel like training, so you start to speed up.  You look at your watch and you remember that you swore not to wear one and you curse the author who suggested you didn’t need to look at your pace. 

I get it now. Sometimes you need to use technology to help – and running faster or running slower is one of those times. But I struggle with a watch telling me what to do because watches can’t speak. They beep. And beeps trigger my PETSD: Physical Education Traumatic Stress Disorder. Which is like PTSD but with plimsolls. 

One beep and I’m back in a gym hall at the Stornoway Primary. There are foot high wooden benches along the walls. Climbing bars. A mounting horse. Scuff marks on the battered, shiny parquet floor. And a fire exit. Cause all gyms had a fire exit which was used for fire drills and, more importantly ventilation as the gym would heat up faster than a Pop-tart and convert from gym to sauna by the time I run my first lap of the dreaded ‘Bleep Test’.

The Beep Test was a simple idea made flesh and that flesh was then tortured repeatedly by our P.E. teacher. He stood at the side of the gym with a portable stereo. He would load it with a cassette tape and, before he pressed play, he would say:

“Line up on the back wall. When you hear the beep, run to the opposite wall. If you don’t touch the wall before you hear the next beep. You’re out. If you do touch the wall, wait, and then run back when you hear the beep. Continue until there is no one left.”

This last man standing physical elimination was also the premise of Stephen King’s horror novel  and film ‘The Long Walk’. Primary school teaching should not share any similarity with any of Stephen King’s ideas. What next? Winter ski trips to the Overlook hotel?

I lined up with the rest of the boys in my class. This was the eighties, so the teachers had already eliminated the girls for being too slow because, well, girls can’t run. A digression: one of those girls eventually became a world record holder as the fastest woman to cycle from John O’Groats to Lands End. Back to the gym: BEEP!

The first lap was easy. The second too. The BEEPs were well spaced but by the third and fourth a few of the ‘heavier’ boys were eliminated. BEEP five and six became serious. There was only a second or two to rest before we had to run again. We were getting faster and closer to sprinting to make it. Our teacher watched emotionless, like Robert Patrick as the T1000 in Terminator 2. The teacher wasn’t in charge. It was only the machine. The unrelenting never-ending machine. BEEP. Faster. BEEP. Faster. BEEP. Faster. 

Five of us left. I’m struggling. I barely made the last touch. My stomach is cramped and the only boys left with me are the swots who go to the local running club. They wear singlets. I can’t beat them. And the next BEEP isn’t a BEEP it’s DOOM. Stop. DOOM. Take the walk of shame and join your fellow losers in the corner of the gym furthest from the fire exits so you can drown not just in your sweat but in your shame. 

The Bleep Test was designed to break the self-esteem of a generation of schoolchildren. It was a perpetual motion elimination machine designed to do one thing and one thing only: tell you that no matter how fast you ran you would never ever be good enough for it. 

That’s why I struggle with both running fast and running slow. I like to run at my own pace. And that pace is not your pace, just as your pace is not mine. The Bleep Test told us we’d never be fast enough. The Ultra Iron Mega Badass Brutal Hardcore Three Legged Race tells us we’re not tough enough. Ignore both. Run your own pace. Slow down if you want to. Stop if you want to. Don’t listen to the beeps.