A Race Apart

“Have a look at these,” says Sarah, placing a box of trainers onto my kitchen table.

“MBTs,” she announces proudly.  I stare at her.  “Masai Barefoot Technology,” she adds, urging comprehension.

“Are you in training with the Kenyan distance running team?” I ask.  “I suppose there’s a space in the team now that Sammy What’s-his-name's tragically fallen from his balcony…”

“Don’t be silly, I’m in training for June 25^th.”

June 25th.  Have I missed something?  It doesn’t ring any bells.

“Sports day? The Mothers’ Race? You can’t have forgotten?”

Of course.  The Mothers’ Race. Once upon a time, when mothers still wore pinnies and slept in rollers, this was a little bit of sadistic fun invented by games masters to ensure that women attending Sports Day couldn’t nod off in the sun behind their copy of Woman’s Weekly while their little Johnnies wobbled down the track with newly off-ration eggs.  Fast forward fifty years however and, like everything else in British culture, it’s an altogether meaner, more competitive story.

Last year, forty-two year old Sarah came second in the Mothers’ Race.  The mother who beat her is nearly ten years younger with a thirty-four inch inside leg (Sarah is five foot four with a following wind).  These facts are immaterial, apparently, as no handicapping system applies to novelty races, much to her dismay.  Instead, she has chosen to approach the event as if it were the London Marathon, which explains the over-priced, hi tech trainers.

My own introduction to the Mothers’ Race came several years ago.  I was thirty-four – just a filly – and gym fit.  I took the race at face value: a bit of a laugh before we broke open the picnic lunch and the tepid cava.  “Shall we jog at the back and chat?” I asked my pal, Mandy who nodded in agreement.  We took our places in the line-up, me in my flip-flops, she in Dunlop Green Flash.  I could have sworn she hadn’t arrived in those… 

The starter’s gun sounded.  Mandy disappeared into a cloud of dust; the dust I was eating.  I was left to amble in last, a picture of bewildered confusion.  It was only as I flip flopped across the tape that now lay fluttering on the ground, that I realised the Mothers’ Race is a front for so much more. 

What I had failed to appreciate in this uber-competitive era, is that where you finish in the Mothers’ Race invites judgement not just of your running ability, but of your competence as a parent. The faster you run, clearly the better able you are to bring up a child.  The mother who breasts the line in first place therefore, is the best mother. And she even gets a medal from the Headmaster to prove it.

If you wanted evidence to support this unpalatable thesis, you’ve only to think of Princess Di.  In the face of self-confessed faithlessness, philandering and proper dodgy liaisons, she retained an unassailable position in the mothering stakes.  She’d surely earned it, for who cannot recall her spirited win in the Mothers’ Race at her sons’ prep school in 1989?  (Before you protest, I simply won’t countenance any theories that the other mothers let her win just so they’d be safe from accusations of treason.)

“So,” says Sarah, “will you be taking part?”  I see that she is already sizing me up; she needn’t worry.  I have every intention of running, but none whatever of competing.

“I expect so,” I say, “I like to support the children.”

“That’s right,” she agrees, “it’s not the winning that matters but the taking part.”

I snort.  It seems to me that that particular adage belongs to a bygone Britain. Today, it’s only winning that matters, even when it sets friend against friend, mother against mother. What we need is more people prepared to lose graciously.

“Why do you always come last, Mummy?” asks my younger son when we discuss the matter later.

“So nobody else has to,” I reply.