Running: The Autobiography Read online

  I loved the routine. My mate would come over to me, we’d get there for 11.30, get dressed, ready for 12, ready to race at 12.30, timings done, shower, boom boom boom. In the pub for 3.30–4 p.m., just on the orange juice, focused, everyone talking about their time, the race, where they’d come.

  It’s funny that it became such a huge ambition to represent Essex. Let’s face it, there was no money in it for me, and no status – you’re not going to be remembered for having run for your county, are you? Certainly, I’d be better off concentrating on the snooker from a financial point of view. And yet still there was something pushing me on. I was desperate to do it. I began to think if I did represent Essex it would be the same as winning the World Championship. The running replaced AA and NA meetings in my life. There wasn’t time for meetings, snooker and running. One had to give way, so it was the meetings. By now I looked totally different. I weighed 11½ stone and was down to a 31-inch waist. Everybody would go, you look really ill, and I’d think, great, that must mean I’m really fit. Then, when they said to me: ‘You look really well’, I’d think: ‘Shit, I’ve put weight on.’ I knew when I looked gaunt that I was in good shape and could run a good race. I’d be flush, I’d think, cor I’m flying.

  In 2008 I was playing well and won the World Championship for the third time. I really was flying then. I’d beaten Ali Carter in the final, my daughter Lily was just over a year old, little Ronnie had just been born, I was world champion: life was good. About a week after the Crucible final I won my first race and I did it for charity. There were 150 to 200 people racing. When I was overweight and did it, I came about 100th. Middle of the pack.

  This time round we got to the race in Epping Forest and my mate the mad Irishman’s running. He was about 42, and he could run – about 33 minutes for 10 kilometres. He was a class act. I thought, there’s no way I’m going to beat him so I just sat in behind him in about fourth or fifth. I thought, I’ll stick on his shoulder and I did till mile two. After about two and a half miles I got in front of him and I thought, come on, you’re in front, just push on. So I pushed on and pushed on and won it by 40 to 50 seconds. And I’d done five miles in 27 minutes. I couldn’t believe it – the thrill of running through the tape, and winning £80 worth of vouchers. I was buzzing. Ecstatic. It was on the back page of the local Epping Forest paper. Me on the sports pages – and not for my snooker. I’d always wanted to make Athletics Weekly and I thought the only way I was going to do that was through running.

  But that day in Epping Forest I peaked. I don’t know why but it all went downhill from there. I’m still hoping it hasn’t – that I’ll get back and beat my PB. Maybe I just got a bit lazy. Maybe I didn’t know where to go on to once I’d won a race. I suppose it was always going to be impossible balancing the running and snooker.

  One of the problems was with Jo, my then partner and the mother of Lily and Ronnie. She always felt my running was selfish because she’d had two kids and was bringing them up and I was out playing snooker and running. She didn’t like me going out racing, then she didn’t like the mess I’d bring in – dirty running gear, dirty legs. Often I’d put my clothes on top of my clobber, run upstairs, get in the shower and wash all the mud off before she’d had time to complain about it. Running was probably one of the things that brought our relationship to an end.

  2

  WHEN LIFE KICKS

  YOU UP THE ARSE

  ‘Monday, five miles, 47 minutes. Did not enjoy my run, calves felt tight, lost my love for it at the moment, it feels like an effort.’

  Life has a knack of kicking you up the arse when things are going well just to remind you who’s boss. It was 2008: I’d just won the UK and World Championships, I’d made three 147s that season, my running was going brilliantly, I had a beautiful baby and a two-year-old toddler. I was on top of the world. In theory. Unfortunately, my relationship with Jo was collapsing.

  The role of dad has always been important to me – I knew what it was to have a good dad who would do everything for you, and I knew what it was like to lose one for the best part of 20 years. I’d always thought I would be a dad, but didn’t really know what to expect.

  I was only 20 when I became a father, but unfortunately I’ve never really been part of Taylor’s life, so I had never properly experienced what it meant to be a dad. And then, when Lily was born, it suddenly hit me. Boom! It’s hard to put into words what it’s like. When friends of mine are having their first baby, I tell them this is going to be the best feeling you’ll ever have. That’s what it was for me. It just gave a bit more meaning to life. Everything seemed to have more point.

  I was there for the birth. Jo had an emergency Caesarean because the cord wrapped round Lily’s neck, and they said, we’re going to have to do a quick Caesarean and get her out. It wasn’t planned, but it worked out well because it was short and sweet. I got a phone call, rushed down there, didn’t know what to expect. It was 2–3 a.m. You get to the hospital and it’s all quick, quick, quick. You’re panicking, but for the nurses it’s just an everyday thing. Then, within 10 to 15 minutes, it was done. The baby came out, it’s a girl. Wow! Pure elation.

  I was 28 and life suddenly made more sense. Until then I had just been playing tournament to tournament and one year rolled into the next; then Lily arrives and a sense of responsibility comes with it. It was a bit of pressure, I suppose, because I had to provide for this little baby. I’d provided for Taylor for eight years, but because I didn’t have an active role in her growing up it didn’t feel like it. You stop thinking so much about yourself as a self-contained unit and more about yourself as a father – making sure the baby eats and sleeps and has a good home.

  When you’re just looking after yourself you kind of know you can get through to the other end, and in the end it will be alright. The feeling I had now was almost primitive – I was the hunter-gatherer, the provider. Family has always been important to me, and we have always been a close unit, even when both Mum and Dad were banged up in jail. Mum, Dad, me and my younger sister, Danielle – the O’Sullivans. We’d always supported each other throughout, and this is what I hoped for with my new family. We were close in every way. Last year I bought a house in Loughton, a couple of miles away from the rest of the family in Chigwell, and I couldn’t cope. I thought, what have I done? It was like another world to me, and I seemed to spend all the time driving from Loughton to Chigwell so I knew it wasn’t right for me. Mum, my snooker table at Mum’s, Dad, Danielle, my running routes, my local haunts, like the bagel bar, are all around Chigwell. Sometimes you don’t realise how rooted you are in your community; it took me moving a few miles down the road to realise it!

  So when Lily was born it was important to be around Chig-well. For the first few months Jo and I were getting on fine. We’d started going out in 2001 and had been together for around five years. Jo and I met at Narcotics Anonymous, where we were both being treated for addiction. We had a bond from the start, and in the early days we got on great. We’d always had our little tiffs, like everyone does, but soon after Lily was born things started to become difficult. Before, I’d always had my own routine. Ask any sportsman or sportswoman and they’ll tell you the same. Without routine you’re lost; you’re not going to achieve anything. I would go for my runs, work out in the gym, play my snooker. But when Jo was pregnant there was more pressure on my time. She wanted me to go to all the meetings about childbirth and getting ready to have a baby, but I wasn’t into all that. Perhaps I could have been more supportive, but I saw that as her role. I was there for her to tell me about it when I came home, but I couldn’t break up my day for hospital appointments and meetings about birthing pools or how to pack your bag for the maternity ward.

  I didn’t feel it was something I had to contribute to until the baby came along, and I always felt we’d know what to do when it happened. I’ve never been one for preparing for things; I’ve always been much more, let it happen and see how it goes. I think men are just construct
ed differently from women biologically. There is something in women that makes them want to prepare for babies, and they feel it much earlier than men do – ’course they do, they’re carrying the baby. Whereas for fellas, we’re not really involved and don’t understand what our contribution is supposed to be till the baby arrives.

  I’m not saying I’m right, but this is the life of most successful sportsmen. We need our routine; we need to be focused; we are selfish; we do have to put ourselves first. Jo wanted more of my time, but I didn’t know how to change and wasn’t sure if I could change.

  Sportsmen also tend to be superstitious, and I thought any slight change to what I was doing would detract from where I wanted to go. Also, practice is bloody important. As Matthew Syed says in his great book Bounce, it’s not natural-born genius that tends to distinguish high-achievers from less successful sports people, it’s practice – he reckons that you’re never going to get anywhere in a sport unless you’ve put in 10,000 hours’ practice, and he’s got a point. Then, when you’ve put in your 10,000 hours you can’t just stop. You’ve got to keep practising, reinforcing your good habits. So the idea that you could give all your practice a miss, then just turn up for tournaments, was always going to be a nonsense to me.

  It might seem old-fashioned, but the way my life is it was always going to be my partner’s main role to bring up the kids. I don’t mean that in a sexist way. I’d be happy to do it if I wasn’t playing. And I am happy to do it when I’m away from the game. But the reality of life for any sportsman is that you’re on the road loads of the time, travelling from hotel to hotel, earning your crust. Obviously, I’d be there once I finished my practice and come home and bath them and feed them, do whatever, but it never quite worked out that way.

  I spoke to other snooker players who had become dads to see how they felt, and how they worked out their fatherhood responsibilities. So I chatted to Stephen Hendry and Jo Perry – I chose them because Stephen’s the best the game has known, and Jo hadn’t achieved as much but had still dedicated his life to sport. In terms of application, there was probably no difference between the two, but one was seven-time world champion and the other was a good player who hadn’t won the same kind of silverware. I wanted two different perspectives. Jo Perry told me: ‘I get up in the morning, go to do my snooker, go to the gym, and when I come back from the gym my missus says, do you want to help feed, put the baby down, and it’s all great.’ Stephen Hendry said: ‘My life didn’t change at all, my missus knew what I was like, I was down the snooker club five hours a day, I’d be in the gym in the morning for an hour, my missus was happy for me to do anything I had to. If anything she was, get the fuck out of the house because you’re getting in my way.’

  For any sportsman a successful relationship is always tricky to negotiate, particularly where kids are involved. Talk to any golfer or tennis player, anyone who spends most of the year on the road. Yes, they might well want to be home most of the time, and share all the domestic responsibilities, but that’s not ever going to be the reality while they take their sport seriously. It’s impossible. The simple truth is that for those years you’re playing sport at the highest level, you can’t maintain a true balance between family and job, and something has to give. In the relationships that work, wives and girlfriends accept that they are going to be left to shoulder the burden of bringing up kids unless they hand over to childminders. It ain’t ideal, but life’s not ideal. Of course, lots of women don’t want that deal – they want their own career, their fella at home most evenings, shared responsibilities. My advice to them? Don’t get involved with a sportsman – and certainly don’t have their kids. (One of the few exceptions is football where it is much easier to be around a lot of the time because you’re only playing once or twice a week for 90 minutes, and after training you have so much spare time – but even then you’re going to have loads of time when you’re simply not around for your partner.)

  Again, I want to stress I was never going to be the easiest person to live with. But that was obvious from day one. I’ve always been obsessive about practising. There’s nothing unusual about that – Steve Davis once said he overpractised when he was at his peak, but if he didn’t he felt guilty. If you didn’t practise you felt guilty, and if you felt guilty you didn’t play well. Daft, I know, but that’s how it works. It’s difficult enough to make any relationship work, but so much more so when you are on the road for so much of your life. I couldn’t blame Jo for getting frustrated, but nor could I change my lifestyle unless I gave up snooker.

  At the time, running was a huge help. It would clear my head. I was running well then, and keeping records of my progress. I was flying back then. And the running was holding me together. I learnt how to manage family, conflict and snooker as best as I could. I decided the best thing to do was move out of home three days before a tournament started, so by the time I got to the tournament I was clear-headed for the first round.

  I was running away. I knew that was the only way to manage my career, and that I had to keep playing snooker. I wanted to be there as much as I could with the children and as a family man, but in my mind the most important thing was that I went to work and did as well as I could just to support my family.

  My relationship with Jo broke down and I began to feel useless as a dad. There came a time when even running couldn’t sort out my mind. I felt defeated. I wanted to be at home with my family, I wanted to be able to go to work; I was in a fortunate position and I should have been enjoying all those things, but it just wasn’t happening.

  Ever since I was a kid it had been instilled in me that you have to give your everything to your job, and my job was snooker. So the idea that I could only enjoy the family side of life if I gave up on the professional side was always going to be something I struggled with.

  I was putting off the inevitable, which was that we would split up. I just thought if I stuck around, saw through the bad times, things would turn around. With Taylor I felt I’d done the wrong thing. I wished I’d been part of her life, and there was guilt there. I didn’t want to break a family up. I always remember when I was younger and Mum and Dad would have an argument and he’d go away for four or five days and then he’d pick me up on Saturday to go to football. I’d always be crying, knowing that I wasn’t going to see him for a week or so. I didn’t want to put my family through that, too. In my heart I just wanted to be there and not separate the family.

  Anytime I wasn’t playing snooker I wanted to do something with Lily. Sometimes I’d take her over to the cross-country races. I’d wrap her up, keep her nice and warm, put her in the pram and off we’d go. I expected that would be how it panned out – when I was playing Jo would look after the kids; when I wasn’t I assumed I’d come in and take over. Even though in lots of ways the life of a sportsman is uncompromising and inflexible, in other ways there are huge pluses. If you’re working a regular nine to five you’re not going to be able to call for the kids from school, but in my job there was plenty of opportunity for stuff like that.

  The first two months after Lily was born were great. We were both ecstatic about having a baby, but it wasn’t long before it went sour again and we were living separate lives. Then Jo told me she was pregnant again, and I was delighted. I thought another kid would help us and I’d always wanted two anyway.

  Eighteen months after Lily was born little Ronnie came along. His was a natural birth, and it seemed to go on for ever and ever. He was born at Harlow hospital. When I was there for Lily’s birth, the feeling was unbelievable; ecstatic, shared, beautiful. I’d not been there for the birth of Taylor, so this was the first time I’d seen it. By the time little Ronnie was born, I was more prepared for it; I’d been through the emotions, so it didn’t have quite the same impact. But it was great to have two kids. I’d always felt that when Lily was born we have to have another – it was only fair for her to have a brother or sister. I didn’t want her to be an only child.

  When Lily was born sh
e was so aware; she looked as if she knew everything that was going on. Little Ronnie was quieter, a bit more away with the fairies. They were very different children, and still are. Ronnie is much more laid back, Lily is more talkative and outgoing. Yet Lily is shyer than Ronnie when she first meets people. He just stays the same whoever he’s with. Little Ronnie is probably more like me.

  It was such a buzz taking the babies to see Dad for the first time. He was at Long Lartin when Lily was born. Dad was excited for me – and for himself. Then, when Jo was pregnant for the second time, I told Dad she was expecting a boy.

  ‘You’ve got to call him Ronnie,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ I said.

  The name was pretty much decided. Three generations of Ronnie: Ronnie Senior, Ronnie Junior and little Ronnie. Mum has a brilliant way of distinguishing the three Ronnies. You can always tell who she’s talking to. ‘Ro-nnnnnie’, gentle and loving and going up at the end – that would be for little Ronnie. ‘Ronnnnie’, still fairly gentle and loving but more grown up – that would be for me. And then the bark: ‘Ron!’ That’s for my dad.

  We went to see this marriage guidance counsellor called Jerry, who suggested that I was too close to my mum, and it might help our relationship if there was more distance between us. It crossed my mind that things might improve if we moved away from Chigwell, where I’d always lived, and where Mum, Dad and Danielle all lived within a mile of me.

  We were having the house done up in Manor Road in Chig-well, and Jo said, let’s move out. So I said, great, go and look for somewhere for us to live, and she came back and said, I’ve found a place in Ongar, which is 15 to 20 miles away in the sticks. I didn’t fancy it, to be honest, but I thought, let’s give it a go. It was probably the worst thing we could have done. It alienated us both – she was stuck out there, I’d travel back to Chigwell to play my snooker and then, when I got back home, there was nowhere to go.