“Win the Dads’ Race or I Will Eat Your Head”

I began with research. Adams had attended six years of sports days without ever seeing a parents’ race, so he turned up in jeans and walking boots, with an ankle already on a specialist’s waiting list. He is, he writes, suspicious of anyone in active wear near a school. Then the mums’ race went off before his, and the one in active wear flew down the track.

I wrote that down.

His race lasted about seventy metres by his estimate, and went wrong at once. One of the mums shouted “On your marks, get set, go” as a joke, half the dads believed her, and Adams set off late. He passed several runners, including one who had fallen flat on his face, and finished somewhere between the first third and the first half. Then the verdicts. His eldest said he had been “going slowly”. His younger daughter, who had been keen for him to enter, told him off for running on his injured ankle. That evening the ankle froze up and he needed an ice pack. Two judges, two charges, one ankle.

Case two was worse. Russell Runner was in the first week of a twelve-week build-up to the London Marathon when the dads’ race was called at his children’s sports day. His children chanted for him. He sat with his head down and refused to budge. At dinner he explained that he had run ten miles that morning and twenty-two the day before. “It fell on deaf ears.” A man who had run thirty-two miles in two days lost the argument for not running seventy metres.

Case three was Kim Carberry, at her daughter’s last primary sports day in 2018. Her daughter ran about eight races. There was a parents’ race, Carberry reported, “but I chickened out.” Secondary school, she added, does not invite parents to watch. I did not regard this as an option. I regarded it as a warning.

So I trained. Day one: trainers, £74.99. Day four: three sprints between the postbox and our gate, timed by my husband on the microwave clock. Day seven: a hamstring I had not been introduced to. Day eleven: the field, the leggings, the matching top, the headband. I had a plan for the false start. I had a plan for falling men.

I finished ninth of fourteen. Adams’s woman in active wear flew down the track and proved him wrong. I have proved him right. Our daughter has not eaten my head yet. She is saving it for the car.