Letter from Tehran: out for a jog

I’m not a runner. I don’t have the build or the stamina. But I’ve taken up running twice, once as a teenager and now as a middle-aged woman.

The first time I was 16 and had a crush on my art teacher at school. I ran at the start and end of each day so I would catch a glimpse of him. I ran at the time his car entered the school grounds and at the time it left. I would stop jogging the moment I was out of his view, bend double and heave. I hated running.

Two years ago, in London, the park near my house was invaded by runners. “Hell, I can do this, ” I thought. I got me a pair of expensive running shoes and an app on my phone and started to build up. After many sporadic attempts, I managed to run a whole five minutes without throwing up. It was such a joyous landmark I didn’t attempt to run again for another year.

I hadn’t really planned on running. I walked, fast. But every now and then, I felt the urge to sprint. Maybe it was being in the open air without my hijab that made me feel light enough to want to run. Maybe it was an urge to dash from where I was in my life, from the things I had accumulated, from the thoughts in my head.

I have a friend who says: “I’m a runner.” As if he is declaring his faith or nationality, or species. Well, he is declaring a state of mind. The discipline is key, the staying power, the positive outlook; the need to succeed, relentlessly drip-fed onto asphalt. I don’t have the drive that gets you out of a warm house on a cold day to pound the pavement or the vision that gets you through the stiff start into a flow. For one thing I can’t run and think. The minute I start thinking, I’m walking.

Now I’m back in Tehran. I can’t stand the gyms full of botoxed women and I can’t be bothered to spend time in traffic to go to the acceptable pilates and yoga classes an hour across town. So I thought I’d run.

Tehran is a city sprawling up a steep mountainside. Sitting in my house I am 1800 meters above sea level. I carry the same weight as in London with twice as much effort. The air is thin and what little oxygen there is, swirls out of nostrils’ reach in a soup of fumes, dust and pollutants. Each breath burns through nasal membrane dried to a crisp. It doesn’t help that most Iranians suffer from deviated septums, that perennially useful excuse for an upturned nose job.

But I’m determined. If my American friend, the runner, who visits our foul city regularly for work, can jog every morning in this poisonous air, so can I. He does it downtown next to a madly busy boulevard where the gold sellers are. I have the luxury of the tree-lined alleys of a neighbourhood in north Tehran. He doesn’t have to wear a scarf and as a guest, whatever he does is permissible. I on the other hand will invoke Ginger Rogers, who “did everything Fred did but backwards and on high heels.” If Ginger could do it…

But I’m not a runner. I said that, right? I just feel the need to run right now. It’s good to break a sweat in Iran from something other than fear or rage. So I go to a canal near my house where the stream that brings the water from the melting snow on the Alborz mountains still has enough water to make the kind of noises my friends buy on meditation CDs. I make sure I stop, take in the sound. I focus on the now. I breathe in, I breathe out and I try to pay attention to the texture and the temperature of my breath, exactly as my meditation master taught me. I can see the snow on the mountain from here, what little has fallen this year.

There is a small park across the water with clunky metal outdoor gym equipment in the bright yellow and reds of children’s playgrounds. Probably bought from China. Each morning a troupe of old men and women come and do their exercises here. Last week a group of women were brandishing what looked like broom sticks. They looked like tribal Bakhtiari men doing the stick dance, only they were swinging to the sound of Adele blaring out of I don’t know where.

I wanted to take a picture of them and post it on my Instagram account with some witty comment about how we do it in Tehran with full hijab and a huge grin. They were grinning a lot. Not sure whether out of pleasure or the pain of having to repeat each move so many times. Maybe from the sheer thrill of exercising under what’s left of the majestic old plane trees in the jungle of high-rises that is now my neighbourhood. Maybe they’re grinning because they’re pushing at the boundaries. Who knows?

The old park janitor is watching over them like a hawk, right by the public toilets where he is always stationed. I lose my nerve about snatching that photo. All around them, men and women walk briskly, in groups of two, three, four, chatting loudly, doing their round of the block. Some wear the chador. None of them bats an eyelid at the women dancing around in the open.

I take this as my green light, my go ahead. I wouldn’t have run otherwise. I warm up on the park’s cranky metal equipment then head downstream. The municipality has recently created a paved walkway above the ravine where the water flows and it’s still not discovered so there are few people here. When I get to the new pavement I run down hill. I run in my thick grey winter coat over my leggings and vest, with a scarf to cover my hair.

It’s empowering to run downhill, if you don’t have bad knees. I run past a new swanky condominium. They have marked their boundary with the public pavement by a wall of river rocks caged in thick chicken wire. Tehran is littered with visual metaphors like this. Or is it the Iranian mind trained over millennia to look for oblique ways of expression that seeks hidden messages everywhere.

Few people go past me, but those who do, try not to look too surprised by the sight of a heavily built woman with white hair poking out of her scarf jogging as if she’s in another country. A few people go past me on their business. I’m watching each one for a reaction. I detect mild curiosity, and bemusement, but no hostility.

I am gasping after a minute of jogging. My style isn’t bad, I know that because a friend who knows once came with me to jog and he told me so. I can hold my back straight, I can take the right sized strides with a well balanced gait so I look as if I know what I’m doing. A real runner would know I am struggling. A small child would know if they heard me wheezing through my mouth. Breathe through your nose I tell myself, out through the mouth, synch with your feet, but I keep wanting to open my mouth and swallow the atmosphere whole.

The heart beat rises. I start to feel my blood flow again. I am out of breath but already feel more alive. My scarf falls off my head and I let it be. I’m running for God’s sake, in Tehran. I reckon anyone about to admonish me for my poorly observed hijab will come to the quick conclusion that they are dealing with a madwoman. No one in her right mind would run on this slant and in this air.

And anyway, my ignoring the basic rule of grooming as an Iranian woman in the weekly visit to the hairdresser for a dye and set, means that the wisps of white hair floating up from my face attest to my advancing age. I’ve heard that women who are no longer fertile are released from the obligation of observing the hijab. I am itching to remind anyone who challenges me that menopausal women are not required to cover their hair in Islam. Fantasising about disseminating an obscure point in sharia quickens my steps with new energy. I feel quite strongly that mad and sexless as I am, I am entitled to run in peace.

Only I’m not really a runner.