Running: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 fatherhoodresponsibilities. 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 lotof 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