Gapped text: parte 6 del B2 First

When my doctor told me, two days after my forty-ninth birthday, that I needed to take more exercise, I decided to do something dramatic about it. I would run a marathon. I had never run further than the end of the street to catch a bus, but that, I told myself, was a minor detail. Other people managed it every year, after all, and some of them were a good deal older than me.

My family's reaction was not encouraging. My son laughed so much that he had to leave the room, and my wife asked, quite seriously, whether I had checked that our health insurance was up to date. (1) Within a week I had bought a pair of expensive running shoes, downloaded a training plan and announced my intention to everyone at work.

The plan itself looked simple enough. It began with three short runs a week and gradually increased the distance over six months. (2) By the end of that outing, which was supposed to last twenty minutes, I was walking slowly home, red in the face, after barely ten.

What saved me was a running club that met in the local park on Saturday mornings. I had always imagined that such clubs were full of thin, serious people in bright clothes who would look down on beginners. (3) There were teenagers and grandparents, people training for races and people who simply enjoyed the company, and the coach, a former PE teacher called Bridget, seemed to have time for all of them. Nobody asked how fast I was, which was just as well.

Bridget's first piece of advice surprised me. She told me to slow down. Most beginners, she explained, try to run too fast and give up because every run feels like torture. (4) At first I felt rather foolish jogging along at a speed that would hardly have frightened a pigeon, but within a month I could run for half an hour without stopping.

Not everything went to plan. In the third month I injured my knee, and for several weeks I could do nothing but swim and feel sorry for myself. (5) In the end, it was my son, the same one who had laughed at the idea, who persuaded me to carry on. He had started coming to the park with me on Saturdays, and he pointed out that it would be a shame to waste everything I had already done. He even offered to come on my longest training runs with me.

On the day of the race, I was more nervous than I had been at my own wedding. I had been warned that the last ten kilometres would be the hardest, and they were. My legs ached, my shoes felt as if they were full of stones, and at one point I seriously considered sitting down at the side of the road. (6) I finished in just under five hours, which is not a time that will impress many serious runners. But when I crossed the line and saw my son waiting there, cheering more loudly than anyone, it felt like the best result in the world.

When my partner and I moved into a flat with no garden, we put our names on the waiting list for an allotment, a small piece of land that the local council rents out for growing vegetables. Neither of us knew much about growing things, but we liked the idea. We were told the wait could be up to five years, so we more or less forgot about it. Then, eighteen months later, a letter arrived offering us plot 14. (1)

The plot had not been used for two years, and it showed. Brambles had taken over most of it, and the old shed in the corner leaned so far to one side that we were afraid to open the door. When we finally dared to look inside, we found a rusty wheelbarrow, a pile of broken pots and a family of mice. We spent our first weekend simply cutting things down. By Sunday evening our hands were covered in scratches and we had cleared perhaps a quarter of the ground. (2)

Help came from an unexpected direction. Our neighbour on plot 15 was a man in his eighties called Desmond, who had been growing vegetables on the site for over forty years. His own plot was the tidiest on the site, with perfectly straight rows of beans and not a single weed. For the first few weeks he watched us without saying much. (3) After that, he appeared at our gate most mornings with advice, seeds and, occasionally, a tool he no longer needed.

Desmond's main lesson was patience. We wanted to plant everything immediately, but he insisted that the soil had to be prepared first, and that took the whole winter. 'Good soil is like a bank account,' he told us. 'You have to put something in before you can take anything out.' We dug in manure, removed stones and pulled out roots that seemed to go down forever. (4) When spring finally came, though, the difference was obvious: the earth was dark and soft, and things grew in it almost as soon as they were planted.

Our first harvest was not quite what we had imagined. The potatoes were excellent, and we had more courgettes than we could possibly eat. (5) We learnt to take a more relaxed attitude: if one crop failed, another usually did well, and there was always next year. We also discovered that it is almost impossible to give away courgettes in August, because everyone else has too many as well.

What surprised us most, though, was how much the allotment changed our weeks. We had expected it to be a hobby, something we did on Saturdays. Instead, we found ourselves going there most evenings, even when there was no real work to do. We would water a few plants, pull up a weed or two and then simply sit on the old bench by the shed. (6) Desmond says that is the real reason most people keep their plots, and that the vegetables are just an excuse. I am beginning to think he is right.