Keep on Running (5 page)

  Moreover, I was convinced – and I now recognise this to be an important part of the process – that I was never ever, no,
never
, going to do it again. One marathon was going to be enough. The marathon itch had lurked in my mind for a few years before the chance had arisen, and now I was going to purge myself completely of all mad urges in one insanely long run, after which I would return to normal life. No more getting up stupidly early on a Sunday and running 15 miles. No more nipple plasters. No more sore bits where you really, really don't want to have sore bits. No more stinging eyes as the sweat drips in. No more aches and pains. No, I was going to go back to a life of leisure.

  My real world was the one where a Marathon was the much-lamented name for what was now ludicrously called a Snickers; where my only exertion was to reach the bar in the theatre. It was to be a glorious one-off. And that was a big part of my motivation on that slightly overcast April morning. I was going to do it once and I was going to make it count.

  We were staying the weekend with my wife's sister and her husband in Tooting – though sadly my sister-in-law Anna wasn't there. She was a couple of hundred yards down the road in the special care baby unit in St George's Hospital, having been admitted horribly early for a baby which threatened to be born fatally premature – a terrible time for her when all she could do was hang on and hope. Days stretched into weeks, and hope started to grow stronger. The happy outcome was that a week after the marathon she gave birth to Callum, a special boy indeed, healthy and to this day a glowing testimony to the wonderful care Anna received; testament too to Anna's remarkable endurance and spirit. But the happy outcome was still in the future as marathon morning broke. Anna's situation was a grim background which helped put everything into perspective. It was only a run, after all. Nothing more than that.

  Adding to my motivation was the fact that Linda McCartney had lost her battle against cancer exactly a week earlier. I have been a Beatles obsessive all my life. Given this and the cause I was running for, Linda's death was another spur, another reason to run an unfeasibly long distance – and certainly part of the mental preparation which sees you get your mind in the zone.

  Also helping in that respect was the London Marathon registration, another of the areas in which the event is just so damned well organised. Others come close, as I have learned in the years since, but it's London that takes the biscuit, a fact which inspires you with confidence before you even start.

  You have to register to run. In other words, you need to pick up your number at the London Marathon exhibition, a great jamboree which I remember most for the inspiring music which plays constantly and for the machine-like competence with which you are processed, packaged and provided with race number and race instructions. After that, you try to find your way through the marathon exhibition, an array of sportswear and shoe firms mixed in with nutritionists and masseurs, all jumbled together with eager representatives from other marathons around the world, keen to nab you to share their own big moment.

  Practicalities meant that I registered on the Saturday – the day the marathon exhibition becomes impossibly busy. I panicked and scurried away pretty quickly, fearing it was just too tiring and stressful a place to be the day before a marathon – no fault of the exhibition. It was huge, it was inspiring, it gave you an idea of the scale of the task ahead and it suggested just how well supported you were going to be, but after a few minutes I just wanted to be by myself to contemplate what the morning would bring – 26.2 miles snaking through London on a course I'd heard so many conflicting things about.

  Inevitably, if you do well, you will like the course; if you don't, you won't, but it is certainly a course designed to impress, essentially the same course every year, kicking off in Greenwich Park from three separate starts which converge after a few miles. The course then takes you out towards Woolwich and then back towards Greenwich where, just after 6 miles, you pass the National Maritime Museum, so elegant and attractive beside the river. At around 6.5 miles, you pass the Cutty Sark before continuing into Deptford, broadly following the river before turning sharp right at 12 miles to cross the Thames at Tower Bridge, a majestic structure widely regarded as one of the great London Marathon highlights.

  Just to its left, enticing you across, is the Tower of London, but once on the north side of the river, you veer right before turning south again into the Docklands where you circle and loop, taking in Canary Wharf, before running back towards the Tower of London. From here, just before the 23-mile mark, you again follow the river, heading west and then curving south past the Embankment at about 25 miles, by which time you begin to sense the finish. As you reach Big Ben, you turn right, away from the river, towards Parliament Square, passing the bottom of Whitehall as you move into Birdcage Walk for the final half a mile. With St James's Park on your right, you run towards Buckingham Palace where a couple of turns will direct you down the Mall for your first sight of the finishing line. With Buckingham Palace behind you now, just a minute stands between you and your finisher's medal.

  These were the images I was trying to evoke on the Sunday morning as I travelled to the start. The local trains are free for runners. All you have to do is wave your race number and you're on. Follow the instructions, follow the crowd, follow the marshals and you're there. From Tooting, where I was staying, it's a fair old hike to Greenwich and Blackheath, the recommended tube stops, but while it seemed a pain at the time, yet another thing to think about, I am sure now that it helped, all part of the focusing which culminates in that great moment of release when the gun is fired and off you go.

  One of the recommendations for marathon training is to run races, something I never did. I'd read and been told repeatedly that it was a great way to psyche yourself up and get yourself in the right frame of mind. Also that it was good to get used to the idea of running with other people. After all, most runners do the vast majority of their training on their own, churning out those country miles with nothing but the wildlife for company. Marathon day was pretty much the first time I'd seen another runner – the first time running became remotely sociable.

  And therein lies one of the great paradoxes of marathon running – the fact that something so solitary and self-centred can also prove, as I discovered that morning, such a bonding experience. Many millions of pounds are raised for charity during a marathon, but I still think there is something self-centred about running even when you are doing it for charity. It is something you do because you want to do it, however much your run will benefit others through the money you raise. Running has always seemed to me an intensely personal thing, and yet huge crowds turn out to watch you do it, all intent on enjoying London's unique blend of street party and elite athletics. Huge intoxication lay ahead – though not of the alcoholic variety.

  I'd barely spoken to any other runners until that day, but that morning, suddenly everyone was my mate. Catch someone's eye on the tube, and you're straight into conversation. 'Is this your first?' Stand next to someone at the urinal, and 'Have you done this before?' takes on a different meaning. I remember being struck by the camaraderie, and I continue to notice it to this day. One of the great discoveries of marathon running for the masses is that you run against no one except yourself. The 30,000 other people around you are people you are running with, not against. Run a marathon and you're running a lone race in a huge crowd, all part of the rich fascination that I started to learn and love that day.

  On my longer training runs, it had become clear to me just how much marathons are run in the mind, reliant on that bloody-mindedness I was talking about. Consequently, there was something quite forced and determined about my positivity that morning. I was intent on thinking a good race even before I'd started running it. I devised my own little mantra on my way to Greenwich that morning. When I wasn't confessing to being a virgin marathoner to some superfit and slightly intimidating-looking fellow runner, I was muttering to myself 'You can do it, you can do it', my own little hymn that I resorted to on and off throughout the race. Far more important things were happening; Anna was hoping; McCartney was grieving. I needed to keep it in perspective and go out and enjoy it.

  I arrived at Greenwich Park at around 8 a.m., with an hour and three-quarters to go until the start. But there were plenty of people there already, and it was quite some prospect as I passed the point of no return, entering the runners-only enclosure where I handed over my labelled luggage to a waiting lorry corresponding to my race number and then settled down to wait. There was an air of nervous expectation overhanging it all; the morning was bright but still slightly chilly; everywhere people were stretching, chatting or queuing for the loo.

  Water was available everywhere; tea and coffee were on tap; sports drinks were being dished out. There was everything you needed as you settled down for that final hour or so – everything you needed except sufficient loos. The final 60 minutes passed in what was to become clear to me later as time-honoured marathon fashion, that great queue-for-the-loo ritual which marks marathons everywhere, an essential part of the pre-race warm-up for anyone, anywhere, with 26.2 miles ahead of them.

  You've been keeping your hydration up for days; you started the day with a drink; you drank on the train; and you drank on the walk to the start. There's only so much you can take, and so you join the snaking loo queue. Once you reach the cubicle, you do your business and then rejoin the queue, a process you will probably complete – as the minutes tick by – four or five times with ever-diminishing output. The great benefit is that it passes the time – along with whatever else you are passing.

  But then, with 10 or 15 minutes remaining before the 'off' at 9.45, it was time to suss out the starting enclosures. A letter on your race number indicates the starting area you will begin from. The faster you predict your finishing time will be, the further to the front you will be placed by the race organisers, a simple tactic which works wonderfully well when it is enforced, just as it is in London. So many of the early yards in other marathons are spent weaving through the wobblers who've started far further forward than their predicted times justified – great for them to steal a march perhaps, but a pain for the quicker runners who've now got to negotiate their way around them. In the London Marathon the organisers get it spot on. At the time, I remember people tutting at the apparent officiousness of it all. It was only in later marathons that I realised how important it is. Strict corralling is ultimately a friend to every single runner.

  Of course, the corralling in itself poses a horribly difficult question for a first-time marathoner. Asking you to predict your finishing time seems a terribly unfair question, inviting hubris almost. You've never done it before, yet you are being asked to announce just when you expect to finish.

  In reality, it's not too difficult to take a stab at it based on your training, your half-marathon times in particular. I took an average half-marathon time, doubled it and then added a quarter of an hour or so. And then a bit more. More sophisticated methods of calculation are available now, particularly these days with the proliferation of wrist-worn GPS tracking devices, but even without them there are plenty of tables you can resort to, all of which give you a pretty good idea just how you might do in the great unknown ahead. Best of all, perhaps, was simply to follow your instinct. After six months' training, I felt I had a fairly shrewd idea – and I put myself down for somewhere between four and four and a half hours.

  Here again, Pamela was wonderfully wise. She was at great pains to point out to me the dangers of fixating on a particular time. Her theory was that you need to have three times in mind: one you would be overjoyed with, one you would be happy with and one that you would consider adequate. In reality, an experienced marathon runner will probably take a more zonal approach, with the range of emotions – over the moon at one end and severely hacked off at the other – shading one into the next over a spectrum.

  One way or another, there was plenty to think about as we huddled at the start.

  As we waited, I discovered perhaps the thing I love most about marathons, and that's their utterly seductive sense of convergence. Waiting, queuing, wasting time, you see so many people running for different clubs and for different causes, people of so many different nationalities and from so many different walks of life. And yet all of them got up that morning thinking, 'I'm going to run the London Marathon today', and all of them, by whatever means, had made their way here, the only time in the history of the planet that exactly these people will gather together in exactly the same place.

  The marathon organisers produce lists of occupations and lists of countries of origin. I like to let my mind be boggled thinking about all the tiny moments and the tiny decisions which have led precisely this group of people to be in this place at this time. Just think of the chain of events which have led to this number of German lawyers lining up alongside that number of French dentists in a field which features this number of English journalists and that number of Spanish accountants. Is it random or is it somehow written in the stars? You suspect it's a quirk of fortune, but you can almost believe there's a hidden hand guiding it all.

  Time and again, something quite spiritual rises out of the sweaty mass of humanity which constitutes a marathon, particularly as we gathered at the start that day. I could wax quite lyrical about it, and mentally I started to as I waited. There's something transcendent about a marathon. We've all answered an unheard call. We're lured there to be collectively bigger than the sum of our individualities. Stand at the start of a marathon, and you'll sense it too – a beguiling magnetism about the whole thing which lifts you out of the everyday and lets you glimpse the operating of the universe at a higher level where we are all somehow connected, brought together in a shared consciousness of the task ahead.