Keep on Running (8 page)

You walk a little taller when you become a marathon runner. How could you not? Train properly, as I like to think I did (well, more or less), and your first marathon will dominate your life for half a year, like exams, only worse. It sits on the horizon, slowly inching closer, and all you can do is wonder whether you are doing enough; whether you're deluding yourself even to think that you might be able to do it. And that's precisely why it's such a glorious feeling when you finally manage it. It probably also explains how quickly you recover.

  There had been a wall in my first marathon, but not the one that legendarily cripples runners at 18 miles. It had been the wall of emotion I ran into as I crossed that line. The finishing photo was straight up in the hall at home.

  If you've ever completed a marathon, you'll know not to underestimate your achievement. You've not saved a life, split an atom or pushed back the frontiers of human endeavour, but you've pushed your own endeavour painfully beyond what you believed to be its breaking point. In terms of your own existence, you've gone places you've never been before, and that's why swift recovery is so satisfying. You've displayed stamina you barely dared hope for, and now you've sprung back into place, showing a resilience born of the underlying fitness you've acquired over the past few months.

  That night I wrote it all down, anxious not to lose any of those memories, keen to relive all those impressions, and the next day at work – there was no way I wasn't going into work on the Monday – I was ready to recount it all once again at the merest hint of interest on anyone's part. In fairness, everyone was genuinely interested, but after a while I realised that most people were more than happy to settle for the edited highlights. There was really no need to part with all the gruesome detail. Not everyone wanted to hear that the insides of the tops of my thighs had been rubbed raw by my shorts – discomfort which had merged with the more generalised discomfort of the race itself.

  But at least my nipples were intact, and I was mighty glad of that. Some friends, hearing of my early tussle with the agony of chafed nipples, had given me a good-luck present of Harry Potter plasters, a little bit of magic which certainly worked for me. Over 26.2 miles, even those of us blissfully free of man boobs will still shred our nipples if we don't take precautions. The sweat, the fabric of your running top and the rain will all combine to reduce you to nipple misery. I certainly felt for the runners, and there were plenty of them, who hadn't realised just how important a couple of plasters might be. There was no mistaking them. Their running vests were stained with two ragged columns of blood, like some kind of kinky stigmata.

  Fortunately I was saved that, but I did wake up on the Monday to the dawning realisation that in the night someone had injected concrete into my thighs. When I stood up, it shifted agonisingly. I eased myself into the bath, which brought some relief, but all movement that day had to be preprogrammed and absolutely essential. This was the dreaded lactic acid build-up, and stairs were a particular problem. I'd stand at the top thinking it would probably be less painful to throw myself down. But the weird thing was that there was actually something slightly pleasant about the pain. Not for a moment could I forget that I had run a marathon the day before; nor indeed could any of my colleagues.

  Experience has since taught me the huge importance of keeping walking at the end of a marathon. Once you're washed and changed, keep moving still. Walk several miles, and you'll feel the benefit in the morning. And if it does hurt in the morning, then you need more of the same. Just keep walking. Walk and walk. My only evidence is my own experience, but I'm convinced that walking really is the best antidote to the effects of running. Unfortunately, I didn't know that in 1998. I barely strayed from the office, and I probably made my discomfort even worse. The one saving grace for colleagues bored with my tales was that by now they could definitely move more quickly than I could.

  Smug just wasn't the word for it, though, as I penned my piece for that week's newspaper. I'd finished in 4 hours 11 minutes, a time I now shudder at the thought of. What on earth had I been doing? Did I stop for a pub lunch en route? Did I sit in the park and read the paper for half an hour halfway round? But no, at the time, I was delighted. It wasn't until weeks later that I even started to think how nice it would have been to knock those 11 minutes off. That's the great thing about your debut marathon. Just to finish is enough. Whatever the time. And to cap it all, I had comfortably exceeded my fundraising target for Macmillan. I'd been convinced I was taking a great risk over the whole thing; but, in the event, everything came up trumps.

  In hindsight, of course, there was precious little risk at all. I was fit, I was 34, I wanted to do it, I was given superb guidance by Pamela, and I had plenty of family support at a great moment of opportunity – just a few months later, we would become parents for the second time.

  And, above all, I had got one thing blissfully right. I had taken the whole thing incredibly seriously. It wouldn't have been in my nature to have done otherwise. A marathon is a huge undertaking. The only way to complete it is to treat it with the utmost respect, and I did so.

  I noted with a mix of dismay and vindication a few years later when a celebrity runner, proclaiming her lack of preparation, simply launched into the London Marathon, apparently without knowing, or even asking, how long a marathon race was. She reached about 18 miles, that natural human limit, before collapsing. A newspaper article ripped into her the following day – and rightly so. It reflected on the huge disservice she would have done marathon running by dropping dead. Had she done so, it would have been entirely her own fault. Her crime was to disrespect the marathon and, with it, every single one of her fellow runners, all the men and women from all walks of life who had put in month after month of preparation, running mile after mile in readiness for the big day. The celebrity had attempted to belittle us all. The marathon didn't have the least qualm in showing her emphatically just who was boss.

In the newspaper following my London debut, I waxed lyrical about the day, lauding everyone and everything, signing off with the words, 'So what about next year? I don't think so. One marathon seems very special. Two just sounds like a small number.' It was out of my system. Laura was born in the August following the April marathon. I didn't want to run another marathon; and even if I had wanted to, I would have counted it unreasonable to head off for all those hours of training. Fiona would have let me. It would never have occurred to her to stop me, but I wouldn't let me because I knew my place was with my family at this critical time. Not that there was even any great sense of sacrifice on my part. I'd done a marathon. As simple as that.

  But clearly something was niggling away in the unvoiced recesses of my mind over the next couple of years. Not high-level niggling, but niggling all the same. And so it was that in July 2001, more than three years after my first London Marathon, I converted my 'very special' number into a 'very small' one with a spur-of-the-moment run which broke all the rules.

  By now, Laura was nearly three; Adam was five years and two months; and the difficult days of having two really tiny children were starting to slip into memory. Of course, Fiona had borne the brunt, as any mother always does, however much of a new man you try to be. But by 2001, life on the home front was easing to the extent that I started to contemplate quite openly what could be next in the running stakes. Life seemed manageable again; possibilities were opening up, one of them right on my doorstep at work.

  For years, Chichester had boasted an annual event, inaugurated by the Royal Military Police, in which servicemen were joined by members of the public on a long trek out into the countryside, up onto the South Downs and back down and round to complete a big circle. It became known as the Chichester March. Inevitably, it started to attract runners.

  When I covered it for the newspaper one year in the 1990s, turning out to work – oh horror of horrors – on a Sunday morning, I arrived so ludicrously early that it was the runners I found myself interviewing. Generally, they were on the wrong end of a bit of unspoken disapproval. There was a feeling among some of the march diehards that running around the course somehow really wasn't in the spirit of the whole thing. But it certainly impressed me. It's perfectly possible that meeting the front-runners that morning was one of the keys which eventually unlocked my own marathon aspirations. In hindsight, there was something inspiring about them, arriving back far too soon, looking tired but satisfied. There was something in what they'd achieved which appealed to me.

  Gradually, over the years, the running element had grown, and by 2001 it sat comfortably alongside the marching element in an event which had changed character. The Royal Military Police stepped back from the march, taking with them much of the services interest which had defined and driven the early years. By 2001, with the runners getting more numerous, the day had sprung its own marathon on the back of a few changes to the route to bring it up to the marathon distance. Or nearly. It was advertised as a marathon – otherwise I wouldn't have gone near it. But, confusingly, the event was promoted as a '42 km All Terrain Run', in other words almost a couple of hundred metres short of a marathon. But I decided I could add that distance in myself somewhere along the line. Everything else was in its favour. It was in the city in which I worked, and I couldn't think of any reason not to have a go.

  You couldn't wish for a marathon more different to 'the London', as we runners like to call it. In the capital, you had massive support on a fast, flat course, bringing together tens of thousands of runners in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators; in Chichester, just looking at the route, it was obvious that you had ahead of you a hilly ordeal, mostly in the middle of nowhere with only the occasional other runner for company. The course rapidly left the city behind to head out onto the South Downs. At least 90 per cent of it was going to be out in the country. A good proportion was going to be on decent roads, but a substantial part of it was clearly going to be on trails and tracks. The whole event was as low key as 'the London' was high profile – and that suited my purpose.

  Making a mockery of just about every piece of marathon wisdom I'd ever acquired, I decided to give it a go on the back of virtually no training whatsoever. And, yes, I know that does make my criticism of that celebrity just now sound rather hollow. It was the kind of rashness which really ought to have left me collapsed in a ditch halfway round; but at least, I reasoned, I did already have a marathon under my belt, even if it had been three years before.

  My initial approach was that I would treat the day as a training run, that I would run the first hour and see what happened. I did a test run on the Thursday before the race on the Sunday, running for 1 hour 28 minutes and guessing my distance to be around 10 or 11 miles. The important thing was that the run had gone well.

  I consequently broadened my ambitions for the Sunday, deciding that I would aim for a half-marathon and then walk the rest. 'You can do it' had been my mantra for London. For Chichester, it was 'Let's see how it goes'. The impact on the family was minimal, just half a day away. There was no reason not to try.

  The route was essentially a large loop to the north and north-east of the city, taking us out from Chichester, up through the Goodwood estate, past Goodwood Racecourse, down into the village of East Dean and then up into the woods and onto the South Downs Way, before curving back down south-westwards towards Chichester again. The outline was easy enough to grasp, but once we were out there, we would never really know just how far round we were. In London, the runners always had a good idea. On the Chichester route, no distances were marked. I realised I was just going to have to try to assess distance in terms of how I was feeling.

  The marathon set off at 8 a.m., as I recall, well before the walkers were unleashed on the same route, and, after all the planning and preparation which had gone into London, it was rather nice simply to drive to the nearest car park and walk the couple of hundred yards across Oaklands Park to the start, just north of the Festival Theatre, next to Chichester Rugby Football Club. A few marquees had been set up as the walk/race headquarters, and it was all very relaxed, with plenty of people I knew manning the tents. I'd signed up for the race during the week, and the remaining formalities on the morning were quickly dealt with.

  With ten minutes to go, worried about the missing 195 metres, I walked away from the start line; with three minutes to go, I ran towards it, timing it to perfection to cross the line as the gun went off. I'd done the little extra which would turn – to my satisfaction, at least – a 42-km run into a marathon, and off I went, one of several dozen runners heading out under clear blue skies, still with just a hint of chill in the air.