Keep on Running (21 page)

  It's great in life to set yourself goals and targets, but you do need to keep half an eye on the extent to which you become selfish in your pursuit of them. I'd learned by now that a marathon is a selfish taskmaster. It can be run properly only if you accept that it demands a selfish attitude requiring regular and time-consuming attention, but what you need to guard against – especially if you have a young family – is allowing that selfishness to start with you, as opposed to it emanating from the marathon itself. It's an important distinction, and it seemed to me that if I joined a club, then I would risk losing my perspective on this. Far better to run when I could fit it in around family life than run when a club dictated, especially when my reviewing commitments were already a heavy demand.

  Maybe this is why I haven't turned good times into genuinely impressive times. I have needed to retain a freedom which wouldn't have sat terribly easily within a club-running format. But even just saying that makes the decision sound far more conscious than it ever really was. The fact is that club running didn't appeal. It was never a serious consideration.

  But, as ever with running, it's very much a case of 'to each his own'. By now, Michael was very much a fan of club running. After his London Marathon in 2002, he decided to enter again in 2003, but this time on the back of some rather more serious training, if only to minimise the aches and pains. He had found a 10-mile race organised by the Great Bentley Running Club and, on finishing, was promptly asked if he had ever considered joining a club.

  Michael doesn't consider himself a clubbable person but agreed to think about it. He looked at the websites of other local clubs but they all seemed very competitive and rather frightening for someone who was, as he says, so clearly past his prime. He asked at his local specialist sports shop; they recommended the Bentley club as being the most friendly one in the region; and so he joined – a decision he has never regretted. From the very first, he was never made to feel an outsider, even though he was immediately their oldest and least experienced runner. Michael doesn't train with them, but he runs their races and participates in club functions, enjoying all the encouragement they freely give. The club willingly worked out new handicap tables to accommodate his advancing years. As he says, they have helped him in every way possible to improve and, more importantly, to enjoy his running. All of which makes Michael a model runner – and a great advertisement for joining a club.

  But it just wasn't for me, and so, instead, I had to find other ways to make up for the disappointments that marathon running was clearly going to bring. Amsterdam was a setback. That was all. I had to prove that it wasn't typical, and the only way to do that was to make the next move – one made all the easier when a colleague told me that her husband, also a working journalist, ran most of his marathons on 'press places'. It had never occurred to me that they existed, but indeed they did.

  The deal was that, in return for your press place, you wrote about what a great event it was. For the 2005 London Marathon, I promptly secured myself just such a press place – much to the annoyance of Michael, who was by now progressing nicely with his world-record bid – still ongoing – for the most number of times anyone has ever been rejected by the London Marathon.

  However, my 2005 London Marathon would turn out to be a different kind of marathon. I decided to run it with Jane, a friend of Fiona's with whom I trained for a few months leading up to the race. As a relatively experienced marathon runner by now, I was going to help her round on her marathon debut – a different kind of challenge for me. But because she was slower than I was, the pressing need in the early months of 2005 was to find a marathon or two which I could run semi-competitively. There was another requirement. After the disappointment of Amsterdam, and given that I was returning to London in April, the new marathon had to be a step away from the big-city treadmill I'd launched myself onto.

  To an extent, I wanted a no-pressure marathon. Having got too hung up on beating my previous times, I'd gone astray. I wanted a marathon that I could run simply for the sake of running it, one where I wouldn't be obsessing about elapsed minutes and kilometres which started to seem like miles.

  That's when the wonderfully named Steyning Stinger entered the frame, a marathon which carries a clue in its title. And therein lay the appeal. How could you not want to do a marathon called the Steyning Stinger? Even better, it was close to home, convenient and cheap – important considerations, given that I had just booked a big-treat marathon for the autumn of 2005. Dublin, centred on a half-term holiday for all of us, was the appealing prospect for the back end of the year.

  And so, for all these reasons, the Steyning Stinger in March 2005 was just what the marathon doctor ordered. I wanted a new marathon experience, and the Steyning Stinger promised to deliver: one of those middle-of-nowhere odysseys which are generally labelled 'cross-country'. There's a perverse element of self-flagellation to events such as the Steyning Stinger which, sad to say, appeals to the twisted side of my brain. If you're going to flog yourself, flog hard. And if you want to take masochism to the next level, search out the conditions we had on that mad March day.

  Cross-country horror is actually the simplest of recipes. Take a cross-country marathon and just add water. You can add it during the race, or for even better (or should that be worse?) results, you can add it in torrents the day and night before. Either way, the outcome is a marathon in which you will constantly revise downwards your possible finishing time, a race in which the struggle is simply to finish; a race where there's every reason to soldier on. If you don't, you'll risk spending all eternity in a lonely, windswept field with not the foggiest idea where you are.

  The Steyning Stinger is organised by the Steyning Athletic Club, and in 2005 the race took place on 6 March, after the soggiest of weeks which mixed snow with deluge and then served it all up with heavy frost on the day. The day itself was moderately bright, but by then the elements had done their bit to make tough terrain as tough as it possibly could be.

  The route takes you from Steyning to Chanctonbury Ring Road and Washington, then on to Cissbury Ring and then a circuit around Steep Down. The return is via Chanctonbury and Wiston and then back to Steyning – all places I can barely picture now. If I think of the race, all that comes to mind is snow, ice and mud.

  I am sure there was an impressive amount of outstanding natural beauty en route, but the beauty isn't the memory. Yes, of course, this was picturesque West Sussex at its absolute best; unspoilt fields stretching down towards the coastal towns with the sea beyond; patchwork greens of all hues in the foreground suggesting all the luxuriance which follows a damp winter; all promising the rapid growth to come. Snow was still thick on the high ground; lower down were the shoots of new life. Small wonder Sussex has attracted poets, painters, musicians and novelists down the centuries. Few counties have proven themselves more fertile when it comes to sparking the imagination of our artists and writers. Anyone who has ever set foot in the county could wax lyrical for ages about its splendours and its glories; a great tradition of art and literature has striven for years to do them justice.

  But on 6 March, all the beauty was wasted on a day which was simply about keeping your footing while all around were losing theirs – if Rudyard Kipling will forgive the paraphrase. Belloc and Co. had wandered across Sussex collecting its folklore and lauding its idiosyncrasies. We were about to skid across it collecting bumps and bruises.

  The race began from a field opposite Steyning Leisure Centre, launching you off into the unknown in the most relaxed and friendly of ways. After all the pressure of the big-city marathons, all the formalities, all the jostling, it was lovely to get back to something chilled (in every sense) and informal. The organisation was excellent, with no need to be oppressively so. This was small scale and inviting.

  It was an early start to the day, being an hour and a half's drive away, but I got there in good time and was just settling down for the usual lengthy pre-marathon wait when word was passed around that you could go whenever you were ready – an astonishingly laid back approach to marathon running. I kept wondering how they would do the timing, but that wasn't my problem. And nor was it theirs. They managed it efficiently. What it did mean, however, was the chance to get up, off and out well before the designated start, one of a trickle of runners setting out on the most monumental of treks.

  I ran it in a T-shirt and running jacket and never once felt warm. There was ice on the ground, and it wasn't long before there were glimpses of snow through the trees, lying in the shade in woodland that the pale sun couldn't reach. Right from the start, I was on my own, and I was immediately rediscovering something rather lovely – just why I wanted to run. Or perhaps it was more negative than that: I was seeing just what I had lost in Amsterdam. There was a newfound freedom. I was off the leash, a feeling which translated into a comfortable start. The thought of all the miles stacked up ahead didn't hang heavy along those opening country tracks. It hovered as a potential delight about to unfurl.

  The staggered start meant that we were well spaced out, a fact which somehow added to the camaraderie. There was no way you were going to pass someone – or be passed by them – without a smile, a hello or maybe even the quickest of chats. There was a feeling that this was one for the serious runners. You had to be pretty serious even to contemplate it, and each new greeting with each fellow runner seemed to reflect that. We were the big boys, and we were doing our thing. The field was very, very male, much more so than usual for a marathon, or so it seemed. But, unlike Amsterdam, I felt I had every right to be there. Again, it's all in the mind; but I didn't feel out of place, and that was crucial. Somehow in Amsterdam I had become detached from the marathon; here I was once again in the thick – or perhaps more accurately – the thin of it.

  Consequently the whole thing had kicked off with a general, smug sense of well-being – and maybe that's why I have so few impressions of the route from those early miles, beyond track stretching ahead through the trees – and then track slowly starting to rise, which was when the underfoot conditions really did start to become a major factor.

  On the flat, there had been some squelching and a degree of hopping to avoid the worst of the puddles, but then as the terrain started to get steeper, so the ground underfoot started to get treacherous. The higher I got, the worse it got – to the point where on narrow paths I had to pull myself up on the branches either side.

  There were times when I just stood there and thought,
Well, how the hell am I going to get past that?
It was either ice or deep, thick, cloying mud and pretty much nothing in between. If I attempted to run up the mud, I would be flat on my face in an instant and sliding ignominiously back down, the same fate which awaited anyone foolish enough to take a run at the ice or simply unlucky enough not to have noticed it.

  It was no better going down the other side. Gravity working with me was no better than gravity working against me. Once I reached the mini-pinnacles of the frequent ups, I had little choice as to how to tackle the downs. Running wasn't an option. It was more a case of clinging to the branches and trying to slide in as controlled a way as possible. Not so much flying as falling with style, as Buzz and Woody would have said if the
Toy Story
superstars had joined us that day.

  Just occasionally at these points, things got as congested as the day was ever going to get: two runners together. I don't remember much conversation by this stage. A certain grim chumminess had taken over. The chat had evaporated. What could you possibly say in the circumstances? 'Lovely day for a 26.2-mile squelch, don't you think?'

  We all just had to keep on going. Occasionally it would flatten out and the path would become firmer, but the psychological damage had been done. This was a race in which it was easy to lose your nerve – a race which became less of a race the longer it lasted. It became simply a question of shuffling on. Often where the ground looked safe enough for something a bit more firm-footed, I would quickly discover that it wasn't. The sane runners were running gingerly by now. A few slips, and your confidence would be gone; and even if you didn't slip, just the sight of the path ahead was enough to loosen your assurance.

  Inevitably, it wasn't long before tiredness started to become a factor. I was feeling it strongly after perhaps a dozen miles. Running in a cramped, unnatural style is hopelessly enervating. Running is supposed to be all about freedom, about letting rip and letting go, just as it had been for those very early miles. But by now, it was all about caution, not letting slip and keeping upright. That great surge of sovereignty at the start had become as cramping as that damned Amsterdam wristband. For hundreds of yards at a stretch, there was no chance of a sweeping stride. Instead, I had to pull my foot free with each step I took. Hey, Mother Earth, can I have my shoe back? And when she released it, it was caked in mud, heavy, uneven and awkward.

  
Sod this
, I started to think. But then I started to smile.

  The strangest thing was starting to happen. The more stupid the whole thing started to seem – and, believe me, it really was stupid – the more the enjoyment started to creep back in. It was a different kind of enjoyment to the off-the-leash burst we'd had at the start. This was now pleasure of a darker kind, much more the perverse thrill of something so utterly pointless that it defied all logic. An early start, a long drive… and all for the purpose of mud-coasting and ice skating. In the end, the only reason to be doing it was because it was so difficult to do – and for me, that was suddenly enough. I can't say I surged onward with renewed vigour. But I certainly stopped feeling sorry for myself. I started to chill out. I started to have fun.