Keep on Running (24 page)

  The holiday needed to be the reward for the marathon, not the build-up. Maybe I relaxed too much. Maybe I didn't relax enough, but the marathon the following Monday sat lump-like and immovable on the horizon. I did a couple of runs during the week, nothing too strenuous, but probably not enough. It was far too hilly, and besides I was too much in holiday mood. The thought of exploring Dublin was an appealing one, but I couldn't honestly say I was relishing the thought of running round it, even less so as the clouds darkened ominously as we approached the city that Saturday morning. I registered for the marathon as the rain lashed down outside. I hoped it wasn't a little taste of things to come.

  Every single marathon I've ever run has been a Sunday marathon, except for Dublin, which was run on the Bank Holiday Monday, which gave us the whole of the Sunday to get to know the city. And we had a great day – a day of brilliant sunshine during which we fell in love. Dublin city centre isn't just beautiful; it's fascinating. Dublin has got it all – gorgeous parks, elegant classical architecture, a modern buzz, a rich, complex history and plenty of present-day chic. And for the children, to cap it all, it offered the prospect of a hotel breakfast. They could barely contain their excitement – which probably says it all about the deprived upbringing we'd inflicted on them. There they were at the ages of nine and seven eating a hotel breakfast for the very first time. As parents, we had clearly failed. But at least we let them add a new Pizza Hut to the list they were lovingly building up: Pizza Hut Dublin. Now, how cool was that, at least in their eyes? We were nothing if not sophisticated on holiday. But even as we sat there, I started to think
Uh-oh!

  Intoxicated with the city, we had walked for miles, striding out across parks, strolling down attractive shopping streets, exploring little arcades, haring off after historic monuments, lapping it all up on the tourist equivalent of a trolley dash. Absolutely the right thing to do in family terms; absolutely the wrong thing to do before a marathon. A far cry from the three or four hours of
dolce far niente
which Michael and I had come to regard as de rigueur the afternoon before a marathon. In Dublin, for all sorts of reasons, such considerations went out of the window. I am not saying it was crucial. Or course it wasn't. But it was one of those little controllables that I had opted not to control – a sacrifice which may or may not have made a difference, but one which I was foolish to make as far as the run was concerned.

  The real setback came on the Monday morning, however. There was no need to look out of the window to see that Sunday's fine weather had been a false promise. It was tipping it down, the rain hammering onto the streets on which we would soon be running. I wandered down to the starting area in plenty of time, half a mile or so from the hotel. There was no point taking a rucksack with me to leave at the left-luggage. The hotel was close enough. Besides, anything I carried would have been soaked right through by the time I reached the start. Instead, all I took was a T-shirt, which I discarded, and a bin bag, which I didn't – and therein lay the decision which defined the day. It was my first bin bag – and quite definitely my last.

  Bin bags are very much a part of marathon tradition. You need something to keep you warm at the start of a marathon, something you can hurl into the gutter just before the off. Inevitably, you reach the point after a while where you've got no more sweatshirts you want to part with. And so out come the bin bags. I'd never tried one until that day, but I'd often, rather bizarrely, thought that my fellow runners had looked pretty cool as they strolled around at the start sporting theirs. I wanted to be one of them.

  But things started badly when I all but suffocated. Being a bin-bag virgin, I imagined that you just pulled it over your head and used your manly strength to push out the arm holes and head hole. Unfortunately, I'd brought along a heavy-duty refuse sack. Those around me must have thought I was chickening out, preferring to commit suicide on the streets of Dublin than to actually run on them in the cascading rain. Eventually, possibly slightly blue in the face, I gave up, pulled it off and did things the conventional way, ripping the holes before putting it on. I can't help thinking that it was my difficulty in getting it on which led to my bizarre decision to keep it on – quite the daftest thing I have ever done in a marathon.

  In my defence, I would have to say that it served a purpose for the hour or so we hung around at the start. I was soaked beneath it, but it did actually feel as if it was keeping me warmer than I would have been without it.

  The marathon wasn't particularly big, less than a third of the size of the big ones such as London. There were about 10,000 runners, I believe. Consequently, we weren't particularly tightly packed at the start for the wait, which went on forever. I muttered 'Bloody rain' to the guy standing next to me, who replied with the legendary Irish twinkle, 'Well, what do you expect? We're in Dublin!' Oscar Wilde couldn't have put it better. The weather was clearly par for the course in a notoriously soggy city.

  And so as we stood there, I could find no reason to divest myself of my plastic coating. We moved off eventually, and still it seemed reasonable to keep it on.

  The start would have been impressive had we been able to see more than a few yards in front of our faces. I knew that I would be seeing – or trying to see – Fiona and the children just before the end of the first mile, standing on the corner of the road a few hundred yards from our hotel. It was a great incentive to get cracking – if only to allow them to rush for shelter all the sooner. In the event, they gave me a quick wave and returned to our room drenched and shivering. It was that kind of day – not a day for running. Not even a day, really, for being a duck.

  With the rain came an autumnal gloom, which in turn became a slightly more inviting mistiness as the course took us, fairly early on, into Phoenix Park, a couple of miles west of the city centre, north of the River Liffey. Here there were some long straight stretches, and on a clear, bright day, it might just have been a little oasis for marathoners. Instead, under oppressive skies and with the rain belting us straight in the face, it simply seemed exposed.

  One good thing was that fairly rapidly in Dublin you could run at your own pace. There was very little bunching. The streets were wide and would have been great in the dry. But on this particular late-October day, we were running through sheets of water, splashed by those ahead as we splashed ourselves and splashed those behind us. But thank goodness for my bin bag, I suppose I must have occasionally thought to myself. I'll show them. I hadn't a clue that I was actually the biggest Irish joke of them all.

  After a few miles, there began perhaps to be an element of keeping it on deliberately; once past the half-marathon, the element of deliberateness grew stronger. It started to seem to me that a Clark Kent moment was there somewhere ahead. I was going to rip off my bin bag and suddenly become Superman, whizzing through the last few miles for an extraordinarily fast finish.

  All of which goes to show one thing and one thing only – how easily muddled thinking can creep in when you're tired. By keeping it on, I started to think – if think isn't too strong a word for it – that I was somehow keeping something back, a trump card, an ace up my soggy sleeve that would stand me in good stead for the final flourish.

  2005 hadn't been a year of competitive running, so I felt I had something to prove. The Steyning Stinger and the Isle of Wight marathons had never been going to be about times. London had been a joint venture. All of which meant that I was pinning my hopes on Dublin, my only genuine race of the year. I blanch, though, at the twisted logic – or lack of logic – that persuaded me that running in a bin bag was the best way to prove myself. Twenty miles became the fixed point in my head. At 20 miles I would rip it off, the crowds would gasp and I would fly. Absurd. And absurd for one blindingly obvious reason.

  The fact is that for 20 miles of torrential rain, 20 miles of feeling frozen, I was sweating like a pig beneath my plastic. I was like a cheese sarnie in cling film. And I didn't realise it. I just didn't have a clue how much I was perspiring, no idea how much fluid I was losing, nor how dehydrated I was becoming. Madness. When I ripped off my packaging, it was too late. I wasn't a tasty little M&S sarnie, fresh and flavoursome, tumbling out of its box. I was weeks past my sell-by date. I ran dressed as rubbish, and I ran a rubbish race.

  We were in nondescript backstreets by now, no one around apart from the runners. Pulling off the bag, I shoved it rather decorously into a roadside bin. And then I waited to soar. Nothing happened. The damage had been done, and there wasn't the remotest prospect of recovery. I'd been drinking steadily, but nowhere near enough, and instead of surging, I slumped. Exactly as in Amsterdam. And just as in Amsterdam, there was no chance of any help coming from the course itself.

  After the comparative pleasures of Phoenix Park, the route had nosedived into mile after mile of suburban could-be-anywhere anonymity. The day before, under bright blue skies, the city centre had oozed charm with its classical buildings, attractive shops and beautiful parks. In the rain, in the outskirts, we really could have been anywhere, with almost no points of interest for miles on end. Or if there were, we couldn't see them. It was grim, featureless and boring. I don't even remember the mile markers on a course which was unremarkable in the extreme.

  The roads merged one into another, undistinguished and indistinguishable. The route felt like the least interesting sections of the London Marathon cut out, elongated and stitched together for the ultimate in monotony on two legs. I am tempted to say it was the middle 24 miles that were the problem, but that's probably being a little bit unfair. The boring bit was probably much less than that, but there was just absolutely nothing for the soul to rejoice in, nothing to send the spirit soaring – just grey buildings on grey streets under grey skies in heavy, heavy rain.

  Fortunately, the skies can hold only so much. Around mile 15 or 16, the rain had started to ease, lessening considerably towards the 20-mile marker, where I had discarded my plastic cloak and discovered I wasn't Superman after all. By miles 21 or 22, the rain had more or less stopped, but with the sheets of water we were running through there was never any prospect of drying off. And that's when the cold started to set in. Perhaps the bin bag had actually kept me warmer than I would have been, but this was no compensation for its unnoticed dehydrating effect, which probably also contributed to the coldness I felt in the early 20s.

  I started to shiver and could sense that I was not alone. People were dripping and bedraggled. This was another of those marathons where the prevailing mood was a gritty determination, people slogging it out for no other reason than that there was nothing else to do but keep on going.

  As early as 15 or 16 miles in, people had been falling by the wayside, pulling up with cramp, leaning against lampposts, stretching legs or sitting forlornly in the gutter. In the 20s, there was even more roadside suffering. Dozens of people were walking. I managed not to; I was hanging on in there. But my run wasn't much faster than a walk. I was shuffling along, dog-tired and fed up, and it was now that my hideous deformity started to take its toll.

  Perhaps because of asthma, or perhaps the cause of it, I have one shoulder a few inches higher than the other. I am naturally lopsided, and as tiredness set in, one shoulder rose as the other one sank. I was unaware of it, but towards the end I was running in a horribly hunched position, which added to my tiredness and made my running all the more ineffective.

  Bizarrely, it had never been an issue until Ireland. If my shoulder slump had been particularly marked when I first started running, I am sure Pamela would have picked up on it. Perhaps it had simply worsened with the years. Perhaps it was just that I hadn't ever really had any supporters towards the ends of races when the deformity was at its worst. In fact, in Amsterdam, the Chichesters, Steyning and the Isle of Wight, I had had no personal support at all.

  But now, suddenly, somehow, here in Ireland, my lopsidedness was indeed a problem – even if it wasn't a problem I was aware of until after the race. Whilst I was still running, it was indistinguishable from the general discomfort I was suffering.

  Maybe my right-leaning lurch was worsened by the weather, perhaps even by my bin bag barminess, but more likely perhaps by the sheer amount of running I had done that year. But by the time Fiona and the children, waiting for me at around the 25-mile mark, saw me, it would have been impossible not to notice it. They tell me they were aware of my shape before they were aware that it was me. Staring at the runners, they saw Quasimodo lumbering towards them. My gait was awful; my posture was terrible, any running efficiency long since wrecked by a shape which was hopelessly skewed.

  Since then the firm instruction to anyone kind enough to support me has been to shout 'Shoulder up!' when they see me coming. If it's well into the race, it's certain that the shoulder slump will have started – just another of the ways in which the extremity of long-distance running can play havoc with your body. I was almost certainly running like this towards the end in Amsterdam. I just didn't know it then. There was no one there to tell me. No one there to care.

  Yes, self-pity was never far away. But here, thank goodness, I had support – terrific support. Fiona, Adam and Laura were there after mile one and there they were again at 25, and I was overjoyed even if I didn't manage to show it. Ideally, it would have been great to have had someone midway round the course as well, but there was no way Fiona could have dragged the children to some remote Dublin suburb in torrential rain simply to stand for hours in the hope of not having missed me. And I wouldn't have wanted her to. I'd wrecked their day enough. It was enough that I saw them with just over a mile to go.