Keep on Running (31 page)

  It had been the strangest feeling, one of being utterly overwhelmed. I craved darkness. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hide. I wanted to get away from the noise. I felt awful. But fortunately the tide of human kindness turned me round and I carried on, not significantly the worse for wear.

  The end result was a good enough time on a good day. Part of the problem, though, was that this was London number six, and it was all starting to seem just a touch déjà vu. Fiona came up to support me and we were joined by Alistair and his girlfriend – now wife – Jo afterwards, going for a lovely pizza to round off the day. But the point was that London was becoming rather routine. Even I wouldn't have baked myself a celebratory cake after this one – even if there was plenty of satisfaction to be had from the fact that, just as in La Rochelle, I had seriously wobbled but then pulled it back.

Far more interesting in 2008 was my return to the kind of cross-country marathon I'd slogged through in Chichester and Steyning a few years earlier – a marathon which answered the need for something different. This time my self-flagellation of choice was the Clarendon Way Marathon, a marathon which will always rank among my most memorable.

  A huge part of the appeal was the fact that this is a marathon that goes from Salisbury to Winchester. So many marathons – Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin – take you on a huge loop from A round to A again. You run for 26.2 miles to get back to where you started, part of the seductive perversity of marathon running in general. But every now and again, it's nice to actually go somewhere. The Clarendon Way Marathon seemed to offer something different – running for a purpose, running because you need to get back to where you left your car.

  Equally appealing was the fact that it goes between two cities I have known all my life. You have to take your hat off to the runner who dreamt up the race, realising that with a few kinks and loops, you can make Salisbury and Winchester exactly 26 miles 385 yards apart, an approach to map-reading which I find thoroughly laudable. Those less in awe of marathons will argue that you could do this for any two points 26.2 miles apart, but you'll struggle to find too many marathons that go from one city to another; even fewer that link two cities by an almost entirely cross-country course.

  For me, it added to the point of it all. The Clarendon Way Marathon was a marathon I simply had to tackle. I wanted to know whether actually going somewhere would be a good way of getting there. And indeed it was. But what a day it proved.

  The event is impressively organised. You start from the King's School in Winchester, where one of several coaches takes you to Salisbury if you are running the full marathon or to a village halfway between the two if you are a spineless faint-hearted good-for-nothing chicken contenting yourself with a half-marathon – which is what I did the following year.

  It should have been lovely, but in the days before the race, the heavens opened, and boy, did it rain. It rained and rained and rained on the Saturday and then rained some more overnight. When I woke up, there was no need to open the curtains to see what the weather was doing that October Sunday. Dublin here we come. As my great-great-aunt in Yorkshire would say, it was bouncing. It wasn't just hitting the ground, it was hammering into it with such force that it jumped up to meet the next drop on the way down.

  Fiona kept telling me not to bother with the marathon, just to stay at home, but I don't suppose for a moment she ever thought I would listen. She said I was stupid even to try it, but my view was that there was no backing out. I didn't want all those miles of training to count for nothing; they had to count for something whatever the weather on the day. And I suppose that's why it's so hard to pull out of a marathon. You invest so much in it, you focus on it so hard, that it's going to take something rather more than a bit of rain – or in this instance an almost biblical downpour – to keep you away. Even staring at the rain out of the window that morning, I knew I would be unbearable within the hour if I didn't at least try. There was never any question that I wouldn't. Not running was unthinkable.

  Even so, it was the most apprehensive of drives to Winchester. Then came relief as I made it from the car to the coach, for this was when it really started raining. It had been mucking around until then. Now it was raining like some huge celestial plug had been pulled, and so it continued all the way to Salisbury. We really ought to have been travelling in a World War Two DUKW, that boat-like amphibious thing that I used to love making Airfix models of. We were crawling along the road, the windscreen wipers at full pelt barely clearing anything in the rainstorm we were heading through.

  Inevitably, everyone on the bus was chatty. There was a great feeling of togetherness. I remember speaking to a guy contemplating his first-ever marathon and thinking, without saying it,
Blimey, I
wouldn't want to start with this one!
The camaraderie was the best I have ever known it before a race. The windows were steamed up. We were sealed in, getting ready for a soaking. We were back in the realms of those self-loving adverts I hate, the smug 'We must be mad!' ones. Except that we really were mad, sitting there on a coach in torrential rain for three-quarters of an hour simply so that we could run all the way back.

  Our Salisbury destination was The Godolphin School, a starting point with excellent facilities and the air of an Oxford college. The organisation was excellent in every respect, leaving us nothing to do but hang around for the big adventure, an off-road extravaganza which is probably around 85 per cent trails. Kicking off from the school, the route headed off under the Salisbury bypass and then very quickly out into whatever countryside hadn't been washed away in the meantime. In all, we were probably several hundred runners.

  An online reviewer of the race two years later in 2010 summed it up perfectly as 'Mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, hills, hills, hills, mud, mud, hills, hills and bananas'. I don't remember the bananas. Otherwise that was precisely the experience we had in 2008. I can't imagine anyone set off with a finishing time uppermost in their mind. This one was going to be all about just finishing – which suited me perfectly.

  By now I was doing two marathons a year, one of which was generally a marathon in which time was never going to be the major consideration. Partly a defence, I am sure, against the fact that by 2008 it was getting ever harder to knock any time off a fully competitive marathon, but partly also for the stimulation of trying something different. Marathons don't have to be about big cities and running on the flat. There are kicks enough from 'up hill and down dale' in mud you could drown in – not that that was how the organisers sold the event.

  However, within half an hour of the start, something entirely unexpected started to happen. Imperceptibly at first, the rain started to ease. Imperceptibly because by then we were so used to it that we imagined it going on forever. I could easily envisage people in their back gardens building arks. But then, suddenly, a few miles in, I became aware that the battering was diminishing. By mile 5 or 6, as we skirted yet another sodden field, the rain had more or less stopped, and from then on the sun started to break through. This was October. It was never going to be hot, but the skies cleared as an impressively bright day started to take ever-stronger hold.

  The temperature was just on the comfortable side of cool, but by the halfway point the skies were blue and the sun was high. Suddenly everything was looking much rosier in our countryside garden. In fact, it was all rather attractive as we followed the dotted arrows which took us across fields, down valleys and through woodland, the gently varying kind of rich-green, luxuriant landscape which seems so quintessentially English. It was beautiful in a way which was undemanding, until you tried to run through it.

  I don't know the overall gradient, but there were some stiff climbs, and with a decent number of runners out there, there was bunching at a few points where the route thinned to go uphill or down. We were in the middle of nowhere, but for several minutes I couldn't go at the speed I wanted as we ascended a narrow path which skirted a hillside. There were brief windows of opportunity where you could nip past the slower runner ahead, but it generally meant clambering onto a slippery bank and hoping not to slide down into their footfall.

  Things weren't helped by the fact that the half-marathon runners joined the route pretty much as we were going by. Suddenly we were running with far more people around, runners inevitably far fresher than we were. Would it have been better to let the half-marathon runners loose earlier? Or was it better to have them coincide with us and so increase the overall density of runners at the finish? I don't know. And I still don't know, having joined the race as a half-marathon runner at this point the following year. Maybe it adds to the atmosphere, but the moments of congestion were an irritation, albeit a mild one. In any event, there was no hope of a personal best. It was never going to be like that.

  Instead, on this kind of course and in these kinds of conditions, it was like a rerun of the Steyning Stinger. It was heavy, hard work, the drain on tired legs all the greater for the endless ups and downs, made all the more difficult still by the fact that your shoes were heavily caked in thick, cloying mud. And you couldn't just run it off. Time and again, you had to flick it, rub it, do anything to it just to loosen it.

  One particular hill is scored into my mind. It was 16 miles in as I lumbered up it, squelching and slipping backwards as I hauled my body against gravity. It was like trying to run up a banana skin. Maybe that's what the online reviewer had been talking about. And a splashy, uneven banana skin at that. If your foot didn't slip backwards, it slipped sideways. Each step was tentative. Each stride was a hostage to fortune – which was precisely why a photographer had positioned himself at the top of the incline, strategically surveying us all as we waded through the mud up towards him.

  It was steep. Very steep. So steep that you were putting your hands out in front of you, and that's when I went over, just a few yards from the photographer's feet. Maybe it was because I glanced up at him. Maybe I was always going to go. But I lost my footing and crashed down in the mud chest first. I held my head up as my arms shot out, and I fell – not very far, but far enough. And this really wasn't falling with style. If I'd had any pride left by then, I would certainly have hurt it. But the only sane response was to laugh – as doubtless others did.

  'Don't you dare!' I shouted at the photographer, who must have thought Christmas had come early. He dared, and then dared again, producing a lovely sequence of photographs of me on my way down and back up again. The photographs now adorn the wall in our downstairs loo – an appropriate place for images of me in the mire.

  A feature of marathons these days is that the official race photographs are up and ready on the website within a day or so. These particular photographs were hilarious. Even funnier was the fact that mine featured in a special subsection of photographs simply called 'Slips', or something like that. Even funnier still was that when a friend and I were registering for the half-marathon the following year, one of the photographs of me was on the home page of the website. I must say I took it as a tribute. How could it be anything else? We all did a daft thing that day in the daftest of conditions. And I am all for celebrating that.

  I don't remember getting seriously tired during the Clarendon Way Marathon, though I do remember a degree of disorientation when trying to work out how far we had gone at various points towards the end. It took me a stupidly long time to tumble to the fact that, very unusually, the final half-marathon was counted down rather than counted up. I suppose it makes sense when you remember the half-marathoners who had joined us by now. But it did add to my confusion to be reaching what I knew to be 16 miles and seeing the number 10 by the wayside. Finally the penny dropped. Ten miles to go, after which it all started to seem endless.

  We endured an unrelenting stretch of forest and woodland in the final quarter, still moderately hilly, but above all everlasting. One of the most enjoyable things about doing the half-marathon the following year was recalling how I had felt at various points the year before. At the same time, I also felt a bit of a cheapskate. I felt as if I had gatecrashed somebody else's party. Half-marathon running is an immensely respectable discipline, but it has never grabbed me. A half-marathon is too much of a halfway house to my way of thinking, something you can knock off in a time which makes you question whether it was worth all the hassle of getting kitted out and numbered up in the first place.

  OK, that's probably being rather unfair. Very unfair, in fact. All I am trying to say is that, to my mind, only the full marathon distance justifies all the effort. And on that rare half-marathon the following year, which I did with a colleague from work, I was looking out for the full-marathon runners, feeling a little bit of awe towards them, deeply impressed that they had gone so far on so challenging a course. And I mean that in a loving, caring way, as Dame Edna would say. I am not talking a self-satisfied 'that was me last year' type feeling. It was a lovely warm feeling of solidarity, a kind of 'I know exactly where you're coming from and I know exactly how tough I found it' type feeling.