Keep on Running (6 page)

  And yes, I know that sounds horribly pretentious. But maybe you've just got to be there. On the day, I was welling up at the thought of it. Not many things make me sentimental, but on that morning, I discovered that marathons most certainly do.

  It wasn't the morning's only discovery. You'd think that we would all run in the same way. We don't. Far from it. You get the super striders, the low-bodied lopers and everything in between; some people mince, some people prance, others surge; some glide like swans, others are all legs like newborn giraffes; some pump with their arms, some keep their arms stock-still. With some people, you wonder how the mass of their movements can ever combine to create forward thrust. With others, all you can do is marvel at the slick efficiency of it all. Some flail, some ease; some crunch, some coast; some sashay, some flow. Some make it all look incredibly easy; others make it look nigh on impossible. Each to their own, and the great joy is that it is wonderful to see.

  No wonder the shoe manufacturers, much as I like to malign them, are constantly pushing forward with their product range, searching for ever-greater degrees of sophistication. It's a wonder they don't give up. How could you possibly ever cater for this lot, charging like rhinos, floating like birds, sprinting like gazelles, hopping like grasshoppers, prowling like tigers, scuttling like mice and heaving like hippos? I soon found myself thinking how exciting it was to be in the thick of it.

  It was all decidedly stop-start at the off, though. The gun went. Nothing happened. And nothing continued to happen for the next 30 seconds. We simply stood there shoulder to shoulder. The old hands knew exactly what was happening. We first-timers were bewildered. 'This is going to take much longer than I thought,' I chuntered, throwing in an extra few chants of 'You can do it'. This was something I hadn't anticipated.

  Penned in the enclosure for those anticipating a 4 hours to 4 hours 30 finish, we were so far from the start that it was several minutes before the forward motion rippled back to us. Even then, it started out as a shuffle, followed by a standstill, followed by a shuffle, followed by a standstill, a pattern which repeated itself for the first five minutes of my first London Marathon with the start line still nowhere in sight. Finally, the shuffle became steadier; shuffle became walk; walk became trot; the starting arch started to dominate the horizon, and then, almost imperceptibly, trot became run, the transformation completed with the step which took us over the start mat – in my case 11 minutes after the gun, by which time the front-runners had probably completed the first 2 miles.

  As I was to discover when my father-in-law joined the fray a few years later even further back, it can be a good 20 minutes before you get over the line – at which point those race leaders would have been 4 miles to the good. Of course you clock your start time from the moment you cross the line, but no wonder I wasn't going to win if I had to give a long-legged Kenyan a 2-mile head start.

  But then again, you've got to bear in mind the sheer logistics of it all, the mind-numbing complexity of getting more than 30,000 people simultaneously in motion – people vastly ranging in ability, in expectations and in style. You aren't looking at a complete cross section of humanity, of course. It's a cross section at the upper end of the fitness spectrum, but even so, there was evidently a great breadth of talent on display, and the London organisers' skill was to get us all up and running as smoothly as possible – something they pulled off brilliantly.

  The sky was bright as we finally got underway, a thrilling moment after that initial slowness. A very useful slowness, as it turned out. The received wisdom is that the very worst thing you can do in a marathon is to start off too quickly. The argument goes that with all those miles ahead, you've got to pace yourself – which is fair enough. But unless you're a super-fast runner, most of the big-city marathons will hem you in any way in those early stages.

  Even once we'd started, we still came to a couple of shuddering halts – and here the reason was obvious. Scores of runners dashed off to the side for a wee after a few hundred yards. They simply couldn't hold it in any longer, and for reasons only traffic-management experts will understand, their swift side-footing off the course brought us all to a halt. Runners obsessing over time were probably worrying at this point; those of us just enjoying the experience had to view it as part and parcel of the London Marathon's rich mysteries.

  The sight of dozens of peeing runners was a timely reminder of all that Pamela had told me. Top up. Top up. Top up every few minutes. Maybe her greatest gift to me as a novice had been to hammer home the crucial importance of hydration. If you feel thirsty, it's too late, she kept saying – words which rang through my head. If you feel thirsty, you are dehydrated. If you are dehydrated, you are in danger. Not necessarily done for, but certainly on the at-risk register.

  And so I sipped dutifully from the start as we passed through the leafy residential area which borders Greenwich Park. Everything seemed very gentle, very guarded, everyone running well within themselves at this point. Spectators had gathered in their front gardens and on the pavements to cheer us on, but suddenly, and slightly strangely, it was all seeming a little low-key. We were passing opulent, attractive houses, but no landmarks at this stage. The only thing approaching a landmark came after 2 or 3 miles, when the various starts merged and the three streams of runners became one continuous flow as we headed towards the Thames. There was plenty of good-natured booing and jeering between the runners as the three races became one, compensation perhaps for the fact that we were in fairly nondescript suburban sprawl and remained so until we reached Greenwich.

  Here the Maritime Museum, striking in all its classical elegance to our right, was an early highlight of the day – especially as it seemed to signal that we were making progress.

  By now, the crowds were thickening and the noise levels were rising, bands interspersing the spectators, music mixing with the roar as we passed by. Greenwich looked gorgeous on that sunny spring morning, and, just over 6 miles after the start, the Cutty Sark proved exactly the lift I'd been hoping it would be – a lift denied runners in recent years following the fire in 2007. Later marathons showed it boarded up. The

2011 London Marathon bypassed it altogether.

  After the Cutty Sark, the route became largely landmark-free once again, but the crowds were reward enough in a stretch which was disappointingly dull in every other respect. I started to pin my hopes on Tower Bridge, just after 12 miles, to lift things once more, as indeed it did. Here, and on both sides of the river, the crowds were intense for one of the day's great moments. Think of the traffic there usually, and here you are running straight across it, but this genuine high was followed by a genuine low. I remember miles 13 to 15 as decidedly dreary. Not a lot distinguished them – a key area where London palls alongside other marathons. The very best courses keep the interest constant, as I was to discover later. London falls short. You just have to rely on the spirit of it all.

  By now, the weather had deteriorated significantly, and it was around the halfway mark that we had the second and the heaviest of the three showers that hit us en route. But I loved them – especially when one of the roadside DJs blasted us with 'It's Raining Men'. All you could do was smile. There was goodwill on the day, but even better, there was humour, and the laughs along the way put an extra little spring in our steps.

  Time and again, the music chimed in beautifully. Around the halfway mark, 'Honky Tonk Women' by my gods, The Rolling Stones, blared out, always one of my favourites from a band I've idolised for years. It was fabulous to fall into step with an all-time classic; surreal to be one of thousands of runners doing so. You slip into a strange impressionability as you run; you absorb what's going on around you and literally you take it in your stride. As we loped along, the rain, bizarrely, was part of the fun.

  It was considerably less enjoyable for Pamela. She was there to support her Macmillan runners, and as the rain came down, all my whingeing was uppermost in her mind. 'Poor Phil,' she kept thinking to herself. 'He hates the rain.' She wasn't to know that I was loving it. I feel rather guilty about that now – and even guiltier when I recall that, selfishly, it never occurred to me just how miserable the downpours were making life at the time for my wife. Fiona had nobly come to support me, despite having a toddler in tow and being now six months pregnant.

  Our son, Adam, was very nearly two; our daughter, Laura, was just over three months away from being born. Fiona had a tough day. At the finish, her first chance to change Adam's drenched clothes, she discovered that the spare clothes in her rucksack were even wetter than the clothes he was wearing. The rain dampened the day for thousands in the crowd and probably for many of the runners. For me, at least, it was precisely what the doctor ordered.

  One of the benefits was that it helped clear my head for the mind games I was now playing.

  I have always found that the great problem with running, certainly the longer distances, is that I just don't know what to think about. Listing various categories sends me round the twist, although it's a technique used by many runners to keep boredom at bay. Actors, actresses, batsmen, bowlers, whatever. I find them difficult to count, even more difficult to remember. And then it becomes all the more infuriating still when I can't remember whether I have already remembered them or not. In the end, it just adds another layer of fretting to the whole thing at a time when, somehow, you need to be relaxing.

  Instead, my favoured approach, which I had evolved in training and now started to perfect on the day, was to focus on the significance of the numbers depicted on the mile markers – the only mental gymnastics I can comfortably handle in race circumstances. And this is what I did in London.

  The first mile is great because it means you are well under way (and because a round 25 remain). Number two is significant because it is the first even number and means you can start playing with fractions: you've done 1/13th of the race. Number three I like, because if you times it by nine, you've got just slightly more than a marathon (in other words, you've done just over a ninth – well, it's something to cling to). Four is good too, but five is the early highlight. We're getting into round-number territory here, always a treat. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25. I love them. At five, you're just a fraction under a fifth of the way there. Obviously.

  Six is a cracker. It means that you've got a round 20 to go. Seven I always enjoy, because the remaining miles have now slipped under 20 and also because you are more than halfway towards the half-marathon. Eight is good – you're just under a third of the way round. Plus it represents 4/13th, a fraction which has a pleasing irreducibility. Nine brings you back to the logic of three – you're just over a third of the way home. Plus there's the bonus that you are just a mile away from the satisfaction of reaching double figures, that great landmark of ten, a figure whose double-digit attraction is enhanced by the fact that the remainder is now just 16, the distance of a not particularly long Sunday run.

  And so it goes on, the reasons for enjoying each number ever more strained, ever less obvious. But it was a game that worked for me.

  Others say you need to imagine that with each mile in the first half you are adding a block to a big tower you are building that will eventually stretch to 13 storeys high – a tower from which you will then remove a block with each mile of the second half of the marathon until you get back down to ground level again as you finish. I'd far rather be telling myself that 15 is great, because it is the third of those five magical multiples of five which will take you there; that 16 is terrific because you've got the pleasingly round number of ten outstanding; that 17 is another high point because the miles remaining have now dipped into single digits for the first time; that 18 means you are more than two-thirds of the way there with simply a midweek, shortish run left; that 19 is bliss because it's your last teenage mile before you hit the 20s… And so it goes on, ever more desperate, ever more satisfying.

  And ever more necessary – if only to guard against thinking about 'the wall' and so being sucked into it. By now – miles 18, 19 and 20 – you are definitely in danger territory. Infamously, the wall is the point at which you've so depleted your body's stored energy that overwhelming fatigue takes over and your energy falls away precipitously. My great fortune was that Pamela had taught me the simplest of ways to protect yourself against it: you drink and then you drink some more.

  Just how much you need to drink is one of the things you need to assess as you train, always bearing in mind the simple test that is always available: look at your piddle when you get back home. The experts say that the ideal is a light straw colour, a description which somehow seems rather too romantic for the notion of peering down the pan. 'Light straw' sounds more the kind of thing you might wish for on your kitchen walls. However, that's the guideline. Too much darker and you are dehydrated – a fact which reduces marathon running to a very straightforward task: it's all about delaying the shade change in your wee. Lovely.

  My view is that it is inevitable that you will finish dehydrated – a belief which others will say explains why I have never run spectacularly well. But I've drunk to the point where I couldn't comfortably drink any more, and yet I've still finished a couple of dozen colour cards away from light straw. It seems to me that, for us mere mortals at least, hydration on the day is essentially crisis management, an exercise in staving off the crisis – and its effects – until the very last moment.