Life Without Limits, A (9 page)

When you’ve studied and worked in development, you bring more of a problem-solving attitude to new places. Previously, my heart would bleed at some of the things I saw on my journeys through Africa and Asia, but I wouldn’t think much about the causes or the possible solutions. Visiting, or revisiting, the actual places whose problems were held forth upon by dazzling delegates from around the world and ambitious civil servants in Westminster further fuelled doubts that were percolating in my mind. How much of an impact was our work having on the ground? Or, worse still, were our policies actually harming those we were purporting to help? My passion had always been for grassroots development work, and these trips reminded me of that. I loved my job, and the opportunity it brought to work with ministers and within the UN machinery, to meet statesmen such as Kofi Annan. But I was starting to question whether my ultimate intentions were being met.

Nevertheless, I was granted a temporary promotion, which lasted a year and a half, to the grade of higher executive officer. Towards the end of 2003, I started to work on post-conflict environmental reconstruction policy, particularly for Iraq, leading for Defra in negotiations with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). I drafted the UK Government’s policy and had it agreed at ministerial level, which was one of the most satisfying moments of my career.

One day, I represented Defra in an intergovernmental meeting on Iraq at the Locarno Suite in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I don’t think I am breaking the Official Secrets Act by discussing what it’s like in there. It’s breathtaking just to go into that room. We took our seats at the table that Churchill and his team sat around during the Second World War. And a lot of politically sensitive information was exchanged around it when I was in there with officials from the MoD and the Foreign Office. A few years later, in 2009, my superior from that time asked for my files to help with the Chilcot Enquiry into the UK’s role in the war.

I even made it into 10 Downing Street. With no knickers on. At that time, I was swimming before work every day. On this particular day, I cycled to the pool in my cycling gear, changed into my swimwear, swam, then cycled to Defra. When I changed into my work clothes, I discovered I had left my pants at home. Muppet. So I cycled from Defra to Downing Street with only my skirt between me and the saddle. They wouldn’t let me leave my bike outside Number Ten, so I left it tied to a railing on Whitehall with a special plea not to have it blown up by security. Then I went inside for my meeting with Tony Blair’s private secretary. I was especially careful not to do a Sharon Stone.

To my delight, it turns out that the inside of Number Ten is a very faithful reproduction of the set for
Love Actually
, one of my favourite films. Not that I got to explore much. I walked in through the front door and was taken up a flight of stairs to quite an austere, oak-panelled room. In between regular bouts of skirt-straightening, I looked around the place with awe. But I was also careful to appear nonchalant, as if I came in here every day. It’s the Daley Thompson method, and something I follow meticulously as an athlete. However exhausted he might have felt at the end of an event, Daley always walked away nonchalantly, as if it hadn’t hurt him at all. Never give your opponents anything.

Just as my career was taking off, so was my passion for competitive sport. No longer was it only a social pursuit (although it was still that), a mere distraction from the business of achievement elsewhere. Now it was an outlet for achievement in itself.

After the Marathon in 2002, I joined the Serpentine Running Club. I trained with them on Wednesday evenings after work, joining the group on the Three Parks loop, starting at Serpie’s HQ by Marble Arch and running the 7.2 miles round Hyde Park, St James’s Park and Green Park, back to Marble Arch. I held my own and started to get quite competitive with the boys. I ran a few times for the club, and that summer won the women’s events in the club championships over one mile, 3km and 5km.

On Thursday evenings, the club trained at Battersea Park. I went along a couple of times that summer, where Frank Horwill, the legendary coach of British middle-distance runners, held his sessions. They looked a bit more serious than the Serpentine’s, so I went over and got talking to him. I told him of my new ambition, which was to finish in under three hours at the 2003 London Marathon, and he said he could help.

He was in his mid-seventies at the time, a sprightly man, small of stature but huge of personality. Tuesdays and Thursdays we were down at the track, but it was his Saturday sessions I loved the most. We would start at the track, then go off on a 5km loop. Then he would have us running up and down banks carrying each other. There would be hopping races, press-ups, sit-ups. It was like being on an army camp. And he was very much the sergeant major, barking out orders and reprimands in his clipped Empire accent, never once losing the mischievous glint in his eye.

‘You’re all a bunch of pussies!’ was a favourite of his.

He called the women ‘wenches’ and, even though he knew full well what my name was, he always called me ‘Sissy’. We spent a lot of those sessions doubled up – and not just because we were knackered.

‘Sissy!’ he would shout at me as I ran past. ‘How’s your sex life? Have you got a man yet?’

‘No, Frank.’

‘Why not? What’s wrong with you?’

He was very open about sex. He felt we should all be having it. No one could be a successful athlete, it seemed, unless they were having sex at least five times a week. He was constantly trying to pair us off with each other, and boasting about how many women he had on the go. ‘Not dead yet, am I?’ he would cry. And then he would drop and do a press-up.

Most of all, though, he was a wonderful man, and the first proper running coach I ever had. He gave me such confidence, and immediately I could see improvements. At last, there was some structure and variety to my training, which I found so enjoyable in a team environment. Frank had around a hundred articles on the Serpentine website, offering advice on every aspect of an athlete’s regime. I printed them all off, kept them in a folder and studied them assiduously. I learned about nutrition, which meant another step away from anorexia. I was eating to run now, rather than running to justify my eating. My diet was balanced and tailored towards my sport. Running had replaced anorexia, and I felt and looked a lot healthier for it.

All of these things, though, are obsessive. Nothing had changed in my personality with regard to that lust for control, but now it had found a healthier outlet. I had put on weight since Manchester, but I was generally happy with how I looked. Or, maybe I should say that I was happy with my body, because it was no longer so much about how it looked, about that image in the mirror, but more about how it functioned, about how effectively it enabled me to pursue my new passion for running. Those years, 2002 and 2003, were wonderful times for me. I’d never been happier. Attaining a distinction for my MA had helped boost my confidence, but it was the London Marathon that really clinched it. And the way things took off so quickly at Defra further consolidated things.

But it was intense. I was fitting my running around my work, which was relentless as it was. I ran to work. Lunch hours were spent pounding the streets. ‘Mate, does it look as if I’ve been running?’ I would say to Georgie, before staggering into the office after lunch, red of face, in different clothes from the ones I’d been wearing in the morning, sweat trickling down my brow.

Two evenings a week, work permitting, I was training with Frank and his group, known as the Horwill Harriers. One Harrier was also a colleague of mine at Defra, Dorothea ‘Dorchie’ Lee. She is now Dorothea Cockerell because, to Frank’s unbridled delight, she did get together with another in his group, Will Cockerell, a talented British marathon runner. Dorchie was an excellent athlete too – much better than I was. The two of us went over to Amsterdam one weekend in 2002 to run the Amsterdam Half-Marathon.

During the build-up to the 2003 London Marathon, I was so excited. I ran the Reading Half-Marathon and improved on the year before. I was on course for a sub-three-hour showing in London. I had my eyes on 2hr 57min.

My impatience with our capital’s public transport meant I had bought a £50 second-hand mountain bike for commuting around town. A couple of weeks before the big day, I was cycling from my cousin Tim’s house to mine in Clapham on a Sunday afternoon. The traffic was heavy on the north side of Clapham Common, so I was taking my time in the cycle lane. Suddenly, a car pulled into a petrol station and I had no time to stop. I hit the side of the car, flew over my handlebars and crashed onto the pavement, cutting open my chin. The bike followed me over, and some part of it – I think it must have been the end of a handlebar – thumped into my thigh. I was fine, but the blood from my chin was enough to involve an ambulance. Tim accompanied me to hospital, where I picked up four stitches.

Even as I was in mid-air, flying over the handlebars, I was thinking, ‘Will I be able to run the Marathon?’ I kept asking the paramedics the same question in the ambulance, even though my wounds seemed superficial. They released me that night, but the next time I tried to run it was clear something was not right with my left thigh. I ran on anyway, but within a couple of days I could no longer do that. I couldn’t even stretch off my quad properly. I saw a doctor, and he diagnosed a haematoma. There was no way I could run the Marathon.

That was the year Paula Radcliffe broke the world record. It was the first time I had ever watched a marathon live. I was amazed at the sheer speed of the woman as she flew by. The atmosphere in the crowd was electrifying that year, as Britain’s darling romped home. How I longed to be taking part. I was devastated.

My injury turned into quite a problem over the following months. Running so soon on my haematoma had exacerbated it, such that, after scans a few months later, they found a 5cm spur of bone growing from my femur. Myositis ossificans, they call it. Sometimes your body reacts to a haematoma by calcifying. If you then run on it, the muscle around it will tear, causing further bleeding and further calcification. I had stopped running quite soon after the injury, but I used the opportunity to start swimming again (initially with a float between my legs, on doctor’s orders, so I didn’t have to kick). I continued cycling to work. None of it seemed to bother my leg. But there it was, this bony spur. The specialist told me I just had to be patient and wait for the injury to heal and the bony spur to mature, that is, to stop growing. This it did by the end of 2003. It’s still there now, though. I can actually feel it in my thigh.

Something else had been growing inside me in 2003, and that was the sense that my work at Defra was not making the difference to the world that I had hoped it might. I was becoming disillusioned with all the bureaucracy and red tape.

The breaking point came on a trip to the island of Jeju, in South Korea, at the end of March 2004. There was a forum being held there by the governing council of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). We flew out business class on KLM and stayed in the five-star Lotte Hotel with its vast gilt foyer. Outside, the grounds were immaculately manicured. There was a massive replica of a Dutch windmill and an artificial volcano that went off at night every hour, on the hour. We spent a certain amount of time milling around beneath it, drinking wine and eating canapés.

I sat there one evening with Georgie, looking out at the scene. Suddenly, my quietly building doubts over the work we were doing came crashing in on me. For the first time, I felt naked revulsion for the hypocrisy of it all.

‘What is this?’ Georgie and I said to each other. ‘We’ve flown business class, we’re eating canapés, sipping champagne, staying at a five-star hotel with erupting volcanoes – and we’re talking about eradicating poverty and delivering water and sanitation to the millions of people who don’t have it.’

For so many people out there that week, what they were doing was a job, not a passion. They get so caught up in the minutiae of the text – where does this comma go, what does this word say? They don’t take a step back and think about whether it is going to effect change. Why are we negotiating a quantifiable target for the improvement of infrastructure? The fact that there is no demand for the infrastructure is what we need to be addressing, or that people do not have the capacity to use or maintain it.

A lot of the people I worked with were there for the crack of the negotiation. There was one guy in my team in particular, who thrived on it. It was his drug; it was a game. He wasn’t passionate about international development. He was passionate about winning the argument, negotiating over the text. I’m sure he didn’t worry too much about whether any of it trickled down to those living in poverty. A brief survey of the scene under the erupting volcano told you all you needed to know about how much some of these senior civil servants and diplomats valued their five-star lifestyle.

I won’t act the innocent too much, though, when it comes to playing the game. Jeju was a great success for me. I was very confident in my job by now, building relationships with people that would benefit the UK. Occasionally I led for the Government in negotiating new text for water and sanitation, but usually I was sitting at the right hand of my boss, Roy Hathaway, who is a fantastic guy, feeding him information. A lot of negotiation takes place in smoky back rooms, and I played a part in that with the heads of delegation of the countries present. I ended up writing the paper that formed the EU’s position on water and sanitation. What happens is that you draft the paper, incorporating all of the UK’s priorities, get it rubber-stamped, whoop and cheer and, before you know it, it has become EU policy.