Keep on Running (10 page)

  Maybe that was true. But I felt sceptical. As acts of vandalism go, it rang false. You can't imagine a bunch of ne'er-do-wells getting tanked up in the city and then walking miles to the middle of nowhere simply to change the direction markers on a cross-country marathon. Hee, hee! What a lark! If that had really been the case, we would probably still be running it now. A random act of vandalism was hardly likely to have shortened the course. More likely it would have dispersed us to the four winds. Or perhaps they were philanthropic vandals, worried for our feet, knees and hips. But somehow I doubted it.

  I didn't know the course well enough to work out where the route had been changed, but that was hardly the point. The worst thing race organisers can do is to lose the trust of the runners in their charge, and that's what happened in Chichester in 2004. Or so it seemed to me.

  Significantly, the event has since abandoned its pretentions to be a marathon – though you've only got to look at the Internet to see that plenty of runners still refer to it as the Chichester Marathon or the Chichester Marathon Challenge. They need to be careful. Marathon is far too important a word to be abused in this way. It can be claimed only when the course is well marked, well protected and exactly 26 miles 385 yards (or 42 kilometres 195 metres) long. The plus side was some fantastic scenery, but that's little compensation for those who ran along to the increasingly depressing realisation that they weren't running a marathon at all. Maybe the organisers have made all sorts of improvements in the years that have followed, I don't know. But there's no getting away from the fact that in 2004, it was a good 4 or 5 miles short, maybe even more.

  Somehow, it seemed, for me at least, that satisfaction and long-distance running in and around Chichester weren't destined to go hand in hand.

In hindsight, it's obvious that the Chichester Marathon in 2001 did serve one purpose at least. Effectively it cleared the way for another tilt at the London Marathon, which I returned to in 2002. And, just to double the motivation after the purposelessness of Chichester, I decided to do it for the MS Society, a charity dear to my family.

  In 1982, my parents created from scratch the Gosport & Fareham branch of the MS Society, in part a response to all the difficulties my mum's sister, Diana, had faced. An MS sufferer from her late teens, Di started to show the signs of the disease in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that is, at a time when little seemed to be known about MS. When diagnosis came, it was harshly delivered, with little explanation and no backup – so different to all the support that is available now.

  Fortunately, my mum, a nurse, was able to make a genuine difference; and my elderly grandparents, to the limit of their abilities, adapted their bungalow to Di's every need. Sadly, however, her condition deteriorated rapidly. I can still hear my grandmother saying, 'It's a wicked disease.' Within a few years, Di was wheelchair-bound, and there she stayed, knowing no remission until her death at the age of 43 in

1991. Within a couple of months, my grandparents had also passed away. But by then, the Gosport & Fareham branch of the MS Society was flourishing, scores of people relishing the companionship, comfort and sheer common sense it was able to provide.

  When I managed to get a place in the 2002 London Marathon, I resolved to use that place to raise money for the branch. I thought of the aimlessness and emptiness that had sunk any sense of achievement in my Chichester run. London 2002 was going to be different.

  But first I had to get there, and that meant a return to training – something I hadn't seriously done for four years now. The Chichester Marathon was under my belt, but I had no intention of approaching London with the levity with which I had approached Chichester. For London, I was going to be back in training in earnest. The last time I had done that, Adam had been nearly two and Laura just a bump. Now, in the autumn of 2001, Adam was five and a half and Laura was three and a quarter. These two VIPs had to be factored into the equation, and I am convinced that they are to blame for the strange addiction I developed around this time to running in the dark.

  These days, work is much more flexible. I have taken the opportunity to make it so, championing the notion of working from home a couple of days a week, saving many boring and, indeed, expensive hours on the motorway, and making the whole thing so much more manageable into the bargain. Back then, though, things were much more rigid. By the time I'd got home, helped with the tea, done my bit towards kiddie bath time and enjoyed the bedtime story routine, it had been dark for hours. If I wanted to get my run in, there was no alternative but to head off out there into the dark. The surprising discovery was that it was hugely enjoyable.

  I was hooked. Within a few hundred yards I'd left the town behind me and was heading off down country lanes, criss-crossing rural routes and relishing a newfound freedom. Work couldn't reach me, and nor could home. Recklessly and irresponsibly, I refused to carry a mobile. It's only very recently that I have consented to possess one at all – though, much to Fiona's annoyance, I don't take it running. Foolish and selfish, I know, but it would be an intrusion. This was me on my own, out there running, grabbing a bit of life that was mine, all mine, all mine.

  Older and just possibly a fraction wiser, I generally avoid running in the dark these days, but back then, I'd head off as if in answer to some kind of call. The wolves were howling. The drums were beating. I was summoned, and no one was getting in the way.

  It was strange how quickly my eyes became accustomed to the darkness; after ten minutes or so, I could quite persuade myself that near-total obscurity was actually a kind of half-light. I never had a moment's fear for my safety. In fact, I managed to persuade myself that I was safer in the darkness. During the day, you might not hear a car heading towards you the other side of a narrow bend. But at night, in addition to various reflective strips on my clothing, I had an extra protection. I might miss the noise of the engine, but there was no way I could miss the headlights glowing in the darkness, throwing up all sorts of shadows around me. It gave me plenty of time to retreat into the hedgerows, well out of the way. The last thing I wanted to do was spook an oncoming driver. As for me, I was spooked by nothing, and I was having a ball.

  It became addictive – an alternative, murky existence in which every stride was an email deleted, every yard a phone call answered. All the people who'd pushed me during the day were being pushed back in a darkness which put me beyond their reach. It started to seem the perfect antidote to work. The benefits were huge. For years, I'd suffered from insomnia, and while I didn't particularly notice it recede the first time I trained for the London Marathon, this time round it vanished altogether. The early months of 2001 marked the start of the year-round running I've pursued pretty much ever since. It's no coincidence that my insomnia, though it comes and goes, has never returned to its pre-2001 levels.

  Equally, I found my asthma easier to deal with. As a child, I'd occasionally been quite debilitated by it, and it had flared up from time to time ever since. But with the introduction of running as a fixed and regular part of my life, the asthma seemed so much more under control. The cold night air was cleansing. Away from work and in my own bubble, I was breathing the deepest I had ever breathed.

  In hindsight, a late-evening run, darting wherever I wanted in the obscurity, created a need every bit as much as it satisfied one. It became addictive, but part of that addiction, I started to realise, was the simple fact that I always felt better for a run. Opt out of a run, and I knew I would regret it. Go for it, and somehow I felt back in touch with myself.

  It was almost like a rebalancing, a re-synching at a time in my life when perhaps the demands were at their greatest. It was me jumping off the treadmill, I'd tell myself as I darted down blind alleys, and I started to become quite pretentious and pompous about it. It seemed to me that I was somehow realigning my existence, tightening up my life and refocusing – all of which sounds terrifically self-centred. But I am convinced that it was self-centredness with a purpose. My me-time made me much more generous in my everyone-else time. It was as simple as that. Or so I liked to tell myself.

  In those early days of fatherhood, it was quite difficult to make the regular transition between taking myself seriously as a respectable journalist and being a dad wiping bottoms and getting regularly puked on. In some ways, the running was part of handling that transition, and it seemed to me that if I got a regular run in, then in so many ways I was able to be both a better dad and a better worker. I like to think I never lost sight of where my real responsibilities lay, but I genuinely believed that I fulfilled those responsibilities all the more effectively once I'd burned off some energy in the darkness. It seemed a reasonable pay-off. For a few hours off the leash, I was much more focused when I got back.

  Fiona wasn't necessarily ecstatic at my absences, but she recognised the equation and the benefits it brought. In fact, it was often Fiona who encouraged me to go out on those rare occasions when I wavered. As she puts it, she likes me better when I've been for a run.

  Besides, as the 2002 London Marathon dawned, she started to realise that there was just something about the men in her life. This was the year I gained the most unexpected and the most welcome of running mates, Fiona's father, Michael, and I am delighted to take the credit for tipping him over the edge.

  Michael had been extremely supportive and encouraging before my debut marathon, but only, I thought, out of healthy respect for any level of sporting endeavour which takes you out of your comfort zone. A skilled cyclist in his younger days, Michael had always had the sporting bug, and through his cycling he probably knew far more than I did about pushing yourself to the limit and beyond. Little did I know that he had been contemplating a marathon of his own.

  Unknown to me, Michael had for many years seen the marathon as a great achievement, envying anyone who managed to complete the course. He later admitted that he had posted a ballot application to run the London in 1998, the year in which I had made my own marathon debut. How lovely it would have been to be novice marathon runners together. Sadly, however, he had been unsuccessful in the ballot, much to the relief of Stella – Fiona's mother – who pointed out that he had never run in any race whatsoever up to that point. But my London finishing photos niggled away at him to the extent that he decided to mark his 70th year in 2002 by having another attempt at getting into the London Marathon.

  Thus he embarked on what was to become a remarkable sequence of ballot rejections that has lasted to this day. Anyone else would take the hint and conclude that London really didn't want him, but not Michael. He wanted London, and he got it, finding a different way into the race which bypassed the main entry ballot. After the initial rejection from the London Marathon organisers, he made an application for one of six places that were offered by
The Times
newspaper. Just after Christmas 2001, he was told that he could have a place provided that he ran for charity.

  After all the trauma of grandson Callum's arrival in this world, Michael opted for Tommy's, a charity which supports premature babies. This left him 16 weeks to do some training and to try to raise as much sponsorship as possible. Michael was up and running, and I couldn't have been more pleased.

  All sorts of reasons militate against us running together, not least the fact that Fiona's parents live in Colchester, 140 miles away from our home in Hampshire. Even more significantly, Michael and I run at a very different pace, not surprisingly given that there are 31 years between us. But I welcomed him warmly into the running fold for so many reasons. We'd always got on well, but maybe this was the point at which the usual father-in-law/son-in-law relationship developed into the firm friendship we now enjoy.

  I'd got together with Fiona in 1986 towards the end of our modern languages degrees at Oxford, the university Michael had also attended, completing his doctorate there just before Fiona was born. His encouragement was central to my decision to return there – with Fiona in 1987 – to embark on my own doctoral research. A university librarian, Michael was well versed in research at that level. He knew what was required, and it was helpful to have someone within the family who had been there before. I completed my PhD – or DPhil, as Oxford prefers to call it – in 1990, confident that an Oxford doctorate would do wonders for my approval ratings as far as Michael was concerned.

  And now the boot was on the other foot. Just as Michael had blazed the academic trail for me to follow, so now he was dipping into my world of marathons – much to my delight. It was a vindication as much as anything else; proof – to my mind – that running stupidly long distances wasn't necessarily a daft thing to do. Of course, I loved the bizarreness of it anyway, but if two of us within the family were at it, then somehow it was legitimised. It helped that it was no longer just me doing it.