Keep on Running (18 page)

  Three of us had set out on the Eurostar from Waterloo the day before. Each of us had achieved something, and we each enjoyed each other's success as much as we did our own. I couldn't run a marathon in 3:17, as Marc had done; and I certainly couldn't keep running for 5 hours 34 minutes, as Michael had done. And yet, for me, it was 'job done' too, my first day as a sub-3:30 marathon runner.
La
vie
was definitely
belle
.

One of the most genuinely bizarre aspects of running a marathon is that you celebrate it by stopping. Not just stopping on the finishing line, but you actually stop running for a few weeks. To an extent, it becomes a habit. You step off the conveyor belt – a necessary response, if only to underline the fact that the marathon was an end point in itself. You build up to it, you count the number of runs left until you are running for real and then suddenly you cast aside your trainers as a mark of respect. Mission accomplished, you pause before the next one.

  Partly, and more obviously, it's also a question of recharging depleted batteries. By then you are ready for a rest, but subliminally it has always seemed to me that something slightly darker is happening.

  You are waiting for withdrawal symptoms to set in. You've been so focused on the big day for weeks that it's good to remind yourself of the emptiness which comes when you just don't run. To start with, it's great. You enjoy those extra hours in bed at the weekend; during the week, you look out into the darkness and rain and you think, 'Huh, I'm glad I'm not going out in that.' But beneath the superficial laziness, just waiting to break through, something much more primal is gathering momentum, something you are allowing yourself to discover anew: the fact that you actually want to run. Rest, and you will refresh your hunger, sharpen it and refocus it.

  For the weeks before the marathon, you run because you have to run, because you've mapped out a training schedule, however idiosyncratic, and you are trying to keep to it – if only because keeping to it will be a big part of your confidence on the day. All of which obscures the fact that running is actually something you want to do. Moreover, it's something which your body is expecting you to do. Desist for a while, and it won't be long before your mind starts to long for it and your body starts to crave it.

  You sense the pressure building up, and you let it build up a bit more, knowing that the moment of release will be all the sweeter. I usually manage to hold off for a couple of weeks, which probably sounds a ludicrously short break, but by then the cracks in what I like to consider my usual sunny demeanour have started to show. Mr Grumpy moves in and takes up residence. Fiona is convinced she can tell whether or not I have had a run, and she can certainly tell when I need one.

  It's not quite cold turkey, more what the Aussie cricketers used to like to call mental disintegration before they started succumbing to it themselves. You start to feel fat, and no matter how much the feeling flies in the face of all evidence, it's a feeling which grows as you feel increasingly de-energised, lardy and slothful. When the children were small, my yardstick was that I needed a run when I started hearing myself say too frequently, 'Adam, will you fetch this?'; 'Adam, will you fetch that?' If I've had a run, I simply get up and fetch it myself. Time and again, it seems the only way to replenish energy is to expend it. As the French say,
l'appétit vient en mangeant.
So it is with running.

  And so it is with missing a run. Even when I've really, really not wanted to go for a run, I've forced myself, knowing the satisfaction of having gone will be worth its weight in gold compared to the self-flagellating grumpiness of not having gone. Once running has got hold of you, all you can do is obey; once marathons have got hold of you, all you can do is decide which one next.

  On the back of Paris, I thought I would turn my attention to Amsterdam. After London and New York, I had already felt I was getting the hang of these big cities. And I wanted more. Amsterdam was an obvious one to try, another database marathon which is easy to get into. Just as with Paris, you pick your moment, you whip out your credit card and within seconds you've got an email confirmation: you're in. I was now in the habit of running a spring and an autumn marathon, occasionally throwing in an extra one. Amsterdam on Sunday, 17 October was to be my autumn treat for 2004, another notch on my growing list of countries conquered.

  It would be a hectic weekend, flying out on the Saturday morning and heading back on the Sunday after the race. With the children at school, there was no way we could turn it into a family break, and I wasn't keen to use up holiday allowance without them. We decided that I would go off alone, not something I particularly relished, but the marathon bug was strong, and I felt I was getting stronger. I had eaten into my finishing time over successive marathons, and I wanted to eat some more.

  A huge part of the attraction was also that Amsterdam in the autumn would be the perfect complement to Paris in the springtime: another legendarily beautiful city at an attractive time of year. The Venice of the North, with its characteristic architecture reflecting in those endlessly alluring canals, strongly appealed to me. Throw in the gorgeous colours of the season, and I was hoping to come close to my New York experience of a year before.

  Cost, too, was a factor. It was barely an hour's flight from Southampton Airport, just a few miles up the road from home. In fact, it was so close that, in one of those appealing quirks of European timekeeping, you actually arrive home – regaining the hour – at pretty much the time you took off.

  In short, it was a marathon which ticked all the boxes: close enough, but still exotic; no great disruption to family life, but still a chance to go on a plane (always a big plus in my book) to a beautiful city which was relatively cheap to get to.

  And when I studied the course, I soon saw another reason to lap it up. The marathon starts and ends in the city's Olympic Stadium. How inspiring was that going to be? What a prospect. First New York and then Paris had underlined the importance of picking an inspiring course. The thought of running on an Olympic track had me drooling. And then, in between, when tiredness set in, just how inspiring were those canals going to be? As marathons go, it looked ideal.

  I was psyched up and confident as I flew off on that Saturday morning in October 2004. Soon after arrival, I discovered to my delight that registration was just a few minutes from the Olympic Stadium. Disappointingly, the stadium turned out to be a fairly ugly building from the outside, but the glimpse of the track I got through the main entrance looked enticing. A historic running track was bound to put a spring in our step, I told myself.

  But then things started to go wrong. I've always prided myself on having an excellent sense of direction, but after registering, I struggled for a couple of hours to locate my hotel. I found a street plan but I couldn't see the road anywhere. I wandered into a hotel and asked. The guy replied, 'That's almost in Belgium' – which wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear. Eventually I found it, but a preparation which involved a flight and getting lost wasn't good. Nor was a poor night's sleep – even though I kept telling myself that the night before a marathon wasn't the night that mattered.

  I was finally asleep when the alarm went off at 6.20 a.m., which was far too early. I can't imagine why I set it for that time, save to say it's possibly some kind of Pavlovian conditioning. If you're doing a marathon, you get up stupidly early – really stupidly in this case, given that the marathon started at 11 a.m., which was far too late – an hour and a quarter after London and two and a quarter hours after Paris. I lay on the bed for a couple of hours, had a light breakfast and idly waited for the time to pass. Instead of mounting excitement, I felt a deepening gloom for no reason I could fathom.

  Finally, I left the hotel at about ten to nine and joined a train, which was already full of marathon runners. It took a quarter of an hour to get to the marathon stop and then five minutes to walk to the sports hall which served as marathon HQ.

  In keeping with Paris, this was a marathon which ended where it started. I dumped my bag in a big hall divided into sections according to your running number – all very straightforward. I queued for the loo several times, largely to waste time and then, to my annoyance, I started to get worried about being hungry. I bought a biscuit and a coffee. 11 a.m. was a bad time to start. You really don't want to be running right through a time of day when your body might reasonably be expecting to get fed, but there was no way round it. For a 9 a.m. start, you want to be having a light breakfast soon after six. For an 11 a.m. start, it was all much more difficult to compute, and I suspect I got it wrong.

  The other problem was that the later start gave us all far too much time to think about it, and the more I thought about it, the less appealing the whole prospect became. I glanced outside the sports hall at the dark grey skies. The temperature had dropped significantly from the day before. The morning was overcast and threatening to deteriorate. The air was chilled. It had been raining heavily when I woke up, and it looked as if the rain would return any second.

  The sensible thing, partly to get in the mood, would have been to wait around outside, and plenty of people did, but I didn't fancy it, hanging back instead in the relative warmth of the sports hall – a decision which probably nibbled away at my confidence even more.

  Finally I emerged at about 10.40 to join the crowds wandering towards the start, a few minutes' walk away. Some people were jogging gently, which seemed daft.
Surely the first kilometre or so is going to be
warm-up enough
, I thought miserably. But, of course, they were doing the right thing. I was shivering and hunching up; they were loosening and starting to focus. I was beginning to dread; they were starting to synch body and mind.

  Inside the stadium the atmosphere was good, which lifted my spirits a little as we assembled for the off. A choir was singing on a huge, temporary stage, and there was a reasonable number of supporters in the stands which rose up above us all the way round. I walked around the outside of the track and found the pink starting zone, the colour corresponding to the time I had said I hoped I'd finish in – 3 hours to 3 hours 30 minutes, the third group back from the front. The organisation was good, which is always an early comfort, and slowly I found myself being sucked into the zone, both mentally and physically. There was quite a buzz.

  The fact that we were standing on an Olympic track definitely added to the sense of occasion, but it was noticeable that people were looking cold already. People were jumping up and down on the spot in an effort to keep warm. Runners were reluctant to discard their bin bags and extra layers. I was among the many who left it to the last couple of minutes to cast aside sweatshirt and extra T-shirt, flinging them into the trackside piles which generally get donated to the homeless at these events.

  Just as in Paris, I didn't hear whatever it was that started the run, but suddenly we surged forward, stopped and then surged again in the time-honoured big-city marathon way. I was over the line in about 40 seconds, which I was delighted with. This wasn't a marathon remotely on the London, Paris or New York scale. It was much smaller and, on a more forgiving day, it would have been much more manageable. But at least we were away, and with no hold-ups or significant bunching, it was all looking more promising.

  After a couple of hundred metres of track, we left the stadium and disgorged onto the streets where it was suddenly all just a fraction tighter, or so it seemed – an impression which lasted just a few minutes as the wide avenues opened up ahead of us.

  This was my second marathon in kilometres and once again I came armed with a wristband, having printed out one which promised to get me around in 3:20. After New York and Paris, I was feeling ambitious. It meant having to keep my wits about me. The 3:30 wristband which had been such a success in Paris demanded five-minute kilometres. For the 3:20 schedule, I had to be doing kilometres in about 4:45, not such an easy figure to multiply in your head.

   But, of course, it was more complicated than that. Wristband times don't allow for the inevitable slowing across the second half of the race. I calculated that, just as in Paris, I needed to have five minutes in hand at the halfway mark, but I knew that working that into multiples of 4:45 was never going to be easy.

  From the stadium, we launched into a big, rectangular route, which, bizarrely, after 7 kilometres, took us back into the stadium. The fourth and long top side of the rectangle was a couple of kilometres through the Vondelpark, a picturesque run through a lovely autumnal open space. Conditions were damp from the overnight rain, and a glance at the skies suggested it was only a matter of minutes before more rain hammered down. More worryingly, even after 5 or 6 kilometres, I didn't feel that I had remotely warmed up. I wasn't into my stride, and inside I felt cold. Rather than slipping into an expansive forward flow, I was hunched and uptight.