Keep on Running (22 page)

  The sun never gained much strength as the day wore on. To an extent I could read from the shadows whether it was mud or ice which awaited me, but it wasn't exactly a knowledge I could do much with. I just had to keep on keeping on. I can't even remember whether there were mile markers and I have no recollection at all of the water stations, though there must have been some. It was all about trying to find – and eventually finding – the fun in a race which would have been tough enough on hard ground, but which was now starting to seem like the oddest of lotteries.

  Inevitably, the thickest snow was on the highest ground – a point, I seem to remember, where we ran a big loop around a wide-open patch, three-quarters of the way into the race. I hadn't a clue where I was, but here, I hate to say it, I dropped to a walk for about ten minutes. Someone said we were about 20 miles to the good, but the temperature had dropped. Briefly, I lost it, conscious that my walk was probably about the same speed as my run anyway. I let the walk take over for ten minutes, thinking that nothing much – probably not even face – was being lost. But then bloody-mindedness reasserted itself. I cursed myself, told myself I was an idiot, useless, hopeless and worse and forced myself back into a trot, which inevitably was the point at which things started to seem easier again – not for the fact of having had a breather, but more because this was simply the motion my aching body had congealed into before my walk.

  Presumably the last few miles were downhill. They must have been. By now I was seriously plodding, but with the plod was growing a kind of smugness. It was tough, really tough, but I was going to get back. There wasn't any point looking at a watch. This was a run way outside anything I had ever done before. Time didn't enter into it. All that mattered was finishing, especially as I was starting to feel uncomfortably cold – which is a rare and worrying thing on a long-distance run. The minimum is always the best thing to run in. You might take along more, but you'll soon discard it or wish you had once you're off. But that didn't seem to be the case on the day of the Steyning Stinger. The route home seemed to be much more in the shadow, the temperature seemed to be dropping all the time, and that alone was the best possible reason for shuffling onwards, finally reaching the flat which would take me back to the start for the lowest of low-key finishes. No crowds, no banners, no cheers. Just someone with a clipboard. But that was more than enough. It was all I wanted.

  They were serving teas and coffees in the leisure-centre canteen when I finally reached it. A couple of dozen runners were there already, readmitting themselves to the human race, defrosting their frozen bodies and mulling it all over. I've no idea how many runners completed the course, but it can't have been many. I grabbed a drink, sat down and started chatting with the others.

  I couldn't take my eyes off the hands of the chap sitting opposite me. They looked like dead flesh. They weren't just colourless; they were lifeless. He couldn't help but see me staring, and he started to explain the circulation problem which he suffered from in low-temperature conditions. I went to get him another cup of coffee. It was steaming in a thin plastic cup which he wrapped his hands round without the slightest wince of discomfort. It was obvious that he had almost no feeling in his hands whatsoever. He kept saying that the sensation would come back, but they looked utterly beyond revival and it was difficult to see that burning them was going to help.

  'Have you had a good morning?' I asked him. 'Yes,' he grinned. 'Great. Really great.' And the worrying thing was that he meant it – worrying until I realised that I too, despite the mud, the ice, the snow and the hills – or perhaps because of them – had had a great time too.

  I haven't kept a record of my time on the Steyning Stinger, but I am reasonably sure it was around the 4:20 mark – nine minutes or so slower than I had achieved seven years earlier on my marathon debut in the wonderfully supportive atmosphere of London.

  But 4 hours 20 minutes in such terrain felt good. By now I was generally marathoning at around 3 hours 30 minutes on the flat in the big cities, something I was clearly never going to do in Steyning. But my Steyning time suggested a significant improvement in stamina, which was gratification enough. And I was home for a late lunch, knackered but deliciously invigorated. You're supposed to believe eight impossible things before breakfast. OK, so it was only one. But I hadn't just believed it. I had actually done it.

A month later, I was back for the big one, the London Marathon of 2005. It was a strange affair, run in a time not my own with a knee not my own.

  As anticipated, I ran it with Jane, who was making her London Marathon debut. We completed it together in 4:20, a time which didn't stretch me, I am pleased to say – a measure of my progress since my own London Marathon debut. But I am not sure that I could have run it much faster anyway, because I had a bursar. At least, that was what I heard when the doctor first told me. Fleetingly I had wondered what a public school money-man had to do with the price of eggs, but then the doctor explained: not a bursar, but a bursa – the ignominy of housemaid's knee. Chafed nipples had been bad enough, but this really did seem the ultimate indignity. My knee was a squidgy mass of wobbly fluid, a condition more usually caused by too much time down on your knees vigorously polishing and scrubbing. I pleaded most definitely 'not guilty' to that kind of activity, but my knee argued otherwise.

  I was lean and fit in every other department, but it dragged me down that I seemed to have borrowed one of my knees from the Michelin Man. It was raw, red, puffy and horribly big. Two or three times in the week before, I had had it drained at our doctors' surgery, trying not to look as vast syringes gorged themselves on the yucky yellow-red fluid my knee was apparently floating in. But still the fluid came back. I started to write the run off, but to my astonishment and delight, the doctor didn't advise against running. I simply ran with my knee tightly strapped, and surprisingly it did the trick – albeit in a marathon in which I didn't have to extend myself fully. If I was ever going to get housemaid's knee – oh the shame! – before a marathon, at least it was this one, one which wasn't about finishing times as far as I was concerned. All that mattered was getting Jane round safe and sound at a pace she was happy with.

  I felt in control at every point, which perhaps underlines the extent to which marathons are run in the mind. I was so focused on helping Jane round, sorting out her drinks and her gels, that I didn't think about any tiredness I ought to be feeling myself. Consequently I didn't feel any. Retrospectively, I probably ran it as a 4 hours 20 minutes pacer might have done. Finally I saw how pacers managed it. They ran at a pace well within their natural time. That's why pacers float by, chatting, at ease with the world, untroubled, unflustered, unbothered. That's why they had left me so woefully far behind in Amsterdam. They were coasting; I was clinging on.

  And at the end of it, I felt as a pacer probably does. They've run unselfishly in a race which was never about them. Consequently my personal craving wasn't sated. I needed more of that marathon drug. Steyning had been a blast (an icy one); London had come and gone almost unnoticed; and Dublin was still six months away. There was nothing for it but to head overseas. Well, across the Solent. The Isle of Wight is just a short ferry ride away, and the Isle of Wight Marathon beckoned.

The Isle of Wight Marathon is broadly in the Chichester up-and-down cross-country category. Right from the start, I suspected it was going to be a good one. From the outset, you couldn't fail to be impressed by the organisation; nothing fussy, nothing more than necessary, but efficient and on the ball – the perfect cushion for the feat of endurance ahead of us that Sunday morning in May 2005.

  The course starts and ends in Ryde; in between times, you run a big circle, starting to the south-west before heading back home from the south-east. The route takes you from Ryde to Newport, through Blackwater, Rookley and Sandford, across to Shanklin, north to Sandown and Brading and then back to Ryde, a description which betrays nothing of the fact that this is a marathon which is relentlessly up and down, a real and persistent drag on your determination.

  The hills, many long and steady, begin fairly soon after the start. After a while, you cease to enjoy the downhills that follow, for the simple reason that you know that before long you will be going uphill again.

  You also cease to enjoy them for the fact that they actually start to hurt. You tire yourself as you go up, but force of gravity means that inevitably you pound your legs even harder on the way down. Eventually it takes its toll. It's an established fact (unless I've just made it up) that in running you are much more prone to injury on a downhill. The Isle of Wight Marathon is for many the proof of the pudding. Downhill, your stride is that little bit longer; gravity means you crunch your knees and your ankles with greater impact; and the chances are that your joints will protest somewhere along the line. Mine certainly did – and quite vehemently.

  But it was a good course, one for the serious-minded marathon runner – good in the sense that it was bound to test your body and also your resolve to the limit. We hadn't even left Ryde and already we were climbing, a foretaste of hills to come. Thereafter we were constantly heading up and down. The roads were good for 6 or 7 miles, all the way to Newport, but after that we were much more on country – rather than main – roads, and the hills seemed to get bigger all the time – a reflection, most likely, of their frequency rather than their actual size.

  With a limited field, this was another marathon where the runners were rapidly stretched out, and for long periods there was no one much in front of me and seemingly no one behind, though every now and again someone would storm past, leaving me wondering where they'd been all along. Or if they had suddenly had an excess of renewed energy? If so, how? I wanted some!

  Rather worse, from the motivational point of view, was the fact that this wasn't a marathon that impacted much on the island. We were very carefully marshalled and protected from car traffic at every point, much to the organisers' credit, but it was not a day which brought the islanders out in support. For the most part we were running on an island going about its daily business, rather than making us its daily business – a sobering little thought for any marathon runners who get their kicks from the big cities and their crowds.

  Run the London Marathon and you'll feel like you are the centre of the universe. Run the Isle of Wight Marathon and you'll feel like you are on a back road between Rookley and Sandford, which is precisely where you will be at one point. There's nothing to lift you out of the here and now – though, in fairness, the marathon never actually claimed that there would be. All I mean is that this was a different kind of marathon, one where the route was actually working against you. In New York and Paris it helps you glide, just as it does at significant points in London. Similarly Steyning, in all its ludicrousness, had a certain quality which urged you on. But here, there was no boost from the seemingly endless up-and-down dreary greyness of the Isle of Wight on a dreary grey day.

  The morning had dawned dull and had proceeded to get duller still. The route from Ryde to Newport isn't exactly the island at its most attractive, and Newport itself isn't exactly the most beautiful of places. We weren't going to be seeing the lovely coastline, but I would have hoped for a few more of the picturesque villages. Sadly, they were in short supply. I had to fall back on my old habits of creating significance for the numbers from one to 26, getting ever more obscure in my reasons for enjoying them. When I got bored with that, I made the mistake of trying to reel off Aussie opening batsmen – a task I soon abandoned. There is something about that kind of exercise that I simply cannot cope with in a marathon. I always hope that it will ease the passing of the miles, but it doesn't. Instead, it replaces grind with frustration as I struggle to retain names I know I can list easily in other circumstances. It simply makes a bad thing worse.