Keep on Running (25 page)

  Fiona tells me I looked shot away at that stage, every effort focused on just keeping going, which I did, and slowly the finish inched nearer. Maybe ten minutes before I got there, the sun came out, and by the time I finished, the sky was suddenly as blue as it had been the day before. Dublin was determined to have the last laugh on the toughest of days.

  But, as with all tough marathons, I did feel a certain grim satisfaction. You've stopped banging your head against the wall. You've stopped dropping the hammer on your foot, and at last it feels good. And even now, I can't helping smiling at my 20 miles in a bin bag – smiling while at the same time thinking how unspeakably stupid I had been.

  Perhaps the point is that when you are tired, you really do stop thinking logically. 'Marathon brains' is the best way of describing it. You enter into a strange, isolated world where you torment yourself about the things you cannot control, but miss the blindingly obvious things you can actually change.

  The finish was in Merrion Square, one of the most attractive sights in Dublin; classical, elegant and classy – and so typical of a city centre which once again seemed all of those things in the bright sunshine. It didn't take long to find Fiona and the children, and I am sure I looked quite a state, unable to stand straight, weather-beaten and exhausted.

  I slumped down beside the railings which enclose the square. I ached, but not enough to stop me thinking some deeply pretentious thoughts about the healing power of the sun. Sitting on my pavement, I closed my eyes, lifted my face and thought just what a gorgeous sensation it was to feel the sun on my skin. Adam and Laura sat down either side of me. No one said a word for several minutes. I needed time to come back to me before I could come back to them.

  But it strikes me now how odd it was that the children never once thought to ask me that question so beloved of children everywhere. This was the first time they had seen me at the end of a marathon, and yet as they looked at me, it didn't occur to them to ask: 'Why?' Perhaps it was because I'd done it all their lives, bar the first two years of Adam's. They accepted it as normal in an abnormal kind of way. You can imagine the playground conversations. 'What does your dad do?' 'Oh, he likes to go fishing. What about yours?' 'Oh, you know, he just likes to run himself into the ground for four hours in torrential rain dressed in a bin bag, you know the kind of thing.'

  But even if they had asked me, I doubt I would have been able to frame a sensible answer. Arguably, I still couldn't. 'Because' is the only possible response. 'Because I do.'

  My finishing time was 3:40:38, positioning me 1,475th out of just over 8,000 finishers – and as I look at those stats now, a big part of me wants to shout 'So what on earth have you been whingeing about?' I guess the answer is that this was one of those instances where the position was much more satisfying than the time achieved, which is a problem when time is the thing you instinctively measure a marathon by. The placement was impressive for a non-club runner on a tough day, but that doesn't change the fact that placement can never be more than the consolation prize when the golden ticket of a PB has been denied you.

  I did the first half of the race in about 1:40. The second half came up in two hours, such was the extent of my slowing. But for hours afterwards people were streaming in, which was gratifying in its way. The Dublin course record for men at the time was ten minutes off the world record and the best women's time was a strangely slow 2:35-ish, so I guess you have to take into account the fact that it wasn't a quick course.

  Even so, I look back on Dublin as my stupidity marathon, just as Amsterdam had been my misjudgement marathon. Having perfected in Amsterdam a route to disaster which involved fixating on a specific finishing time, I went for out-and-out idiocy in Dublin, indulging a piece of foolishness so foolish that it goes off the top of the foolish scale. I shudder at the thought of it. What on earth was I thinking? Except, of course, I
wasn't
thinking.

  My Amsterdam and Dublin experiences left me starting to think that my Paris time of 3:27 six months earlier was probably an aberration, the kind of result you get only on that rarest of rare occasions when absolutely everything goes right. My Amsterdam and Dublin times were 3:37 and 3:40 respectively, times so closely clustered that I started to think that this was probably my natural time.

  But even after 3 hours 40 minutes of grind in Dublin, the day wasn't done yet. This wasn't so much a marathon as a triathlon. Within a couple of hours of the marathon, we were heading home on the ferry, being tossed around by seas so stormy that even the crooner had to give up and stop singing. A triathlon because part two (the ferry) was followed by part three, a 300-mile drive home, from North Wales back to Hampshire on endless motorway in the middle of the night.

  And this is where I am prepared to admit to yet more stupidity. Fiona repeatedly offered to drive, but I insisted that I wanted to, and I just kept going – perhaps in expiation for a disappointing marathon. I suppose I wanted to redeem the race – a stupid reaction given that in the cold light of day there can't possibly be any connection between the run and the return home.

   I was awake and invigorated, and we got home safely and without incident, but I suppose it does have to count as daft, given that another driver was available and more than willing. Perhaps it's an insight into the marathon mind. Running marathons is all about setting yourself targets and challenges. Marathons are all about the feeling of 'I've got to do it'. Subconsciously, I was trying to make up for the day's setback by setting a new challenge straight away. Foolish. It didn't make the marathon any better in retrospect.

When you have a stinker such as Dublin, there's nothing you can do except try to be philosophical. Not in the sense of reaching for Nietzsche. Rather, you just try to put it down to experience and hope you'll bounce back. With Dublin, just as with Amsterdam, the only way to move on was to do another – which suggests a freedom that most blokes probably simply don't have. I'm married with children and have a job, but marathons were here to stay as far as I was concerned. Fiona recognised it too. She doubted my sanity at times, but never for a moment opposed my running.

  Thus it became a question of working the running around all the other commitments we had – and if nothing else, the Dublin experience at least suggested one way how. Dublin had been the first marathon I'd combined with a family holiday, and apart from the run itself, it had worked out extremely well.

  We'd been wanting to take the children to Paris for a while, and so Paris once again became my next marathon, in April 2006. In my defence, it wasn't simply a question of 'think of a marathon and then tack on a holiday'. It was much more positive than that. The marathon made us get ourselves organised and do something we'd long been intending to do. All we needed now was to reverse the order of ceremonies. Dublin had confirmed the folly of having the holiday first and then doing the marathon. This time we would do things the right way round from the point of view of my running.

  Fiona and I are both modern languages graduates, and Adam and Laura, by now nine and seven, had started to do a little French at school. We were keen for them to progress, and it was time for them to get to know one of the world's most beautiful cities, an experience which came with the added excitement of travelling there and back under the sea. For us (older) Brits, it's a truly novel experience to sit on a train and end up in a country which speaks a different language. In our student days, we'd InterRailed to our hearts' content, always more than a little gobsmacked at that great experience of standing in a European mainland train station and totting up all the different countries that you could reach without once getting on a boat.

  From a London station, Edinburgh and Glasgow were about as exotic as it got. In Paris or Stuttgart or Vienna, the world (well, Europe at least) was your oyster. But now, since the advent of the Channel Tunnel, we too can be part of that great sense of countries joining together. Those awful coach journeys to Paris were a thing of the past, with all that tedious getting on and off at a ferry port in the middle of the night. Now we Brits had joined the gang. Catch Eurostar and, at the price of having half an hour's worth of sea over your head, you could be in a different land all without leaving the comfort of your seat.

  Another big bonus, of course, was that it was so wonderfully easy to sign up for the Paris Marathon with that instant confirmation email. I secured my place soon after we got back from Ireland, and life seemed good. I was twitchy whenever I didn't have a marathon on the horizon, and now I had a good one, along with the perfect pretext for planning a treat for all of us.

We travelled out on the Friday; I ran the marathon on the Sunday; and we then had three days to stroll the boulevards.

  The weather was perfect throughout, another of those important elements which fortunately slipped into place this time. And just to add to the family feel, we were joined by Fiona's brother, Alistair, on the race day itself. It was another sociable time in Paris, and again the togetherness of it all – just as it had with Marc, his family and Michael a couple of years before – added hugely to the experience. Factor in that base support and you factor in a precious stepping stone on the path towards eventual success – priceless when it comes to knocking off a minute or two.

  In the intervening two years, Amsterdam and Dublin had surfaced to suggest, whatever excuses I could offer, that I was definitely getting slower. For that reason, I can't say I was overly confident about my Paris performance. A few days before the race, I had also twisted my ankle, doing nothing more heroic than walking to Marks & Spencer's for a sandwich. Mostly it was fine to walk on, but there was a lateral movement, which I couldn't quite pinpoint, which sent razor-sharp pain shooting up my leg. It gave me grief the day before the race at the Paris Marathon registration, and I started seriously to doubt that I could run at all. In the event, so strange is the world of running, it gave me no problems at all – a great relief and perhaps the final element of good fortune I needed. Another factor was that I went into it with a couple of months' worth of intervals under my belt.

  Also helping on the day was the fact that 2006 was the race's 30th anniversary, a landmark which added greatly to the fun and the colour of the event. We were given special 30th-anniversary yellow sunhats, which everyone wore for a picture at the start. It must have looked lovely from above. Down below, there was the traditional swill of piss and ponchos – something which was starting to seem typical of the Paris Marathon. But from above, we must have been quite a sight, resplendent in our matching hats – a fine start to a race which became more and more enjoyable as the morning wore on.

  Once again I was back in the world of five-minute kilometres. Rather than focusing on 4:45 minute-kilometres for an eventual 3:20 finish, I decided to look at it the other way. Five-minute kilometres would get me there in 3:30. The task was simply to build up minutes in hand and then not let them go. It seemed a more practical, more encouraging approach, and soon it started to pay dividends

  I reached 10 km in 47 minutes, which gave me three minutes in hand just under a quarter of the way round. I wondered whether it was enough, but at this stage the main thing was that I was feeling comfortable and looking forward to the next section of the race, the country trek through the Bois de Vincennes. Even-numbered miles were again marked in Paris, and the 10-mile marker came up in good time. I trotted out all my reasons for liking the number ten. I'd reached double figures and there were just 16 miles left, which always sounds manageable. For once, I was managing to think in both miles and kilometres – a definite rarity in marathon conditions.