Keep on Running (32 page)

  It sounds trite, I know, but for me this is once again where marathons lift you out of the here and now, where somehow you move above your own feelings in the moment and partake of the great shared endeavour which brings everyone together on race day, full of hope and full of an energy which will be increasingly depleted as the miles lengthen. And yet, however tired we get, the links between us are never broken, the marathon binding us all in an unspoken brotherhood.

  Yes, OK, that really is trite, but the point is that exhaustion, with all its attendant confusion, so often heightens the emotions, and few things make me quite as emotional as a marathon. It can be your pain or someone else's pain, but there are moments when it feels like it is hurting us all. Of that half-marathon, my enduring memory will always be seeing a full-marathon runner, high in the woods, possibly 6 or 7 miles from the finish, stagger to the side, veer towards a marshal and collapse against him. Maybe the runner said it. Maybe the marshal recognised it. Cramp.

  The marshal eased him onto his back, cradled his outstretched foot and tried to ease his silent agony. The marshal pulled and it was silent no longer, a scream of pain filling the woods as we ran past. He screamed for all of us, and we felt it with him. I'd love to know whether he finished. I'm sure he did. Long-distance runners are made of tough stuff. He wouldn't have got that far without the stamina to finish. Besides, there was nowhere else to go. Only one trail was taking us back to Winchester.

  And so on we ran in 2008. And on. And on. The forest trails on that marathon morning were attractive, a variation on the more open scenery we had been through so far. But this was hardly the moment to enjoy them. My legs were becoming wobbly – though not to the extent that I wanted to walk. I was determined not to, and not just because it wouldn't have helped. But certainly tiredness was now my constant companion. The remaining distance was unyielding. One path led to another path, which dipped, rose and then twisted before leading to another, which then darted down to the next. It seemed like it was never going to end.

  Finally, though, we started to approach Winchester. Isolated buildings started to become slightly less isolated; fences appeared, and behind them were rows of houses, not yet urban, but somewhere in that middle ground where city and countryside merge.

  And then, not long after that, we started to hear the finish. We began to see a few runners who'd already crossed the line and were now ambling back to find friends. And then we realised that the fence to our right enclosed the school where the finish lay. Even so, it seemed to take forever to reach the gap which would take us onto the field and into the grounds where the running would finally stop.

  But I could hear the crowd. That was the main thing. I could hear the cheering. And then came the turn. And beyond the turn was the final stretch diagonally across the playing field where ropes and spectators narrowed the route and funnelled you over the line. Fiona and the children were there just to my right, with just 100 yards to go. They shouted out. They gave me the lift I needed as I pushed myself over the finish.

  Annoyingly, I have no record of my actual finishing time – which sounds bizarre for a time-obsessed runner. But this one really wasn't about the stats. I suspect I was somewhere between 4 hours and 4 hours 20 minutes, much closer to the 4:20 no doubt, but respectable, highly respectable, at the end of a stupidly tough course; one where, quite literally at times, you were taking a couple of steps forward and one step back. Gravity always seemed to win, just a little, as we tried to defeat inclines which gave us absolutely no purchase.

  There had been no snow, no ice, just mud, mud, glorious mud. Mud that spattered up your legs, engulfed your shoes, caked your hair, shot up your arms and entered your head. Mud which I wore with pride across a chest which had hit it full on. And I was happy. Very happy indeed. I don't remember the shock of stopping, something you invariably feel much more strongly on the pacier marathons. But I do remember just easing out of the whole thing very nicely. Quickly I felt fine. Rapidly I started storing it all away. I was going to dine out for years to come on this one – the tale of the day we braved torrential rain and slimy, slippery mud to run all the way – don't ask why – from Salisbury to Winchester.

The following year my country slog was the New Forest Marathon. I had wanted something for autumn 2009; the New Forest fitted the bill, not least for the fact that it was close and convenient. The big-city overseas marathons were by now firmly established as my favourites, but I had run Paris (for the third time) in the spring of 2009 (a top-20-per-cent finish with a time of 3:33:57), and I was looking to run one abroad in the spring of 2010. I wanted something different in between, and I was happy to fill the slot with another cross-country toil – another marathon where my finishing time wouldn't be the be-all and end-all, a marathon where simply finishing it was challenge enough.

  I knew from running the New Forest in 2004 that we weren't talking massive hills, but we weren't talking flat either; so not Chichester, and certainly not London. Somewhere in between, it was a consistently undulating course which would be rugged and fairly wild and probably also fairly lonely, which suited me perfectly.

  I had my entertainment all mapped out – something to take my mind off an injury which I expected to hamper me seriously on the physical front. I'd tried running with a bin bag; I'd tried running with the snots. This time I thought I'd try running with a cracked rib. I'd slipped on a rock during our family holiday that summer and fallen quite heavily. I'd had a camcorder in one hand and a camera in the other. As I fell, I saved both, instinctively stretching out my arms, which meant that I took the rock full on the chest. It hurt. It really hurt. And five weeks later, it still hurt. My big fear was that the pounding of the race over such a long distance would open up the break or at the very least produce a pain so intolerable as to make it impossible to continue.

  Fiona's view was simply 'What on earth possesses you?' For her, my behaviour was unfathomable, if not exactly unpredictable. For me, opting out was never an option. I knew I would have been in a foul mood if I hadn't at least given it a go. Fiona tried to dissuade me from running on this occasion, but in time-honoured tradition, it was advice I was never going to take.

  I had launched into the training several months before our holiday that summer, and four times during our two weeks in North Wales, I had hammered out 15 miles on the hills – tough running which was a good test of stamina. I didn't want those miles – and all those that had preceded them – to count for nothing. In preparing for a marathon, you give in to a rhythm; you push the distance and then you start to ease off, and though I had probably lost a couple of weeks because of the break, the training had gone reasonably smoothly.

  Fiona's view is that running a marathon with a cracked rib is screamingly abnormal behaviour; my view is that I had cracked it six weeks earlier, that the pain was by now more of an ache, and that I was just about fit enough to have a go. It wasn't just a perverse habit of never doing what people tell me to do: the rib was throbbing, but I had never pulled out of a marathon, and I wasn't going to start now.

  In the event, it was uncomfortable, but not overpoweringly so. I am not even sure just how much of a factor it actually was. The ache did become pain again about halfway round, but the jabbing in some ways helped me to keep going before, in the final miles, it slowly merged with the more generalised pain of running a marathon.

  Even so, I approached the whole thing with a degree of caution. Given the rib, and given the relative difficulty of the course (relative to the big-city marathons where I was now hitting 3:20–3:30), my aim was to finish within four hours. My determination was not so much to run it, but simply to enjoy it. The big-city marathons were the ones where I had a chance of beating my best. There was no hope of doing so in the New Forest, and the cracked rib lowered ambitions still further.

  No, for me, the whole point was to fulfil a little ambition I'd been harbouring for years, one which meant that on the day I took in very little of the scenery. I'd always been a huge Beatles fan, and ever since George Harrison's death on 29 November 2001, I had wanted to pay my own tribute. A marathon nut, I let that tribute take marathon form.

  My idea was to run against a soundtrack of continuous, chronological Beatles tracks and see on which album I would finish. It took me until 2009 to work out how to do this. It then became a question of just how many albums I needed.

  The worst scenario would be not to put enough on, run a horribly slow race and finish in silence. Using the wonders of iTunes, I hedged my bets and stuck on everything up to
Magical Mystery Tour
, The Beatles' second 1967 recording after
Sgt Pepper
. The aim was to finish well inside that. I wanted to hit 1966. To finish close to four hours would be to finish somewhere during the
Revolver
album, an appealing prospect because it had always been a favourite of mine.

  By now I was routinely running to music. In my early marathons, I had felt it would be impolite to do so. It felt wrong to be shutting out all the people who were roaring us runners on, but after a while the need for a relentless running rhythm took precedence. Besides, for the New Forest Marathon, there really wouldn't be many people to shut out anyway. Plus, I felt sure that my Beatles tribute would be a huge part of the fun. Perhaps the only part.

  In the event, it provided plenty of moments of quiet amusement. The Beatles, so they say, are the soundtrack to our lives. They've got a song for every mood and every moment, or so it seemed as I ran along. 'Misery' as the second song was premature, but 'Ask Me Why' was appropriate. I still don't know the answer. Maybe the answer lies in 'There's a Place' if you take it to refer to the finish.

  The Beatles' second album,
With The Beatles
, offered similar moments with the encouraging 'It Won't Be Long', the reassuring 'All I've Got To Do' (i.e. keep on running), and the worrying 'Not a Second Time' (not what you need on your return to a race).

  The third album,
A Hard Day's Night
, had the bonus of a vaguely appropriate title track. It also offered another imponderable with 'Tell Me Why', and then quick-fire pessimism and optimism with 'I'll Cry Instead' and 'I'll Be Back', plus the ominous 'I Should Have Known Better'. 'You Can't Do That' was a bit of a downer; 'When I Get Home' offered hope.

  The next album,
Beatles For Sale
, threatened 'I'm a Loser' before concluding 'I Don't Want To Spoil the Party'. It also pondered 'What You're Doing'.

  Album number five said it all in the title track 'Help!', before
Rubber Soul
offered a sane alternative, 'Drive My Car', rapidly followed by the sublime and wonderfully appropriate middle-of-nowhere song 'Nowhere Man'. 'In My Life' will lift any moment in my life, and it was followed by the stop-start contradiction of 'Wait' and 'Run for Your Life' – by which time the finish wasn't so very far away, signalled by the start of the
Revolver
album, offering Paul McCartney at his upbeat best with the cheery 'Good Day Sunshine'.

  And so The Beatles dragged me to the finishing line. I crossed it as Paul, as jolly as ever, blasted my lugholes with 'Got to Get You into My Life'. Marathon done;
Revolver
still rolling; mission accomplished.

  The start had been in New Milton, and the route had taken in various places, including Wootton, Burley and Sway, along the way. The course was resolutely rural, some main roads every now and again, but a lot of tracks through the woods and endless country paths. Unlike the Isle of Wight Marathon, we were in company for the most part. I remember passing a wizened little man in a home-printed T-shirt proclaiming that this was his 157th marathon – an astonishing achievement, though you couldn't help wondering what he would have looked like without those 157 marathons. But more power to his knees – and he was still going at an impressive rate.

  From time to time, mostly on the decent roads, we could see a long way ahead, often a good thing, inspiring almost, especially as the weather was bright, the conditions were good and the temperature was perfect. As I have said, the course certainly undulated and there were a couple of steady uphill drags, but never to the extent that it wore me down in the Isle of Wight way, and with the miles clearly marked, the distance soon started to stack up.

  The water stations were good; I stayed ahead of looming dehydration and somehow, urged on by The Beatles, simply kept going, and this, apart from The Beatles, is my main memory of the day. There were several moments in the last quarter where I felt drained, but I never felt as if I was running on empty. I found a rhythm and I stuck to it, turning in a workmanlike performance during which I never set a cracking (or even rib-cracking) pace, but nor did I slow. It was a steady-as-you-go performance, which didn't significantly diminish. I didn't fade. The Beatles and plenty of water did the rest.