Keep on Running (33 page)

  Coming 195th out of 514 finishers, I completed the course in 3:54:54. Job done. Rib not significantly worse. I was satisfied. I'd done something I'd been intending to do for years, and in the process I'd come up with a novel approach to marathon running, definitely a way to renew the interest. And by the end of it, marathon number 21 was in the bag. Thank you, The Beatles.

  And thank you, Fiona, ever-forgiving of my stubbornness, who was there with the children to greet me. It was terrific to see them just a few hundred yards before the finishing line. Knowing they would be there had been a help, and it was great to be looked after once the race was over. Instantly, I felt frozen, shivery and decidedly fragile. I had a craving for a hot drink, and Fiona went off into the school, where the race starts and ends, to ask for one. The receptionist suggested she try the next village, which amused us hugely.

  Presumably the receptionist thought we wanted cream tea with the full works, which conjured lovely images of me sweating into bone china amid all the gentility of little old ladies on their afternoon out. Fiona explained the need was rather more pressing than that and was directed to a vending machine, from which she returned with the most welcome cup of coffee I have ever had.

  Maybe it was a reaction to the rib; maybe there was an element of shock to the body from finally stopping, but I felt chilled to the core. The weather had been fine, but I wasn't. Slowly, though, with that coffee, the warmth flowed back into me; it was wonderfully restorative and exactly what I needed.

By now, country collecting was a big part of my marathon running – partly a reaction to the fact that it was getting so tough to knock time off, and bound to get tougher. My thinking was that I might as well measure my marathon pleasures in some other way. In March 2010, Rome added Italy to my list. It also added one or two standout memories – though perhaps not quite for the right reasons.

  Rome was also my first Garmin marathon, the first I had run with that high-powered GPS wristwatch which tracks your every route and then throws it all up on your computer screen in glorious Technicolor. I'd been wanting a Garmin for ages, but until I actually got one, I had simply no idea just how much it would transform my running, changing my approach in ways that I could never have imagined, and releasing the anorak inside me and giving him a field day.

  There are all sorts of ways you can measure your running on the mind-bogglingly brilliant Garmin 305, a fact which is doubtless true of all sorts of other makes and models. The way I quickly focused on was minutes per mile, in other words pace rather than speed (miles per hour). My mission in life became to run miles in 7 minutes 30 seconds; in other words, at 8 miles an hour. More specifically, the aim was to do so for as long as I possibly could. The closer I could come to doing so over marathon distance, the closer I could come to achieving marathon times of around 3:20. It was as simple as that.

  By now I had long since abandoned running in the dark in favour of early-morning midweek runs, plus a long weekend run. The ability to measure every step along the way brought renewed focus and intensity to my running just when I needed it.

  But at the same time, it soon became clear that there was something just a touch double-edged about running with a sports watch. Having your very own GPS tracking system with you at all times is a liberation in all sorts of ways, creating and sating a craving for all sorts of instant information. I wished I'd had one years ago. But alongside that freedom, it also introduced a constraint. It meant that every run mattered, which meant that every run was tough. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it's that the novelty of the Garmin hadn't worn off. But the Garmin brought an end to coasting and, with it, an end to some of the pleasure of weekly training.

  Its mere presence started to force me down very narrow lines. When it's suddenly all about measuring pace and/or speed, I found myself thinking twice before heading up a long hill, even if it was the way to some of my favourite running country. Slog too long up a hill, and I'd never have decent stats at the end of it. Slowly and subtly, my sports watch started to dictate my path. Given half a chance, I opted for the flat – which proved extremely limiting in the heart of rural Hampshire, where there really isn't too much flat to be had. I started to become terribly bored of the few bits I could find.

  There are all sorts of fantastic things you can do with a sports watch. You can run against a set pace or you can run against yourself over a previous performance on a route you've already recorded. But the basic measurement of minutes per mile struck me straightaway as the guiding principle that I needed, and my training became rooted around it. And because of it, my running routes suddenly started to seem a bit pedestrian. There wasn't any longer any great scope for the dash-down-here invention which meant a run could take you anywhere. And if I did factor in a few hills, I then felt obliged to run the same route the following week just to measure myself against it. It wasn't enough just to do a route. With the endless scope for comparison that a sports watch sets up, I had to do it quicker. Otherwise, what was the point? It all became rather too regimented for my liking.

  My training for Rome fell into a pattern: two 8-mile runs during the week, where the aim would be to get back home inside the hour. I measured success by just how far inside the hour I was. For the weekend long run, I persisted with my usual pattern of mostly 18-milers, and then for the final six weeks or so before Rome, I introduced a Saturday session of the intervals which I loathed, where the aim would be to average – including a gentle mile to the start and then back again – around 8.4 miles an hour across the 40 minutes it took me to complete the whole exercise.

  It meant, so I told myself, that I had jettisoned what the serious runners dismissively refer to as junk miles, something I'd long suspected I was guilty of. They mean those miles that you churn out by the dozen, simply piling them up and reaping no benefit. For years, I imagined that I was running comfortably at about 8 miles per hour, however far I went. I imagined I could tell how far I had gone just from the time I'd been running, so metronomic did I fancy myself to be. Mr Garmin soon told me just how generous I was being to myself. In the very early days, I had consistently run further than I thought, but somewhere down the line, I'd started to run much shorter than I thought. Mr Garmin delighted in pointing out the error of my ways.

  Yes, I could run at 8 miles an hour, but it was an effort – a real, sustained effort, in which I couldn't allow myself to drop back for a minute. But the benefits were evident. Finally, after all those years of junk miles, this was proper, directed training, and it worked, with a noticeable improvement in pace creeping in, even on generally undulating terrain. The downside was that this progress came at the expense of a great deal of the fun and almost all of the variety.

  To start with, it was a relief to complete my 8-mile route in an hour; within a couple of weeks, it was an expectation. By late February, I was looking to do it with a minute and a half in hand. The Garmin had been a Christmas present with my March date in Rome in mind; by the time the race arrived, I was generally clocking up my 8 miles in 58 minutes. Every step, every mile had counted.

  My best-ever marathon had come after I had trained with Rob and Nick, and it had been no coincidence. The sports watch effectively replicated the act of running with someone just a bit faster than me, someone who ensured I never drifted; it meant that I pushed myself all the time. And I suspect that approach carried through into my long run, where I discovered that in training I could keep up those 7-minute-30-second miles for 12 miles, just slipping back a bit at around miles 13 and 14. The pattern became to hit mile 16 somewhere between 2:02 and 2:05, depending on the route I took.

  The Garmin gives you a wonderfully colourful record of exactly what you have done, especially if you bypass Garmin's own boringly utilitarian software and load your runs into the superb (and free) running site Running Free. There you can amuse yourself for hours. You can view your route on a map, or overlaid on satellite images, or a combination of both. You can view the route with each mile coloured differently, or with your pace coloured differently as your speed varied, growing darker as you slowed. Or you can even follow your route on a line colour-coded according to elevation. The permutations are endless. And it is blindingly obvious: if you are going to take your running remotely seriously, a Garmin or something similar is absolutely essential.

  A few weeks later, Michael also bought a Garmin, which turned out to be another spur for me. We signed each other in as friends on the Running Free website. I could keep an eye on what Michael was doing 140 miles away in Colchester; he could keep an eye on me. I've almost never ducked out of a run, but plenty of times I haven't fancied going. Just knowing that Michael had been out already was incentive enough. His runs were also a motivator in terms of distance. At 31 years younger, I felt I had to go considerably further than he ever did to match his achievement.

  The downside, though, was that I was allowing the device to take control of me, rather than me keeping control of it. Something in my make-up meant I took it far too seriously, allowing it to become a nag. Obviously, one answer would have been to leave it at home every now and again, but that wasn't a real solution. Leave it at home, and obviously the miles wouldn't count towards your weekly and monthly statistics. Slowly, but surely, if you let it – and I did – a sports watch can tie you up in statistical knots.

  Even so, those first three months of 2010 seemed to me, in the context of years of erratic and slightly idiosyncratic training, to be three months of the closest thing I was ever going to get to model training – certainly now that the great London triumvirate of 2007 was never going to reunite, with Rob
hors de
combat
and Nick now living elsewhere. The sports watch was a reasonable, if very much less enjoyable, substitute.

I'd been egged on to do the Rome Marathon by my running friend Marc, who I'd run in Paris with six years earlier. Paris had been terrific, all going swimmingly well. Annoyingly, as soon I arrived in Rome, things started to go wrong.

  A good time will always owe as much to luck as judgement. Your training is all about trying to control the things that you can control, chief among which is your own basic fitness. But you can do little about coughs and colds, as I had discovered in Berlin; you can't do much about injury (London, New Forest); you can do nothing about the weather (Dublin, Amsterdam); and you're defenceless when it comes to the quality of the race organisation (Paris). Worst of all, you are utterly powerless against the feeling – fortunately rare – that, for whatever reason, today just isn't your day.

  That feeling started to take hold when I couldn't get through to Marc on my mobile the day before the race. It was my only way of contacting him. He was out there already on an extended birthday break, and I didn't have a clue where he was. His phone number wasn't summoning him, possibly wasn't even getting through, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Mobile phones are no substitute for proper arrangements and, as a mobile phone novice, I had been too trusting, never for a moment thinking that I might need a fallback plan. Travelling alone had often been a prelude to a tough marathon, but I hadn't for a moment intended to be alone once I was actually out there. Sadly, that wasn't the way it worked out.

  On another day, in another mood, it was something I would have shrugged off. But not that day. It meant that I was completely alone in a city I didn't know, just as I had been in Amsterdam. It didn't worry me unduly on the surface, but it niggled away in the back of my mind where the fact was firmly logged. There is a definite connection between good finishing times and personal support at a race, by the roadside and at the end. For Rome, I wasn't going to be getting any at all.