Keep on Running (35 page)

  However, my return to the hotel had been enlightening in itself. The receptionist was a friendly, chatty guy who instantly asked me how I had got on. I told him that I had been disappointed, that the last 6 miles had been terrible and that I just couldn't fully explain why they had been so tough. Articulating a thought that had only now crystallised, I told him that I just couldn't fully get my breath towards the end, at which point he looked at me with that recognisable 'It's Dublin! It's raining! What do you expect?' type look. He gave a very Italian shrug and said 'Well, it's the pollution.' He told me that Rome was so polluted that in certain conditions you can actually see it just sitting there like a blanket over the city.

  And so the penny dropped. The conditions had been the same for absolutely everyone, but with a long history of asthma, I was bound to feel it more acutely. It was 50-per-cent excuse, 50-per-cent reason, but the immensity of the struggle I'd endured at the wrong end of the marathon suddenly started to seem explicable. I hadn't been on top of my running. It had run away from me. Suddenly that feeling of being sucked back as everyone else was sucked forward made sense. It really hadn't been my day.

  In a sense, though, my folly had been to allow negativity to creep in. I was definitely breathing too shallowly towards the end, but contributing too was a lack of desire. The start had been so awful that even before the off, I was wondering what on earth I was doing there. After 8 miles, I was thinking that 8 miles was a decent-length run, and yet there were still 18 to go. And now, after the race, I was thinking that I was 46 years old and to do just over three and three-quarter hours was respectable – which again was a kind of negativity I would never have tolerated before.

  As I pondered it afterwards, I was guilty of a kind of indulgence towards my finishing time which I would never have permitted a few years before. I was settling for what I achieved, and I knew that wasn't good. Something had changed, and it made me wonder if I was coming to the end of my marathon running, 12 years and 22 marathons after I started. Was I falling a little out of love with it?

  A few years before, I would have considered 3:48:46 for a big-city marathon to be an awful time. Now, so far had I sunk, I was actually thinking it was OK. I was getting defeatist. Or maybe realistic. Have I passed the point where I have done my best-ever marathon? Quite likely, I suspect. But in Rome that day I was convinced that I had. And that's something that's very difficult to cope with.

  Deepening my depression in the race aftermath was one of the most shameful incidents ever recorded on a marathon course anywhere in the whole history of marathons – one which underlined just what a shocker I had had.

  The crowds had been good throughout, but in places there were no barriers, which was reckless to say the least. I was 25.5 miles in; I was feeling absolutely shattered; and my mood was thunderously dark when a little old lady – just like the one in Paris – dashed across in front of me just as the route narrowed, in the way that sometimes spectators do, totally misjudging my oncoming speed relative to her speed across me. She saw her mistake, realised that I was very nearly upon her and half-raised an arm in self-defence – an arm which rose into my face. I had to swerve sharply. There was definite grazed contact. If I hadn't reacted so quickly, either or both of us could have been seriously injured. It was a horribly close-run thing – and that was the thought which flashed through my mind. And out it came.

  As I swerved, I voiced my infuriation with the entire day. Uncharacteristically, but with the excuse of marathon-induced stress, I shouted: 'Get out of the ******* way, you ******* stupid cow!' As I spoke, I half-turned. And as I turned, I discovered to my horror that she wasn't just any little old lady, but a nun, resplendent in full nun regalia. I could almost see her halo.

  I was appalled; all I could plead was that the day had thrown me so deeply into my discomfort zone that I had completely lost touch with the kind of person I like to think I am. Her behaviour was foolish in the extreme, but my rudeness was unconscionable.

  Or at least that's the way it seemed at first. I hate to say it, but my horror didn't last long. Within a couple of hours, the incident was becoming the one thing that let me look back on my day with anything approaching a smile – and a deliciously wicked one at that. For a moment, it had been the day's low point. But very quickly, it became the day's high point, perfectly summing up precisely what I thought about the shambolic organisation which marred the entire event.

  My shame has long since gone now. Instead I am secretly delighted (don't tell anyone) that I let rip and gave Rome both barrels. Hilarious in retrospect, but at least she was heading for heaven, whereas I'd just booked myself eternal damnation in the Eternal City.

So, once again, I had to face up to the annoyance of a marathon which ultimately ended in disappointment – one made all the worse for the fact that I had been completely on my own. I'd half expected to bump into Marc at some point, the kind of coincidence that does tend to happen in big crowds, but no such luck. Instead, I was a sad, solitary failure, a fact which did at least spur me on to some vigorous sightseeing the following day. Still wearing my sports watch, I walked a ludicrous 18 miles on the Monday. Or maybe it wasn't so ludicrous. Driving me as much as anything, I suspect, was some kind of desire to compensate for the day before. But the upshot was that any stiffness in my legs was soon dissipated and I had a great time exploring one of the world's most fascinating cities.

  Back home, however, I really did start to enter new and uncharted territory. The usual pattern, whether my time had been good or bad, was to feel more and more frustrated with it once I was back in the normal run of things. But after Rome, something rather different happened: I grew increasingly forgiving towards the time I had achieved. Instead of beating myself up about it, I found reasons to believe I had done respectably, not least for the fact that Rome was so obviously polluted. By the time I'd finished recounting it, the skies had been black with clouds of filth which threatened at any moment to descend and choke the life out of me. I conjured visions of a marathon in which breathing apparatus should have been de rigueur. Instead of making a good time worse, as I usually do, I was attempting to make an average time better. Something had indeed changed.

  I was winding down. Without realising it, there was an element of signing off in my behaviour. After Rome, my couple of weeks' lay-off stretched towards a third as I found more and more reasons not to go out running. One marathon is usually the spur to the next. Not so Rome. It started to seem as if I had roamed enough.

  In the end, it was Michael who rescued me from my self-indulgence and sloth with the kind of plan only a marathon runner could come up with. Fifty years before, he and Stella had honeymooned in Mallorca. In their golden wedding year, any normal husband would have taken his wife back there. Instead, after an anniversary party for family and friends in London that summer, he suggested that he and I go out there to run the Mallorca Marathon in October. I liked that man's thinking – the kind of warped thinking I could relate to.

  At last, I had a purpose again. And so it was that in June 2010 I resumed training. However, that's when I started to get seriously worried. Something grim started to happen. I found myself once again in new and unexpected territory. Suddenly, I found myself really hating the training. It had never happened before. There had been times in the past when I had endured it without enjoying it, but I always did it. And in truth, I didn't duck out of it this time. But I started to grab a few extra minutes in bed. I would always go in the end, but procrastination was creeping in. There was no spring in my step, and no enjoyment either.

  Over the past four or five years, I have invariably announced my next marathon as my last – and at first, I imagine people believed me. But then, the marathon over, I would always book another. I couldn't stand the thought of being someone who 'used to run marathons'. Stopping running altogether seemed to me the most monumental defeat. It seemed like saying goodbye to everything. But still, as some kind of self-defence mechanism, I would spread the word that I would be quitting after the next one, and at times I probably even managed to kid myself.

  After a while, whenever I said it, I was met with disbelief, groaning and 'I've heard that before'. It was annoying because part of me meant it. But others had seen what I was slow to see – that announcing my imminent retirement had become part of that complex package which counts as training. It was one of the ways I psyched myself up. Believe it is your last and you make that extra effort. Announcing my retirement had become a way of saying 'this next one is special'.

  And so the marathons came and went, and always I added a next one. Always the thought of stopping was worse than the thought of continuing.

  Then came the run-up to Mallorca 2010. It felt different. Much more of me meant it this time when I said it would be the last. The training simply wasn't fun anymore. For each new marathon I had taken to inventing a new 18-mile route going out in a different direction from Bishop's Waltham. For the Mallorca training I lumbered myself with an absolute rotter, pleasant enough back roads to begin with, taking me to a new town which I always got lost in while trying to find my way through to the other side. It was infuriating every Sunday as I hit this bizarre mass of identical houses plonked in the middle of nowhere. All I wanted to do was to emerge on the far side, but time and again I would run down blind alleys, run into building sites or simply end up where I started, all without seeing a single person up and about. I started to wonder whether the town was inhabited at all.

  I was going nowhere – and it seemed somehow symbolic.

  Each week I would get a little bit further before getting lost, but there was no pleasure in it. It was just an annoyance. Eventually, I started to make it all the way through, thanks to the ruse of treating the whole thing as a maze and making a succession of left turns on the lifeless, deserted, early-morning streets. It wasn't the most direct route, but it got me through. But even then, there was no pleasure in the run.

  Again, it's behaviour that normal people would find baffling. Fiona insists it's pretty weird. Surely the obvious thing would have been to find another route, but not being able to get through the town annoyed me, and so I kept going back. I didn't want to be defeated by it. Just as a cat returns time and again to the spot where it deposited a bird on your carpet long after you've disposed of the corpse, I kept niggling away at my route – behaviour which some might consider appropriate given that the name of the town is synonymous in local folklore with the asylum which once stood there.

  Also, I felt locked in. I was recording good times over the first 8 miles of the route, and my sports watch made me want to stick to it. Stubbornness and stupidity played their part as I pursued a course that was so obviously sapping my will to run. Maybe I kept at it for the reason that I was actually falling out of love with running. By heaping up the frustrations, I was subconsciously making it easier to hang up my trainers for good.

  Interest was sparked a little by the fact that Michael and I, using sports watches and computers, were able to follow each other's progress as we counted down to the selfsame race. But after a while I took myself in hand. I was being stupid. I had to make it more fun. Having cracked my labyrinth at last, I did finally resort to variations and combinations of my previous long routes, but none of it quite worked. Not even the change could bring back my desire. It was a grim few months in my running schedule.

  I looked forward to the chance to revive my running on holiday in France that August, a way to step things up a fraction before the October marathon, but once again I stalled. We stayed just south of Limoges in a gorgeous cottage and had a fabulous time, the whole family together lapping up all the pleasures of
la vie française
. But as a place to run, it was duff in the extreme. The routes were hopelessly hilly. This was going to be my second sports-watch marathon, and my sports watch didn't mince its stats: my French runs were just as poor as my English ones.

  And then I hit a new and utterly unexpected low. I was running through a deserted French village, the kind of village that looked as if no one had lived there since the war. The shutters were up; no humans were around; the only sign of life was the barking of dogs, that low-level yapping so typical of rural France. But I was experienced in these things. I knew that all the
chiens méchants
would be slobbering and slavering behind bars. Except that this time one of them wasn't. A ghastly nippy little thing, it shot right out and bit deep into the flesh just above my left ankle, sinking its teeth into me just as I was going through with my stride. In that split second, the dog hung on and the flesh ripped – a V-shaped tear which bled profusely.