Keep on Running (2 page)

  I've been running marathons for 14 years now. I've clocked up 25, ranging from 4 hours 20 minutes down to 3 hours 20. I've run in eight different countries and in five different capitals, and no one believes me when I announce that my next marathon will be my last. They're right. It won't be. Life without a marathon looming on the horizon has become unimaginable.

  This book is an attempt to explain why – a look back over the pleasures and the pains my addiction has given me. Marathon runners will recognise them one and all; I hope non-marathon runners will want a bit of it too. If you've already run a marathon, I hope you'll be with me on every page; if you haven't, I hope you'll want to run one by the time we reach the finishing line.

If you want to annoy a marathon runner, wait till he or she starts to tell you about their latest marathon and then ask, all innocently, 'So how far was that one then?' A marathon is a marathon is a marathon, and a marathon is always just a touch over 26.2 miles: 26 miles and 385 yards to be exact. Or 42.195 km. However you want to express it, it's a fixed distance the world over, and that is both the point and the pointlessness of it.

  History tells us that the first marathon runner – though he didn't know it at the time – was Pheidippides, a Greek messenger who was sent from the battlefield at Marathon to tell everyone in Athens about 26 miles away that the Persians had just been defeated. He'd just fought in the Battle of Marathon himself, poor chap, and a marathon straight afterwards was just too much for him. Pheidippides ran the entire distance (presumably with very little crowd support), shouted 'We have won!', keeled over and died. The world's first marathon runner had also set the standard for the world's worst post-marathon celebration.

  But it was Pheidippides who ultimately defined the event which featured in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. In the 1908 London Olympics, the final 385 yards were added to accommodate the Royals and to give them a better view – or, at least, that's the popular understanding. In May 1921, the International Amateur Athletic Federation set the distance in stone: 26 miles and 385 yards – the distance which has been run around the world ever since.

  It was a vague distance in those early Olympic Games, hovering around 40 km, but for the past 90 years it has been immovable – and that's a big part of its charm. The distance is predetermined. It is also absurd. You can't beat 26 miles and 385 yards as a clunky, arbitrary and deliciously random distance, and yet it has become the rigid standard by which long-distance runners measure their prowess.

  Generally, it takes a marathon runner to know that a marathon is 26 miles and 385 yards – or even the rather more imprecise 26.2 miles which is more often referred to. And we look at the rest of the world aghast when we discover that they don't share that knowledge. My late grandfather, ex-RAF, was convinced that the wingspan of a Spitfire was the most rudimentary piece of general knowledge on the planet. We marathon runners are rather like that about the exact length of a marathon. But for all we tut, the true marathon runner feels a certain smugness when other people ask the question: 'How far is that marathon?' It sounds condescending, and probably it is, but the fact is that other people simply aren't like us. They haven't joined the club – the best club in the world.

  Running a marathon doesn't make you clever, and it almost certainly doesn't make you interesting. In fact, probably quite the opposite is true. But anyone who has ever gone the distance will tell you that running a marathon is your admission ticket to something truly special, something that takes you to the next level of human experience and beyond. And therein lies the bond between marathon runners. As soon as you have run one, you belong to a brotherhood.

  Fellow members won't ask you how far you ran. Far more pertinently, they will ask you how quickly you ran it. In their mind will be their own time. The point is that no time stands by itself. Every time needs a point of reference, a point of comparison.

  Every time, that is, except your first. And that's what makes your first marathon so very special. It's the only time you will run a marathon wondering simply whether you can finish it. For all the rest, you will be wondering whether you can run faster than you've run before. Only in your very first marathon is it enough to run it for running's sake. Your debut is the marathon that gives you the marker by which all your future races will be judged; the marker you hope will recede as you start to set new standards.

  My good fortune was that my first marathon was the London Marathon, arguably the best in the world. London offers one of the greatest marathon experiences imaginable. Many marathons are deadly serious, and so too is London, but London's great distinction is that it is also the biggest street party ever staged.

  The first year I did it, one of those interminable Saturday supplement colour pieces nailed it when the writer described the London Marathon as 'part race, part garden party'.

  A huge part of the charm is the great atmosphere, the hundreds of thousands of supporters, the almost constant roar of the crowd, the generosity of the man quite literally on the street as he urges you on as if it really matters to him. It's an event which brings out the best in us all, a terrific gathering of selfless spectators egging on tens of thousands of selfish runners. For the runners, even as they raise millions for charity, it's all about their own personal goals on the day. For the spectators, it's all about helping the runners get there. And that's what makes marathon running unique.

  Nothing else summons people in quite such numbers for such a mass act of collective altruism, all directed at an endless stream of complete strangers toiling past, in amongst whom, somewhere, is the one person they are truly supporting.

  Twenty-five marathons – six in London – have convinced me that it's at the London Marathon that this street-level philanthropy receives its greatest expression, every year, year in, year out. You run through sheer benevolence, and you can get quite drunk on it, the runners responding in kind, which is what makes up the garden-party element.

  Musicians of all kinds will set up stall along the route to will you on. You'll get everything from roadside discos to rock bands, from gospel choirs to kettledrums, from brass bands to samba. Every musical hue will be there, beating out every rhythm under the sun – and all so that you might find your own rhythm in your run. It's exotic, it's spontaneous, it's a blast and it's fun – and the runners rise to the occasion, adding their own colour to the most colourful of days.

  In amongst the runners will be Teletubbies, rhinos, Elvises, Supermen, people chained together, people tied together. People will run as tins of baked beans, as watches and as cavemen; they will run dressed as a London bus or even an aircraft. And for reasons known only to them, the butchest and hairiest of men will take to the streets in fluffy pink tutus. Everything and anything goes. Disinhibition runs wild as dark dreams and private fantasies are lived out in public.

  You wouldn't want to spend too long running behind the chap in the eye-watering mankini, but you can't help but smile as you leave him behind (and no longer have to look at his behind). Why's he doing it? Isn't it enough to run just over 26.2 miles without having your privates dangling round your neck in a strange kind of sling? Clearly not. Along with all the clowns, Postman Pats and other cartoon characters, he's a runner intent on taking it all one step further for the craziest show on the road.

  Is it a question of standing out? More likely, it's a question of underlining the inbuilt madness of marathon running. It's like those deeply irritating adverts, usually for furniture superstores, where an overexcited, half-crazed voice tells you of the latest price reductions and then squeals with stomach-churning, smug self-deprecation: 'We must be mad!' Except, of course, they're not mad. They wouldn't be selling you anything at a price which wasn't entirely beneficial to them. Maybe it's only marathon runners who can
genuinely
claim: 'We must be mad!' Presumably the logic goes: I am running an awfully long distance for no reason any sane person would ever understand, so I might as well run it as a Womble.

  So much for the garden party, a mix of eccentricity and ostentation in equal measure. But several miles further towards the finish, you've got the business end of the race – and that's the part that attracts me. Down this end is the race in its purest sense, and it's for this that I am there. For some people towards the back, a marathon is about running an absurd distance dressed in an even more absurd costume; for me, keen to close the gap on the front-runners, the pull is that I am running with the greats. The elite athletes will have collected their medals, showered and eaten by the time I finish, but I will still have run the same race as they have.

  Football fans don't get to share the pitch with the Beckhams, the Ronaldos and the Pelés. Yet we runners get to share the course with our heroes. It's an unbroken chain which leads from the slowest of the slow right the way through to Paula Radcliffe at the front, setting yet another record. Somewhere between the two extremes is me, generally in the top 10 to 20 per cent of finishers, desperate to get away from those Teletubbies, even more desperate to inch closer to the runners who will make the next day's headlines.

My first marathon – the London Marathon of 1998 – tumbled into my lap by chance, but perhaps I had been seeking it unconsciously for a while. I was reaching
that
age. The age where, if you're not careful, your trousers start to feel just a little bit too tight, the age where you ponder a task and then decide 'Hmmm, I'll do that later'. I was 34; sluggishness had crept in by the back door and was just about to plonk itself down in the armchair of my existence.

  A largely sedentary job was partly to blame. As arts editor for a group of newspapers in West Sussex, I was starting to live life just a little vicariously. All the action I saw was on the cinema screen or on the stage in front of me. The journalism training I'd done years before had promised that a career in newspapers gave you 'a ringside seat at life's great events'; eight years into the job, I was starting to realise that I was in danger of becoming a full-time spectator.

   The job was demanding, and so too was home life. Our son Adam was just over a year old. He was great fun and rewarded every second you spent in his company; and we were hoping it wouldn't be long before he had some company of his own in the shape of a brother or sister. One way or another, there never seemed to be any time for anything which didn't involve either work or Adam, and if all went according to plan, there would soon be even less time.

  I'd run occasionally in my years at university, but never any great distance, never with any real discipline and never with any great heart – and certainly never competitively. Slowly, however, with life's responsibilities stacking up, my thoughts started to turn increasingly to running again, an unspoken longing for that rush of energy you're supposed to get as you hammer out the miles. Mortgage, work and family life constrict you, and so, in some primeval kind of way, you find yourself longing to reclaim a few lost freedoms. In an era when man can no longer dash out of his cave and slay a mammoth, he simply slips on his Lycra and goes for a run.

  There's a fantastic birthday card which I have been sent probably a dozen times down the years. It shows a jolly, wonderfully hearty-looking runner, awfully British with his hair slicked back in a 1940s kind of way. A sporty cove if ever there was one, he positively beams at the camera with a smugness that shouts 'Aren't I just a picture of health, don't you know!' Above the photograph, the caption reads: 'After a month of jogging ten miles a day, Phil was feeling terrific. The only problem was that he was 300 miles from home.'