Keep on Running (20 page)

  But a policeman by the roadside shouted 'Run, run, you are almost there!' I managed a sickly smile and said to him, 'I will run if you will', and he did, for 50 metres or so, a sweet gesture. But then he stopped and said in a lovely, thick Dutch accent, 'I will stop here. I am wearing my bicycling booties!' It was an exquisite moment – just enough to get me home.

  Soon people were shouting that the stadium was just around the corner, and it was. That was when I realised that I had completely missed the 41-km marker. I turned the corner and the stadium loomed massive before my eyes. I had barely the strength to run but I trotted into the arena once again. We were suddenly on the track, running round and the finish slew into view. But even that was an anticlimax. I usually can't help but shed a tear on crossing a marathon finish line, but this time I just felt monumentally depressed.

  My only consolation – and it counted for little – was that I had rallied just a fraction in the final few hundred metres. I had glanced at my watch and had seen how perilously close I was to slipping into the 3:40s. That would have been the final humiliation. I had dredged up something from somewhere, put on a spurt and finished just 20 seconds inside what would have been the ultimate defeat. Even so, I felt horribly flat at the end, as if the whole thing had been pointless.

  For every high, there's a low. For every cloud with a silver lining, there's one with a big, black duffle coat. For every moment of elation, there's a moment of abject misery. For every Paris, there's an Amsterdam.

   Marathon number nine was in many ways the most disappointing of any I have ever done. I came in 1,669th out of 4,498 recorded finishers, completing the course in 3:39:33, which at the time was my third-fastest marathon, but that wasn't the real significance of my finishing time. Amsterdam entered my record books as the first time I had done a serious marathon slower than the previous one. I can find lots of reasons for the failure, though it is probably better to call them excuses. Basically, I fluffed it – almost certainly by setting off too fast. And probably by never being truly up for it in the first place.

  When the post-race reaction set in, I started to shiver uncontrollably. I could see plenty of other runners suffering the same fate. Some had even succumbed before the end. For the last few kilometres, there were noticeable numbers of people pulling up and stretching their leg muscles, clearly fighting off cramp. There were a good number of runners standing by the roadside looking bemused. Like me, their eyes had lit up at the thought of a traditionally fast course but in the long run they simply didn't have the legs. I tried to cling to the thought that clearly I wasn't alone in all that I was suffering, and it was a thought which brought a kind of consolation. Whatever my miscalculations, I had plenty of company in the pain stakes.

  Another factor was that support had been poor and there had been none personal to me. Another was that I had walked around far too much the day before. Another factor? Another excuse, more like. In hindsight, from the start, the whole thing just hadn't felt right.

  Dejectedly, I made my way back to the sports hall, picked up my stuff and resolved to go straight back to the hotel. It was raining icily and heavily, and I'd had enough. But then something started to change in my thinking.

  I knew without a shadow of doubt that this wasn't a race I would ever contemplate doing again, but I knew too that my experience of the day wasn't done yet. I baulked at the thought of simply walking away. I knew that it would add to the sense of defeat. But more insistently, something told me that a key part of the experience still awaited me, and so I headed back to the Olympic Stadium to watch the finishers.

  I am glad I did. What was crystallising was the need to show and share a little solidarity. I'd had an awful time with that ghastly, icy rain for the final half an hour, but those runners still out there had now endured an hour and a half of it. I wanted to show them that I cared. It was as simple as that. I would have hated to be out there still. From that thought it was a short step to wanting to show support towards those that were.

  I put on all the clothes I had in my rucksack and ventured out of the changing area to find that the rain at last was easing. I smiled for the first time since finishing. Those still on the course hadn't deserved the weather they had been enduring. None of us had. I made my way into the stadium, and, finally, it was then that I had some of the emotions I usually feel on finishing – except that this time I was having them for my fellow runners.

  They were now coming in 60 to 75 minutes after me, and they were absolutely streaming in, hundreds and hundreds of them. And I felt for them. At last I had my post-marathon tear – a selfless one for a change. 'Well done!' I shouted. 'Come on, come on, come on!' I thought of that wonderful woman on the tannoy in New York. 'Come on, Bill, you can do it! Come on, bring him home!' I wanted to be that woman. I wanted to be the one who helped them all in out of the rain, stoked the fire, brought them a steaming mug of hot chocolate and ran their bath. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

  From the stands, I looked down at the recent finishers below me, emerging from the enclosure in their orange throwaway macs. I could see how cold and exhausted they looked. Scores of runners slumped against walls. Others, more canny perhaps, went straight into stretching exercises. Wherever you looked, there was distress. I stood high in the stands, but in spirit I was down there with them. We'd run it together, and that was all that mattered. It didn't matter that I was way off my target time. All that mattered was the marathon effort which had got us all home. Forget the PB. It was just about being there.

After running smoothly in my previous marathons, I'd run into a wall in Amsterdam, and inevitably it was tough coping with my first stinker, a run which was effectively a step backwards. And this is where the slightly (OK, the very) obsessional side of marathon running takes over. The fact is that those extra minutes really did matter – something that non-runners will never quite grasp. Most people have no idea what constitutes a good marathon time; more particularly, they won't know (and why should they?) what constitutes a good marathon for you. You've run an absurdly long distance; what does it matter if you end up five or ten minutes either way? Oh, but it does, and it matters hugely, and it matters more and more, the more you think about it.

  Amsterdam brought home to me one of the curiosities of running. You would expect your fastest marathons to be your hardest marathons, the ones where you have strained every last sinew for those extra few seconds that will take you over the line to a new personal best. But no, quite the contrary.

  The fast marathons are the easy ones – easy because all those controllables and uncontrollables have deigned to converge in your favour. We're talking about those countless factors that come together to shape the overall result, from route to crowds, from general well-being to ability to take on water, from shoes to temperature, from clarity of thinking to the moon rising in Venus – factors which unite in your favour simply because you got out of the right side of the bed.

  The tough ones are the hard ones, the ones where you lose the plot, lose your time and lose all sense of perspective in a slog which becomes mind-numbing and knee-knackering in its intensity of effort and endurance.

  All of which explains why, once you are hooked, it's so difficult to give up marathon running. If you achieve a personal best, then you will have done so because everything has conspired to make it all go well for you on the day. And that's why it won't be long before you start thinking, 'Well, that was pretty straightforward – so straightforward I really ought to have done a better time than that.' Dissatisfaction creeps in precisely because you've had a good day. You start telling yourself it was all so stacked in your favour that in reality you underachieved. A good marathon always leaves you feeling that somehow you didn't try hard enough, that you didn't capitalise on a great opportunity.

  And so you push on – just as you do after a shocker or a moderate marathon. You'd think that an experience such as Amsterdam would be the end of it. Far from it. You don't want disappointment to be your last experience and so you book up for another marathon in the hope of erasing the memory. You tell yourself: 'I'm better than that.' A bad time leaves a bad taste, and the only way to rid yourself of it is to sign up for another. You need to show yourself – and a world that isn't remotely interested – that the bad one wasn't representative. You had put in the training and yet, for whatever reason, you didn't realise the potential it gave you.

  Fiona has long since learned the pattern. On marathons abroad when she's not been there, I've phoned home and been either satisfied or disappointed. The only certainty is that by the time I get back satisfaction will have turned to disappointment and disappointment will have turned to dejection. Fiona knows not to say, 'That was a good time!' She's realised it's far better to ask, 'Are you pleased with it?' And even then, she knows that the answer will be different a couple of days later. And it's that, as much as anything, which keeps you going.

  It reaches the point where, whatever you do, you aren't pleased – something Fiona and my mother-in-law Stella have grudgingly learned to accept. Whatever they achieve, marathon runners are far more likely to grunt in disappointment than whoop with delight – a fact which doesn't necessarily make them easy to live with. In the end, you become so hooked that, whether you do a good time or a bad time, your only response is to want to do another. And so it goes on.

  Fiona asked me whether I'd been wishing I was at home with the children during my Amsterdam lows, and sadly the answer was no, not especially. My only wishes were that I'd been running faster and hadn't felt so awful, which probably illustrates the strange position that marathon running had come to occupy in my life. It was a huge part of my life, but at the same time, it seemed to stand wholly outside it. The training was a big commitment which had to be accommodated within all the usual home, work and family constraints, but the marathon itself was an absolute, standing apart from everything else.

  In a way, my marathons didn't relate to my day-to-day life, and maybe that was the whole point. They weren't rooted in what the French like to call
métro, boulot, dodo
– that daily routine which supposedly taps out the rhythm of our workaday existence. By now my marathons stood wholly apart from my own daily slog, existing entirely in their own right and subject to their own set of distinctly peculiar laws.

  Training, especially in the darkness that I was still enjoying at this point, had a crucial function in helping me sleep, keeping me energetic and happy, and also obliterating all the nonsense and hassle that go hand in hand with work. But the marathons themselves were more than that, existing on an entirely separate and elevated plane. What drove me on was the desire to feel worthy of that plane a couple of times a year. Amsterdam had been a nightmare in so many respects, and as the grim reality sank in, I told myself endlessly that I was a much better runner than that.

  Logically perhaps, this was the point at which I should have joined a running club. There are thousands of runners who will insist that you cannot possibly consider yourself a serious runner unless you are a club runner – and maybe they are right. It's manifestly a great way to learn to push yourself and to raise your game, but club membership seemed to me too much of a negation of the many reasons I ran. I was unaffiliated, as club runners like to call non-club runners. Unaffiliated and proud. For me running was a freedom, not a tie to a particular group of people once a week in a particular location.

  One of the great attractions of running alone was that I didn't have to drive anywhere to do it; I just seized the moment and dashed out the door. The run began the moment the door clicked behind me.

  Inevitably, my running fell into a pattern, but I could still persuade myself that there was something vaguely spontaneous about it.

  Of course, I wanted to get faster, but just as important in my day-to-day existence were plenty of other considerations. For work, I was at the theatre reviewing once or maybe twice a week; the last thing I wanted was another definite commitment on top of that. If something cropped up at home to stop me running, then home would come first. If I joined a club, then I would be taking on a new set of obligations, bringing other people and other places into the equation. I needed to keep running simple to make it fit alongside job and family. Joining a club would have taken my running to the next level, but I just felt I couldn't do it – and nor did I particularly want to. Specious nonsense, club runners would say, I am sure. But that's how I saw it.