by Ben Smith
Nine of the runners set new PBs, including a few who completed marathons having had absolutely no intention of doing so. This is starting to happen a lot, I think because people are getting carried away with the magic of the Challenge. It’s nice that they wanted to run with me and support me and what we were trying to achieve, but it can get overwhelming at times. So it’s also nice to be the guy at the back, geeing other people up and setting targets. I’ve got good at selecting one person in the group who I’ll persuade to run a marathon with me. Gently, of course. At the start of every day, I’ll say: ‘So, how far is everyone thinking of running?’ And it’s often the people who say, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’ve just come out for a bit of fun’, that are still there at the finish line. Seeing the look in somebody’s eyes after they’ve achieved something that wasn’t even on their radar that morning makes me quite emotional and is starting to become addictive.
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Paula Radcliffe, marathon world record holder: Ben didn’t seem to think that what he was doing was a big deal. Talk to him and he’d be like: ‘I honestly haven’t done much, I had a lot of help and support.’ He was right to thank his support team, they were amazing – and I’ll never forget my physio, Gerard Hartmann, who treated me twice a day when I ran 151 miles in a week – but Ben was the beating heart of it.
He was very smart in the way he structured the Challenge. He got clubs involved, had people out running with him every day, ran with kids, stopped for lunch. When I trained, I trained for quality. But what Ben was trying to do was different in so many ways. He was just trying to get round each day. And it doesn’t matter if you eat cake and drink coffee on the way round – whatever gets you through it, and it’s still a marathon if you run 26.2 miles! The upshot was that every day was broken down into smaller chunks. That made it easier physically, but also mentally.
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Almost as soon as I moved into my new flat in Portishead, having separated from my wife, I started plastering the bedroom walls with flip-chart paper and writing down anything that came into my head. I was like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, maniacal, verging on psychotic. It was as if I’d thrown the workings of my brain onto that wall and was trying to work myself out mathematically. There were numbers, spider diagrams, drawings and scribbles, and my task was to work out the puzzle.
In the beginning, there was a lot of gibberish, including things I thought I wanted, but later worked out I didn’t. It was a case of sifting through the chaos and picking out the truth. Because I was now on my own, I was independent, so able to focus purely on me. The process lasted for about three months. The breakthrough came when I started writing down what a happy life would look like. Now, it wasn’t a case of picking out the truth, the truth just came pouring out. My job required me to spend a lot of time on the road, and I fantasised about this other life I wanted while I was driving. Suddenly, all those fantasies and dreams took centre stage: to love a man, and have a man love me; to be happy with a man; to know the feel of a man; to feel safe with a man; to walk along the beach with a man; to have a dog together. All things I hadn’t thought possible, because of what I thought society expected of me.
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When kids started calling me gay at school, I didn’t have a clue what gay was, except that it was meant to be wrong. And I didn’t want to be wrong, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I knew I was different from when I was about 13, but didn’t really know how. I found boys attractive and masculinity attractive in men, but I wasn’t attracted to girls or effeminate boys. I buried it for a couple of years, until I was 14 or 15, when I finally realised what I was. Even then, I only thought I was gay because people were calling me gay, that’s how messed up my head was. I can’t remember how I figured it out, but when I did, it scared me.
There’s a lot more awareness nowadays, but there was no information when I was at school. I had nobody to discuss it with, and I just assumed that everybody, even the teachers, thought being gay was a bad thing to be. It seemed really odd that that’s what I could be. I remember going home to Mum and Dad’s in Lincoln, going on the computer and looking at images of gay porn. I was absolutely petrified, thinking: ‘Oh no, this can’t be it, they must have all this wrong…’ I didn’t know anything about clearing browser history, so Dad discovered all these images of naked men, and men having sex with other men. He marched me and my brother downstairs, plonked us on the sofa and read us the riot act: ‘Why are you looking at this type of material? It’s disgraceful!’ Later, I realised he wasn’t angry because it was gay material, he was just angry because it was pornographic.
So I went back to school and wrote a letter to my parents, telling them – categorically, without any shadow of a doubt, 100 per cent – that I was not gay. I was just so scared of what people might think if they knew the truth. If anything, I protested too much but it seemed to do the trick. I’d dodged a bullet and my secret was still under wraps. Looking back, I wish my parents had worked out that the vehemence of my denials was proof of a cover-up.
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Beverley Smith, Ben’s mum: When that letter arrived, I rang Pete immediately and said: ‘We’ve got to go and see Ben, something’s going on at school.’ On arrival, I said to Ben: ‘Whatever’s going on, darling? It doesn’t matter to us if you’re gay, you’ll be our son whatever.’ The other kids had been taunting him because he was so soft and gentle. But he didn’t want to tell us about it because he didn’t want us to feel guilty. He saw how upset I got when they went away, so that was him being the grown-up little boy, brave for his daddy and trying not to worry me. He repeated everything he’d written in the letter, insisted he wasn’t gay, and that was the last we heard about his sexuality for about 16 years. But the bullying never stopped.
The day after we found him in the garage, I took him to the doctor and she was just wonderful. I stepped out of the room and left them to talk, and Ben must have opened up to her. She wrote a letter to the headmaster, telling him that this young man would be better off never returning to his school. We got Ben a private tutor, so he could continue with his A-levels at home. But he wasn’t in a fit state to do anything, let alone study.
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After leaving school, I went to study at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. I’d had so much of the stuffing knocked out of me, I didn’t know who I was or what my place in the world was, so I went to university because everybody else was doing it. The only reason I studied what I did was because Mum was a counsellor at the time and said: ‘Why don’t you do psychology?’ And I said: ‘Oh, alright then.’ Bear in mind I’m dyslexic, and I chose a subject which required me to read a shit-load of books and write lots of essays. Madness.
Just like when I went from prep to senior school, I thought everything might suddenly be different when I went to university. People often talk about uni as the place where they ‘find’ or ‘regenerate’ themselves, where they learn to stand on their own two feet, finally blossom or emerge from their chrysalis. But although the environment allowed that, I didn’t allow myself to change. I was conditioned to be a certain way, all that bullying at school had had such a profound effect on me. I was completely broken, no more than a shell. I didn’t have the confidence, energy or ability to be reimagining myself.
In my first term I tried to take my own life again. After a very drunken night out at the Students’ Union, I went back to my room, locked the door and took a mixture of 30 paracetamol and aspirin, with the intention of not waking up. Two hours later, I was bent over in intense pain, throwing up in the sink. When I eventually emerged from my room a couple of days later, the girl next door asked if I was alright. I told her what I’d done and ended up in hospital. They fitted me to a drip that made my kidneys hurt – imagine really wanting to pee, multiplied by about 20 – and rather than being supportive,
the nurses treated me as if I was a loser, wasting their time. I had my obligatory 15-minute appointment with a shrink, faked it again and was given a clean bill of health – I don’t even remember what he said.
That second time was a cry for help: I just wanted someone to hug me and tell me everything was going to be OK, but nobody did. The nurses didn’t care, the shrink didn’t care, and I had nobody else to turn to. That was the point when I thought: ‘I’ve tried to kill myself twice, haven’t been successful, so I might as well just exist.’
When I did make a tentative attempt to be the real me, I was punched in the stomach, albeit not literally. A girl on my course had quite a lot of gay friends, and I felt comfortable talking to her. So one night, I plucked up the courage and told her I thought I was gay. But she didn’t hug or congratulate me, but said: ‘Are you sure your housemates want to live with a gay person?’ She was the first person I’d told, and that was the reaction. The following morning, I retracted my story and told her I’d made a mistake, which made it twice I’d climbed back into the closet. Shortly after that, I was in my bedroom after a drunken evening, in a desperate, depressed state, and I could hear the girl in the front room, telling everybody I was gay. Seconds later, they were all banging on my door, taunting me, with one guy shouting in a camp voice: ‘Just let me in, Ben, I’m obviously what you want!’ I felt utterly victimised. What that girl did to me was absolutely despicable, especially considering that she knew about my suicide attempt. No wonder it took me so long to come out again.
I soon lost interest in the course, stopped attending lectures and, for whatever reason, that frustrated my housemates. I’d set up all the bills and the girls I lived with weren’t pitching in, so I was left out of pocket. Dad got involved and it all got very messy. In the end, I absolutely lost it and moved in with the girl who had told everyone I was gay. That was the only place I could go, I had no other options. That’s how friendless I was.
In my second year I took a year out and worked at a disabilities camp in America. But even out there I played another version of myself, going along with all that bravado around the campfire. I became over-confident to compensate for my lack of confidence, which I’m quite ashamed of. Now, when I see that kind of over-confidence in other people, I sometimes wonder what they’re hiding, deep inside. While I was there, I started a relationship with a girl from the UK, which carried on for a while when we returned to the UK, until I made the decision to end it.
As time went on, my focus became clubbing, drinking, smoking and taking drugs. After I graduated, I chose to stay in Middlesbrough, where I’d come under the influence of a group of supposed friends. I threw myself headlong into these drug-fuelled nights of escapism, which involved taking anything I could get my hands on. It was my way of escaping, leaving all the shit behind. I’d completely lost control again. I didn’t have an anchor, and when people aren’t anchored they can drift into rocky waters. In a way I enjoyed it, because it meant I didn’t have to be me and everybody was the same when we were all off our faces.
My eyes were opened to things I’d never seen before – drug dealing, prostitution, violence. I was at parties where people overdosed on ketamine. But even though there was a gay club on the high street, and part of me wanted to go, I didn’t feel like I could – I’d pushed things down so deep, I’d almost started believing that I was this role I was playing.
I got a job at Topman and worked in bars, on the promotions and marketing side of things, but that just meant I had money to spend on the wrong things. This had never been my life: I had a nice upbringing, but I felt grown-up in that environment and as if nobody could get to me. But after becoming far too partial to pills and getting into a lot of debt because of a growing coke habit, I had the good sense to stop. I’ve always had this little person on one shoulder, telling me when I’ve gone too far. It was after he had one of his little chats with me that I decided to move home.
Chapter 6
Is That It?
Three or four months after returning to Lincoln, I met the woman who would become my wife. Because I’d been working at Topman in Middlesbrough, and my cousin was one of their learning and development officers, I was encouraged to apply for a place on their graduate programme. I was offered a placement and my first post was deputy manager at Topman in the Gateshead Metro Centre, working under a lovely lady called Heather. I then had spells in Newcastle, London and Nottingham, before me and my future wife decided to move to the South West, where she had landed a new job.
In Bristol, I got a job as operations manager at the new Topshop and Topman store in Cabot Circus shopping centre. Six months later I left and got a job with a large corporate FTSE 100 company. A few years passed and we decided to move from Bristol to Portishead and rented a house before taking the leap a year later and bought a four-bedroomed house in Portishead. I was on a lot of money compared to what I had been earning before, which included previously unimaginable bonuses, so it looked like I had the dream – big bucks, big house, big car, pension plan, two holidays a year, a lovely girlfriend. But I felt empty inside. I got very good at faking contentment, had created my own warped reality, my own screwed-up set of beliefs, so nobody knew otherwise. By then, I’d had a lot of practice in lying.
You know what happened next, and separating from my wife was the catalyst I needed. I no longer had anything to lose, I felt uncluttered, and I decided I wasn’t going to be that person anymore. In my bedroom, surrounded by my dreams, which had been whittled down and refined over the weeks, I finally decided I’d done enough planning and it was time to go out and be me, starting with my sexuality. It took me a while to pluck up the courage to sign up to gay dating app Grindr. I’d never kissed a man or even held a man’s hand before, and I was 31.
The first time I had sex with a man was in Helsinki, when I was over there for a marathon in 2014. He was an Englishman, a lot younger than me, and it felt right. It wasn’t some monumental moment, it just confirmed something I already knew: ‘Yeah, I was right, let’s move on.’ I was self-conscious, a bit embarrassed, because I was in my 30s and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. In a gay relationship, I had the added complication of figuring out what my preferences were and what role I was going to play. With women, I knew what I was supposed to be doing; with men, it was a little bit more complex. It was like being a teenager all over again. The difference this time was that I had this new-found vigour, and I was doing it while being who I really was.
The great thing about doing all those marathons in far-flung places was that I was only there for the weekend, so I could hook up on Grindr and I was never going to see them again. It gave me the freedom to figure out what I wanted, without any fallout so I took every opportunity I could in every city I ran in to try things out. A big part of attraction is the confidence someone has, which suggests they know who they are. Because I now knew who I was, I felt more attractive, and I was playing catch-up. Even when I had something close to a relationship with a guy in Bristol, we weren’t exclusive, and it just cemented in my mind that I was too old to carry on like that. Grindr is a very convenient tool, but it’s basically about sex. And having made up for lost time and had fun doing it, I was beginning to work out what type of a man and relationship I wanted.
SEPTEMBER 2015 IN NUMBERS
Marathons: 30
Miles run: 799 (average per day: 26.6)
Running time: 161:51.35 hours (average per day: 5:23.43)
Number of people run with: 250
Distance personal bests: 16
First marathons/ultra-marathons: 6
Pints of cider: 16
Flat whites: 30
DAYS 28–47: Devon and Cornwall are wonderful, but absolutely exhausting. I’m driving on bad roads, getting up at six, introducing myself to new people, answering questions, going for massage therapy, updating social media, and obviously running the odd marathon. On the video message I record in Bude, where I pass the 750-mile mark, I look and sound terri
ble. Some nights I’ll have a cry in the van, because I’m so tired and trying to function in the most basic way. Whenever that happens, I’ll look in the mirror, see myself crying and say: ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? Pull yourself together, man!’
••••••••••
28 MARATHONS DOWN – JUST THE 373 TO GO FOR FUNDRAISER
WESTERN DAILY PRESS,
28 SEPTEMBER 2015
‘…During the first 25 marathons Ben has had to come to terms with some miserable weather and tough hills. He told his fans he had been suffering with tendonitis in his left shin but that it was improving…’
••••••••••
At the Bournemouth Marathon on day 34, my first official marathon of the Challenge, I somehow crank out a time of 3 hours, 55 minutes. I’ve no idea where that time came from – my average time before then had been about 5 hours, 20 minutes – but I just flew. I pass 900 miles in Christchurch the following day, accompanied by Danny, dressed in a Spider-Man onesie on a bike. We got some looks, especially because it was absolutely tipping it down. Around the 21-mile mark we celebrate with a cheeky can of Thatchers and some Jaffa Cakes – which I have quickly worked out are the cider and cakes of choice for marathon runners.
Passing through Southampton and on to Eastleigh for day 38, it is all about The Two Jims – one of whom had already run about 140 marathons, while the other completed his first with me. The Stubbington Green Runners, the largest group to turn out so far, lead me through the 1000-mile mark on day 39, and bizarrely, I stay at Stephen Fry’s husband’s parents’ house, although I don’t know who they are until they tell me over dinner, when I almost spit my chicken out. It was they who told Stephen what I was doing, hence the supportive tweet a week or so earlier.
After Stubbington, I make my way to Portsmouth, where I meet up with the local running club and take part in the first parkrun of the Challenge. Next, it’s over on the ferry for the Isle of Wight Marathon on day 41, back to Portsmouth, on to Hayling Island for day 43 and out onto the South Downs Way. It’s a whirlwind, and while I wouldn’t say I’m losing motivation, I have to admit I’m flagging. Some mornings I wake up and have no idea how many marathons I’ve run, which means I have no idea how many marathons I have left, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Then, coming up to the 50-day mark, my body suddenly falls into a groove. It’s as if it has said to itself: ‘Right, clearly nagging’s not going to work, might as well just get on with it.’ Nobody said this was going to happen, although, to be fair, I’m not sure anybody could have told me, even if I’d asked.