I used to love watching Daley Thompson and Steve Ovett in particular – Daley because he was the greatest ever, and Ovett because I much preferred him to Seb Coe on account of his apparent unpopularity with the media. Identifying with the anti-hero is something I’ve done my whole life, which is why I have the friends I have, I suppose. Despite being interested in athletics, this didn’t translate into me actually getting off my arse and doing anything about it. It wasn’t until I was 35 that I entered my first ever race. At that time I was working for Lord Vader of the Empire, also known as Barclays Bank, and in a bid to make ourselves feel that our working lives were even vaguely worthwhile, a bunch of us decided we’d go and do the Great North Run for charity. At this particular point in my life I was suffering from a medical condition known as being a ‘fat bastard’, tipping the scales at an impressive 15 stone, but still looking good – for someone twice my age. I wasn’t particularly conscious of having got overweight and I didn’t achieve it by anything as remarkable as a junk-food diet. I just steadily ballooned over a period of about 15 years until, by the time I was in my mid-thirties, I had achieved a waist size of 38 inches and I couldn’t walk along any beach without fear of feeling the thump of a harpoon in my thorax from a passing Norwegian whaling ship.
In truth I probably thought I could do with losing a bit of weight and the Great North Run gave me a mission, a vision, a target, an impetus and lots of other wankybanky phrases we were indoctrinated with at that time. My favourite was a poster on the office wall of a soaring bird of prey with the title ‘Good Managers are like Eagles’ – which was true, because you wouldn’t have found either of them in that office. I set about training for the run by making my first mistake and joining my local gym, a costly place that was harder to leave than the Freemasons. However, they had treadmills aplenty and big screens showing Jamelia and Pussycat Dolls to distract me. I then went and bought a pair of trainers from JJB Sports (my second mistake) and began my self-created training plan – mistake number three. When I started I could literally run on a treadmill for five minutes before I had to stop, and with my ponderous pace and slowly undulating flesh I looked like a human lava lamp. However, the next time I went I ran for six minutes, then seven, then eight until after a while I was all the way up to an hour. I don’t remember what my pace was, or even considering that such a thing as pace existed, but I don’t recall ever considering running outside at any point, or doing longer than an hour, which was the maximum time setting on the treadmill.
When it came to doing the Great North Run, we all arrived at the start line in Newcastle at the same time as 40,000 other people, and I committed a sin that would come to enrage me in the future when others did it – I went down to the front of the race. My logic for this was that with the channel of competitors stretching back half a mile I’d end up going through the wall twice just to cross the start line. It never occurred to me that I would be getting in the way of lots of others, and indeed for the first mile I didn’t because, committing mistake number four, I went off at the same pace as everyone around me. A slight tightening in my legs, chest, forehead, groin muscles and teeth told me after a couple of miles that I had gone off too fast and what followed was a kind of slap-footed shuffle through Tyneside while being quite rightly jostled by people trying to get round my girth. Despite the abominable preparation and poorly executed race strategy, I somehow contrived to cross the line in Gateshead in 1 hour and 59 minutes. This came as a revelation not just to me but also to my wife, who wasn’t expecting me for another hour and who memorably said, ‘What are you doing here, did you pack in?’ My debut running time, coupled with having beaten all the other Barclays runners, convinced me that THIS was the sport I had been searching for all my life, that I was obviously a natural and that the world of running now consisted of me, Haile Gebrselassie and Paula Radcliffe in that order – mistake number five.
There are any number of sensible moves I could have made at this point, such as joining a running club, trying another half marathon or perhaps something shorter, or going to a proper running shop and getting some proper shoes rather than ones sold by some grunting teenaged host-organism for acne because ‘they’ve got big heels innit.’ My actual next move was to enter the London Marathon. The year was 2003, notable for the triple tragedies of the invasion of Iraq, the death of comic genius Bob Monkhouse, and the opening of Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre. It was not notable for an unheard-of runner shocking the world by winning the London Marathon in a pair of shitty old trainers. Quite why I thought doing a marathon was a good idea is lost in the mists of time; however I do recall a couple of things about my pre-race preparation:
1. I bought a new T-shirt.
2. I did absolutely no training for it whatsoever. And I mean that. None. Nothing. Not even the treadmill running I did for the Great North Run.
Ignorance is bliss, of course, and I don’t remember being unduly concerned as I set off from Greenwich Park. Once again, I set off too fast, although partly this was to get away from a bloke calling himself the Karaoke Runner who had hooked up speakers to his belt and was running with microphone in hand, singing along to ‘Keep on Running’, ‘Run to You’, ‘Everybody Wants to Run the World’ and ‘Corpses’ by Ian Brown. Although that last one may have been what I was on the verge of turning him into. Despite my catastrophic lack of preparation my confidence was sky-high when I crossed the halfway point at Tower Bridge in 1 hour and 59 minutes, emulating my Gateshead time and underlining my latent potential as a running Gladiator. What followed was a series of episodes that meant that should I ever actually be selected to appear on Gladiators, my Gladiator name would have to be something like ‘Blister’, or ‘Guff’, or perhaps ‘Spasm’, ‘Dunce’, ‘Void’, ‘Simpleton’ or most accurately of all, ‘Shitclown’.
First off, I started to feel a bit tired and my knees started to hurt. Then, without being conscious of the fact that I was slowing down, I was overtaken by a man dressed as a fairy who tapped his wand on my head as he skipped past. Then I was overtaken by an old woman who saw me shuffling along as though I’d soiled myself and said ‘Repeat after me, this is fun’, the vicious old cow. Next I was overtaken by a man dressed in a giant port bottle, two runners dressed as rhinos, and someone in a Mr Tickle costume. And then I heard it, ‘Ohhhhhh, I’m going to run to you, yeeeeeah I’m going to run to you’ as the Karaoke Runner came oozing up behind me. I searched for a chair leg or piece of broken pipe with which to kill myself, but instead opted for something more shameful – I walked. Anyone who has ever done this knows that once you stop running, starting again is almost impossible, and even greats like Paula Radcliffe struggle to get going once they’ve stopped staggering around a gutter in their knickers like a Greek holidaymaker.
Luckily though, after walking for a couple of miles (five) I spotted a man up ahead of me in the wide, sky blue, vertical stripes of a Coventry City shirt. If only I could catch him up we could talk football and distract ourselves from the misery and pain. It took me two miles to hunt him down when, to my shattering dismay, it turned out he was wearing an Argentina shirt! I don’t remember much about the last few miles apart from crossing the finish line next to a lad I thought was quite fat but who, on the photos, looks the same size as me. Looking at the photos now I realise that I have carefully cut off the part of the gantry that shows my finishing time so people would never see it, but I’m now happy to reveal to all three of you who have bought this book that my finishing time was 5 hours 20 minutes, and despite my dreams of running greatness it had taken me almost three and a half hours to do the second half of the race. Reality is a bitch.
Skip forward ten years and, thanks to running with Godiva, things have changed somewhat. As contrasting evidence to my London experience I offer the experience of my last marathon, which took place around the attractive business parks and industrial estates of Abingdon in Oxfordshire, and for which I trained by temporarily abandoning any swimming, cycling or triathlon activity
of any kind. If you are a triathlete then I realise this admission will probably make your tempers hotter than Peter Stringfellow’s hairdryer, because the universal law of triathlon states that running should never be engaged in as a stand-alone activity, because that is wimpish. Triathlon is a multi-sport full of danger and gadgets, and for triathletes 5ks are ‘a leg stretch’, 10ks and half marathons don’t count unless you cycle to them, and marathons should only be completed as a ‘training session’ for an Ironman. I broke this golden rule to concentrate on training for a marathon in a bid to complete one under the magic 3-hour barrier. I’d managed this once before a few years previously but rumours abounded that I was now past it, having done my previous two marathons in lovely Stockholm and not-so-lovely Leicester in 3.05 and 3.08. I decided that if I wanted to enhance my image as an athletic egotist wedged so tightly up my own sphincter that I’m basically just a burly haemorrhoid, then I needed to have a marathon result that started with a ‘2’, proving that my last one wasn’t a fluke. Also I needed something – anything! – to distract me from the fact that, at the time of this race, the triathlon season had finished and it was either run a marathon or spend the next few weeks pinned to my mattress by an invisible goblin of woe.
I chose the Abingdon Marathon as the scene of my shameful exploit because, like Challenge Roth, it is renowned as a ‘fast’ course, and I began doing some running – lots and lots of running. As far as my triathlon friends were concerned, news that I was ‘just running’ was treason that should be repaid with death, and I was told to either pledge loyalty to the God of Triathlon and live out my days as a wealthy lord with rich lands and many sons, or they’d have my head on a stick. However, by this time I’d begun my training plan set for me by Dave-who-shall-be-obeyed so it was too late to turn back. Training enables greater effort, harder sessions, and the need for more and more kit … in other words, it enables most of the shit in my life. Without specific training I can categorically state I would never make it as a runner, because it just hurts too much. No freewheeling on your bike, no using your arms to give your legs a rest, no having a crafty rest in transitions, just hours and hours of endless effort that gives your legs the same flexibility as a two-pin plug.
Marathon runners in particular seem to me to be a strange, solitary breed who list their hobbies as things like ‘training’, ‘cold baths’ and ‘preparing for the war against the machines’, so it came as a relief that on marathon race day there were evidently plenty of triathletes doing the race, easily identified by their headsweats, caps, skinshorts, compression socks, special belt for holding gels and the latest-shiny-gadget on their wrists. They did not, however, identify me, because such was the extent to which I’d turned my back on triathlon that I wore just a vest and a pair of running shorts and I carried my gels in my hands rather than in some kind of specially designed belt – shameful stuff. The race itself was flat and twisty and when I set off at my 6.45-a-mile pace, half the field swarmed past me in a way that suggested that either
a) I was still poor at running
or
b) half the field was over-optimistic about their fitness and repeating the mistake I made in Newcastle all those years ago.
The chief incidents of note during the race were a stabbing pain in my groin that made me consider changing my name to Screaming Lord Crutch, and duelling for five miles against a baldy runner with ill-fitting dentures who looked like Nosferatu, only much more real. On the plus side, at least he wasn’t singing. I finally shook off Mr Baby-New-Potato-Head at mile 15, by which time I was steadily making my way back through the overoptimistic portion of the field who’d started too fast. At mile 18, I had an energy gel that tasted like Gollum dung and spent two miles gagging on vile glop but by mile 21 I was striding forth at 6.30-a-mile pace and waiting for ‘The Wall’ to rear up and smack me in the Jacob’s cream crackers. The Wall, of course, is that infamous imaginary barrier that comes somewhere between 17 and 22 miles and which makes you stumble about like you’ve been for a night on the ale with Sarah Harding. Yet on this day The Wall never came despite 26.2 miles being a long way and me having the same bandy-legged gait by the end of the race as someone who had spent their life working on the waltzers. At the finish line I was so thin I had to eat five Curly-Wurlies before I became visible to the human eye and, despite being desperate for a pint, I was offered only a cup of tea by a marshal so young he couldn’t have understood the phrase ‘Give me Guinness’ if I’d spelled it out with Sticklebricks. All this fandango was worth it because of the time as I crossed the line – 2.54:26. Boom-shakalaka-boom-shakalakalaka. Boom. That time is exactly 2 hours and 26 minutes faster than my first marathon. My Godiva teammates Emerson and Iwan would have time to go round the whole course again and still finish ahead of my fat former self, but not any more!
These days I’ve even managed to win a couple of medals for running (albeit ‘Masters’ medals, which are awarded to older runners who have defied death long enough to still be competing) and it is the part of triathlon that has had the most dramatic effect on my physique. I’m grateful for that because it’s a good bit cheaper than paying someone to follow me round slapping pork pies out of my hand. On reflection, though, as Messrs Constable & Robinson publishers are paying me to be reflective, if there’s one sport that has landed me in more trouble than any other, it is running.
Trouble number one
One night a couple of years ago, after sliding home from the village pub, I went online and entered the Stockholm Marathon. I’d read an article about it earlier that day, saw a photo of a drinks station that appeared to be staffed entirely by Miss Sweden contestants in wet T-shirts and thought ‘that’s the race for me.’ As I entered the race, the date rang a distant bell but, being pissed, I didn’t dwell on it any further. It wasn’t until the following day when Nicky asked me where we were going to go for her birthday that an icy claw gripped my insides and I was transformed from carefree triathlete into a dead-eyed totem of misery. Yes, the date of the marathon was indeed her birthday, and not just any old birthday but a landmark birthday, too. As this is a book that may be read at some point by somebody, let’s say it was her twenty-first birthday, and definitely not her fortieth.
This was the point at which I should have said to Nicky, ‘I have inadvertently entered the Stockholm Marathon while under the influence of Stella Artois, so how would you like a weekend there?’ but, given that she has the compassion of a water cannon operator, instead I crapped my packet and squeaked, ‘How would you like to go to Stockholm?’ Her response was to get very excited, text all her friends to tell them she was off to the home of Ikea and their so-called chairs, and to cook me meatballs for tea. Her excitement reached fever pitch when she found out it was the same weekend as a Swedish royal wedding culminating in the ‘Love Stockholm’ festival, a three-day free booze, food and music jamboree. This was the point at which I should have said, ‘Yes, and there’s a marathon, too, which I’d really like to do, please may I enter it?’ but once again, like a white mouse, I said nothing. I carried on saying nothing until we were boarding the flight to Arlanda Airport, at which point I thought the presence of armed security staff might make it the perfect moment to own up, given that she couldn’t attack me without being subjected to gunfire.
She was already disappointed that her promised ‘bottle of bubbly’ was a half-used bottle of limited edition Matey from 1999, so as she asked what we were going to do on her birthday I said, ‘Well, er, I wondered if you could spare me for a couple of hours …’ Nicky gave me a look made entirely of ice and said, ‘Why?’
‘Well, there’s a marathon which I may have already entered,’ I replied, while experiencing more hot and cold flushes than a malaria patient going through the menopause. Nicky’s face darkened and some birds flying overhead suddenly dropped dead out of the sky. In a flash, she understood precisely what had happened and that her birthday treat was little more than elaborate window dressing for another race. Then, instead of kicki
ng my knees so hard that they folded the wrong way, she merely said, ‘You’ll pay for this’ in a voice that suggested I would shortly be pecked to death by ravens. And I did pay for it, with expensive meals every night during which Nicky made me watch as she ate chips the size and weight of piano keys while I had to have salad and muesli. Her greatest revenge came within 20 minutes of me crossing the finish line of the race, whereupon she marched into the warm-down area where I was warming down by lying on the floor groaning and announced, ‘Right, that’s done. Now it’s sightseeing time.’ I spent the next three hours walking around every monument, park, festival event and shop in Stockholm, despite the fact that I couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable if I’d been gelding a horse. I’d like to say there is a profound moral to this story but other than ‘don’t take your wife to races’ I can’t think what it might be.
Trouble number two
In 2009 I tore a muscle in my foot. This was particularly annoying because:
1. It hurt.
2. It was two weeks before I was due to run in the Stratford-upon-Avon marathon, a key part of my build-up for doing that year’s Ironman Austria.
Accidental Ironman Page 7