I learned about the Undercliff Walk, a wide esplanade cut into the chalky cliffs, running from Brighton Marina to Saltdean in the east. I would run along it, basking in the glare of the winter sun, then turn and make my way back along the top of the cliffs, feeling a few steps from flying. I would watch the Palace Pier twinkling at dusk as the lights came on, and see the West Pier seeming to bob up and down with my movement, like a regal spider in the bath.
On New Year’s Day, I ran for a mile behind two emaciated, shivering Goths who hugged and huddled against each other. When I caught up with and then passed them, I wanted to embrace them both. As January took flight, I watched teams of workmen repaint the pale green Victorian railings along the front, taking a few each day, slowly making progress. Each morning I would say hello and congratulate them on getting a little farther.
When I needed to add miles to my runs, I would shimmy down narrow streets lined with fishermen’s cottages and parks I’d never seen. I discovered little Tudor-style cottages and pockets of midcentury design tucked away from the endless wedding-cake prettiness of the creamy Regency seafront.
I felt myself become part of my new city as it became part of me. I ran along the pier early one February morning, looking up to see a seagull hovering above, searching for doughnuts to grab. I dropped my gaze to see the sea raging beneath the wooden slats of the pier. Running between gull and water, I had never felt happier or more like I belonged. I started to understand the rhythm of the weird mists that appeared over the sea but never seemed to make it to land. In turn, I myself became part of the view: a runner whizzing past the tourists who dawdled by shops filled with flip-flops and ornaments made from shells. As I enjoyed the landscape of my new city, I was also absorbed into it. Like the laces pulling the two sides of my running shoes together, running was meshing me and my home closer together.
It didn’t feel as if I was falling back in love with running; it felt as if I was falling deeply in love with Brighton. For the first time in my life, I had chosen a city, rather than letting my job or my father’s military postings dictate where I called home. And now it was up to me to become a part of it, let it truly become part of my identity. My hair was salty with sea spray wherever I was. And I spent so much time with my legs still moving beneath me that I barely noticed I was running. Running became my meditation. Not having yet reached a point where the runs were pushing me to the point of breaking, I was able to enjoy them, thinking about the end goal and basking in the process and my surroundings.
Just as I was enjoying the gifts of running more than ever, Julia was struggling with the enormity of what she had taken on. Sadness continued to wash over her, and with it the brutal confusion of grieving for someone who had died too young. As our marathon training ramped up, I noticed a shift in her attitude. She was preparing the ground not for victory but for potential failure. She suffered an injury in her coccyx—a nasty sprain—that caused her a huge amount of pain. She became scared to run. Her confidence stalled, then eroded. She worried about not spending enough time with her son, she worried about the amount of money we’d committed to raise, she worried about letting anyone down.
Watching her, I remembered the cast-iron belief I’d once had that I could never run a marathon. I remembered my father’s calm, consistent confidence in me and how a particularly bad run had felt at times like a sort of defiance against him. I recalled with crystal clarity: I didn’t doubt that I might not make it; I knew I couldn’t. Now I knew I could, and I knew she could, but I didn’t know how to convince her.
“But you’re so much fitter than me,” Julia would say.
“Only because I did the training,” I replied.
“But you’re a natural runner,” she’d say.
“No, I am not! Have you seen my boobs? I was not born a runner. I became one.”
I tried everything I could think of to reignite her self-belief—joking, pushing, ignoring, cajoling, recruiting mutual friends—but there was no convincing her. She firmly believed it was not possible.
One time we threw a trivia-night fund-raiser at a bar, and I heard Julia’s husband reassuring her that it didn’t matter if she didn’t make it. I felt despair. How dare he undermine her hard work? How dare he undermine my hard work? I felt like he was deliberately fueling her self-doubt. I was furious. (It was only years later, when someone said the same to me, that I understood it came from a place of unconditional love.)
As marathon day approached, Julia and I locked in a battle of wills: She became ever more convinced that she couldn’t do it, and I remained sure that she could. It was as if we were determined to prove each other wrong. She was even painfully embarrassed to run in front of me, despite being strong and significantly leaner than ever before.
At one point the only thing that seemed to be impelling us both was the fact that we were raising significantly more money than we had dared to hope. We asked everyone we knew and everyone they knew for help. It was crucial that the whole endeavor had some sort of tangible result. We started compulsively checking our fund-raising site to see how the donations were totting up.
We auctioned film and TV memorabilia that we’d managed to beg, steal, and borrow. Julia arranged a sellout night of live comedy as well as the aforementioned trivia night. I wrote about our project in a national magazine, and we charted our progress online. Entire families were involved, whole friend groups. A community grew. I hoped that Julia felt the swell of goodwill toward us when she doubted herself in the dead of night, because it was certainly there; at times it was all that kept me going as I tried to maintain high spirits and confidence. Our charity was thrilled and gave us two tickets for supporters to sit with the press and VIPs at the finish line. Julia decided that she wanted her husband and friends along the course, so the tickets were sent to my delighted father. No standing on the sidelines in the rain for my parents this year.
As training progressed, the weather flip-flopped insanely between the temperatures of midwinter and midsummer. It was so hot during my seventeen-mile slog in Brighton that I ran into the sea. It was the closest I have ever come to heatstroke—the white chalk of the cliffs glowing under the beam of the sun. I dreamed of water, imagined it oozing from the ground. My tongue seemed to be growing inside my mouth like that of a dog stuck in a hot car. I waded ankle-deep into the sea, wishing I could drink it. I looked around. There were women in bikinis on the beach. It was March. I took off my running top and dipped it in the icy water. I wrung it out and put it back on. The fabric stuck to my skin, cooling me down with reassuring speed. I would make it, we would make it.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, we became fitter. On the weekend before the race, a dear friend had her bachelorette party in Dorset. I attended without touching a drop of alcohol and still had the time of my life. My confidence in my body had returned, as had my enjoyment of food and its disassociation from guilt and shame. Once more I was proud to be able to do rather than to watch. I spent the entire afternoon exploring the tidal pools, leaping happily from rocks into the sea like a chirpy little mountain goat. Julia texted me a couple of times, terrified that I would hurt myself and be unable to run. What she didn’t know was that even if the rocks of Dorset’s Jurassic coastline had smashed both of my legs to smithereens, she would not have tackled that marathon alone. I was ready.
It was not until a few days later, when we went to the London Marathon Expo in Docklands, that Julia allowed herself to believe she might make the finish line. Held at the enormous and terrifying ExCel conference center, the Expo is a three-day event where competitors collect their numbers, their running chips, and final information regarding the event. They are bombarded by corporate stands and loud vendors who hawk every conceivable type of event, outfit, shoe, power food, and accessory. The Expo is simultaneously reassuring and leg-numbingly scary. You are confronted with a world of running otherwise limited to magazines, TV footage, or word of mouth: It is a runner’s mecca. It’s comforting to meet other runners and discover that t
hey are people just like you. They are dads with kids, grannies with family, friends supporting friends, and large charity groups egging one another on. Among them are many who, like Julia, are undertaking the challenge not for bravado-instilling bucket-list reasons but for emotional ones. They are making a tribute; they are offering up their suffering to help others who have suffered worse.
At the hall’s entry was a large white wall steadily filling with scribbled-on messages and dedications. Julia wrote a small note to Jerome, and I signed a note next to it in support of her. As we stepped back and looked at our tiny handwriting, almost lost in the sea of others’ jottings, I put my hand out and held hers. We were going to do this. We were part of something bigger than us. And we would see it through to the end.
On the morning of the event, I woke up as sick with nerves as I had three years before. This time the nerves were not about whether I could get myself round the course (which was feeling like less of a certainty) but about whether I could get Julia round it. While her anxieties had ebbed a little—and her sense of humor was doing its best to mask them—the importance of her finishing had grown with each passing day. For Jerome, for those who had helped us with the fund-raising, for those at the Royal Marsden Hospital who would be helped by the money, and for our eternally patient loved ones. We had to do them all proud.
We met at Blackheath station, where Julia presented me with a huge HEMMO badge to sew on the front of my running top. Many close friends had used the nickname since I was in my twenties. With the advent of Twitter (and my use of “@hemmo” as my handle) and my renewed enthusiasm for running, it had become more than a nickname. It was a persona, a sportsman’s moniker, a superhero identity. I was Hemmo when I was at my most “me,” and Julia knew that.
As at the start of all public races, there was little space for dignity, so I whipped out the needle and thread I’d brought along and stitched the badge onto my top before asking Julia to create a temporary tent with the baggy old hoodie I was wearing and I whipped my top on beneath it. Once in Greenwich Park, we checked our bags at the luggage trucks, and I watched the dismay flicker across Julia’s face as she realized that we had to surrender our valuables to a total stranger.
We took our positions in the penultimate enclosure and waited for the start to be announced. All around us, the hubbub of runners, costumes, supporters, and the incessant PA system playing “inspiring” eighties music created a carnival. We surrendered and joined in, whooping and clapping. The countdown began, and the crowd burst into cheers. We were off. It took a good ten minutes to cross the starting line, going at barely more than a shuffle, but as we did, Julia shrieked, “We’re running the bloody London Marathon!”
“We so are! We so bloody are!” I shrieked back.
As with all big races, there are a few minutes, maybe half an hour, when you run along, almost in a trance, semi-hypnotized by the unfamiliar sound of hundreds of other runners. The thud of running shoes, the whispers of breath, the feeling that you can’t stop because you’re moving as a pack and no one’s getting left behind. I tried not to talk for a bit, hoping that Julia would absorb and enjoy the moment, letting confidence and pride seep in. We ran in silence before I cracked and let out the first of many hollers on seeing our friends Jon and Dave standing at the side of the road. Arms crossed, feet hip-width apart and eyes glazed, they had led the charge with teasing us about training over the last few months. Now they were there for us. Up early on a Sunday, as steadfast and honorable as I’d always suspected they were.
“GUYS!” I shouted, and their blank gazes broke into goofy grins and big lollopy waves. They shouted back and carried on cheering until we were long gone. I felt a lump in my throat: The first of many supporters had seen us making a go of it. Julia was glowing at the sheer exhilaration of being cheered in the streets.
The bands, the crowds, the children with their little pots of jelly beans: The atmosphere alone kept us going for the first few miles. Soon we were approaching Tower Bridge and the halfway mark. The heat was rising. The unpredictable weather had settled on “blazing summer day.” I kept encouraging Julia to drink water and was barely without a bottle in my hand myself. It seemed prudent to walk for a portion of each mile, rather than to overheat before the end. Even the spectators looked roasting.
As we got to the bridge, I told Julia we should run. “You don’t want to wake up tomorrow and say that you walked over Tower Bridge,” I insisted.
“I’m not sure how well I’m doing,” she replied.
“It doesn’t matter! We’re not going for a time! It’s an experience you’ll never repeat!”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Please! For me! Why don’t you run ahead a bit, and I’ll take a picture!”
Julia was persuaded. The photograph I took is one of my favorites, with her looking over one shoulder and an image of Jerome on the back of her T-shirt. We held hands aloft over the second half of the bridge, screaming with delight.
Not long after the halfway mark, the heat and the exhaustion started to take their toll. The sunshine was merciless; there didn’t seem to be enough water on earth to keep us cool. I tried pouring it down the back of Julia’s neck, and we took turns squealing through the showers at the side of the road.
When you’re running, heat doesn’t just make you feel hot—it chips away at your reality, slowly but surely. It makes your feet feel as if you’re wearing someone else’s oversize shoes. It makes your tongue feel as if you have woken up with the worst hangover of your life. Worst of all, it can confuse you. Distances start to lose perspective, limbs feel heavy, and words begin to jumble.
During a marathon, perfectly normal, reasonable physiological responses to heat suddenly feel like emotional Armageddon. While I knew that the third quarter of a marathon felt like hell, I knew that it didn’t last forever. Julia did not. To watch her slump was heartrending. The longer a run is, the less it becomes about running. The challenge is dealing with the waves of emotion, keeping the mind from collapsing. As anyone who has started from scratch knows, emotions carried around for several miles can feel heavier than hell itself.
Throughout training, I’d seen Julia find threads of confidence and hope in running, to retrieve her pre-baby body and feel stronger than ever. That Julia was fading in front of me. Her shoulders slumped, her feet struggled to lift in the heat, and the face that had earlier been alert and positive, looking out at the spectacle, was now downcast. Where she was waving brightly at strangers, she was now avoiding their gaze. Where our shared sense of humor had seemed so infallible, my cajoling now met her ears as goading.
Our pace slowed and our faces reddened. I felt utterly helpless, seeing Julia losing every last scrap of self-belief. To say that she was convinced we wouldn’t finish would be an understatement—she seemed almost affronted that I had the temerity to suggest otherwise. Every “You can do this, I know you can!” was met with an even sharper “No, I can’t! Why don’t you understand?”
Ever grateful that I had been down this dark road and slugged it out with my dad’s support, I tried to let her protestations ride over me. They still stung, as the exhaustion was far from easy for me. I channeled my father’s unwavering faith and kept talking, kept encouraging, kept distracting. At times I was so hot that I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating. Words upon words came spilling out of my mouth until I no longer really knew what my latest profundity was. A quote from Eleanor Roosevelt? Or perhaps something from Dawson’s Creek. No matter, as long as we kept going forward, forward.
Toward the end of the race, I felt Julia was truly at her darkest, almost physically exfoliating herself of layer upon layer of grief. Her emotional pain was mirrored by considerable physical pain. I encouraged her to let it all out. If she could cry here on the street, maybe there would be less sadness when she got home, I reasoned.
Slowly, eventually, we turned onto the Embankment and saw more familiar faces. I had been talking up the “last-mile high” since we starte
d. Julia was struggling. For months I had been telling her that this moment would be worth it. And then we were there. But even as we turned onto the Mall, she was expressing doubt that she would make it.
“I can carry you from here!” I yelled, sure that her spirits would rally soon.
“Oh my God, oh my God.”
“What?”
“I can see the finish line!” A huge grin cracked her face. Finally, she knew she could do it.
As we ran toward the finish line, I took her hand. We heard people shouting our names. I couldn’t work out where the voices were coming from. As we approached the gallery of press seats at the finish line, I saw my parents: my father in his seat, grinning and waving wildly, and my mother, shrieking and clambering down from the seats and onto the side of the track. She scuttled toward us as the sound of her voice cut over the music and cheering. “GO GO GO ALEX AND JULIA YOU ARE THE BEST YOU MUST KEEP GOING EVERYONE IS SO PROUD OF YOU, YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW PROUD WE ALL ARE AND NOW IT IS THE FINISH JUST ENJOY IT I HAVE BEEN SITTING HERE ALL DAY AND SEEN SO MUCH BORING SPORT AND NOW YOU ARE FINALLY HERE OH THANK GOD GO GO GO GO ALEX AND JULIA . . .”
She was off the seating area and running alongside us, my father behind her in the stands, taking photographs. She continued to run along with us, screaming, until we ran our final steps. We crossed the finish line, grinning, crying, holding hands.
We had done it.
We collected our medals and bags and headed to the crowd of friends and family waiting for us with hugs, food, and congratulations. A friend’s little boy paraded around wearing my medal, convinced he had won the marathon. My mother cried and stroked my hair. Julia hugged her son, who was wearing her medal.
We had done it.
I lay facedown on a massage table the next day, staring at the masseuse’s feet: a moment of stillness after the shouting, heaving, and weeping of the previous day. I watched the feet shuffle gently out of view and realized that something had shifted in me. While you, and only you, can move your legs from start to finish, no one runs a marathon alone. Though I had supported Julia, I had received great support myself. My friends and family knew how hard I’d found it, and they had been wonderful. But what I had really learned was that running could no longer be about me and my personal goals. To go that far, to feel that pain, to endure that depth of despair, it had to be about more than my own self-worth; it had to have a purpose beyond me. I couldn’t continue running around in circles.
Running Like a Girl Page 9