by Phil Hewitt
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.'
How apt that he should have been called Phil. He's even wearing the same colour of orange running vest I have worn for most of my marathons. Just that look on his face seems to explain it all. Without realising it, I was hankering after Birthday Card Phil's vigorous good health and seemingly boundless energy. As the old lady says in When Harry Met Sally, 'I'll have what she's having.'
Work was good; family was great; but I needed something that was me; just me. Which is an easy thing for a bloke to say as he approaches his self-indulgent midlife wallow. Not many dads of young kiddies would get away with it, let alone put it into practice, but fortunately in Fiona, my wife, I have an absolute model of tolerance and forbearance. She knew – and I knew – that I wanted something. I just didn't know quite what. It took a chance conversation to fill in the blank. I happened to be in the right place at the right time, which happened to be the normal place at the normal time: the offices of the Chichester Observer where I work, one grey morning in October.
Being arts editor isn't a role that tends to come with too many sporting demands, though I have always been more sporty (it's all relative) than our succession of sports editors – sporty in the sense of actually going out and doing it. My weekly thrash on the badminton court was – and still is – a cornerstone of my life. Bizarrely, you don't see too many sports editors on court, though. They're the ones with the knowledge and the contacts, but they never seem to sample the delights they describe – and for one reason. Sports editors, in my limited experience, tend to be rather on the large side. Not that I am complaining. It was the size of our 1997 incumbent that led to my London Marathon entrée.
Our newspaper worked closely with the Macmillan Cancer Relief service at Midhurst, just a few miles up the road from our base in Chichester. For a year we'd run a campaign supporting their bid to raise sufficient money for an additional nurse. I wrote most of the articles as part of a general features role, and they were, strangely, simultaneously both easy and difficult to write. Easy as they touched so many people and so many people had so much to say in support of the fundraising initiative, but difficult because so much of what they had to say was horribly sad. Inevitably, Macmillan's greatest advocates were people who had lost loved ones. It was Macmillan who helped them in the final months as they faced up to impending bereavement – which is why the newspaper was proud to work closely with the charity. Macmillan responded by offering us one of their places in the 1998 London Marathon, as another way to highlight their fund-raising efforts.
Our then editor Gary, my badminton partner and close friend, offered the place to our sports editor. Let's call him 'Fred'. Gary felt it was the most appropriate thing to do, not just because he was the sports editor but also because he sensed a good story. Fred was big. Not the largest sports editor we have ever had, but not far off. The idea was that selfless Fred would slim down in preparation, write about it endlessly and then whizz round the London Marathon in a way that was an example to us all, raising several thousand pounds for Macmillan into the bargain
Fred was tempted. It seemed a great idea until one of our features subeditors pointed out the drawback. 'It will kill him,' she said. There was a ripple of nervous laughter. 'No, seriously,' she insisted. 'It will kill him.'
The bubble burst; reality rushed in. Fred, who was already having problems with his knees, consulted his physiotherapist. He learned that when you run, you crash down on your knees and ankles at something like four or five times your body weight, which for Fred would have been an impact approaching 90 stone up to 60 times a minute. You didn't need to be in medicine to work out the implications. You just needed to look at him.
'My knees won't take it,' he told us when he came back from his appointment – a reasonable opt-out which saved face and probably also saved a life. And that's the point at which I chipped in with three momentous words: 'I'l
l do it.' There was general agreement that the arts editor running a marathon had an appealing whiff of the ridiculous about it, and so the gig was mine. Just as you wouldn't necessarily want to send your sports editor to review the latest in new writing at the National, so you wouldn't want to send your arts editor into the sweaty throng of a mass endurance event – or so the thinking went. Slightly stereotypical thinking, I thought, which seemed to project us arts editors as effete, rather fragile creatures, not strong enough for the exertions of this world. Nonsense, of course. And for me, it was a red rag.
I broke the news to Pamela, Macmillan's fundraising manager and now my marathon mentor. A marathon runner herself, she knew exactly how to go about it and, from that moment, she became a never-ending fount of sweetly dispensed wisdom. Blessed with the most appealing personality, she was bright and breezy; just as importantly, she was also calm and crucial. I didn't move in running circles; I didn't have running contacts; and it wouldn't have been fun simply to read up about it. Pamela was the answer to my every running need.
These days I'm sure all the tips are out there to be found and tested if you scour the Internet enough, but it's no substitute for having someone with you to tell you the dos and don'ts and to bring them to life with genuine, first-hand knowledge. Pamela's gift, amply displayed in her work for the charity, was that she was a born communicator, adept at enthusing and highly skilled at encouraging.
Right from the start, she was insistent that, at the age of 34, the question was never going to be whether or not I could do it. I was generally fit, slight of build and keen. The only question was how quickly I could do it, an argument no first-timer will ever accept until he or she has crossed the finishing line. Nonetheless it was a considerable confidence-booster. After all, I reasoned, Pamela should know. If she was confident, then perhaps I should be so too.
Pamela was crystal clear as to what the first step should be. Get some proper running shoes. She even told me where to get them – the wonderful Alexandra Sports in Portsmouth, a paradise for the kind of anorak I didn't know I was. I wandered in half-expecting the staff to sigh 'My hero!' and swoon when I announced, coat slung nonchalantly over my shoulder, that I was running the London Marathon. But no, they took it disarmingly in their stride, not even batting an eyelid as they motioned me to await my turn at the back of the queue.
The shop is staffed by people who know. It's a place where the romance of marathon running is shoved aside in favour of the basic scientific practicalities. I was seen by the owner, a man with a Sherlock Holmes-like ability to construct a stride, indeed an entire running personality, from the merest glimpse of a foot.
Return customers would present the staff with their used running shoes. The assistant would examine the soles and then pronounce: 'I can see you are a left-handed printer, recently married and now living in a terraced house three storeys high, backing onto a railway line. But tell me, sir, why did you invest quite so
heavily in the South African mines?' Or something like that.
They would upend the shoe and read it like a book, pointing out where the runner was wearing the sole down the most, where he was exerting pressure that he shouldn't and quite why the impact wasn't right. All this information would then be computed into a series of suggestions for the most appropriate successor shoe, which would then be road-tested outside the shop. People living in the vicinity had presumably long since ceased to be amused by the surreal sight of besuited blokes and smartly dressed women running up and down in trainers. Alexandra Sports would not sell you anything they were not happy with, and they soon opened up to me a vast world of arcane terminology.
The scientific names of muscles and tendons were tossed around as part of the shop's everyday vocabulary, alongside words such as 'pronate' and the various degrees to which you might or might not do so. They soon told me that I was an over-pronator, which sounded like a compliment. I imagined myself over-pronating over that finish line as I waved to the crowd. Except that it wasn't a compliment at all. It was a polite way of saying – and fortunately they didn't express it quite this way – that you could drive a bus between my knees. Far from being greeted as a visiting Olympian, I was labelled bandy-legged – which meant that I would turn my foot inwards as I ran, a gait likely to lead to all sorts of injuries.
I was the best part of an hour in Alexandra Sports, emerging with a lovely pair of ASICS running shoes, which I swore by – and occasionally at – for most of the next six months. They lifted my instep sufficiently, and they seemed perfect – proof absolute of Pamela's point: decent shoes are the sine qua non of running.
A dozen years on, I would temper that. Sheer bloody-mindedness is just as important, and I am sure Pamela would agree. Certainly you won't get anywhere without it, just as you won't get anywhere if you don't spend out on the shoes. I seem to remember that that first pair cost around £65, which seemed a fortune, but the shoes hovered around the £70 mark for years to come – and these days you can get them considerably cheaper on the Internet if you know exactly which ones you want. That's the key, though. Never take a punt on a pair of untested shoes. You need to know that they suit your feet. You need to have run in that model first, ideally in suit and tie outside a sports shop. Buy them untested and you might be lucky. But then again, you might not, and the consequences of getting it wrong can be disastrous.
Even then, it's not plain sailing. Just when you're totally happy with your shoes and go back for your third pair of the same, you will run into that infuriating thing known as progress. Under the banner of striving always to improve your running experience, the big sports shoe companies every now and again ditch some of their most popular models and introduce new improved versions. It's astonishing that they don't hear the howl of protest that erupts up and down the country. To us over-pronators, it effectively means starting again. When that particular model of ASICS disappeared, I was bereft. The successor – in those sprints up and down the road outside the shop – didn't seem to be anywhere near as good.
Under the expert guidance of the sales assistant, I jumped ship, defecting to New Balance with whom I stayed for years, happy as Larry in my 857s, until New Balance foolishly thought they could make a good thing even better. They failed, and so I and my feet started to worship at the temple of Nike, where I have stayed ever since. They too have gone through several different models, much to my consternation, but the latest variety has more or less done the trick for me so far.
Armed – or footed – with the shoes back in 1998, it was now a question of getting down to some serious training, and for this Pamela gave me what every marathon runner will know as 'the schedule', the get-you-round week-by-week plan of action that will overshadow your every weekend from the dark days of winter through to the bright spring day when you finally hit the streets of London.
Alongside it, she gave me a sheet of hieroglyphics which, on closer study, revealed a stick figure pushing against walls and tugging his own legs up behind him, fortunately one at a time. I thought I was back in the realms of Sherlock Holmes. Could these be those famous Dancing Men? But no, they weren't dancing. They were stretching.
Whenever you go out running, so the theory goes, you are supposed to do some stretching beforehand, and before that first marathon I did so religiously. If you are to stay injury-free, it's even more important to do a similar set of stretches after you return, and again I did them dutifully during the early months of 1998, trying to play it very much by the book on my marathon debut.
Very early on, Pamela stressed to me the importance of 'intervals' and 'fartleks', exercises which are designed to increase your speed and stamina. It wasn't until later marathons that I indulged her passion for intervals, more of which later, but for marathon number one I certainly did my best to obey her injunction to 'fartlek', a piece of intensity training nowhere near as antisocial as it sounds.
Like all these things, it can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be, and I opted to keep it simple, in
keeping with what the word actually means. Apparently it's Swedish for 'speed play', and, in essence, it's a way of putting your body under stress. You see two markers on the route ahead – be they gates, telegraph poles, street lamps or whatever – and you run like hell between them. And you do that every now and again as you run along. The idea is that you up the intensity of your endeavours and, in theory, you get your body used to the kind of pressures you will be putting it under come the big day.
Bizarrely, fartleks proved tolerably enjoyable. Unlike intervals, which I didn't dip into until later, they are unstructured, and for me, they seemed to tie in nicely with the whole ethos of running – an off-the-leash surge which is there to be enjoyed. In those early runs, I became reasonably adept (and reasonably strong-willed) in determining the markers for my sporadic sprints, and I am sure they played a key role when it came to increasing my distance, the basic goal of training for a first marathon.
In short, the training has got to get you from not running at all to running 26.2 miles on one glorious day which has got to coincide with the very moment at which you are at your readiest. Fartlekking was one of the ways of getting there.