by Phil Hewitt
These were the images I was trying to evoke on the Sunday morning as I travelled to the start. The local trains are free for runners. All you have to do is wave your race number and you're on. Follow the instructions, follow the crowd, follow the marshals and you're there. From Tooting, where I was staying, it's a fair old hike to Greenwich and Blackheath, the recommended tube stops, but while it seemed a pain at the time, yet another thing to think about, I am sure now that it helped, all part of the focusing which culminates in that great moment of release when the gun is fired and off you go.
One of the recommendations for marathon training is to run races, something I never did. I'd read and been told repeatedly that it was a great way to psyche yourself up and get yourself in the right frame of mind. Also that it was good to get used to the idea of running with other people. After all, most runners do the vast majority of their training on their own, churning out those country miles with nothing but the wildlife for company. Marathon day was pretty much the first time I'd seen another runner – the first time running became remotely sociable.
And therein lies one of the great paradoxes of marathon running – the fact that something so solitary and self-centred can also prove, as I discovered that morning, such a bonding experience. Many millions of pounds are raised for charity during a marathon, but I still think there is something self-centred about running even when you are doing it for charity. It is something you do because you want to do it, however much your run will benefit others through the money you raise. Running has always seemed to me an intensely personal thing, and yet huge crowds turn out to watch you do it, all intent on enjoying London's unique blend of street party and elite athletics. Huge intoxication lay ahead – though not of the alcoholic variety.
I'd barely spoken to any other runners until that day, but that morning, suddenly everyone was my mate. Catch someone's eye on the tube, and you're straight into conversation. 'Is this your first?' Stand next to someone at the urinal, and 'Have you done this before?' takes on a different meaning. I remember being struck by the camaraderie, and I continue to notice it to this day. One of the great discoveries of marathon running for the masses is that you run against no one except yourself. The 30,000 other people around you are people you are running with, not against. Run a marathon and you're running a lone race in a huge crowd, all part of the rich fascination that I started to learn and love that day.
On my longer training runs, it had become clear to me just how much marathons are run in the mind, reliant on that bloody-mindedness I was talking about. Consequently, there was something quite forced and determined about my positivity that morning. I was intent on thinking a good race even before I'd started running it. I devised my own little mantra on my way to Greenwich that morning. When I wasn't confessing to being a virgin marathoner to some superfit and slightly intimidating-looking fellow runner, I was muttering to myself 'You can do it, you can do it', my own little hymn that I resorted to on and off throughout the race. Far more important things were happening; Anna was hoping; McCartney was grieving. I needed to keep it in perspective and go out and enjoy it.
I arrived at Greenwich Park at around 8 a.m., with an hour and three-quarters to go until the start. But there were plenty of people there already, and it was quite some prospect as I passed the point of no return, entering the runners-only enclosure where I handed over my labelled luggage to a waiting lorry corresponding to my race number and then settled down to wait. There was an air of nervous expectation overhanging it all; the morning was bright but still slightly chilly; everywhere people were stretching, chatting or queuing for the loo.
Water was available everywhere; tea and coffee were on tap; sports drinks were being dished out. There was everything you needed as you settled down for that final hour or so – everything you needed except sufficient loos. The final 60 minutes passed in what was to become clear to me later as time-honoured marathon fashion, that great queue-for-the-loo ritual which marks marathons everywhere, an essential part of the pre-race warm-up for anyone, anywhere, with 26.2 miles ahead of them.
You've been keeping your hydration up for days; you started the day with a drink; you drank on the train; and you drank on the walk to the start. There's only so much you can take, and so you join the snaking loo queue. Once you reach the cubicle, you do your business and then rejoin the queue, a process you will probably complete – as the minutes tick by – four or five times with ever-diminishing output. The great benefit is that it passes the time – along with whatever else you are passing.
But then, with 10 or 15 minutes remaining before the 'off' at 9.45, it was time to suss out the starting enclosures. A letter on your race number indicates the starting area you will begin from. The faster you predict your finishing time will be, the further to the front you will be placed by the race organisers, a simple tactic which works wonderfully well when it is enforced, just as it is in London. So many of the early yards in other marathons are spent weaving through the wobblers who've started far further forward than their predicted times justified – great for them to steal a march perhaps, but a pain for the quicker runners who've now got to negotiate their way around them. In the London Marathon the organisers get it spot on. At the time, I remember people tutting at the apparent officiousness of it all. It was only in later marathons that I realised how important it is. Strict corralling is ultimately a friend to every single runner.
Of course, the corralling in itself poses a horribly difficult question for a first-time marathoner. Asking you to predict your finishing time seems a terribly unfair question, inviting hubris almost. You've never done it before, yet you are being asked to announce just when you expect to finish.
In reality, it's not too difficult to take a stab at it based on your training, your half-marathon times in particular. I took an average half-marathon time, doubled it and then added a quarter of an hour or so. And then a bit more. More sophisticated methods of calculation are available now, particularly these days with the proliferation of wrist-worn GPS tracking devices, but even without them there are plenty of tables you can resort to, all of which give you a pretty good idea just how you might do in the great unknown ahead. Best of all, perhaps, was simply to follow your instinct. After six months' training, I felt I had a fairly shrewd idea – and I put myself down for somewhere between four and four and a half hours.
Here again, Pamela was wonderfully wise. She was at great pains to point out to me the dangers of fixating on a particular time. Her theory was that you need to have three times in mind: one you would be overjoyed with, one you would be happy with and one that you would consider adequate. In reality, an experienced marathon runner will probably take a more zonal approach, with the range of emotions – over the moon at one end and severely hacked off at the other – shading one into the next over a spectrum.
One way or another, there was plenty to think about as we huddled at the start.
As we waited, I discovered perhaps the thing I love most about marathons, and that's their utterly seductive sense of convergence. Waiting, queuing, wasting time, you see so many people running for different clubs and for different causes, people of so many different nationalities and from so many different walks of life. And yet all of them got up that morning thinking, 'I'm going to run the London Marathon today', and all of them, by whatever means, had made their way here, the only time in the history of the planet that exactly these people will gather together in exactly the same place.
The marathon organisers produce lists of occupations and lists of countries of origin. I like to let my mind be boggled thinking about all the tiny moments and the tiny decisions which have led precisely this group of people to be in this place at this time. Just think of the chain of events which have led to this number of German lawyers lining up alongside that number of French dentists in a field which features this number of English journalists and that number of Spanish accountants. Is it random or is it somehow written in the stars? You suspect it's a quir
k of fortune, but you can almost believe there's a hidden hand guiding it all.
Time and again, something quite spiritual rises out of the sweaty mass of humanity which constitutes a marathon, particularly as we gathered at the start that day. I could wax quite lyrical about it, and mentally I started to as I waited. There's something transcendent about a marathon. We've all answered an unheard call. We're lured there to be collectively bigger than the sum of our individualities. Stand at the start of a marathon, and you'll sense it too – a beguiling magnetism about the whole thing which lifts you out of the everyday and lets you glimpse the operating of the universe at a higher level where we are all somehow connected, brought together in a shared consciousness of the task ahead.
And yes, I know that sounds horribly pretentious. But maybe you've just got to be there. On the day, I was welling up at the thought of it. Not many things make me sentimental, but on that morning, I discovered that marathons most certainly do.
It wasn't the morning's only discovery. You'd think that we would all run in the same way. We don't. Far from it. You get the super striders, the low-bodied lopers and everything in between; some people mince, some people prance, others surge; some glide like swans, others are all legs like newborn giraffes; some pump with their arms, some keep their arms stock-still. With some people, you wonder how the mass of their movements can ever combine to create forward thrust. With others, all you can do is marvel at the slick efficiency of it all. Some flail, some ease; some crunch, some coast; some sashay, some flow. Some make it all look incredibly easy; others make it look nigh on impossible. Each to their own, and the great joy is that it is wonderful to see.
No wonder the shoe manufacturers, much as I like to malign them, are constantly pushing forward with their product range, searching for ever-greater degrees of sophistication. It's a wonder they don't give up. How could you possibly ever cater for this lot, charging like rhinos, floating like birds, sprinting like gazelles, hopping like grasshoppers, prowling like tigers, scuttling like mice and heaving like hippos? I soon found myself thinking how exciting it was to be in the thick of it.
It was all decidedly stop-start at the off, though. The gun went. Nothing happened. And nothing continued to happen for the next 30 seconds. We simply stood there shoulder to shoulder. The old hands knew exactly what was happening. We first-timers were bewildered. 'This is going to take much longer than I thought,' I chuntered, throwing in an extra few chants of 'You can do it'. This was something I hadn't anticipated.
Penned in the enclosure for those anticipating a 4 hours to 4 hours 30 finish, we were so far from the start that it was several minutes before the forward motion rippled back to us. Even then, it started out as a shuffle, followed by a standstill, followed by a shuffle, followed by a standstill, a pattern which repeated itself for the first five minutes of my first London Marathon with the start line still nowhere in sight. Finally, the shuffle became steadier; shuffle became walk; walk became trot; the starting arch started to dominate the horizon, and then, almost imperceptibly, trot became run, the transformation completed with the step which took us over the start mat – in my case 11 minutes after the gun, by which time the front-runners had probably completed the first 2 miles.
As I was to discover when my father-in-law joined the fray a few years later even further back, it can be a good 20 minutes before you get over the line – at which point those race leaders would have been 4 miles to the good. Of course you clock your start time from the moment you cross the line, but no wonder I wasn't going to win if I had to give a long-legged Kenyan a 2-mile head start.
But then again, you've got to bear in mind the sheer logistics of it all, the mind-numbing complexity of getting more than 30,000 people simultaneously in motion – people vastly ranging in ability, in expectations and in style. You aren't looking at a complete cross section of humanity, of course. It's a cross section at the upper end of the fitness spectrum, but even so, there was evidently a great breadth of talent on display, and the London organisers' skill was to get us all up and running as smoothly as possible – something they pulled off brilliantly.
The sky was bright as we finally got underway, a thrilling moment after that initial slowness. A very useful slowness, as it turned out. The received wisdom is that the very worst thing you can do in a marathon is to start off too quickly. The argument goes that with all those miles ahead, you've got to pace yourself – which is fair enough. But unless you're a super-fast runner, most of the big-city marathons will hem you in any way in those early stages.
Even once we'd started, we still came to a couple of shuddering halts – and here the reason was obvious. Scores of runners dashed off to the side for a wee after a few hundred yards. They simply couldn't hold it in any longer, and for reasons only traffic-management experts will understand, their swift side-footing off the course brought us all to a halt. Runners obsessing over time were probably worrying at this point; those of us just enjoying the experience had to view it as part and parcel of the London Marathon's rich mysteries.
The sight of dozens of peeing runners was a timely reminder of all that Pamela had told me. Top up. Top up. Top up every few minutes. Maybe her greatest gift to me as a novice had been to hammer home the crucial importance of hydration. If you feel thirsty, it's too late, she kept saying – words which rang through my head. If you feel thirsty, you are dehydrated. If you are dehydrated, you are in danger. Not necessarily done for, but certainly on the at-risk register.
And so I sipped dutifully from the start as we passed through the leafy residential area which borders Greenwich Park. Everything seemed very gentle, very guarded, everyone running well within themselves at this point. Spectators had gathered in their front gardens and on the pavements to cheer us on, but suddenly, and slightly strangely, it was all seeming a little low-key. We were passing opulent, attractive houses, but no landmarks at this stage. The only thing approaching a landmark came after 2 or 3 miles, when the various starts merged and the three streams of runners became one continuous flow as we headed towards the Thames. There was plenty of good-natured booing and jeering between the runners as the three races became one, compensation perhaps for the fact that we were in fairly nondescript suburban sprawl and remained so until we reached Greenwich.
Here the Maritime Museum, striking in all its classical elegance to our right, was an early highlight of the day – especially as it seemed to signal that we were making progress.
By now, the crowds were thickening and the noise levels were rising, bands interspersing the spectators, music mixing with the roar as we passed by. Greenwich looked gorgeous on that sunny spring morning, and, just over 6 miles after the start, the Cutty Sark proved exactly the lift I'd been hoping it would be – a lift denied runners in recent years following the fire in 2007. Later marathons showed it boarded up. The
2011 London Marathon bypassed it altogether.
After the Cutty Sark, the route became largely landmark-free once again, but the crowds were reward enough in a stretch which was disappointingly dull in every other respect. I started to pin my hopes on Tower Bridge, just after 12 miles, to lift things once more, as indeed it did. Here, and on both sides of the river, the crowds were intense for one of the day's great moments. Think of the traffic there usually, and here you are running straight across it, but this genuine high was followed by a genuine low. I remember miles 13 to 15 as decidedly dreary. Not a lot distinguished them – a key area where London palls alongside other marathons. The very best courses keep the interest constant, as I was to discover later. London falls short. You just have to rely on the spirit of it all.
By now, the weather had deteriorated significantly, and it was around the halfway mark that we had the second and the heaviest of the three showers that hit us en route. But I loved them – especially when one of the roadside DJs blasted us with 'It's Raining Men'. All you could do was smile. There was goodwill on the day, but even better, there was humour, and the laughs along the way put
an extra little spring in our steps.
Time and again, the music chimed in beautifully. Around the halfway mark, 'Honky Tonk Women' by my gods, The Rolling Stones, blared out, always one of my favourites from a band I've idolised for years. It was fabulous to fall into step with an all-time classic; surreal to be one of thousands of runners doing so. You slip into a strange impressionability as you run; you absorb what's going on around you and literally you take it in your stride. As we loped along, the rain, bizarrely, was part of the fun.
It was considerably less enjoyable for Pamela. She was there to support her Macmillan runners, and as the rain came down, all my whingeing was uppermost in her mind. 'Poor Phil,' she kept thinking to herself. 'He hates the rain.' She wasn't to know that I was loving it. I feel rather guilty about that now – and even guiltier when I recall that, selfishly, it never occurred to me just how miserable the downpours were making life at the time for my wife. Fiona had nobly come to support me, despite having a toddler in tow and being now six months pregnant.