Keep on Running

by Phil Hewitt

  Our son, Adam, was very nearly two; our daughter, Laura, was just over three months away from being born. Fiona had a tough day. At the finish, her first chance to change Adam's drenched clothes, she discovered that the spare clothes in her rucksack were even wetter than the clothes he was wearing. The rain dampened the day for thousands in the crowd and probably for many of the runners. For me, at least, it was precisely what the doctor ordered.

  One of the benefits was that it helped clear my head for the mind games I was now playing.

  I have always found that the great problem with running, certainly the longer distances, is that I just don't know what to think about. Listing various categories sends me round the twist, although it's a technique used by many runners to keep boredom at bay. Actors, actresses, batsmen, bowlers, whatever. I find them difficult to count, even more difficult to remember. And then it becomes all the more infuriating still when I can't remember whether I have already remembered them or not. In the end, it just adds another layer of fretting to the whole thing at a time when, somehow, you need to be relaxing.

  Instead, my favoured approach, which I had evolved in training and now started to perfect on the day, was to focus on the significance of the numbers depicted on the mile markers – the only mental gymnastics I can comfortably handle in race circumstances. And this is what I did in London.

  The first mile is great because it means you are well under way (and because a round 25 remain). Number two is significant because it is the first even number and means you can start playing with fractions: you've done 1/13th of the race. Number three I like, because if you times it by nine, you've got just slightly more than a marathon (in other words, you've done just over a ninth – well, it's something to cling to). Four is good too, but five is the early highlight. We're getting into round-number territory here, always a treat. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25. I love them. At five, you're just a fraction under a fifth of the way there. Obviously.

  Six is a cracker. It means that you've got a round 20 to go. Seven I always enjoy, because the remaining miles have now slipped under 20 and also because you are more than halfway towards the half-marathon. Eight is good – you're just under a third of the way round. Plus it represents 4/13th, a fraction which has a pleasing irreducibility. Nine brings you back to the logic of three – you're just over a third of the way home. Plus there's the bonus that you are just a mile away from the satisfaction of reaching double figures, that great landmark of ten, a figure whose double-digit attraction is enhanced by the fact that the remainder is now just 16, the distance of a not particularly long Sunday run.

  And so it goes on, the reasons for enjoying each number ever more strained, ever less obvious. But it was a game that worked for me.

  Others say you need to imagine that with each mile in the first half you are adding a block to a big tower you are building that will eventually stretch to 13 storeys high – a tower from which you will then remove a block with each mile of the second half of the marathon until you get back down to ground level again as you finish. I'd far rather be telling myself that 15 is great, because it is the third of those five magical multiples of five which will take you there; that 16 is terrific because you've got the pleasingly round number of ten outstanding; that 17 is another high point because the miles remaining have now dipped into single digits for the first time; that 18 means you are more than two-thirds of the way there with simply a midweek, shortish run left; that 19 is bliss because it's your last teenage mile before you hit the 20s… And so it goes on, ever more desperate, ever more satisfying.

  And ever more necessary – if only to guard against thinking about 'the wall' and so being sucked into it. By now – miles 18, 19 and 20 – you are definitely in danger territory. Infamously, the wall is the point at which you've so depleted your body's stored energy that overwhelming fatigue takes over and your energy falls away precipitously. My great fortune was that Pamela had taught me the simplest of ways to protect yourself against it: you drink and then you drink some more.

  Just how much you need to drink is one of the things you need to assess as you train, always bearing in mind the simple test that is always available: look at your piddle when you get back home. The experts say that the ideal is a light straw colour, a description which somehow seems rather too romantic for the notion of peering down the pan. 'Light straw' sounds more the kind of thing you might wish for on your kitchen walls. However, that's the guideline. Too much darker and you are dehydrated – a fact which reduces marathon running to a very straightforward task: it's all about delaying the shade change in your wee. Lovely.

  My view is that it is inevitable that you will finish dehydrated – a belief which others will say explains why I have never run spectacularly well. But I've drunk to the point where I couldn't comfortably drink any more, and yet I've still finished a couple of dozen colour cards away from light straw. It seems to me that, for us mere mortals at least, hydration on the day is essentially crisis management, an exercise in staving off the crisis – and its effects – until the very last moment.

  Certainly Pamela was clear: stay hydrated, and the wall doesn't exist. And she was right. We come back to that natural limit for humans, that 18-mile distance after which you really do have to go the extra mile – and then go it seven more times. Run a marathon and you will see that 18 miles is the moment that separates the hydrated from the dehydrated. It certainly was that day.

  At around 16 or 17 miles, I started to see the walkers, those who just couldn't continue running; at around 18 miles, where most people hit the wall if they are going to hit it at all, I saw people pulling up, stretching legs against lampposts, lying squealing on the floor as helpers tugged at their feet. I saw pain. Real pain. And I saw an incentive to keep going, thanking Pamela as I did so. I'd remained sufficiently hydrated, and, as others fell by the wayside, I enjoyed one of those 'There but for the grace of God' moments that spurred me on.

  It was difficult not to feel a certain smugness, but I was prepared to forgive myself such unsporting thoughts. I needed to drink deeply on feelings, whatever they were, that would carry me forward. However self-satisfied and uncaring it sounds now, the fact is that I felt emboldened by the distress I saw around me – for the very reason that it wasn't me feeling it.

  Pamela had said, 'Sip your water every few minutes and you should be fine,' and events were vindicating her. So many people speak about the wall as if it is really there, some kind of sadistic fixed landmark that you have to launch yourself against in the hope of tumbling through the other side. I learned that morning – exactly as Pamela had said I would – that if you approach the wall in the right way, it need never loom at all, except insofar as you see other people running smack into it; people who have allowed it to grow.

  The whole event is set up to hydrate you, with regular water stations plus others dishing out sports drinks. They were generously manned and generously stocked – all part of the remarkable support service which underpins the marathon and keeps it running. Dozens and dozens of volunteers were dishing out tens of thousands of drinks – and always with a smile. It was superbly done, the whole event looking after you every step of the way.

  As you approached the drinks station, the helpers were holding out the bottles in anticipation; all you had to do was snatch one, say 'thanks' and glide on into the distance, scrunching a discarded bottle or two as you passed. So many runners just took one swig before slinging the bottle into the gutter, and yet still the supplies kept coming – all part of the reassuring thought, almost every inch of the way, that London wanted you to do well. Marathons are tough, but here the whole organisation was geared up to make it as easy as it possibly could be – and that's also where the huge crowds came into it.

  The noise at times was intense, almost overwhelming, particularly in the Docklands area where it seemed to echo, but its net effect was always to urge you on. Helped on by the crowd, no wall on my horizon, I started to focus on the 20-mile marker, so important in my
evolving philosophy of cherishing every number for every possible reason. Twenty miles. How good did that sound, and how good did it feel as I passed under that characteristic, balloon-strewn arch which straddles the road every 1,760 yards along the route of the London Marathon?

  Beside it, on it and over it were the two digits. Two and zero. It wouldn't be long before I entered uncharted, never-done-before distance. It wouldn't be long before we were leaving Docklands and heading towards the home straight. Just 6 miles to go, I kept telling myself. But what a 6 they were. Running out of the house and knocking off 6 miles is nothing. But it is everything when you are doing a marathon and you've already got 20 miles under your belt.

  Tony Blair's press secretary, the marathon-running Alastair Campbell, summed it up beautifully some years later when I had the great pleasure of interviewing him. He was doing a theatre-tour question-and-answer session, mostly I guess about his Downing Street years. On the phone, I was keen to talk to him about marathons. He observed that marathons are in fact two half-marathons put together; it's just that the first half is 20 miles long. Those final 6 miles equal in effort the first 20, he said. He was right.

  And here, in London, we weren't particularly helped by the course in the middle stages. We ran through some long stretches where not a lot happened in the early to mid teens, passing through some fairly shabby districts before our reward was the aural lift which came with the Docklands and then the release you enjoy as you are propelled over the cobbles of the Tower of London with just 3 or 4 miles to go, a pleasure denied runners these days for reasons I cannot fathom.

  Much was made of how uncomfortable the cobbles were to run on and how dangerous they could be; but the few times I did them, I loved them, and I certainly loved them that day in 1998. They were a landmark on a course which seemed short on landmarks. The cobbles were carpeted, which took away some of the impact, but the main point was that at least they were a feature – and an important one at an important time. This wasn't the end, but at least it was the beginning of the end, as Churchill might have said had he been a marathon runner.

  Soon after that, with the Thames on your left, you are into the long, broadly westward final straight, again a point where the crowds are banked steeply, where the noise can be huge and where the roads are wide and comfortable under foot as you steel yourself simply to keep going.

  By now, I was wishing I'd written my name on my vest. I was wearing a Macmillan running top, and just occasionally someone would shout at me 'Come on, Macmillan!' I'd glance behind me in fear that I was about to be overtaken by Harold. I was very much the novice. The experienced runners know to emblazon themselves with their name, and then you can play one of the great marathon games – one I have played ever since. Choose the face in the crowd that you want to call out your name, thrust your chest towards them or simply look pained in their direction. The great groundswell of humanity is such that you invariably hit lucky. 'Go on, Phil!' rings out.

  And you've just got to hope that it takes you there. Something certainly did that day. The number games, the hydration, the mantra, the crowd, the course: something worked (or perhaps everything did). In recent marathons, I have told myself endlessly that the best way to finish is simply to keep going; and maybe this is where I am finally starting to get a bit deep and meaningful in my marathon running. I tell myself that time is so utterly relentless in its passage that all you've got to do is cling on to it and it will get you there. Think how life has slipped into fifth gear since the children arrived; think how, suddenly, without you remotely realising how, let alone why, you've passed your 30th birthday, then your 40th, and then suddenly you're heading towards your 50th, and there's not a blind thing you can do about it. The years flash by.

  These thoughts help me to hang on in there. However slowly you feel you are going, you will get there in the end – for the simple reason that time will pass. All you have to do is somehow keep your feet moving, and time will take care of the rest. Do the training and you're facing maybe three-quarters of an hour, an hour at most, of awfulness. Well, we can all get through that, can't we, if we've got hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets urging us on?

  However, on my marathon debut, I was nearly tripped up by something thoroughly unexpected. I was seduced by my first sight of Big Ben in the distance. Stupidly so. I saw Big Ben and I thought I was home. I wasn't. Far from it. There were several miles still to go, the hardest miles, and they suddenly seemed all the harder for the fact that Big Ben had lifted my hopes prematurely.

  That first sight was special, but I hadn't realised how easily it can trick you into thinking you are further along than you are – and that's when I had my marathon debut low point. I'd been feeling increasingly tired, but basically OK, still surviving on the wide-eyed wonder of the novice runner, lapping up every experience and trying to take it in, convinced that this would be my one and only marathon and that I was going to make it count.

  Perhaps Big Ben was simply the trigger for something which would have happened anyway, but I suddenly felt I couldn't run any more. I tried to hold on, but my run became a walk – just for two or three paces. I'd reached the point at which my body rebelled. But fortunately, after three and a half hours of running, my body simply refused to walk. The two or three steps sent my legs flailing into a kind of spasm. The only way out of it was to start running again. The whole thing lasted perhaps ten seconds at most, but it was a turning point.

  It helped that by now the Thames was so close. We were following it, almost flowing along it. And it helped that at last we were back in landmark territory. Finally, after those nondescript central sections, we were ticking off recognisable places as we passed, getting ever closer to the turn into Parliament Square. We passed the Embankment tube station, and everything was getting reassuringly familiar; Big Ben was getting so huge in front of us by now that I just knew it wasn't deceiving us; and the noise of the crowd was growing ever stronger as we approached it and turned right, away from the river.

  The 25-mile marker had come and gone. There was less than a mile to go, and all I had to do was keep going as we moved into Birdcage Walk, knowing that just the other side of St James's Park to the right, hidden by the trees, was the finishing line.

  But now it started to seem horribly, painfully long again. Once more I was thinking that I was there when I wasn't. Birdcage Walk seemed to stretch for miles; we just didn't seem to be moving along it, but we were, and then we were turning right, Buckingham Palace now resplendent to our left. And I steeled myself to see the finish in the Mall. Except I didn't see it. There was still another turn to go. And then there it was in the distance, drawing all of us in as we screwed that final effort out of our legs, pushing ourselves forward towards the finish, the noise of the crowd now reaching a peak.

  And yet the finishing line didn't seem to be coming any closer. I saw it too soon. Was it going to do a Big Ben on me? But no, it was getting bigger, and then suddenly it was exerting a force all of its own, pulling me towards it and over the line – the point at which the tears started to fall. I realise now that they are inevitable, a natural reaction to the effort finally ceasing. Back then, though, they took me by surprise. I saw my time as I crossed the line. I stopped, I wobbled and I cried, a gentlemanly tear or two.

  I swayed as my body absorbed the news that I was finally going to let it stop, and I dabbed my eyes after 26.2 miles of grind, all directed at that one moment – that lovely, indescribable, you've-just-got-to-be-there moment of finishing. Other activities may throw up something similar, but I can't believe anything beats that surge of emotion which chokes you as you complete a marathon – especially when it is your first.

  And even then, the London Marathon organisation was making my every moment as simple as possible. I inched forward and I wobbled some more – the point at which a rock-steady hand shot out from nowhere and held me under the elbow. They are eagle-eyed, these marshals. They know what to look for. They can spot a runner about t
o keel over, and they do what they need to do. And then, when I was steady, I did what I had been doing for hours: I followed the crowd. I wrapped myself in a space blanket because suddenly I knew – I don't know how – that I would shiver uncontrollably without it; and I leaned forward as the medal was placed around my neck. It was the final proof, as if my feet could possibly have doubted it: I had become a marathon runner.

  A few minutes later, when it started to sink in, I discovered that I was far too happy to feel tired. I managed to find Fiona and Adam relatively quickly at the end, and there is a lovely photograph of me cradling Adam in Parliament Square. Everywhere around, the sun now out, runners were relaxing on any available patch of greenery. Some were stretched out, eyes closed, satisfaction written across their faces. Others were talking animatedly with friends and family, reliving the key moments. The atmosphere was superb, a general air of fulfilment hovering above thousands of exhausted runners. We paused to soak it all up before repairing to the Macmillan reception where there were food and medical attention to be had. It was beautifully organised but, unable to find Pamela, we didn't linger.