by Phil Hewitt
It was far more enjoyable to savour the world outside, particularly as we could see thousands of runners still running, still streaming past. There was no sense of 'Hey, look, I beat this lot'. It was simply a delicious feeling of camaraderie. We were looking at them at about 25.5 miles, and I knew exactly what they had been through, exactly what they were thinking. We were all in it together, gloriously so, whatever our respective finishing times.
As I wrote in the paper that week: 'In what other race can you come in two hours and three minutes after the winner and still be stupidly, eternally thrilled? Oh boy, oh what a day. Just over four hours of grind and then a lifetime of inane, self-satisfied grinning.'
Chapter Three: 'Not Fade Away'
A Country Slog – Chichester 2001, 2002
You walk a little taller when you become a marathon runner. How could you not? Train properly, as I like to think I did (well, more or less), and your first marathon will dominate your life for half a year, like exams, only worse. It sits on the horizon, slowly inching closer, and all you can do is wonder whether you are doing enough; whether you're deluding yourself even to think that you might be able to do it. And that's precisely why it's such a glorious feeling when you finally manage it. It probably also explains how quickly you recover.
There had been a wall in my first marathon, but not the one that legendarily cripples runners at 18 miles. It had been the wall of emotion I ran into as I crossed that line. The finishing photo was straight up in the hall at home.
If you've ever completed a marathon, you'll know not to underestimate your achievement. You've not saved a life, split an atom or pushed back the frontiers of human endeavour, but you've pushed your own endeavour painfully beyond what you believed to be its breaking point. In terms of your own existence, you've gone places you've never been before, and that's why swift recovery is so satisfying. You've displayed stamina you barely dared hope for, and now you've sprung back into place, showing a resilience born of the underlying fitness you've acquired over the past few months.
That night I wrote it all down, anxious not to lose any of those memories, keen to relive all those impressions, and the next day at work – there was no way I wasn't going into work on the Monday – I was ready to recount it all once again at the merest hint of interest on anyone's part. In fairness, everyone was genuinely interested, but after a while I realised that most people were more than happy to settle for the edited highlights. There was really no need to part with all the gruesome detail. Not everyone wanted to hear that the insides of the tops of my thighs had been rubbed raw by my shorts – discomfort which had merged with the more generalised discomfort of the race itself.
But at least my nipples were intact, and I was mighty glad of that. Some friends, hearing of my early tussle with the agony of chafed nipples, had given me a good-luck present of Harry Potter plasters, a little bit of magic which certainly worked for me. Over 26.2 miles, even those of us blissfully free of man boobs will still shred our nipples if we don't take precautions. The sweat, the fabric of your running top and the rain will all combine to reduce you to nipple misery. I certainly felt for the runners, and there were plenty of them, who hadn't realised just how important a couple of plasters might be. There was no mistaking them. Their running vests were stained with two ragged columns of blood, like some kind of kinky stigmata.
Fortunately I was saved that, but I did wake up on the Monday to the dawning realisation that in the night someone had injected concrete into my thighs. When I stood up, it shifted agonisingly. I eased myself into the bath, which brought some relief, but all movement that day had to be preprogrammed and absolutely essential. This was the dreaded lactic acid build-up, and stairs were a particular problem. I'd stand at the top thinking it would probably be less painful to throw myself down. But the weird thing was that there was actually something slightly pleasant about the pain. Not for a moment could I forget that I had run a marathon the day before; nor indeed could any of my colleagues.
Experience has since taught me the huge importance of keeping walking at the end of a marathon. Once you're washed and changed, keep moving still. Walk several miles, and you'll feel the benefit in the morning. And if it does hurt in the morning, then you need more of the same. Just keep walking. Walk and walk. My only evidence is my own experience, but I'm convinced that walking really is the best antidote to the effects of running. Unfortunately, I didn't know that in 1998. I barely strayed from the office, and I probably made my discomfort even worse. The one saving grace for colleagues bored with my tales was that by now they could definitely move more quickly than I could.
Smug just wasn't the word for it, though, as I penned my piece for that week's newspaper. I'd finished in 4 hours 11 minutes, a time I now shudder at the thought of. What on earth had I been doing? Did I stop for a pub lunch en route? Did I sit in the park and read the paper for half an hour halfway round? But no, at the time, I was delighted. It wasn't until weeks later that I even started to think how nice it would have been to knock those 11 minutes off. That's the great thing about your debut marathon. Just to finish is enough. Whatever the time. And to cap it all, I had comfortably exceeded my fundraising target for Macmillan. I'd been convinced I was taking a great risk over the whole thing; but, in the event, everything came up trumps.
In hindsight, of course, there was precious little risk at all. I was fit, I was 34, I wanted to do it, I was given superb guidance by Pamela, and I had plenty of family support at a great moment of opportunity – just a few months later, we would become parents for the second time.
And, above all, I had got one thing blissfully right. I had taken the whole thing incredibly seriously. It wouldn't have been in my nature to have done otherwise. A marathon is a huge undertaking. The only way to complete it is to treat it with the utmost respect, and I did so.
I noted with a mix of dismay and vindication a few years later when a celebrity runner, proclaiming her lack of preparation, simply launched into the London Marathon, apparently without knowing, or even asking, how long a marathon race was. She reached about 18 miles, that natural human limit, before collapsing. A newspaper article ripped into her the following day – and rightly so. It reflected on the huge disservice she would have done marathon running by dropping dead. Had she done so, it would have been entirely her own fault. Her crime was to disrespect the marathon and, with it, every single one of her fellow runners, all the men and women from all walks of life who had put in month after month of preparation, running mile after mile in readiness for the big day. The celebrity had attempted to belittle us all. The marathon didn't have the least qualm in showing her emphatically just who was boss.
In the newspaper following my London debut, I waxed lyrical about the day, lauding everyone and everything, signing off with the words, 'So what about next year? I don't think so. One marathon seems very special. Two just sounds like a small number.' It was out of my system. Laura was born in the August following the April marathon. I didn't want to run another marathon; and even if I had wanted to, I would have counted it unreasonable to head off for all those hours of training. Fiona would have let me. It would never have occurred to her to stop me, but I wouldn't let me because I knew my place was with my family at this critical time. Not that there was even any great sense of sacrifice on my part. I'd done a marathon. As simple as that.
But clearly something was niggling away in the unvoiced recesses of my mind over the next couple of years. Not high-level niggling, but niggling all the same. And so it was that in July 2001, more than three years after my first London Marathon, I converted my 'very special' number into a 'very small' one with a spur-of-the-moment run which broke all the rules.
By now, Laura was nearly three; Adam was five years and two months; and the difficult days of having two really tiny children were starting to slip into memory. Of course, Fiona had borne the brunt, as any mother always does, however much of a new man you try to be. But by 2001, life on the home front was easing to t
he extent that I started to contemplate quite openly what could be next in the running stakes. Life seemed manageable again; possibilities were opening up, one of them right on my doorstep at work.
For years, Chichester had boasted an annual event, inaugurated by the Royal Military Police, in which servicemen were joined by members of the public on a long trek out into the countryside, up onto the South Downs and back down and round to complete a big circle. It became known as the Chichester March. Inevitably, it started to attract runners.
When I covered it for the newspaper one year in the 1990s, turning out to work – oh horror of horrors – on a Sunday morning, I arrived so ludicrously early that it was the runners I found myself interviewing. Generally, they were on the wrong end of a bit of unspoken disapproval. There was a feeling among some of the march diehards that running around the course somehow really wasn't in the spirit of the whole thing. But it certainly impressed me. It's perfectly possible that meeting the front-runners that morning was one of the keys which eventually unlocked my own marathon aspirations. In hindsight, there was something inspiring about them, arriving back far too soon, looking tired but satisfied. There was something in what they'd achieved which appealed to me.
Gradually, over the years, the running element had grown, and by 2001 it sat comfortably alongside the marching element in an event which had changed character. The Royal Military Police stepped back from the march, taking with them much of the services interest which had defined and driven the early years. By 2001, with the runners getting more numerous, the day had sprung its own marathon on the back of a few changes to the route to bring it up to the marathon distance. Or nearly. It was advertised as a marathon – otherwise I wouldn't have gone near it. But, confusingly, the event was promoted as a '42 km All Terrain Run', in other words almost a couple of hundred metres short of a marathon. But I decided I could add that distance in myself somewhere along the line. Everything else was in its favour. It was in the city in which I worked, and I couldn't think of any reason not to have a go.
You couldn't wish for a marathon more different to 'the London', as we runners like to call it. In the capital, you had massive support on a fast, flat course, bringing together tens of thousands of runners in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators; in Chichester, just looking at the route, it was obvious that you had ahead of you a hilly ordeal, mostly in the middle of nowhere with only the occasional other runner for company. The course rapidly left the city behind to head out onto the South Downs. At least 90 per cent of it was going to be out in the country. A good proportion was going to be on decent roads, but a substantial part of it was clearly going to be on trails and tracks. The whole event was as low key as 'the London' was high profile – and that suited my purpose.
Making a mockery of just about every piece of marathon wisdom I'd ever acquired, I decided to give it a go on the back of virtually no training whatsoever. And, yes, I know that does make my criticism of that celebrity just now sound rather hollow. It was the kind of rashness which really ought to have left me collapsed in a ditch halfway round; but at least, I reasoned, I did already have a marathon under my belt, even if it had been three years before.
My initial approach was that I would treat the day as a training run, that I would run the first hour and see what happened. I did a test run on the Thursday before the race on the Sunday, running for 1 hour 28 minutes and guessing my distance to be around 10 or 11 miles. The important thing was that the run had gone well.
I consequently broadened my ambitions for the Sunday, deciding that I would aim for a half-marathon and then walk the rest. 'You can do it' had been my mantra for London. For Chichester, it was 'Let's see how it goes'. The impact on the family was minimal, just half a day away. There was no reason not to try.
The route was essentially a large loop to the north and north-east of the city, taking us out from Chichester, up through the Goodwood estate, past Goodwood Racecourse, down into the village of East Dean and then up into the woods and onto the South Downs Way, before curving back down south-westwards towards Chichester again. The outline was easy enough to grasp, but once we were out there, we would never really know just how far round we were. In London, the runners always had a good idea. On the Chichester route, no distances were marked. I realised I was just going to have to try to assess distance in terms of how I was feeling.
The marathon set off at 8 a.m., as I recall, well before the walkers were unleashed on the same route, and, after all the planning and preparation which had gone into London, it was rather nice simply to drive to the nearest car park and walk the couple of hundred yards across Oaklands Park to the start, just north of the Festival Theatre, next to Chichester Rugby Football Club. A few marquees had been set up as the walk/race headquarters, and it was all very relaxed, with plenty of people I knew manning the tents. I'd signed up for the race during the week, and the remaining formalities on the morning were quickly dealt with.
With ten minutes to go, worried about the missing 195 metres, I walked away from the start line; with three minutes to go, I ran towards it, timing it to perfection to cross the line as the gun went off. I'd done the little extra which would turn – to my satisfaction, at least – a 42-km run into a marathon, and off I went, one of several dozen runners heading out under clear blue skies, still with just a hint of chill in the air.
Just as in London, it was great simply to get going; interesting too to see which route the marathon was going to take us on as we headed northwards out of the city before veering across towards the former Westhampnett airfield, which so famously became the Goodwood motor-racing circuit in the years after the war. We were on historic turf as we clipped the corner of the site before crossing the road to head towards Goodwood House itself, seat for centuries of the Dukes of Richmond. Running past the house, we headed up the celebrated Goodwood hill climb, now a central part of the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed. The Festival website bills it as a 'challenging white-knuckled 1.16-mile course', which 'starts as a tree-lined run through the southern corner of the Goodwood estate' and then 'turns to sweep past the front of Goodwood House before climbing a steep and narrow estate road bordered by flint walls and dense woodland groves towards Goodwood's equine racecourse on top of the magnificent South Downs'.
Magnificent indeed, but on foot it wasn't quite so white-knuckled. Instead, it was a slog; long, slow and draining, but, coming just 40 minutes into the race, it was manageable enough, bringing us to the top of the first of the day's four climbs, emerging on the high ground next to Goodwood racecourse, elegantly positioned to enjoy stunning views across the Downs. Not that we paused to enjoy the views. Instead, we ran beyond the course and then darted down a country track to run sharply downhill on a tough, rutted, stony footpath through the woods northwards into the beautiful village of East Dean.
Against the clear early-morning sky, it looked ravishing, full of archetypal Sussex appeal and, for me, full of happy Sussex memories. It was here that the poet and playwright Christopher Fry lived for many years, and one of the great pleasures of my job was occasionally going to see him, always a treat as I stepped back into another world full of charm and pleasantries long since lost to modern-day living.
'Have you come here by motor car?' he would ask with a twinkle, and I would always wonder whether the archaism was deliberate, before concluding that it wasn't. Christopher really did live in a world where cars were motor cars. I smiled to myself as I ran through the village, just a few yards from where he was doubtless sipping tea from a bone china cup. 'No, I came here on foot this morning,' I chuckled to myself in tribute to quite the most endearing man I have ever met.
But there was no time to pause for thought as the route took us on and out of the village, a flattish road taking us eastwards towards a left-hand turning which led steeply upwards through the woods to the top of the South Downs where we joined the South Downs Way. The ascent was a struggle, particularly as the risk of tripping seemed high, but it was more tha
n worth it. There was something about the air at the top. You could almost feel it cleanse your lungs as you breathed it. Again it struck me: you couldn't possibly conceive a marathon more different to London.
As so often happens after a long climb, I accelerated once I was finally on the flat. It's as if the ascent had somehow coiled up my legs, unleashing me to spring forward once the climb stopped, and it was certainly with renewed energy that I hared off eastwards on our section of the splendid walking route which runs 100 miles from Eastbourne to Winchester. We were on the South Downs Way for probably 3 or 4 miles, and I had an excellent half an hour to start with up there, largely by falling into the slipstream of someone running at more or less my pace. I'd like to think I helped him keep going, but I doubt it. When two hours were up, I remarked how quickly the time had flown since the start. His only answer was 'Yes!' Conversation clearly wasn't on his agenda. We separated soon afterwards. The London camaraderie wasn't much in evidence out on those lonely hills.
Maybe that was why my high started to evaporate, and soon afterwards I endured a tough quarter of an hour, struggling for the lack of landmarks, struggling for the lack of company. I was lucky if I could see more than a couple of runners ahead of me, so thinned out were we by now, and my struggle was compounded by the fact that suddenly a solitary runner came running towards us the other way. I started to think we were going to turn around at some point and that he was miles ahead – a depressing thought. Even worse was the niggling worry that somehow I had gone wrong. I hadn't, as it turned out, so heaven knows what he was doing. He had a number on. He was part of the race. Unless I just dreamt him. Who knows?