by Phil Hewitt
Tiredness was certainly taking hold. This was far further than I had run since London and on terrain I had never attempted before. Even during my 'London training' I had mostly kept to roads; this was now mile upon mile of track, often uneven, often stony and just occasionally slippy. It was much more forgiving on the knees than tarmac, but in my tiredness I started to feel that I couldn't trust it. Again, I started to worry about tripping.
Fortunately help was at hand, and from an unlikely source. A checkpoint suddenly loomed, unheralded, just as we were about to leave the heights and head back down through the woods. High on the Downs, I was suddenly being offered water by a former Mayor of Chichester. I knew her reasonably well, and it felt more than a touch surreal to see her again in such circumstances. But a friendly face is always a boost, particularly when she offered me welcome confirmation that we were comfortably past the halfway mark. I knew it. We had to be. But it was great to hear someone say it.
And that's where the mind took over. I enjoyed an excellent three-quarters of an hour after that. Feel good, and you'll run well. For those 45 minutes, I enjoyed the almost spiritual lift that running can give runners but so rarely gives me. I could feel the rhythm of my run and I could feel that the rhythm was good. I wasn't aware of speaking, but I could hear myself saying 'good running' every now and then, which made me run even better. Mind games, indeed, and the games got even better during a lovely stretch which took us back down off the Downs. It felt like the beginning of the end. Just to cap it all, there was a hint of spitting, refreshing rain and the temperature was perfect.
The long downhill stretch took us right back into East Dean, just a few miles north of Chichester as the crow flies. There, at the checkpoint, a rather vague woman said that we had either 8 or 10 miles to go, she wasn't quite sure. I remember thinking that she might have thought it an idea to find out – a rather ungracious reaction given that she was kindly dishing out water.
Soon afterwards, still in East Dean, we passed a table groaning with choccies and flavoured drinks for sale. I imagine it was intended for the walkers who would be coming along several hours later with pocketfuls of cash. But just the sight of it was enough to undo me. I was starting to get hungry – or rather I was starting to think I was. I saw a Bounty, and that was it. I wanted it. But I had no money. It had never occurred to me to bring any. When you run, you take as little with you as you can possibly get away with. A fine principle, but the damage was done. Hunger – or maybe just the thought of it – took hold. My problem was that I had no idea how to deal with it.
Maybe eating would have been the wrong thing to do. Given a choice between running hungry and running full, give me running hungry every time. I've never experienced it but I've always assumed that a full stomach must be one of the worst discomforts on a racecourse. You need to be lean and a bit mean. Hunger keeps you going. A full tummy would stop you in your tracks – or so I've always assumed.
But that day, it was hunger – or the illusion of it – that was nearly my undoing. I was tired, and there was nothing robust about my thinking. I was showing my inexperience and, with it, a lack of control. I should have nipped the thought in the bud. Instead I let it grow, and that was the big mistake. I made things difficult for myself.
At least we were clearly heading towards Chichester now. Unfortunately there was one very sharp ascent to go. After East Dean, the course cut across a field which rose vertically before us as we headed back towards the plateau where the Goodwood racecourse stands, high above Chichester. It was the low point of the day. Tiredness was kicking in strongly, hunger was hammering, and I was reduced to a disjointed run-walk-shuffle with the summit still hundreds of yards above me.
All I could do was cling on to the thought that what goes up must come down, and sure enough, eventually, we came out close to the racecourse – and the realisation that almost everything would be downhill from now on. More encouraging was the fact that we got our first glimpse of the walkers. They had set out on their trek several hours after us and were now 5 or so miles into their circuit. The runners – and we were very thinly dispersed by now – knew exactly what the walkers had in front of them. We also had the huge satisfaction of having put it behind us.
From the racecourse road, the last little ascent was to the top of the Trundle, an Iron Age hill fort on Saint Roche's Hill just north of Chichester, for a fantastic if fairly blowy view towards the city. Beyond it was the sea, and beyond that was the Isle of Wight in the far distance. Just in front of us was the joy of the final checkpoint, this time manned by two former mayors. One of them asked me how I was. I told her I was starving, to which she offered moral rather than actual sustenance – welcome news that there were just 3 miles to go.
From the heights, Chalkpit Lane sliced wonderfully straight through the chalk of the lower Downs in an invitingly direct line to the city below. At last, after all the hours of where-am-I uncertainty, the goal lay ahead, and so I trotted on with surprising vigour. Big Ben-like on the horizon, the spire of Chichester Cathedral seemed to grow with every step, a lovely sign of getting oh so close, until the road dipped and the cathedral disappeared from view.
But then suddenly, with the cathedral gone and only fields in front of me, I ran again into that sapping sense of not having the foggiest idea where I was. We really could have been anywhere. I walked for five minutes or so, conscious that I was probably losing the chance of beating my London Marathon time, but I was tired. And maybe deep down I didn't want to beat my previous time for the simple reason that this was a run done without training. Subconsciously, perhaps, I wanted to believe that all that training first time round had actually counted for something.
Eventually, we rejoined the road by which we had left Chichester. Knowing where I was, I broke into a strong run again for the last half-mile and felt quite choked as I crossed the finishing line. It was sad not to have anyone to meet me. But I felt good. I felt strong and loose-muscled. I glanced at my watch as I finished. I had completed the course in 4 hours 13 minutes 43 seconds, two minutes slower than my London debut three years before. And I was home in time for lunch, wondering more and more just what it was – if anything – I had accomplished.
Any other day I'd have struggled to run 10 or 12 miles, and yet suddenly I had done a marathon. And I had done it on no training at all. My knees hurt and my ankles ached, but no more so than the last time. My only conclusion was that I was reasonably fit and unreasonably pig-headed. But I still couldn't work it out. Perhaps I had kept going because the run was for real in a way that training never can be. Perhaps I'd kept going because I already had a marathon to my credit and knew I could do it. Perhaps also I'd benefitted from the low-key nature of this particular marathon. There had been no pressure. Almost nobody had known I was doing it, in sharp contrast to the London Marathon, which I had repeatedly mentioned in the newspaper in order to bring in the sponsorship I had needed to justify my place. By contrast, here was an instance where the absence of a sense of occasion had actually been a help during the run – even if it was somewhat deflating afterwards.
The terrain had been tough. There had been four steep climbs. And yet I had found it much, much easier than the flat London course with its endless streets and huge, cheering crowds. Maybe it was the fact of just deciding to get up and do it – a return to the kind of freedom that running really ought to be about. In all these ways, the pressure had been off.
But the downsides were that suddenly I had done two marathons rather than one, and that the second had been completed with no build-up whatsoever, leaving a downbeat sense of 'Well, what was that all about then?' I wasn't remotely on a high. Instead, I felt disappointed. Ultimately, it was an anticlimactic experience, one which underlined the extent to which a marathon needs a build-up and just how much it needs an audience. You need to feel that you have earned it; you also need to feel that you have been urged on to finish.
I returned to the Chichester Marathon in 2002 for an almost identical e
xperience, completing the course in 4 hours 10 minutes. In July 2004, I went back again for what should have been my hat-trick of Chichester marathons. Except that was the year of the marathon that wasn't. Again, it was generally referred to as the Chichester Marathon. Without the M word, I wouldn't have shown up. Officially, it was still a '42 km All Terrain Run'. But I knew the score on that one. Once again, making up the missing 195 metres, I gave myself a three-minute run-up before the start.
But within a couple of hours, I was mystified to find myself much further around the course than I ought to have been. At the end, I was given a certificate to confirm that I had completed the City Of Chichester International Challenge 42 km All Terrain Run, but nothing about it seemed right. I came in fifth with a time of 3 hours 19 minutes, and I knew that something was seriously up. How likely was it that I would knock nearly 50 minutes off my first London time on an up-and-down course such as this?
As the poor chap wrote out my certificate, I grumpily told him: 'That was never a marathon, you know.' He confessed that 'some lads' had been caught changing the arrows up in the woods.
Maybe that was true. But I felt sceptical. As acts of vandalism go, it rang false. You can't imagine a bunch of ne'er-do-wells getting tanked up in the city and then walking miles to the middle of nowhere simply to change the direction markers on a cross-country marathon. Hee, hee! What a lark! If that had really been the case, we would probably still be running it now. A random act of vandalism was hardly likely to have shortened the course. More likely it would have dispersed us to the four winds. Or perhaps they were philanthropic vandals, worried for our feet, knees and hips. But somehow I doubted it.
I didn't know the course well enough to work out where the route had been changed, but that was hardly the point. The worst thing race organisers can do is to lose the trust of the runners in their charge, and that's what happened in Chichester in 2004. Or so it seemed to me.
Significantly, the event has since abandoned its pretentions to be a marathon – though you've only got to look at the Internet to see that plenty of runners still refer to it as the Chichester Marathon or the Chichester Marathon Challenge. They need to be careful. Marathon is far too important a word to be abused in this way. It can be claimed only when the course is well marked, well protected and exactly 26 miles 385 yards (or 42 kilometres 195 metres) long. The plus side was some fantastic scenery, but that's little compensation for those who ran along to the increasingly depressing realisation that they weren't running a marathon at all. Maybe the organisers have made all sorts of improvements in the years that have followed, I don't know. But there's no getting away from the fact that in 2004, it was a good 4 or 5 miles short, maybe even more.
Somehow, it seemed, for me at least, that satisfaction and long-distance running in and around Chichester weren't destined to go hand in hand.
Chapter Four: 'Street Fighting Man'
Fitting in with Family – London 2002, 2003
In hindsight, it's obvious that the Chichester Marathon in 2001 did serve one purpose at least. Effectively it cleared the way for another tilt at the London Marathon, which I returned to in 2002. And, just to double the motivation after the purposelessness of Chichester, I decided to do it for the MS Society, a charity dear to my family.
In 1982, my parents created from scratch the Gosport & Fareham branch of the MS Society, in part a response to all the difficulties my mum's sister, Diana, had faced. An MS sufferer from her late teens, Di started to show the signs of the disease in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that is, at a time when little seemed to be known about MS. When diagnosis came, it was harshly delivered, with little explanation and no backup – so different to all the support that is available now.
Fortunately, my mum, a nurse, was able to make a genuine difference; and my elderly grandparents, to the limit of their abilities, adapted their bungalow to Di's every need. Sadly, however, her condition deteriorated rapidly. I can still hear my grandmother saying, 'It's a wicked disease.' Within a few years, Di was wheelchair-bound, and there she stayed, knowing no remission until her death at the age of 43 in
1991. Within a couple of months, my grandparents had also passed away. But by then, the Gosport & Fareham branch of the MS Society was flourishing, scores of people relishing the companionship, comfort and sheer common sense it was able to provide.
When I managed to get a place in the 2002 London Marathon, I resolved to use that place to raise money for the branch. I thought of the aimlessness and emptiness that had sunk any sense of achievement in my Chichester run. London 2002 was going to be different.
But first I had to get there, and that meant a return to training – something I hadn't seriously done for four years now. The Chichester Marathon was under my belt, but I had no intention of approaching London with the levity with which I had approached Chichester. For London, I was going to be back in training in earnest. The last time I had done that, Adam had been nearly two and Laura just a bump. Now, in the autumn of 2001, Adam was five and a half and Laura was three and a quarter. These two VIPs had to be factored into the equation, and I am convinced that they are to blame for the strange addiction I developed around this time to running in the dark.
These days, work is much more flexible. I have taken the opportunity to make it so, championing the notion of working from home a couple of days a week, saving many boring and, indeed, expensive hours on the motorway, and making the whole thing so much more manageable into the bargain. Back then, though, things were much more rigid. By the time I'd got home, helped with the tea, done my bit towards kiddie bath time and enjoyed the bedtime story routine, it had been dark for hours. If I wanted to get my run in, there was no alternative but to head off out there into the dark. The surprising discovery was that it was hugely enjoyable.
I was hooked. Within a few hundred yards I'd left the town behind me and was heading off down country lanes, criss-crossing rural routes and relishing a newfound freedom. Work couldn't reach me, and nor could home. Recklessly and irresponsibly, I refused to carry a mobile. It's only very recently that I have consented to possess one at all – though, much to Fiona's annoyance, I don't take it running. Foolish and selfish, I know, but it would be an intrusion. This was me on my own, out there running, grabbing a bit of life that was mine, all mine, all mine.
Older and just possibly a fraction wiser, I generally avoid running in the dark these days, but back then, I'd head off as if in answer to some kind of call. The wolves were howling. The drums were beating. I was summoned, and no one was getting in the way.
It was strange how quickly my eyes became accustomed to the darkness; after ten minutes or so, I could quite persuade myself that near-total obscurity was actually a kind of half-light. I never had a moment's fear for my safety. In fact, I managed to persuade myself that I was safer in the darkness. During the day, you might not hear a car heading towards you the other side of a narrow bend. But at night, in addition to various reflective strips on my clothing, I had an extra protection. I might miss the noise of the engine, but there was no way I could miss the headlights glowing in the darkness, throwing up all sorts of shadows around me. It gave me plenty of time to retreat into the hedgerows, well out of the way. The last thing I wanted to do was spook an oncoming driver. As for me, I was spooked by nothing, and I was having a ball.
It became addictive – an alternative, murky existence in which every stride was an email deleted, every yard a phone call answered. All the people who'd pushed me during the day were being pushed back in a darkness which put me beyond their reach. It started to seem the perfect antidote to work. The benefits were huge. For years, I'd suffered from insomnia, and while I didn't particularly notice it recede the first time I trained for the London Marathon, this time round it vanished altogether. The early months of 2001 marked the start of the year-round running I've pursued pretty much ever since. It's no coincidence that my insomnia, though it comes and goes, has never returned to its pre-2001 levels.
Equally, I found my asthma easier to deal with. As a child, I'd occasionally been quite debilitated by it, and it had flared up from time to time ever since. But with the introduction of running as a fixed and regular part of my life, the asthma seemed so much more under control. The cold night air was cleansing. Away from work and in my own bubble, I was breathing the deepest I had ever breathed.
In hindsight, a late-evening run, darting wherever I wanted in the obscurity, created a need every bit as much as it satisfied one. It became addictive, but part of that addiction, I started to realise, was the simple fact that I always felt better for a run. Opt out of a run, and I knew I would regret it. Go for it, and somehow I felt back in touch with myself.
It was almost like a rebalancing, a re-synching at a time in my life when perhaps the demands were at their greatest. It was me jumping off the treadmill, I'd tell myself as I darted down blind alleys, and I started to become quite pretentious and pompous about it. It seemed to me that I was somehow realigning my existence, tightening up my life and refocusing – all of which sounds terrifically self-centred. But I am convinced that it was self-centredness with a purpose. My me-time made me much more generous in my everyone-else time. It was as simple as that. Or so I liked to tell myself.