by Phil Hewitt
With a limited field, this was another marathon where the runners were rapidly stretched out, and for long periods there was no one much in front of me and seemingly no one behind, though every now and again someone would storm past, leaving me wondering where they'd been all along. Or if they had suddenly had an excess of renewed energy? If so, how? I wanted some!
Rather worse, from the motivational point of view, was the fact that this wasn't a marathon that impacted much on the island. We were very carefully marshalled and protected from car traffic at every point, much to the organisers' credit, but it was not a day which brought the islanders out in support. For the most part we were running on an island going about its daily business, rather than making us its daily business – a sobering little thought for any marathon runners who get their kicks from the big cities and their crowds.
Run the London Marathon and you'll feel like you are the centre of the universe. Run the Isle of Wight Marathon and you'll feel like you are on a back road between Rookley and Sandford, which is precisely where you will be at one point. There's nothing to lift you out of the here and now – though, in fairness, the marathon never actually claimed that there would be. All I mean is that this was a different kind of marathon, one where the route was actually working against you. In New York and Paris it helps you glide, just as it does at significant points in London. Similarly Steyning, in all its ludicrousness, had a certain quality which urged you on. But here, there was no boost from the seemingly endless up-and-down dreary greyness of the Isle of Wight on a dreary grey day.
The morning had dawned dull and had proceeded to get duller still. The route from Ryde to Newport isn't exactly the island at its most attractive, and Newport itself isn't exactly the most beautiful of places. We weren't going to be seeing the lovely coastline, but I would have hoped for a few more of the picturesque villages. Sadly, they were in short supply. I had to fall back on my old habits of creating significance for the numbers from one to 26, getting ever more obscure in my reasons for enjoying them. When I got bored with that, I made the mistake of trying to reel off Aussie opening batsmen – a task I soon abandoned. There is something about that kind of exercise that I simply cannot cope with in a marathon. I always hope that it will ease the passing of the miles, but it doesn't. Instead, it replaces grind with frustration as I struggle to retain names I know I can list easily in other circumstances. It simply makes a bad thing worse.
So instead I tried to let my mind wander, eventually meandering to the conclusion that there are actually two types of marathon runner. There are the big-city specialists who love the roar of the crowd, and then there are those who actually relish the loneliness of the long-distance runner. You're either London or you are Isle of Wight. On that May morning on the island, it seemed to me that it was hopelessly overambitious ever to aspire to be both.
Certainly I remember the Isle of Wight as a heads-down, no-nonsense type marathon, with the runners clearly committed types, presumably knowing precisely what they had let themselves in for in a way that I didn't. This wasn't a marathon with a great deal of chat, not even at the start as we waited for the off. Instead, it was a marathon where we dutifully got on with it, and for a long time it went well – not so well, however, that I could be bothered to write it up afterwards in the top-secret Dear Darling Diary section on my computer. I have to therefore rely on memory for my account of it here, but it does come back to me as a marathon that flowed past reasonably satisfactorily for the first three-quarters. Oddly, it was once we were back in civilisation that it started to seem tougher.
Once we reached Shanklin and Sandown and the more built-up area on the east of the island, the hills seemed to go beyond relentless, towards impossible. None of them was huge, but the cumulative effect was taking its toll. I felt increasingly on the wrong end of an interminable, body-sapping succession. I doubt I was alone in approaching the downhills fairly gingerly by now. The uphills were hurting, but the frustration was that there never seemed to be any reward at the top. I remember several times experiencing a kind of leg spasm as I tried to open my stride on a summit – a reaction against the cramped, closed style of running that the uphills had forced me into.
The mythology is that you are supposed to welcome hills; you are supposed to look forward to them and attack them. Opinion is divided as to whether you stare at your feet as you ascend, carefully avoiding any sight of the ordeal ahead, or whether you boldly pitch your eyeline on the horizon and drag yourself up to it. Some people will tell you that you are supposed to imagine you've got ski sticks in your hands and that you are pulling yourself up with them. Certainly your upper body comes into it more as the incline forces you to dig deeper and, in stamina terms, hills are said to be excellent training.
When the numbers of hills are within acceptable limits, then there can indeed be something masochistically pleasing in imagining that you are a rubber band being stretched with every step as you head upwards, ready to ping forwards when you reach the top. In those first few steps at the crest, it often feels as if you've built up some kind of credit in your legs as you surge forward. But on the Isle of Wight, the sheer frequency of the hills means that the credit dwindles, diminishes and disappears. Hill after hill after hill in the end wears you down.
I walked for maybe five minutes in all across two or three little troughs of 'What the hell am I doing here?', but just as I had felt in Steyning, walking was the harder option for legs that had got into a groove and couldn't get out of it.
Eventually, as it always does, the finish started to close in and then, quite suddenly, Ryde boating lake was in view for a final little loop round to the finish, a choice of location presumably supposed to create a little more sense of occasion. On the far side of the lake, I could see people gathered and when I reached where they were at their densest, I stopped, thinking I had finished. I'm sure I must have seen some kind of line on the ground. I can't be that daft. Something must have made me think I was there. But instead, all I heard were shouts of 'Keep going!' There were a few more yards to go, but the false finish had been a strange, slightly deflating experience, as were the couple of minutes which had taken me past the four-hour mark.
I completed the course in 4:02:09, finishing 66th out of 119 male finishers – not great, but reasonable enough on a hard course. The next day, my boss, an Isle of Wighter through and through, told me that the Isle of Wight Marathon was generally believed to add half an hour to your normal marathon time. It seemed to me that his words were spot on.
Looking back, I was guilty of not adjusting my expectations to the reality of the course. On a new marathon, it's vital that you recompute and rethink as you go along. I hadn't done so. Hence the initial disappointment with my time, but once I started to think back on the course, I realised that my time hadn't been bad at all. I was well down in the field, but my time was respectable given the serious nature of the runners who turned out that day. I suspected I had run with a lot of seasoned club runners. The Isle of Wight Marathon is not for wimps, and I had shown that I wasn't one.
I can't imagine any possible reason for ever wanting to do it again, but I'm glad I did it – a hilly, testing marathon in the Chichester mode, but one where I felt I could trust myself to the experience of the organisers. After all, the Isle of Wight marathon has been run continuously since 1957, making it the longest-running UK marathon – and that's something worth shouting about. If it keeps going, perhaps one day it will flatten out a few of those hills.
For me, though, it had been just the job – my third marathon in four months. After the horrors of Amsterdam, I was back in business. Steyning, London and the Isle of Wight, in their different ways, had given me back a sense of perspective. More importantly, they reminded me of the great joy of running. I was never going to give up after Amsterdam, but I had certainly needed to go back to basics. I'd done exactly that, and I was back on track now. And, deliciously, I had Dublin on the horizon.
Chapter Nine: 'Gimme Shelter'
Running Stupid – Dublin 2005
By now, things were subtly changing at home. My marathons – for everyone else, if not for me – had been absorbed into the natural workings of the household, and, somehow, for the rest of the family, the gloss had slipped off them. The cakes and celebratory banners which used to greet me on my return from each new marathon had started to disappear for wholly understandable reasons. If you win the FA Cup twice a year, year after year, the celebrations will inevitably become more muted in the end, I told myself. And I wasn't even winning marathons. I was merely taking part.
For me, however, marathons will always belong, one foot at least, in the realms of the extraordinary – a reflection of the fact that I was experiencing them from the inside, rather than the roadside. It was the extremeness of marathon running which appealed, which was possibly in itself a reflection of my more than modest record in PE at school. In games, I was invariably among the last to be picked for any team sport. I played plenty of cricket and football informally with my mates and did reasonably well, but when it came to organised sport, I was right at the back of the queue.
The low point came at the end of my second summer at secondary school when school report time came round. Having got over the shock of having to hold a pen, our PE teacher came into the showers at the end of a lesson and asked, 'So which one is Philip Hewitt?' Naked and mortified, I put my hand up and confessed. How dare he write a report about me when he doesn't even know who I am, I complained to friends. I was annoyed – an annoyance which shot off the end of the Richter scale when I eventually read the report. C+ for attainment, C+ for effort. The swine. Even worse was the comment: 'It is felt that Philip is somewhat lacking in co-ordination.' What kind of phrasing was that? 'It is felt'. I ask you! Who by? Certainly not by someone who had only just noticed my presence. 'Huh!' just didn't cover it. But at least I could manage joined-up writing, I told myself in consolation as I looked at the report.
I wouldn't pretend that the slight altered the course of my life. Little swot that I was, I was always far more interested in pursuing the academic side of school life. But maybe, just maybe, the put-down was there, lurking somewhere unacknowledged at the back of my mind, in the marathons I was now doing. It would be wrong to suggest that I was trying to prove something to a games teacher who had long since forgotten me, but possibly the memory heightened my satisfaction when I discovered that I could indeed compete at the upper end of the sporting scale. I had gone off and got a degree. I had even completed a doctorate. And now I was turning on the sporting prowess. I was one of the boys – at last. Maybe that's one of the reasons marathons have never lost their aura for me, no matter how many I have stacked up.
For the rest of the family, however, they were becoming run of my particular mill. For Fiona, Adam and Laura, they were by now simply something that Daddy did. Of course, there was plenty of genuine interest and plenty of encouragement alongside some perfectly reasonable expressions of sympathy/dismay in all the appropriate places, but for the rest of the family the extra special something had tumbled away and the extraordinary had become ordinary.
My brother Jonathan, a doctor, had even stopped telling me that marathons were unhealthy, that our bodies simply weren't equipped for that kind of pounding and that I was daft to be doing them. I'd never taken any notice anyway. Besides, there are plenty of doctors more than happy to run marathons. Plus, I was convinced that general well-being in the moment comfortably outweighed any joint damage I was saving up for later. But by now, not even Jonathan was trying to dissuade me.
I guess people had started to recognise my supreme ability to ignore advice. Some would call it pig-headedness. I prefer to think of it as single-mindedness. But certainly it had started to filter through and affect the way I was regarded.
Fiona had even stopped trying to get me to eat properly in the weeks before a marathon. In the early days, she would mug up on good foods for runners and serve it up religiously in the final few weeks before the marathon. Meanwhile, I'd keep on eating the biscuits and the chocolate, confident that the running would run them off. I am naturally fairly skinny. For me, eating properly simply means not missing my mouth, but in truth, in my view, I was eating well enough. We've never eaten junk food; Fiona has the highest standards in that respect.
But by now, after a dozen or so marathons and the likelihood of marathons stretching long into the future, Fiona had started to worry less about preparing special meals. Again, my marathon running had simply become part of the pattern of our life. If I wasn't in the house, the children would automatically assume I was out running. Even if I was sitting quietly in another room, they would assume that I was out hammering the country lanes – for the simple reason that that's what their dad did.
However, for the Dublin Marathon of 2005, for once running and family life happily converged. Amsterdam had been a lonely miserable slog; Steyning and the Isle of Wight had been renewal runs. It was now time to reconnect running and family. I was going to put the two halves of my life back together in one glorious week in the Republic of Ireland.
It was half-term and we'd booked a cottage in Waterford, where we spent an exceptionally enjoyable eight days, our first time in Ireland, just the four of us in a beautiful converted barn well and truly off the beaten track. None of us really knew quite what to expect. We'd driven off the ferry from Wales late on the Saturday night in urgent need of petrol. It sounds stupid, but I had no idea whether I was going to be understood at the garage. Everything was written in Gaelic, strange combinations of consonants which looked utterly alien. But there was no need to worry. Everyone was friendly and welcoming, and I spent a very happy week practising, and indeed perfecting – much to my children's annoyance – my Irish accent. I was feeling quite the natural by the time our week in Waterford was up and it was time to head north for the Dublin Marathon.
We'd seen a strange mix of run-down towns and wonderful sights. Among the best of the sights was the Rock of Cashel, which we reached by driving over mountains offering beautiful views across the Tipperary plains. At the Rock, a collection of half-ruined ecclesiastical buildings, the wind across the plain was ferocious. The children loved leaning fully into it, trusting their whole weight to the gust hitting them full in the face. The pleasures were rustic, rural and simple, and we had a great time – though increasingly in the back of my mind was the niggling, unsettling thought that we were doing things the wrong way round.
The holiday needed to be the reward for the marathon, not the build-up. Maybe I relaxed too much. Maybe I didn't relax enough, but the marathon the following Monday sat lump-like and immovable on the horizon. I did a couple of runs during the week, nothing too strenuous, but probably not enough. It was far too hilly, and besides I was too much in holiday mood. The thought of exploring Dublin was an appealing one, but I couldn't honestly say I was relishing the thought of running round it, even less so as the clouds darkened ominously as we approached the city that Saturday morning. I registered for the marathon as the rain lashed down outside. I hoped it wasn't a little taste of things to come.
Every single marathon I've ever run has been a Sunday marathon, except for Dublin, which was run on the Bank Holiday Monday, which gave us the whole of the Sunday to get to know the city. And we had a great day – a day of brilliant sunshine during which we fell in love. Dublin city centre isn't just beautiful; it's fascinating. Dublin has got it all – gorgeous parks, elegant classical architecture, a modern buzz, a rich, complex history and plenty of present-day chic. And for the children, to cap it all, it offered the prospect of a hotel breakfast. They could barely contain their excitement – which probably says it all about the deprived upbringing we'd inflicted on them. There they were at the ages of nine and seven eating a hotel breakfast for the very first time. As parents, we had clearly failed. But at least we let them add a new Pizza Hut to the list they were lovingly building up: Pizza Hut Dublin. Now, how cool was that, at least in their eyes? We were nothing
if not sophisticated on holiday. But even as we sat there, I started to think Uh-oh!
Intoxicated with the city, we had walked for miles, striding out across parks, strolling down attractive shopping streets, exploring little arcades, haring off after historic monuments, lapping it all up on the tourist equivalent of a trolley dash. Absolutely the right thing to do in family terms; absolutely the wrong thing to do before a marathon. A far cry from the three or four hours of dolce far niente which Michael and I had come to regard as de rigueur the afternoon before a marathon. In Dublin, for all sorts of reasons, such considerations went out of the window. I am not saying it was crucial. Or course it wasn't. But it was one of those little controllables that I had opted not to control – a sacrifice which may or may not have made a difference, but one which I was foolish to make as far as the run was concerned.
The real setback came on the Monday morning, however. There was no need to look out of the window to see that Sunday's fine weather had been a false promise. It was tipping it down, the rain hammering onto the streets on which we would soon be running. I wandered down to the starting area in plenty of time, half a mile or so from the hotel. There was no point taking a rucksack with me to leave at the left-luggage. The hotel was close enough. Besides, anything I carried would have been soaked right through by the time I reached the start. Instead, all I took was a T-shirt, which I discarded, and a bin bag, which I didn't – and therein lay the decision which defined the day. It was my first bin bag – and quite definitely my last.