by Phil Hewitt
Bin bags are very much a part of marathon tradition. You need something to keep you warm at the start of a marathon, something you can hurl into the gutter just before the off. Inevitably, you reach the point after a while where you've got no more sweatshirts you want to part with. And so out come the bin bags. I'd never tried one until that day, but I'd often, rather bizarrely, thought that my fellow runners had looked pretty cool as they strolled around at the start sporting theirs. I wanted to be one of them.
But things started badly when I all but suffocated. Being a bin-bag virgin, I imagined that you just pulled it over your head and used your manly strength to push out the arm holes and head hole. Unfortunately, I'd brought along a heavy-duty refuse sack. Those around me must have thought I was chickening out, preferring to commit suicide on the streets of Dublin than to actually run on them in the cascading rain. Eventually, possibly slightly blue in the face, I gave up, pulled it off and did things the conventional way, ripping the holes before putting it on. I can't help thinking that it was my difficulty in getting it on which led to my bizarre decision to keep it on – quite the daftest thing I have ever done in a marathon.
In my defence, I would have to say that it served a purpose for the hour or so we hung around at the start. I was soaked beneath it, but it did actually feel as if it was keeping me warmer than I would have been without it.
The marathon wasn't particularly big, less than a third of the size of the big ones such as London. There were about 10,000 runners, I believe. Consequently, we weren't particularly tightly packed at the start for the wait, which went on forever. I muttered 'Bloody rain' to the guy standing next to me, who replied with the legendary Irish twinkle, 'Well, what do you expect? We're in Dublin!' Oscar Wilde couldn't have put it better. The weather was clearly par for the course in a notoriously soggy city.
And so as we stood there, I could find no reason to divest myself of my plastic coating. We moved off eventually, and still it seemed reasonable to keep it on.
The start would have been impressive had we been able to see more than a few yards in front of our faces. I knew that I would be seeing – or trying to see – Fiona and the children just before the end of the first mile, standing on the corner of the road a few hundred yards from our hotel. It was a great incentive to get cracking – if only to allow them to rush for shelter all the sooner. In the event, they gave me a quick wave and returned to our room drenched and shivering. It was that kind of day – not a day for running. Not even a day, really, for being a duck.
With the rain came an autumnal gloom, which in turn became a slightly more inviting mistiness as the course took us, fairly early on, into Phoenix Park, a couple of miles west of the city centre, north of the River Liffey. Here there were some long straight stretches, and on a clear, bright day, it might just have been a little oasis for marathoners. Instead, under oppressive skies and with the rain belting us straight in the face, it simply seemed exposed.
One good thing was that fairly rapidly in Dublin you could run at your own pace. There was very little bunching. The streets were wide and would have been great in the dry. But on this particular late-October day, we were running through sheets of water, splashed by those ahead as we splashed ourselves and splashed those behind us. But thank goodness for my bin bag, I suppose I must have occasionally thought to myself. I'll show them. I hadn't a clue that I was actually the biggest Irish joke of them all.
After a few miles, there began perhaps to be an element of keeping it on deliberately; once past the half-marathon, the element of deliberateness grew stronger. It started to seem to me that a Clark Kent moment was there somewhere ahead. I was going to rip off my bin bag and suddenly become Superman, whizzing through the last few miles for an extraordinarily fast finish.
All of which goes to show one thing and one thing only – how easily muddled thinking can creep in when you're tired. By keeping it on, I started to think – if think isn't too strong a word for it – that I was somehow keeping something back, a trump card, an ace up my soggy sleeve that would stand me in good stead for the final flourish.
2005 hadn't been a year of competitive running, so I felt I had something to prove. The Steyning Stinger and the Isle of Wight marathons had never been going to be about times. London had been a joint venture. All of which meant that I was pinning my hopes on Dublin, my only genuine race of the year. I blanch, though, at the twisted logic – or lack of logic – that persuaded me that running in a bin bag was the best way to prove myself. Twenty miles became the fixed point in my head. At 20 miles I would rip it off, the crowds would gasp and I would fly. Absurd. And absurd for one blindingly obvious reason.
The fact is that for 20 miles of torrential rain, 20 miles of feeling frozen, I was sweating like a pig beneath my plastic. I was like a cheese sarnie in cling film. And I didn't realise it. I just didn't have a clue how much I was perspiring, no idea how much fluid I was losing, nor how dehydrated I was becoming. Madness. When I ripped off my packaging, it was too late. I wasn't a tasty little M&S sarnie, fresh and flavoursome, tumbling out of its box. I was weeks past my sell-by date. I ran dressed as rubbish, and I ran a rubbish race.
We were in nondescript backstreets by now, no one around apart from the runners. Pulling off the bag, I shoved it rather decorously into a roadside bin. And then I waited to soar. Nothing happened. The damage had been done, and there wasn't the remotest prospect of recovery. I'd been drinking steadily, but nowhere near enough, and instead of surging, I slumped. Exactly as in Amsterdam. And just as in Amsterdam, there was no chance of any help coming from the course itself.
After the comparative pleasures of Phoenix Park, the route had nosedived into mile after mile of suburban could-be-anywhere anonymity. The day before, under bright blue skies, the city centre had oozed charm with its classical buildings, attractive shops and beautiful parks. In the rain, in the outskirts, we really could have been anywhere, with almost no points of interest for miles on end. Or if there were, we couldn't see them. It was grim, featureless and boring. I don't even remember the mile markers on a course which was unremarkable in the extreme.
The roads merged one into another, undistinguished and indistinguishable. The route felt like the least interesting sections of the London Marathon cut out, elongated and stitched together for the ultimate in monotony on two legs. I am tempted to say it was the middle 24 miles that were the problem, but that's probably being a little bit unfair. The boring bit was probably much less than that, but there was just absolutely nothing for the soul to rejoice in, nothing to send the spirit soaring – just grey buildings on grey streets under grey skies in heavy, heavy rain.
Fortunately, the skies can hold only so much. Around mile 15 or 16, the rain had started to ease, lessening considerably towards the 20-mile marker, where I had discarded my plastic cloak and discovered I wasn't Superman after all. By miles 21 or 22, the rain had more or less stopped, but with the sheets of water we were running through there was never any prospect of drying off. And that's when the cold started to set in. Perhaps the bin bag had actually kept me warmer than I would have been, but this was no compensation for its unnoticed dehydrating effect, which probably also contributed to the coldness I felt in the early 20s.
I started to shiver and could sense that I was not alone. People were dripping and bedraggled. This was another of those marathons where the prevailing mood was a gritty determination, people slogging it out for no other reason than that there was nothing else to do but keep on going.
As early as 15 or 16 miles in, people had been falling by the wayside, pulling up with cramp, leaning against lampposts, stretching legs or sitting forlornly in the gutter. In the 20s, there was even more roadside suffering. Dozens of people were walking. I managed not to; I was hanging on in there. But my run wasn't much faster than a walk. I was shuffling along, dog-tired and fed up, and it was now that my hideous deformity started to take its toll.
Perhaps because of asthma, or perhaps the cause of it, I ha
ve one shoulder a few inches higher than the other. I am naturally lopsided, and as tiredness set in, one shoulder rose as the other one sank. I was unaware of it, but towards the end I was running in a horribly hunched position, which added to my tiredness and made my running all the more ineffective.
Bizarrely, it had never been an issue until Ireland. If my shoulder slump had been particularly marked when I first started running, I am sure Pamela would have picked up on it. Perhaps it had simply worsened with the years. Perhaps it was just that I hadn't ever really had any supporters towards the ends of races when the deformity was at its worst. In fact, in Amsterdam, the Chichesters, Steyning and the Isle of Wight, I had had no personal support at all.
But now, suddenly, somehow, here in Ireland, my lopsidedness was indeed a problem – even if it wasn't a problem I was aware of until after the race. Whilst I was still running, it was indistinguishable from the general discomfort I was suffering.
Maybe my right-leaning lurch was worsened by the weather, perhaps even by my bin bag barminess, but more likely perhaps by the sheer amount of running I had done that year. But by the time Fiona and the children, waiting for me at around the 25-mile mark, saw me, it would have been impossible not to notice it. They tell me they were aware of my shape before they were aware that it was me. Staring at the runners, they saw Quasimodo lumbering towards them. My gait was awful; my posture was terrible, any running efficiency long since wrecked by a shape which was hopelessly skewed.
Since then the firm instruction to anyone kind enough to support me has been to shout 'Shoulder up!' when they see me coming. If it's well into the race, it's certain that the shoulder slump will have started – just another of the ways in which the extremity of long-distance running can play havoc with your body. I was almost certainly running like this towards the end in Amsterdam. I just didn't know it then. There was no one there to tell me. No one there to care.
Yes, self-pity was never far away. But here, thank goodness, I had support – terrific support. Fiona, Adam and Laura were there after mile one and there they were again at 25, and I was overjoyed even if I didn't manage to show it. Ideally, it would have been great to have had someone midway round the course as well, but there was no way Fiona could have dragged the children to some remote Dublin suburb in torrential rain simply to stand for hours in the hope of not having missed me. And I wouldn't have wanted her to. I'd wrecked their day enough. It was enough that I saw them with just over a mile to go.
Fiona tells me I looked shot away at that stage, every effort focused on just keeping going, which I did, and slowly the finish inched nearer. Maybe ten minutes before I got there, the sun came out, and by the time I finished, the sky was suddenly as blue as it had been the day before. Dublin was determined to have the last laugh on the toughest of days.
But, as with all tough marathons, I did feel a certain grim satisfaction. You've stopped banging your head against the wall. You've stopped dropping the hammer on your foot, and at last it feels good. And even now, I can't helping smiling at my 20 miles in a bin bag – smiling while at the same time thinking how unspeakably stupid I had been.
Perhaps the point is that when you are tired, you really do stop thinking logically. 'Marathon brains' is the best way of describing it. You enter into a strange, isolated world where you torment yourself about the things you cannot control, but miss the blindingly obvious things you can actually change.
The finish was in Merrion Square, one of the most attractive sights in Dublin; classical, elegant and classy – and so typical of a city centre which once again seemed all of those things in the bright sunshine. It didn't take long to find Fiona and the children, and I am sure I looked quite a state, unable to stand straight, weather-beaten and exhausted.
I slumped down beside the railings which enclose the square. I ached, but not enough to stop me thinking some deeply pretentious thoughts about the healing power of the sun. Sitting on my pavement, I closed my eyes, lifted my face and thought just what a gorgeous sensation it was to feel the sun on my skin. Adam and Laura sat down either side of me. No one said a word for several minutes. I needed time to come back to me before I could come back to them.
But it strikes me now how odd it was that the children never once thought to ask me that question so beloved of children everywhere. This was the first time they had seen me at the end of a marathon, and yet as they looked at me, it didn't occur to them to ask: 'Why?' Perhaps it was because I'd done it all their lives, bar the first two years of Adam's. They accepted it as normal in an abnormal kind of way. You can imagine the playground conversations. 'What does your dad do?' 'Oh, he likes to go fishing. What about yours?' 'Oh, you know, he just likes to run himself into the ground for four hours in torrential rain dressed in a bin bag, you know the kind of thing.'
But even if they had asked me, I doubt I would have been able to frame a sensible answer. Arguably, I still couldn't. 'Because' is the only possible response. 'Because I do.'
My finishing time was 3:40:38, positioning me 1,475th out of just over 8,000 finishers – and as I look at those stats now, a big part of me wants to shout 'So what on earth have you been whingeing about?' I guess the answer is that this was one of those instances where the position was much more satisfying than the time achieved, which is a problem when time is the thing you instinctively measure a marathon by. The placement was impressive for a non-club runner on a tough day, but that doesn't change the fact that placement can never be more than the consolation prize when the golden ticket of a PB has been denied you.
I did the first half of the race in about 1:40. The second half came up in two hours, such was the extent of my slowing. But for hours afterwards people were streaming in, which was gratifying in its way. The Dublin course record for men at the time was ten minutes off the world record and the best women's time was a strangely slow 2:35-ish, so I guess you have to take into account the fact that it wasn't a quick course.
Even so, I look back on Dublin as my stupidity marathon, just as Amsterdam had been my misjudgement marathon. Having perfected in Amsterdam a route to disaster which involved fixating on a specific finishing time, I went for out-and-out idiocy in Dublin, indulging a piece of foolishness so foolish that it goes off the top of the foolish scale. I shudder at the thought of it. What on earth was I thinking? Except, of course, I wasn't thinking.
My Amsterdam and Dublin experiences left me starting to think that my Paris time of 3:27 six months earlier was probably an aberration, the kind of result you get only on that rarest of rare occasions when absolutely everything goes right. My Amsterdam and Dublin times were 3:37 and 3:40 respectively, times so closely clustered that I started to think that this was probably my natural time.
But even after 3 hours 40 minutes of grind in Dublin, the day wasn't done yet. This wasn't so much a marathon as a triathlon. Within a couple of hours of the marathon, we were heading home on the ferry, being tossed around by seas so stormy that even the crooner had to give up and stop singing. A triathlon because part two (the ferry) was followed by part three, a 300-mile drive home, from North Wales back to Hampshire on endless motorway in the middle of the night.
And this is where I am prepared to admit to yet more stupidity. Fiona repeatedly offered to drive, but I insisted that I wanted to, and I just kept going – perhaps in expiation for a disappointing marathon. I suppose I wanted to redeem the race – a stupid reaction given that in the cold light of day there can't possibly be any connection between the run and the return home.
I was awake and invigorated, and we got home safely and without incident, but I suppose it does have to count as daft, given that another driver was available and more than willing. Perhaps it's an insight into the marathon mind. Running marathons is all about setting yourself targets and challenges. Marathons are all about the feeling of 'I've got to do it'. Subconsciously, I was trying to make up for the day's setback by setting a new challenge straight away. Foolish. It didn't make the marathon any better in retrospect
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Chapter Ten: 'Like a Rolling Stone'
Thinking a Good Marathon – Paris 2006
When you have a stinker such as Dublin, there's nothing you can do except try to be philosophical. Not in the sense of reaching for Nietzsche. Rather, you just try to put it down to experience and hope you'll bounce back. With Dublin, just as with Amsterdam, the only way to move on was to do another – which suggests a freedom that most blokes probably simply don't have. I'm married with children and have a job, but marathons were here to stay as far as I was concerned. Fiona recognised it too. She doubted my sanity at times, but never for a moment opposed my running.
Thus it became a question of working the running around all the other commitments we had – and if nothing else, the Dublin experience at least suggested one way how. Dublin had been the first marathon I'd combined with a family holiday, and apart from the run itself, it had worked out extremely well.
We'd been wanting to take the children to Paris for a while, and so Paris once again became my next marathon, in April 2006. In my defence, it wasn't simply a question of 'think of a marathon and then tack on a holiday'. It was much more positive than that. The marathon made us get ourselves organised and do something we'd long been intending to do. All we needed now was to reverse the order of ceremonies. Dublin had confirmed the folly of having the holiday first and then doing the marathon. This time we would do things the right way round from the point of view of my running.