Keep on Running

by Phil Hewitt

  Fiona's view was simply 'What on earth possesses you?' For her, my behaviour was unfathomable, if not exactly unpredictable. For me, opting out was never an option. I knew I would have been in a foul mood if I hadn't at least given it a go. Fiona tried to dissuade me from running on this occasion, but in time-honoured tradition, it was advice I was never going to take.

  I had launched into the training several months before our holiday that summer, and four times during our two weeks in North Wales, I had hammered out 15 miles on the hills – tough running which was a good test of stamina. I didn't want those miles – and all those that had preceded them – to count for nothing. In preparing for a marathon, you give in to a rhythm; you push the distance and then you start to ease off, and though I had probably lost a couple of weeks because of the break, the training had gone reasonably smoothly.

  Fiona's view is that running a marathon with a cracked rib is screamingly abnormal behaviour; my view is that I had cracked it six weeks earlier, that the pain was by now more of an ache, and that I was just about fit enough to have a go. It wasn't just a perverse habit of never doing what people tell me to do: the rib was throbbing, but I had never pulled out of a marathon, and I wasn't going to start now.

  In the event, it was uncomfortable, but not overpoweringly so. I am not even sure just how much of a factor it actually was. The ache did become pain again about halfway round, but the jabbing in some ways helped me to keep going before, in the final miles, it slowly merged with the more generalised pain of running a marathon.

  Even so, I approached the whole thing with a degree of caution. Given the rib, and given the relative difficulty of the course (relative to the big-city marathons where I was now hitting 3:20–3:30), my aim was to finish within four hours. My determination was not so much to run it, but simply to enjoy it. The big-city marathons were the ones where I had a chance of beating my best. There was no hope of doing so in the New Forest, and the cracked rib lowered ambitions still further.

  No, for me, the whole point was to fulfil a little ambition I'd been harbouring for years, one which meant that on the day I took in very little of the scenery. I'd always been a huge Beatles fan, and ever since George Harrison's death on 29 November 2001, I had wanted to pay my own tribute. A marathon nut, I let that tribute take marathon form.

  My idea was to run against a soundtrack of continuous, chronological Beatles tracks and see on which album I would finish. It took me until 2009 to work out how to do this. It then became a question of just how many albums I needed.

  The worst scenario would be not to put enough on, run a horribly slow race and finish in silence. Using the wonders of iTunes, I hedged my bets and stuck on everything up to Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles' second 1967 recording after Sgt Pepper. The aim was to finish well inside that. I wanted to hit 1966. To finish close to four hours would be to finish somewhere during the Revolver album, an appealing prospect because it had always been a favourite of mine.

  By now I was routinely running to music. In my early marathons, I had felt it would be impolite to do so. It felt wrong to be shutting out all the people who were roaring us runners on, but after a while the need for a relentless running rhythm took precedence. Besides, for the New Forest Marathon, there really wouldn't be many people to shut out anyway. Plus, I felt sure that my Beatles tribute would be a huge part of the fun. Perhaps the only part.

  In the event, it provided plenty of moments of quiet amusement. The Beatles, so they say, are the soundtrack to our lives. They've got a song for every mood and every moment, or so it seemed as I ran along. 'Misery' as the second song was premature, but 'Ask Me Why' was appropriate. I still don't know the answer. Maybe the answer lies in 'There's a Place' if you take it to refer to the finish.

  The Beatles' second album, With The Beatles, offered similar moments with the encouraging 'It Won't Be Long', the reassuring 'All I've Got To Do' (i.e. keep on running), and the worrying 'Not a Second Time' (not what you need on your return to a race).

  The third album, A Hard Day's Night, had the bonus of a vaguely appropriate title track. It also offered another imponderable with 'Tell Me Why', and then quick-fire pessimism and optimism with 'I'll Cry Instead' and 'I'll Be Back', plus the ominous 'I Should Have Known Better'. 'You Can't Do That' was a bit of a downer; 'When I Get Home' offered hope.

  The next album, Beatles For Sale, threatened 'I'm a Loser' before concluding 'I Don't Want To Spoil the Party'. It also pondered 'What You're Doing'.

  Album number five said it all in the title track 'Help!', before Rubber Soul offered a sane alternative, 'Drive My Car', rapidly followed by the sublime and wonderfully appropriate middle-of-nowhere song 'Nowhere Man'. 'In My Life' will lift any moment in my life, and it was followed by the stop-start contradiction of 'Wait' and 'Run for Your Life' – by which time the finish wasn't so very far away, signalled by the start of the Revolver album, offering Paul McCartney at his upbeat best with the cheery 'Good Day Sunshine'.

  And so The Beatles dragged me to the finishing line. I crossed it as Paul, as jolly as ever, blasted my lugholes with 'Got to Get You into My Life'. Marathon done; Revolver still rolling; mission accomplished.

  The start had been in New Milton, and the route had taken in various places, including Wootton, Burley and Sway, along the way. The course was resolutely rural, some main roads every now and again, but a lot of tracks through the woods and endless country paths. Unlike the Isle of Wight Marathon, we were in company for the most part. I remember passing a wizened little man in a home-printed T-shirt proclaiming that this was his 157th marathon – an astonishing achievement, though you couldn't help wondering what he would have looked like without those 157 marathons. But more power to his knees – and he was still going at an impressive rate.

  From time to time, mostly on the decent roads, we could see a long way ahead, often a good thing, inspiring almost, especially as the weather was bright, the conditions were good and the temperature was perfect. As I have said, the course certainly undulated and there were a couple of steady uphill drags, but never to the extent that it wore me down in the Isle of Wight way, and with the miles clearly marked, the distance soon started to stack up.

  The water stations were good; I stayed ahead of looming dehydration and somehow, urged on by The Beatles, simply kept going, and this, apart from The Beatles, is my main memory of the day. There were several moments in the last quarter where I felt drained, but I never felt as if I was running on empty. I found a rhythm and I stuck to it, turning in a workmanlike performance during which I never set a cracking (or even rib-cracking) pace, but nor did I slow. It was a steady-as-you-go performance, which didn't significantly diminish. I didn't fade. The Beatles and plenty of water did the rest.

  Coming 195th out of 514 finishers, I completed the course in 3:54:54. Job done. Rib not significantly worse. I was satisfied. I'd done something I'd been intending to do for years, and in the process I'd come up with a novel approach to marathon running, definitely a way to renew the interest. And by the end of it, marathon number 21 was in the bag. Thank you, The Beatles.

  And thank you, Fiona, ever-forgiving of my stubbornness, who was there with the children to greet me. It was terrific to see them just a few hundred yards before the finishing line. Knowing they would be there had been a help, and it was great to be looked after once the race was over. Instantly, I felt frozen, shivery and decidedly fragile. I had a craving for a hot drink, and Fiona went off into the school, where the race starts and ends, to ask for one. The receptionist suggested she try the next village, which amused us hugely.

  Presumably the receptionist thought we wanted cream tea with the full works, which conjured lovely images of me sweating into bone china amid all the gentility of little old ladies on their afternoon out. Fiona explained the need was rather more pressing than that and was directed to a vending machine, from which she returned with the most welcome cup of coffee I have ever had.

  Maybe it was a reaction to the rib; maybe
there was an element of shock to the body from finally stopping, but I felt chilled to the core. The weather had been fine, but I wasn't. Slowly, though, with that coffee, the warmth flowed back into me; it was wonderfully restorative and exactly what I needed.

  Chapter Fifteen: 'Losing My Touch'

  When It Just Isn't Your Day – Rome 2010

  By now, country collecting was a big part of my marathon running – partly a reaction to the fact that it was getting so tough to knock time off, and bound to get tougher. My thinking was that I might as well measure my marathon pleasures in some other way. In March 2010, Rome added Italy to my list. It also added one or two standout memories – though perhaps not quite for the right reasons.

  Rome was also my first Garmin marathon, the first I had run with that high-powered GPS wristwatch which tracks your every route and then throws it all up on your computer screen in glorious Technicolor. I'd been wanting a Garmin for ages, but until I actually got one, I had simply no idea just how much it would transform my running, changing my approach in ways that I could never have imagined, and releasing the anorak inside me and giving him a field day.

  There are all sorts of ways you can measure your running on the mind-bogglingly brilliant Garmin 305, a fact which is doubtless true of all sorts of other makes and models. The way I quickly focused on was minutes per mile, in other words pace rather than speed (miles per hour). My mission in life became to run miles in 7 minutes 30 seconds; in other words, at 8 miles an hour. More specifically, the aim was to do so for as long as I possibly could. The closer I could come to doing so over marathon distance, the closer I could come to achieving marathon times of around 3:20. It was as simple as that.

  By now I had long since abandoned running in the dark in favour of early-morning midweek runs, plus a long weekend run. The ability to measure every step along the way brought renewed focus and intensity to my running just when I needed it.

  But at the same time, it soon became clear that there was something just a touch double-edged about running with a sports watch. Having your very own GPS tracking system with you at all times is a liberation in all sorts of ways, creating and sating a craving for all sorts of instant information. I wished I'd had one years ago. But alongside that freedom, it also introduced a constraint. It meant that every run mattered, which meant that every run was tough. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it's that the novelty of the Garmin hadn't worn off. But the Garmin brought an end to coasting and, with it, an end to some of the pleasure of weekly training.

  Its mere presence started to force me down very narrow lines. When it's suddenly all about measuring pace and/or speed, I found myself thinking twice before heading up a long hill, even if it was the way to some of my favourite running country. Slog too long up a hill, and I'd never have decent stats at the end of it. Slowly and subtly, my sports watch started to dictate my path. Given half a chance, I opted for the flat – which proved extremely limiting in the heart of rural Hampshire, where there really isn't too much flat to be had. I started to become terribly bored of the few bits I could find.

  There are all sorts of fantastic things you can do with a sports watch. You can run against a set pace or you can run against yourself over a previous performance on a route you've already recorded. But the basic measurement of minutes per mile struck me straightaway as the guiding principle that I needed, and my training became rooted around it. And because of it, my running routes suddenly started to seem a bit pedestrian. There wasn't any longer any great scope for the dash-down-here invention which meant a run could take you anywhere. And if I did factor in a few hills, I then felt obliged to run the same route the following week just to measure myself against it. It wasn't enough just to do a route. With the endless scope for comparison that a sports watch sets up, I had to do it quicker. Otherwise, what was the point? It all became rather too regimented for my liking.

  My training for Rome fell into a pattern: two 8-mile runs during the week, where the aim would be to get back home inside the hour. I measured success by just how far inside the hour I was. For the weekend long run, I persisted with my usual pattern of mostly 18-milers, and then for the final six weeks or so before Rome, I introduced a Saturday session of the intervals which I loathed, where the aim would be to average – including a gentle mile to the start and then back again – around 8.4 miles an hour across the 40 minutes it took me to complete the whole exercise.

  It meant, so I told myself, that I had jettisoned what the serious runners dismissively refer to as junk miles, something I'd long suspected I was guilty of. They mean those miles that you churn out by the dozen, simply piling them up and reaping no benefit. For years, I imagined that I was running comfortably at about 8 miles per hour, however far I went. I imagined I could tell how far I had gone just from the time I'd been running, so metronomic did I fancy myself to be. Mr Garmin soon told me just how generous I was being to myself. In the very early days, I had consistently run further than I thought, but somewhere down the line, I'd started to run much shorter than I thought. Mr Garmin delighted in pointing out the error of my ways.

  Yes, I could run at 8 miles an hour, but it was an effort – a real, sustained effort, in which I couldn't allow myself to drop back for a minute. But the benefits were evident. Finally, after all those years of junk miles, this was proper, directed training, and it worked, with a noticeable improvement in pace creeping in, even on generally undulating terrain. The downside was that this progress came at the expense of a great deal of the fun and almost all of the variety.

  To start with, it was a relief to complete my 8-mile route in an hour; within a couple of weeks, it was an expectation. By late February, I was looking to do it with a minute and a half in hand. The Garmin had been a Christmas present with my March date in Rome in mind; by the time the race arrived, I was generally clocking up my 8 miles in 58 minutes. Every step, every mile had counted.

  My best-ever marathon had come after I had trained with Rob and Nick, and it had been no coincidence. The sports watch effectively replicated the act of running with someone just a bit faster than me, someone who ensured I never drifted; it meant that I pushed myself all the time. And I suspect that approach carried through into my long run, where I discovered that in training I could keep up those 7-minute-30-second miles for 12 miles, just slipping back a bit at around miles 13 and 14. The pattern became to hit mile 16 somewhere between 2:02 and 2:05, depending on the route I took.

  The Garmin gives you a wonderfully colourful record of exactly what you have done, especially if you bypass Garmin's own boringly utilitarian software and load your runs into the superb (and free) running site Running Free. There you can amuse yourself for hours. You can view your route on a map, or overlaid on satellite images, or a combination of both. You can view the route with each mile coloured differently, or with your pace coloured differently as your speed varied, growing darker as you slowed. Or you can even follow your route on a line colour-coded according to elevation. The permutations are endless. And it is blindingly obvious: if you are going to take your running remotely seriously, a Garmin or something similar is absolutely essential.

  A few weeks later, Michael also bought a Garmin, which turned out to be another spur for me. We signed each other in as friends on the Running Free website. I could keep an eye on what Michael was doing 140 miles away in Colchester; he could keep an eye on me. I've almost never ducked out of a run, but plenty of times I haven't fancied going. Just knowing that Michael had been out already was incentive enough. His runs were also a motivator in terms of distance. At 31 years younger, I felt I had to go considerably further than he ever did to match his achievement.

  The downside, though, was that I was allowing the device to take control of me, rather than me keeping control of it. Something in my make-up meant I took it far too seriously, allowing it to become a nag. Obviously, one answer would have been to leave it at home every now and again, but that wasn't a real solution. Leave it at home, and obviously the miles wou
ldn't count towards your weekly and monthly statistics. Slowly, but surely, if you let it – and I did – a sports watch can tie you up in statistical knots.

  Even so, those first three months of 2010 seemed to me, in the context of years of erratic and slightly idiosyncratic training, to be three months of the closest thing I was ever going to get to model training – certainly now that the great London triumvirate of 2007 was never going to reunite, with Rob hors de combat and Nick now living elsewhere. The sports watch was a reasonable, if very much less enjoyable, substitute.

  I'd been egged on to do the Rome Marathon by my running friend Marc, who I'd run in Paris with six years earlier. Paris had been terrific, all going swimmingly well. Annoyingly, as soon I arrived in Rome, things started to go wrong.

  A good time will always owe as much to luck as judgement. Your training is all about trying to control the things that you can control, chief among which is your own basic fitness. But you can do little about coughs and colds, as I had discovered in Berlin; you can't do much about injury (London, New Forest); you can do nothing about the weather (Dublin, Amsterdam); and you're defenceless when it comes to the quality of the race organisation (Paris). Worst of all, you are utterly powerless against the feeling – fortunately rare – that, for whatever reason, today just isn't your day.