Keep on Running

by Phil Hewitt

  That feeling started to take hold when I couldn't get through to Marc on my mobile the day before the race. It was my only way of contacting him. He was out there already on an extended birthday break, and I didn't have a clue where he was. His phone number wasn't summoning him, possibly wasn't even getting through, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Mobile phones are no substitute for proper arrangements and, as a mobile phone novice, I had been too trusting, never for a moment thinking that I might need a fallback plan. Travelling alone had often been a prelude to a tough marathon, but I hadn't for a moment intended to be alone once I was actually out there. Sadly, that wasn't the way it worked out.

  On another day, in another mood, it was something I would have shrugged off. But not that day. It meant that I was completely alone in a city I didn't know, just as I had been in Amsterdam. It didn't worry me unduly on the surface, but it niggled away in the back of my mind where the fact was firmly logged. There is a definite connection between good finishing times and personal support at a race, by the roadside and at the end. For Rome, I wasn't going to be getting any at all.

  Perhaps as compensation, perhaps simply because of the buzz of being there, after registering on the Saturday afternoon, I set out for some sightseeing. I had no intention of walking as far as I did, but my sense of direction, usually strong, abandoned me completely – again, just as in Amsterdam. I didn't have a decent map. The one I had was too small. I couldn't read a word on it. Time and again, I would be striding out in completely the wrong direction. It was infuriating. Nothing was where it ought to be; my every intuition was wrong; and the miles stacked up as I slowly went nowhere. I've since bitten the bullet and bought reading glasses. How I needed them then.

  In the end, I made it to most of the places I wanted to see and ended up chilling out over a pizza, but I was tired, frustrated and actually just a little lonely. I'd been looking forward to a sociable time in an exciting city; instead, all I had achieved was to get miserably and repeatedly lost all on my tod. But at least the hotel was comfortable, and I slept moderately well, having studied and restudied and then studied again my route to the start, down by the Colosseum, about 20 minutes away. I'd bought some croissants and honey for my feeling-sorry-for-myself marathon breakfast, and then I set off, wondering if a little bit of exhilaration was going to steal in from somewhere. I felt quite flat – a flatness which was soon replaced by fury.

  The start was a nightmare, an awful crush which was allowed to deteriorate by an absence of anyone to police the starting zones. I had left it fairly late leaving the loo area to wander to the start area, thinking I would be fine, given that Rome isn't a huge marathon. But even medium-sized marathons require the strictest of surveillance, and there was none of it here. It was a battle to get to my starting group (the one corresponding to an anticipated 3:00–3:30 finish), and then once I'd got over the barrier (the only way in by now), I discovered that I was surrounded by runners (you can tell from their numbers) looking at finishes of upwards of 4 hours 30, which was infuriating.

  Everything conspired to take away the magic of the fact that, if I glanced to my left, I could see the Colosseum. It ought to have been an inspiring sight. It wasn't. It simply left me reflecting that Ancient Rome surely wouldn't have offered such a chaotic start to its chariot races as modern-day Rome was now serving up to its showpiece marathon.

  The whole thing was abysmally handled – all the more irritating for the fact that the starting area offered plenty of natural advantages. We were on a wide, wide street. If it had been properly policed, we could all have moved off comfortably and on time. But, sadly, there was no effort to spread us back into a long column ready to roll. Instead, everyone just bundled in as tightly as possible as close to the start as they could get, never mind who they crushed along the way. It was possibly being a little harsh, but I couldn't help reflecting that Rome was playing up to the national stereotypes as surely as Berlin had done. The only difference was that the Berlin stereotype was by far the more appealing.

  Distinctly gladiatorial, it was the worst possible preparation for the run. The scrum left me hassled, weary and wound up before I'd even started, and certainly the first mile was an effort, trapped behind slow-moving, shall we say larger, runners who should never have been where they were. Why am I even doing this? was a constant thought as I slogged away amid the chaos.

  Consequently, my first mile was way outside my hoped-for 7:30. I completed it in 7:59 (with the sports watch, I was now in anorak, time-obsessed mode, very much focused on miles rather than kilometres). I then embarked on a determined policy of weaving in and out, desperately trying to leave the slow coaches behind me. It wasn't so much a marathon as an obstacle course, but the tactic worked, with the next 7 miles coming up within 7:30. I was relieved to have done my first 8 miles within the hour, just as I had hoped. It seemed I'd got over the frustrations of the start.

  Helping considerably was the fact that the course was by now definitely in the mouth-watering category. Properly organised, the start could have been terrific; but once we were properly underway, there was every chance to appreciate that this was a marathon which offered something rather special, courtesy of a proud city determined to show us something of its importance, its charm and its romance.

  After the Colosseum, we had headed south roughly parallel to the Tiber for the opening few miles, after which we turned to head north, hugging the river, towards St Peter's and the Vatican. Just clipping the square, we continued for a long stretch on the western side of the Tiber until, turning at our northernmost point, we headed back down the eastern side of the river to re-enter the city centre. We reached Piazza Navona just before the 35-km marker and then Piazza di Spagna at around the 38-km marker. We passed the Trevi Fountain soon afterwards, before heading back towards a finish which half-circled the Colosseum, which had of course been our starting point.

  Two or three miles in, I had turned on the MP3 player. Today was going to be a Status Quo day again. Several hours stretched ahead of their greatest hits, all of them solidly thudding, their rhythms cascading down into my shoes to propel my feet forwards. The Beatles don't thud; nor do The Stones; but Quo have the right beat, and there was something slightly otherworldly when 'Mystery Song' – always a favourite – struck up just as I got my first glimpse of the Vatican. When the song had finished, I jumped back to the start (of the song, that is) and played it straight off seven or eight times more. But, towards the end of my 'Mystery Song' replays, I realised it wasn't masking what I was subconsciously wanting it to mask. I was getting tired – prematurely so.

  The 11th mile proved to be the last I did under eight minutes. With mile 20, I slipped over into nine-minute miling and worse. The low point (and thank you, Garmin, for telling me this) was an 11.5-minute mile, a time worsened by a failed attempt at a roadside puke. There's nothing worrying about a failed puke in itself. It's just that a successful one – not to put too fine a point on it – gets things out the way and lets you move on. I can't claim vast experience, but 'better out than in' would seem to be the maxim, after which inevitably you will start to feel better. In Rome, feeling nauseous and knackered, I was left in vomit limbo and my sports watch spared no detail as I faded and started to fail. On the computer, my speed line for that run gets darker and ever darker as my efforts threatened to tail off entirely.

  Dehydration became a big factor. I'd taken several sports gels, which my body didn't seem to want to dilute. They just sat on my stomach, immovable and nauseating; anything I drank seemed simply to slosh around on top of them, which made me less inclined to drink for the simple reason that drinking made me feel worse. It was like filling an overfilled sink. Consequently, I felt more and more revolted at the thought of the warmish sweet stuff in my water bottle – a once-fresh sports drink which I had been topping up at the water stations. It tasted horrible, and yet the remedy was so obvious. At one point late on, I took a swig of lovely, cold, fresh-tasting water from a fresh bottle a
nd realised that this was what I should have been doing all along. It was so invigorating. But by then it was too late.

  For the last 6 miles, the sights stacked up impressively, with plenty of support and even more to look at. This was a fine course, one of the best. But somehow, none of it was quite enough. It felt that nothing I had done in training helped me remotely once I had passed 20 miles. Those final 6 miles took me well over an hour – a serious deterioration from a position of relative strength.

  I had managed to overcome the slow start; I was running at just inside 8 miles an hour at the hour mark, just outside 8 miles after 90 minutes and then passed 16 miles at 2:03. I was still going well after that. At 20 miles, I should have been looking at a 3:25 finish. But when it came to it, I had absolutely nothing left for those final six.

  Towards the end I had the awful sensation of going backwards, simply because of the surge of all the runners going past me. The Rome Marathon website offers you the chance to watch video footage of yourself at various points – desperately unedifying in my case. My shoulder had risen dramatically, and I crossed the line with a gait that was an exhausted, camp prance delivered in slow-motion action replay. It looked as if I had deliberately dreamt up the most tiring, inelegant way of running and was determined to stick to it. I'd entered the Ministry of Silly Runs.

  Even worse, I was entering uncharacteristically defeatist territory. For much of the last 5 miles, I found myself thinking – if disconnected, ratty snatches of consciousness can be considered thought – that a marathon is an absolutely stupid distance and that anyone who completes it has done well, whatever their time. To an extent, I was thinking all my usual thoughts at this stage of a marathon. But this time there was something different going on, a loosening of my love of marathons perhaps. I had always adored the perversity they bring out and celebrate, but now the perversity seemed to be perversity and nothing more.

  And to add insult to injury, when my sports watch finally conceded that, yes, I had now done 26.2 miles, I was still way short of the finishing line. Finally, I finished after 26.64 miles. It never occurred to me just how much you can add to a marathon by not following the thin blue line. All that weaving in and out early on, plus some fairly erratic meandering towards the end, had added nearly half a mile to my ordeal. Not that it made a huge difference. I can't claim that my time would have been wonderful if I'd stuck to the required distance. My time was very much in the C+ should-do-better category, whichever way I looked at it.

  When I did finally cross the line, I had no little tear of triumph or relief. All I thought was a big Berlin-style 'Huh!', and the 'Huh!' stayed as the defining word for the entire experience. Sadly this time there was no one there to lift the day. Michael's finish had transformed my day in Berlin. Rome remained a 'Huh!' with a 'Harrumph' on top.

  I finished in a time of 3:48:46 – not in the 3:50s but nowhere near the 3:30s which would have justified the day. I finished around 3,400th out of about 11,000 runners, which was just about tolerable in terms of positioning, but you know what I think about positioning by now. Time wise, it was so far off what I had hoped for as to rank as miserable failure.

  Never has a marathon seemed so long. Not for nothing do they bill it as a race through the heart of the Eternal City. Eternal summed it up precisely. On another day, the fact that I ran 26.64 miles on a 26.2-mile course would have seemed part of the quirky pleasure of this most quirky of pastimes, all part of my why-I-love-marathons mythology. But today it simply pissed me off. I could hear Pamela, my first and only marathon trainer, telling me years before that the thin blue line painted on the course is the only thing about a marathon that is 26.2 miles long. I half expected my sports watch to flash up 'Well, don't say she didn't tell you' when I glanced down at it. Wristbands have been thrown in the gutter for less.

  But more frustrating still was the fact that this had been a good course – an excellent course even. It was striking that my other poor times or bad marathons had been in Amsterdam, Dublin and Berlin, where the courses were dull – 75 per cent dull in Amsterdam, 90 per cent dull in Dublin, and 75 per cent dull in Berlin. Rome was 75 per cent good, a course dreamt up by a city exceptionally keen to show off its superb sights.

  Sadly, the experience was all about to get significantly worse. I am sure fondness for the event would have filtered through if I had hung around at the finish, or even returned to the finish once I had freshened up. But the bag retrieval process knocked out of me what little stuffing I had left. By comparison, the organisation at the start had been a model of efficiency. The bag retrieval area was like every worst nightmare come scarily true.

  There was zero respect for fellow runners as everyone piled in around the lorry which held their bag, pushing and shoving quite violently. Eventually I made it to the front and handed over my number, but the people behind me were shouting in Italian, stretching over me and jostling. For fully half an hour I was pinioned against the side of the lorry, looking helplessly up at the bag handlers who were working to no discernible system. They were taking the runners' numbers and heading off to find the runners' bags, an approach which might have made sense if they did them one at a time. But every time they found a bag, they collected a few more numbers.

  My only connection with my bag was the number they had now gone off with, and I certainly wasn't in a position to remember it, certainly not in Italian. Everyone else took the view that their only hope of retrieving their bag was to shout louder than everyone else. Absolutely not my forte, especially as I was no longer sure I even knew what my number was. Bear in mind, we were looking into a lorry stacked high with official-issue, identical Rome Marathon luggage bags.

  I felt as if I was going to be standing there for the rest of my life. It was an awful way to end a marathon. Several times I felt as if I was going to pass out. If I had done so, I would have remained standing, so tightly was I being pushed against the lorry.

  Sheer lack of organisation and the appalling behaviour of my fellow runners resulted in a shambles which was an insult to the whole spirit of marathon running – and it was that as much as anything which stopped me going back afterwards to commune with those still out there on the course.

  Having at last retrieved my bag, I got back to my hotel and thought about heading back down after a shower, but I felt so battered and angry by then that I just couldn't be bothered – a big mistake, in hindsight, though comprehensible at the time. Consequently, I didn't do the one thing which could have lifted the negative vibe that the whole memory still gives me.

  However, my return to the hotel had been enlightening in itself. The receptionist was a friendly, chatty guy who instantly asked me how I had got on. I told him that I had been disappointed, that the last 6 miles had been terrible and that I just couldn't fully explain why they had been so tough. Articulating a thought that had only now crystallised, I told him that I just couldn't fully get my breath towards the end, at which point he looked at me with that recognisable 'It's Dublin! It's raining! What do you expect?' type look. He gave a very Italian shrug and said 'Well, it's the pollution.' He told me that Rome was so polluted that in certain conditions you can actually see it just sitting there like a blanket over the city.

  And so the penny dropped. The conditions had been the same for absolutely everyone, but with a long history of asthma, I was bound to feel it more acutely. It was 50-per-cent excuse, 50-per-cent reason, but the immensity of the struggle I'd endured at the wrong end of the marathon suddenly started to seem explicable. I hadn't been on top of my running. It had run away from me. Suddenly that feeling of being sucked back as everyone else was sucked forward made sense. It really hadn't been my day.

  In a sense, though, my folly had been to allow negativity to creep in. I was definitely breathing too shallowly towards the end, but contributing too was a lack of desire. The start had been so awful that even before the off, I was wondering what on earth I was doing there. After 8 miles, I was thinking that 8 miles was a decent-length ru
n, and yet there were still 18 to go. And now, after the race, I was thinking that I was 46 years old and to do just over three and three-quarter hours was respectable – which again was a kind of negativity I would never have tolerated before.

  As I pondered it afterwards, I was guilty of a kind of indulgence towards my finishing time which I would never have permitted a few years before. I was settling for what I achieved, and I knew that wasn't good. Something had changed, and it made me wonder if I was coming to the end of my marathon running, 12 years and 22 marathons after I started. Was I falling a little out of love with it?

  A few years before, I would have considered 3:48:46 for a big-city marathon to be an awful time. Now, so far had I sunk, I was actually thinking it was OK. I was getting defeatist. Or maybe realistic. Have I passed the point where I have done my best-ever marathon? Quite likely, I suspect. But in Rome that day I was convinced that I had. And that's something that's very difficult to cope with.

  Deepening my depression in the race aftermath was one of the most shameful incidents ever recorded on a marathon course anywhere in the whole history of marathons – one which underlined just what a shocker I had had.

  The crowds had been good throughout, but in places there were no barriers, which was reckless to say the least. I was 25.5 miles in; I was feeling absolutely shattered; and my mood was thunderously dark when a little old lady – just like the one in Paris – dashed across in front of me just as the route narrowed, in the way that sometimes spectators do, totally misjudging my oncoming speed relative to her speed across me. She saw her mistake, realised that I was very nearly upon her and half-raised an arm in self-defence – an arm which rose into my face. I had to swerve sharply. There was definite grazed contact. If I hadn't reacted so quickly, either or both of us could have been seriously injured. It was a horribly close-run thing – and that was the thought which flashed through my mind. And out it came.