Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon

by Tim Marshall

  Having sat and waited for months for any further news from Chris Brasher about wheelchairs, I learned somehow – let’s call it the grapevine – that wheelchairs wouldn’t be included. As soon as this was confirmed, I wrote to him on March 23rd:

  “Dear Chris Brasher

  I’m sorry you weren’t able to let me know whether wheelchairs were to be allowed in the London Marathon, though I heard on the grapevine that they were not. May I dare to hope that the franchise will be widened next year?

  Can I also let you know that London’s loss is Chelmsley Wood’s gain, for there will be half- a-dozen wheelchairs in the People’s Marathon on May 10th this year.

  Best wishes for Sunday – I hope it is the success the project deserves.

  Yours sincerely

  Tim Marshall”

  I never had a reply

  * * *

  Before May 10th, however, I was back to the Lakes Project. April was Derwentwater, and at last I was going to be able to take part. It was a particularly busy weekend, for Douglas Hurndall wanted me to help launch the Challenger Trimaran project at the Queen Mary reservoir at Datchet on the Saturday; Derwentwater was on the Sunday. Douglas picked me up at Reading station on the Friday evening, put me up at his home, and then on the Saturday morning we went to Datchet. Unfortunately, the weather was awful: not raining, but blowing a hooley, Force 8, and it was thought to be unwise to let a total novice out on the water, a sentiment I could only agree with. So the designer, Rod McAlpine-Downie, took the boat out for a few reaches under the eyes of a few cameras – the yachting press had been well primed – and then we all went home; or in my case on a train up to Lancaster – guard’s van of course, along with a pile of people looking after their bicycles – and changing for Barrow where I was to stay with Colin, another climbing club member, the husband of Joan and, more to the point, a fell-runner who was going to run round Derwentwater with me. The gales down south had been matched by heavy weather up north; specifically, a 6” blanket of snow on the Thursday evening. At the time, I didn’t think this would really matter because it disappeared over Friday night and Saturday morning almost as quickly as it had arrived.

  At the school in Keswick on the Sunday morning – the school had become, de facto, the headquarters of the whole operation – there was a full complement of pupils, staff, police and local volunteers; and almost no participants. The snow which had arrived overnight on Thursday had provoked a torrent of cancellations on the Friday, too late, however, to cancel the food, which on the Sunday morning lay on trestle tables in the school entrance hall demurely wrapped in cellophane, enough for 60 people. Bill Parkinson had handed on the local organisation to someone else from the north-east, but his own cancellation came along with all the others on the Friday. Too bad that by Sunday morning the only remaining snow was on sheltered, north-facing slopes, or on the very tops. In the end there were only nine participants. I started off hoping to get somewhere near Gerry Kinsella’s 1h 28m, but 2½ years of relative inactivity meant I wasn’t nearly fit enough, and I only managed 1h 55m. It may have been the problem with the food which led to the following year’s being the last-ever such event; it had run its course, been fantastic while it lasted, but now was the time to close it. I never discovered what happened to all the food.

  The four lakes I’d been round so far had all been done using my everyday chair, an Everest and Jennings, which weighed about 40 lbs. Good of its kind at the time, it was definitely not a racing chair, but the lake circuits were not races, rather me just bumbling round. The marathon would, I supposed, be different. From somewhere I heard that there were two Dutch racing chairs, Hofmeisters, acquired by the local Lions club using funds raised by the first of the “Sutton Park Brands Hatch” events. They were kept at Wyndley Leisure Centre, but sort of belonged to the Wilson Stuart special school, which was willing for others to use them provided their own children didn’t need them at the time. Since the kids only needed them during the week, the headmaster, Colin Grantham, was happy for me to use one at the weekend, and happier still when I offered to pay him £5 each time I did so.

  The Hofmeister chairs were intended to be a club chair, and were thus widely adjustable. Seat and back-rest up and down, footplates of course, axle position up and down and fore and aft, large wheels (the same size, 26”, that I’d seen on the Australian chairs at Stoke Mandeville three years earlier), and small handrims which gave a gearing effect when pushing on the flat or downhill, but made it much harder pushing uphill (even then, international regulations had got as far as proscribing more than one handrim per wheel, so you couldn’t have a suite of rims to suit all gradients). The bearings were much better than those of my chair, so it would go faster, but it was made of steel and with all the facilities for adjusting everything under the sun, it was even heavier than mine. I hoped the drag of the extra weight would be outdone by the extra speed (in the event, it was).

  This is the article I wrote for John Walker about the race, which appeared in the race programme the following year. With a small amount of editing (not by me!) it also appeared in “Running” magazine:

  “The London Marathon didn’t want to know, so John Walker’s enlightened attempt to stage the first wheelchair marathon in this country to be integrated with runners came to fruition. There are six of us at the start, one being pushed and five self-propelled; we start before everyone else, of course, to avoid notching dozens of Achilles tendons as victims of the footplates. By the time the runners catch us up, both we and they will be well spaced out and any danger to them will be over.

  The gun goes at last. It’s a downhill start and very soon Mark and I, in the only two proper racing chairs (both borrowed) leave the others for dead. It’s fast, faster than I’ve been before in a chair, but in this weather you need windscreen wipers for your eyes. We slow down as the horrible truth of the first hill looms. Horrible, because I soon realise that I’ve put too small handrims on the chair, too small to give adequate leverage to power up hills, and already Mark is hanging around waiting for me. I tell him to get on and forget about our finishing together; thereafter I only see him coming back along opposite sides of dual carriageways.

  The motorway section [NB this was before the M42 opened to traffic; part of it was used in the marathon] is only fractionally downhill, but what a beautiful ride – it has stopped drizzling, too, and before the runners have caught up I sweep past the first feeding station, arm out to grab a sponge. And there goes Mark, back up the other side – wonder how far to the turn. The slight downhill becomes a laborious uphill, but the runners begin to flock past and there is an almost continuous stream of encouragement. “Well done, lad.” “You’re bloody marvellous.” “Can I have a lift?”

  Another long dual carriageway – Mark again – and then a very unsettling, bumpy, narrow, twisty footpath, too much height lost too quickly, and – Christ, a kerb! Two people obviously detailed to lift the chair over, and then try to get a rhythm back. My fingers hurt like hell – I have gloves, but I didn’t tape the fingers individually, and I already have blisters, less than half-way round. Stop at a St John’s post for taping. Ray, whom I knew at school and who had appeared just before the start, runs past. “You’ve cracked, Marshall, you’ve cracked.” A short steep climb out of an underpass and a girl comes out of the crowd and starts pushing me. She seems offended to be asked to stop. Too bad. Back onto a road, and here beginneth the second circuit. Hope I can get round – probably all depends on the fingers. More drizzle, more hills – the later memories are nearly all of up rather than down – but at three months distance the memories even of the first are telescoped!

  Except the finish. Along the road, roaring crowds, and – help – a steep grass bank covered in matting, liberally smeared in mud. I start at it but get nowhere. I try diagonally for a zig-zag, but a runner comes along and shoves me five yards up the very steep bit. Hmm, does the whole thing still count or not? Still grass – can’t get the leverage on the handrims, and have t
o push the wheels – very slow. The small front wheels reach the tarmac and as the chair begins to freewheel a bit there’s a roar from all around – somehow they realise how different from tarmac – and difficult – grass is. A large digital clock looms (4 hours 9 minutes – plus 17, of course, disappointingly slow); as I reach it someone pours champagne (sparkling wine?) over me and throws three Mars bars onto my lap.

  The others are all looking relaxed at the finish, with half-marathons under their wheels. All but Mark, who’s in the first aid tent after throwing up. Does he realise he holds the British Wheelchair Marathon record? Who the hell wants a Mars bar? I want to live in a warm bath for a week. Wonder if, after this, the London lot will let us in next year?”

  (Jim also finished the race, in 4h 50m.)

  It was a start, though without the immediate consequences we all wished for. But with London in particular, and of course its television transmission, the whole country seemed to go wild with staging marathons (not, in the first instance, half-marathons or 10k races). It was as though every local authority needed to stage a race (always “The FIRST Somewhere Marathon”, thus implying there was to be a dynasty – which, of course, in many cases there wasn’t), demonstrating their importance to the local population and, almost, the justification for the existence of their Leisure and Recreation departments, which, with the exception of libraries, were a non-statutory element of local authority responsibilities, and just beginning to come under increasing financial pressure near the start of the first Thatcher government.

  A couple of weeks later Mark came back from a weekend at Stoke Mandeville – he’d been there for a training session with the Paraplegic Athletic Association. Track work had never interested me, so I didn’t go to that sort of thing. But he brought news of a forthcoming wheelchair road race, “just for wheelchairs” I understood him to say, at Newcastle, a half-marathon. After the experience of the People’s Marathon I was sceptical about a wheelchair only race, and said so; but he persuaded me to apply. He’d brought an entry form, but the closing date had already gone, so I sent off the form with a covering letter outlining what I’d done in helping to organise the Derwentwater affair, the Sutton Park races and, most recently, in taking part in the People’s Marathon. Almost by return of post I had a letter telling me I’d been accepted into the first-ever running of the Great North Run (what a brilliant title, I thought).

  A couple of weeks before the event I had a letter outlining the arrangements for the start. Alarm bells rang, because although the organisers had announced prizes for the first three wheelchairs, they had also said that we should join the athletes at the start in accordance with our estimated finishing times, guidance for which would be provided in the form of large banners by the side of the start showing estimated finishing times every 15 minutes. As a recipe for a disaster for wheelchair racing, and for the runners starting in front of us, this could hardly have been bettered. I wrote immediately, explaining the American practice of giving the wheelchairs a short headstart, which also enabled the wheelchair section to be identified as a distinct race within the overall occasion, and provided the maximum safety for both wheelchair users and, particularly, runners. Within a very short time I had another letter, which had obviously been sent to all the self-propelled wheelchairs, advising us that the starting arrangements had been changed, and that the self-propelled wheelchairs would now all start in front, with a headstart of 5 minutes.

  There were about 20 of us milling about at the start, some of whom I recognised as being from the hospital sports club, and some from the basketball circuit. Amongst all, however, there was the same topic of conversation: “Did you apply to London?” “Did you get in?” “Did you tell them you were in a chair?” “What did they say?” “What are you going to do next year?” “What’s Stoke doing?” In this context “Stoke” meant Stoke Mandeville, which at the time was only concerned with people with spinal injury, and here, there were evidently some amputee, non-spinal injury wheelchair people about to take part. And, as far as I knew, Stoke had nothing to do with organising road racing. I learned later that the wheelchair element of the race had been proposed by, and argued for, by Carole Bradley, who had an important role in working for BSAD in the North-East, across all disabilities. I never found out what the distinct areas of responsibility of Carole and Bill Parkinson were.

  And so, off we went. If the start of the People’s Marathon was faster than I’d ever been in a chair before, this was like going down a bobsleigh run (but without the sharp corners). It was dry, which was definitely a tick in the “go faster” column. But more than that, it began with a mile and a half descent down the motorway which went north to south through the middle of the city. At that stage, no one wore a helmet, and to my embarrassment I found myself braking for parts of the descent, simply because I was scared by how fast I was going. The course flattened out on reaching the New Tyne Bridge (the one that looks like a mini- Sydney Harbour bridge) and climbed up to pass through Gateshead. The race gave rise to one of the great early pictures of wheelchair road racing in this country, with Mick Kelly, a single leg amputee from Sheffield, being snapped on the Tyne bridge shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike McLeod, one of the top road-runners of the day. Of course they weren’t in direct competition, but as an exhibition of one type of integration it could hardly be bettered.

  Still trying to work out the best combination of seat height, seat angle, pushing rim diameter, gloves and so on, on this occasion I got the gloves wrong, and ended up fourth, the race being won by Alan Robinson from Doncaster, whom I knew through the basketball team. But what made it stand apart from the People’s Marathon was the crowds – the crowds of spectators. The route was almost all on dual carriageway, with both sides seemingly crammed several people deep all the way along (the weather was better too, which no doubt helped). Apart from the start, the main feature of the course I remember was Marsden Hill: about 1½ miles from the finish, there was a steep downhill of 100 yards at about 1 in 8 (maybe even 1 in 6), followed immediately by a sharp left turn and a gentle undulating mile-and-a-bit to the finish. And, as far as I could tell, and apart from the initial hiccup, there had been no quibbling about the wheelchairs starting in front, and so constituting a separate race within the overall event. Look at this, London.

  Another Interlude

  A friend of mine from work was a statistician in the academic department of Physical Education. As one of his duties he had taken over running the British end of an exchange with PE students from Charles University in Prague. The nature of this exchange was that the British students went over to Prague in early January, and then to a mountain hut in the Krkonoše mountains on the Czech–Polish border, to be introduced to skiing, both downhill and cross-country, whilst the Czech students came over to England in July to be introduced to sailing, rock-climbing and orienteering (most of them had already a lot of experience of kayaking), based on the university’s outdoor centre near Coniston. They then spent a couple of days in Birmingham, and a few more in London, before returning home.

  The Iron Curtain was still in place, and exchanges like this were one of few ways that the Czech students could experience the West. There was, so we understood, considerable competition to get on this exchange, which always had two members of staff from the department at Charles University, at least one of whom was a fully badged-up member of the Party to keep an eye on, and no doubt report on, any students showing overt signs of dissent. Mostly, there was very little trouble of any kind, though the male Czech students found it rather demeaning to be expected to take a full part in running the centre, doing what they regarded as women’s work: preparing the food, including cooking, laying the tables, washing-up and cleaning, including the toilets.

  I had no instructional qualifications in anything, and many of the activities – hill-walking, rock-climbing, abseiling (Hodge Close quarry), white-water canoeing – were in effect out of bounds to me. But I could, and did, take people sailing, in GP 14s, where I sat
transversely across the stern of the boat and issued instructions to one, or occasionally two, people up front regarding moving from side to side of the boat, pulling or slackening the jib-sheet, and so on. Over the years, the most challenging of these trips was taking one of the Czech staff members, who had never sailed before, and spoke no English, down the lake from the Centre at Torver to Peel Island, lunching there, and returning safely. The conversation was in French, which we both had, to an adequate extent at least. There was no point in using sailing jargon when telling him what to do – I didn’t know the correct jargon anyway – so “tighten the jib-sheet” became “tirez la corde”, with other instructions similarly turned into the vernacular.

  Windermere

  Although the main purpose of my going to Coniston was to help with, and indeed be part of, the Czech exchange, with another member of the climbing club, Steve Oliphant (a fell-runner), I had planned to finish off the big five lakes by doing Windermere. So, on the Tuesday evening after the meal, clearing away and a wash, I took off and parked overnight in a lay-by near Ambleside on the road from Coniston, meeting Stephen and his wife, Wendy, in the Waterside car park at the northern end of Windermere at 5.50 on the Wednesday morning. And I used the Hofmeister chair – it would be a lot quicker than mine.