Marathon Man Read online

  By the time I’d reached the halfway point, the sky had grown dark and cloudy. It looked like rain was imminent. I ate some sandwiches and pasta, and took on some water before getting going again. Pretty soon those clouds opened and the rain came down. Only it wasn’t rain – it was hailstones the size of pound coins pouring down on our heads – all accompanied by great booms of thunder and blinding flashes of lightning. It was epic!

  The drop in temperature that came with it was a welcome relief and the hail was, well, interesting. I carried on running while others sought cover. Running while getting pelted with hail was a bit like having some sort of pressure massage on the go (I took a few blows to the skull but luckily there’s not much to damage under there). As long as I wasn’t knocked unconscious I’d be fine, and at least it kept me awake.

  After the downpour, the rest of the course was covered in puddles and thick mud. It became really hard for me at about the 75km point and I needed some encouragement from others to carry on. I remember I stopped and sat on a log for a while to get out of the rain. It turned out I just needed a rest and then I felt fine again. My body was OK, and apart from the usual aches and general soreness I was in good shape.

  Eventually, some 13 hours after setting off, I saw the famous stones in the distance and the finish line. I was relieved to have made it around in one piece. Apparently someone fell and broke their arm on the course, which is always sad to hear. I chatted to some great guys at the finish and shared what food and drink I had with them. Some of the finishers looked pretty beat up. I probably didn’t look a million dollars myself. So that was my first 100km race, run and done. Not a bad feeling, I can tell you.

  Now I needed to get home. We were in the middle of nowhere and I needed a lift back to civilisation, and preferably all the way to London. Luckily for me, I asked around and someone was going right past my flat. We set off and I was home by about midnight and in a hot bath. Then I slid in beside my sleeping fiancée.

  At 5am the next morning, I was up. After grabbing some fresh clothes for my bag and kissing Joanna and my son, I was out the door for the next leg of the weekend’s adventure. My legs felt very stiff still and sore, but they would hold up fine for a few more miles yet.

  A tube, a train and an hour and a half later, I was in Stevenage at the race HQ for the Fairlands Valley Challenge. Ahead of me was a 50km trail race. Everyone kept talking about how easy it was to get lost out there. They were studying their maps and trying to work it all out. This was not what I needed. I could get lost in a two-bedroom apartment, so I would have to keep another runner in sight at all times and hope they knew where they were going. They gave me a map, but I put it in my bag and never took it out again.

  Fortunately, once the race got underway, I teamed up with a guy who had run the race before and knew what he was doing. He was going my kind of pace (not fast), so I stuck with him and watched the miles tick away. It would be a just-get-around race for me. My legs were like jelly and I clearly hadn’t eaten enough to be doing this. A bit like the Runfest marathon in Wales, I’d bitten off more than I could chew here, but I was making the best of a bad job.

  It was a race across bridleways, footpaths and tracks in the, by all accounts, beautiful Hertfordshire countryside, but it was just plain nightmarish for me. I finished, though. I was cold and tired and just wanted to get back, though you probably wouldn’t have known it if you’d spoken to me at the time. I am an expert at looking OK when feeling the opposite and saying everything is fine. I certainly wasn’t going to share my anguish with anyone there, but inside I was hurting like crazy.

  After a night’s recovery in a warm bed, I was back out running my 107th marathon/ultra in Richmond Park on Monday morning, 21 July, like clockwork. Did I feel more tired than usual that morning after the weekend’s exertions? I don’t think so. I was tired and sore all right, but that was a given. I think I felt rejuvenated by the knowledge that I was able to run as far as I had. It had given me a boost. I wondered what else I was capable of doing.

  I’ll admit that at this stage I started getting slightly carried away. Whether you call that being over-reaching or exploring my vocation is a matter of opinion. All I knew was, I was loving the challenges, and had plans to run further. The more daunting the races I set myself, the more it put me on my mettle. And the more alive I felt, which explains why, that night, I signed up to a 100-mile race – the North Downs Way 100 – which was taking place in three weeks’ time. It was an off-road race across the Farnham hills, and it had the reputation for being the toughest 100-miler in the UK, and I hoped to cover those 100 miles in 24 hours. In fact, I’d need to if I was going to do another marathon the next day. It didn’t leave much room for things going wrong.

  Now that was an exciting prospect.

  Later that week, Matt Dickinson, a journalist from The Times, turned up to run with me. It turned out he lived locally and had heard what I was doing. So I told him about my background and why I was running, and answered his many questions. He was good company and I felt he understood what I was doing and why.

  Dominika and Pippa both saw me that week, too. I’d come to rely on both of them for their strong hands and words of advice – more and more my running was becoming a team effort. That weekend I had two regular marathons to run, one on the Saturday and one on the Sunday – nothing ultra, nothing very sexy. How could I make the weekend a little more interesting, I wondered?

  The first marathon was in Northampton. I thought: why not run there? That would add an extra challenge to the weekend. A bit of drama. Like I said, I was getting carried away by then.

  So that Friday started, as usual, with an early-morning Richmond Park marathon, followed by a day at work. Afterwards, though, instead of heading home I hitched on my backpack and laced up my shoes for a through-the-night run to Northampton. I left work at 5.30pm and got the Metropolitan line from Finchley Road to Watford. I’d figured that running straight from work was a bit of a risk. Northampton was almost 70 miles away and I might not cover that many miles in time for the race start the next morning, so I got to Watford first and started my running from there. It was at least 15 miles closer to the race and gave me a cushion. I thought I might even arrive in time to put my head down and sleep before the marathon began.

  From Watford, it was straight up the A roads passing through the occasional town or village. They were busy roads and surely even I couldn’t get lost on them. It was pretty noisy, of course, with all the cars whizzing by my ear all night, but I made great progress. I turned my head torch on when it grew dark. I was in a really good mood that night, bouncing along like a kid with a brand new toy.

  I began to think about what my next challenge would be when I had completed this one. All sorts of crazy ideas for adventures flashed through my head as I made my way along: swimming the Amazon in a kilt, walking to the North Pole backwards, swimming the Amazon backwards.

  I stopped at a Chinese restaurant somewhere on the route and ordered a couple of portions of rice to go. I walked and ate the rice as I went – eating on the move is part of the ultra marathon way. I ran through the night to Northampton and for the last few miles, once I’d left the safety of the A roads, I did manage to get lost. I don’t quite know how that happened, but at five in the morning I wasn’t thrilled about it. I ended up going down a winding road for a mile or two before realising I was meant to be on a larger road parallel to it. I was in no mood to turn back on myself, so I decided to try to cut through some fields to get there. I jumped over a barbed wire fence and weaved my way through nettles and thorn bushes. Then I came across a small river. ‘Are you serious?’ I thought. I realised it wasn’t a great idea to keep going, but I was stubborn. I waded through the river, up to my knees in water, then there were more nettles and thorns on the other bank. Finally, though, I saw the road I was looking for. Thank God!

  I ended up arriving at the race HQ, a Holiday Inn, at about 5.50am, having run over 56 miles according to my GPS watch. I was pret
ty tired and tried to sleep in the reception. I managed to zonk out for an hour, but there were too many people coming and going after that.

  I had some breakfast there and chatted with a few guys who I’d seen at various marathons over the summer, Tiago, Steve, Denys, Lance and Jez. They were knowledgeable marathoners with lots of races under their belt. They’d been doing this far longer than me and had lots of great advice, about nutrition and running strategy. I listened carefully to what they had to say. They were passionate about sharing their knowledge and were concerned that I could be helping myself out more than I was. I don’t imagine any of them thought my way of getting to the race was the best of ideas! If you’re going to get into this world, then seek out those kinds of guys at the races. You’ll be glad you did.

  The race itself, Summer Around the Reservoir, was six laps around the Brackmill reservoir. It was a pretty featureless course, but flat as a pancake and having challenged myself by running there, I thought there was nothing wrong with one of those on my schedule, I can tell you.

  After completing that without any problems, I took a train down to Bath and began the task of finding somewhere to stay the night. I met a student on the way down who said I could probably rent a room in halls at the university for the night. That sounded cheap, so when I arrived I went to the university and had a good night’s sleep in some modest but adequate student digs.

  The Bath Running Festival marathon the next day got underway at 9am. Bath is a beautiful city, as everyone knows, but it’s also very hilly – at least the area surrounding the city is. I knew the course had more than 2,100 feet of elevation so it was going to be a tough afternoon. I didn’t realise just how tough, until we began. The klaxon sounded and we rushed off into the woods. After a bit of a loop around the university grounds, we wound our way through woods and fields before heading downhill. I was in the leading group at about the two-mile stage and going well. Then there was a bit of confusion as we reached the bottom of the hill. Someone said it looked like we were off course, so we turned back and went looking for other runners.

  We were now heading uphill. On the way up we bumped into some more runners, as lost as we were, coming towards us. It was chaos and I couldn’t stop laughing. I love that kind of stuff; I find it hilarious. It was like we were all in a Carry On movie. Carry on Running.

  Eventually we found the course again. Now the faster runners were behind the slower runners, which was interesting. I made a big push to get back up into the lead and went by a whole lot of runners. It was all very scenic and flat as we ran along a canal. Then came the first uphill: Fosse Way. It started off as tarmac and then regressed into gravel, then dirt as it kept on going up and up for a good mile or so. When we got to the top, it levelled off for a while before heading steeply down through some woodland.

  Then we reached the real hill.

  That second hill was seriously steep. I’d learn later it had a 25 per cent incline! I clambered my way up it. All the way up, you could hear nothing but the pants of the racers, mumbling to themselves, cursing under their breaths. We were all humbled by that gnarly, muddy, rocky gully and glad to eventually reach its summit. We weren’t halfway into the race yet, but I was pretty tired already. At the top was an aid station and I had some cakes and drank some coke. I stopped for a while to get my breath back, while other runners sat on the dusty ground, looking ruined. This wasn’t a marathon – it was an assault course.

  I got going again and there were more downhills, uneven ground and steep inclines. Eventually I stood on top of Little Solsbury Hill and looked out over the whole city. We had covered some ground by then, that’s for sure. I chatted to some great people at this race and was my usual sociable self. I remember someone telling me that if I liked hills I should go to the Cheddar Gorge marathon in a few weeks’ time. I made a mental note.

  The race continued steeply downhill before we reached the turning point. Knowing we were halfway was a comfort, but the thought of running the same inclines again was not. I do love a challenge, though, and this was certainly that. Somewhere along the way I got fully committed to this one. It needed all I had and that’s what I gave it. I was used to resting in the second half of the marathon, beginning the recovery process – but not today. Today was a case of leaving it all on the mountain (or on the hill in this case).

  Soon I was cutting through the university and breaking the finish line. My 115th marathon/ultra was done and it had been a good one, right up there with the toughest courses I’d ever raced. A time of just shy of five hours was respectable, too. I’d run flatter courses in the same time, so my fitness and endurance levels were clearly growing.

  On 29 July my story went national, and it became the beginning of a week of media for me. I started off running my usual morning marathon, but this time with a twist. On finishing my run, an ITV news team turned up to interview me for a slot later that evening. The reporter and the whole crew were great. They were fascinated by what I was doing, though again it was a bit awkward for me, being the centre of attention. I think I coped OK, joking about with the reporter, asking him to join me on a run one morning. I tend to turn the questions on the reporters in my interviews, perhaps as an attempt to divert the focus onto somebody else. I think I’d rather be the one asking the questions than answering them.

  Being interviewed is one of those things you get better at and I was just starting out – I’d never done something like this before and was unsure of myself. I felt like I was stumbling, saying some dumb things and getting tongue tied, but I tried to get the main message across and just hoped they’d focus on the charities in the edit. The interview meant I was late for work, and I was dreading explaining it away to my boss. I was certain that doing interviews for national TV would only make Ken even more annoyed than he already was.

  As if that wasn’t enough, Matt Dickinson’s article about me came out in The Times the same morning. He’d written a full-page piece all about what I was doing and why, about my background and my fundraising goals. All this in one of the most important newspapers in the world – it was a great read and I couldn’t have hoped for more. Again, I was a little embarrassed to see myself spread all over the paper like that, but I knew it was good for my fundraising goals. I just hoped Ken was reading another newspaper that day.

  Everyone at work soon found out about the article and I spent the rest of that day getting my back slapped and being told how ‘it was all going to take off now’. I didn’t see my boss, though; Ken was in his office that day. A storm was brewing, I could feel it.

  I was worn out from the weekend and all that extra attention wasn’t entirely welcome. Don’t get me wrong, I was grateful and pleased at the same time. This was what I had wanted after all, but the media side of things, the spotlight being on me, would take a bit of getting used to and I’d always be happier when the cameras were off.

  Marathon Man media week continued the next day when I was interviewed again in the park, this time by the National Forces TV channel. As an ex-Royal Signaller, they were interested in what I was doing and why. It was the same old rigmarole, but I think I felt a bit more comfortable this time.

  Beat up as I was, physically, looking back I think all that media exposure gave me a bit of a boost and some added purpose. I felt pumped up all week and was always on the lookout for more miles to run. It was as though I had extra energy I needed to expend. My times around the Richmond Park course got quicker, too. The best effect of the publicity was that I got a lot more visitors to my website and a fair few more donations to my charities.

  On the Thursday that week, after my morning marathon in the park, I was invited to the Institute for Sport, Exercise and Health (ISEH) in central London to undergo some tests. Dr Kipps and his team were going to look at my running stride and my physical capacity to see if anything interesting could be learned from me.

  I turned up with Dominika, who had asked to join me for the session to see what she could learn from it herself. We met Dr Ki
pps and head physio Bruce Paton who soon got various sensors and wires clipped to me to measure my performance on the treadmill. I was interested what they might find out.

  They ran a number of tests that day. They tried to do some muscle testing, but because of my sore knee it was difficult to measure both legs as they would have liked. They did a VO2 max test and a cardiopulmonary exercise test, which meant doing a fair bit of running on the treadmill, wearing a mask to measure oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production and so on. I ran at different speeds for them to see what difference that might make.

  I looked like Bane from the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises in that mask. We had a few laughs about it, but apparently it was not the first time that joke had been cracked. After a fair amount of exertion, the results came out. They were interesting.

  The VO2 max test measures your lung capacity and is one way of measuring your fitness levels. My results showed I had a decent level of fitness, what you might expect from your average 3-hour 30-minute marathon runner, but there was nothing exceptional there at all. I was quite fit, but not ridiculously so.

  Next up, were the results of the cardiopulmonary exercise test. This measured how well my lungs, heart and muscles worked together when I exercised, how efficient I was at using the oxygen I breathed while running. It turned out my anaerobic threshold was pretty high, which means I’m pretty efficient at using oxygen and can exert myself for longer than most people without getting a build-up of lactic acid in my bloodstream. That’s what gives you that burning sensation when you run (and makes you want to give up and eat chocolate in the bath instead). Here, apparently, I’m better than average, but still not outstanding.

  There was one aspect, however, where I really did stand out, where I’m top of the class, and that was in running economy. The treadmills at the institute have sensors on them that measure exactly where your feet land each time and with what degree of pressure. When I was asked to run at my favoured 3-hour 30-minute marathon pace, then I landed in almost the exact same spot under my body each time. There was almost no variation between each step. And that was exceptional, apparently. When I had to run a bit of faster or slower, the consistency of my feet placement decreased, but at my most comfortable pace I had an incredibly uniform stride pattern, which was comparable to elite runners, so they told me.