Marathon Man Read online

  So I had to go and get my wet kilt and put it on while they all waited for me. It was funny and embarrassing at the same time, but at least the kilt was working in terms of building my profile. Running in a wet kilt was a small price to pay if the funds started rolling in for my charities. The race itself was amazing – one of the best I’ve done to date. It was a challenging course, with lots of undulation and some amazing scenery. The organisation was spot-on and everyone seemed to be having a good time.

  I’ve come to see that each marathon has its own inimitable spirit. It’s a feeling that dominates the event and can vary from lively and magical to fairly dull and uninspiring. Usually the smaller the marathon the more spirit it has, though with certain big marathons events, like the epic London marathon, that logic doesn’t hold true.

  That day I met a great guy called Nick Kyritsis, who was running his 200th marathon in ten years. Isn’t that something? I was so impressed. We got chatting in the race and ran the last half of the marathon together, chatting and sharing stories. We finished hand in hand in 3 hours 46 minutes, which is a good time for that course. It was an amazing moment and one of many high points in my year’s running.

  If that wasn’t enough, I also met a guy there who was running his 600th marathon! To me that’s astonishing and I was honoured to be in his presence. I would end up seeing him a few times at other races throughout the year and always went up to say hi and pay my respects.

  Back in the 1980s, aged about six, it seemed I was always either getting beaten up or recovering from a beating. One time I remember, I found a leaflet by the door that had been dropped in by some Christian evangelists. I never had any books or comics to read so I took the leaflet to my bedroom, as if it were some kind of exciting blockbuster, and hid it. It turned out to be a bad move.

  Soon after, my dad found the leaflet in my room and he was furious about it. He came after me, in a rage, about as angry as I can remember seeing him. He grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me to the floor. ‘You like this, do you?’ he shouted, brandishing the leaflet in my face. ‘You want to be like Christ, do you?’

  Then he went to the outhouse and came back with a hammer and a nail. He dragged me over to the bottom of the stairs and took my shoe and sock off. I had no idea what he was going to do. He held my foot down and placed a nail against the top of my foot. Then he lifted up his hammer and started banging a nail into it. I screamed out. The pain was excruciating. He kept banging until that nail went all the way through my foot and out the other side. Then he placed the nail against one of the uprights of the banister and started banging it in there. It was horrific. There was so much blood all over the stairs, his hands and my clothes.

  All the while I begged and pleaded with him to stop. But he didn’t. I tried to block out the pain by switching off, but the sharpness of it hit me full on. By then I was screaming and in agony. Even now it still makes me agitated to remember it. How dare he do that to me when I couldn’t defend myself. The anger rises up in me, as I remember that day, but only briefly; I won’t allow myself to stay angry and I have forgiven him for everything he ever did to me. He has no power over me now.

  He stepped back from the stairs to look at his work, my blood all over his shirt sleeves. I was pinned to the stairs by my foot. ‘That’s what Christ feels like,’ he said. ‘What do you think now? Is that what you wanted?’

  He pulled the nail out later on and gave me a rag to tie round it. My mum patched me up when she came in, as best she could. I never went to hospital for things like that, we just had to cover up and pretend everything was fine. It was a kind of grim survival and I never knew what he would do next.

  My mum and sister weren’t spared either. My dad used to abuse my sister sexually. I know this because he made me watch him doing it. He’d put me in a chair right by the bed while he raped her. I used to look away, or tried to. I was only young, but every cell in my body knew this wasn’t right. He wanted me to watch, so he’d tie me to the chair with a belt so I couldn’t look away. It was horrible and I think I was sick once, but shockingly it had become our kind of normal.

  I don’t know if my mum knew about his raping my sister; he did it only when she was out. I know Mum lived in terror of him and I don’t think she felt she could ever leave him. She’d been bullied and goodness knows what else for years, so she didn’t have much strength left. I do know my dad used to put cigarettes out on her, and there might have been other things that I don’t know about. I certainly don’t blame her for what went on.

  I don’t think my dad hated my sister and perhaps his abuse was some sick kind of affection. Instead, he saved all his hating for me. So when it came to sweets, presents and even food at times, my sister got the luxury treatment. It wasn’t five-star exactly, but she did at least get sweets and gifts, unlike me. My mum used to try and bring me treats sometimes, but if my dad found out she’d get told off and I’d get a beating, so she soon stopped doing that.

  One time I remember sitting on the couch with my sister and she left a sweet packet next to me when she went to the toilet. I couldn’t resist it and took one of her sweets and popped it in my mouth, just as she was coming back in, so she went and told my dad what I’d done. He stormed in and gave me a right telling off but he didn’t hit me, which I thought was strange. Later on, my sister went into the kitchen and came back with a fork and, out of nowhere, stabbed me in the leg with it, below my right knee. I still have the scar there now. My father was laughing – he had told her to do it. My sister was laughing too, which really broke my heart. Then he started beating me up and my sister went up to her room to be away from it.

  No matter the pain and the humiliation taking that sweet might have caused me, it was worth every bit. To experience the watering frenzy of that sweet on my tongue, the sweet/sour sensation was really something amazing. It was my moment of defiance. I felt I was telling him I deserved nice things too, and I wouldn’t stop trying to get them.

  After beating me up for a while, he went to get a suitcase – a prop in one of his favourite games (and in fact mine, too, although I didn’t let on). It was one of those old-fashioned, hard suitcases, the kind rich kids used to take to boarding schools. The game essentially involved dragging me upstairs (which I didn’t like), putting me inside the trunk, closing it up and pushing it down the stairs. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was a rush. It was dark and cramped in there. Sometimes the metal clasps inside would dig into my head or into the back of my neck, which was pretty nasty. The only real danger was if the case opened up on its way down the stairs, when I could be thrown out. I had some nasty knocks playing that game and I’ve a few scars from it, too.

  After that was all over I went to my room, glancing in at my sister on the way. The look on her face told me she was sorry. I could tell she knew the pain I went through at his hands, but this time she had joined in. She was too young to know what she was doing. Her mind was being twisted by being around my dad, I guess. I hope she doesn’t blame herself for what went on that day, because I certainly don’t.

  When people ask me how I can possibly run all the miles I do, I wonder if those early days taught me how to deal with pain, taught my body how to recover from trauma. I think I learnt a trick to go beyond pain, out onto the other side of it, which meant that my suffering could become a distant irritation rather than a pressing and inescapable ordeal. It must be a survival reflex, a door you can only work out how to open when your life depends on it. It’s not something I’ve ever been able to teach to another person, so that they can learn how to do it – and it’s definitely not something I’d ever want another person to have to go through. But if there’s one benefit to come out of the whole experience of abuse that I suffered, it was that it’s prepared me to cope with the pain I experience during my long runs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Never Give Up

  12–16 May 2014

  After about three weeks of running marathons, I found that my body had adapted to the effort I
was putting it through. It was as if it had started to accept the new regime and understood that this was how it was going to be from now on. After another week, my mind adapted too, and all the shock and trauma of daily marathons became almost normal – a very tired kind of normal, admittedly, but my body and mind had stopped fighting how things were and a kind of peace had settled in.

  Now I was a month into my challenge and I felt adapted. There was still something going on with my knee, though, so I was looking forward to chatting with Pippa Rollitt about it. I met her for the first time at her clinic in Richmond on 12 May. She’s a top physio, used to working with world-class rugby players and other top-level athletes. Those sorts of characters tend to rest properly, attend to their nutrition and get plenty of sleep, so she was a bit wide-eyed when she met me and heard what I was doing and the manner in which I was doing it.

  ‘So what do you eat before runs?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing usually,’ I said. ‘Just some coffee with sugar in it, to wake me up.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘Whatever I can get hold of, really. I like jam sandwiches, and chips, Doritos, sandwiches. Thai curry’s my favourite,’ I replied.

  ‘And what do you drink?’

  ‘Coke, Fanta, Red Bull, Lucozade, orange juice, water.’

  ‘And what kind of vitamin supplements are you taking?’

  ‘Vitamin supplements? Oh, I don’t take anything like that . . .’

  And so it went on – I think it’s fair to say she was pretty horrified by what I told her – a look of incredulity turned up on her face and didn’t go away. My slapdash approach to everything was clearly a million miles from what she was used to. She told me I needed to attend to my nutrition (what I ate and when) and get more sleep. I was already getting massages from Dominika, and she advised me to keep doing that to ‘flush the muscles out’. She also said she’d email Dr Courtney Kipps, a consultant in sport and exercise medicine, involved with the marathon and elite performance. She said he’d be interested in what I was doing and might have time to help me and keep me from doing myself any harm. It all sounded a bit dramatic, but I was glad for the help.

  ‘You’ve got to eat properly, though, Rob,’ she added. ‘The right foods and at the right times – not just when you’re passing a chip shop.’ She was like a lovely big sister. I had lost a good 15kg by then, but I thought I was now eating enough to make up for it.

  To be honest, at that stage I simply thought I’d be fine; I don’t need too much food or sleep. Later, I started listening more closely to the medical advice I was getting, but running at least a marathon a day, doing a full-time job and living on a budget, there was no way I could do everything I needed to do. I felt I could rely on my inner resources to get me through and had decided that would be enough – Bulldog British spirit. But over the course of the year I’d come to need plenty of devices, tricks and vitamins to help me through as the year went on. Science, in the hands of qualified medical professionals, was a useful friend to have, too. ‘Never Give Up’ may have been my mantra, but ‘Get All The Help You Can’ needed to be a close second.

  At that time, however, I wasn’t quite ready to embrace all the suggestions on offer. Whether I followed Pippa’s advice or not, I appreciated her trying to help and being in my corner – and for free, too. I could never have done half of what I did without her help and the support of the rest of the medical team. Someday I hope I’ll be able to show them just how grateful I am.

  A couple of days after seeing Pippa, I got a chance to sit down with some of the key people from the Dreams Come True charity. While people in the running community and in my local area were getting to know me, I’d raised only a couple of thousand pounds to that point. I was pretty frustrated that I’d not been able to generate more, and wanted to find out how I could do a better job on that side of things, and felt I needed some help from people who did this for a living.

  Of course, the way I’d gone about this whole thing was the reason the money wasn’t rushing in in greater amounts. There’d been no fundraising plan, no preparation, no PR company, no strategy from the get-go. I’d just started running and had been trying to add all the other bits in as I went along. That’s just how I am: spontaneous, I guess. Being like that certainly helps me get the hard yards done, but I recognised it hadn’t helped in other ways.

  When I heard some of the big success stories in marathon-running fundraising, it made me even more disappointed. In 2010, Irishman Gerry Duffy ran 32 marathons in 32 days, one in every county of Ireland, and raised over €500,000. Now that’s more like it. The fact that I’d already run more marathons than Gerry and in fewer days (34 marathons in 29 days) but had raised less than 10 per cent of his donations was a bit depressing, if I’m honest. I needed to get my act together.

  On 15 May I met Sue and Martin from the Dreams Come True team in the local pub, the Victoria, after an evening marathon. I turned up late, and they were already sitting down with Ali and Dustin chatting over a drink when I arrived.

  I liked them both from the very first moment. They were really grateful that I was doing this challenge for them and couldn’t have been more enthusiastic and positive about it. That’s what I wanted: people who cared. They wanted to throw all their resources behind what I was doing to support me in any way possible. We spoke about their work and how they might be able to help, as well as the logistics, and how fundraising for multiple charities might work.

  Martin mentioned that he’d run a marathon in a big hippo outfit once, when he was working in conjunction with Silentnight mattresses, who have a hippo on their logo. That sounded awesome! Now I wanted to run in a hippo outfit. Martin said he still had the outfit somewhere if I was interested. So while everyone else was talking about PR companies and media opportunities, I was picturing myself hobbling around Richmond Park in a hippo suit.

  The hippo plan didn’t go down well with my team, who were concerned how much harder it would be running in a heavy costume. That didn’t worry me a bit – think of how much fun it would be. It’s not like I was going to run every marathon in the suit. Not this year anyway. The others laughed off my harebrained plan, but I gave Martin a conspiratorial nod to let him know I was serious and wanted to hear back from him about that hippo suit.

  The meeting went well and wheels were put in motion to get some PR going with their team so I could generate some coverage in the papers and even get the TV news teams interested. It all sounded very promising.

  The next day I met up with the rapidly growing MMUK team that Ali was forming around him. At that point Angela Cluff, a senior charity consultant and a Sheen Mount parent, had offered her advice on the fundraising element. She was really helpful in many ways and gave us some great pointers. It was she who suggested that the NSPCC would be a good fit for me. She knew I was looking to support another charity, and she had worked for the NSPCC in the past for many years.

  It was a good idea. I was motivated to help children who needed it, not specifically children who’d been abused like me. But I could see that supporting the NSPCC and the amazing work they were doing made perfect sense, so I added them to my roster. Now I had three charities to feed, so I knew I had better get some coins rolling in.

  At that time, while Dreams Come True were giving me the personal treatment and throwing their resources behind me, Great Ormond Street Hospital had appeared to keep me more at arm’s length. They’d sent a supportive email with lots of suggestions on how to raise funds, but I’m not sure how seriously they took what I was doing. It was understandable – I think a lot of people were expecting me to tire and fade away. After all, nobody knew me, and I had no track record in this field, and who else would have taken on this challenge, never having run a marathon in his life beforehand? I thought it was a shame, because the PR that a big charity could muster would have really helped to get my fundraising going. I knew what I was doing was at least as challenging as what other people had done in the past, if not more
so.

  I reasoned all I could do was to keep turning up and finishing marathons. With a good team forming around me and the press starting to become interested, I couldn’t fail to gradually become a better-known story and with that the donations would surely come.

  I’d been working for Ken at the car parts business ever since I’d quit professional cycling in 2008. I had a close relationship with him and I like to think we had a lot of mutual respect. I did things unconventionally – adverts in car magazines that nobody else would have thought of doing – but they got results and I’d helped make the business more profitable year on year. I also did things to improve the efficiency of the company overall and make it run smoother.

  I’d decided to keep quiet about my running at work, until I felt the time was right to tell him (or I got discovered). Although I was physically spent and sleep deprived, I still managed to get my work done. I’ll admit probably not with the same level of inventiveness or efficiency as before, but still enough for me to be comfortable in saying I was doing my job. I’m sure my appearance had changed and that was probably ringing alarm bells, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

  Whereas before I had been clean-shaven and well turned-out, these days I was red-faced or pale, often unshaven and tired-looking. Marathon running has a well-documented effect on the body, altering breathing rates and depth, and causing trauma to the heart, muscles and major organs. Blood is rushing to the aid of exhausted muscles, so you end up looking pale as little blood is pushed to the skin. So each day at work I was essentially in a state of recovery, my body working hard to recover its natural balance. My new regime was leaving a mark on me and I don’t think you needed to be a private detective to see it.