by Ben Smith
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I got married in August 2013, when I was 31, and our wedding day was a really happy occasion. It was nerve-wracking, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it didn’t feel right. I certainly wasn’t walking to the altar thinking: ‘I shouldn’t be doing this.’ It was a day I’d accepted had to happen, so it might as well be a happy one. Because I was leading this fake life, I thought getting married was the right thing to do. I’d become comfortable and, dare I say it, happy. Or at least I’d tricked myself into thinking I was happy with it. She was my companion, my best friend and I loved her. I found my wife extremely attractive. Most people think that if you’re a gay man you can only fancy men, and if you’re a straight man you can only fancy women. I don’t necessarily think that’s true. In my opinion, you can fall in love with the person, regardless of their sex. That’s what happened with me.
I wasn’t the only one kidding myself I was in a healthy relationship, and the illusion of a functioning marriage could only last so long. We hobbled on through Christmas, putting on a face, although I didn’t do a very good job. That Christmas was hell. I felt like I didn’t have any control. The lid had been lifted and, try as I might, I couldn’t shut it. My insides were starting to seep over the top and I was reacting to things in ways I wouldn’t normally. We tried to talk but I would be verbally aggressive, start crying or shut down completely and show no emotion. In the end, she suggested I see a counsellor, so I did. This time I was 100 per cent honest and the counsellor started to help me accept who I was. It was scary, because I didn’t know whether I was ready to hear that.
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Beverley Smith, Ben’s mum: As long as Ben is happy, we’re happy, no matter what he decides to do. On his wedding day, I was pinning the flower on his jacket and I said to him: ‘You are sure, aren’t you? Because if we’re going to do a runner, we’ll have to do it now.’ It was only a joke, but I’d been married and divorced before I met Pete, and I wish somebody had suggested that on my first wedding day! Ben replied: ‘We have talked about this and this is what we want.’ Little did we know what was going on in Ben’s head.
He started to put on weight and was always stressed. He’d explain it away by saying work was getting on top of him, which made sense, because he was working for a big corporate company. Ben is a perfectionist and he’d spend hour upon hour getting his work right, sometimes until 5 o’clock in the morning. There was love between Ben and his wife, the two of them got on very well. But they didn’t visit that often because they were always too busy, and never seemed to be around when we suggested going to visit them. Then, out of the blue, a couple of months after he got married, he sent us a letter, telling us we didn’t understand him and he didn’t want us in his life anymore. He didn’t even say: ‘I’m thinking things through, I’ll contact you.’ I said to Pete: ‘We’ve lost him.’
We thought he might have been to therapy, the counsellor had told him to put his thoughts down on paper and he’d posted it, instead of filing it away. But I still don’t know for sure why he wrote that letter. I think he was going into crisis. Maybe he thought, if he cut us free, we wouldn’t be hurt by what was to come. Maybe he was trying to protect us again. Whatever the reasons, it broke our hearts. I was told for a long time that I could never have kids, so to have Ben and Daniel was such a gift. At times, we didn’t get things right, because no parent does. Children don’t come with a book of instructions, so all you can do is your very best by them. And all we’d ever done for both our children was motivated by love.
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I just wanted simplicity in my life, which is how I started to drift apart from my parents. Because I was battling so much inside, it seemed easier to remove Mum and Dad from the equation. It wasn’t a case of wanting to protect them from anything, I was just stuck between a rock and a hard place. I made the wrong choice, and that’s how the letter came about.
I worked my way through to the beginning of February, when I moved out of the house and into the local Premier Inn, to give my wife time to think. I was meant to be gone for a week, but after three days she said she’d done her thinking and wanted to meet. I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room when she told me it was over. I couldn’t believe it, I was in complete dismay. My life was like a Jenga puzzle, with my wife at the bottom, propping the whole thing up. I thought it would all come crashing down if you removed her. We’d been together for almost 10 years, so our lives were so intertwined.
I just wanted this life of a ‘normal’ person, but it went too far, and I’m sorry for that. I didn’t mean to hurt her, but now I was fearful this plan I’d had in my head since I was a teenager was falling to pieces. I was worried what people would think of me when they found out. The idea of anyone thinking bad of me filled me with dread. I thought it would end me. The day she told me she wanted to end it was the worst day of my life. But probably the best, too.
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Millennium Square begins filling up as start time approaches and a small crowd of family and friends begins to gather. It’s a beautiful day, warm and sunny. The press has turned up – the Bristol Post, local TV – as well as a sprinkling of old workmates, running club friends and family. Mum is selling wristbands out of the front of the van and there’s a real market stall mentality about the whole thing. It feels small, but like something that will grow organically. At least some people have bought into it, although I’m not sure how many of them have complete faith. It ticks round to 10 o’clock and off I go, wondering what’s going to happen, where this journey is going to take me, whether I’m going to be OK, and whether I’ve made a mistake.
Maybe they’re right not to have faith. Halfway round that first marathon, I’m thinking: ‘Oh shit, what the bloody hell have I done?’ My running buddy Susan has planned the course and she hasn’t given me a flat one as a gentle introduction. In fact, it’s bloody hilly, and I’m cursing her all the way round: ‘How could she do this to me?’ I wanted to kill her. But it’s spectacular at the same time, running with good friends, including Vicky Burr, who props me up for the last couple of miles. Day one complete and I’ve survived! Afterwards, I pick up the van, drive to Gordano Services and head to Starbucks. And while I’m sitting there, nursing a flat white, I’m thinking: ‘What will happen along the way?’ I’ve got 400 more days of unknown stretched out ahead of me. I rolled the dice, created a life for me. And the really exciting part is, I don’t really know what it is yet.
Chapter 4
Rationalising Madness
Day two in Bristol is the same route as day one, although this time I cover the full 26.2 miles with a great guy called Andy, who owns a coffee shop in Bristol and is training for his Land’s End to John o’ Groats run. Andy has turned up at exactly the right time because he gets what I’m trying to achieve completely, rather than looking at me as if I’m absolutely nuts. You need people like Andy because they make the apparently absolutely nuts seem almost normal.
DAYS 2–7: When I leave Bristol at the end of day two, and realise I’m not going to be back for 50-odd days, it feels like I’ve strayed too far from the shore. It’s not as if I feel stranded, but a reality hits me: ‘There’s no going back now, too much of me has been invested. I have no choice but to plough on…’ More hills in Portishead, which is where I call home, but the views from the coastal path, of Cardiff, Newport and the Severn Bridge, keep things sweet. Tim from the local running club has planned the course, which takes us past some fishing boats, parked in the middle of a forest, apparently part of some art exhibition. It’s a surreal sight, and slightly unsettling, because I suddenly wonder if those boats might be me soon, lost and forgotten, marooned where I don’t belong.
Travelling downhill – trail running was never my strong point – I go over on my knee. It hurts, but I keep on going, and I don’t realise I’ve damaged it as badly as I have. Over the next four days, it gets progressively worse.
By day seven, it’s doubled in size. Tim feels guilty: ‘Great, I’ve already killed him.’ That’s already a running joke, members of running clubs saying to me: ‘We don’t want to be the ones who damaged or broke you…’ On top of the gammy knee, I’ve also got tendinitis in my left shin and a suspected fracture in one of my toes. It doesn’t sound ideal, and it’s only day three, but I tell myself I have to go through that at the beginning. It forces my body to ask the question: ‘What the hell are you doing to me? It’s not right!’ But as time goes on, my body starts saying: ‘Alright, you’re not going to listen to me, so I might as well fall into line.’ And the fact the problem started in my knee and moved downwards into my toes suggests it is exiting my body. That’s what I’ve decided to tell myself anyway. Well, you’ve got to stay positive…
I work my way down through Somerset and into Devon, taking in part of a 24-hour race in Taunton, the Long Run in the Meadow. This is my first proper night in Florence and I’m not prepared. I buy some chicken from the local supermarket and spend about an hour trying to cook it in the oven. I realise I haven’t filled the van with water, so I can’t shower, and end up eating my chicken thighs on the bed and falling asleep stinking.
On day six, the Forever Running Club from Taunton are out in force to support me, and we follow a route shaped like a flower petal, flitting between the town, the canal and the glorious Quantock Hills. In Exeter, I stay with the guys from the local fire station and they treat me to a roast dinner, and I’m able to fill Florence with water and charge her up. Day seven, and I’m on my own for the first time. The guy who planned the route greets me at the start but is working, and nobody from the local running club has made it. I don’t blame them, people have commitments. My family friends, Ian and Rosie, surprise me, having come all the way over from Germany, and it’s lovely to see them. But it’s 30°C, I’m lonely, my legs are in bits and I’m only partially comfortable running uphill. All the aches and pains are starting to play on my mind and zap my motivation. So much for the positivity. I’d been on such a high, and now I’ve come crashing down to earth. I start out jogging, then start walking, and end up shuffling. My phone won’t get a signal, I get lost, run out of water and end up covering 29 miles in about eight hours. My confidence is through the floor and I’m thinking: ‘There might be a lot more of these…’ I’m already sick of it and I’ve still got 394 marathons to go.
I park in an industrial estate just outside Exeter, head to a supermarket and stock up on water and frozen peas, to reduce the swelling on my knee. When I come back, Florence isn’t there. In a panic, I start scanning the car park, hoping I’m just so tired that I’ve forgotten where I put her, but also terrified she’s been stolen. Everything I have is in Florence – is this the end of the Challenge? Two guys approach me and one of them pulls out his phone. On the screen, it reads: ‘Your van is in a tree’. He’s used Google to translate it from Lithuanian to English. Florence isn’t actually in a tree, but she has rolled into one because I forgot to put the handbrake on.
I just want to go home.
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The moment my wife said, ‘It’s over’, it set the wheels in motion. In a cowardly way, I was relieved she’d made the decision because I wasn’t strong enough to. The split was amicable, and clean. I moved into a flat on the marina in Portishead and we put the house on the market and split the difference. I sold my shares in the company I worked for, bought loads of furniture for the new flat and started the long journey of trying to figure out me.
I truly believe that I had to go through everything I did to be the person I am now. As such, I stand by my choices. But I honestly think that if I hadn’t had running, I wouldn’t have got through my divorce. Just after we separated, I was due to run the Barcelona Marathon, the first of 18 I had scheduled for 2014. My wife was supposed to be coming with me and was on every ticket, so I didn’t want to go to Spain. But my brother Dan dropped everything, drove down and persuaded me to go. He even came with me, and I’m so glad he did. He also told me to contact Mum and Dad, which I did. Mum told me how much my letter, which I’d sent only a couple of months earlier, had hurt her, which was understandable. But I didn’t really explain anything. Because I was still so submissive and meek, I just took it. But running was already making me stronger. In fact, it was the one thing that gave me the strength to do everything I’ve done since. It would be too dramatic to say running saved my life, but it allowed me to work out what my life was going to be.
When I was 29, I had something called a Transient Ischaemic Attack (TIA), or a ‘mini-stroke’. I was sitting at my desk at work and my sight went, as if somebody had drawn a black curtain across my face. On top of that, I temporarily lost the feeling in my left arm and developed tinnitus in my left ear. My colleague read out all the symptoms on the NHS website and it said: ‘Go to hospital’. It might sound terrifying, but I was just so dead inside that I didn’t really feel much about anything. It was more a case of: ‘Oh, OK, this is happening now…’ I thought the nurse at the hospital was going to tell me I was stressed, so when she explained what had actually happened to me, it was a bit of a shock. But maybe it shouldn’t have been. I had so much internal turmoil because of hiding who I really was; I was 16 and a half stone; smoking a pack a day, maybe more; drinking too much. I had a high-pressure job as an operations executive that I’d become totally immersed in, because, albeit on a subconscious level, it meant I didn’t have to confront who I truly was. Like so many people, I’d just drifted into this existence. And that’s all I was really doing – existing. When the TIA happened, the doctor told me to start looking after myself and I knew something had to change. It was an epiphany, but not like in the movies. Things didn’t suddenly become great, they actually grew worse before they got better. I’d conditioned myself over so many years to think in a certain way, so to suddenly change overnight was not going to be possible.
On the list of 500 things I wanted to do in my life, running was about 500th. I was that classic guy who bought a gym membership in January and cancelled it a month later. I’d been out for a few jogs but never found a passion for it. When a work colleague dragged me down to Southville Running Club in Bedminster, Bristol, I felt like my 10-year-old self again. I was putting myself in a situation I didn’t really want to be in, this time where everyone was skinny and fit and I was going to come in last. I was terrified. I wasn’t a runner, I couldn’t run for a bus. To this day, I don’t really know why I went. I ran and walked a couple of miles, but I wasn’t the only one walking, so I didn’t feel like a failure. People didn’t point at me and laugh. I went home that night with this feeling of accomplishment, thinking: ‘You know what? I quite enjoyed that.’ So I went back the next week. And I kept on going, week after week, paying my 50p to run on a Tuesday night.
Within six months, I’d done my first 5k, 10k and half-marathon, and in 2013 I did my first marathon in Brighton. I ran the first 19 miles and everything was going to plan, before I stopped for a wee and seized up. The last seven miles were hell. Running along the seafront towards the pier, I could see the finish line in the distance, but my body hurt and I was exhausted. But I was utterly focused on finishing. After I crossed the line, I collapsed on the floor, someone put a medal around my neck and I cried. I’d finished in a respectable four and a half hours, and I was hooked.
Two days later, I booked up for the Amsterdam Marathon, because I wanted to do better. Running was making me fit and healthy, I was feeling better about myself, more confident, because I was running further and it was getting easier. It was incredibly invigorating just doing something I’d never done before – ‘There is an alternative!’ I liked the fact I was achieving things I never thought I could, conquering new ground. And I loved the sociability and companionship of the running club, making new friends, with like-minded people – my own friends, not people I was expected to be friends with. Running created this wonderful new world for me. And it felt like I was figuring out my own
place in it, at last.
I used to call running my filing time. I’d have a horrible day at work, come home full of stress, my brain addled, put my trainers on and disappear for an hour. To begin with I ran with music, maybe to take my mind off the pain, but I soon stopped doing that because I liked to take in everything around me – the scenery, the conversations, the laughter. By the time I got back from a run, it felt like everything in my mind had been tidied up and filed away. For the first time in my life, I felt organised. And running rekindled my love of travel and adventure, which I’d had as a child, and made me feel free. So, when I split from my wife, running had equipped me to deal with the inevitable fallout.
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24-HOUR RUN IN TAUNTON? EASY WHEN YOU’RE DOING 401 MARATHONS IN 401 DAYS
SOMERSET COUNTY GAZETTE,
8 SEPTEMBER 2015
‘…Ben has already raised £3,500 of his target of £250,000, to be split between anti-bullying charities Kidscape and Stonewall…’
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DAYS 8–9: When I wake up, my knee is bigger than ever and I don’t know if I’ll be able to run at all. But about eight miles in, my legs start working. One of the lads from the local fire station keeps me company, and the views along the coast from Dawlish to Exeter are stunning. Suddenly, everything is good again. I pass 200 miles since the start of the Challenge and celebrate on the quayside with a flat white and a bowl of nachos. By the end of day eight, I’ve set a new PB – eight marathons in eight days. Looking back, I’m glad I had that horrible day as early as I did, because I was able to use it as a tool and tell myself: ‘It will never be as bad as that.’ When we were planning The 401 Challenge, Mum often used to say to me: ‘Look what you’ve faced, look what you’ve been through – if you can get through all of that, you can get through anything this Challenge throws at you.’ All those horrible days I’d stored up were my preventative medicine.
