by Phil Hewitt
Writing in my marathon diary the day after, I was perhaps a little harsh: 'I hate to say it, but it makes the London Marathon pale into insignificance – probably largely for the fact that New York is foreign and thousands of miles away.' But somehow the support had just seemed so much greater in New York: so many fire crews, the gospel choirs, so many faces. It was the place and the exhilaration of being there that got me around so quickly.
I had been far too busy thinking 'Can I really be here?' to bother about getting tired. If the course can take your mind off tiredness, then you're bound to succeed. Plus the conditions were perfect. How things can change. In London 2002 I had come in blue in the face, in a state of near collapse and absolutely shattered, yet 21 minutes slower in considerably cooler conditions. I was starting to realise that I thrive on warm marathons. I have since learned that I am useless in comparison in the cold and wet.
Early on in New York, the heat had been a problem every time we went into an east-west shady street from a sun-drenched north-south avenue. I was so dripping in sweat that I felt chilly until we were out in the sun again. But overall, the sun had just made everything look all the more colourful and all the more beautiful on an absolutely sparkling day.
The icing on the cake had been just how friendly the people were as they dished out space blankets and medals. They all said congratulations and really seemed to mean it. A bit less impressive was the time it took for my bag to be found on the van at the end, and then there was a long walk to get out of the marathon finishers' enclosure. But in that moment, I would have happily forgiven New York anything. Besides, walking was definitely the right thing to do. I'd felt a bit wobbly while waiting for my bag, but all in all I was feeling fine, helped on by complete strangers saying congratulations to me, all the way back to our hotel, half a mile or so south of Central Park.
I freshened up and then headed out again, bumping into mum in the lobby just as she was about to go up. I bought a phonecard (how dated does that sound!), phoned Fiona and was amazed to find that she knew more about my time than I did. She'd been tracking me on the Internet, as had my dad and Michael, now a marathoner himself of course. She told me my time was 3:35:45 and knew that I'd taken just over two minutes to cross the start. She'd been worried when my quarter-marathon time flashed up – worried that I was going too quickly. The website had even thrown up a couple of predicted finishing times for me, one for 3:43 and the other accurate to within seconds. These days, we take this kind of thing in our stride. Back in 2003, it seemed positively space age.
I was on a high. I wanted to dash back into the action and so left mum in the hotel for an hour and a half during which I wallowed in the whole experience of it all. I was very glad I did. I wanted to soak up every moment. I watched the runners going along the road at the bottom of Central Park and then made my way to the finish, determined to swim in the gush of post-race sentimentality which was threatening to engulf me.
The grandstands were pretty thinly peopled by now so it was no problem getting right up close to the finishing line where I watched a fantastic woman on the tannoy who seemed to sum up the whole spirit of the day. She kept shouting: 'And here's Bill (or whoever)! Bill's going to make it! And so's Susan! And here's Jane. Jane's going to do it!' Or 'Rita's just done it. Dex has just done it. Brad's going to do it. And here's Leroy! Come on, bring him home. Bring him in. It's getting cold. He's tired. Bring him home!'
Even now, when I think about it, I go a little misty-eyed. She was oozing goodwill in her relentless, fantastically good-humoured patter – an image of the day I will always retain. She was generosity on legs, a mother hen urging all her chicks home. It mattered to her as if she knew us all. For me, she'll always be the lasting symbol of the welcome that New York City gave us all.
This was marathon running at its absolute best. Everyone was welcomed over the line as a winner, and that's what makes marathons (the good ones, at least!) so intoxicating and so addictive. There you are, flogging yourself on a course, your whole horizon reduced to the road ahead as you try to remember distances, calculate times and see your way through. It's the solipsistic 'me, me, me' of marathon running.
But in a race such as New York – and to a very large extent London too – your narrow focus is balanced by the broader focus of hundreds of thousands of spectators who see the wider perspective, coming together to witness the mass spectacle of all those individual battles out on the course, all part of one monumental effort on the part of everyone.
It's that gorgeously seductive spiritual side to the whole marathon experience once again, that wonderful thing that makes humans human, that generosity of spirit which makes mankind en masse gather together and urge us on. It's that great kindness – embodied by the woman on the tannoy – that brings us runners home. Days really don't come much better than this – and in a sense, I've never let it go.
It's become an annual ritual – easier of late – to watch the New York City Marathon on TV. In the early years, it meant hanging on to some flaky streaming from a cloudy website, sound and pictures never quite in synch. Now we've got satellite TV, it's as if I'm there. Each year I watch it, refreshing my memory of the streets on which I ran; each year, the memories get better. It really was one of the greatest days of my life.
I have never seriously considered trying to do it again. My New York experience was too perfect to risk tarnishing it by trying – and undoubtedly failing – to recreate it. Everything was just too good for it ever to be so good again.
Chapter Six: 'In Another Land'
Why the Course Counts – Paris 2004
If 'Fred', our sports editor back in 1997, had been lean and mean, would I ever have run a marathon? I'd like to think so. I'd just have come to it rather later.
By the time I'd run New York, however, I was a marathon regular and even fancied that I was some kind of role model at home. It seems to me crucial that you don't just preach to your children the benefits of regular exercise. You need to put it all into practice. Just as you need to create a home environment where books are everywhere and often open, you need to create a home life in which exercise is simply there, where it isn't an event if someone does something energetic, where it's simply part of your weekly existence.
I try to do the right things. I try to pronounce the 't's on the ends of words; I try to avoid rising inflections; and I try not to swear. I try to be as rude as possible about the Conservative Party at every opportunity; and I also like to think that I have always projected The Beatles and The Stones as the great pinnacles of man's achievement, the highest high points of our civilisation, never to be surpassed.
But, above all, I like to think I've set an example to my children that exercise is vital – though I can't honestly say that that's the reason I go out running. By 2004, running had become such a central part of my life that it was always going to be there, existing in its own right as something to be treated with reverence. How I sneered and sniffed, a few years later, at the comedy film Run, Fatboy, Run, which the rest of the family enjoyed – and which I secretly enjoyed too. But it was a film which committed a crime, allowing its hero to run a marathon on the back of the poorest of training regimes imaginable. This was reckless, I chuntered. This wasn't the way marathons are run, and it wasn't helpful – even in popular culture – to portray them this way. You don't undertake marathons lightly, I moaned – 'pompous' my middle name as I conveniently overlooked my own version of Fatboy in Chichester in 2001.
Oh yes, I was a serious runner, and I was facing the kind of problems only a serious runner will face, not the least of which was 'Where next?' How on earth do you follow New York? I wondered. The answer, as it turned out, was simple. You go to Paris.
Some marathons have just got to be done, lifetime highlights that should be obligatory for anyone capable of putting one foot in front of the other. Paris is one such marathon. I have run it three times now and have happy memories of all of them, even my most recent Paris when I recorded my slo
west time on the course. So what? How could you ever be disappointed about anything you do in Paris?
For me, London had been all about the excitement of the debut; New York had been all about the thrill of New York itself; but in Paris, the thrill was all about the course, the thing that keeps you going and makes Paris such a memorable running experience. Like New York, Paris is very generous with its sights, and what sights they are.
However, the attraction begins much earlier than that. One of the great advantages of the Paris Marathon is that it is so easy to get a place. The London Marathon application process was – and probably still is – one of its biggest drawbacks. In years gone by, I would trail the sports shops vainly trying to find a London Marathon application form, an ordeal fortunately considerably simplified now. In recent years, at long last, London has finally moved across to online application, but even now you endure a long, long wait to discover the outcome.
Paris, on the other hand, was an absolute doddle. Sign up while there are places still available, and you are instantly confirmed as a runner. French bureaucracy isn't known for its simplicity, but here Paris was streets ahead of London. Adding to the appeal was the fact that I was approaching it from a position of strength. I went into my first Paris on the back of a couple of good marathons. I was on a roll.
Also key to the anticipated fun was that this was going to be a sociable marathon. I travelled out to Paris with my good friend Marc, a running enthusiast whom I knew through work in Chichester. Marc lives in Brighton, which is as far east of Chichester as I live west, and consequently we have only rarely enjoyed the chance to run together. Instead, we have shared countless run-related conversations over a Chichester coffee, and it was during one such coffee that we hatched the Paris plan.
Also joining us was Michael. Michael was itching for his first overseas marathon; Marc was on marathon number two; and I, as ever, was looking for new marathon experiences. But first, urged on by Marc in those early months of 2004, I knew that I had to up my marathon training. My 18-minute improvement in New York was massive, and I knew I was going to have to find something else in my armoury if I was to improve once again. That something, it pained me to admit, was the ordeal known as intervals.
Intervals seemed the key to making it all happen – a dip into the draining, knackering world of intensity training I'd flirted with when I did those fartleks for my first-ever marathon. They had been free and easy, and I'd occasionally gone back to them in the intervening years. But I had always avoided intervals, finding plenty of reasons to steer clear of them. In truth, one reason had generally been enough. I hate them.
Even through that hatred, though, I have to admit that they are – or should be – central to serious marathon running. And, sadly, if I wanted to build on my New York improvement, there was no getting away from them this time.
Intervals are supposed to give you two things. They increase your overall running speed, but also, just as importantly, they give you the strength to carry on when you are starting to flag. They are about overall pace, but they are also about end-of-race endurance. Intervals are there to help you keep going when stopping is all you crave. How do they manage it? I haven't a clue, save they attune your body to greater demands.
Intervals presumably come in all shapes and sizes, but the only one I know – as explained by Marc – is that you chalk a line on a straight stretch of road and then run absolutely flat out for, say, 40 seconds, timing yourself as you positively bust a gut to achieve maximum distance in that time. And then you stop, topple over and chalk a finish line on the road. This is the marker by which you will subsequently test yourself. Whatever the distance, if you have run it properly, you will have run it at a blood-vessel-bursting 100 per cent of your potential. The challenge now is to run that distance repeatedly at 75 per cent of your potential, a speed which should still be significantly above your natural running speed. I've long harboured the suspicion that the maths doesn't quite add up, but Marc's system is that you add 25 per cent of your initial time to your subsequent running times as you redo the distance in multiples of four, ideally building up to 16 intervals in all. If your full pace was 40 seconds, you now need to complete that distance repeatedly at 40 seconds plus 25 per cent of 40, which even I can work out is 50 seconds in total. It should still feel like you are pushing yourself, particularly as you push towards 16 repetitions. Then, when you've done however many you are doing, the big test is to repeat the distance in the original 40 seconds. I always aim to do so in 38 or 39 – which presumably, the purists will say, means that I was holding something back for the very first one, which is absolutely not the idea. It's got to be flat out to start, flat out to finish and severely pushed in the middle. Equal that initial burst and you can count your intervals a success: you've taken a key step towards running at an overall quicker pace and you've told your body that you're more than willing to push it when the time comes to shove.
Be a good boy or girl and intervals will form one of your four weekly training sessions. The intervals, plus the sheer weight of regular training runs, will help you increase the number of miles you do as you head towards the big day.
In recent years, I have inflicted intervals on my son's football team, telling them – and genuinely believing – that they are the means by which they will acquire essential stamina towards the end of the game. Some of the players are gracious enough to admit that the off-season intervals have actually made a difference. The year 2004 had, therefore, seen me practise what I would one day preach. It was the year I played it by the book more than I had ever done before or have ever done since. It seemed like a way of trying to take control of the day before it dawned, and in that respect it was a confidence-booster I wished I'd drawn on before.
Michael and I converged at Waterloo station. We wandered through to the Eurostar lounge where we soon found Marc, his partner and his young daughter. The added bonus, as far as I was concerned, was that Marc had family in Paris. Michael had booked a hotel, but I stayed with Marc and his folks, just about ten minutes' walk from the Arc de Triomphe. Their flat was brilliantly located for getting to the start. It was all set up perfectly.
As always, I slept really badly the night before, but I knew that it didn't really matter. The time 3:27 kept coming into my head all night. Is it possible? I wondered. I set the alarm for 6 a.m., but I needn't have bothered. I was wide awake by then, as I had been for most of the night, and soon afterwards Marc was wandering around too. We looked out the window. It was pouring with rain and very windy – not at all what we wanted. The forecast the day before had been for mild weather, some sun and no wind. That happy state seemed a long way off just after 6 a.m.
Marc and I passed the time with some stretching exercises, which were actually good fun. He was excellent at explaining the point of the exercises, something I hadn't really grasped before. It was all about loosening you up and toning you up, and under his expert guidance I did indeed feel somehow much more pumped and primed. There was a definite element of getting in the zone – of yet another element slipping into place. Stretching prepares a runner's body, but it also prepares his or her mind. During the stretches, rather than thinking as I so often had before a marathon that it would be good just to get going, I found myself positively looking forward to the off – an important difference. The right mind frame for the day was starting to emerge.
And then, at about ten past eight, Marc and I set off. Gently continuing our limbering-up process, we jogged the ten minutes or so to the Arc de Triomphe, joining the crowds of people who had presumably been hanging around for ages. It was a highly civilised way to prepare for a marathon and we both felt relaxed and up for it. It was coolish, but bright, with increasingly big patches of blue in the sky. The weather was improving with every passing minute. Fortunately, it seemed the French weather forecasters had got it exactly right, and we'd be running in ideal conditions.
Not quite matching the conditions was the organisation. Marc was in the yell
ow band for those wanting to do 3:15 and I was in the blue band for those aiming at 3:30, but the reality was light years away from the neatly cordoned-off time sections the organisers had promised. It was a scrum. The problem was that the entrances into the time zones were tiny gaps in high barriers right at the back of each section. Rather than slipping in at the back and moving forward within the zone, most people, understandably, were forcing their way along the pavement outside the zone and then clambering over the barriers once they had got as far forward as they could. The zones were fairly tightly packed at the back, but from the mid-section to the front, the crush in each was awful.
Marc abandoned all hope of entering the yellow section. It was all we could do to get into the blue section, where we stood squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder and genuinely worried. Any significant surge from the back, or anyone toppling, and it could have been nasty. At times, my feet were off the ground. Rather inappropriately, perhaps, I kept thinking about all those Middle Eastern holy sites where hundreds of pilgrims get crushed as a seemingly regular occurrence. Shove tens of thousands of people together in cramped conditions, and disasters do happen. I was getting nervous.
Making it all the more unpleasant was the fact that plenty of bodies around us were already pretty whiffy. Even worse was the fact that the chap next to me, who probably couldn't have raised his hands above his waist if he had wanted to, was quietly pissing into his water bottle. Scores of other people were doing the same, or peeing straight down onto the road, which was covered in discarded, increasingly wee-soaked plastic ponchos, dished out the day before to keep us warm at the start. It seemed a treacherous combination. The upper-body crush held you rigidly in place while your feet skidded on urine. This really was mankind at his most unappealing. If we could have hopped, we would have been hopping mad. Any serenity had long since gone, replaced by increasing anxiety.
