Next on the To Do list, 26.2 miles

One week to go (14 April)

With few miles to get through physically I’m all in my head this week.  It’s not pretty.

As promotion begins and the rest of London’s marathon consciousness stirs, I retreat further and further away from the starting line.  It seems simultaneously massive and tiny, easy and impossible, real and illusory.  My coping mechanism is to ignore it all and the more people focus on it the more I descend into vague, unsatisfactory platitudes: It’ll be fun, nice to experience the atmosphere, should be good.  My family and friends try to generate some enthusiasm about champagne, cake, rest; but the truth is, this was always about the training for me, not the marathon.  I already feel lost without it.

My final Sunday run is far from triumphant.  I emerge kitted out as usual for the British Spring (base layer, two t-shirts, fleece, cagoule, gloves, woolly hat) only to discover that it’s unusually sunny.  There’ll no doubt be plenty of wind still, I reason, but bravely turn back indoors to ditch the hat.  An hour later I return, drained of energy and soaked to the bone in sweat.  Turns out it’s 19 degrees, and there’s a reason why you’ve never heard of Bikram Jogging.  There’s a genuine fear that I might pass out through heat exhaustion and it’s many hours and copious pints of water later that my urine stops resembling butter.  I spend the rest of the day in bed, feverish.  Ah well.

Unintentionally bedridden I realise that I’ve still got some work to do.  I need to work out how to get to the starting line on race day, I need to restock my iPod, I need to get some rest.  And OMG: I need to work out what to wear. 

In the last two weeks we’ve had snow and we’ve had sun; biting wind and cloudless skies.  My face has been pounded by hail so hard it stings and yet I spend the next day reading the Sunday papers topless in the Wandsworth sun.  It all makes for difficult wardrobe decisions, I’m sure you’ll agree: And clothes have never been my forte.  I’m lucky that Hire Fitness Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire has sponsored me and provided me with a top to wear on the day, that could have been a nightmare of indecision.  And don’t I look pretty?

 

I’ve got some loose ends to clear up with this blog, bits of running that I meant to talk about and never did.  Like finally getting the point of London’s cycle ways – Brisbane had hundreds of miles of interconnecting cycle paths, completely separate from roads, so it was a bit disappointing when Boris’ revolutionary bike scheme turned out just to be the odd strip of woad.  More The Wizard of... than Oz.  But they’ve been a massive help for navigating when lost so no complaints here, even though they seem to think that most people on bikes are heading for Elephant and Castle.

I also never got round to marvelling at Nike+, a fantastic device that allows you to ruin Facebook and bore the shit out of everyone else via social media.  I never got on board the ‘Map my run!’ trend but wish I had, if only to contribute my own fair share of spam in face of endless ‘funnies’ and domestic minutiae.  Facebook is dead, that much is obvious, and I look forward to deleting my account once all fundraising avenues have been milked.  Nike+, on the other hand, will be with me a while longer.  The best thing about it is the congratulatory messages that come at the end of some runs, though I seem to have graduated to a Fifty Shades of Gray edition perpetrated by meaningless American athletes.  Shelly Flannigan wants me to enjoy the party, Sonya Richards Ross compliments me on my boom. Tim Tebow likes my grind and asks me to grip his Heisman.  

I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing

I’ve seen so many parts of London I didn’t know existed and throughout it all my surprise favourite London landmark has remained: Stand up and collect your prize, Battersea Power Station.  It is such an iconographic building and takes on as many different forms as there are times of day and weather.  I’ve charted its redevelopment over the last four months and its resolute immobility has been a constant reassurance for the final few miles home on my difficult outings.  I also feel I know London inside out now: I can take you to Napolean’s toothbrush, Little Britain, Back Passage.  The last few months have done more to improve my London geography than the past five years living here and to prove a point I’ve added some random photos to the bottom of this blog.  If you can locate them all, I’ll give you £500; and for an easier challenge, see if you can spot the one that isn’t London. 

I’ve also learned a lot.

• That physical training is only half the battle, mental training is where it’s at
• Portion control is bollocks: The suggested serving of cereal doesn’t fill a spoon 
• And soft drinks are universally shit 
• The people closest to you will be the last to sponsor you 
• Lance never used his balls anyway
• If you raise £2k in sponsorship then you will pay out £2k sponsorship in kind 
• Marathons are as interesting socially as mortgages, ailments and dreams 
• If you’re in a pub sipping lemonade talking about running, everyone else wishes you weren’t there 
• That the devil has the best tunes, but God has the best architecture

There’s not much more to say, bar a massive thanks to everyone who’s supported me to get this far.  Some individual thanks go to:

• Alan Davis for The Tuesday Club podcast, the best on iTunes and my main support through some of the worst times.  A well-timed jibe at the expense of the French football league has got me up some of SW London’s steepest hills. 
• Thai on the River, Battersea, for joking about ‘my usual seat’ when I burst in yet again on the way home to use the toilet.  I promise I’ll come back as a paying customer. 
•  Jedi Mind Tricks, Loso, Masta Ace, Kano, Doom, John Robinson, Cunninlinguists, Baby J, Skinnyman and anyone else with beats and lyrics to keep you moving.  And TL for supplying them.  Thanks too to Hospital Records and the Nextmen for their immense back catalogue of free podcasts.
• Hire Fitness Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire for sponsoring me, and also for providing short-term treadmill loans to get through training when it's cold and wet outside.  Genius.
• Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, for making me re-apply for my job for the third time in 18 months and thus ensuring I have plenty to mull over whilst notching up the miles.
• The 334 people to date who have read my blog.  I realised early on that it was going to be of little interest to anyone but me, but decided to continue as a legacy for other average Joes wanting to give a marathon a shot. 
•  My girlfriend, for being perfect.  Only she would quietly book me a massage and wash my sweat-soaked pants after suffering weeks and weeks of stench and whining.
• Anyone and everyone who has sponsored me and Diabetes UK - I really appreciate it.

Finally, I’d like to say a thank you to UK rap outfit LDZ for inspiring me on my runs and for providing the following subliminal sponsorship message:

http://tinyurl.com/cqke4xb

Catch you on the flip side.

The Last Tango

Two weeks to go (7 April)

With a fortnight to go I’m settling into the wind down.  My midweek outings remain pretty much the same, bar a kilometre or two.  The big change is that my longest run of the week is now a mere 23km.  For the first time it doesn’t lurk disconcertingly in the back of my mind for the days leading up to it and it’s a measure of how far I’ve come that I now see the prospect of running a half marathon as a welcome break.  But then, I have notched up 13 of them since December. 

They’re funny things, training plans.  I’m sure there’s science behind it but I cannot for the life of me understand the premise:

• One, painstakingly increase your distance by a mile each week until you’re six miles off your target; then
• Two, do absolutely nothing for three weeks and hope you get by on adrenaline and carb loading come race day. 

How much difference do they think a few extra spuds will make?  Does Mo Farah win things just because he can swallow more pasta than his rivals?  Seems absolutely crackers to me and my newfound confidence at dispatching half marathons without so much as a water bottle only underlines that.  Why not train to 30 miles, so that you know you can complete the course and still have something left in the tank?  “This one was easier because I already knew I could run 26 miles”, confirms a friend who casually smashes half an hour off her Personal Best at the Paris Marathon.  Which is fair enough, I’m sure, but I’d rather have had a couple more weeks’ training to know that than have to go through an entire fucking marathon again.

Bonkers.

For all my cynicism I love a good rule and so stick to the letter of the training plan, even on a supportive weekend break to Paris.  France, now there’s a country that truly gets carb loading!  I gleefully mop up my leftover baguettes with bits of brioche, pastry and bigger bits of baguette, wondering what the hell their training plans say about the need to increase carbohydrates: You’d have no time for running, you’d just be cramming bread and croissants in at every waking moment.  A Frenchman without a breadstick is a lie: If carb loading worked they’d be the fastest nation on earth.

My training only allows for two runs here and so I try to use them well.  The first goes nicely to plan, a lovely loop of Sacré Cœur ending with a view over the city at sunset.  From this vantage point I can see the Arc Du Triomphe, built in honour of the French surrender during the second world war, and the Louvre, opened to the public to commemorate the surrender of the monarchy to some local peasants.  Further east is the iconic Eiffel Tower, built to appease the feared invaders of the 1889 World Exposition, and just about visible by the river is the modernistic Centre Pompidou, which was intriguingly built inside out so that the French didn’t have to make eye contact with the aggressive foreigner in charge of installing the plumbing.

It’s a breathtaking panorama and I take time to stroll round the Sacré Cœur to appreciate the city from all angles.  It’s impressive and the Sacré Cœur is a suitably imposing monument to keep constant watch over Paris.  Whilst London’s skyline is in danger of becoming overly gimmicky Paris keeps it classy and the subtle back lighting emphasises its pure beauty.  I pause to read a plaque explaining why it was built - as a symbol of subordination to the fictional Prussians, or something – then take the near-vertical road home to the apartment.  All the boulevards are gargantuan in size which makes running a more pleasurable experience than at home, though I can’t suppress a snort of derision when I learn that they were deliberately built like that to facilitate the movement of soldiers. 

What a courteous gesture to invading armies.

The next day begins at six with my last half-marathon.  With an 11km radius to play with there are tons of world famous landmarks I can get to: But I choose poorly and aim for the eastern park, the Bois de Vincennes.  A glance at the map led me to think it would be a picturesque stroll along the Seine: But as I pass abandoned dockyards, motorway flyovers and vacant shipping quays I’m constantly taunted by the knowledge that Notre Dame and her ilk are in full view 180 degrees behind me. 

It’s a soulless run which I try hard not to blame on Paris itself; and then the rain comes down, and I give in.  Paris is rubbish.  It stinks, it’s empty, it’s dull.  It’s romantic like a foetus on a toothbrush.  One enormous boulevard after another, derelict flats, 11.7 million people in need of a lick of paint and a bath.  In a country of endless beauty and genteel pleasure how on earth did they come to make such an unpromising dump capital?

Realising that I’ve misjudged the distance and have no chance of getting to the park in my mileage, and with my mood slowly taking a turn for the worse at the thought of what could have been, I kill time traipsing round the bits of the city no one bothers to visit.  And I can see why: Outside of the tourist trap, Paris is a homogenous, faeces-strewn trampshack.  I compare it to London and it loses out in almost every way, the one saving grace (more bridges over the river) overshadowed by the fact that as none of the neighbourhoods have any individuality or personality about them, why would you bother crossing the river?  Moving from Brixton to Chelsea to White Chapel you could be in different continents, here it’s just a uniform grey.  I see armies of homeless people whilst I’m out and about, most in tents, and you can’t help thinking that they’re not truly homeless just lost, struggling to identify which decrepit breezeblocked highrise is theirs.

Bijou.

As I cross south and head back into the centre things perk up.   I come across the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, a misplaced National Trust building in exquisitely manicured gardens, and come

a-cropper with a bunch of ostriches hiding in a random menagerie.  And then a yak.  And then I’m back into prime real estate as I circle Notre Dame, breathing in the history and the atmosphere (and the recurrent stench of dog shit, sadly, for this is Paris) as the matins bells sound to herald the arrival of the Japanese tourist coaches. 

 

I get gripped with adrenaline – this is what marathon training is all about, this is why we put ourselves through it – and surge back to the apartment at a much quicker pace than usual.  I was here and you were not, and I was here because of the marathon.  QED.  As I come to the end of the outing I realise I’m slightly lost, unable to locate the elusive Boulevard de Sébastopol despite it being half a mile wide and 20 miles long.  I stop at a street corner, pull out my map and spend a minute or two getting my bearings, then resume running: At which point my Nike+ informs me that I was a few seconds off setting a new record time for a half marathon.  This is an unexpected boost: I discover I am not in the slightest bit irritated, taking some pressure off me to finish the marathon itself in any particular time.

The rest of Paris passes in a happy blur of tartes aux pomme, croque-monsieur, boeuf.  I stock up on booze for the post-marathon era and as much Vache Qui Rit as my pockets can handle.  With the marathon training effectively done and dusted it’s time to kick back and play the waiting game.

Training?  Tick.  

Pelouse knows what time it is.

Footnote: My girlfriend maintains that my mood has not been too adversely affected by the move back to England from Australia.  Which is bollocks, clearly, as this Parisian diatribe testifies.

Built by the Parisians to accommodate the soldiers of the lost city of Atlantis, should they be passing through

It doesn't hurt me. Do you want to know how it feels? Do you want to know that it doesn't hurt me?

Three weeks to go (31 March)

This is the last full training week and I’m determined to get through it in one piece.  The arrival of the Easter break is a huge boost psychologically as I’m running pretty low on energy and enthusiasm.  We’ve got a lot of cool stuff planned – a box at the Royal Albert Hall, a trip to Windsor, the Boat Race – but most of all I'm looking forward to waking up without an alarm for once.

Midweek runs pass without too much drama and I record my fastest mile yet on Wednesday morning, which I put down to the release of anger at losing at football the night before and then watching England vs. Montenegro.  Despite the rain and the return to sub-zero temperatures I arrive at work with a smile on my face and open an email from Diabetes UK thanking me for the cheque in the post they’ve received on my behalf.  Feeling touched by this anonymous generosity I then discover a letter from M&S on my desk: It’s a £20 gift voucher to help with my fundraising.  So that’s lunch sorted.  What a lovely start to the day.

I check how I’m doing with sponsorship and am blown away: To date I’ve raised £1,661.72.  This is unbelievable considering that I haven’t done anything more sophisticated to fundraise than ask for donations.  I had underestimated the generosity of my friends, family and colleagues and I’m genuinely moved by this show of support for people with diabetes.  There are some individual donations that mean a lot, particularly from my brother, and old friends emerge from the woodwork to help me nearer to my target.  It’s a warm glow.

In humble mood I ring my mother and ask her to thank her friends for their generosity, too.  We get to talking about the day of the marathon itself and whether I want her to be there.  I know it’s what people do but I’m a bit baffled by this to tell you the truth, though I suspect I’m in a minority.  When I exercise I sweat a lot, and have earphones in, and spit, and, oh, will be in mental and physical agony: I think there are probably better weekends to have visitors, don’t you?  Aside from the fact that conversation is quite hard when one person keeps running off. 

I hope to be proved wrong on the day of the marathon but I’m quite a loner when it comes to things like this and am already getting self-conscious about the idea of people lining the streets watching.  Nowhere to hide, and too many witnesses if I fail.  My running experience to date hasn’t always been that pretty and I can just picture the scene.  “Look, here he comes!  Come on!  You can do it!  Oh, he’s going into that portaloo.  [Pause] He’ll be out in a minute, I’m sure.  [Pause] Won’t be long now.  [Pause] That’s added a bit of time on, hasn’t it?  [Pause] Probably looking at plus five hours now.  [Pause] Ah well, if he’s out soon he should still be able to finish before they clear the course away.  [Pause] Oh look kids, that runner’s wearing a life-size replica of York Cathedral”.

And so the conversation with my mother ends in predictable fashion.  “Of course I’d like your support”, I reassure her.  “Pay it in online”.

I have a short jog on Saturday morning and my girlfriend comes along for the cycle.  It’s nice to have company and point out all the tiny things that you notice but don’t bother sharing: The new bar opening, the nice house, the random statue.  We don’t go far, round the backstreets near our house, though I end it with a punishing climb up the hill by Wimbledon Park.  My girlfriend comes over all Kate Bush and so I tell her that if I only could, I’d make a deal with God, and get him to swap our places, be running up that road, be running up that hill, be running up that building...  Totally lost on her, there’s only four years between us and yet an entire generation - she's all Take That this and Spice Girls that, and I bet things are even worse in the Bieber era.  Funny to think that our kids will grow up without knowing what music is.

On Sunday I get up and go with a vague plan to get to Buckingham Palace and then take it from there.  I’ve got the last few chapters of an audiobook to finish, The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and in spite of having listened to it for over nine hours it comes to a conclusion without my having even the slightest clue about the plot or the main characters.  Which isn’t to say that it’s not a good book, just that the sound of Jim Broadbent reading is the best anaesthetic known to man.  I’m going to write and ask if he’ll come with me round the marathon, and tell him that if my girlfriend ever goes into labour there is no one but him I want by her bedside.  And maybe ask for a lock of his hair.  Not in a weird way, just to inhale as I sleep.

When the book ends I come to, and find myself dodging tourists along Victoria Embankment.  I decide to briefly follow the marathon route and do the back nine.   Let me do what Nas did and tell you that shit in reverse: I head from the palace 

past the Houses of Parliament

along the river opposite the Southbank

past Tower Bridge and up through the Tower of London

 and then inside to the land that the DLR forgot: Limehouse, Westferry, Poplar.  When you think they’ve got the whole of London to play with the marathon route is surprisingly dull: I assume it is the logistics of road closures that dictates the course, rather than the perceived beauty of endless loops round abandoned East London industrial estates.

With a glimpse of the O2 and Canary Wharf I turn back and retrace my steps, feeling like it’s a reasonably solid performance as I reach the halfway mark.  The sun’s out, I’m enjoying the views, no aches or pains yet. 

And then disaster strikes, predictable, bowel-themed disaster.  You have not known fear until you need the loo in the City of London on Easter Sunday.  Not a single place open and not a soul to be seen, my Plan B of just crouching in a doorway almost moves to Plan A when I realise that there’d be no witnesses and my crime wouldn’t be discovered until the banks reopen in 48 hours.  Instead I clench and cross over to the Southbank, alternately sprinting and crawling, straight into the underrated paradise that is the gents in the Coat & Badge.  Heaven.

For a re-enactment of this section of my run please see the following documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMmMvh1hSN4

I plough through the kilometres after that, averaging ten seconds faster than my usual pace – no mean feat given the mass of tourists on the Southbank – and am reasonably comfortable for the homeward stretch.  Around Battersea Park my iPod fails, irritatingly freezing with 30.6km done, but I estimate that what’s left of the journey home will take me just over the 20-mile mark.  It is hard going, harder than anything else I have done in training so far.  My stomach constricts, I double up in agony, I hold my mouth open for the vomit that never comes.  In view of my house I almost bring myself to a stop, unable to cope with the muscular agony in my stomach, and it takes everything I’ve got to make it to my door.  There I collapse immediately into bed and pass out, whining like cattle being slaughtered and demanding water, food, attention from my girlfriend.  “It’s like dating Gwyneth Paltrow’s OSCAR speech”, she complains, before dutifully passing me the eggs Benedict she has made as a special Easter breakfast.  Obviously I’ve not got her anything because I’m not eating chocolate at the moment, which is how all male minds work.

I get to thinking.  If that’s the kind of melodrama I unleash after a Sunday morning jog, six miles shorter than the marathon distance, you can understand why I don’t want anyone who knows me well to be anywhere near me at the finishing line.  I’m going to be an absolute nightmare.  There’ll likely be vomit, poo, tears, elation and disappointment within a whirlwind few seconds of emotions, and then I’ll awaken an hour later, huddled on the floor wrapped in BacoFoil and smelling of isotonic wee.

It’s a beautiful image, though one not quite as confident as I hoped I’d have after hitting the peak of my training.  I feel a bit let down by two things: Firstly the British weather, which has made it impossible for me to run the marathon dressed as I would have wanted (that and Diabetes UK’s curious reluctance to associate themselves with a novelty cock ring...).  And secondly, I’m a bit disappointed with myself.  Whilst I’ve done every distance in the training plan to the letter, I haven’t particularly pushed myself: My ‘timed sprints’ would be impossible to identify in a line up, my 5k and 10k trial runs actually came in slower than I would normally cover these distances and early on in my training I set my mental ‘race pace’ at an unambitious 11 minute 30 second miles.  Which means that come race day, in spite of 16 solid weeks of training, I’m still going to be reduced to walking the course for a good few miles when I run out of juice.

There’s a lot I’d do differently, even now, before the starter’s gun.  Despite repeated advice from people who’ve gone through it I haven’t done any cross-training, bar the odd bike ride and an occasional spot of yoga.  I’ve not spent enough time thinking about carbohydrates on the day so with no long training runs left I still don’t know if I and when I should be reaching for energy gels, or sweets, or isotonic drinks.  And whilst I’ve been quite virtuous in my abstinence from alcohol – unless I fancy a pint – and have cut out a lot of unhealthy food, I’ve still casually eaten a bag of Mini Eggs and an entire chorizo in the time it’s taken to write this.  That’s a little over 2,400 calories, meaning that I’ve probably got about an apple left of my recommended daily calorie intake.  And I’ve had a massive breakfast, and lunch, and an ice cream, and a bag of crisps, and a muffin, and an energy bar.  And it’s tea time.

Despite not being competitive about this sort of thing I feel like it’s taken me to the very end of my training to understand the point of a marathon, and having gone through the motions I wish I’d taken it more seriously earlier on.  I’d never admit this out loud but a sub-four hour finish should have been within my grasp, as it is I think I’ll come in at 4hr 45mins.  And that’s down to laziness as much as a lack of a competitive spirit, which is a ridiculous thing to realise when your Nike+ tells you that in the last four months you’ve run the distance from John O’Groats to Land’s End, then back to London.

 Ah well, it’s all learning.  Plenty to build on for the next one...