At just past seven on the big day, coming down the hill towards Hampstead Tube station, I am alone, an urban widdle rolling down towards a greater flood. The sleepy station guard lets me through and wishes me luck. Down on the platform there are two or three others carrying their plastic marathon kit bags and looking around them.
Then we join several dozen more as the train pulls in, and hundreds more join us at Camden Town and Euston. By the time we get to Charing Cross station we are a minor river. Just south of Greenwich Park, arriving at the start positions, we number 35,000 — a torrent that now seems (as evidenced by the long, long queues for the portable toilets) to need to produce more streams.
How many more resolutions are there here? Not everyone is changing their worlds, as I am. There are sinewy, older runners who have been out in the rain and snow and sun for years and look as if they could maintain an even pace between Earth and the Moon. There are running couples, who obviously do this sort of thing most weekends as others go caravanning or to dog shows. But there are many, many first-timers here, too, for whom all this is new — the balloons, the starting arch, the stretchy rituals of the pre-run. Many of them, I guess, decided months ago to do something utterly different and — now it’s upon us — pretty frightening.
I have always been something of a weed. And, latterly, a fat weed, if such a thing exists in nature. Only briefly, playing rugby at school, was I a contender in the physical world (apart, of course, from my exceptional talents in the boudoir arts). On April 23, 2005 I was on beta-blockers, well over 18 stone (114kg), and felt as fresh and vital as a Stilton. Then I went to the Pritikin Institute in Florida, learnt to eat properly, to take exercise, lost that essential first stone in a fortnight and threw away the pills.
The second part was what happened after the Anthony Nolan Trust asked me, on reading about Pritikin, to run the London Marathon for them. I mean, they had to be joking, didn’t they? Ludicrously, I agreed. The trust is based next to the Royal Free Hospital, which is just down the road from where I live. I remembered the case of the boy with leukaemia who so badly needed a bone marrow transplant, and the actions of his extraordinary, truly extraordinary, mother, Shirley Nolan, in setting up a charity designed to create a bone marrow donor registry so that matches could sometimes be found.
Confidence breeds confidence. That’s the thing. I ran three miles and that was hard, and then five and that was as hard, and then seven. Last Christmas, as part of its Change One Thing campaign, Body&Soul made me an appointment with Steve Black, the renowned sports motivation coach, and he set me some programmes and gave me advice that proved to be crucial. I was stuck at seven or so hilly miles, and to run the big race I needed to double and treble my distances. Two steps forward, one step back, said Blackie. Seven miles, six miles and then eight. Eight miles, seven miles and then nine. You’ll always find yourself, over a period, going forward.
I had some injuries, some problems with running shoes (I have arches so high, apparently, that you could mount processions under them), and tightnesses and stiffnesses in every possible leg muscle. But the seven became ten and I ran a half-marathon in just over two hours, and then 20 gruelling miles on the Thames Path. My general fitness was transformed. I had puff, and lots of it, for running for buses, or up escalators, or anything you care to mention. I was in better nick at 51 than I had been at 31.
Marathon day approached and people asked what my goal was. The truth was that I had a declared target and a secret one. The declared one “is just to finish, darling, that’s enough for me. Running just about all the way, if I can. That’ll be fine.” And the undeclared target? We’ll come to that. So there I am, in the light drizzle of a Sunday morning, standing with the people who I will be keeping strenuous company with for the next few hours. I stand near the back, as befits my neophyte status; even so, by 9.47am I am through the gate and heading for Woolwich, surrounded by my new comrades.
The marathon is very moving. After a couple of miles I pass a man whose T-shirt commemorates his wife of many years, who died just one week ago, 16.04.06. I cannot stop myself putting an arm across this stranger’s shoulders, and far from flinching he just says: “God bless you.” God bless me? If I believed in Him, I’d think He had. There are friends of 7/7 victims running, relatives of those who have died of cancer, sons who have lost mothers. At just after six miles, by the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, the support of the crowd and the emotions of the day come together, and tears fill my eyes. Part of the common river, all of us, vulnerable, needing love and sometimes able to give it.
Funny, too. The wedding couple running towards Tower Bridge in full regalia, their hour come round at last. The weird costumes (though I did object to being overtaken by Scooby-Doo). The early, underpopulated stages in which men took unembarrassed roadside leaks at every bush. The banter. For the first ten miles I drank all this in; the roadside kids with their hands out for runners to touch, as though offering cures from the king’s evil. The pubs with bands outside. The people saying such wonderful things to us. Go on. You can do it.
We’re on Tower Bridge and then across it in nearly no time. It’s halfway and I can articulate my secret desire: I really want to do this in under 4 hours 30. To run an average of a mile every ten minutes will mean over 26.2 miles a time of 4 hours 22 or so. At halfway I am nearly five minutes ahead of that average, so I have 13 minutes to play with. I can, maybe, do it, if I don’t stop, don’t get injured, don’t slow up too much. But now, as we head into Docklands, I’m scanning every little niggle. Is that an incipient stitch (if so, stamp foot on the opposite side)? There’s the unmistakeable tickle of an early blister in my right instep.
Briefly, I find myself next to Professor Alejandro Madrigal, the scientific director of the Anthony Nolan Trust, with whom I’d had a fascinating lunch a month earlier, and who had talked about the research carried out by the trust to find a vaccine for chronic myeloid leukaemia. We shook hands, wearily, and lost each other again. The trust needs money, of course, but it also needs people to join the register, people who are required just to have a blood test and then to be on standby in case they are the best possible match for someone who might otherwise die. Someone to be mourned on the back of another T-shirt, perhaps.
Sixteen miles, into the Isle of Dogs. Towards the building nicknamed “The Gherkin”. Away from the Gherkin, as the route meanders. Thank God for the kind people with Starburst sweets.
Less than nine miles to go. The maths, the maths. I’m still on course, but my pace has dropped. And it’s now that my brain becomes treacherous. Maybe I can’t carry on running — plenty are walking now. Just a few minutes strolling maybe? Nooooo! Vade retro, Satanas! I feel myself shutting down from what is around me and becoming inwardly focused. Out of Docklands, back towards the City and the home run. Seven miles is less than my weekend run, I tell myself; 3.8 miles is the length of my twice-weekly short runs. This is the London Marathon and I must just keep going, despite the desire to stop. I have nothing left, though, and I’ve lost eight minutes of my time in hand.
On the Embankment I’m hanging on like grim death. I can’t make sense of the maths. I can’t look around me too much, but there’s a tenacity I didn’t think I had. I am still going. Big Ben. 800m; 600; 400; 200. The slowest 800m ever, but the green and yellow finish arches are in view, and I’m over! 4.24.12. Better than my best hopes; it can’t have been me! The woman who gives me my medal seems utterly unsurprised when I kiss her on both cheeks.
Kiss her for the brilliance of the organisation of the marathon, for being there, for giving me this.
Postscript One minute after the race ended I could hardly move, and told myself that I could never do this again, for all that I felt elated and proud. Half-marathons, no problem, but could I really be that mentally tough a second time? Five days on and, like a happy mum, I’ve forgotten the agony. Could I possibly, if I trained really hard, manage to . . ? Better not say it, better to reflect on the fact that, a year ago I could hardly run a bath and now I think half-marathons are a doddle.
To join the Anthony Nolan register or to make a donation, visit www.anthonynolan.org.uk
