TO love marathon running, there has to be something you seriously dislike about yourself.
Why else would you put yourself through all that? The exhaustive training, those lonely, early morning miles in the most inhospitable conditions, the injuries, the nipple abrasions. Oh, my days, the nipple abrasions.
One of many pointers along my own long road of losing the plot came when travelling on the Metro from the finishing line of the Paris event to my regular base in Neuilly-sur-Seine and chatting with a Moroccan man about the benefit of ice baths.
Lovely fellow, no doubt, but he spent half the conversation talking to my chest like an IT geek meeting Dolly Parton in a hotel lift. It was only a little later, peering with some longing into a cake shop window, that I realised my lucky orange vest was soaked in blood.
The French Gas Board had handed me a wristband as a freebie before the race. Friction took care of the rest. I, of course, had been too absorbed in mile-splits to notice.
Watching all those brave amateurs end their own little odysseys in New York on Sunday brought back such nostalgia. For a while, it made me wonder if I might fancy doing it again.
The day of the race is the loveliest part of it all, you see. In which other discipline can you compete in the same event as the best in the world? There was one stretch of the Brussels Marathon in which you could run downhill towards a turning point and admire those most graceful swans – the elite group banging out five-minute miles – within touching distance to your left.
Outwith that, you are surrounded by such uplifting examples of the human spirit. You rub shoulders with those whose lives have been ravaged by diseases, disfigurements and disasters, all united by a common goal. It is the ultimate feelgood experience.
Feeling good about yourself is what underpins much of this. Or, at least, feeling better.
Keeping fit through the odd 20-minute jog is one thing. Having a proper crack at marathons is something else entirely.
For starters, your body is not built to run 26 miles. To make raceday bearable, you must take on a four-month training regime that borders on lunacy and careers towards obsession.
Like many, I suspect, marathon running filled a void for me for a while. Six years spent finding out whether life was more tolerable without John Barleycorn as a travelling companion, to be frank.
There is no question that there was an element of self-flagellation involved in pounding out those miles in all conditions. Punishment for past misdemeanours, if you like. When high-jinks turn into hospitalisations, your outlook can become blacker than the richest stout.
There could be no respite. Hip damage sustained ahead of the Course du Soleil, a beautiful and hilly 13 miles along the coast from Nice to Monte Carlo, was overcome by injudicious use of co-dydramol.
When a former drinking chum, now an accomplished sub-three hour competitor, asked if I would introduce him to the sport, we ran together in Milan just two weeks after I had battered myself into submission on a motorway stretching from Marathon to Athens.
The discipline of training gave life a welcome structure. The solitude brought thinking space. The meditative aspects of running on dark winter mornings, the metronomic thump of heel on tarmac, calmed angry internal voices.
There is glory in repetition. The history of German electronic music tells you so.
Self-flagellation is not only about punishment. It also exists as a pathway to altered states.
Certainly, no substance shall replicate the euphoria, on my first marathon in Florence, of emerging from the darkness – literally and metaphorically - of Via Ricasoli at the 35km mark into the dazzling brilliance of a sunlit Piazza del Duomo.
At the risk of sounding like Jim Morrison talking about Indians in a car crash, there also remains something eerie and meaningful about the morning I found a dead deer on a normally busy dual carriageway.
Six am. Foggy and silent. I stopped to look at this splendid creature, still and lifeless. How short our time is and how silly to waste it by intentionally living in dark places. Silly, really, but a fair reflection of where my fragile, eggshell mind was at the time.
My target was always to qualify for Boston. I did that in San Sebastian, bettered my time in Paris and, even though I never did quite break three hours, was happy to end my marathon career with a Guinness in Mr Dooley’s after crossing the line on Boylston Street.
My gut, of course, is back to the size it was when playing darts for steak pies in the Miners’ Club and I am back looking at my gutties.
There might still be a leisurely 10k in me, but the days of The White Flash, toast of the International Road Racing Circuit, are over.
I am not angry enough at myself to do it any more. Proof, I suppose, that running, as a catalyst for all-round well-being, works.
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