Remarkable Possibilities
With apologies to Emil Zatopek, if you want to experience life, you should not run a marathon; you should pay a 4am visit to the Streatley aid station at mile 71 of the Thames Path 100 ultramarathon. Runners refuelling with soup, coffee and baked beans. Volunteers fetching and carrying, to ease the runners’ burden. Runners arriving purposefully and leaving hopefully. Volunteers recording arrivals and urging departures. Runners sat unmoving, staring into nothing, their race cut short by mental and physical fatigue. Volunteers and fellow runners probing motivation and seeking the trigger to get a runner’s race back on track. Runners seeing months of preparation negated by 18 hours on the move. Volunteers consoling those whose dream of a finisher’s buckle has ended, at least for now. Runners seeing months of preparation validated by a confident departure into the approaching dawn and a mere 29 more miles to Oxford. All the world – or at least all the runner’s world – is there for people to see.
When I arrived at Streatley – a small Berkshire village that happens to be where the Thames Path and the Ridgeway intersect – I was on a high. On another occasion, I might have called this a
runner’s high, but truth be told it was mostly an Anadin Ultra high. Four miles and an hour earlier, I had reached my low point in the race. I’d arrived at the 67 mile aid station at Whitchurch feeling nauseous and exhausted. I sat in the first available chair, weakly refusing offers of food and water. I’d left Reading, at 59 miles, in good spirits, and with plenty of energy. For a few miles, I’d clocked up some speedy miles, overtaking many other runners. Then I had come down with a crash – a metaphorical energy crash. There’s a bridge over the railway on the outskirts of Reading that requires lots of climbing and descending steps. Those steps took all the bounce out of my legs. It’s followed by a rollercoaster ride of ascent and descent through a seventies housing estate. By the time I got out of that suburban hell, my stomach was vetoing all running. Unlike many others on the Thames Path that day, I didn’t actually vomit, but only because I slowed to a virtual crawl. This in the dark of night, sixteen hours in to a non-stop foot race. Among the runners at this year’s TP100 was Bryon Powell, author of ultra-running bible, Relentless Forward Progress. The title was apt. For four miles to Whitchurch, I simply put one foot in front of the other, persuading myself that with every step I was measurably closer to my goal.
I don’t have a great memory for the people I meet during a race. Some people can remember the names of all those they meet, but I struggle to do so. My memories are impressions. Two women in luminous running tights. A man who dropped his folded up paper with aid-station cut-off times (he received it gratefully when I jogged up to him to hand it back). The man who didn’t recognise Windsor Castle. The comic member of the public in Oxford who said roadworks meant there was a seven mile detour. At Whitchurch there was a runner dressed in green there before me, who looked very much worse for wear. When he asked me if I was OK, I knew I must look bad, because he looked terrible. I would not have put a fiver on him completing the race from there. I was feeling too sorry for myself to offer him any encouragement, but when he staggered out of the door, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had turned the wrong way, or got no further than the end of the street. A day after the race was over, I saw online that a genius volunteer at Whitchurch had been running a time-lapse camera. I’d actually seen it when there, but my befuddled brain had not registered its purpose. But it meant I could see myself slumped on a chair at 3am. I could see the mystery man in green, identify him from his number, then look for him in the results to see if he did actually finish. It turns out he did. Sixteen minutes inside the cut-off time; the penultimate finisher of the event. Which meant it took him a little under 11 hours to complete the last 34 miles of the race. The ultrarunner’s death march.
When I saw that the man in green had completed the race – something 29% of the starters did not do – I realised that not only had I misjudged him, I’d made a fundamental perceptual error. The fact is, appearances of physical and actual mental well-being are not strongly correlated mid-way through an ultra-marathon. The man in green at Whitchurch looked physically spent, but he clearly had a reservoir of mental strength he had not yet depleted. By contrast, the runner I later sat down next to at Streatley had spent all his mental reserves. Physically, he looked fine, but his mind would not let him get out of that chair and back out onto the path to Oxford. For each of my attempts to urge him on, he had another reason not to move: the hills had hurt; he was damaging his body; there was too far to go; it hurt too much to run. All these things were true for me too. But somehow, like others who hauled themselves out of that all-too-comfortable aid station, I had managed to retain a hold of a deeper truth: regardless of hills and pain, regardless of nausea and fatigue, I was getting out of that chair, leaving that aid station, and getting back on the path. I had my mantras in my pocket: Breathe! Stride! Smile! Think of something else! I had my reasons why I could succeed in another pocket: you are fit, you are light, you are well trained, you are healthy, you are loved, etc. I even had a card in my Streatley drop-bag, tucked in with my dry shirt to change into. That card simply said: Don’t think about how you feel now. Think about how you’ll feel tomorrow. You can do this! I didn’t even need to look at it. There was no way I was not going to finish this race from there.
As soon as I had changed my top, spoken to a few runners, swapped new batteries in my drop bag for old batteries in my head torch, got a word of encouragement from race director James Elson, and eaten something hot, I was out of the door. The something hot was half a cup of what I guess was chicken and vegetable cup-a-soup. After thirty or more miles into a running race, small things take on great significance, and things one would otherwise take for granted, or even spurn as unworthy, give great pleasure. A piece of pineapple at Wallingford. Changing into fresh socks at Henley. A piece of Jack Daniels fudge at Abingdon (OK, three pieces!). All these things lifted my spirits out of all proportion to their everyday significance. So it was with my Streatley soup. If cup-a-soup marketing executives ever want ringing endorsements from satisfied customers, they need only stick a microphone in the face of runners at early morning aid stations on 100 mile ultras. That soup was the best I’d ever tasted in my life, and I made my pleasure known in no uncertain terms to the volunteer who had lovingly prepared it (pour contents of packet in cup, add hot water and stir), and she humoured me indulgently. (I’ve said elsewhere about how fantastic Centurion volunteers are, but I’ll say it again here: really fantastic!)
Soup drunk, I was back out on the trail, running into (though technically away from) a new dawn. I had been told that sunrise would bring with it a new burst of energy. I guess it did, but I wasn’t really in need of it. There had been some points, running in the dark on a narrow path directly next to a drop into the river, when I had needed to remind myself not to drift off into a perambulatory sleep, but for the most part, I had not felt at all sleep deprived. You can’t bank sleep before an all-night run, but if you start well rested, it seems cola, coffee and adrenaline will fend off drowsiness for as long as necessary.
Because I had been preparing for this race for several months, the idea of running 100 miles had become normalised for me. It may not be what other people do, but it was what I did. It had stopped feeling weird. But there were times when that mask slipped. One of those was when my watch showed 26 miles left to go, and the thought “nearly there, only a marathon left to run” went through my mind. If I think a marathon – what many people see as an unachievably long distance – is not far to go, then maybe I am – or what I do is – a little out of the ordinary.
Despite all the preparation, it’s really not possible to know exactly what to expect during a 100 mile race, particularly if it is one’s first, as this was mine. It’s impossible to know how one will feel at 3am, with 65 miles in your legs and after 17 hours on your feet. It’s impossible to know how far or how fast one will be able to move. It’s important to have a plan, but equally important to know the plan will require adaptation pretty much from the first mile onwards.
I had set off from Richmond with a club-mate, with no particular expectation about how far we would run together. It turned out we ran almost the entire race together. We provided each other with company – sometimes chatting, sometimes running in amiable silence – for nearly two thirds of the race. Then she supported me through my low patch between Reading and Whitchurch, not letting me slide into negative thinking. Her own low patch started around 80 miles in, before the Clifton aid station. Fatigue set in, and she found it hard to move beyond the pace of a brisk walk. Now it was my turn to support her, reassuring her repeatedly that she was moving quickly enough easily to beat any cut-offs. Easy for me to say, who felt relatively full of running; less easy for her to believe. It wasn’t until we were past the final aid station at Radley, four miles from the end, that I was confident that she was confident she would finish well within the cut-off, and I could leave her to her own devices. She only had to keep moving forwards to be assured of a buckle, and I knew she had the pure determination to do that.
We’d been overtaken by a few people, but were still moving faster than most people remaining out on the course, having gained more than 70 places since the half way point. By then I wanted nothing so much as to see the finish, and walking was more painful for me than running. So off I ran, re-passing a few of the people who had passed us in the previous few miles, and feeling remarkably sprightly as I dodged tourists and students out for Sunday strolls. Some paid no mind to the bedraggled runners in their midst. Others saw our Thames Path 100 bibs and gave knowing looks of what I imagined was awe and respect, but was most likely incredulity.
Unlike the South Downs Way 50 a few weeks previously, there was no final 400m lap of honour at the end, just a right angle turn off the Thames Path and a hundred yards across a grassy field towards a pavilion, with earlier finishers, supporters and Centurion crew clapping and cheering one across the line. When I finished, and pressed stop on my Garmin for the first time since the previous morning, I felt relief and I felt joy. But I did not feel the overpowering elation which part of me had imagined this accomplishment should merit. I was happy, but I wasn’t ecstatic. I felt calm and fulfilled, rather than overjoyed. It took me a couple of days to work out why.
At first I thought it was because I was disappointed with my time. 26 hours and 31 minutes was well within the cut-off time, but well outside the Plan A 24 hours I had in my mind at the start. I knew, and know, that in other circumstances, I could have run the final 20 miles much more quickly. Running was actually easier than walking, and I felt if not full of running then perfectly able to continue running when I crossed the line. I will likely have to run another 100 miler to prove this to myself. But that wasn’t the reason for relative disappointment. I was perfectly happy that I had run my best race, supporting when necessary the person who had supported me when I needed it. If she hadn’t been there, perhaps I would have dropped at Whitchurch. I don’t know. There is no point second guessing such things.
No, I believe the real reason I was merely happy and not elated was that I had ceased to countenance any other contingency. I may not have known it, but by the time I toed the start line, I had convinced myself that I would finish. I had banished doubts, and replaced them with rock solid self-belief. My preparation had gone well. I had visualised many scenarios and how I would deal with them. I had anticipated difficulties and how I would overcome them. As early as 40 miles in, I had overtaken a runner who let it be known he was planning to drop at the next aid station. At that point, the day was bright, the sun was out, and all was well in my world. He was running, I was running. Second by second, step by step, Oxford was getting closer. But he had already decided to drop. I couldn’t understand why he was quitting, and I didn’t want to. As much as the ultra-running community is a supportive one, I wanted to get away from him as fast as possible. There was no room in my mind even to hear his reasons for quitting. I wasn’t going to quit, and I didn’t want to jeopardise that by listening to the negative thoughts of others. I ran on ahead, and didn’t look back.
So when I crossed the finish line, I was conflicted. On the one hand, I knew I had achieved something out of the ordinary. Of 297 starters, 209 finished. I was 166th. In six years, fewer than a thousand people have completed the Thames Path 100, and I’m one of them. On the other hand, I had known, as much as one can know anything – that is, with a 99.99% belief – from before I started running on Saturday morning, that I would finish. I had prepared. I had belief
in myself. Preparation and belief had made sure that for me, it was my new ordinary. With preparation and self-belief, remarkable things can be achieved.
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