It was marvellous to meet Steve Cram once, at the Buckingham Fountain in Chicago before the marathon.
Then, a few weeks ago at the school Christmas production, Roger Black sat down only two seats in front of me.
‘Excuse me, you don’t know me, but…’
No, it wasn’t going to work, so I sat there silently and tried to remember.
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Posted in 2004, heroes, the marathon journey, training
It’s an unsatisfactory sort of place now, but once it must have been a pleasant hamlet beside the River Wey.
This oft-flooded piece of grazing land, named in the Domesday Book of 1086, now carries the name of Old Woking, dwarfed by the newer town to the north.
A Saxon monastery once stood here, but when the railway arrived in 1838, nine astonishing years after Stephenson’s Rocket had changed travel for ever, this was a blasted and empty heath. Woking Common was just a deserted staging post as the tracks grew to Southampton in the west and Portsmouth to the south. Continue reading
Posted in 2004, history, Surrey and Sussex, the marathon journey
Twice this week, I had company whilst running. On Monday, I ran with my boss.
No gentle outing this, perpetually waiting for the breathless old codger to catch up, for this boss is different. Different enough to have a 2:52 marathon PB.
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Posted in 2004, the marathon journey, training
Another week, and another long run, which this time I’ve scheduled from Crawley. Theoretically it’s possible to fit the miles around ring roads and residential streets, but although that type of running can make for an enjoyable sort of fartlek, I’ve a different kind of excursion in mind today.
The route I’ve planned crosses the suburban landscapes to Three Bridges, where I leave the sixties estates to pick up a cycle track along the Worth Way. Passing Worth church, in part built by the Saxons, my run heads across the M23 Brighton motorway and into the Sussex farmland beyond.
Just four miles into my outing, and I’m standing outside a smelly cowshed with green fields all around me, questioning my sanity. Twelve miles to go, and my legs should be feeling much better than this. But somehow they don’t, and I can see a struggle looming worryingly up ahead.
The track crosses the road to Turners Hill, scene of many an office outing to the Red Lion pub, to rejoin the course of the old railway, for the Worth Way follows the course of an old branch line. Continue reading
Posted in 2004, history, Surrey and Sussex, the marathon journey
If you drop a tennis ball into the Thames at Chiswick, the tidal nature of the river means that it will take three years to reach the sea, spending all that time coursing up and down The Tideway with the ebb and flow.
So says the display in the London Aquarium, where we’re spending a cold and draughty Saturday afternoon amongst the sharks and rays from waters far more tropical than those of the Thames outside.
It’s an interesting thought, this minutia of estuary dynamics, but one which vexed Victorian Londoners greatly, once condemning them to repeated reacquaintance with all of the effluent discharged into the river from the city.
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Three months to go, exactly. Time for some real action, some solid workouts. Routine five milers and run-walking twelves just won’t cut it now, won’t get me to The Embankment in April, let alone to the finish line on The Mall.
I’m back in Stratford-upon-Avon today, the town where I grew up. Scene of my most recent marathon tableau, a grateful and joyous homecoming for the local boy.
The meticulously planned, yet widely unexpected metamorphosis from boyhood wimpishness and utter athletic indistinction to the cool, calm and rakishly collected 3:59 marathon runner.
Well, it looked good on paper, and in my dream issue of the Stratford Herald too, but reality had kicked in somewhere amongst the mists of marathon’s dreaded mile 20. “Run a dream marathon for 20 miles, and suffer like hell for the next 6.2“, as Shakespeare himself would have put it, in describing probably 90% of all the marathons that have ever been run, anywhere, by anyone and everyone, except for Paula Radcliffe.
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Posted in 2004, Shakespeare Country, the marathon journey
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roads of stone 