The One that Got Away…
It had to happen – after several near misses, I finally missed a marathon (Richmond Park). The background to the failure is sufficiently convoluted for me to assume that this one was just not meant to be…
For the eighth time in 2015 I had misplaced my debit card (something the clerk at HSBC thought worthy of comment – briefly scratching at the surface of the reasons – before realising this was a thread at which no one should pull unless prepared for a visit to the darkness). This in itself did not present an insurmountable problem, since with a passport and a smile, there’s little in life which one cannot procure – including cash without a cash card. On Friday lunchtime, I duly loaded up with enough cash for a train ticket to Reading (plus a contingency buffer).
The plan had been to travel to Reading on Saturday morning for a restful day in the capital before the marathon but like all the best laid plans, it was put aside when the (possibly) once in a lifetime offer of a match at Nottingham Forest’s ground presented itself. The decision to accept this offer soon became worthwhile when I scored the opening goal of the game in front of the packed (empty) Trent End at the City Ground (that is a fact which can stand unopposed and history need not dwell on the standard of the players on either team, including the author). Our team went on to comfortably win the game, forcing us to indulge in a couple of post-match drinks in the May sunshine. This was all fine, as I remained a man with finance and a plan – the 19:55 train to Reading. Alas, despite making the station comfortably in time for this train, it turned out that the afternoon drinks had pushed my cash holdings three pounds under the cost of a single ticket. Fortunately, my brain was still razor sharp at this point, and I remembered that a train ticket acquired through work to London, which I had used the previous week, had never been through a machine, nor checked, so I could use that. The slight wrinkle was that it was in the office, although that was still workable, since the first train on Sunday morning (6:30am) would still get me to the capital in time to make the race. So I determined to enjoy a few more drinks with two of the football boys, all of which ended helpfully early when we were (separately) asked to leave a birthday party we had gatecrashed. The enforced early night meant that I was able to respond to the 5am alarm and make it to the office to collect the unusued train ticket which was the key to the day. I was cutting things fine and took the decision to prop my flat door open with a football boot when I couldn’t find the keys. Bearing in mind I wasn’t due back to the building for the best part of 15 hours this was slightly reckless, although, given the paucity of possessions in my flat, I reasoned that I was more likely to get a donation than robbed…Anyway, said ticket was indeed in my drawer, but had expired three days previously, meaning that my early start had been fruitless. Worse news was that, although I had propped the flat door open, the building door was locked and I was forced to sleep on the floor in the car park for three hours until someone finally left the premises and I could get back into the flat, where I spent most of the day feeling sorry for myself at the number of aches of pains the football had caused…
Going round the bend (about 1,820 times)…
“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward” (Martin Luther King Jr)
The preparation for what promised to be possibly the most gruelling challenge of my life could scarcely have been worse. A working week which started fairly sedately took a dramatic turn for the hectic, sparked by a conference call at 8am on Wednesday morning. From that point, I worked until 12:30am on the Thursday, before getting up at 5am for a 6:30 train to London, where I worked in our London office until 10:30pm before getting the last train back to Nottingham, which arrived at 1:30am. I managed two hours of hugely interrupted sleep on the train (mostly disturbed by my fat head banging on the window as the train jolted) before heading directly to the Nottingham office, where I worked until 5am before running home for one hour’s sleep, before running back to work for 7am and working until 8:30pm on Friday night. From there I headed back up to the parents’ in Derbyshire and managed a half decent seven hours or so of sleep before getting up to head for the event in Preston…
Just before getting onto the challenge itself, I made a very exciting discovery for men across the world. Some have never found it, some rarely so, but I can confirm that the elusive, some say mythical, Clitheroe(™) is actually just off junction 31 of the M6 (no wonder that motorway is always so busy). Onto the event…
The Foxton 24 was the inaugural running of a challenge which involved running as far as possible around the athletics track at the University of Central Lancashire in a period of 24 hours. What one did in those 24 hours was entirely up to each individual entrant but the convivial event organiser, Stanley Jewell (biography at http://www.thefoxton24.org/brief-history-stanley-jewell/), seemed slightly surprised when I confirmed that I had turned up with neither a ‘support team’ nor a tent. This caused a brief moment of doubt in my mind, but I buried it with all my other doubts in a little place I like to call ‘denial’ (that particular box is becoming somewhat full). What was of slightly more concern, as I lined up with my 18 fellow competitors, is that I had absolutely no game plan. What I did know is that I was wearing some shiny new illuminous yellow trainers (from Mike Ashley’s wacky warehouse), which made me feel FAST. I therefore found myself starting out at a decent marathon pace, whilst the rest of the field was taking it somewhat more steadily and several of them asked me if I knew what I was doing as I repeatedly lapped the entire field (I had absolutely no idea what I was doing was the answer). Just after the expiry of each hour, Stanley would come out onto the track and update a board with current standings. At the end of hour one, I was three laps up, and this lead continued to extend over the next few hours, which I guessed was a good and bad thing. By mid-afternoon, it was a glorious May day, unless one was involved in a 24 hour running event, in which case it was a worryingly warm May afternoon. Unperturbed, I continued on my merry way, chalking off a marathon in well under four hours and 50 kilometres in 4 hours 30 minutes. By now I was over 10 laps up. The one lady who was now some way behind but running at a similar pace to me had her husband as her support crew. He was sat behind a table laden with energy shots, drinks and various other items and every lap she would shout instructions at him about requirements for the next lap – “Phil, pepsi shot and gel, next lap”. I was nearby when poor old Phil got it wrong – or wasn’t ready – on a couple of occasions and he got whatever item he had wrongfully handed over to her thrown at him, along with a colourful dressing down from his loving wife. I would personally consider it way beyond the call of duty to sit and support surely one of the least spectator friendly events ever conceived of – watching a handful of idiots destroy themselves, very slowly, over the course of a day. Poor Phil…
I clocked up my 100th kilometre after just over ten hours and was still making decent progress – having extended my lead to over 25 laps – prompting the following comments from two different spectators (both clearly maniacs, but which I thoroughly enjoyed and may have turned into t-shirts):
- “He hasn’t got a heart, this man – he has an engine…”
- “It’s not a person, it’s a superhuman thing…”
Sadly, fast forward a couple of hours and the engine had almost completely broken down and the superhuman had become a subhuman…
Neither boredom nor fatigue had played much of a part up until midnight on the Saturday, helped by the fact that I had obtained some sort of cult status amongst the scouts, who were manning the food/drink station and would applaud wildly each time I finished a lap. At one point a number of them even joined me to run a lap – causing me to feel a bit like a modern day Pied Piper of Hamlin – before their grumpy scout leader ordered them off the track. However, as midnight gave way to the small hours, a number of spectators retreated to their tents, as did a number of runners, and it became a lonely trot around the track with the handful of others who had decided to press on into the night. The main thing which kept me going during this period was that a spectator (he of quote one above), decided that I was to become his personal project and he would shout encouragement and advice to me each time I passed. The one slight problem was that he for some reason thought I was called Nigel, and I failed to correct him the first time that I realised this was the case. It caused some confusion amongst my fellow runners – who knew me as Nick (which is my name) – that a man was shouting “That’s it Nigel – steady pace to the end and you’ve got this”; “Come on Nigel!”; “Nigel – you’ve still 11 hours to go, slow down…” Anyway, it helped pass a few hours…
By 4am, a steady drizzle had set in and I was tired to the point of near collapse. I decided that a short lay down in the medical tent was in order, and gave the young girls marshalling the tent strict instructions that in no circumstances were they to let me sleep for more than 10 minutes. When they nudged me after what felt like seconds, I snoozed them and asked for another wake up call in five minutes. This time, I knew that if I didn’t get up, it may well be that I would not be setting foot on the track again, a reality borne out by the fact that I could barely even roll off the bed even after such a short break, such was the stiffness in my legs. I had also noticed a few blisters, which appeared to have come and gone if the now red colouring of my fancy shoes was anything to go by…
The next few hours were amongst the most miserable of my life as I trudged my destroyed body around and around the track through relentless. For a few laps of this I would let the tears flow for 300 metres of each lap, before composing myself at the refreshment station, as I couldn’t possibly have my totally misplaced hero status questioned. My ‘coach/cheerleader’ had retied to his tent shortly before my own brief lie down so it was timely that another saviour arrived around this time. It was a guy who had recently broken the world record for running on a treadmill – he managed 100 miles in 24 hours – and he had come down to help motivate we hardy fools (one of the field having done the same for him during his challenge). Everything in my body was by now suggesting that sitting down was the only sensible thing to do, but the treadmill man’s enthusiasm was infectious and he dragged me round a few laps in half decent times, against every instinct in my body. By now my targets for the day had been downgraded multiple times and I had settled on a definitive target – SURVIVAL. Nothing else mattered. Despite this new aim, I did take something from being the first runner in the event to clock up 100 miles. This coincided with the availability of a bacon and egg sandwich, making it THE BEST BACON AND EGG SANDWICH I HAVE (OR WILL) EVER EAT. I took the opportunity to sit down and enjoy the sandwich and it transpired that wearing a non-waterproof top from Primark (thanks to all my sponsors by the way – Primark; JD Wetherspoons; Febreze; Boots Paracetamol Extra) throughout a damp night had resulted in me uncontrollably shivering and apparently “looking like you’re about to pass out”. I was soon wrapped in a foil cloak and ushered into a wooden hut where I was ordered to sit by a heater for half an hour, whilst fellow competitors rustled up some dry kit for me to finish the remaining three hours of the race. To be honest, I would have been fairly content to stay sat by that heater, but once I had dried out I back out onto the track, where I was scarcely able to muster more than a shuffle for the majority of the time, despite my mentor yelling “Nigel – you can do better than that. Get bloody running!” (It later transpired that this gentleman is some sort of Irish record holder for endurance running and I was very grateful for his encouragement)
Thanks to my earlier work, and deterioration throughout all runners (who were now almost exclusively walkers), I knew by now that I was going to win the event (as with the football above, we won’t dwell on the calibre of the field, although I can legitimately say that it included multiple ultra winners and national and world record holders) and despite agony in every part of my legs, and strips of blisters on the balls of both feet, I mustered some decent pace for the last few laps, which I felt was only befitting for the winner of a race. I regretted this act of vanity almost immediately and the relief of the airhorn, which signalled the end of the race, is impossible to overemphasise as it meant the end of a 24-hour journey I would not wish on anyone (http://multidays.com/foxton-24-hour-2015-updates-results/)…
A short while after the finish, all of the competitors retrenched to a nearby sportshall for the presentation ceremony. My prizes for winning (having completed 178.5km/110.9 miles/455 laps/4.23 marathons/burnt over 16,000 calories) were a bottle of La Cantera red wine (£8.49 a bottle from Laithwaite’s Wines (online)) and a £30 Tesco voucher (£1.25 per hour), which fully justified my efforts and the fact that I could by now barely walk. The sad epilogue to this generally happy tale was the look on my mother’s face (on her birthday weekend no less), when I fell out of her car and pretty much had to crawl to get into my family home (reminiscent of the look on her face when I walked sideways down the hill into Robin Hood’s Bay at the end of the coast to coast challenge nearly four years ago). Deja-vu indeed…
And we don't stop, cos we can't stop... 