The ‘Neolithic’ Marathon
One of the main fund raising events of the year for the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust is its annual 26 mile event from Avebury to Stonehenge. This is both a sponsored walk and a multi-terrain running race.
In 2003 my partner, Lynne and I walked the full distance. We were the first to start at about 6am and almost the last to finish but we had a very nice day strolling along through a variety of Wiltshire countryside. I was somewhat hampered by the fact that we had just returned from a walking holiday on the Isle of Man and whilst the airline had delivered us safely back to Bristol Airport it had seen fit to send my walking boots to Belfast instead. As all long distance runners will agree, you do need to be happy about your footwear. I found out that day what happens when you are not…
Shortly before the half-way point we began to be caught by the marathon runners; they had started several hours after us. Although I had run in races over the years, there was something about these madmen (and mad-ladies) that touched a nerve. I started to form a plan, which was that I would run in the marathon myself the next year.
The plan was not over-crowded with schemes to get fit in the preceding months. My records show me running the Slaughterford 9mile, (an excellent off-road mud-bath!) the Terminator (likewise, but 11 miles) and the London Half Marathon in the weeks before the big day. I continued to run in the hills around the University at Bath much as I had done for the previous twenty years, rather oblivious to fellow runners doing their weekend long runs to prepare for the London Marathon etc., and as for such technicalities as a ‘taper’… wassat? I also continued to enjoy such training aids as chips, long bicycle rides and freezing days in bird-watching hides. Still, with my malt & hop-derived muscle stimulant (aka beer), how can I go wrong?
On a rather misty May morning I find myself in the oddest bus queue of all time, all of Great Britain’s greatest eccentrics gathered together in one place and catching a bus from Stonehenge at dawn. We are taking advantage of the bus service which ferries runners (and walkers) from various finish points to their chosen point of starting. Obviously all the full marathon runners want to start in Avebury but to find their car waiting for them at Stonehenge. Most of the participants are just like me, but on our bus one runner stands out as somewhat more impressive. Together with his ‘buddy’ he is going to run 26 multi-terrain miles without the benefit of eyesight. I feel rather humble at that point!
The bus arrives in Avebury in very good time for the start and I am able to enjoy the normal good cheer which passes between competitors. To be fair this is the only time that I will see most of them.
Soon we are being hushed to hear the advice of the starter and the words of some dignitary who is probably saying what brave buffoons we all are; I can’t hear. On the other hand he may be telling us that his pit-bull terrier hasn’t been fed since Thursday and if we don’t leave Avebury immediately… Either way, we soon leave town and head out along the narrow road to the west and into a series of paths and tracks.
Upon reaching the main A4 we are hugely amused to discover half of the field approaching us from the opposite direction, so clearly some of the marshalling will be ‘iffy’! The road crossing at Beckhampton is well controlled though and we cross in safety and start along the path which will lead to the Marlborough Downs. This is a considerable climb which is mostly on field-edge tracks of the sort made ‘smooth’ by the passage of several dozen tractors each year. The top of this hill is the highest point in Wiltshire, Tan Hill at 294 metres, a climb of about 140m. from the start-line. Near the top, the ancient earthwork, Wansdyke is crossed, followed by a sharp drop and then a sharp climb to the hill-fort of Rybury Camp. There follows a tricky descent to the lane near All Cannings Cross. Here there are water and toilets, mostly for the benefit of the sponsored walkers.
The next section is a series of lowland tracks leading to the main street of All Cannings, a pretty thatched village where the villagers put on a feast of sausage sandwiches for the walkers. Next time I run I’ll carry money for one; it’ll be worth the time lost.
All Cannings is left behind as one plods through a not-very-nice quagmire caused by the route coinciding with the main commuter route for 200 Friesians. It doesn’t last for long though and there soon follows one of the few tarmac sections. It's nice easy running that feels madly fast after the off-road section. There’s some nice surfaced bridle-path and then a boggy section which includes a couple of stiles. At this point is something I have yet to encounter in any other running race. You cross a 125mph railway-line. “Stop, look and listen.” says the sign… Damned right you do!
More pleasant countryside passes and then suddenly the A342 is encountered. After this is crossed, the route is tarmac surfaced for nearly 2 miles. Don’t think this is some sort of holiday as in the distance can be seen Redhorn Hill, a 75 metre climb and a steep walk for most competitors.
At the top is a crowded area of tents and tea vans where most of the walkers will stop for a bite and a rest. Hard to drag myself past these attractions but apart from filling up my water bottle I don’t pause.
The route turns left here; ahead are army firing ranges. Our path is a shingle path of varying quality and often crowded with walkers and their dogs plus the vehicles of various participants all heading east in a voluntary one-way system. A place called Charlton Clumps is reached, the start of the half-marathon, and for us, the halfway point. There is a water station there and other ‘facilities’, plus the litter of 400 half-marathoners.
At times the road turns nasty and has a few climbs. These climbs seem visible from miles back so by the time you get to them, your resolve has melted away. However for every up there is a down and progress is made after all. One of the most significant climbs of the day comes after Casterley Camp, another Iron Age hill fort, at about 15 miles. The track climbs out of Water Dean Bottom. It’s an excuse for a walk for many. From the top of that climb though, the trend is generally downhill for the rest of the way to Wexland Farm where runners take a sharp right into the heart of the military training zone. The next four miles are, frankly, dull, very slightly uphill and quite featureless. At least along that section you can concentrate properly on the suffering. Eventually the junction with the old coach road appears though, where a left turn is made and a rather forlorn pub, the Bustard Inn, stands surrounded by a permanent caravan site and various military ‘street furniture’. Sadly the pub must be shunned on this occasion though I have been glad of its presence on many a cold winter’s day whilst cycling. Ahead of me I see Lynne, and her friend Debbie, walking in the sponsored walk from Redhorn Hill to Stonehenge. I can’t resist clowning and empty my water bottle over Lynne as I jog past.
The road becomes tarmac for a mile then the fast road to Larkhill is reached and the course takes to the grass track alongside. Soon a marshal sends us across the road and onto a private drive for a mile.
It is along this drive that a pile of very ancient rocks appears on the horizon for the first time and a grin replaces a grimace for the first time. The end is in sight. The last mile is an agony and an ecstasy and the last hundred yards a delirious dream. I achieve something for the first time in my life; I finish a marathon. Sitting down near the finish line I do something else for the first time in my life. I fall asleep in a public place. A marshal wakes me up to give me my finisher’s medal. I find the car and continue my snooze in the boot of the car.
The run has taken its toll. Somewhere at about the 18 mile point I had felt the pressure on my increasingly sore right foot ease off, accompanied by a damp feeling. A vast blister had burst. Both feet had suffered but the marathon has really exposed the weakness in my right foot and by the end I had lost three toe-nails. (To say I had lost them is a bit inaccurate. I knew precisely where they were – somewhere in my sock!)
With the benefit of hindsight I would have run in road shoes. I had run in off-road shoes, well suited to the Marlborough Downs section early in the race but hopelessly lacking in cushioning for the majority of the miles.
I took 4-22-35 to finish and a further 11 months to enter my next race, a doddle round the woods called the Chedworth Roman Trail.
The Neolithic is no place to be if you want to do a ‘personal best time’ and some aspects of it lack the polish of events run by experienced running clubs, but over the years it is improving. It remains one of my most cherished memories. I’m sure I will run in it again one day, hopefully soon.
Wednesday 24 February 2010
Friday 19 February 2010
Life before the Harriers
“There he is!” exclaimed my Dad, pointing to a grey smudge on the screen. It is the earliest recollection I have of the sport of running, the first time I realised that running wasn’t just something you did to get away from the psychotic kids at school. (I did a lot of running at that school.)
Dad’s friend Hugh, a fellow member of his cycling club, doubled as a runner when he wasn’t testing the local ale. He must have been quite good as we were watching him ‘on the telly’ in some event at Crystal Palace. Dad knew it was Hugh because a man called David Coleman had just read his name out, though how he could have told one runner from another I have no idea as it seemed that all the runners wore grey. Also the grass was grey, the sky was grey (It was south London in the sixties; what did you expect?) and the spectators were grey. These were the days of ‘black and white’ television, a misnomer if ever there was one – nothing on the TV was black or white just grey, and very, very fuzzy. A 405 lines TV makes the screen on the back of your mobile phone look like HD, just as if the picture had been painted by Turner on one of his gloomier days.
We’d only just got our first TV so it must have been about 1963. I still remember Dad tuning the thing and adjusting the aerial while I sat glued to the image of the ITV test-card and my dinner got increasingly cold. By the time he had a good picture the food was just about frigid.
The test-card in those days was a photograph of the Houses of Parliament, an omen if ever there was one. Little did I know that I would be limping pathetically through the same scene less than 43 years later, trying to look dignified despite being beaten hollow by four pantomime rhinos and about 60 eccentrics who had all had the same hilarious notion to run the London Marathon dressed as Sponge Bob Square Pants.
I say it was the same scene, but I was disappointed to discover in 2007 that the barrage balloons had been removed from around Parliament.
The TV came just in time for us to see such varied but earth changing events as JFK’s failure to duck in time in Dallas and also the baffling reports of one Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space. Presumably the cosmonauts had given up on their plan to fit Soyuz craft with a reverse gear. Maybe parking isn’t an issue when you are the only person up there. Much was made of this event, which followed the entry into space of the presumably bold but barking mad Yuri Gagarin who obviously hadn’t learned much from the fate of Laika, the first dog in space. On quiet nights in the Ukraine you can still hear him yipping as he passes over his kennel every 80 minutes. Obviously Yuri Gagarin paid extra and got the return ticket.
I can’t recall how Hugh got on in his televised running race but he wasn’t invited to run in the Tokyo Olympics with the big boys, so maybe not too good then. Or maybe the other runners were a bit suspicious of those odd shoes he ran in, the ones with the nails sticking out of the bottoms of them. Those shoes must have been popular on the bus to Crystal Palace …
Also in those early years I remember being taken to watch a race, ‘Cyclists versus Harriers’, which was held annually on common land on the North Downs. Such was the mud that most years the harriers would win. It was surprising what those spiked shoes could do to a bike tyre.
We moved to Westwood near Bradford on Avon in 1965. Handy, as I was able to start reccying the Over The Hills course even before the current organiser was born. At the same time I was given my first bicycle and I set about exploring the locality on blissfully traffic free roads. The main danger came from the local Royal Enfield factory which periodically sent out its maddest employees to test the products. It was perfectly normal to be overtaken by some nutter doing about 90 on a gleaming new motorcycle, just out on its maiden run before being fitted with boring stuff like brakes.
My new school was a bit of a shock. No longer necessary to dodge the scarier boys at playtime, my main run of the week was chasing the cows up to one end of the field so that we could have our weekly games lesson. This was football in a minefield of cow-pats.
I don’t know why we chased the cows off. If we’d let the cows stay we’d have had enough players for a decent game, and at least half of them would have been better players than me.
With a field like that, cricket wasn’t played at our school. (Besides, have you seen a Friesian catch a ball? – blooming hopeless!) By the time I got to Trowbridge High School in 1968 I had developed into one of those kids who gets picked last for teams. (I thought I was quite good holding out until the end each week!) I tolerated the team games stoically every week but when you aren’t very good you get nagged at a lot and I wasn’t keen to sample married life at 12.
Rugby was the best of the games I suffered; it seemed to involve lots of anarchic milling about and I could go all afternoon without holding the ball. Best of all was the look of pleasure on my Mum’s face when I went home with such clean kit. If I found myself in possession of the ball I found that the best course of action was to run like hell, especially as all those psychotic kids seemed to have found me at last and were hell-bent on flattening me.
Eventually the games teacher must have spotted that if I couldn’t play, at least I could run away. One of my school reports of the era says “Ian shows potential as a middle distance runner.” Of course no-one thought to mention this to me at the time. Maybe they knew that they couldn’t count on the Second XV to show up on race days to chase me round the 1500 metres.
We had a rather unusual road run which I used to actually enjoy, a circuit of about 4km. (The kilometre hadn’t actually been invented yet. We made do with miles) A group of us used to run the circuit against the clock and I made such good progress that by the time I was fifteen I had become almost feeble, and not many of us were that good!
Of course it wasn’t long before a new teacher spotted how much pleasure we derived from our running, so just to spur us on and make the whole experience more satisfying, he made us run the circuit bare-foot. Initially I was horrified, having visions of cuts and blisters and, even worse, having to walk like you do on the beach. You know; as if the Home Guard had sprinkled anti-personnel carpet tacks amongst the shingle. Surprisingly though, running barefoot was a doddle. It really didn’t hurt, and the savings in shoe leather have appealed to the economist in me to this day. Our times round the circuit were no slower, rising to the dizzy heights of ‘pathetic’ on a good day.
I don’t think I ran again until I was an apprentice and we were pressed into taking part in the Civil Service sports day. In those days I had ‘Wally’ tattoed across my forehead, or so it seemed, as I was deemed the most suitable lad to run the 5000 metres. I was fit as I had been riding a lot of bike races at the time. As a tactic I had learned that you need to be at the front around the first corner. This tactic is not as suitable for long running races. For a start, a race around an oval track is one long corner so my starting effort was a bit of a long one, but not having run for about three years left me vulnerable to the more experienced runners who started at the correct speed, ran the middle of the event at the correct speed and, more importantly, reached the finish line without a spell of lying down gasping. DNF.
When I started working at the university I was still obsessed with cycle-racing but gradually began to run with work-mates, running in our lunch-hour. (Another misnomer - lunch-hour!) The university is well placed for runners, with plenty of footpaths and tracks both on Claverton Down and in the surrounding countryside. Most runs require a climb back up to the campus and I soon realised that off-road running, preferably as hilly as possible, was a great aid to getting some sleep in the afternoons.
Then one fateful day we all entered a running race. It was organised by a club called ‘Chippenham Harriers’. I was doomed…
Dad’s friend Hugh, a fellow member of his cycling club, doubled as a runner when he wasn’t testing the local ale. He must have been quite good as we were watching him ‘on the telly’ in some event at Crystal Palace. Dad knew it was Hugh because a man called David Coleman had just read his name out, though how he could have told one runner from another I have no idea as it seemed that all the runners wore grey. Also the grass was grey, the sky was grey (It was south London in the sixties; what did you expect?) and the spectators were grey. These were the days of ‘black and white’ television, a misnomer if ever there was one – nothing on the TV was black or white just grey, and very, very fuzzy. A 405 lines TV makes the screen on the back of your mobile phone look like HD, just as if the picture had been painted by Turner on one of his gloomier days.
We’d only just got our first TV so it must have been about 1963. I still remember Dad tuning the thing and adjusting the aerial while I sat glued to the image of the ITV test-card and my dinner got increasingly cold. By the time he had a good picture the food was just about frigid.
The test-card in those days was a photograph of the Houses of Parliament, an omen if ever there was one. Little did I know that I would be limping pathetically through the same scene less than 43 years later, trying to look dignified despite being beaten hollow by four pantomime rhinos and about 60 eccentrics who had all had the same hilarious notion to run the London Marathon dressed as Sponge Bob Square Pants.
I say it was the same scene, but I was disappointed to discover in 2007 that the barrage balloons had been removed from around Parliament.
The TV came just in time for us to see such varied but earth changing events as JFK’s failure to duck in time in Dallas and also the baffling reports of one Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space. Presumably the cosmonauts had given up on their plan to fit Soyuz craft with a reverse gear. Maybe parking isn’t an issue when you are the only person up there. Much was made of this event, which followed the entry into space of the presumably bold but barking mad Yuri Gagarin who obviously hadn’t learned much from the fate of Laika, the first dog in space. On quiet nights in the Ukraine you can still hear him yipping as he passes over his kennel every 80 minutes. Obviously Yuri Gagarin paid extra and got the return ticket.
I can’t recall how Hugh got on in his televised running race but he wasn’t invited to run in the Tokyo Olympics with the big boys, so maybe not too good then. Or maybe the other runners were a bit suspicious of those odd shoes he ran in, the ones with the nails sticking out of the bottoms of them. Those shoes must have been popular on the bus to Crystal Palace …
Also in those early years I remember being taken to watch a race, ‘Cyclists versus Harriers’, which was held annually on common land on the North Downs. Such was the mud that most years the harriers would win. It was surprising what those spiked shoes could do to a bike tyre.
We moved to Westwood near Bradford on Avon in 1965. Handy, as I was able to start reccying the Over The Hills course even before the current organiser was born. At the same time I was given my first bicycle and I set about exploring the locality on blissfully traffic free roads. The main danger came from the local Royal Enfield factory which periodically sent out its maddest employees to test the products. It was perfectly normal to be overtaken by some nutter doing about 90 on a gleaming new motorcycle, just out on its maiden run before being fitted with boring stuff like brakes.
My new school was a bit of a shock. No longer necessary to dodge the scarier boys at playtime, my main run of the week was chasing the cows up to one end of the field so that we could have our weekly games lesson. This was football in a minefield of cow-pats.
I don’t know why we chased the cows off. If we’d let the cows stay we’d have had enough players for a decent game, and at least half of them would have been better players than me.
With a field like that, cricket wasn’t played at our school. (Besides, have you seen a Friesian catch a ball? – blooming hopeless!) By the time I got to Trowbridge High School in 1968 I had developed into one of those kids who gets picked last for teams. (I thought I was quite good holding out until the end each week!) I tolerated the team games stoically every week but when you aren’t very good you get nagged at a lot and I wasn’t keen to sample married life at 12.
Rugby was the best of the games I suffered; it seemed to involve lots of anarchic milling about and I could go all afternoon without holding the ball. Best of all was the look of pleasure on my Mum’s face when I went home with such clean kit. If I found myself in possession of the ball I found that the best course of action was to run like hell, especially as all those psychotic kids seemed to have found me at last and were hell-bent on flattening me.
Eventually the games teacher must have spotted that if I couldn’t play, at least I could run away. One of my school reports of the era says “Ian shows potential as a middle distance runner.” Of course no-one thought to mention this to me at the time. Maybe they knew that they couldn’t count on the Second XV to show up on race days to chase me round the 1500 metres.
We had a rather unusual road run which I used to actually enjoy, a circuit of about 4km. (The kilometre hadn’t actually been invented yet. We made do with miles) A group of us used to run the circuit against the clock and I made such good progress that by the time I was fifteen I had become almost feeble, and not many of us were that good!
Of course it wasn’t long before a new teacher spotted how much pleasure we derived from our running, so just to spur us on and make the whole experience more satisfying, he made us run the circuit bare-foot. Initially I was horrified, having visions of cuts and blisters and, even worse, having to walk like you do on the beach. You know; as if the Home Guard had sprinkled anti-personnel carpet tacks amongst the shingle. Surprisingly though, running barefoot was a doddle. It really didn’t hurt, and the savings in shoe leather have appealed to the economist in me to this day. Our times round the circuit were no slower, rising to the dizzy heights of ‘pathetic’ on a good day.
I don’t think I ran again until I was an apprentice and we were pressed into taking part in the Civil Service sports day. In those days I had ‘Wally’ tattoed across my forehead, or so it seemed, as I was deemed the most suitable lad to run the 5000 metres. I was fit as I had been riding a lot of bike races at the time. As a tactic I had learned that you need to be at the front around the first corner. This tactic is not as suitable for long running races. For a start, a race around an oval track is one long corner so my starting effort was a bit of a long one, but not having run for about three years left me vulnerable to the more experienced runners who started at the correct speed, ran the middle of the event at the correct speed and, more importantly, reached the finish line without a spell of lying down gasping. DNF.
When I started working at the university I was still obsessed with cycle-racing but gradually began to run with work-mates, running in our lunch-hour. (Another misnomer - lunch-hour!) The university is well placed for runners, with plenty of footpaths and tracks both on Claverton Down and in the surrounding countryside. Most runs require a climb back up to the campus and I soon realised that off-road running, preferably as hilly as possible, was a great aid to getting some sleep in the afternoons.
Then one fateful day we all entered a running race. It was organised by a club called ‘Chippenham Harriers’. I was doomed…
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