Taking a breather before the agony of race day

Lean times: David Cohen’s long-suffering wife Pam can’t hide her disapproval at taking second place to our man’s schedule

David Cohen, Investigations & Campaigns Editor @cohenstandard

20 April 2012

All around the capital, there are thousands of ordinary Londoners who have had one date imprinted on their mind like a tattoo for the last three months.

This day, circled in red on their desk diaries and wall calendars, is the culmination of more than 16 weeks of sadomasochistic self-sacrifice. And it is now upon us. Looming large.

This Sunday, April 22 at 9.45am, around 40,000 athletes — yes, we have earned that title — will line up at the start in Blackheath for the 2012 Virgin London Marathon, and for many, like myself, running to raise money for the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund, it will be our first London Marathon.

For me, this final week has been an anxious and discombobulating affair. Instead of my normal structured training routine — which has seen me running four times a week since late-December to cover 345 miles, the equivalent of running from London to Glasgow — I find myself at a loose end.

My work colleague Matthew Beard, a veteran of several London Marathons, says that in the final week “you can only run too much”.

Even the official Virgin London Marathon magazine advises us: “All the hard work is done. The miles are in the bank. Try to rest. Save your energy!”

But the result is that I suddenly have no idea what to do with myself. Into this limbo intrudes the worry that I will catch a cold or flu that will put my marathon in jeopardy.

This morning I awoke with a sniffle and immediately downed a glass of powdered vitamin C and some drops of herbal remedy echinacea.

The wait for Sunday is turning me into a hypochondriac where every ache is magnified.

The advice from my personal trainers at the Hampstead gym of Matt Roberts — where I have been working on strengthening my gluteus maximus (weak bum) once a week for the last two months — is to “keep stretching so that you arrive at the start with your muscles relaxed”.

The thing you notice about personal trainers, though, is just how few run marathons themselves. Why did the penny not drop? People who make a living from helping others run mad distances know better than to do it themselves.

But I gratefully cleave to their advice because stretching gives me focus, all the while carbo-loading, refining my checklist of what to bring on the day (spare nipple plasters, Maxifuel carbo-gels, Vaseline), and trying to drum up another £470 in donations to bring the total I have raised in pledges for the Dispossessed Fund to £5,000.

I have kept one eye on the weather forecast. The Met Office is predicting wind and rain most of this week but a moderately cool, partly-cloudy Sunday is in prospect, with temperatures rising from 9˚C at 10am to 12˚C by midday — ideal conditions for runners and spectators.

My long-suffering wife Pam, who has been unafraid to voice her disapproval at taking second place to my training schedule, has been planning with friends to join the thousands of spectators who make the London Marathon the most atmospheric endurance race in the world.

They hope to watch my pageant of pain on the final stretch along the Embankment and then dash the last mile through backstreets to see me hobble up the Mall to the finish. (Lora, my friend more familiar with walking than running, worries that this could render her “fatigued, out of breath, even vomiting”.)

More worryingly, another friend, Lauren, whose husband has run a dozen marathons including London, Berlin and New York, has warned Pam to “expect vomiting at the end” and that I “might look a bit green”. But in my mind, I hope to run an elegant marathon. Ideally, I would take it at a steady clip of 10 minutes a mile to finish in 4 hours 30 minutes, completing the second half in roughly the same time as the first. The reality is likely to be the opposite — that I kick off too fast and end up being passed and humiliated by runners in fancy-dress banana costumes as I grimace through the pain and limp the last six miles.

The expert advice is to start slow: “If you don’t feel like you’re going too slow in the first mile, then you are almost certainly going too fast,” I was told. But the real race begins, I have been warned, in the last three to six miles when our energy and strength runs out and it comes down to pure willpower.

In my training I have only run up to 20 miles, once. After that, I will be into unknown territory and it will be all about mind over matter.

That is what’s so great about the marathon. The Olympics may be the greatest spectator show on earth but for those of us taking part in the Virgin London Marathon on Sunday, this is our moment — a moment we have sorely earned — to test ourselves to our mental and physical limits. Bring it on.

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