Today I did the Burnham Beeches Half Marathon.
Or was it the other way round?
So despite the sense of incredulity that had lasted all of last week, I did make it to Burnham, though in keeping with the precedent set during my London training, everything was thrillingly last minute. I was up early enough for my condemned-man breakfast of dry toast and coffee. Even at 7am, the morning was bright and clear, and I could see that it was going to be a scorching day. It didn’t assuage my sense of foreboding about the venture.
I pottered around for far too long, and at 8:45am, the point where I should have been striding confidently towards the car, I was instead still in my dressing gown, straining to get out of an armchair, and wondering where I could find some safety pins to attach my running number. Even in my most disorganised pre-London days, I would have prepared a ‘to do’ list the night before a race, and at least have laid out my kit and pinned the running number to my Hal Higdon singlet.
No such foresight was going spare this time around, which is why, with only an hour to go till the race (30 miles away, in a place I’d never been to before), I found myself rapidly sinking into a puddle of panic, as I tried to recall all those essential things I had to do for a race. Petroleum jelly, blister plasters, water, those damn safety pins, contact lenses, sunhat, spare socks and shoes and T-shirt for the journey home, money, heart rate monitor, dressings, kitchen roll, Power Gel, cotton wool…
But I needn’t have worried. M had heard my high-pitched distress, and had come to the rescue. With her help, I was out of the door and on the M4 by 9:15, and had found the venue by 9:50, which left me precisely the 10 minutes I needed to jog the 3/4 of a mile to get to the start. I even had time for a few stretches once I’d joined the other 800 or so runners.
I still felt pretty rough, but it was too late to back out, and as that suitably mournful sounding hooter sounded to start the race, I had no choice but to shrug my shoulders and get on with the thing.
The rain god didn’t deliver, and it’s been one of the hottest days of the summer, though even this didn’t stop some people wearing leggings and long-sleeved shirts. Inexplicable.
The suffering began immediately as a long, steep hill appeared round the first corner. News of the pain began with a murmur at the front of the field which rolled slowly back down the hill like a lumbering avalanche, growing in audibility as the athletic profile became less… athletic. By the time it reached us at the back, the volume of the moan and the pain of the hill had become quite disproportionate to that of the smarties at the front. It was the first of many occasions when I was tempted to walk, but I just managed to avoid it, switching to that strange shuffle that every plump middle-aged jogger keeps tucked in his sock along with other emergency supplies.
I’d not been to Burnham Beeches since I was a child. It was the sort of place that kids in my neighbourhood used to get bussed out to by the church on summer Sunday afternoons, in the days before mass car-ownership. It was always a pretty exclusive address, and 25 years of fat-cattery has kept it so. Now and then we would creep past some great detached house with extensive mature gardens and carport, and see one or two of the residents standing silently at the gate, gazing at us without expression, as though posing for a formal portrait. I couldn’t work out if they were being disdainful or supportive. Paranoid, or just curious? I got the impression that perhaps they wanted to feel that they were taking part in this annual event, but that they weren’t quite sure how to cope with the social interaction involved. At other races I’ve been in, people smile and clap, or shout encouragement, or distribute sweets, or do something. Here, they seemed disorientated and awkward. Or perhaps they were just making sure no one nipped inside the gate for a furtive pee.
I got talking to a couple of chatty, sporty Kiwis (is there any other sort?) after a couple of miles, and stuck with them for half an hour, before they eventually pulled ahead.
All along the course were signs declaiming “CAUTION, RUNNERS!” Wasn’t sure if this was a warning to drivers to watch out for pedestrians, or a general warning that there were hundreds of people in the area who wanted to run 13 miles on one of the hottest days of the summer. “Beware!”, it might almost have been saying, “Lunatics at large in the woods”.
An hour into the run, and the heat and the recurring hills were becoming quite a problem. It didn’t help to see crowds of solemn locals, sitting along the route licking ice lollies or languidly sucking on long iced drinks. But I managed to keep running, determined to beat the Reading Half Marathon time of 2 hours 30. With an additional 4 months or so training, this was well within my grasp. My splits up to 12 miles were: 9:08, 9:34, 10:03, 10:41, 10:36, 10:04, 9:47, 11:06, 12:23, 9:29, 12:59, and 11:40. This meant an average of 10:32 a mile which, given the conditions, I was happy with. If the final mile had gone the same way, I’d have finished in 2:18, 12 minutes ahead of the Reading time. But the final mile did not go the same way at all.
With less than a mile to go, I was following behind a small group of two or three runners, and looking forward to seeing the finishing line. We reached a T-junction, where a marshal pointed us to the right. This took us along a long, quiet lane. Strange. Instead of getting closer to the end of the race, we seemed to be heading out into the country again. But we kept on until the woman running in front of me started to voice her suspicions that we weren’t going the right way. We’d been running for 6 or 7 minutes since the last marshal, and even at my slowing pace that was at least half a mile. We should be hitting the finish around now, but there was nothing in sight. Then a cyclist went past, and told us we were going the wrong way. We should have gone left at the T-junction, not right.
It was a terrible thing to happen at that stage of the race. After trying so hard not to take any walking breaks for so long, I just gave up at that point. The thought of running an extra mile after being so close to the finish did not appeal. The only incentive I had to maintain even a steady walk was that it would get me to that bloody marshal a bit quicker. There were three or four of us, and oh dear, when we finally got back to the fateful junction, we lined up to let him know how we felt. He nervously explained that he was chatting to a friend and had been pointing to a car, rather than indicating the direction we should take. I can’t repeat my exact words as I’m writing this before the 9pm watershed, but let’s say that I was half-expecting to be disqualified for abusing an official. By the time I’d finished with him he’d gone white, and I can only guess what colour he ended up. As I tottered off towards the finish, the Australian guy behind me was yelling at him: “Yer know what I’m gonna do to you mate? I’m gonna pull yer f***ing head off and push it up yer arse!” Whether his plan came to fruition, I don’t know. But I hope so.
In the end, my official time was 2 hours 30 minutes and 28 seconds. I had to wait till I got home to discover that this was 8 seconds faster (or less slow) than my time for the Reading Half Marathon. Eight bloody seconds. It should have been 12 minutes.
I later complained to the race director, a rather oily man who suggested that I find him after the presentations because he “might be able to find something” for me, presumably to keep me quiet. I thought: “Bugger the lot of you”, and limped back to the car.
