Surely no one sets out on a career in radio, hoping to become a traffic reporter? So where do they all come from?
The Traffic Desk strikes me as a kind of holding cell; a place to store failed broadcasters on their way out of the profession. I was able to gather plenty of evidence on the way up to the north east on Friday. “Long queues on the A1 near Durham. Particularly bad southbound. And northbound is even worse.”
Even more baffling is the army of civilian volunteers patrolling the roads network on behalf of the radio stations, with their vigilante-like nicknames. “The Prince of Darkness of the A14” was one of todays’s reporters. Make that the “Prince of Dorkness”. I could imagine him turning up on his blind dates wearing shades and a bootlace tie, smeared with Lynx aftershave, his favourite chat-up line at the ready: “Reckon I got more Willie Nelson LPs than absolutely ANYONE… in the North Peterborough area.”
So where were we? We were travelling from Berkshire to Gateshead.
It was good to escape from gardening guilt for a couple of days, and to head north-east for the first time in seven years. Apart from the traffic reports, there is nothing to say about the journey as far as Leeds. The M1 isn’t much cop as a muse.
It struck me that Yorkshire gets posher as you go north. I like South Yorkshire, but it’s raw and uncompromising. Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster are all places I could tell painful stories about, and they all took place on cold, dark nights. West Yorkshire I know much better, having survived there for around eleven years. It’s a paranoid, curmudgeonly sort of county, though it will become more civilised in time, if it continues its policy of opening up lines of communication with the outside world.
Escaping across the border into North Yorkshire, you feel a sense of immediate relief. Away from enemy territory. It’s a sort of very North Sussex. Calling in at Betty’s in Harrogate to stock up on curd tarts, fat rascals and giant tea-cakes, you feel safe again. Back with your own. After Harrogate, it was on up the smaller roads through more deft, self-confident places like Ripon and Thirsk, before crossing into Teesside.
We were getting hungry by now, and stopped off at a good up-yer-sleeve restaurant south of Middlesborough for M’s belated birthday meal. With about 40 hours to go until the race, I felt able to allocate myself a single shot of alcoholic stuff, and opted for some inoffensive house white. Not a bad bit of scran, though I’m not much of a judge of these things, and usually defer to M’s superior, and more instinctive taste buds. Her verdicts are often mystifying but I know better than to question her wisdom. She sampled my main course and dismissed it as tasting “too much like fish”. Always a danger with sea bass, unfortunately, though I felt it best to keep this opinion to myself.
It had been raining since before Leeds, and now it was teeming, and would continue to do so for another twenty four hours. We continued up the A19 a bit further than intended, and ended up hacking cross-country through that swathe of inhospitable names south of Newcastle: Hetton-le-Hole, Houghton-le-Spring, Jarrow… the darkness and the rain making them seem far less welcoming than I know them to be.
It was still tipping down on Saturday afternoon when I went off to see Newcastle play Bolton. It confirmed what I’d long suspected about the Premiership – that it isn’t really much good. The players seem uninterested. Perhaps it really is just a sort of cultured nonchalance, as their supporters say it is; a fieldful of flickering skill, tantalising and toying with us. But it sure looked like ineptitude and bone-idleness to me. Oh to have been at a real football match. This was all icing and no cake.
I was hoping to see Bolton win. About 4-0 would have done the job. Not that I particularly like Bolton, or particularly dislike Newcastle, who are nothing like as pleasingly reckless as they were under Keegan. I just thought it would be more culturally interesting. It’s a British thing. (There’s a joke in there about seeing 50,000 people in pain two days in a row, but that would be too easy). Anyway, the match flopped to a soggy 0-0 and we all sloped off into the drizzle.
Carbo-loading eventually got done, though it was close. No pasta to be found in Gateshead, so we headed back into the city centre to find a Chinese restaurant where I could guzzle noodles and rice. I have to believe the widely-accepted wisdom that this sort of meal is a good thing the evening before a race. It doesn’t always feel like it.
I wasn’t sure how I’d feel when I woke on Sunday morning. Fear? Apprehension? Resignation? No. I was surprised to find a sense of mild excitement waiting for me. Why that should have surprised me, I don’t know. I suppose because it had been so long since I’d run this far, and because I felt so undertrained.
We’d planned to leave at nine, but at nine-thirty we were still hanging around the hotel. The phone rang. It was Nigel Platt, asking where I was. When I said “a hotel room in Gateshead”, he seemed so taken aback that for a panicky moment I thought I must have got the time wrong. Perhaps the race was starting at 9:40, not 10:40? But no, he was just surprised that I wasn’t at the start, enjoying the atmosphere as much as he obviously was. We wished each other luck and said we’d meet up in the beer tent after the race.
We arrived at the start about half an hour later. After fighting our way through a dense cloud of Ralgex or something similar, we found several tens of thousands of happy people. Quite a sight. The weather was perfect: sunny but cool. M took some great home video of Paula Radcliffe warming up in front of us, then setting off on her record-breaking run. After she’d vanished into the distance, we realised the camera hadn’t been recording.
After M had left to save the car from being towed away, I went off to find my place in the line. It was hard to work out where to be. The seven and eight minute-mile areas were full of people who seemed unlikely to be able to manage double that pace. I kept on walking back until I reached a point where I couldn’t see the start of the crowd and couldn’t see the end. I guessed this was probably halfway, and stopped there. Ten minutes later, we were away.
It took about eighteen minutes to reach the start line. From there, the shuffle continued for the first mile or two. That said, the first and second mile markers always come more quickly than I expect in these big races, and the pace is always slightly quicker than it feels – though at 10:35 and 10:40, they were hardly quick.
I passed the first walkers just after two minutes into the race, and there were many thousands more through the thirteen miles. I was one myself for at least one minute each mile, and towards the end, longer than this. There has been much heated debate on the Runners World forum about walkers, and whether the large number of people who walked most of the race are an essential part of the fabric of the GNR, or just a bloomin’ nuisance. Is the Great North Run a proper race or just a happy-clappy happening?
The obvious answer is that it’s both, and neither should be allowed to dominate the other. For the race to work well however, there must be greater tolerance of the other camp. It’s frustrating and puzzling that the organisers make no effort to educate new runners and first-time entrants. I don’t think the majority of walkers are deliberate troublemakers and anarchists. They want to start near the front because they know they are going to be slow, and think that if they get off quicker they will finish quicker. It doesn’t make a lot of sense as they’ll still take the same amount of time to complete the course, and the nearer the front they are, the more people they will interfere with. If they understood this, they might be happy to start further back. And if they are going to walk, they should stick to the left hand side. And if they are going to suddenly stop running, they should look behind them first. Just a few simple rules and guidelines that the organisers could promote, and everyone would be happier. I wish someone had told me these things when I did my first race.
It was very clear early on that I wasn’t going to turn in a good time. The crowds, my unfitness and the general light-heartedness of the occasion made this a strangely unimportant race to have to do quickly, or even to want to do quickly. And it was much hillier than expected. To be honest, it wasn’t really a race at all. Eventually, I crossed the finish line nearly two hours and forty minutes after starting. I didn’t really care about the time, and I didn’t even care that I was overtaken by an eight-foot McCain’s Oven Chip on the home straight. Much.
I felt alright. Legs a bit tired but the decision to take it easy, enjoy the day and take walk-breaks made a difference. I still had enough energy to totter over to the beer tent where, miraculously, I found M – but no Nigel or Ian. Hung around for a while, then found a pub and had a couple of faraway pints, and fish and chips on a plate the size of a dustbin lid.
So. The Great North Run – how great is it?
Well, it’s big. Very big. The biggest race in history (if the announcer is to be believed) with 47000 entrants. How many of those entrants turned up, I don’t know. On nearly every front, it’s a thoroughly laudable occasion. One of those events that generates a lot of publicity, that sets seeds in the minds of couch potatoes and draws new people into running, that raises a fortune for charity, and gives many thousands of people a lot of pleasure. The medal’s nice too.
On the frontline, there aren’t a lot of negatives. Some attention needs to be paid to the walking problem (and yes, I ran-walked myself, and don’t exclude myself from that problem). Although well-organised in terms of the logistics and the on-site facilities and the signage, not a lot of thought has been put into deciding what sort of event it is. Or if it has, the results of such ponderings haven’t filtered through to the runners. Mass-participation beano? Or bona-fide half marathon running race?
It can be both of these things simultaneously, but in that case, there needs to be better instruction, and perhaps a radical rethink about how the start is organised. One obvious suggestion is to ask people to estimate finishing times, and issue colour-coded numbers. Matching pens would then have to be introduced, and these would need gentle marshalling on the day. It would cost money, it would increase the need for helpers, and it wouldn’t guarantee that ‘serious runners’ wouldn’t be impeded, but it would improve the quality of the race, and it would make most people happier.
At present there seems to be a kind of self-education system. The running world is divided between one-timers who are pissed off with this Great Run nonsense, and who’ll never do it again, and on the other side, those who have pulled themselves through a kind of apprenticeship where they’ve passed from frustration into sentimental enlightenment. “I learnt long ago that the Great North Run is all about having a great time, not running a great time.” (That’s a made-up quote, but it’s the kind of thing that I’ve bee reading on the running forums this week.)
Where am I on this? Hmm. Fences can be surprisingly comfortable. The GNR is one of those happenings that I’m glad I’ve been a part of, but probably wouldn’t do again – at least not for a while. The main reason is not so much to do with congestion on the route, or the massive delays getting out of the car park in South Shields. They are unavoidable. It’s other things. For us, the north east is a very long way off — we clocked nearly 800 miles getting there and back. The race itself isn’t cheap to enter (£29), and if you live where we do, you have to make a weekend of it. And apart from expense, there are several other events on around the same time that I want to do – in particular the New Forest Half and Marathon.
No. When all’s said and done, I can’t really be bothered with the GNR hype. I entered the race, and bought my hotel room, in November 2002. Even then, ten months before the event, I had to book at least a two-night stay to guarantee a room at the inn. Nirvana, the enterprise behind these “Great” runs, own nearly all the accommodation in the Newcastle area for the entire weekend. They own the race, the accommodation, the TV rights, the lead participants. The Great North Run people do to Newcastle what Microsoft does to my computer, and I think it’s this I don’t like much. It might explain why the event itself is slightly schizophrenic. The run itself is enjoyable, and I’d recommend it. It’s all the stuff around it I’m not so keen on.
The delay in getting out of South Shields meant I missed most of the Manchester United v Arsenal game on TV, though I did catch the only interesting bits – the sending-off of Vieira, Van Nistelrooy’s penalty miss and the post-match argey-bargey. If most of my worst suspicions about the Premiership were reawakened by the limp spectacle at St James’s Park on Saturday, this pretty much confirmed them. More entertaining were the back-page headlines I noticed over breakfast the next morning (yesterday). One was “SHAMED”, while the other said: “VAN NISTELROOY JOSTLED AS UNATTRACTIVE ENCOUNTER DESCENDS INTO RANCOUR.” One was from the Sun, the other from the Independent, though I can’t recall which went with which.
