It’s 10 months since I ran this distance: long enough to forget a few things I should have remembered, but too long to remember what it was I’d hoped to forget.
The race was as tough as any half I’ve done — a comment not on the event (a straightforward town race with no gotchas worth wibbling over) — but on my lardy unpreparedness.
The weekend began at 0325 on Saturday, more than half an hour before the alarm. Rather pitifully, I found myself lying awake, picking over recent troubling events at work, instead of looking ahead to a weekend in Spain with friends, and the prospect of a bracing Mediterranean race.
By four a.m. I’m muesli-munching in the kitchen, and calculating. Four days away from work. Four days and… four hours. A total of… one hundred hours. Almost to the minute, I have 100 hours off work.
A hundred hours. Fantastic. Let the sun obscure the clouds for once.
Mouth full of toothpaste: the phone rings. Time to go.
Almeria was just about sunny. We had a few minutes to enjoy the unfamiliar brightness before Antonio turned up. Much shaking of hands.
Breakfast isn’t a sacrament in Spain, nor in many places beyond the English-speaking world, so finding something to eat before noon can be a stressful experience. This puts a strain on Antonio, whom we expect to fight a corner to which he owes no cultural loyalty.
It’s one of the several reasons we love the guy — and after some tense negotiation with the proprietor of a pleasant seafront café, Antonio managed to secure for us some ham and cheese toasties, and orange juice and coffee.
Then a spot of sight-seeing on a rocky promontory, a few miles out of town. Antonio made us line up for posed photos at every opportunity before good-natured album-cover anarchy broke out. There was a suggestion of bar-hopping with Carmen, the feisty English teacher we met last year, but it wasn’t the right time. We needed rest, so we found the hotel and holed up there for a few hours. I was weary and spaced-out. The perfect mood for my book: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. As bleak a tale as you could ever, ever read. At six, carrying a wretched headful of its post-nuclear-holocaust prose-poetry, I shambled round the brightly-lit supermercado next door, gazing blankly at the primary coloured abundance of the vegetable aisles, as though seeing these items for the first time.
Just like last year, I bought bananas and clementines and lemon water and warm bread and a pot of olives, and returned for a spot of hotel room haute cuisine.
Antonio collected us at seven, and drove us to the stadium for the race registration. This should be a straightforward process. They find your name on a list, check it, and hand you a bag containing a teeshirt, ChampionChip, ticket for pasta meal, race number, magazine. But it never works like this. Instead we see a good deal of head-shaking, furtive consultation, and we make multiple visits to the same person to collect the items not given to us first time around. It’s part of the event’s charm. We grumble about it, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
We were joined for the the pre-race meal by some new friends, Paul and his wife (whose name I didn’t catch, unfortunately). Paul’s a decent standard club runner from Oldham, and was enthusiastic enough to ask Antonio if there were any races in May, when he’ll be back in the area again.
As always, this last supper brimmed us with carbs and protein: cold pasta, chunks of bread, the legs of monster chicken, water by the litre. The runner’s ambrosia. The chatter was of PBs to come — though not alas from me. When I said that my two targets were to avoid finishing in last place, and to get in under 2 and a half hours, there was an air of general mirth around the table. No one actually said: “Ha ha! That’s a good one!” But I got the impression that that’s what the cheery laughter meant. Sorry guys, but I was being deadly serious.
We waddled back to the hotel. Before falling unconscious, I remembered the advice of the godlike Hal Higdon, conveyed via his earthly emissary, Pope Nigel. It seems that you don’t just lay out your race kit; you should point your shoes towards the door. It’s the detail that counts, and it’s the detail I’d been overlooking all these years…
The Tryp Indalo is a great name for the official race hotel. The breakfast room was filled with fellow explorers. Mournful Kenyans loped around the room, eyeing the buffet with suspicion. Giacometti figures. I remembered a lifesize Giacometti encountered in Zurich, the day after the marathon. I have a photo somewhere… here you go…
This time, we walked to the stadium for the start. The gathering grey-black clouds were ominous, but other signs were kinder: cool rather than cold, and dry. Ash vanished with our fleeces to the baggage drop, and re-emerged a half hour later, blinking in the light, his expressionless face indicating a post-traumatic daze. He explains why in his excellent reports here and here.
The Almeria start always provides a talking point. Last year it was the pain of the blustery, freezing rain. The year before it was the peculiar double start. The gun went and we launched ourselves, only to be brought to an unexpected halt again, a hundred yards up the road.
This year it was the start line that never was. The gun sounded, we moved forward, thumbs poised to start our watches as we passed over the chip mats. And we kept moving, kept jogging, but no chip mat came, no start line was crossed. A minute or two further, with confused runners looking round at each other, we realised the race had begun without us.
Running is a solitary activity. Always. Even in races, surrounded by hundreds of others. Races may even be more solitary than training. The close proximity of so many people doing the same thing forces the runner to confront, yet again, that question: why am I doing this?
I feel more reflective in a race than in training. It’s partly that all these other people remind me that it’s not a rare compulsion. This is comforting, but increases the fascination with the question. More than that, a race adds a dimension of relentlessness not found in training. I won’t stop to walk unless there is really no choice. And as the grind factor increases, the question becomes more urgent, and the answer more complex. It’s not that it has no answer, but too many answers, with each of them spawning more questions. It’s this explosion of thoughts, the explanation’s exponential fragmentation, that makes the question ever more unanswerable, and ever more compelling.
The first four or five miles were tolerable, but after this I struggled. Time for an inner pep talk. OK mate, you may be knackered, but you’ve eight more miles to go, so don’t even think about it. You’re going to feel a lot worse than this, so get used to it. You’ve been here many times before and you’ve got through it every single one of those times. Today we’ll get through it again. And afterwards? Afterwards my friend, we will drink beer and eat heavy, sweet puddings to replenish the spirit.
The promise of alcohol and blunt carbohydrate pulled me through those eight miles, even though I knew the chances of acquiring a glistening mahogany pint of West Berkshire Brewery’s Good Old Boy, here in Spain, or indeed anywhere outside West Berkshire, were small.
Up and down La Rambla a couple of times. Along to the end of the extended, wind-blown Avenida Maritimo. This stretch is long but it has its compensations. For those of us living far from the sea, the sight of the Mediterranean, and those waving palm trees, can be uplifting. Something happens. A sudden wistfulness that gnaws at my heart: threatening and consoling at the same time.
Out and back, out and back. All the time, confronted with the faster guys coming towards me, whistling past like missiles. After the gliding Kenyans and the best of the rest — the muscular, athletic Spaniards, came the first of our lot: whippet Paul, head down, straining at the leash, face tomato-red and blotchy, gurning angrily, anxious, carrying some appalling burden I’d never experience. Ten or twelve minutes later, in a cloud of steam, Ash appears, scarlet and sweat-glistened, cooking in his clothes, but, in his often used phrase, grinning like a loon. Here’s the long-limbed Nigel, rangy galloping strides, that characteristic, distant smile — the man who knows too much. Antonio: intense, determined, rhythmic. Head up, eyes straight. This is a serious business. And Suzie. Relaxed, beaming, gentle gait, a runner who knows what she’s doing; a runner at peace with herself.
All of us crossing and re-crossing those thresholds, picking up and peering at nuggets of self-doubt before tossing them over our shoulder and out of sight.
Twice I reached the roundabout at the end of the Avenida Maritimo, and twice I had the chance to measure how far I was from the back of the field. The first time, I counted eleven casualties behind me. The second time, just three. There was an elderly couple holding hands, and finally, some way behind, a plump young girl in a red, military sweatshirt, plodding along like her life depended on it. Immediately behind her, just a few feet away, were two police motorbikes with flashing lights, an ambulance, a transit van, and five hundred metres of honking traffic. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I overtook someone — a girl dressed all in white — two kilometres from the stadium. Through that long final stretch towards the stadium, I constantly expected her to float past me again, but she never did. The end of this race was always going to be grim, but it really shouldn’t have been as hard as it was. It had become a marathon survival-shuffle, and it shouldn’t have been.
Let’s end the misery. How nice to hit that ramp and plunge down into the stadium to the finish line.
I got home in 2:28, my slowest half marathon in 5 years.
The others were waiting to greet me — thank you. They needn’t have waited, but it meant a lot to me that they did.
The girl in white never appeared, so she must have dropped out in the final mile. The older couple arrived, still holding hands, still grinning. I wanted to clap in the final finisher, the girl who’d led the angry queue of traffic, but I missed her while I was collecting my fleece. But the records show that she finished. Beatriz Ramos Jorge, we salute you.
How good that post-race shower feels. How good to sink into that bath. How good to pull on a clean, sweat-free tee-shirt, glowing like a saint. And downstairs in the hotel bar, the glass of beer that isn’t big enough, or brown enough, but it will do. By god, it will do.
Lunch this year was in a nicely-tiled seafront restaurant romantically entitled The Building. If you’re Spanish, it probably sounds exotic. Jugs of beer arrived, then ham soup, a massive paella crawling with alarming crustaceans, and a slab of celestial cheesecake. This is what I’d spent 13 miles running towards. The annual trip to Almeria has many enjoyable moments, but the post-race meal is perhaps the best of the lot. The hard work is done; from now on in, it’s wall-to-wall pleasure.
Another ritual had to be checked off the list — the visit to Molly Malone’s, Almeria’s Irish bar. Now Irish bars that aren’t in Ireland are, by definition, phoney, but it has to be said that Molly’s in Almeria isn’t even a phoney Irish bar. It’s a Spanish bar that happens to sell draught Guinness in pint glasses. I can’t think of any other concessions apart from the name. We’d hoped to catch some English football — a staple of Irish bars across the world, but instead we watched a lacklustre Barcelona lose. And then we discover it wasn’t Barca at all, but some other team playing in the same kit. How fitting to watch a bogus Barca in a bogus bar.
My shouted conversation with Suzie was real enough: in Canada, she runs in temperatures so low that her water bottle freezes. And I tried explaining the plot of Citizen Kane, but never quite got to the denouement because I thought I’d cry. (How pitiful is that?). We talked about marathons past and to come, like old soldiers ruminating on past battles.
A few beers further into early evening, the music gets just too loud for these old timers, so we clamber delicately into a cab back to the hotel to find the bar we went to last year. But there were too many decibels in the air there too, so we start walking the mile or so back towards the town. Another backstreet bar, another football match: this time it really is Barcelona, confirmed by an outrageous penalty decision to give them the win, shortly before the end.
Next item on the agenda was a place we visited the first year we were here. By now we were hungry again, so food was shouted up, and we moved onto the Rioja. And so it went on.
We talked a lot about this website, and compared ideas for how it could be developed. This was extremely useful for me, and I was pleased that people clearly felt a sense of shared ownership — as they should. Without the contributions of people like Ash and Nigel, it wouldn’t have evolved as it has. We decided on a number of changes that will start to appear shortly.
There was plenty more weekend left after this. More wine, more Guinness, more tapas, more running (for some), more conversation. But this report will close here. To learn everything, you’ll have to join us there at the end of January 2008. Almeria has become a festival of running, of good food and wine, and good conversation. It’s the chance to prise open one of the windows that winter nails shut, and to glimpse a little sunshine, some mountain scenery and the Mediterranean. It helps to pull us through.
Above all, it’s a celebration of the friendship that running offers. No matter how slow, or how old, or how serious. Racing may be elitist by nature, but runners are democratic to the core. It’s what the Almeria weekend stands for.
