Marathon mannish

On January 25, seven days short of my 41st birthday, I ran my first marathon. I say “ran”, but I actually ran only about 18 of the 26.2 miles. My final eight miles was a run-and-walk, with the bias heavily in favour of the walk. Still, I had left the starting-point expecting to make only half the distance. I’d been training since November: ample time, since I run three or four times a week anyway. By the beginning of December, I was up to a comfortable enough nine miles but, at the end of that month, I got a stomach virus that laid me low for about four days. When I resumed training, I found that I could barely break the ten-mile mark. And, I had been told, you needed to do at least 18 to be confident of finishing.

I don’t usually get stomach problems of any sort, but I think the Xmas liming caught up with me. And even that probably wouldn’t have happened if my friend Indira had not very foolishly been born on December 29, on which day the group had a little eat-up lime for her 27th birthday at a restaurant and pub in Central. Since Clico has refused to listen to the local runners’ clubs and hold the marathon in the more sensible month of May, I almost didn’t run; but Shane, who’s been running the marathon for about ten years, had already registered me. So I thought, what the hell, I’ll just go and get a feel of the thing. My sister Kay dropped me off at Midcentre Mall at five o’ clock, and my writer’s mind immediately started classifying.  There were about 300 people there, most of them in their 30s. The vast majority were male: I estimated that only about five percent of the runners were women.

But women are very recent entrants into marathon running: the Boston Marathon was the first to officially allow women to compete in 1972.
Indo-Trinis were also in a minority. Nearly everyone looked very fit: I don’t know why this should have surprised me, except that I had never seen so many people without potbellies in one place. At 5:30 exactly, the horn sounded and everyone was off. There were groups of people lining the sidewalk, clapping the runners on: and I thought it extraordinary that they should have come out at that cold hour for an event like this. And there I was, trotting down the Montrose main road and then through Cunupia and Caroni, waiting to run out of gas. But I surprised myself. I don’t know if it was the tips Shane had given me — eat lots of carbohydrates and hydrate the day before — but when I passed the 13.1 mark, I felt no malaise and I was still lifting my feet with fair ease. So I decided to see how far I could go again. That was my mistake. The marathon got its name from the feat of a Greek soldier who, in 490 BC, is supposed to have run from the city of Marathon to Athens to bring news of the Athenian victory over the Persians: upon which, legend has it, he collapsed and died. By 17 miles, I was envying that soldier greatly. But he had run only 25 miles: the official marathon distance is 26.2 miles, because that is the distance from Windsor Castle to the Royal Box in the stadium at London. Damned Brits!

It was now after nine and the sun was blazing down. There were water points every two miles, and I was grabbing two of the Chubby-sized bottles, taking a sip and pouring the rest over my head and neck. I was impressed by how well-organised the event was, and thinking how it was really only in our politics that our society was completely at sea. And then I had a dreadful realisation: this was the second Clico-sponsored event that I had taken part in within two weeks. First, there’d been the Critical Thinking Symposium at UWI and now this marathon. It was a dreadful thought because, as a journalist, one doesn’t want to feel too appreciative of any corporation. But I had to be appreciative because Clico’s sponsorship policy is more subtle and less mercenary than that of the energy companies and the banks and other companies. Which means I’ll be even more vexed when, as corporations inevitably do, Clico gets up to some ratchefy. By 17 miles, though, I was suffering too much to intellectualise about anything. I wanted badly to walk, but out of a stubbornness that had absolutely nothing to do with my powerful brain, I held on until the 18-mile-mark. As I started walking, my thighs stopped feeling like iron slabs and instead started feeling like teak planks — with lots of splinters. The thing was, I had passed 18 miles: if I stopped now, I’d be boofing myself for months.

This is the disadvantage of having an obsessive character. And I was by now thoroughly awed by those persons who not only run the whole marathon, but run to beat a time. The final eight miles clearly defied the laws of physics, since time and space and the Cocorite main road stretched out interminably. The sunlight beat like sticks on the pan of my skull, and every step seemed to spurt runnels of hot pitch through my legs. And, instead of the route finishing in a straight line, you have to go up the Diego Martin highway and loop back: it was mentally quite debilitating to see people passing on the final leg just inches away from me on the other side (although, once I reached the turn, I felt all snotty about those stragglers behind me). As I headed back toward the Oval in St James, I trotted a bit, but it was only when I passed the Roxy roundabout and saw the finish line banner that I began to jog. I could feel my calf muscles jumping, ready to cramp, but I made it in at five hours and 27 minutes and, as I crossed, I bowed my head to receive my medal: the first I have ever gotten in my life and, although I have always thought myself above Napoleon’s dictum that men are ruled by toys, I felt absurdly proud to have that piece of metal hanging around my neck as I went into the Oval and discovered a marvelous new pleasure in life: sitting.

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