The ballot place arrived in the post and I knew immediately what I was going to do with it. I didn’t need to think about it. I didn’t need to talk it through. Some decisions make themselves.
Sarah had lost her mother Linda to bowel cancer at 53. Her brother Anthony at 34. Her grandfather John too. Three people, same disease, one decade. I had watched her carry that — with the kind of quiet strength that doesn’t ask for recognition, that just gets on with it — and when the London Marathon handed me 26.2 miles to do something useful with, the answer was already there.
The Parvalux reception, before the start. Beating Bowel Cancer vest. The banner that made it official.
Before the start
There was a newspaper piece. A photo in the Parvalux reception, in the vest, holding the Beating Bowel Cancer banner — the company I worked for giving me the floor and a camera and their full support without hesitation. I stood there grinning in my running kit surrounded by gearboxes and felt, not for the last time that day, entirely grateful.
The local paper ran the story before the race. Remembering loved ones with a big run. That’s it exactly. That’s all it was.
The local paper, pre-race. The story was already written. I just had to run it.
The day itself
April 22, 2018. Hot. Much hotter than forecast, much hotter than ideal for a marathon. The kind of heat that makes the later miles feel like a negotiation.
I had trained for sixteen weeks. I had run the Cardiff Half in 1:39. I had quietly told the newspaper I thought I could go under four hours. The newspaper, to its credit, did not hold this against me.
I started in the 4:30 wave — back of the field, which meant the course was busy, the roads thick with runners for the first miles, the pace frustratingly stop-start through the early kilometres. I lost time I never fully recovered. By the time I was moving freely the heat was already making itself known.
The crowds on the London Marathon are something that photographs don’t quite capture. They are continuous — not clustered at landmarks and thin elsewhere, but constant, wall-to-wall, the whole way around. They carry you through the miles where you don’t have much left to offer yourself.
I was carrying Linda. And Anthony. And John. That helped more.
2018 Finisher. Bib 13730. Fist up. One of the best days of my life.
The finish
I crossed the line in 4:00:36. The chip time. The real time. The time I am having, and will continue to have, regardless of what Strava thinks it recorded while I was presumably standing still somewhere near Canary Wharf.
Thirty-six seconds outside four hours. Thirty-six seconds that have haunted every training run since, that I mention to nobody and think about constantly, that will probably appear on my headstone if Sarah gets to write it.
I had wanted sub-four. I did not get sub-four. I got 4:00:36 and a medal and a finisher shirt and the clearest sense I have ever had that I had done exactly what I set out to do. The time was a number. The reason was not.
I raised £2,500 for Beating Bowel Cancer. We raised it — Sarah, the people who donated, the colleagues who cheered, everyone who read the newspaper piece and clicked the link or texted the code. It wasn’t my achievement alone. It never was.
Medal. Bib. Finisher shirt. The evidence. 4:00:36. I’m fine.
What it started
I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of something that would take six years to fully understand.
Not the running — I had been running for a while by then. But the idea that movement could be purposeful in ways that had nothing to do with pace or personal bests. That a run could carry something. That it could be for someone, or somewhere, or something larger than the effort itself.
In 2019 my kidneys failed. The running stopped. The recovery was long.
When I got back on my feet, properly back, I ran the London Landmarks Half Marathon for the renal ward at Dorchester County Hospital — for the staff who looked after me when I was at my worst. That post is here too.
And then Italy. But that comes later.
London, England — 27.19 miles — 4hrs 01m 48s — 1,283ft — 8:54/mi