I have run the London marathon twice before, and I have also stood on the Embankment cheering runners along those last few miles before the finish. For most people taking part, this is a place – the last few miles of a marathon – they have rarely, if ever, visited. It’s etched across their faces in grimaces or manic grins. Each step is a small mountain, the crowds are a blur … everything is a blur.
Yet for a few runners, reaching 23 or 24 miles and pushing on is nothing special. For some, it’s not even that far. When I spoke to the famous ultra-runner Scott Jurek, before he ran the Boston marathon last week, he was hardly nervous about the distance.
“I don’t want to say it’s just like brushing my teeth,” he said. “But to run around in 3hr 30min … I mean, I want to respect the distance, but it feels comfortable. Almost like a warm-up.”
Ultra-runner Karl Meltzer wears a T-shirt that says “100 miles is not that far”. Well, for him, it isn’t. He recently broke the record for the Appalachian Trail in the US, which is a mere 2,190 miles. After that, 100 miles may well seem short. Twenty-six miles? Pah, it’s barely worth getting changed.
I bring all this up because having run a 34-mile ultra race a few months ago, I’m hoping to feel like I’m breezing along in this year in London, come mile 24. That’s how it works, right?
Of course, Jurek’s answer contained a little caveat. “To run around in 3:30 …” he said. For one of the world’s best ultra-runners, that’s clearly not full speed ahead.
But while running the marathon distance may not be a problem for an ultra-runner, running it fast is still a big challenge. Ali Young, a British international ultra-runner, says: “The London marathon is still a big race. For me, I find it the most intense training. It’s the only distance I have a coach for.”
Young says she will line up in Greenwich on Sunday looking for a fast time. “Yes, if was doing a marathon just for fun, it would be an easy task, but I defy anyone to say when ‘racing the marathon’ that it was easy. Just thinking about running 26.2 miles in sub-7 min/mile pace is hard. But that’s always my aim.”
It is a perennial grievance of non-ultra runners that people are more impressed if you run the Marathon de Sables or the Sparthalon than if you run a fast marathon or 10K, even though the commitment, talent and effort required for the latter can be just as demanding – if not more so. Even to run one mile in a fast time is difficult in its own way – more people have climbed Mount Everest than run a mile in under four minutes.
Yet the fact remains, that there will be a select few runners on Sunday who won’t be remotely intimidated by the distance. Another is Peter Thompson. Come Sunday, he will be midway through an epic challenge to run 44 marathons in 44 days – one in each country in Europe (“I’m using the UN definition of Europe,” he says).
Thompson says that by running all these marathons he has, oddly, cured himself of his fixation with the marathon. He only started running in 2009 but he was soon obsessively training, running over 100 miles a week, and eventually, he ran a marathon in 2:25. This year, however, he says he will probably run London in “four or five hours”. “But,” he says, “it will be so much more rewarding.”
Rather than chasing fast times, he is now running for two mental health charities, a cause that is close to his heart. “My focus is very much on the charity,” he says. “I have had family and friends suffer mental health issues and I have dealt with it in my job, so I really just want to encourage people to talk about it.”
This focus on using his running as a way of raising money, and also to travel and experience new things, has improved his relationship with running, he says. He sounds like a recovered addict when he says that, before, it took over his life, that he couldn’t relax in the morning unless he had had his run. “I still have friends who run and when they go to the pub all they talk about are splits, times, mileage. I’m really glad that’s not me any more.”
So if you’re struggling along the Embankment and a runner next to you is barely sweating, chatting and generally enjoying himself, it may be Thompson, or some other ultra-runner out for an easy Sunday jaunt around the capital. That is, unless they’re “racing” the marathon.
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