Six Hours In The Cold

Our continuing mission: to boldly drivel where no running publication has drivelled before.

Six Hours out in the Cold

Dave Weeden

The world, or the club room anyway, is once again safe for a few more months from announcements drumming up support for that feared event, the Barry 40. The first Sunday in March dawned on a cold clear day in South Wales, although the expected snow never arrived. Some thirty-three participants, slightly under two thirds of the fifty-two entries, did. One travelled from Scotland, and one from Ireland, as if unaware of the restrictions on internal travel.

Ultra running may be a solitary vice, but several of the competitors actually brought supporters prepared to lap count and when I arrived, as late as possible before the start, it seemed that I was surplus to requirements. Andy Cleves then rather smartly wrong footed himself and pressed me into the service of Phil Adams who he’d wanted to help. Andy fixed himself with John Keogh, who though an old hand at this, wasn’t sure he’d make the cut off time.

Thirty-two runners started with the gun. Hilary Walker, one of the regulars, was summoned by her mobile phone, and spent the first half hour of the race in conference. "Talk about being kyboshed by work," she said, after managing a 20 mile ’training run’ interrupted twice more.

Alan Reid flashed round the first lap in 76 seconds, just outside five minute mile pace. To put that into perspective, Abera of Ethiopia won the Olympic marathon in Sydney in 2:11, or averaging a sliver of a second outside five minutes per mile. And the Olympics carries prestige, crowds, and immediate competition. By contrast, most of the spectators in Barry were there out of kindness, not for the thrill or beauty of the thing. By the third lap, Alan had lapped the back markers, but he had also only run three quarters of a mile in four minutes, a rate of deceleration which if kept unchecked, would see him finished sometime the following week.

The first truth of the ultramarathon is its scale. With 161 laps, if a runner slows by one second every lap, the final lap lasts nearly three mintes longer than the first. This is not unlike the chessboard problem with one grain of barley or whatever on the first square, two on the second, until the entire GDP of a country in on the last. The trick is therefore not to slow. The modulations in pace, the surges, the breaks, which constitute the entire interest in top level racing, don’t belong here. John Cox, the local runner (Reid had travelled down from Peterhead in Scotland), was locked in his own pace, commenting on the exact duration of each lap with his supporters. Reid, by contrast, was experiencing the true loneliness of the long distance runner. He hadn’t brought a single friend, and was proving entirely self sufficient. Whether he was aware that a partisan crowd were waiting for him to break wasn’t clear from his face as he kept floating along hardly breathing or lifting his legs, only his arms movements testifying to any physical effort.

Somewhere behind in the race, Ian Anderson from Ireland kept to a solid cadence. Second last year, and still improving. In 2000, he ran two 100k (62 miles) races, the first in Edinburgh in 7:46, and the second in the World 100k in Winschoten in 7:21. Only a month after that, he finished London to Brighton (55 miles) in 6:39. He undoubtedly knew what he was doing - he was waiting for the runners ahead to make a mistake, to fade. He was giving out slack, rope to hang themselves. He wasn’t allowing anyone to trick him into a pace which would exhaust him. He’d run further, and knew all abut patience.

More conventional tactics were employed by Don Ritchie, still the world record holder at 40 miles and 100k, who sat back in a pack which also featured Walter Hill. Ritchie is some 20 years past his peak at this event: his 50 mile record is 18 years old, and his 100 mile one was set in 1977. The distances involved in training and racing take their toll on most mortals as witnessed by the 30 per cent dropout rate before the start. The champion’s only intimation of mortality seems to have been leg cramps at here in Barry in 1999, were he was reduced to one good leg, and a crab wise canter for the last laps. His world record for 40 miles is 3:48 or a sub 2:30 marathon carried on for half the distance again, so an amount of wear and tear is to be expected. Endurance through pain is clearly one of his continuing strengths, but it is balanced by a cool self knowledge, and when Hill upped the tempo, Ritchie knew not to follow.

Phil Adams was keeping me in check, his gaze sweeping the home straight for some acknowledgment that I was paying attention every lap. He was keeping to a disciplined 1:45 lap rhythm, largely to himself, not bothered by the cold - he was one of the few who kept his attire down to the vest and shorts more appropriate at the summer games than to a midwinter spring event at aerobic pace.

Alan Reid’s decline had all but settled to around six minutes per mile. If he could get round 10k in 29 minutes, this speed might almost feel too easy. He caught and lapped second place John Cox after four miles, but seemed to have more trouble thereafter. Cox had held himself and check and not chased the leader when the chance presented itself, taking his own counsel in preference to an easy ride. Unlike most distance events on the track where the leaders have right of way over the back markers, here the faster athlete is obliged to go round the slower. If some runners moved out of the way and others didn’t, sooner or later it would all end in a tangle of limbs, and tears. Reid was threatening to go the extra mile just by being in lane two so much. Cox wasn’t having it much easier. He went through ten miles in under 59 minutes, not fast enough to threaten the local record, but if he kept it up, good enough for second.

Eventually, Reid caught Cox a second time. Instead of surging past with an ego withering kick, he clamped himself to Cox’s back and simply held on. This could have been a chess player’s manoeuvre: when up, just trade pieces until a fractional advantage becomes decisive. He could have been playing mind games, willing his only obvious threat to run himself into the ground, and irritate him beyond endurance. Two laps was a lead of half a mile, or around three minutes; in a straight race he would have been over the hills and far away. It might have been a subtle surrender; an indication that from now on, he was only in survival mode, and as long as he kept that lap in hand, he had a chance.

That support for one athlete was much more impassioned didn’t overly phase Reid. Perhaps he felt that applause disturbed the Zen monotony.

At the ’sharp end’, and even more so at the blunt one, ultra races are against the self. They are a way to self discovery through pain. Many things can be achieved by application. Alison Pearson is last weekend’s Telegraph described Chris Woodhead, as having the strengths of distance running, which seemed to boil down to bloody mindedness. That bloody mindedness can accomplish great things. Martin Amis failed his English A Level at the first attempt. To get his Oxford First, he worked fifteen hours a day, an application the EU will some day find a way to outlaw. The slower runners here today have to trudge continuously for over five hours, by which time existing British employment law would demand a break. There is a difference between being pushed by oneself and another. The first is freedom, the second slavery.

When Pheidippides ran from Athens to Sparta - 200 kilometres by modern estimate - he did it in a day. The Greek historian Herodotus reports than he met the god Pan on the way, so the journey probably got to him. Herodotus is less specific as to who ran from Marathon to Athens (less than 40k), but it is certain that the ancient distance runners travelled far further than the modern marathon distance each day. There is something heroic about the mental effort required to balance urgency and energy conservation to go the whole distance.

Excitement is not a big factor in long distance running. If there’s a feeling to watching, it’s torpor. If competing, it’s more like fear. As Terry Caveney remarked last year as a few runners threatened to finish together, It’s quite interesting now. In other words, not much happens, and when it does, it can go unnoticed.

We left Alan Reid sitting on John Cox, we weren’t sure if his nerve had gone, or if he was there for a win. The pressure was on Cox, he had the option to test Reid, to see if he could hurt him. His only other choice was to blot Reid out, to try to forget the stranger breathing down his neck for the next two hours. It would be a battle of wills.

As so often in a battle of wills, the body broke. Cox lost his rhythm, while Reid looked concentrated rather than comfortable. Cox started to grimace, and his gait looked less sure, less easy. It emerged that after all his years of marathon training, of miles and miles each week, he’d developed the simple problem that anyone with new shoes risks. A blister was swelling under his right big toe, and, even if he could ignore the pain for a further 22 miles, it was affecting the plant and roll of his foot. Trying to compensate threw his knee out, and then his hip. Reid moved on. Cox deliberately lost time trying to have to foot lanced and dressed. Reid passed him twice while he lay in the pits: a lead of a mile couldn’t be got back without the leader throwing in the towel.

But John started again, grimacing, his gait uncomfortable to even watch. He passed people, although his speed was down, and he was being told to come off. He tried to persevere for 30 miles. And made it. He carried on for 50k (31 and a bit miles), and made that too. Reid was slowing. Ian Anderson was now the fastest man on the track, and John Cox pulled out. Not through tiredness, not through exhaustion, the distance hadn’t beaten him, but a common or garden injury had. The effect on his knee might be more permanent than the blister, and his staying in could have affected his chances in London in seven more weeks.

Richie Bullen, club treasurer, so I suppose the man who pays for this site, asked why I didn’t comandeer Steve Lewis’ video camera and grill the sulking John Cox. "What sort of a web site are you running, anyway?" demanded the man who pays the bills. - One where I try to keep my friends - I replied. Anyway, I had to wave at Phil every two minutes to show him I was still paying attention.

Reid won, still flagging, but that was forgiveable after such an aggressive start. Anderson came second. Chris Finhill, who won in 2000, lost two minutes on his time then to take third, and first veteran.

The afternoon gradually got colder, as the sun sank behind the Western stand. This didn’t much affect the runners as most of the race was done by the time the shadow loomed over the home straight, but all the spectators moved to the infield to conserve heat. Eric Rees, Welsh champion with fourth place in 2000, took the national honours, this time in fifth. Wally Hill grabbed fourth through the intelligent application of acceleration throughout the race. Phil Adams, after a passage where every mile took a minute longer than it had at the start, grew in confidence when badgered that he could still break five hours. He got second Welsh place, with a creditable 4:58, the last laps almost as good as the early ones.

The next mark of distinction was Jackie Leak’s finishing time of 5:01:56, second in the world ever to Ann Transon’s veteran of 40 or above record set during a 100k in Phoenix in 2000. Her time would have been the outright world record before 1982.

Last updated 27 September 2005