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On Sunday April 22nd. the untold thousands who habitually browse in The Meadow may be vouchsafed the inestimable privilege of a microsecond glimpse or two of the present contributor's home. They can do this by tuning their TVs to the start — whether live or news coverage — of the London Marathon. Utterly coincidentally I live some three hundred yards directly downstream from the event's main start. 
Out of the corner of their lenses helicopter cameras, the wide-angled main camera on the back of the pace car, will vouchsafe to the world a fleeting impression of a moldering gray-green domicile lurking behind a flowering cherry. The race moved on beyond this point the connoisseur of the obsolescent may safely switch off. To stand at my wide front window, a muscle-building glass of champagne in my hand, and watch the marathon parade go by is truly an amazing spectacle. Crowds line the sidewalk a pitcher's throw in front and some six feet lower than my line of vision. Silence has fallen. A gun's boom breaks it. Nothing. Then a beginning spatter of light cheering and the growing patter of more than tiny feet. Abruptly, both sooner and later than you expected, a covey of camera cars sweeps through right to left. Then a lone runner — the agreed pacesetter or an ego-tripper bent on his fifteen seconds of I'll lead the world fame. Hard on his heels come the lean, small, grim-faced men whose company includes the race's eventual winner. Kenyans, all string and bone and teeth, loping along with a casual, soul-less insouciance. Japanese whose grimaces suggest that even at the outset their ligaments have been replaced by razor wire. Mexicans and Portuguese communicating that it has ever been and will be the peon's lot to toil. All are already travelling at a faster pace than I in my salad days could maintain for more than a mile. For perhaps as long as half a minute you can clock individuals. Then, over the next five seconds, the four-lane highway has become, border to border, rising and falling humanity. The club, the once-in-a-lifetime runners are starting to come by. Drip-fed gradually over the start line, the mass of the twenty to thirty thousand entrants process past my window. The trick is to look steadily down one transverse tranche of sight. After a few seconds, like men set off the wrong way on a travelator, the runners start to mark time on the spot. It is the background — the open vista of one of London's parks — that now moves. Picking up speed the open heath beyond the running on the spot multitude most disconcertingly sets off westward towards Central London. More champagne becomes essential. The London Marathon is just one, of course, of the many now staged by or in association with big cities around the world. All run on the lines — a couple of hundred seriously good world-class athletes drawing along several thousand enthusiast, club, runners who, in turn, precede the overwhelming majority — the fun runners. Why, non-combatants ask, do they do it? One (eternal) reason, we can be sure, is "because it's there". Even though Pheidippides, the onlie begetter, troubled the odometer by some five times the distance on his anticipation of Paul Revere's ride (going on foot was always going to be quicker than the freeway he subsequently revealed to reporters) the twenty-six miles plus has since become the classic distance to take on. The professionals, naturally, slug it out for fame, fortune and big bucks. Some years the London Marathon is a qualifying event for a national Olympic or World Games team spot. (Because the course is flat it is a good bet for achieving a qualifying performance if the chancy English Spring deals you a cool, wind-free day). And, let's not forget, because they can hack it, the good guys (and women: the main women's event goes off in back of me) do like it. Watch them in the middle section of the race and you see that their countless training hours of picking them up and laying them down now grants them cruise control at a mile inside every five minutes and in a state of equilibrium. As they near the finish — when a stealthy Ethiopian will decide to try a tad and burn off the front in between his yawns— it's probably the mind games that hurt most. The club runners are bush league followers in the top group's footsteps. They will go back to their home town bigger fish in that little pond for their having competed and finished. More importantly, they will have obtained the fulfilment that comes from measuring yourself on the Everest scale. "How would I make out?" they used to wonder. Now they know. But what about the fun runners? What drives them? Most, we all know, claim to be taking part as sponsored entrants supporting a charity. What soon streams past my window amid the singlets and rip-off priced third-world sports shoes is a cornucopia-load of crazy costumes — Penguins, Chinese Dragon tandems, a black-tied waiter holding aloft a be-bottled and be-glassed tray. Such participants bear banners proclaiming their allegiance to a cure cancer campaign, to single parents, to an AIDS charity. Good luck to them all — even though you know that when six hours later, out on their feet, they stagger across the line into space blanket what is going through their mind is "Yes! Made it! Now I'm high man on the back to home totem pole". And me there with my nose to the window? Don't my feet ever twitch? Do I never get the itch to join in? You bet I do. After all, as a callow youth I used to go out for track. (I was so callow it took me years to figure that that the reason I couldn't run fast enough was that I couldn't get my legs to run fast enough). I could hack it, sure. I could be a contender, still. Only'train for the marathon - as you need to - and you don't get to play bridge, watch Robert Mitchum movies on late night TV, practise the clarinet. Life is short and you have to take decisions. Take one road and .... hey, must be a poem in there somewhere. I won't, therefore, be taking the twenty-six mile three hundred and eighty-five yards long road of the London Marathon. But different strokes for different folks. Come April 22nd. I'll raise a glass to all the thousands, good, bad or already regretting, who pass by outside. And I'll do it with respect. |
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