6pm. The sun, relenting after its scorching assault upon the day, cast a benevolent glow upon the golden stone of a handsome Cotswold church – and, in its peaceful graveyard, upon a small, nervous group of ultra runners.
Rory Coleman, (MOB Race Director) characteristically, was neither peaceful nor nervous.
“First of all, welcome to the first ever Marathon of Britain! For twelve months, this has been my dream – and now I want it to be your dream!”
He spread his arms in a wonderfully inclusive gesture, which embraced not only the thirty-five bemused guinea pigs who had signed up for this extraordinary ordeal, but also most of Worcestershire – starting with the gently rolling lawns of Coombe Landscape Park.
This venerable estate, centred about an uncompromisingly geometrical 18th century house, is most renowned for its artfully-landscaped grounds – the very first opus in the portfolio of Capability Brown.
There were the Brits, a handful of Germans (a handful being the collective noun for any number of Germans greater than two) and Cyril.
“And let’s also welcome Cyril, who’s from Ireland!”
There was a pregnant silence – then, in an especially aggressive brogue: “Have you got a problem with that?”
Cyril was to be my tent-mate, apparently.
I was already slightly frayed. I’d turned up at Evesham railway station, expecting a shuttle to spirit me, in the style due to a senior media celebrity, to the MOB encampment.
Two hours of merciless sun in the station car park elapsed before I was forced to seek urinary relief at the Railway Hotel. Which was deserted. I sidled to the gents where, bizarrely, a loudspeaker was relaying a recording of the alleged comedian, Bernard Manning.
“So this Scouser was walkin’ down Lime Street an’ a hooker comes up to ‘im an’ sez, ‘Do you wanna blow job?’ An’ he sez, ‘I dunno – will it affect me dole money?’ ”
Rory was right about the dream thing. The inaugural MOB was about to become the most surreal event in my running career.
As we waited for dinner – the first of many miracles, up-conjured twice-daily from thin air by Denis & Anne – we circled warily around the neighbours whose personal idiosyncrasies, bodily odours and mood-swings we would have to endure for the next six days.
Thankfully, one of these turned out to be Luke Cunliffe with whom I had charged around Dartmoor two years earlier to celebrate Shaun Fishpool’s thirtieth.
Unaccountably, he was fat. I say unaccountably because he’s a personal trainer. And only a few months earlier, he’d been the only Brit to complete the dreadful Trans 333, just before turning in a sterling performance in the Grand Union Canal 145 mile race – the one where they castrate you with a rusty hacksaw if you sit down for more than five minutes.
He moaned a lot about being overweight. He needn’t have worried. Six days later, despite the best endeavours of Denis and Anne, he was thin. We all were.
Cyril was thin already. He resembled a spectral projection of Richard Harris after an eternity spent in Limbo, deprived of all sustenance.
But he was amiable enough for a spectre and displayed an early enthusiasm for tidying the tent which the rest of us quietly conspired to encourage.
The rest were mostly Malcolm and Del, proprietors of Tortoise & Hare, the legendary Surrey running store. They looked horribly like Proper Runners.
Malcolm had dark, burning eyes of the sort that are often to be seen staring wildly ahead as they streak across the finish line twenty minutes before the next bloke.
Del radiated the icy calm of the hard-bitten ultra runner – the professional who has seen things that would make your orthotics shrivel in your Montrails, but who elects to keep his own counsel.
They reminded me of bounty hunters in a Western B movie.
God knows what they thought of Luke and me. Well, me, then. They already knew Cunliffe - together they formed the Flame Health Team, handsomely equipped with gleaming new kit and branded shirts, courtesy of an imaginative and far-seeing sponsor.
While I, the ageing privateer, was clad in exactly the same kit I wore in the 1962 Middlesbrough Boys’ High School Cross Country. When I came second from last.
That evening I laughed intemperately, consumed by a kind of gallows humour that had its roots in my inability to provide a satisfactory answer to the question: What in fuck’s name am I doing here?
We went through a rather perfunctory kit inspection: needless to say, I’d left everything to the minute just after the last one, then raced around town in a frenzy, loading up with kilos of unnecessary stuff – cast iron fire dogs, mahogany table lamps and an impressive Druid headdress cast in phosphor bronze and emblazoned with a hundred leaden figurines representing the elfin spirits of the woods.
In the excitement, I had quite forgotten my whistle.
Fortunately, this oversight was rectified by the redoubtable Stephen Partridge – a key figure in the MOB’s translation from ill-conceived fantasy to ghastly reality.
Only Partridge would carry a spare whistle.
Next morning, we were woken at 6am by a pitifully poor impression of a cockcrow. Rory mustered us for a final briefing. It was already hotter than the Sahara was when I ran the Marathon des Sables (the model for the MOB).
He surveyed us slowly, nodding and grinning evilly. He took us through the day’s section of the road book. He illuminated some of the more arcane convolutions of the course. “This race is 98% off-road. I’ve run every inch of it. It took me twelve months. It’s a bastard, frankly.” He displayed all the self-satisfied sadism of the poacher turned gamekeeper.
“Lastly, a warning. It’s about the stiles. Many of them are rickety. Some are slippery with moss. Be extremely careful on the stiles.
“Now – the bus is waiting to take you to the start. Good luck, everyone, and God bless.”
We turned to go, but Partridge intervened dramatically: “Wait, everyone! Before you go, there’s one thing you should know. It’s about the stiles. Many of them are rickety. Some are slippery with moss. Be extremely careful on the stiles.”
Rory stared at him blankly. “Thank you, Stephen. Now, before we leave – any questions?”
Mimi of the Tuff Muthers team piped up: “Yes. We thought your wake-up call was pathetic. Next time, please can we have a real cock?”
The bus took us to the charming town of Malvern, a celebration of 18th century prosperity. Winding streets, clinging to the side of that astonishing geological aberration, the Malvern Range.
A few elegantly-chosen words from our glamorous starter, Floella Benjamin (surrealism was already taking hold) and we were off.
The race literature makes no bones about it: “Competitors must have considerable orienteering skills to complete this event successfully.”
Three minutes in and we were all completely lost. ‘Chickens’ and ‘headless’ were the terms that sprang most readily to mind as we careered for ten precious minutes around the roads and tracks that were supposed to lead us to the ridge of the Malverns.
I suppose propelling us up a 1:4 incline bearing 10 kilo rucksacks at the height of a heatwave was Rory’s idea of a joke. And we responded, I think, with admirable good-humour. So far there were no blisters, stress fractures nor obvious cases of heat stroke. And the view from the top was simply stunning. Across the Vale of Evesham shimmered the misty ridges of the Cotswolds. Little did we know it then – the course was a well-kept secret – but we could just have made out the destination of the third day’s run.
Back down the Malverns and 17 miles ex-Floella, we broke the tape by the elegant private church at Coombe Landscape Park. Luke Cunliffe and I had notched up a creditable joint sixth place. I was privately amazed. Mr Banks, my high school gym teacher, would have eaten his mortarboard.
My success was largely down to Cunliffe’s excellent map-reading. He ran with his head buried in the road book.
AB: “Look! Muntjack! Dwarf deer originally introduced by private collectors for their private zoos, but now breeding successfully in the English countryside!”
LC: “Hard left, then right in 150 meters.”
AB: “Ah! Now this is a really ancient track! Hooper’s Law enables one to date a hedgerow by counting the established species therein, then attributing one hundred years for each species.”
LC: “Across the field, then a 30 degree turn east-nor’east, passing the sewage works on the right.”
Cunliffe ran from Malvern to Nottingham through some of the most beautiful countryside in all of fair England and I swear he saw about six feet of it. He endured this without complaint and it’s the primary reason why we did so well. In rueful retrospect he called it, “the plight of the navigator”.
I’d loved to have helped, of course, but the road book was designed by The Borrowers and was indecipherable to anyone with eyes more than 40 years old.
I’ve made the point to Rory who has promised to produce a ‘talking book’ version next year for the aged and infirm.
That evening, I extended the hand of friendship to the Bounty Hunters – tentatively, as you do to men with guns.
I asked Malcolm how he’d come to own his own running shop. To cut a very long story short, he’d tried to get a proper job but his interviewer had asked him what frightened him, and he’d replied, ‘Giants’.
Tortoise and Hare is founded on unusual principles. It’s miles from anywhere, it doesn’t open until noon, but it doesn’t close until eight. Its customers have names like ‘Spikey Al’, and are expected to spend several hours there. They are received with greater enthusiasm according to how many doughnuts they bring.
Next day, England lay in a state of shock under a sun like a sledgehammer. Malcolm succumbed to a virus and Del dropped out in a heroic gesture of solidarity and drove him home.
Not a breath of breeze stirred the wilting junipers as we trudged and jogged along the scarp of the Cotswolds. On either side, plains of scorched stubble stretched away into a vague penumbra of heat and dust. Crouched beneath sweltering hills, Stanton and Broadway played dead. The temperature lurched into the high Nineties.
Luke and I found we were good at heat and hills. By the time we’d climbed to the weird, Italianate fantasy that is Broadway Tower, we knew we must be close on the heels of the leaders.
As we crossed the finish line, there was the merest smattering of applause. At first we were crestfallen: then we realised that there was nobody there to applaud. Almost everyone else was behind us.
This was a new concept to us: The less applause, the better your position. Excellent.
I agreed to run the MOB for two reasons: 1) Coleman 2) I’d run up the Himalayas, across the Sahara, through the rainforests of Guyana. But my knowledge of England was largely restricted to what I’d glimpsed from the window of a speeding car on the M1.
I figured I should try to catch at least a flavour of the landscapes that had inspired such giants as Elgar, Vaughan Williams and The Chuckle Brothers.
I wasn’t disappointed. We descended upon Stratford-upon-Avon. There we saw the swans that Cyril, as the highly-unlikely ex-Mayor of that famous town, had once tried to protect. (His efforts brought down upon him the wrath of the fishing fraternity. They placed a mischievous advertisement in the Angling Times which resulted in his receiving around ten thousand unsolicited telephone calls. “So I gave up politics. Now I’m just a folk singer. And every year, me an’ the missus go to Lapland to help Santa.”)
We wound through Leicestershire – a county of extraordinary beauty (and vicious hills) that I would have underestimated to the grave, if not for the MOB.
We were about 35 miles into the Long Day and it was unbelievably hot and I was having trouble keeping up with Cunliffe, Anke Molkenthin (former MdeS winner) and the amazing Andy Rivett.
We reached the summit, capped by an ancient tower and affording fantastic, panoramic views of the surrounding country.
The leaders, though, didn’t pause for a moment. They just peered at their maps, poking and grumbling.
“Look!” I barked (they tell me). “I’m all for competition. But this is beautiful! If you don’t look at it, what’s the fucking point? We might as well be on a fucking treadmill!”
They stared at me like a schizophrenic who had neglected to take his medication – then they were off down the hill with me flailing uselessly along behind them.
Anyway, five of us crossed the line that night, fourteen hours and 56 miles after setting out, and I’ve never run so well nor felt so fulfilled.
The next morning’s ten, beautifully-flat miles up the River Trent to the gates of Nottingham Castle were almost a formality.
The MOB does what all great races do. It binds a band of people together in a huge, pointless, epic enterprise that each of them will always count among the defining experiences of their lives.
You’ve either done it or you haven’t. I don’t often say this, but you really should.
