Thames Ring 250 – ten days on
At eight in the morning on Wednesday June 24th, I sat on a folding wooden chair in a musty village hall in a small village in Berkshire and looked around. It was an inauspicious start to the longest ultra-marathon ever staged in the UK. The same event in California would have warranted a car park full of TV vans bristling with satellite dishes, a giant clock counting down to the start and a dozen sponsors' flags fluttering in the breeze.
Here we had two volunteers at a trestle table, handing out numbers and safety pins, and a lady in the little kitchen brewing builders' tea and instant coffee. The runners -thirty or so- sat around the edge of the hall, some making nervous small talk, others silent; deep in pre-race rituals of Vaseline and tape. A man in a faded vest swigged from a carton of milk. I suspected I was the least experienced ultra-runner there by far. I was almost certainly the youngest.
We started (too fast, most of us later concurred) in blazing sunshine, running in small packs at a conversational pace. It was unseasonably hot, and avoiding dehydration soon became a challenge. I refilled my two-litre Camelbak twice before the first checkpoint -at 27 miles- and I spent much of my time scanning for taps, or friendly-looking people with hosepipes.
The run turns to a walk on the morning of day two. Photo by Alastair Humphreys
The checkpoints were heavenly. The first, in dappled shade in the corner of a field, felt like a picnic at a school sports day. I jogged in grinning to quiet applause, like I'd come third in the long jump, and lowered my bum into a stripey deck chair. I hadn't expected to be waited on, but one of the event's big-hearted volunteers came over with my bags, and a minute later with a cup of sweet tea. I stuffed my face with a chocolate protein shake, a fistful of flapjack and a few strips of biltong (happily, much like Doc's car in Back to the Future II, my stomach seems to burn anything) and trotted off again.
As our individual paces waxed and waned I would meet other runners and, often without knowing each other's name, we would launch into abstract and weighty conversation. One fellow competitor described the self-loathing that fuelled his ultra-running; another exchange touched on the joy of parenthood, and one runner's fear that his young children might see through his facade of confidence and wisdom. It had never occurred to me that having children might bring a fear of the unknown: later that evening I ran alone in happy tears, thinking of my mother and her bravery. She had never seemed overwhelmed to me as a boy, despite bringing my brother and I up on her own for a period, barely out of her mid-twenties. My run seemed a paltry challenge compared to that.
There were highs and lows throughout. I still smile at memories of the sheer beauty of parts of the Thames, the raw, shining spirit of my fellow runners and the magnanimity of the volunteers that stayed up to nurse us through this bizarre test. And I still clench my jaw with rage when I recall the jarring news at the second checkpoint that three runners had been mugged, on three separate occasions during the night (one apparently on his knees, begging to keep his stopwatch, another beaten by three men as a fourth filmed the scene on a mobile phone). We're a peculiar species.
I walked and jogged through the brief hours of darkness with two companions, one agitated, belching and cursing under his breath to no one in particular, the other with a metronomic gait and wire-rimmed glasses. The early sunrise brought primeval joy, and clouds of riverside flies, which gave the burping chap something else to swear at. In fairness, it later transpired that his feet were in a terrible state.
Later that morning I shuffled from the Thames to the Grand Union Canal, though any of the canal's previous grandeur was masked by graffiti, semi-submerged traffic cones and scuttled shopping trolleys, like some strange robotic beaver had tried to dam the stream. My mood fluttered lower as my right ankle started to hurt. There had been dull background pain for a while (I'd clocked up 75 miles by this point) but this was something sharper; more insistent, and at the third checkpoint, at 82.25 miles, I decided it would be prudent to throw in the towel.
Out for the count after 82 miles non-stop. Photo by Sam Christmas
I'm still second-guessing that decision today, though I felt gladly vindicated at the weekend when I heard that Dean Karnazes, widely seen as one of the world's finest ultra-marathoners, had pulled out of the Western States 100 after 62 miles. Dean called his race a "spectacular failure", but I'm being a little easier on myself. Two thirds of the field dropped out of the Thames Ring 250 – nine had retired before I did – and I've never run 82-and-a-bit miles in one go before. Another to falter before the finish line was the ebullient Rajeev Patel, and I'll let him have the final word, with a quote from a fizzingly enthusiastic email he sent the field a few days ago:
"The voice of caution knows nothing of real joy. What joy is there in doing what there was no doubt you could do? Try something you could fail at… that just could be living."
Neal Donald Walsch
[Thank you to Profeet, Skins, Science in Sport and Gregory for their support.]
— Filed under Running