The bit the other side of the finish
line - 9 December 2009

Part 2

If I am totally honest, it’s not necessarily completing the five majors as an amputee that I have impressed myself with, but the fact that from the first day I walked into a gym on 28 December 2002 with the idea of running a marathon, a notion planted in my head in a bar in Peru a few months earlier, I have been utterly unwavering in my devotion, meticulous to the point of obsessive in my preparations and when the chips were down, never doubting a way would be found.

My first run actually took place on a Brazilian beach in October of 2002 and after a kilometer I collapsed into a hammock dying.  That was partly due to being woefully unfit at the time, but also due to the fact that it was the first time that I had jogged for the sake of jogging in 11 years.  The previous time had seen my right knee collapse and with it, another trip to the hospital for surgery with the words of the specialist ringing in my ears as I left, ‘No more running for you!’

I guess to have got five marathons and two half marathons out of my legs is no mean achievement, especially as this has all been done against the  considered recommendations of many physios and prosthetists and with hamstrings that as a youth, I managed to pull one whilst playing snooker!

Having made my mind up to run the Five World Marathons, there have been many points along the way where not doing so would have been a sensible option. Stopping was never an item on the agenda but stopping was something that I came within a hare’s breath of doing at mile 21 of my third marathon in Boston on 23 April 2007.

I went to that race, one of the hardest anywhere on Planet Hollywood, in dreadful shape. Training decimated by injuries so bad, that for five weeks I did nothing at all and for one week of that period I was housebound and unable to walk.  The taper runs were in fact walks because in my final run, the hamstrings had gone twangy and I even picked up a muscle strain on the flight over. On a day where the conditions were so bad that the race itself was nearly cancelled, I set off inadequately prepared, worried and yet I managed to complete the race in 5 hours 23 minutes.

At the top of mile 21 which is known as ‘Heartbreak Hill’, I was in such pain that I found myself in a medical tent unaware how I had got there with the medics ‘recommending’ that I should call it a day. I wanted to stop but somehow I carried on to the end and then spent an hour in the medical tent before anyone would let me leave…still made it to a bar for 8pm meet up with some friends mind!

So, when you compare it with the NYC race just done, where I managed to run the most miles in training and was undoubtedly in the best physical shape ever, I went to the start in reasonably confident mood of beating 5 hours.  Therefore, to have finished with my slowest time of 5 hours, 59 minutes and 19 seconds will tell you that there was to be one final painful and challenging end to it all.

It was going well up until halfway but finally and I guess inevitably, time caught up with me and my legs and from that point until around 21 miles, my New York marathon experience was nothing short of horrible which yet again called upon me to dig in one final time to get to the other side of the finishing line.

I am proud to say that I did not and have not experienced the wall at any stage ever.  The wall is an issue in the mind where the brain says stop and the legs meekly oblige. My problems were the reverse with the legs telling the brain ‘Not today fella!’  The waiting around at the start for five hours on a cold day to run up hills we only hear about in PP conspired against me and I guess flying nigh on 12,000 miles to get there in under a week didn’t help either.

Below are quotes from Paula Radcliffe taken from the BBC: "I knew I was fit coming in, it felt great, then at 11 miles it just went…"…"For the last miles I was just thinking 'just hang in there' as long as I could."…"The really frustrating thing is I don't even feel tired now but my legs just couldn't go any quicker."

It’s almost as if the Beeb interviewed me instead as her experiences are near identical to mine!

The first medical pit-stop, ironically where Paula started having her problems, was at mile 11 and were soon followed by stops at miles 14, 16 and 20 for ever increasing amounts of time whilst medics scurried around trying to find hamstrings for me to complete the race with.  At Mile 14 I whacked down some tylanol for the pain but whereas in Boston I was mentally out of it and running on empty, here I was lucid and chipper by comparison cracking the odd funny here and there.  The seventeenth mile of my race actually took 30 minutes, to be fair a lot of that was spent in a medical tent being iced up whilst eating a choccy cup cake!

Icing of the hamstrings for the fourth time of the day at Mile 20

But as is now common place, fortunes changed and somehow I managed to run down the last five or so miles in a time of 56 minutes which was as much out of keeping with events on the day as it was in any other marathon day. 

My training aimed at a sub-five hour run slowly slipped away from me and in the end, all those months of hard work were meant to get me home and the fact that I got through a difficult race whilst being as alert and nowhere near exhausted shows just how fit I was. Being on my feet beyond six hours would cause fatigue problems and having been up since 4am to finish a few seconds under that critical time was what was meant to be for me on the day. Maybe if I had romped home under five hours I might be tempted to carry on for a sixth race, so maybe something good has come out of it. 

The post-race RV point for the athletes with disabilities was on 72nd Street next to the Dakota Building where John Lennon was gunned down and as I laid out on the cold tarmac recuperating, my hamstrings certainly felt like they had been shot!.  I sat there reminiscing and not wanting to get up as to do so was akin to saying farewell to it all. I was however, consumed by a range of emotions, all of them proud and all encapsulated by the most wonderful of them all.

72nd Street…job done!

Running can be a lonely, isolated experience but with all the wonderful support received over the years, I have never felt alone at any step of the way and for which I am as truly grateful as I am unable to adequately put into words just how much it has been appreciated. I often feel the words ‘thank you’ seem so woefully inadequate, but they are the best I can do.

But as I arrived at the Freiderich Strasser corner of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin on the morning of 28 September 2008 to find a dozen friends readying for the Berlin marathon, I had a lump the size of a melon in my throat with the emotion of it all.  To have run in Chicago and Berlin with friends was indeed special as were seeing family and friends who had come out to cheer on all five of my marathons.  There is also the not insignificant fact that ‘We’ have raised plenty of cash for notable causes and at last count, I think we were at $3,200 for the Achilles Track Club.

The chaps – Berlin 2008

However, it is now time to stop. After my first race I said to Paul Wynn, an old college buddy, about having had such a wonderful experience in the London marathon and how I would hate for that brilliant day to be ruined by a subsequent disaster. Well, I of course went on to have four more brilliant days but NYC clearly showed that despite excellent training, the writing is on the wall and whilst I will be tempted, I know that to continue would only see the law of diminishing returns apply.

After the race I was dining on Park Avenue with a friend in his wife and the next day, my mate Dave Askew and I repaired for lunch and a few bottles of wine. The Askews having put their home into ‘rehabilitation mode’ for the week after the marathon had forgotten to tell beer fridge and their kids, Ms Eva and Master Declan. The latter intent on displaying his wrestling skills and on the Tuesday after the race, Mrs A and I were having lunch when she realised that she was to be on the nature walk of Eva and her fellow first graders.

No time to go home, I joined the mums and of course, there were hills for us to march up and down. Lovely bit though was the teacher turning around to issue a large ‘Shhhh’ only for mums and first graders to look accusingly at me. Yup, still getting told off at school for talking!

Well I can always say that I retired at 43 in New York with my UK tax status being ‘non-dom’ and whilst it might not be work related of course, I guess if you had said to me when I left Wembley hospital in October 1991 after being told to stop running to Imagine that there would be a chapter in my life like this then I could not have comprehended it. As I am sure when I called my Mum from Central Park to proudly announce I had done it and was now retired, she could not have comprehended such a thing after I left King Edward’s Hospital in Ealing in 1968.

But I will leave the last words with Mr Lennon “There is nothing you can do that can’t be done”…although to be fair, it’s not that easy!

It does exactly what it says on the t-shirt

Cheers

JHx
www.firstgiving.com/jhnyhc

PS - in part one I mentioned meeting an Irish man at around mile 19 or so who like me, was struggling and how we discussed the merits of stopping for a beer. As I toured the duty free at JFK who should I bump into?

‘Shall we?’ I said to wit he replied, ‘We will’ and so Michael, his niece who also ran the race and I repaired for a thoroughly deserved cold one.

‘Michelle this is the fella I told you about who inspired me to keep going. Jeez but you looked in some pain.’ he said to me. This I thought remarkably perceptive of him because from where I was stood a week earlier, he looked in an equally shabby state of repair. ‘Will we have another John?’ to which I replied ‘Well, we do deserve it.’

As we sipped another cold one, he looked me in the eye and said: ‘Have you thought of running in Dublin?’  I stared him straight back and gave him the same reply that I did to the lads who ran in Berlin who suggested the same a few days later ‘Stick it up your a…e!!.’

Michael McCole (athlete), me (retired) avec cold ones at JFK