Chester Marathon
Posted by Ed on October 16, 2023
When I arrive in Chester I wander towards the city centre and find myself entering the cathedral for reasons somewhat mysterious to me. There was a time when I’d have said a place like that can just be beautiful and that’s it, but increasingly I’m wondering about the metaphysical implications of that beauty. Regardless, it’s a spectacular room and intensely calming after the cancellations and crowded trains that got me here, and I spent a few minutes sat in silence. A priest with his smartphone out comes on the mic to blankly announce an imminent prayer in the chapel. I can’t help but feel he’s talking to the mic and not the room.
Back to the silence. This is one of the first times I’ve not felt self-conscious or out of place in a church, and I wonder if I might start seeking out such silence more often. There’s a giant LEGO version of the cathedral in one corner and a bunch of tealights flickering away. I think about lighting one for dad but don’t because I’m too self conscious, and besides, if he’s still around in some sense I don’t think he cares much for tealights.
I check into my room I am surprised by its palatial layout given its affordability. I go to Pizza Express where there’s an unusually high number of rakish solo diners. Back at the hotel and it turns out it has the only 2am music license in Chester and when Rock DJ comes on at 10pm I know not to hold out for it to end any time soon and focus on relaxing if not sleeping. I listen to Ken Fancett on the Centurion podcast talking about his hundred hundreds, but am asleep before the end despite Robbie’s chanting.
At 6am I come to consciousness and say no, not now, and delay my alarm by five minutes. When it goes off again I reset it to 6:30. The racecourse is a 9 minute walk away and I am in no rush. When I do arise I spend a lot of time not thinking about what is to come. Instead I make a coffee with my preloaded Nanopresso (sponorship welcome), eat some oats and watch morning TV, which is somehow depressing when you’re on your own, so instead I put on the end of that Centurion podcast and begin the process of preparing without thinking too much about what I’m preparing for. I put my lenses in and catch my own eye in the mirror and feel strangely empty except for the anxiety fluttering in my chest but that’s nothing new. As I lube my junk I think of Gary Robbins in that Ginger Runner Wonderland Trail FKT documentary saying “lube your junk”, and then feel weird that I’m rubbing my nuts thinking of Gary Robbins. On with the shorts. Lube the feet, on with the socks. Lube the nips, on with the vest. I am at this point mostly lube.
With everything packed all that remains is the toilet, which I know can make or break a race though thankfully I’ve never experienced it breaking one. Mercifully things go well and I wonder if I should mention that in my review for Chester Pizza Express – “A great choice if you need to take an early dump”. Finally I stop burning my eyeballs with mindless scrolling and decide it’s time to face the music and I feel that anxiety turn to steel resolve and think, game time, like an action movie hero from 1996.
there once was an old man from Chester
who let his infected wound fester
he went to the doc
who said chop it off
and now he’s a lemon juice zester
Runners flow through Chester’s medieval cobbled streets towards the race course. I text Emily that I’m signing off and find my way to the bag drop. Now it’s just me and my legs and four gels and a bottle of tailwind in the back pocket of my running waist band. I head down an underpass towards the start and am surprised when thousands of runners appear on the other side. I’d forgotten this was a proper big event. I head to the loo queues and with exactly half an hour to go I eat a gel and with exactly twenty minutes to go I’m in a cubicle and with exactly fifteen minutes to go I’ve done the best I can. I jog 500m on the grass and then head to the start pen and stand in the area marked sub-3 and silently try and figure out if the people around me look like they also don’t know if they can do it. Some of them really look like they know they can do it.
The town crier makes a joke from atop a double decker bus about having run the route this morning and then with no countdown he toots a horn. It takes 15 seconds or so for me to reach the gantry, and then everyone around me goes ballistic. I realise quickly that many of them probably cannot do it. This is a British masters event so there are lots of people in masters bibs and kudos to them, but when I pick my way past a lady marked F75 I think, really? But it’s only a few hundred metres before people calm down and stop trying to cut in front of each other and we parade at a decent clip through Chester’s historic centre where people are clapping. I notice I’m averaging five or six seconds per km faster than I need to and ease up and then we cross a bridge over the river and enter the suburbs.
Before long the route enters open countryside and my, it really is open. This is like a trail race, I think, only on the best kind of roads – flat and free of cars. It’s not road running I hate but traffic. What would the world be like without cars I wonder. What would we do with all the roads? Probably run races on them.
There’s no clear pack but there are recurrent faces, most notably a bloke who must be over 50 dressed as Captain America, complete with mask and shield. He ends up storming gallantly ahead (very method) and I focus on keeping my average pace between a narrow window of 4:11 to 4:14 per km. I need to average 4:15 to go under 3 hours. I want to run the first half comfortably because I genuinely don’t know what awaits in the second. This is my first road marathon in seven years and despite having run over a dozen ultras this is far more intimidating to me.
We cross a bridge over a motorway and I wonder what the drivers below must think. Then I realise they must think, “Oh look, there’s a race goin on.” If I was them I’d be googling to find out what the race is but then I’d probably crash my car. At a water station I grab a bottle and drink a bit then throw the rest over me. It isn’t hot out but it makes a difference.
We hit an out and back and get the tantalising opportunity to glimpse some of the folks running at 2:45 pace or thereabouts. A tribute band is playing Queen and there’s a crowd of supporters including a kid with a ‘power up’ button on a placard which I hit. It does nothing but lift my spirits a bit which is about the only power up you can hope for within the bounds of the law. At the turnaround point a bloke in front of me knocks over the inflatable marker which falls to the ground in slow motion and causes some commotion but I feel like my exclamation of ‘fucking hell’ was probably overdoing it.
We come back the way we came and see the 3:15 pacers going the other way, they seem oddly close but then I clock that at this point they should only be three or four minutes back. Back past the tribute band and over a river bridge into Wales which looks the same as England except the signs are in Welsh and the pubs have dragons on them. I think about the Welsh announcements on the train yesterday from Runcorn and wonder what Britain would be like if we all spoke Celtic languages still. It would probably be the same except Keir wouldn’t seem like such an unusual name whereas Cornelius would be positively alien.
I down some of my Tailwind and as my watch beeps on the hour I begin the nerve-wracking process of consuming a gel. This is the one element of my race I haven’t done much preparation for but my stomach makes no objections and I thank the thousands of miles of ultra plodding/face-stuffing I’ve put my body through.
The supporters on this race are amazing. They’re only there when you pass through a village but they come out en masse and wave placards and hold out trays of sweets and yell out your name which I keep reminding myself is on the front of my bib. One of them says “Go on Ed!” and then “You do look like an Ed” and I laugh but also think, what do you mean by that?
We hit a loop which doubles back on itself. This time the runners we see are further ahead towards the front of the race, running on their own. They look like wild men, roaming the hills. Except we are in the flat bit of Wales. We pass through the halfway mark and I use the lap function on my watch to get my split which is 1:28:30. A solid bank of time but not so much that it’s in the bag because I really do not know what’s coming. I pass a runner wearing a V60 vest and ask him if he’s really sixty and he says yes and I say fucking hell because he’s just run a 1:28 half. He says he’s suffering and I say he looks good for it. He does.
there once was a lady from Chester
who had an enormous big chest, her
aunt mabel said “see,
she gets that from me”
but really she bought it in Leicester
I hang with one of the three hour pacers who I’ve managed to catch, thinking if I stay with him I’ll go sub-3 because he started 10 seconds ahead of me or so. But the other three hour pacer is about 300m in front of us. I decide not to worry about them and pay attention to what my gut and my heart and my brain and my watch are telling me. Unconsciously I seem to pick up the pace a bit and find myself clocking a 4:06 and then a 4:08 despite being on the flat, so I urge myself to slow down and let the two lads from Avon Valley Runners who are literally CHATTING overtake me. The first signs of difficulty are showing themselves, nothing major but the occasional soft pang of existential dread and I remind myself to take it easy as there is still a long way to go. My legs seem happy enough to cruise at 4:12 pace which is more than fine by me though I know the second half of this course has a few more hills than the first. Before I know it I’ve overtaken the other three hour pacer who looks like he’s out for a morning jog with his dog.
Back into a village where more supporters are being amazing. We hit a nice steep downhill and my trail legs serve me well even though I’m crap at descending actual trails, then we head over a bridge and back into England, land of the free home of the fucking hell who put this hill right here what an absolute stinker. But then we’re up it and my heart rate begins to stabilise and I start chatting to a bloke with a 100 Marathon Club singlet with the words 200 MARATHONS on his back. He says he only started running in 2015 and I try to figure out how often you have to have run a marathon to have done 200 in eight years, but by this point my brain is preoccupied with its own agenda which consists mainly of repeating songs on a loop and chattering random noise. He says he’s struggling a bit and I notice my pace has slowed whilst talking to him. He encourages me to push on, which I do.
The course collides with the metric marathon runners coming the other way and I see the runners slowly morph from lean whippets to steady labradors to plodding ducks, quite literally because the last runner is dressed as a duck. She cheers us on and I return the favour. My watch beeps the two hour mark and even though I don’t feel like it I cast my mind back to June’s 100 where I never felt like it but did it anyway, so I do it anyway and the gel stays down and I think that’s it, I don’t need to take in any calories now except maybe a few mouthfuls of Tailwind. We hit another water station (they’re every 5k) where a group of very excited teenagers are on duty, and when I grab a bottle from one she screams GO ED YOU’VE GOT THIS and I think, yes, I probably do, but please stop screaming.
The kilometres on my watch start entering scary territory but I still feel okay. 32, 32.2. 10k to go.
there once was a nun, name of Hesther
who claimed that her son was the best o’
the sons of all nuns
but most nuns have no sons
and besides, the pope never blessed her
Things get weird over the next few minutes. It starts to heat up, the sun is quite strong but thankfully the course is fairly shaded. I don’t slow down but I feel like I must be. My legs are somewhere far beneath me and I don’t see how it’s possible that I’m willing such abstract disembodied entities to move at 4:10, 4:05, 4:15 pace. I don’t question it and try to put all thoughts of the miles ahead to one side and let the moments tick by of their own accord. Whoever designed this course did it the wrong way around, I think. All the nasty hills are in the second half. They’re tiny by trail standards but enough to slow me down to 4:20, 4:25 pace which feels like the end of the world until we hit the apex and the descent and then 3:55 pace feels easy and I realise it’s going to be okay, I am actually-probably going to do this. Then it’s 6k to go and I realise if I run the rest of this at 5 minute pace I’ll still finish under 3 hours, then it’s 5k to go and I think the same only slower. Then it starts to really hurt and I tell myself to shut up with the maths.
My brain doesn’t really oblige but chatters a bit quieter and I am amazed to see I’m actually getting faster because it really, really doesn’t feel like it. We cross back over the motorway and into Chester and who’s up ahead but Captain America once more who I pass to a chorus of RULE BRITANNIA and then we’re in Chester properly running down a closed bus lane with traffic on one side of us, then down a hill onto the riverside and I think, I can relax, but another hill appears and the FV50 vest next to me says fucking hell and I join her. Then we’re downhill again along the river and people are saying go on Ed, well done Ed, and I realise I’m pretty much on my own and one guy says suck it up and I try to because it’s really fucking hurting and my watch says 42km and I think about the fact we are going to have to climb away from the river soon back to the race course but then the finish line is right there on the river and I realise that’s it I’ve done it and everyone is saying well done Ed go on lad and I cross the line and stumble to a walk and it feels so weird to walk, the world is a wobbling mirage of jelly and I am not really in my body and someone hands me a medal and a fistbump and then a bottle of water and a finishers fleece and a bag of snacks and crap and I stumble to the grass and lie down and think nothing at all.
there was a man called Ed
who thought things in his head
about himself.
his mental health
improved when he ran ’til near dead.
The first time I ran a marathon I cried when the finish line came into view, and not just because I made the foolish decision to run it in actual sandals. I watched a documentary recently about an ultra in the Finnish arctic where one of the competitors said something like, these events don’t make us rich, we don’t do them to impress people, it isn’t going to change anything, except for my own perception of myself.
I think endurance sports can be a way to process things, to force trauma through the cathedral organ pipes so you can play the music you were born to. Like a lot of young men I have had things to process. But this time I didn’t cry, I didn’t get emotional. I felt satiated and empty at the same time. I wondered, what the hell drove me to do that? As well as, well done for doing that, Ed. Bloody well done.
As much as we should rage against the dying of the light, if there’s anything this year of big running goals has left me with (100 miler, sub-3 marathon) it’s a profound increase in the extent to which I’m comfortable in my own skin. And this makes me want to rest. I don’t know if it’s because I have held these big goals in focus for so much of the last twelve months, but right now all I want to do is take my foot off the accelerator.
My official finish time was 2:56:26. It really hurt but I’ll probably end up doing it again. On the tube back in London a man stood next to me had a Marvel themed shopping bag. Captain America stared out at me all the way to Brixton.
This race report was inspired by Michael Versteeg’s incredible Cocodona 250 summary.
