The Marathon

Laura had been dreaming about the London Marathon for ten years. She was thirty-eight, she worked in a pharmacy in Leeds, and she had only started running after her fortieth attempt to give up chocolate failed. When she finally got a place in the race, through a charity that helped children in hospital, she printed out a sixteen-week training plan and stuck it on the fridge.

It was such a good plan that, for the first month, she followed it perfectly. Then everything went wrong. In February she caught a terrible cold that lasted three weeks. In March she twisted her ankle on an icy pavement. In April, a fortnight before the race, her longest training run ended after fourteen miles, with Laura sitting on a bench in the rain, absolutely exhausted and close to tears. A marathon is twenty-six miles. She had never even run twenty.

"Don't do it," said her sister. "There's always next year." But Laura had raised nearly two thousand pounds for the charity, and she couldn't face telling all those people that she had stayed at home. What she decided, in the end, was to start the race and see what happened. If she had to walk, she would walk.

The morning of the marathon was bright and cold. At the start in Greenwich there were so many runners that it took Laura twelve minutes just to cross the starting line. The first few miles were wonderful. The crowds were enormous, bands were playing on street corners, and children held out their hands for the runners to touch. Laura felt fantastic. She was running far too fast, and she knew it.

By mile six, her legs felt heavy. By mile eight, her ankle had started to ache, and she began to wonder how she could possibly keep going for another eighteen. It was at that moment that a man appeared beside her. He was about sixty, very thin, with white hair and a faded orange T-shirt that said "Bristol Harriers 1987".

"You're going too fast for how you're feeling," he said, without introducing himself. "Slow down a bit. Breathe with me." Laura was too tired to argue. She slowed down, and he matched her pace exactly. His name, he told her eventually, was Ken. He had run thirty-one marathons, and this one was his last.

For the next seventeen miles, Ken never left her side. He didn't talk much. What he did was count. He counted lamp posts, bridges and water stations. When Laura said she couldn't go on, he didn't tell her that she could. He just said, "Run to the next lamp post. Then we'll see." And at the next lamp post he said it again. Crossing Tower Bridge, with the crowd roaring on both sides, Laura felt so emotional that she started crying, and Ken handed her a sweet from his pocket without a word.

The hardest part came at mile twenty-one, along the river. People were walking, stretching, sitting on the curb. Laura's legs were burning and her ankle was absolutely agonizing. "What you need now," said Ken, "is to stop thinking about the finish. Think about the next minute. That's all a marathon is: lots of next minutes."

At mile twenty-five, they turned past Big Ben and the noise of the crowd became deafening. Laura could see the finish line on The Mall. She turned to thank Ken, but he had dropped back a few meters. "Go on," he shouted. "This bit is yours." She ran the last few hundred meters on her own and crossed the line in five hours and nine minutes.

She looked for Ken for half an hour afterwards, but she never found him. The race results showed nobody of his age called Ken from Bristol. Laura has run four more marathons since then. Every time, at around mile eight, she looks to her side, just in case.