Mind over matter

The fridge door don't lie.

I am overwhelmed by feelings of pride for my wife.  Anita has to be the most positively determined person I have ever met. Yesterday she ran her first ever London marathon in the very respectable time of 4:21:23.  Looking at her split times she actually got faster towards the end - unusual in marathon running for all but elite runners.  It makes me wonder how fast she could have gone had she not submitted an ultra conservative estimated finish time and found herself starting right at the back with all the fancy dress participants (Anita told me afterwards that she spent the first five miles dodging giant caterpillars, wombles and pantomime horses, as well as fiddling with her iPod which had inexplicably set itself to play the same single ABBA song on repeat).


It could have been so different. Only seven weeks ago, following her first run after our return from South Africa, Anita started experiencing pain in her pelvis.  Several visits to doctors, chiropractors, physiotherapists and sports masseurs later, she had identified the problem as persistent softness in the ligaments of the pelvis - great for childbirth, not so good for long distance running.  Up to that date she was averaging over 30 training miles a week, with her longest run 17 miles.  Since then she managed only one long(ish) run of 10 miles and a couple of shorter jogs, and experienced a huge amount of injury-related frustration.  Her regular training regime was replaced with cycling round the park, core stability routines, stretching, and lots of exercises designed to strengthen what I can only describe as the 'bottom muscles' (apparently running is all in the bum).  All attempts to get back on track with actual running ended in frustration, tears or hobbling - often all three.


I think it is a measure of Anita's approach that what seemed to be worrying her most was not the fact that she was probably going to have to drop out of the marathon before she'd even run a step of the course, but that she was going to let down all those friends and family who had sponsored her by donating to Parkinson's UK, the charity for whom she was running in the great John Spickett's memory.  Several times Anita came close to emailing her deferment notice to the race organisers.  Each time we would discuss it and I would try and persuade her not to give up until she absolutely had to. And each time she would decide to give it another day just to see whether there was any improvement.  


This continued even through the week of the marathon itself, when she began to have serious concerns about the fact that she had not done enough long training runs.  At this point I looked to the wisdom of John Thicknes, my first ever university rowing coach.  On our local stretch of the river Avon we had a straight section of water, a little over 1km in length, down which we would race thousand metre sprints in preparation for our first regatta season as a novice crew.  I once asked Thicko (as he was known) whether this was adequate preparation for the up-coming university championships, bearing in mind that we would be racing over the olympic distance of 2km - pretty much double what we had ever done in training.  In a quiet voice, he explained my error: "The thing you need to understand, Dave, is that you can never train for the last 1000m. Thats because the second half of a race is all in the mind."


At the time I swallowed it whole.  Later I realised it was a clever bit of psychology to distract me from the inadequacy of our training facilities.  But now I know, as Anita showed on Sunday, that there is truth in Thicko's words.  After the marathon I asked Anita at what point in the race her pelvis started to hurt. She replied "right at the start, when I started running". She also told me that every time she even thought about walking she told herself to keep running for another minute, just to see what would happen. And she kept running all the way round, for over four hours and 26 miles.  It was a triumph of mind over matter. 


I am so proud.