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However, worrying about that doesn’t help and will only make things worse. I try to sit calmly as we wait to leave. Gerard (Hartmann, my physiotherapist) comes to join us and I hear Gary tell him that I am in a panic and they must calm me down. Gerard stretches me out and my legs feel OK. It is time to leave.
By the time we arrive in the BOA minibus, it is less than one hour before the start. I begin to relax and feel a little better. There are things to focus on now.
Nike had developed an ice jacket to help to keep me cool and ideally it needs to be worn for an hour before the start. But now there is not enough time and I can’t really jog and stretch properly with it on. Anyway, although everyone says it is hot, I don’t feel it. I want to jog just a little. Not too much, but enough to make sure my leg is OK and also to help to stimulate some bowel movement because my stomach still feels terrible.
In the final countdown to a big race, Gary gets very nervous and wound up and today is no different. He wishes me good luck and then disappears, accepting that there is nothing more he can do for me.
I don’t do my last stretch with Gerard; I feel loose anyway and my legs actually feel the best part of me. Yet I still feel a little rushed and I notice my hands are shaking a lot as I tie my laces. I try to chat, to reassure myself that I feel fine. Someone says the temperature is 39C but that the road temperature is about 45C. The heat doesn’t concern me; there are so many things on my mind, but the heat is not one of them.
Just before the 20-minute call through to the start area I have my last visit to the toilet. This is normal; I am usually one of the last to go before the start. Yet this time something is wrong. I have been aware for the past few days of the frequency of the visits to the toilet and have a vague sense that what I am eating is simply being passed through my system. I look now at what has been passed; it is white, virtually the same porridge I ate 41⁄2 hours ago. It scares me.
Alex (Stanton, my coach) returns with Bruce Hamilton, the UK Athletics doctor. I do some strides. I do feel OK, my leg is hardly stiff at all and my stomach feels better. “It doesn’t matter anyway; there’s nothing I can do about it now,” I tell him. “I’m here and I’m racing, no matter what.”
At the beginning of the race, I ran on the right-hand side of the road because that was where there was most shade and less of a camber. Through the first 10km, I felt OK. If there was a slight worry it was the sense that I felt I was running faster than the split times showed. It was taking too much effort for the pace I was going.
But my mind was sharp. It’s a hot day, well over 30C; just relax and you will begin to feel better. Keep going at this pace; when you get on to the hill you can pick it up, do a couple of surges and then a long, sustained surge near the top.
After 10km, my stomach began to give me trouble and I needed to go to the toilet, a physical demand that my mind was well used to handling: don’t get stressed, if you stay calm this will pass. You’ve had these problems in your past two marathons; they come and go. Except that this time it didn’t go away.
Prevented from doing what it wanted to do, my stomach began to cramp violently and the more I fought it, the worse it got. Liz Yelling had told me that in the Berlin Marathon she had had to go in her shorts while running. Although it was uncomfortable, she felt better after doing it. If Liz can do that, so can I. To hell with vanity. There was no way I was stopping.
I tried to empty my bowels as best I could while running and for a while it did feel better. But after a bit the cramp returned, got worse and I had to do it again. From the 12km mark, I was fighting this problem all the time. My stomach would cramp, I would feel awful until I could relieve myself a bit, then I would feel a little better for a while until it returned again and again.
After about 18km, we got to the tougher part of the course and, once on the hills, the Japanese runners began surging. Suddenly my legs felt really tired. At this stage, I must have known I needed energy because all I could think about was getting from drink station to drink station, not for the fluids but for the carbohydrate energy. In normal conditions, I drink about 100ml from each bottle; now I was drinking 200-250ml. After each bottle I would feel a little better for a short while.
At the very moment Mizuki Noguchi made her break, I was having really bad stomach cramps. When they eased, I started to work my way back. My mind stayed strong. Don’t panic here. You know you can run the closing 10km of a marathon faster than most people.
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