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Near the crest of the hill, about 12km from the finish, I was closing on the Ethiopian, Elfenesh Alemu, who was in second place. I overtook her. Then Catherine Ndereba came alongside; we ran together going up the hill before I pulled away from her. Coming down the hill, my legs felt really sore.
It was a weird, empty feeling, not like I was in pain from running hard or specifically sore muscles, but rather that I couldn’t seem to control my legs properly.
Early on, I had run on the right side to get some shade, but now this was involuntary. My brain kept sending the same message. Yet my legs wouldn’t respond. My body kept drifting to the right and I was powerless to prevent it.By now, my mind accepted that there was a huge crisis and around the 36km point I knew I was in big trouble. I could hardly pick my legs up at all; they were like sore lead weights. I felt so empty, yet I was only 1km past my last bottle. You’re not going to be able to get anywhere near the next drinks station, let alone to the finish. You can’t do this, you have nothing left.
No, I can’t stop. No. Not now. It’s only four and a bit miles. This is the Olympic Games, I can’t stop. I have to keep going until I collapse.
But you can’t; physically you can’t. Your legs are just too sore and dead, too exhausted.
It got to the point where I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. And I stopped. Although I had done it, I couldn’t believe I had. What have I done here?
For a long time I had felt that I was running up and down, instead of forwards. Now I felt that I physically could not run another step. By stopping, I created another kind of hell. My mind couldn’t believe what I had done. Maybe I could recover a little and get going again. I tried but could get nowhere.
Other runners went past and seeing them go by was awful. They’re still in the Olympics, you’re not. I then went to the other side of the road, where there were fewer people, and although I was in shock, I just wanted to get away from there. There must be some sort of transport to get me back, but where is it?
All the time I was crying and saying how I didn’t understand what had happened. Then the medical van came along. They checked my pulse and blood pressure because they imagined that it was probably heatstroke. Pulse and blood pressure were normal. They put me in the van, wrapped a blanket around me and took me back to the stadium. Sitting in the van, I couldn’t cry any more because I had cried myself dry.
What I felt then was sheer numbness, of being in total shock. I wanted to disappear, to hide from everything. I couldn’t cope with the fact that all the work, all the sacrifice, all the expectation had come to nothing. I couldn’t cope with my anger and emotions. I dreaded the looks on the faces of the people I cared about and felt I had let them down.
At the stadium, Bruce Hamilton, the UK Athletics doctor, awaited my arrival. He took me into a room and I changed out of my wet and dirty kit. Then I lay on a table. I couldn’t stop shaking. Mum and Dad came in. Mum was crying. It was good to see them, I needed the hugs. I felt that I could just go into a deep sleep, a coma almost, right there and then and I wouldn’t have wanted to wake up for some time.
Bruce examined me and said that my spleen was a bit swollen and my stomach pretty battered, but my vital signs OK. “We need to get you back to the (athletes’) village,” Bruce said, “to get proper scans and blood tests as well.”
By the time I got to the medical centre, it was shutting down. They checked everything they could. The heat definitely hadn’t affected me, I was totally hydrated. I had run more than 22 miles of a marathon and my urine was still clear. What happened to me had nothing to do with dehydration or the heat. I had just felt totally empty out there, a feeling that I can hardly describe even now.
I sat on the kerb and cried my eyes out because I was so exhausted, so gutted, so angry and so helpless. Part of me hated myself and my body for being so weak and for giving up, part of me accepted that this was the end of the road; I could go no further. None of me wanted to accept the situation I was in. I was still in a state of shock over what had happened.
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