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Even with all the problems, I had never envisaged it ending like this. I wanted to go back and start again.
Then there were two English accents, voices that were faintly familiar. Jane Caine and Mel Hare were a little older than me, but we had been at Bedford & County Athletic Club together — Jane a high jumper, Mel a sprinter. Although their faces were familiar, I couldn’t come up with their names.
“What are you doing here?”
“Paula, we’re here supporting you.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I don’t understand what happened to me, I just don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry about that now. We’ll find someone to take you back.”
“I just want to get out of here.”
“Do you want me to ring your Mum?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know where we are.”
“Shall I ring Gary?”
“No, Gary might be mad with me.”
Jane and Mel had met Mum and Dad in Athens and they exchanged mobile phone numbers. They rang Mum, but inside the stadium and concerned about what had happened to me, she couldn’t hear her phone. So she missed a call from people who could have given her a precise update. The girls spoke to a volunteer and asked why there wasn’t a van to pick up those who had to stop. “You get a van here now,” Mel said to the guy — and she was not a woman you wanted to argue with.
Then Bill Foster, a good friend from Loughborough, was there. He gave me a hug and I almost collapsed against him. Bill is a marathon runner, had even run the Athens marathon. I don’t know why, but it felt as if he understood what I was going through. I just kept repeating: “I don’t understand. What happened to me? I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” I was shaking but didn’t feel anything now — just totally empty.
“There’s a guy here,” he said, “who’s got a car and can get you to the medical staff at the stadium.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, “because I’ve been to the toilet in my shorts and it’s somebody’s car. I can’t do that.”
“Come on, that doesn’t matter,” Bill said.
Gary: was this big sigh from the crowd inside the stadium. I felt totally helpless. My wife is sitting on the side of a road, totally distressed and I am trapped inside this stadium looking at her on a big screen. The protocol for an athlete who stops in a marathon? It was something we would never, ever have considered.
“She looked awful, like I had never seen her before. I had to turn away. It’s horrific to watch someone so close to you going through this . . . I couldn’t bear to think what was going on inside her head.”
“Later, she was lying on a physio’s couch in the medical room when I saw her. She looked drained, broken-hearted. The worst thing that could have happened to her had happened. I put my arms around her. There was nothing I could say, all emotion had gone. She was numb now. It was like part of us had died, or at least a part of our lives had gone.”
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