When I was 23 years old I almost died. There was a moment when my life could have ended in about the time it takes for Usain Bolt to run 200 metres, if I hadn’t received the right medication. But, as I will explain a little later, I got the correct treatment in the nick of time. When I recovered from this incident, I adopted an attitude of ‘I nearly died, but I didn’t, so that’s ok’, but the experience left me with an enhanced appreciation of life. I think we all tend to take life for granted until we are faced with death. It also increased my appreciation of running, because running always makes me feel so alive.
Running is one of the best sports to be involved in when things are going well. I know it requires a lot of discipline and commitment, but that is part of its appeal to those who enjoy it. Things that come too easily are seldom highly valued, but it can be immensely satisfying when you commit yourself to something, work diligently towards it, and then have to perform well to achieve it.
Running well depends on two things. Physical fitness is the first and most obvious criteria; your talent, or natural ability, will determine your level of competition. Within that level, anyone can excel by training well enough to reach peak fitness.
Ability to perform is the second criteria to running well. It depends on confidence, determination and motivation. When the Tuesday night group at Gateshead Harriers decided to try to win the National Cross Country title, we committed ourselves to it. We trained hard for it, and, more importantly, everyone performed to his utmost on the day, because we believed we could do it, and we wanted to do it. The victory didn’t come easily, but that is why it was so satisfying and rewarding. The same sense of achievement can be enjoyed at any level of running, as long as you have strived to succeed.
Some of the training can be arduous, but the pure action of running becomes a joy when you are fit and well. There are few better feelings in life than running smoothly along a soft forest path, on a bright spring day, with the dappled sunshine glinting on a babbling brook, and the fresh, blossom-scented air filling your lungs. When the ground just flows beneath your feet for mile after mile, you feel tireless, fit, strong, and wonderfully alive. Running is a terrific sport when things are going well: but when things are going badly, it can be really dire.
If you are injured and can’t compete it is just as frustrating for a runner as for a footballer, cricketer or golfer, but when you come back from injury in those other sports, you can usually play straight away. You may not be at your very best, but you can have an enjoyable and satisfying game or round. You can always make a good pass, hit a four, or sink a long putt without being on top form. Running a race depends so much on physical fitness, and if you are an unfit runner, who records slow times and loses to people who have never beaten you before, it is hard to find a section of the race you are satisfied with. When you are unfit that forest footpath is all uphill, the sunshine is too warm, the stream is too noisy, and the blossom makes you sneeze.
My first experiences of running taught me that if I trained I became fitter, and if I trained more, I became fitter still. Injuries are bound to happen to every sportsman at some time, so they shouldn’t be a real problem if they are handled correctly. The first step is to try to avoid them, but when they occur they should be treated. When they are over, some good training will make them seem like an irrelevant interruption. You don’t need to stay unfit for long when injuries have set you back, as long as you can start training again.
The problem occurs when you suffer an injury, recover, fight your way back to fitness, and then get injured again. If this process becomes a regular cycle, you can never build on your fitness level. To improve significantly you need to achieve a certain level, maintain it until it becomes your natural level, and then move on to a higher level. If you keep suffering injuries, progress is always interrupted.
I was 19 when I first developed a sore Achilles tendon in February 1972. After some treatment and a week’s rest, I was fine until April, when I had to take three days off to let some soreness settle down. I was living in a student bed-sit in Sunderland, training once every day, and covering about 55 miles per week. I was injury free until May the following year, when I had another flare up of my left Achilles tendon, which cleared after a week’s rest. These were short-term, minor injuries and had no effect on my progress.
In the summer of 1973, I improved my best mile time to 4 minutes 4.0 seconds on a five-laps-to-the-mile cinder track at South Shields. I reduced my 1,500 metres time to 3:45.3 in the heats of the AAA Championships, and ran 8:35 for two miles at Crystal Palace. Brendan Foster won the latter race with a new world record of 8:13.8. I was in second place with 200 yards to go but was out-sprinted by Chris Stewart and Bernie Ford. I was thrilled with my time, and very excited to be in a world record setting race. I was 21 years old and felt excited about the future.
Lindsay Dunn had recently moved to Newcastle and I got to know him around this time because we trained together at Gateshead on Tuesday nights. He had lived with Brendan Foster when they had both been in Leeds, and was helping Brendan with his training programme. He was very excited about my 8:35 for two miles, and wanted to know what training I was doing. We often discussed training after that, and although Lindsay never formally coached me, this was the start of a relationship which was to guide my whole career.
1974 was the year of my final exams and I worked hard enough to gain my degree. To become a fully qualified pharmacist, I had to complete a year of work under the supervision of a suitably qualified pharmacist. My plan had been to work in, and then take over, my father’s business, but before I did that I decided to do my post graduate year in a London Hospital, to gain a far wider range of experience. I shared a house in Golders Green with five other newcomers to London, and I got a job at St Thomas’ Hospital, where, much to the delight of a lad from Ferryhill, I was able to time my tea-breaks on Big Ben, as the hospital is directly across the river from the Houses of Parliament.
My professional life was moving forward as it should, but my running career was not. I suffered another tendon flare up in the summer, which meant no track races at all, and resulted in a nine week period when I didn’t run a step. Throughout the entire year, I averaged only 38 miles per week. The extended rest took all the inflammation from my tendon, and I was pain free when I started running again in the autumn. Lindsay Dunn was in touch to see how I was doing and insisted that, if I was pain free, I needed to step up to training twice a day all the time.
Throughout the winter of 1974 to 1975, I was running twice a day on Monday to Saturday, with one long run on Sunday. St Thomas’ is a teaching hospital and the medical students had a locker room with showers, which I was able to use by pretending to be a medical student. I would go to work on the underground, with my running kit and a change of underwear and shirt. After work, I would store my clothes in a locker, and run the eight miles home. I would run back to work the following morning, shower and change into my clean clothes. I did this twice a week with all my other runs done from home. It took me 50 minutes to run from home to work, but it usually took 55 minutes to get from door to door when I went on the Northern Line. I was, therefore, saving both time and money, despite the obvious drawback of trying to run across Westminster Bridge and Parliament Square in the rush hour.
I trained well all winter and drove up to Luton in March to meet my Gateshead colleagues for the National Cross Country Championships. I had been 46th in the National the previous year, but felt sure I could improve on that, and play my part in helping the team to regain the National title. Luton was the sort of course that suited me. It had one big hill each lap but the rest of it was flat, grassy and dry. The race was won by a Luton athlete, Tony Simmons, who went on to be fourth in the Montreal Olympic 10,000 metres the following year. I ran the best cross country race of my career and finished twelfth. I was first counter for Gateshead’s winning team, and after the race I discovered that two of the men in front of me were Scottish. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that this race was the trial for the World Cross Country Championships, and with nine men in the team, I was named travelling reserve because I was tenth Englishman. I had won myself a trip to Rabat in Morocco. I was so pleased with the day that I went back to Gateshead, on the bus, with the rest of the team to enjoy the celebration. I had to get the train back to London the next day, then another train to Luton, followed by a bus and finally a long walk to get my car back.
Travelling reserve to Morocco sounds like a nice holiday, and in many ways it was, but it was a strange position to be in. I had to assume I was running, even warm up before the race, in case anyone dropped out at the last moment. I was very pleased nobody did, because two days after Luton my Achilles tendon had started hurting again, and although I was able to run on it, I knew another hard cross country race was not going to help it. The race was won by Ian Stewart, who had won the European indoor 3,000m title a few weeks earlier.
I had several weeks of treatment and easy jogging, which settled it down, as it had done before. By May I was training and racing, but in the middle of June it became very sore again, and I stopped running completely for a week. The time had come for some drastic action, so I arranged to see Dr John Williams, an orthopaedic surgeon in Slough. He had operated successfully on John Caine’s tendons, and it was John who recommended him to me.
The tendon was extremely tender when touched, and Dr Williams thought he should operate and decompress the tendon by removing the scar tissue around it. He couldn’t do it until August, but suggested that I keep running. It might clear up by itself, but if I made it worse it didn’t really matter.
My week of rest had helped, and I was able to run again without any significant trouble. I trained hard in the hope I could salvage something from the track season, knowing that I would soon have the problem solved. I finished second in a mile race in 4:06.5, and two weeks later came back to Gateshead for the Gateshead Games. Brendan Foster had broken the World record for 3,000m at this meeting 12 months earlier, and was attempting the 5,000 metre record this time. The stadium was packed and the atmosphere was fantastic.
I ran the 3,000 metres, and was amazed to reel off laps in 63 seconds. I was second to Ian Stewart at the bell, and although I was out-sprinted in the last lap, I finished fourth in 7 minutes 54 seconds. This was a personal best by a long way and a considerable breakthrough in my level of performance. Several people told me I obviously didn’t need an operation if I could run like that, and I began to wonder if a miracle might happen and I could avoid the surgeon’s knife.
When I woke the next morning, I lay in bed for a while remembering how well I had run the day before, but when I got up my tendon was so sore I couldn’t even walk properly, let alone run. I didn’t run at all for the next four weeks, as I waited for surgery. I was admitted to Taplow Hospital on August 26th, with my operation scheduled for the next day.
I had an antiseptic bath, and a nurse shaved my lower leg. I put on one of those strange back-to-front operating gowns all hospitals use, and I was wheeled into the anteroom, where the anaesthetist prepared me for the operation. I was lying on my back as he explained that he would give me an injection of short-acting barbiturate, which would put me to sleep. He would then give me the full anaesthetic before I was taken into the operating theatre, but I would know nothing about it until I woke up back in the ward, lying on my stomach. He warned me that my leg would be hurting, but he would arrange some strong painkillers to take care of that.
He said he would count to three as he injected Thiopentone into a vein in my arm, but I only heard the one and the two. You cannot fight that injection like you can fight sleep; it just knocks you out. I felt very strange the next time I was aware of anything. I was slowly emerging from a deep sleep, and I was confused. Several different things confused me. I was lying on my back. I had intense pains in my head and groin. I was breathing into a mask held over my mouth. I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t.
I was becoming more conscious now, and I was aware of a lot of people in the room, and a lot of agitated voices. As I tried again to open my eyes, the mask was removed from my mouth and a woman’s voice, close to my ear, said, “Can you hear me?” I told her I could, and she continued, “Don’t try to open your eyes. They are too swollen. How do you feel?”
As I was telling her where I was hurting, someone came rushing into the room, and demanded to know, “What have you given him?”
A different voice said, “Adrenaline, prednisolone, chlorpheniramine and oxygen. His blood pressure was 80 over 20, but it’s 90 over 40 now.”
I felt indescribably bad. My heart was pounding in my chest, and there was confusion all around me, but something registered in my brain. It was only a year since I had taken my pharmacy degree finals, and I recognised that list of drugs as standard treatment for anaphylactic shock. Suddenly I felt better, because I knew what was happening to me.
Later, I was to appreciate that I have an exceptional ability to look on the bright side. I was feeling better about what was happening now that I knew what it was. Someone less optimistic than me may have dwelled on the other things I knew about anaphylactic shock. It is a rare, allergic reaction, and is similar to the reaction caused by a bee sting. The big difference is that the swelling caused by a bee sting is localised, but in anaphylaxis the swelling is happening to the whole body. Liquid that should be in the blood stream leaks out into the gaps between the cells, causing huge swelling, especially around the eyes. When the blood volume goes down, the pressure goes down too, and the heart beats faster and faster to keep blood flowing. If you don’t get treatment very quickly, anaphylactic shock will probably kill you.
The sedative effect of the thiopentone injection only lasts a few minutes, and I had started to wake up in the middle of the allergic reaction. The fact that I woke up at all was reassuring and I assumed I was going to be fine. When my pulse and blood pressure stabilised, I was taken to the Cardiac Intensive Care unit, where I drifted in and out of sleep for an hour or two. When I became more awake, I began to realise the implications. My operation had obviously been cancelled, and I was glad to have discovered this allergy before a minor operation, rather than something more urgent and critical. Having an anaphylactic shock when your appendix has just burst would not be a good idea!
My systems had settled down, and I was feeling a little closer to normal, but there were still some concerns. I had to drink measured amounts of water every hour for the rest of the day, and throughout the night, to see if my kidneys were still working properly. They can easily be damaged by a lack of blood supply, and the doctors were worried this may have happened during my reaction. Thanks to the sophisticated medical process of measuring the volume of my urine, I was declared fit enough to be transferred to a cardiac ward, where I spent three days with a dozen old men who were recovering from heart attacks.
While I was there, the anaesthetist came to see how I was, and to tell me what had happened. After the thiopentone, he had injected me with Scoline, which is a muscle relaxant. It is needed to counteract the convulsions, which are triggered by one of the levels of unconsciousness you descend through when having a general anaesthetic. He had turned away to prepare the next injection, but when he looked at me again he thought my ‘ear lobes looked a little blue’. He checked my pulse and blood pressure, but couldn’t get a reading because the former was rising and the latter was falling too quickly. My face was starting to swell, and luckily for me, he knew exactly what was happening, and more importantly, knew what to do about it.
He felt that if he hadn’t spotted the colour of my ears for another twenty seconds, it might have been too late. He told me that he had never lost a patient, but for about a minute he thought he was going to lose me. I found that all the medical staff preferred to talk about misplacing me, rather than say ‘you nearly died’.
At a later date, I had to go the dermatology department of the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle to undergo allergy skin tests. I had been given two injections, and although everybody expected it to be the barbiturate I was allergic to, we had to make sure, so that I could avoid it in the future. A tiny amount of each drug was injected into the skin on my forearm. A large weal, just like a bee-sting, formed at the site of the Scoline injection. They were so surprised and excited by it, I was paraded, or rather my arm was paraded, around half a dozen departments of the hospital. They even called for a photographer, and I assume that my arm, with a large lump on it, now adorns the inside of some medical textbook.
I was told that being allergic to Scoline was a one in a million chance, and people say that winning an Olympic medal is also a one in a million chance. What I want to know is – how come I’ve never won the lottery?
I recovered fully from the reaction, and spent two weeks at home, before going back to Taplow Hospital to have my postponed Achilles tendon operation. Neither Dr Williams nor I wanted to risk a repeat of my previous experience, so he decompressed my tendon under local anaesthetic. I discovered that he operated while listening to classical music; the procedure took about 15 minutes; and it was very important to keep still. It was a strange sensation. I felt no pain, but I was aware of him touching my tendon and poking about inside my leg.
When he had finished, I was taken back to the ward feeling really good. I felt like the whole thing was no trouble at all, until the local anaesthetic wore off. Then it hurt more than I can describe, and I spent most of the night biting my pillow so as not to cry out in pain.
After four days in hospital, I was transferred to Farnham Park Rehabilitation Centre. Dr Williams would only operate on people who agreed to undergo a full rehabilitation programme afterwards. It was important to get mobility back in the tendon as quickly as possible, so that adhesions and scars from the surgery couldn’t attach to the tendon. I was keen to be back on my feet, but I went into Farnham Park feeling very sorry for myself, because my leg was sore and I was hopping around on crutches.
It took me less than 24 hours to put my position into perspective. There were a few other sportsmen recovering from operations, but most of the people in Farnham Park were recovering from accidents. I shared a dining table with two men learning to walk again. One had lost a leg, and the other had his pelvis crushed when he fell between a moving train and the platform at Paddington station.
There was a 9 am to 4 pm timetable of daily activities and exercises, and the physio-terrorists, as we called them, were relentless in their pursuit of improvement. I was there for four weeks of gruelling work. I went in unable to put my foot on the ground, but I came out doing shuttle runs and circuit training.
It had been July 26th 1975 when I made my breakthrough at 3,000 metres in Gateshead, but it was October 14th before I was able to run another step. I went home on the 19th and began the very long and slow process of getting back to fitness and full training.
My post graduate year was over; I was a fully qualified and registered pharmacist, and I was working fulltime in my father’s business in Ferryhill. I slowly increased my training and I worked my way up to running 70 miles per week by December. In January 1976 I developed plantar fascitis, which causes pain in the arch of the foot, and by February I was doing 20 miles a week. It cleared up in March in time for me to turn out for Gateshead’s defence of the National Cross Country title in Leicester. We won the team race again, but I finished in 95th place, and as I was 7th counter, it was the six team-mates in front of me who won the medals. This was quite a come down from leading the team home in 12th place a year earlier.
I improved during the spring and early summer, and in June I went to Switzerland with Lindsay Dunn for ten days of altitude training at Pontresina near St Moritz. Lindsay has his own, distinct ideas about altitude training, which I will discuss in detail later. We ran some brisk runs through beautiful forests and gasped for air in track sessions, and when we got back to London and went out for a 5 mile spin, we ended up laughing out loud because we were going so fast and feeling so easy.
Although we were only at high altitude for ten days, I am sure it worked because in the next few weeks I ran my best ever mile of 4 minutes 3.5 seconds, followed by my best 2 miles of 8 minutes 26 seconds. I also slashed my best for 5,000m with 13:40.7 when I finished third to Brendan Foster and Nick Rose in the AAA Championship. With that run, I won my first Great Britain vest, as opposed to an English Cross County vest, when I was selected to run in an international 5,000m road race in Belgrade.
It is always a major landmark for anybody to get their first Great Britain vest, and I was very excited when I arrived at the old Amateur Athletic Association office in Brompton Road. I was presented with a size medium, pristine vest and introduced to my team manager. I was the only athlete on this trip, but I still had to have a team manager, because every team had to have a team manager. It appeared that on low key internationals like this one, they shared the team manager jobs around a group of elderly, but stalwart servants of the sport. And if you had never been abroad before, you went to the top of the list.
A couple of hours before the race, I got all my racing kit out and carefully removed the treasured vest from its cellophane wrapping. I tried it on, but it seemed extremely tight, and I realised that I had been given a pristine, size medium, Great Britain women’s running vest. I could have used this as an excuse for my disappointing 12th place finish, but the truth is, I just didn’t run very well. We travelled home the next day. My team manager was a nice enough man, but I fear that he would still be trying to find his way around Belgrade airport if I hadn’t been there to look after him.
During the following winter, Gateshead Harriers were aiming for their fourth National Cross Country team title in five years, but we were concerned that we would need our very best team because there was stiff opposition. Brendan Foster didn’t want to run because it didn’t really fit in with his plans. Somehow, it became my job to persuade him to run, and I did a variety of calculations and projections to predict our rivals possible scores, and what we would score with and without him. I assured him that he and I could have a combined score of 40 points, which should clinch it for us.
Quite remarkably, I predicted our combined score exactly, although I had never contemplated what actually happened. I believe Brendan is still grateful to me for persuading him to run, so that he could add National Cross Country Champion to his list of honours, and if you remember how team scoring works from Chapter 3, you will have already worked out that I finished 39th. I was disappointed with my run, but it was enough for another team title.
I felt that I wasn’t making enough progress and I needed to take my training to a higher level. During June of 1977 I ran weekly track sessions which included 4 × 800m in an average time of 2:03.7; 8 × 400m in 59.7; and 3 × 1600m in 4:17. I did the latter session on a Saturday morning while my Dad worked at the Pharmacy, and I worked in the afternoon while he had time off. I can still remember the intense pain in my right Achilles tendon as I hobbled around the dispensary that day. The intense track sessions had been too much for my fragile lower leg, and over the next nine weeks, the most I managed was a 3 mile jog.
I went back to see Dr Williams and he put me on the waiting list for a repeat of the operation he had done on my left leg. In the meantime, I wore raised heels, took anti-inflammatory tablets, had ultra-sound treatment and regularly plunged my sore heel in and out of buckets of alternately hot and cold water. After a month of this routine, I was able to increase my running slowly and by October I was doing 70 miles per week without any pain. I phoned Dr Williams and postponed the operation as I seemed to be alright. In November I won the North Shields road race, and in December ran for England in a cross country race in Marseilles, where I led and dropped everybody except for a Tunisian, who, as usual, out-sprinted me at the finish. This was a good run and things were looking up.
During my year in London, I occasionally ran with Brendan Foster’s brother, Peter. When I returned to the North East, he went to Kenya to work as a Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) teacher. He was based at a Catholic school in Iten, which had produced a remarkable string of world-class runners. Iten is almost 7,000 feet above sea-level, and Peter invited me to visit him and do some high altitude training.
I really liked the idea, because I had run so well the summer after Lindsay and I had been to Switzerland and I wanted to have another really good track season. The trip was arranged for late March, 1978, and I went with Barry Smith as my training partner. We flew to Nairobi and tried to hire a car. An ex-patriot Englishman ran the company we dealt with, but he wasn’t happy when we told him where we were going. Iten is about 30 miles from Eldoret, and Eldoret is the only place for a hundred miles that could possibly be described as a town. It is a good four hours drive from Nairobi to Eldoret, and the roads get worse the further from the capital you go. This guy only hired his cars to people who wanted to drive around Nairobi.
We played the patriotism card as best we could. We told him, in passionate terms, that we were two British athletes trying to break into the British team; we were here to do four weeks of altitude training, and we had to have a car. He eventually wavered and allowed us to drive away in a six month old Ford Escort, after promising, with our hands on our hearts, that we would look after it. Luckily, neither he, nor I, had the faintest idea what sort of roads we would end up driving on.
There were no motorways or dual carriageways in Kenya in those days, and the main road north to Eldoret was hundreds of miles of regular two-lane road. From Eldoret we turned east towards Iten, which stands on the edge of the Rift Valley. Ten miles out of Eldoret the tarmac stopped, and from there the roads were made of distinctive, hard-packed, ochre-coloured soil.
St Patrick’s School at Iten consisted of a series of single storey brick buildings with corrugated iron roofs. These were the first brick buildings we had seen since Eldoret. Peter’s bungalow had a panoramic view of the undulating countryside, and as we sat on his front porch recovering from the journey, I gazed at miles of jumbled blotches of deep brown and green. At first it looked like a chaotic wilderness, but with time, and Peter’s help, I was able to pick out at first a few, and then dozens, of mud huts spread throughout a patchwork of tiny fields. This was populated and cultivated land, but there were no chimneys, no walls, no pylons, no cables or wires across the sky, and everything was either green or brown.
The children who came to Peter’s school all lived in mud huts, and their families farmed tiny pieces of land. Swahili was their native tongue, but they took lessons in English, and sat examinations set by English exam boards. Peter taught geography, and although most of them had never been more than ten miles from home, they accepted everything Peter told them about the world, except for one thing. Apparently, they just could not accept that places like Greenland and the South Pole were permanently covered in snow. They knew what snow was, but if it lay on the ground, surely it would melt.
In our attempts to emulate the great runners this school had produced, Barry and I took our first high altitude training run. For the first couple of miles we ran comfortably along the dirt road, wondering what all the fuss was about. Then we came to a hill. It wasn’t a particularly long or steep hill, but the minor increase in effort to get up it had us gasping for breath. One of the best measures of physical fitness is how quickly you recover from being out of breath, but we ran down the other side and along the level still gasping for breath.
As the days went by, we either acclimatised or simply got used to running while gasping for breath, because it never seemed quite so bad again. We ran along the edge of the Rift Valley and through forests with monkeys swinging in the trees above our heads. This was definitely not a tourist area, and outside of the school, it was very rare for the local people to see a white face, not to mention our white legs and arms. One day we were several miles away from Iten, running along a small path, when we came up behind a barefoot man in rags carrying a large sack on his back. He heard us just before we caught him, turned to see who it was, then smiled and said, ‘Good morning.’ We returned his ‘good morning’ in what was a quite surreal encounter.
Peter shared his house with Shaun, a fellow teacher. They both thought St Patrick’s was a good place to work because between 7 and 9 pm every evening they had electricity, supplied by the school generator. They also had a cook by the name of Sang, who made them a meal each night, and baked extremely good bread. After about a week of evenings spent talking or reading, we thought we deserved a little relaxation, so we left Sang to make dinner and Barry, Peter, Shaun and I drove two miles down the road to a little village that had a bar.
This village was just a row of seven or eight rectangular wooden huts lined up beside the road. It resembled something from a Western B movie, and all it lacked was a hitching rail and tumbleweed. One of these huts was the bar. It was a basic wooden room with a couple of wooden tables and chairs, and a wooden counter at the back of the room. It served the full range of Kenyan brewed beers, which was a choice between a bottle of Tusker and a bottle of White Cap. The only other drink they served was Chi. Chi was made by putting cold water, milk, tea and sugar in a pan, and boiling it. We all decided to have beer.
After our first beer, we did the sociable thing and had a second. After the second, we thought we ought to be getting back because Sang would have dinner ready. We hadn’t told him exactly when we would be back, so the consensus of opinion was that we should have a quick third beer, and then go. We had almost finished our drinks, when two Kenyans walked into the bar. One was better dressed than the other, and he greeted Peter warmly. They talked for a while in Swahili, and when the Kenyans went to the bar, Peter explained that he had been talking to Josephat, who was one of the local chiefs.
Apparently, Josephat held St Patrick’s school in high esteem, and because Barry and I were visitors to his village, he was going to buy us a drink. All four of us felt that we had already had just the right amount of beer, but Peter made it clear that this was an honour and it would be inexcusably rude to refuse. We had to have this drink for the sake of Anglo-Kenyan relations. I decided that if it was so important, I could force down one more.
Josephat came and sat down with us, while the guy who turned out to be his right-hand man, collected the drinks from the bar. I was slightly concerned when he put a full crate of White Cap beers on our table, especially as a crate contained 25 bottles. I looked at Peter, and he simply said, ‘Yes, the drink he’s bought us is a crate of beer.’ The right-hand man, who never spoke throughout the evening, opened a bottle for each of us and sat down without one, on the next table. Josephat raised his bottle towards Barry and me, and said, ‘Welcome!’
Whenever our beers were almost empty, Josephat’s sidekick would jump up and open another bottle. There was clearly no escape. Before I became too fuddled to think at all, I wondered if the British Ambassador in Nairobi would appreciate the lengths to which we were going to maintain good relationships in local communities. It was dark when we eventually staggered out of the bar. It was dark in a way I had never seen at home. When clouds obscure the moon and stars in Britain there is always reflected light from some nearby city or town. There were no lights to reflect in this part of Kenya, and it was pitch black. We were all too drunk to drive the car, but we couldn’t walk home because we couldn’t see a yard in front of us.
The headlights of the car were our only hope of finding the way back, and as the keys were in my pocket, I was delegated to get us home. There was no chance of anything else being on the road, so I drove very slowly down the middle of the road with one eye closed, because I was seeing double. We got home safely and found Sang, sitting patiently in the dark, waiting to serve a rather over-cooked meal, which we devoured, again for the sake of Anglo-Kenyan relations.
The weather is dry and sunny for most of the year in Kenya, but there is a distinct and reliable rainy season, which lasts about six weeks. We had been assured we would be home before the rainy season started, but this time it came early. The local soil contains a lot of clay, and all the roads are made of local soil. It rained all one night and when we tried to run in the morning, we had to stop after two hundred yards. Every footstep picked up more and more sticky mud until it was impossible to lift our shoes off the ground.
Peter and Shaun thought it might be just a single storm rather than the rainy season, and suggested we wait for it to dry out. It rained for the next three days, and the road became impassable to anything, except maybe a tank. Peter arranged for us to stay with friends of his in Eldoret, where we could run on tarmac, if we could get to Eldoret. On the fourth day the sun was shining and we took this chance to get out, before we became stranded for the rest of the month.
We slithered and slipped along the road, but always managed to keep moving forward. After an hour, we came to a section of road under repair, and for at least a mile, only one side of the road was open. Half way along these road works we met a pick-up truck coming the other way, just as it started to rain. I signalled for them to go backwards and they signalled for me to go backwards. I got out and talked to the driver.
When I got back in the car Barry said, ‘We can’t back up for half a mile. I hope you’ve made them back up.’
‘They reckon I should reverse into the ditch. They’ll drive past, and then stop and push us out.’
‘You didn’t agree to that, did you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But they’ll just drive straight on, and we’ll be stuck in this ditch for a week.’
The edge of the road was severely cambered, and the bottom of the ditch was full of very wet, sticky mud. I was a bit nervous, but I said, ‘No, they won’t. It’ll be fine.’
I reversed the car onto the edge of the camber, and gravity took over. We gently slithered, at almost 45 degrees, into the bottom of the ditch. The pick-up truck drove past, and, much to our relief, stopped. Four of the six Kenyans got out and, while I drove in second gear, they pushed from the back. They pushed and pushed and we didn’t move an inch. They told me to rev harder; then all four of them stood on the back bumper and jumped up and down as hard as they could. We started to move. The front wheels were nearly on the road, the back wheels were in the ditch and for fifty yards we bounced and skidded sideways towards Eldoret. Suddenly we got a bit of traction and we were back on the road. Our helpers jumped off, and I waved my thanks out of the window, not daring to stop.
Barry was giving me a strange look. I told him there had been no need to panic, and I had always been confident they would help us. ‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking how pleased that guy in Nairobi will be that we’ve looked after his car.’
When the trip was over and we got back to London we went for a five mile spin, but I wasn’t laughing at the end of this one, because my Achilles tendon was sore. After a week of jogging and treatment it settled down and I was able to train well. In June I won a 3,000m race in Edinburgh, and then beat a good field over 5,000m in the annual AAA v Loughborough College match. At the end of the month, I went to Crystal Palace for the AAA 5,000m feeling confident that I could make the team for the Commonwealth Games, as this race was the trial. There were a lot of top athletes running, and it was won by Henry Rono, who was probably the best in the world at the time. The pace was just too fast for me and I finished 12th, but more importantly, fourth Englishman. With a maximum of three runners per country, I wouldn’t be going to the Games. I was disappointed, but just felt resigned to try again next time.
A month later I trimmed my best to 13 min 37 sec with fourth place in the UK Championships. That run earned me a place in a 5,000 metres race in Warsaw, where I was outsprinted in the last lap by three Russians, but slashed my time down to 13 min 28.7 sec. It had been a good season with a lot of progress.
The start of 1979 brought several bouts of deep snow, which had me trying to train in multi-storey car parks, and along the middle of the road. I finished 24th in the National Cross Country, and helped Gateshead to another team title. A couple of weeks later I won the Windermere to Kendal 10 mile road race, but had to walk home after a few miles of the next day’s run because my right tendon was so sore. On April 11th I was back in the Taplow Hospital listening to Dr Williams’ classical music and trying to lie very still, as he cut all the scar tissue away from my tendon, under local anaesthetic.
I went through the full course of rehabilitation at Farnham Park and was discharged from there a day before my 27th birthday. I began the long process of building up my training. I had been through this before, but this time I continued to have problems. The tendon was a little sore and lumpy, and the bottom of the scar pulled when I started to run. I got physiotherapy and persevered, but by mid June I was back seeing Dr Williams. He thought the pain was caused by an adhesion and gave me a small anti-inflammatory injection of methyl prednisolone, after which I had to rest for 48 hours.
I got back into steady running but never felt confident enough to run on the track or attempt anything very fast, because it never felt totally right. I was back to see him again in August, and he thought I had bursitis, for which he recommended short-wave physiotherapy treatment. While having treatment, I was able to work my way up to 70 miles a week and ran some reasonable road races, but the soreness kept coming back and I saw Dr Williams again in October. By now he must have been sick of the sight of me and said there was nothing more he could do for me, but he referred me to an orthopaedic specialist.
I continued to run between 70 and 90 miles per week, but the tendon would hurt for the first few miles and then feel ok. It used to hurt every morning getting out of bed, but would get better after walking around for a while. This constant niggle was wearing me down and sapping my confidence, but I also had other important things on my mind.
I was working in my father’s business, but he was still very much running it. I had come into it with the intention of taking over from him, but the years were slipping by, and I still wanted to concentrate on my sport. He never put any pressure on me at all, and always said that this was his way of helping me to run, but he was in his sixties and I was still more interested in running than the total commitment that ownership of a community pharmacy brings. I asked him what he would do if I didn’t want the business, and he said he would sell up and retire. I had suspected this, and now knew that I was taking advantage of him, so I told him to sell and I would do locum work. Within six weeks of this conversation, his pharmacy was sold and he was retired.
Although my father had helped me a great deal, it was always difficult trying to run twice a day, work five and a half days a week and have a social life. I never let anything stop me from training, but I was always very good at fitting it in to keep some balance in my life. If I was going out for the whole day on a Sunday, I would get up at 6:30am, run 15 miles and have the whole day free by 9:00am. It was never a question of either or with me; it was always a matter of how I could fit them both in.
Around the time my dad sold his business, I met the lovely daughter of a local farmer. We had been out together about three times when we both had a day off work, and I suggested a day trip to the Lake District. By mid afternoon we had stopped in Grasmere. She said she had an old friend living there, and would like to visit her. I said I would leave her to catch up with her friend, and come back in about 40 minutes. Being the thoughtful, considerate woman that she was, she asked what I was going to do. Naturally, I was going for a run.
To allay the fears she had for the rest of the journey, I showed her the contents of my boot. I had a kit bag of running gear, a large plastic washing up bowl, a bar of soap, a sponge, two large vacuum flasks of hot water, a couple of towels and some deodorant. I changed in the car, ran five miles, and had a full body sponge bath out of the boot of the car. It may come as no surprise to you that I haven’t seen her for a lot of years, but I have heard through the grapevine that she still tells the story of the strange man who took her on a date, and went for a five mile run in the middle of it.
It was in December 1979 that I went back down to Taplow and saw a podiatrist, who said I was in a vicious circle of pain and running awkwardly to avoid it. I was over-pronating and needed an orthotic device to correct the movement of my foot over the ground. This may sound commonplace now, but in 1979 podiatry was a very new science, and this was radical stuff. He took a plaster cast of my foot and made a customised orthotic out of cork and leather. In 1979 cork and leather were the materials of choice in this cutting edge technology.
After a week of running with this new device in my shoe, I had a large and deep pressure blister on the arch of my foot. When this settled down, I was able to do a few months of consistent training with nothing more than an occasional twinge. This was the year of the Moscow Olympics, and I was running 80 miles or more every week in my bid to make the team. I finished 5th in the UK Championship 10,000m, and went to Edinburgh for the Olympic 5,000m trial hoping to do just a little better. There were 32 runners, which made it a difficult race to run. With five laps to go, I worked my way up to a good position within a few yards of the leaders, but when the pace quickened, I couldn’t respond. Barry Smith came third and won his place on the Olympic team, but I finished 13th in 13 min 57 sec and another season had finished in disappointment.
Eight years had gone by since I ran 4 min 4 sec for a mile. I had managed a few decent times, a handful of minor international races, and a third place in the AAA Championships. Despite nearly a decade of evidence to the contrary, I believed I was capable of more, but success seemed so elusive.