News_
London Calling...
Wednesday 12th October 2022
A handful of Phoenix athletes made their way Northwards, to one of the country’s lesser known and oft-overlooked fixtures, the London Marathon. It turned out to be a mixed bag of results, with hopes realised, and dashed along the way. This hot take is from the perspective of Charlie Penrose, but there were many brilliant club performances on the day, most notably Amy Harris’ new club record of 2:46:10.
As a running race I guess the London Marathon is a bit of a strange one, because unlike most of the other fixtures in our calendars over the course of the year, our muggle friends and family have actually heard of it, and some of them might even have run it themselves. That plus the scale, grandeur and gravitas it holds in my case certainly contributed to the incredible, and totally unnecessary, amount of pressure I’d put on myself to perform on the day. I’m sure others felt similarly.
I’d had a pretty good block for the most part, and been very fortunate to have some great training buddies in fellow Phoenix runners Jon Clays, Alex Sawbridge and Jamie Signy, and with ambitious and always inspiring/herculean guidance from V45 British Record holder Ian Leitch. But the last few weeks had come with their fair, and probably par for the course, wobbles and borderline injuries… so I was definitely not feeling super confident about how the day might unfold at all, and the closer I got, the less confident I felt. When I found out a couple of weeks before the race that I’d managed to get a start right in the middle of the masses, about 30 minutes after the first runners, this definitely didn’t help matters. But that was the hand I was dealt, and so it was.
From my perspective the race organisation felt like it had not fully got past the pandemic - the start layout with its 3 colours and multiple waves in each, all intersecting at different points over the course of the morning felt on paper, and when in amongst it, unnecessarily complicated. But it's a colossal event, with more than 40,000 competitors running everything from 2 to 7 hours, so hats off to the organisers for simply making it happen in any format.
I managed to hustle further forward than my allotted wave, but as we rolled over the line, and a couple of miles in were brought together with the other two colour blocks, I spent a lot of energy darting between slower paced runners, hopping curbs, bollards and spectators, however managed to get into a pretty good rhythm regardless, and was grateful for a handful of other similarly paced runners here and there to get in the slipstreams of and carve our way through the masses. And as we departed South London, coming over Tower Bridge, the road opened up and I was finally able to dial more steadily into my pace.
The second half of the race played out remarkably smoothly - it wasn’t until the final few miles, coming along Embankment that I really started to feel the toll of the effort, and dug deep through to the finish. I’d run London a few times in my twenties, with a much less ambitious/educated approach and prep I should add, and have memories of feeling all shades of awful through those final miles - fortunately this time I held strong to the end.
At the very start of my block I’d had some very ambitious goals of sub 2.35, but after time missed for this and that, and the various latter stage wobbles, I’d settled on a more measured 2.38, which as it turned out was exactly what I got - 2.38.08, a PB by nearly 6 minutes since Brighton earlier this year. I’m so grateful to all those mentioned earlier in the post for their guidance, support and camaraderie in the long lead up to this race, as well as all the other wonderful folks I’ve had the pleasure of training, racing and chatting with since joining Phoenix in March this year. Until next time…