The month that brings it all back

Running a marathon has to be one of the most demanding human experiences available without signing a medical waiver.

Twenty-six point two miles or forty-two kilometres, depending on your preferred system of measurement, is a distance that strips away ego very efficiently. You can train for months, obsess over nutrition, fall out with friends over the merits of carbon plates, and still have no guarantee of anything on the day.

That volatile mix of anticipation, dread, optimism and excitement is exactly why people return, even when they swear they won’t.

A spontaneous beginning in New York

My first marathon was New York in 2008 and it began, as most impractical adventures do, with a spontaneous New Year’s Day decision. I signed up with a charity, joined a running club, and discovered very quickly that feeling under-qualified doesn’t stop you moving forward.

It simply teaches you how to be uncomfortable while making progress, which turns out to be a surprisingly transferable life skill. What caught me off guard wasn’t so much the running as everything that orbited around it.

The expos, the music, the crowds and the sheer sensory theatre of it all were intoxicating. You could walk into an expo as a mildly anxious amateur and leave feeling as though greatness had been pencilled into your diary. It’s experiential marketing in its purest form, executed with forensic precision. Brands know exactly when you’re at your most hopeful and most emotionally exposed, and they make the most of it. I wasn’t immune and made no effort to pretend I was.

The soundtrack

Even now, if I hear I’ve Got a Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas, I’m instantly returned to the start line of those early races. It’s the song that carries that very particular sensation, part nerves, part sentimentality, part thrill, as thousands of strangers stand together pretending they’re calmer than they are. The crackle of the tannoy, the swell of the music and the slow shuffle forward towards the unthinkable distance ahead fused into something oddly electric. It’s unsettling how precisely the body remembers it, long after the legs have forgotten.

New York delivered this in full technicolour. Standing on the Verrazzano Bridge as the sun dragged itself up over the skyline felt theatrical in the most literal sense. Helicopters hovered overhead, the music echoed off steel and concrete, and the whole place seemed to inhale at once. When the cannon finally went, the noise rolled forward like a weather front and carried us with it.

Over the next few hours, the city performed brilliantly. Five boroughs, bands on street corners, strangers shouting your name as though they’d known you for years. Even the later miles through Central Park, when everything hurt, had a strange glamour to them, and a small part of me didn’t want it to end.

Chicago followed a year later and delivered an entirely different surprise when I accidentally qualified for Boston. I didn’t realise until someone mentioned it at the finish, and I assumed they were being polite in an oddly elaborate way. They weren’t. It turned out to be real, and the door quietly opened. Three Bostons followed, plus Berlin, Big Sur and a few others that completed the set.

Ten marathons, ten versions of me

By the end there were ten in total, spread across years and continents, all utterly different despite the identical distance. Some runs felt effortless until they very suddenly didn’t. Others were slow, stubborn slogs that somehow produced more pride than any fast finish ever did. Marathons aren’t sentimental creatures.

They’re blunt, honest things that refuse to flatter. You can’t bluff your way through twenty-six miles, and for better or worse, they tell you exactly who you are on that particular day.

Threaded through all of this was the theatre that first hooked me. The build-up, the branding, the noise, the emotion, the slightly mad circus that arrives in a city and disappears overnight. It’s no surprise I later found myself in experiential marketing.

A marathon is the ultimate activation, tens of thousands of people in an emotionally heightened state, absorbing everything with startling intensity. Every detail lands harder when you’re that open, and the memory keeps it all filed away with remarkable accuracy.

I’m glad I did all ten, though not because of the times, although a few were respectable. Not because of the medals either, although they remain an irrationally pleasing form of clutter. I’m glad because it was a proper bucket-list thing that didn’t quietly fade out after one enthusiastic year. It lasted a decade and became part of how I see myself. Ten finish lines, ten chapters, and ten slightly different versions of me discovering there was more resilience available than expected.

I stopped partly because life had other, better plans. Our first child arrived, and suddenly the appeal of early morning long runs and race calendars lost out to something far more important. And if I’m honest, the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 changed things too. The innocence went out of it for me that day. What had always felt like a benign, life-affirming festival of human effort suddenly carried a weight it never had before. I still loved the running, but the world around it no longer felt quite as simple.

What remains

I’m fairly certain I won’t run another marathon. That chapter feels closed, but in the good way that comes with finishing a book you admired and not needing a sequel. What remains is the echo of those early-morning start lines, the heavy thump of that song, the manic energy of the expos, the final unforgiving mile and the quiet, private pride afterwards. Those things, it turns out, are remarkably durable.