I Am A London Marathoner

London was not where Hearts Across Australia began.

That matters, but not because the chronology needs defending like a court case. It matters because London felt like one of those doors that only appeared after I had already started walking towards something bigger.

I had already said the Perth-to-Brisbane idea out loud. I had already gone to the Heart Foundation because people kept asking whether HAA was for charity, and because the heart-health thread in my own story made too much sense to ignore. Grandpa. Dad. The risk I had been carrying around in my own body. The uncomfortable thought that the changes I had made might genuinely have saved my life.

Then, through that Heart Foundation conversation, London appeared.

My second marathon was going to be the London Marathon.

Even now, that sentence feels a bit daft.

The Secret Was Out

For years, London had been a secret little dream.

Not secret in the sense of being carefully guarded. More like secret because I had never properly admitted it to myself. I had watched the race on television. I had seen Tower Bridge, the Embankment, Big Ben, Birdcage Walk, Buckingham Palace, The Mall. I had absorbed it as one of those great public rituals that belonged to other people.

Then I became a runner.

Then I became a marathoner.

Then I dared say, publicly, that I wanted to run London one day.

Six months later I was packing for it.

The final week before flying out had a strange calm to it. I was excited, obviously. Ridiculously excited. The London Marathon. The London Marathon. I had taper runs to finish, paranoia about colds and sore feet, sports massage, logistics, fundraising, packing, and all the small practical tasks that keep a dream from floating away.

But underneath the noise was gratitude.

In December 2011 I had been an overweight mess who could not run for the bus. In April 2014 I was flying from Perth to London to run one of the biggest marathons in the world for the Heart Foundation.

That was not a neat motivational poster. That was a real boarding pass.

Steve’s Place

The support around London matters as much as the race.

Steve gave me somewhere to stay.

The same Steve from the Christmas Eve cross-country course. The old schoolmate who had come with me through flooded fields while one of the old symbols of quitting turned into something ridiculous and fun. By February the accommodation was locked in, along with a curry-based side bet that gave me one more silly reason to aim for sub-five.

I did not get the sub-five. We will get to that.

But I got the curry, or at least I got the sort of friendship where a curry could be part of the story.

Friday morning started with public transport and ordinary kindness.

I landed at Heathrow, caught a train across London, and Steve picked me up from his local station. Nothing dramatic. No inspirational music. Just a bloke I had known since school collecting me after a very long flight, taking me back towards the part of London where the weekend would unfold.

Later that day we had lunch at a pub near his place. I was somewhere between calm and knackered, trying not to let the size of the weekend get too far ahead of me. That pub lunch made London feel lived in. I had somewhere to sleep, someone to meet me, somewhere to eat, and an old schoolmate helping the whole ridiculous thing feel normal.

Then came the expo.

Race expos have their own kind of nervous electricity, and London had it turned all the way up. Virgin signage everywhere. Registration desks. Runners drifting around with red bags and wide eyes. Steve and I grinning because yes, we really were at the London Marathon expo.

The moment I picked up the race number was another little shift from dream to fact. Number 55659. My name. My start. My place in the thing I had watched on television for years.

I also found the British Heart Foundation stand and said hello, which felt quietly important. I was there for the Australian Heart Foundation, but the red heart on the stand still landed. This whole weekend had a heart thread running through it, in every possible sense.

Saturday morning was Mile End parkrun.

Steve and Paul came with me, though they were not running. I was supposed to keep it gentle, just enough to shake the travel out of my legs and remind my body how movement worked after the flights. Naturally, I struggled to keep the pace down because it felt so good to be moving again.

School friends parkrunning thirty years on.

That sentence still makes me smile.

After that came brunch and rest.

Then, that evening, Mum and Dad.

They had travelled up from Somerset, and I met them for pasta at Jamie’s Italian, the Jamie Oliver place on Canary Wharf. On paper it sounds simple enough: race-eve carbs with my parents. In reality it meant the world to me.

I had moved to Australia. I had rebuilt my body. I had become the sort of person who could fly back to London to run a marathon for the Heart Foundation. And there were Mum and Dad, sitting across from me the night before the biggest race of my life, sharing pasta while I tried to keep the lid on everything I was feeling.

There were menus open, pasta bowls on the table, the London Marathon magazine tucked beside the bread, and Mum and Dad looking like Mum and Dad: present, practical, reassuringly ordinary.

That dinner mattered because it was ordinary family time placed inside an extraordinary weekend. It was pasta, conversation, Canary Wharf outside, the marathon waiting, and my parents close enough to make the whole thing feel less like a spectacle and more like something I could carry.

By the time I went to bed, London had become a series of small, practical pieces: eat, rest, move, meet people, keep the emotions contained for one more day.

Steve’s place was pretty much around the 16-mile mark of the marathon. On race morning that meant we were inside the event before we even reached the start. Police outside. Barriers in place. St John Ambulance volunteers nearby. The city already reorganising itself around 36,000 runners and the crowds that would carry them.

I left a little later than planned, but still on schedule, and walked with Steve and Paul down through the pedestrian tunnel under the Thames towards Greenwich.

Paul was another schoolmate, up for the weekend to watch and staying at Steve’s too. That walk to Greenwich Park could easily have been overwhelming. Helicopters, runners, television screens, crowds, the sense of the whole thing getting bigger with every step. Instead I had two blokes with me who had known me before any of this made sense.

Before Australia.

Before no more mr fat guy.

Before marathon training.

Before I was the sort of person who tied an Australian flag around himself on the morning of the London Marathon.

Company helped. It made the impossible feel strangely ordinary for a little while.

Just three old schoolmates walking to the start of one of the world’s biggest marathons.

As you do.

Greenwich

We said goodbye near the runners’ entrance.

Steve and Paul would be out on the course later, around 16.5 miles, with a surfboard so I could spot them. That sentence alone probably explains why London is lodged in my memory the way it is.

Inside the start area, the scale finally started pressing in. Baggage trucks. Zone signs. A giant screen. TV helicopters. People in costumes. A bloke dressed as a minion, which felt like a lucky sign given the Facebook minions back home. A pink fairy named Aziz who made friends with everyone nearby and announced that I was from Australia, which somehow led to me standing beside a runner from Maddington, five minutes up the road from where I lived in Perth.

The world kept folding in on itself like that.

Eventually the shuffle began.

Not a start, exactly. More a slow collective migration towards the line. It took about half an hour to reach the actual start, which gave me plenty of time to have the small panic every runner knows: GARMIN.

I found the satellite signal just in time.

Then I crossed the start line.

I was running the London Marathon.

Tower Bridge

For the first half, I felt strong.

The crowds were packed from the beginning. Residential streets, pubs, music, kids with hands out for high fives, people shouting names, costumes everywhere, runners turning the whole thing into a moving carnival. It was so different from the events I had run in Perth that I had to keep reminding myself I was part of it.

Me. In the London Marathon.

At six miles we swept through Greenwich, through the same area Steve, Paul and I had walked earlier that morning.

Then came Tower Bridge.

There are some moments you can look forward to for years and still not overhype.

Tower Bridge was one of those.

We turned and there it was. Iconic, ridiculous, full of noise and colour and emotion. I had tears welling up as I ran over it. Not because it was easy. Not because I was having some clean athletic triumph. Because the kid who watched London on television, the bloke who could not run for the bus, the runner who had only finished his first marathon ten months earlier, was actually there.

I was still on track for a while after that. Steady, sensible, maybe a touch too quick but close enough to the plan. For a long stretch I still believed sub-five was alive. Then, around 24 or 25 km, the twinges started. Groin, abs, heat, discomfort. The shiny version of the plan started to fray.

At about 16.5 miles, just past The Lord Nelson, I saw Steve, Paul, and the surfboard.

That helped.

The goals began falling away in stages. First I had to accept that sub-five was gone. Then I tried to turn the day into a sub-5:15. When that went too, sub-5:30 became the line I wanted to hold.

I kept moving, but the second half became harder. I wanted to run the whole way. I did not. I had to use walk breaks. That annoyed me, but less than it had at Perth. I was not unravelling. I was negotiating. Recover enough, run again, keep the walking under control, save something for the final stretch.

At 22 miles I passed Steve’s sister Katy, who was marshalling. I said hello and kept going.

The crowd blurred a bit after that. The work became internal.

The Mall

Somewhere late in the race, I untied the Australian flag and wore it like a cape.

This was not subtle.

It did work.

“Go Aussie” started coming from the crowd. “Aussie Aussie Aussie.” Little bursts of energy when I needed them. I started to settle back into a run along the Embankment, with Big Ben ahead and the finish line beginning to take over my mind.

My parents were near Big Ben. My sister and her family were there too. They saw me. I did not see them. By then I was already somewhere else inside my head, locked onto the finish.

Through Westminster. Down Birdcage Walk. Noise building. The distance boards started counting me down: 800 metres, then 600, then 400.

Buckingham Palace to the left, though I barely had room in my brain for anything except the line.

Then the sign.

385 yards to go.

I took off the flag and held it up.

I started my finish.

All the kilometres came with me. Perth. The dark places. The weight I had lost. The person I had been. The people following along online. The Heart Foundation. Grandpa. The odd little chain of decisions that had taken me from a crisis in 2011 to this red gantry on The Mall.

I crossed the line in 5:23:36 elapsed on Strava’s clock and burst into tears.

Sub-five had gone. Sub-5:15 had gone. But sub-5:30 had survived, and by then the number mattered less than the fact that I was standing there on The Mall with a medal about to be put around my neck.

Sunglasses are useful for that sort of thing.

I was a London Marathoner.

And I had a dirty great big heavy medal around my neck to prove it.

After

The finish area was brilliantly organised, which was fortunate because I was not.

I was drained, sore, disoriented, wrapped in a blanket, trying to follow the post-run plan: protein shake, energy drink, sports bar, water, stretching, leaning against a lamp post, wondering when my parents would appear and whether I might collapse before they did.

When they found me, I felt better almost immediately.

That is the part I do not want flattened into “family watched”. My parents had travelled up from Somerset. My sister had come with her family. They were there inside this impossible thing. I may not have seen them near Big Ben, but knowing they had come, finding them after, being able to stand there exhausted and emotional and not alone, mattered.

London was a dream, yes.

It was also people.

Steve giving me a bed. Paul coming up for the weekend. Katy marshalling. My family making the trip. The Heart Foundation giving the opportunity a purpose. The no more mr fat guy crowd sending the sort of support that somehow travels through a phone and still feels real when your body starts asking awkward questions at mile 22.

The race hurt. Of course it hurt. I finished thinking “no more marathons ever”, which is always a hilarious thing for a runner to think because the lie starts falling apart almost immediately.

But London changed the shape of what came next.

Perth Marathon had shown me I could finish the original impossible thing. London showed me that the story had grown legs beyond that. It had childhood in it, family in it, heart in it, old schoolmates in it, charity in it, public support in it, and a bigger future already waiting.

Soon the attention would turn back to Gold Coast, training, fundraising, logistics, and the still-ridiculous Perth-to-Brisbane crossing.

But for that moment, I did not need to solve any of it.

I had run down The Mall.

I had cried at the finish.

I was a London Marathoner.

Images From The Day