| THE WILTSHIRE YEOMAN'S CHRIS COMPLETES THE LONDON MARATHON |
CHRIS BROOKS, LANDLORD AND CHEF OF THE WILTSHIRE YEOMAN, has completed the London Marathon — and in a very creditable time of 4 hours 41 minutes. Our hopes were with him all the way, as we peered at the television, trying to make out his form among the vast throng filling the screen.
For those of us who have never run a Marathon (basically all of us) it seemed a miraculous achievement. After all, it's 26 miles. That's like running, non-stop, from Chirton to Bath — unimaginable! That Chris had managed to do it clearly meant he was a superman, a born athlete.
Not born to sport
Er ... not quite. He played a bit of rugby at school but says he gave it up at the age of fourteen and took up smoking instead, followed shortly afterwards by drinking. He gave up the smoking four years ago because Carla didn't like it, but that still didn't put him in the Olympic bracket. "When I did my first run" he says "it was six minutes and I nearly died!". But this is Chris, a man of ferocious energy and great determination, and he'd decided the Marathon is what he was going to do. From then on he was regularly to be seen trotting up on to Salisbury Plain at Redhorn Hill, flanked by his faithful companions, golden labradors Scrumpy and Fred.
Once the decision was made, it was just work — hard work and lots of it. By November he'd run three half Marathons, egged on by no more than a book entitled How to Run a Marathon. But Christmas was now approaching and there was an awful lot of cooking to do. So training was put on the back burner so to speak until after his holiday in January. (He would have trained while away but in Kenya, at 12,000 feet above sea level, he found that the mildest exertion very nearly gave him a heart attack.) Returning to Chirton, he was back with a vengeance, running regularly from the Yeoman, up on to the Plain (that's already 1.4 miles, most of it up a steep hill) and then on to Edington, a total of 14 miles.
CLIC
Behind it all of course was his Gold Bond place in the Marathon secured through the children's cancer charity CLIC Sargent, which Chris chose in memory of Chirton's own Amy Pottinger, a tragic victim of the disease. One of the conditions of his place was that he should raise a minimum of £1,700 for the charity. In a single evening, on 24th March, he overshot this target by a wide margin with the Auction of Promises, which brought in the extraordinary sum of £2,543. Chris says he was, and still is, overwhelmed — by the number of people who came to the event and gave so generously; to all those who donated such wonderful and valuable prizes for auction; and to the very generous assistance from the Yeoman's owners Wadworths.
Fired up by this, Chris threw himself into the final push for the Marathon. He had reached a ceiling of 16-17 miles and needed to get beyond it. So he took on a personal trainer. "It just pushed me that little bit further. And it was that extra bit that was the hard part." That little bit further turned out to be 7 miles. On the final weekend before the race he managed 23 miles.
Four O'clock Start
It's the 26th of April, the day of the race. It's four o'clock in the morning. Chris worked late into the night and has had four hours sleep. At 5.30 he piles into a taxi with friends and family (but not the dogs) and heads for London. By eight o'clock he's at the start, along with a few other people ... well, thousands of them actually. In fact he can't quite believe how many there are. Set against this there's the weather, which is perfect. Sunny and not too warm. 9.45 and he's off, and this time it's not a rehearsal. The going is not as fast as he'd like because of the crowds. But apart from that it goes well — until 16 miles, when he gets a painful stitch and has no choice but to stop. He says it's the worst moment of the whole race. He gives himself a couple of minutes to recover and he's off again. He passes the 23-mile point. Never in his life has he run further than this. The remaining three miles seems endless. If he wants, he can walk it, and many people do just that. But he reasons that it's no more painful — and a lot quicker — to run it. So he does, and makes it to the finish in 4 hours 41 minutes.
The Aftermath
So where now? Well, first of all there's the cash he's raised for CLIC. After the two-and-half thousand for the Auction of Promises, there's all the race sponsorship. He doesn't know yet how much that will be, because people are still paying. And there's still a steady trickle of donations as people drop in to the pub and put another tenner or so into the pot. In the end Chris reckons he could be giving CLIC a cheque for £4,500 all told. A fabulous achievement.
What's he going to do to celebrate? Well, he's applied for the London Marathon 2010.
To find out more about CLIC Sargent, visit their website.
Page posted : 6 May 2009