THE BRITISH 10K LONDON RUN
(Chip time 00:57:58)
Yesterday I ran 10 kilometres, in the mutually supportive company of 25,000 others. It was a personal first.

‘The British 10K London run’ does exactly what it says on the tin. It celebrates its city, and there’s queuing at the start.

For a first-timer, the weeks of technology preceding a major race day are pleasing. A fat pack arrives in the post. In tandem the related website displays a 3D route on which a turquoise disk whisks its sleek way between historic landmarks, along the roads to be run. It is the stuff of hypnosis. It comes close to precluding the need for participation.

The day came. At a Sunday morning hour at which, ordinarily, I would not be conscious, I was at Embankment tube station. The area was a configured star of veteran and one-off athletes replete with sport-top water bottles and mobile phone wielding relatives, dividing at tangents in the quest for loos and coffee stalls.

Safety-pinned sheets of A4 (on the reverse of which emergency contact details were penned for the event of collapse) displayed race numbers while red electronic chips sat proud of trainer laces, ready to register the time at which each person passed the start and finish lines.

The runners did not come in a standard shape. For every sinewy biology drawing physique there were angry curves. Charitable causes painted the crowd fluorescent: OCD and Alzheimer Society text alongside the somehow more emotive photographs of lone individuals in whose name the race was undertaken. A weather warning (extreme heat) had stipulated no fancy dress, tempering that very British need for the hairy to put on a tutu.

It was not, for me, an altruistic enterprise. The instances on which I have asked my friends to show their support for a selected cause with money seemed too recent and too many. I am stowing brownie points for a Channel crossing. This was a question of whether I could do what I had set out to do.

Ploddingly slowly, batches of people were ushered towards the arched start on Piccadilly. The ‘gun’ and we moved. A shot of elation carried me along Pall Mall, an element of nodding to the crowds, inner dialogue telling me they were there for me. The relatively small proportion of their time which would be spent with their runner in view lent this credibility.

‘Muscles have a memory’, my pacer had told me. Did mine know, half way along the Embankment, on the return lap, that this was distance unremembered? We were in a tunnel which swallowed the available air. 7k and my legs were buzzing with the need to stop but not enough for me to fail to appreciate the novelty of throwing an empty water bottle to the side of the road. In a society in which anything thrown is known there was a freedom to this. The discarded plastic crunched underfoot.

As we approached Parliament Street 'Chariots of Fire' blared from unseen speakers. 'I vow to thee my country' segued into a more buoyant 'Land of Hope and Glory', confirming this as an event neither for the nationalistically self-conscious nor anyone who can picture Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams.

Where did the final sprint come from? The finish in view, something in me remembered.

Much red, white and blue razzmatazz at Trafalgar Square and Horse Guards Parade. I felt proud, the 'goody bag' and primary-coloured medal small beside the achievement.

At the post race meeting point, my wonderful mother met me. She thinks I should be a year younger than I will be on my next birthday and doesn’t know where the time has gone. I don’t know where it went either. I trap morsels of it in hours in which I do as I did yesterday.

This is my year for sporting feats in which the muscles remember and the memory follows.