Free Keep on Running by Phil Hewitt

was given superb guidance by Pamela, and I had plenty of family support at a great moment of opportunity – just a few months later, we would become parents for the second time.
    Â Â And, above all, I had got one thing blissfully right. I had taken the whole thing incredibly seriously. It wouldn't have been in my nature to have done otherwise. A marathon is a huge undertaking. The only way to complete it is to treat it with the utmost respect, and I did so.
    Â Â I noted with a mix of dismay and vindication a few years later when a celebrity runner, proclaiming her lack of preparation, simply launched into the London Marathon, apparently without knowing, or even asking, how long a marathon race was. She reached about 18 miles, that natural human limit, before collapsing. A newspaper article ripped into her the following day – and rightly so. It reflected on the huge disservice she would have done marathon running by dropping dead. Had she done so, it would have been entirely her own fault. Her crime was to disrespect the marathon and, with it, every single one of her fellow runners, all the men and women from all walks of life who had put in month after month of preparation, running mile after mile in readiness for the big day. The celebrity had attempted to belittle us all. The marathon didn't have the least qualm in showing her emphatically just who was boss.

    In the newspaper following my London debut, I waxed lyrical about the day, lauding everyone and everything, signing off with the words, 'So what about next year? I don't think so. One marathon seems very special. Two just sounds like a small number.' It was out of my system. Laura was born in the August following the April marathon. I didn't want to run another marathon; and even if I had wanted to, I would have counted it unreasonable to head off for all those hours of training. Fiona would have let me. It would never have occurred to her to stop me, but I wouldn't let me because I knew my place was with my family at this critical time. Not that there was even any great sense of sacrifice on my part. I'd done a marathon. As simple as that.
    Â Â But clearly something was niggling away in the unvoiced recesses of my mind over the next couple of years. Not high-level niggling, but niggling all the same. And so it was that in July 2001, more than three years after my first London Marathon, I converted my 'very special' number into a 'very small' one with a spur-of-the-moment run which broke all the rules.
    Â Â By now, Laura was nearly three; Adam was five years and two months; and the difficult days of having two really tiny children were starting to slip into memory. Of course, Fiona had borne the brunt, as any mother always does, however much of a new man you try to be. But by 2001, life on the home front was easing to the extent that I started to contemplate quite openly what could be next in the running stakes. Life seemed manageable again; possibilities were opening up, one of them right on my doorstep at work.
    Â Â For years, Chichester had boasted an annual event, inaugurated by the Royal Military Police, in which servicemen were joined by members of the public on a long trek out into the countryside, up onto the South Downs and back down and round to complete a big circle. It became known as the Chichester March. Inevitably, it started to attract runners.
    Â Â When I covered it for the newspaper one year in the 1990s, turning out to work – oh horror of horrors – on a Sunday morning, I arrived so ludicrously early that it was the runners I found myself interviewing. Generally, they were on the wrong end of a bit of unspoken disapproval. There was a feeling among some of the march diehards that running around the course somehow really wasn't in the spirit of the whole thing. But it certainly impressed me. It's perfectly possible that meeting the front-runners that morning was one of the keys which eventually unlocked my own