The Hard Miles - Gower Coastal Marathon

The roads diverging infront of us present a proposition of terrifying importance. There’s people in the office decidedly younger now and there’s people playing sport on the telly who were only just out of nappies when I was doing my GCSEs. If you are a late twenty something and you stop momentarily to scratch your head about it, you have been in the real world quite some years now…. Where has all that time gone?

These days, everyone who I thought I knew, seems to have gone to ground. I think it’s that late twenties thing. These I suggest are ‘The Hard Miles.’ This is the effort you have to put in when the end is nowhere in sight. The current is strong here and many of those who are the most successful seem to be swimming the hardest against it. The pace leaves you gasping for breath, and when you do surface, it is a rushed, garbled affair that leaves precious little time for introspection. At best it seems that you can continue upstream for the next fifty years, spawn and then shortly die; or you can get washed backwards to be lost out at sea.

Faced with such options it is no wonder that so many of us just clap on the blinkers and follow suit with whichever way the traffic around us seems to be going. I think that I fell in at some stage with the spawners because everyone I thought I knew is so terribly over achieving and seems to be fighting their way along with the best of them against the relentless current.

Running is giving me a bit of respite at the moment. Last post, I wrote about how it was helping me cleave a divide between work and my personal life; putting my fell shoes on instead of my brogues before I commute home over the Cotswolds.

I completed a marathon on the Gower a while ago and slipped into a secluded eddy for the entire weekend on the beautiful and secluded peninsula in this relatively accessible corner of the UK. Sealions, swooping seagulls, seaspray. With these in sight we ran across beaches of wet, packed sand and climbed out of them on tussocky dunes of Marran Grass. Kitchen Corner, Sweyne’s Howes, Burry Holms. On the higher ground little rivulets from an early morning shower laced their way underfoot; tracing new routes over the sodden peat. Llanmadoc Hill, Ryer’s Down, Arthur’s Stone. Ponies blocked the course at one point. They seemed wild but did not startle when we sidestepped past them. Perhaps they were caged in some way, but we hadn’t crossed a fence for miles. Then my family were on the beach, cheering and waving and smiling and stamping around in the cold salty air. Oxwich Point and ancient oak trees come down from the cliffs to dip their gnarled roots in the brackish water whilst the path runs right up through them before tumbling down down down to the sea again.  
Holy’s Wash, Port Eynon and then I’m out of the woods,
so to speak, at about mile 24.  

And then its Blackhole Gut, and the hours of indecision, agonising over the effort expended, start to finally unravel. In this overdistance ‘marathon’ a further 6miles are left to be run on flat, fast grassland bordering the sea. I take an inventory of the resources remaining and then finally turn the taps on full; emptying whatever I find left.  Red Chamber and the feeling of exhaustion and concentration and continued effort is building to a euphoria.  Ever closer to the river head, to the source, to The End. The sea is quiet at Tears Point.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

I cross the line at the end of the journey in fifth, having lost 15minutes along the way with two other runners and having run an extra mile or so as we tried to find our way back on to the course. I had been pretty honest with myself about the speed and direction I was travelling in for most of the race however and had managed to keep it mainly positive. For this reason I felt that I arrived at the end with the final stretch having looked after itself.  

Such windows into hardships and endings is why I keep heading out on journeys such as these at the moment and why I try to keep pushing on even until the closing stages once the real Hard Miles are over. In the much deeper and intimidating wilderness of the late 20 something it’s nice to see how it all might look if you keep swimming earnestly in the same direction.