The last marathon miles

Text 1: Mile Twenty-Two, by Priya Lomax

An original contemporary blog.

Mile twenty-two. Nobody had warned me that the last few miles of a marathon are not run with your legs at all. Your legs gave up somewhere around the bridge, quietly, like employees who stop answering emails. What carries you now is something stubborn and stupid that lives just behind your ribs and refuses to be told.

The course turns along the river here, and the wind comes straight off the water and leans on you. Every step lands like a dropped brick. My left calf has started to flicker, a small warning light on a dashboard, and I am bargaining with it: just to the next lamp post, just to the man in the rhino costume, just to that sign that someone has painted in wobbly capitals, YOU ARE NEARLY THERE, which is a lie, but a kind one.

The crowd is thicker now, three or four deep behind the barriers, and they are shouting my name because I was foolish enough to iron it onto my vest. ‘Go on, Priya!’ ‘You’ve got this, Priya!’ Strangers. Hundreds of strangers who do not know that I cried in the shower this morning, who do not know that a year ago I could not run for a bus. They hold out jelly babies in their palms like offerings. I take one. It is the best thing I have ever eaten.

Mile twenty-five. Mile twenty-six. And then the finish gantry rises out of the noise ahead of me, enormous and inflatable and ridiculous, and the last three hundred metres last about a week.

I cross the line and stop, and my legs, astonished to be consulted again, fold under me like a deckchair. A volunteer wraps me in a foil blanket and hangs a medal round my neck. I sit on the kerb, crinkling, and cannot stop grinning.

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