Puddle Hopper

It began as an angry release from teenage woes, a swift early January 5k in the howling rain the antidote to the blues that beget all young folk at some point in their lives. The next night, another 5k, quicker and slicker and, dare we say it more enjoyable. Then 10k… then 10k in under an hour… under 50 minutes… pushing 40 minutes. Minutes and seconds shaved from personal bests as regularly as left foot follows right on the nightly pound around the streets. Proper running.

“I’ve applied for the Edinburgh Marathon,” announced the boy, one night in February.

“This year’s marathon?” we asked, not really believing him.

“Yeah. It’s in May.”

“What, this May?” we ask. “As in three months from now?”

“Yeah. Nae danger,” he shrugged.

He’s already set up a Just Giving page. He’ll run for Prostate Cancer UK, in recognition of the illness that took my dad’s – his papa’s – life.

He has sponsors, he has a training plan, he has it all sorted out without any help from us.

Young folk and their gung ho-ness is really something to be amazed at.

And so, we (mum, dad, big sister) found ourselves in Edinburgh on Sunday, watching all manner of ordinary people do an extraordinary thing. Old folk, young folk, middle aged crisis-averters, the lanky, the limbless and the laudable all coalesced in one giant, humming and thrumming, stretched out line, pounding the cobbles of Edinburgh’s Old Town and out….waaay out…beyond the coastal holiday resort of Seaton Sands to Prestonpans then back again to cross the finish line at Musselburgh Race Course.

We see Calum off at the starting pen then hot foot it to Waverley Bridge to catch him at the one mile mark. It’s a slow mile, he tells us later, given the sheer number of runners boxing one another in, but by miles 3, 4 and 5, the lines begin to stretch.

Our plan…and that of thousands of others, as it becomes apparent, is to get the North Berwick train and get off at Wallyford to cheer the boy on at mile 13. But the trains are ridiculously oversubscribed and ScotRail really isn’t much help. We can’t get on our intended train and are herded onto another one which won’t be leaving for an hour. We sit, packed in at our table and track the boy on our phones, watching his digital icon crawl across our screens as it makes its steady pace towards the half way mark. Of course, by the time we’re there, we’ve missed him. Our train has slow-snaked its way out of Waverley Station and despite our best efforts to get to the crucial mark on time, he’s two miles further up the field.

That’s good, I suppose.

He’s making excellent progress, despite the weather, which has in typical Scottish fashion been warm and sunny but windy to the point of gale force, then calm and still and punctuated by a stinging 10 minute attack of hailstones, to pure golden sunshine and torrential rain then back again. He’d confidently predicted he’d finish somewhere between 4 and 4 and a half hours and it looks as though he’s on course for that sort of time.

As mile 13 also doubles as mile 25, we leave and aim to get as close to the finish line as possible. By mile 26 the crowd is three-deep at the barrier. We find a spot 150 yards or so from the end, where the route turns into its final stretch and watch the blur of runners going past.

Some are as fresh as the moment they leapt out of bed that morning. Tattooed hipsters with unravelling man buns and glistening, rain speckled beards throw their arms aloft to elicit mass hysteria from the crowd and testosterone-pumping bursts of hidden speed from their sleek, muscular legs. Runners in wraparound glasses and backwards baseball caps coast past like the supreme beings they are. Runners with jaws set in stone and jutting at 90 degree angles push their very limits to new, far-put places. Teeth are gritted, facial muscles are stretched to sinew-snapping levels. Pain – pure pain – is etched on many faces. D’you know these Peter Howson paintings of hard-working industrial guys from the small towns of Scotland? Just like that. Everyone in the crowd, many of us who will never experience what running a marathon is actually like, shouts out the names of these strangers that are on the final stretch.

“Go on Samantha!”

“You can do it, Luca!”

“Keep it going, Abigail!”

Two younger men walk/slow-jog past with an elderly man propped up between their shoulders. The man in the middle is out of it. His legs don’t work and he’s unaware of where he is, but his two helpers are making sure he’ll cross that line.

A guy in his twenties rounds the bend, zig-zagging like a drunk man at closing time on Christmas Eve, left to right to left to further left and back again. His arms flap loosely by his side, he staggers to fall, lurches and rights himself at the last second. The crowd will him on.

“Come on Kenny, son! One last push, big man!”

It’s cliche central, but what else d’you say in times like this? I really hope Kenny made it.

There are at least 3 hot dogs running. A dragon, a chicken, a handful of fairies not far behind them. And then…

…the boy!

He’s almost past us…in fact, he is past us by the time I shout his name.

“Calum! Calum!! CALUM!!! GO ON SON!!!!”

Erin shouts his name. Anne shrieks. Calum looks back, smiling widely and delighted to see us.

And I burst into tears.

Proud barely begins to cover it.

The boy clocks a very impressive 3 hours 57 minutes, a sub-four, in marathon speak. It’s an extremely impressive time for a first marathon, for an 18-year old who only started running out of frustration a few months ago at the bum hand life was dealing him at the time.

Calum had a playlist made up, the idea being that he’d cross the line to Vangelis’s Chariots Of Fire (!), but because he was faster than anticipated, he ended up finishing to Sigur Ros’s atmospheric, anthemic and yet quietly restrained Hoppipolla. As you know already, ‘Hoppipolla’ in Sigur Ros speak means ‘puddle hopper’, a very apt track given the soaking roads and puddle-heavy route in places. A fitting tune to cross any line to, let alone that 26.2 mile line. I bet this sounded epic!

Sigur Ros – Hoppipolla