Spartathlon: Why We Run

David Sexton

Robin Harvie, who has written a book on the art of running, is so obsessed that he will be completing the London Marathon on Sunday not once but twice. David Sexton meets a man on a mission LONDON MARATHON THE RUNNER

ROBIN Harvie is a man obsessed. I know this before we meet, because I've read his book, Why We Run, an honest confession of monomania, frankly subtitled A Story of Obsession.

After the Spartathlon, I remember thinking, 'I can now do anything. Nothing can scare me, nothing can hurt me in the way that race did'

Still, I'm not quite prepared for his appearance. There's nothing remarkable about his physique, clothed at any rate. He's fairly tall, pretty chunky and rather good-looking. But his eyes, which are set wide apart, have a truly alarming focus. Dud thriller writers always talk of their hardened SAS heroes having "a thousand-yard stare". I don't know that I have ever actually seen it in real life but Harvie has got it. He is just completely absorbed in his mission, way beyond the social space of our encounter.

After we've been talking for a bit, in an anonymous room in HarperCollins's corking offices in Fulham Palace Road, where he works as a non-fiction editor, he relaxes a bit, as he gets into telling me about his passion for ultra-distance running. But then that's because he's on his hobby horse.

Harvie, 34, just wants to run, not faster and faster, as most competitive athletes do, but further and further. On Sunday, he's doing a "double marathon" that is, he'll set off at 4am from under Big Ben and run the course to the start line, then turn round and do it all over again, just for the hell of it.

He is raising money for the mental health charity Mind (sponsor him at justgiving.com/robin-harvie) but admits on his blog (robinharvie.wordpress.

com) that he applied to represent them partly to ensure his place in the London Marathon, since it's so oversubscribed that, even with 40,000 runners, only one out of four of those who apply gets in.

While many first-timers will be wondering if they'll make the finish line at all, Harvie is completely confident of doing a round trip of over 50 miles and being home for lunch. "I'll go out and do the first one in about four hours and come back and do the second one maybe slightly faster than that," he says blithely. But then he's run 40-odd marathons before, and competed in many much longer races, including the toughest in the world, the "Spartathlon", 152 miles from Athens to Sparta, 36 hours non-stop, which forms the centrepiece of his book.

Like many obsessives, Harvie turns out also to be an evangelist. He has written this memoir partly to encourage everyone else to keep running further, not to stop after completing just one marathon, or even lots of marathons. "It's there for everyone, for everyone to experience," he keeps saying.

At the very least, absolutely everybody should run a marathon just once, he believes, pointing out that there are some five million people now around the world who have done it. "It's great fun, there's no limit on who can do it in terms of expense it's the time, it's the willpower to get up every day." He says repeatedly that all you need is a pair of trainers. "You just close the front door behind you and off you go."

Harvie ran his own first marathon after a drunken bet. At school, Cheltenham College, he'd been only moderately sporty, though he did discover there that he enjoyed the freedom of running. "Everything was about channelling athletic capability into team sports it was only by accident that I ended up going for these runs on my own and thinking, 'I can do things differently, no one is telling me to do it and there's no reason for doing it other than the enjoyment of it'."

There's no doubting at all that he loves it, even when it is painful even perhaps because it is painful. "Inevitably, you'll hit the moment where you think, 'I just want this to be over'. But the more you run, the more you realise how short term that experience is. If you keep on running, then your body will absorb that discomfort and you come out the other side, and you think, 'My God, I can do this'."

He was forced to withdraw from the Spartathlon in agony at the 85-mile mark but he still rejoices in the experience.

"When I came back from the Spartathlon, having been in excruciating pain and mental discomfort in a way I'd never felt in my life, one of the first things I remember thinking was, 'I can now do anything. Nothing can scare me, nothing can hurt me in the way that race did'. It fortifies you for anything really, any kind of situation you feel, I can deal with this."

In some ways, Why We Run explains very well why Harvie runs. In others, it necessarily fails, though. The deeper meanings of running are beyond language itself, he admits. On the Spartathlon, he experienced "a metaphysical revelation" but he can't put that fully into words.

"I only realised much later that something within me had broken at that moment and that my will, the universal will, had been exposed to a divine knowledge," he says, a bit mystically. "I had been smelted into a different ore," is another way he puts it. Ore!

There is, he admits, a selfish side to his obsession, "a sacrifice side, a compromise side to it". It isn't even necessarily good for his health. Before the Spartathlon, a doctor at the Brompton Hospital told him it was bad for his heart, worrying his French wife, Laurence. He promised her he would never go back to the Spartathlon, a promise he firmly intends to break. "I can't avoid the fact that running 120 miles a week takes a lot of time and we've got a young son now Continued on Page 28

Continued from Page 27 there is an element of it that is slightly selfish."

Has his wife ever been interested in running? I ask. "Hates it. Can't stand it. Doesn't see the point of it," he answers in clipped sentences. "It was only when she read the book for the first time that she suddenly clicked, why you have to keep going back for more."

Harvie, though, finds "non-runners" almost incomprehensible. "I just think they're missing out," he says. So has his wife tried it? "No, erm. She's been on a bike a number of times," he offers. They had a son, Louis, on Wednesday August 11 last year. On August 16, A Harvie wrote in his blog: "I look forward to the day when he starts careering off on his own steam."

Despite publicly owning up to his obsession, Harvie remains entirely inside it still. When I ask him if he is really obsessed, he misunderstands the question and takes it as a compliment too far. "I would never put myself in the same category as the 400 best ultra-runners in the world," he says modestly. Maybe not as good as them but just as obsessed? I suggest. But he still sees it as a distinction, rather than a potential problem. "True, but I don't think I would ever look myself in the eye and say I was really one of them. It's definitely an obsession and I'm still definitely completely hooked by it but I would never consider putting myself in the same category, in any shape or form."

The same problem crops up when I ask him what will happen if he completes the Spartathlon next year but discovers he still wants to keep doing it. "Then I would have found out that I was a far better runner and far more suited to this than I think I am," he replies. Doh!

For Harvie, it's all just a great big adventure, one of the last ones left in the modern world. He's looking forward to 4am on Sunday morning no end. "You have London to yourself. You come down the Y Embankment as they're putting the barricades up. By the time you've got to Canary Wharf, the roads are completely closed and people are pouring out of nightclubs. By the time you get to Tower Bridge, you are running down the normally busy high streets and it's one of the busiest cities in the world and you've got it to yourself " ?Why We Run: A Story of Obsession by Robin Harvie is published by John Murray next week, price £12.99.