They say a marathon is the weeks and months of training you put into the main event… race day is purely the celebration of it all. I’m starting to see why ‘they’ say this.

We caught up with Chris Hewitson to hear about his experiences from last weekend.

Last year I trained fairly well for my first proper marathon ‘race’ – having previously done the Town Moor Marathon in 2022 and the SEVEN loops it entails; Edinburgh 2023 seemed more legit. However, as Bex and I raised our daughter Emily to share – she took this one step further and shared her chest infection with me a couple of weeks before race day.

I started and finished on that day, but knew it wasn’t my best effort and probably went against a decent wedge of medical advice to even run it in the first place. I finished with a time of 3 hours 16… again, not something to be upset with, but when you know you’re capable of better, it eats away at you – back at those Town Moor laps, I’d run 3:14 – so I knew I was capable of more.

This may seem a bit ‘woe is me’ (and I guess it is, a bit!) but to me, this showed me how far I’d come with my own personal running journey. To give you a potted history of how I’d come to be disappointed with such a time, let’s rewind back to 2017…

Jamdani, Whickham – having a curry and beers with friends – “hey, do you fancy doing Gibside ParkRun tomorrow morning?” being full of Dutch courage… or maybe Indian courage, I agreed and despite being full of the previous night’s food and drink, up I rocked at 8:55am – fast forward to the finish along that wonderful but LONG finishing straight that we all remember so fondly, and I’d spent pretty much the entire second half of the course wanting to throw up. The breakfast in the cafe also threatened to make a reappearance within seconds/minutes. I vowed never to do it again and disappeared from the ParkRun scene for a fair few months.

But something on that day unearthed a bit of my brain I didn’t know existed. Having previously been a footballer from the age of 7, running was always used as a punishment when you’d lost a training exercise or hadn’t completed X number of passes, etc – hey, it was the 90s, I’m sure training methods have moved on since… I hope they have, anyway!

Fast forward to 14th April 2024, and I’m stood on the start line of my 3rd marathon, listening to Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham telling us not to go off too fast and that it’s not a race – “aye, maybe to you, pal” I found myself saying out loud.

I’ve been absent from the last 3 months of DVRC sessions, while I took myself away to follow an app-based training programme designed to get me to the holy grail of a sub-3 marathon. Strict sessions were planned for easy runs on Monday, efforts on Wednesdays and Fridays, with a long run on Sunday. Having followed this probably 90/95% religiously, I felt better prepared than ever.

As for the Manchester Marathon as a whole – what an experience! I’d been told and had read so much about how it’s the flattest and friendliest marathon in the country – even my new mate Andy said as much on the start line. Whilst I’m not sure it’s the flattest; Kieran Ridley had warned me about the inclines around 14/15 miles; it certainly was the friendliest. The support was literally non-stop! There was nowhere on those 26.2 miles where there weren’t people cheering and shouting encouragement at you. I made a game of trying to hear when people would shout something including either “Chris” or “Derwent Valley” and tried to acknowledge them as best as I could.

If you’re reading this and pondering giving a marathon a try, Manchester is one I would whole-heartedly recommend. It felt like the whole city turned out and had prepared everything, all the way down to transport links pre and post race, making it a very pleasant experience.

As for me and my performance, I didn’t reach my holy grail of sub-3, and let’s be honest, in only my 3rd marathon, I had no right to… But, I did bag myself a new PB in 3:10 and absolutely laid to rest the chest infection-based feelings I came away with the previous year. Also, that lad who rocked up at ParkRun in football shorts with a cocksure attitude that “it’s only 3 miles” is still in there somewhere, and feeling very proud of what has been achieved and accomplished in that timeframe.

I never intended this to become a thing. I was never meant to be a runner and certainly not a marathon runner. This has all been a terrible/wonderful accident. I grew up hating running, because I’d been taught to hate running… “it’s proper boring” I said, and people still say to me to this day, when I inevitably manage to steer as many conversations as I possibly can towards running as a topic.

If that 2017 Chris can work his way to running and smashing a marathon, anyone can…