1,000 not out Marathon man closes on an astonishing milestone
Rory Coleman is on track to join elite club to have run 1,000 26-milers after quitting life spent in a pub
When they find out how many marathons he has run, there is only one question anyone ever asks Rory Coleman: how are your knees? The assumption is, like shock absorbers on an old jalopy, his joints must be shot to pieces.
“The truth is, I haven’t got one ache or pain,” the 55-year-old father of six smiles (he smiles a lot when he talks about running). “No bad knees, nothing. Not the slightest twinge. I’m lucky I suppose, the running equivalent of those 120-year-old smokers.” And Coleman has certainly put his knees to the test. In September, when he crosses the finish line of the Robin Hood Marathon in Nottingham, he will join an elite band of distance accumulators, becoming only the second Briton to have clocked up 1,000 of the 26.2-mile runs.
“It sounds great,” he says of his approaching record, “but there’s some German guy well into the two thousands. You think you’re doing well and there’s always someone done more. I’ve done 14 Marathons des Sables [the six-day, 251-kilometre ultramarathon in the Sahara Desert]. One guy’s done over 30.” Nevertheless, as becomes clear from a glance at the spreadsheet on his laptop on which he has logged the time he has taken for every race he has run, to have done what he has done requires significant commitment: you do not finish 1,000 marathons by going out for the occasional jog.
“It equates to one marathon every 7.8 days since I did my first on Nov 6, 1994,” he says, and yes, he admits he is obsessed with his own statistics. “Apparently, you’re not meant to do more than two a year. I’m averaging one a week. But I’ve got to run. It’s been my therapy. I can honestly say I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t started running.” He was, he explains, 31 when he took his first running steps. At the time, he weighed 15 stone, smoked 40 cigarettes a day and spent much of his life in the pub. Then he was struck down with a bout of debilitating pneumonia.
“I worked hard and played hard and got myself into a circle where if you didn’t drink five pints of a lunchtime you were a bit of a jessie,” he recalls. “When I got ill, I got frightened. My son – who’s just coming up to 24 now – was six months old at the time and I remember looking at him and thinking: ‘I’ve been drunk every day of your life.’ I said to myself: ‘Right, I’m going to stop.’ And I did. It’s 8,548 days since I last had a drink.”
Sober and smoke free, he initially took to running in an attempt to shift his pub-acquired girth. “In three months, I lost three stone and did a half-marathon, loved it and signed up for the London Marathon. I thought I’d better do one before that as practice, so my first was in Telford. Four hours, four minutes 16 seconds was my time. Then I did London in 3-54.”
And the moment he finished on the Mall in April 1995, his life changed. “I loved it so much, I thought I better do one the next week. The Sunday after that, I did another. That feeling of accomplishment was addictive.”
It is not the experience of most of us who have done a marathon. For us, the overwhelming sense when crossing the finish line is this: never again.
“Not me, I get to 22 miles and I think: s---, I’m having a brilliant time and it’s going to be over soon. I was quickly thinking marathons aren’t long enough, I’m only getting 3½ hours of fix. So I signed up for a 30-miler, then did a 50-miler, then an 80. I’ve done a 145-miler three times. I was third in one. For a fat guy who smoked and drank, that’s not bad.”
What he found when he was running was that he could think. It became a meditative experience. “It’s called meta-cognition. We all live in such busy worlds we don’t have time to consider things. You do on a marathon.” He has had, he says, transcendent experiences when running. Some of which have been in the most unexpected places.
“I remember once I had an absolutely euphoric moment coming into Swindon on the A4. It was a bright sunny day, there were conkers on trees, my wife was waiting with a bacon-and-egg sandwich and I literally couldn’t feel my feet on the floor. I was floating. I thought: wow, life really is good. Not many people have that thought coming into Swindon.”
He soon established a pattern on his runs. He does not talk to anyone, he listens to music, taking a battery charger with him to ensure he never runs out of juice for his phone.
“I listen to prog rock, Pink Floyd, Genesis. The best running track is Black and White Town by Doves. I once did 28 marathons in 28 days and I listened to the same music every day.”
On his wrists, he has three watches, checking his pace, counting his steps and telling him when to drink. On long runs he found that the best source of nutrition comes from liquidised mashed potato and cheese. Thus armed, he was soon running all the time.
“I decided early on, if I was going to do this, I’d do it really well. I couldn’t beat the fastest time, but when it came to running lots of marathons, yeah, go for it. As marathons accumulate, you set new targets. I’ve done 43 in 43 days. I wanted to do 100 in a year. Sadly, I didn’t manage it, but I did do 86.”
Soon, running became his profession. In 2004, he was paid to run from London to Lisbon ahead of football’s European Championship. For an advertising stunt, he completed the marathon distance by running back and forth across Sydney Harbour Bridge; by the 38th crossing, the security guards were convinced he was bonkers. These days he is the country’s leading marathon trainer, helping everyone from Blue Peter presenters, through former Welsh rugby internationals to Ranulph Fiennes prepare for long-distance races.
And he found love on the road, too. Or rather on the dunes. Twice divorced, he met his wife, Jenny, on the Marathon des Sables a decade ago. Now they run together.
“We have very different approach. Her thing is not the taking part, it’s the winning. She was national 100k champion. Mine is about the feeling.” She was by his side when, after the
Marathon des Sables last April, he faced his biggest running crisis. He developed a stomach bug which turned into Guillan-Barré Syndrome. Suddenly, he found himself paralysed from the neck down. The man who considers 26.2 miles a gentle jog could not get out of the armchair in the front room of his Cardiff home. “About 30 per cent of sufferers never recover. Fortunately, I did.”
There is a picture on his sitting-room wall, just above his two young sons’ toys, of him crossing the finish line of a half-marathon last October. In his wife’s arms, he looks ecstatic. “Being able to run again, you cannot believe what a feeling that was,” he says.
Since then, he has run 14 marathons. And is now back on track to hit the 1,000 mark he was planning to achieve last year. With just nine to go, his Nottingham engagement draws ever nearer. This one is going to be a family affair: his wife and his grown-up children will run with him. For his 29-year-old daughter, her father’s 1,000th will be her first.
And one thing is for sure: it will not be Rory Coleman’s last. “I do this because it’s my point of difference, my identity. It’s a good moment at parties when you say, yeah I’ve done 991 marathons,” he smiles. “I set out trying to find my limit. I’ve still not got there.”
Rory Coleman’s 1,000th marathon will be the Ikano Bank Robin Hood Marathon on Sept 24. If you would like to take part or get involved visit www.robinhoodhalfmarathon.co.uk
‘I was floating. I thought: wow, life is good. Not many have that thought coming into Swindon’