Vassos Alexander - Don’t Stop Me Now: 26.2 Tales of a Runner’s Obsession

This is for Caroline, Emily, Matthew and Mary. Who are everything.

Contents

Chris Evans

Vassos Alexander is an extraordinary human being. His Dad also has the finest, firmest, happiest and most committed handshake I have ever had the pleasure of being on the other end of. Energy and what to do with it are obviously deeply rooted in the Alexander gene pool. As a result of which Vassos simply has to exercise for a huge amount of his waking hours otherwise he might explode all over his beautiful wife Caroline and gorgeous and exemplarily well-behaved offspring Matthew, Emily and little Mary (who by the way could all run before they could walk and are already smashing their own PBs at weekly parkruns).

The result of this is our man Vass often turning up to work with a sweaty top lip at Radio 2 where he presents the sport on my Breakfast Show. The few droplets of glistening perspiration however, are the only real evidence of any extreme physical exertion. Bear in mind his commute often involves needlessly extended runs and cycles in various attempts to break his own personal bests between Barnes and New Broadcasting House.

But of course this is not Vassos actually exercising. That comes later in the day, via a 10-, 20- or 30-mile run depending on how hes feeling, how much time he has spare or what he might be training for at the time. The man is a phenomenon of calorie burning. Recently, during a thank you to my amazing team for putting up with me trip to France, hed run 50k before Id even arrived from the airport, which he then followed with a one-mile pre-lunch swim and a display of truly fearless diving off the 10-metre-high sky deck of Eddie Jordans old motor yacht The Snapper .

And so here he is now encroaching on my territory, having written a book about putting one foot in front of the other at various speeds and seeing where that can get a person and how it can make us feel. Encroachment eventually turned out to be mutual, as half way through his endeavour to get his running thoughts, experiences and encounters down on paper, I secretly took it upon myself to run the London Marathon.

I had become the first recorded human case of being infected by fitness from another person. Just being in the same studio for three hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year had been enough for him to infect me with energy, purpose and a goal that would change my life more profoundly and positively than anything I have ever done before.

He knows his stuff when it comes to running. His is the most authentic messenger of the art of running you could ever read. There are some amazing books, and I think I may now have read all of them, already written about what I do a bit and he does a lot. I am certain this tome is about to join the very best of them.

Hes also a thoroughly good human being. But then Ive never met a runner who isnt. It goes with the miles.

Outlaw Ironman Triathlon, Mile 1

My body is at war with itself.

Every step is surprisingly excruciating. Of course having just swum 2 miles and cycled 112, you wouldnt expect running to be easy. But Ive trained hard for this. Almost every day for four months, Ive forced myself to go for a run straight after a long bike ride and nothing has prepared me for feeling as desperate as this.

My legs are like lead. Its not just a struggle to put one foot in front of the other; it genuinely takes every ounce of effort just to stay standing up. My right calf is screaming at me to stop. It began hurting early this morning, just after I started on the bike, and its been getting steadily worse for five hours. Im almost certainly doing myself some proper damage. Meanwhile my hip flexors have simply given up. Theyre not working at all, and seem to have downed tools and gone on strike in protest. I cant believe their timing; Ive never needed them more. The only way to keep going without them is to twist left and right with every step and thats starting to have a negative effect on my already-sore lower back. In fact, the hours in the saddle have seized up the muscles around my middle and forced me into a strange forwards-lean from the waist. I must look decrepit. I certainly feel it. My feet hurt, my neck and shoulders ache, my head is pounding, even my wrists are painful.

Yet all these issues pale into insignificance compared to whatever the hell is happening inside my gut. Its burning in there like Ive swallowed a bottle of neat bleach. And the way its throbbing must be how the Mexican boxer Jos Luis Castillo felt when Ricky Hatton knocked him out with that legendary body shot. Its also a constant, desperate struggle not to throw up. Every ten or fifteen seconds a tiny torpedo of bile shoots into my mouth, so every ten or fifteen seconds I somehow have to force it back down. But occasionally I fail, and some foul-smelling liquid dribbles down my chin and onto my running shirt.

Ive run dozens of marathons before today, and never felt remotely as bad as I do now. Surely the only sensible thing to do is to stop running immediately, and find the nearest doctor.

And this is mile one. Compared to how Ill feel in an hour, this is a holiday.

You wouldnt describe me as an exceptional runner in any sense. Im neither especially quick nor particularly graceful, although I suppose I can run a long way. And I try not to take myself too seriously when I run. So what follows is definitely not a celebration of my running ability or inability so much as a celebration of running itself. Its taken me on quite a journey, from my first pathetic efforts to make it to the end of my street to completing ultra-marathons and triathlons in the same weekend. And all I did was simply stick with it. Amazing really what a difference running, just plain old running, can make. Life-changing and life-affirming. A happy emoji.

I didnt start running because I gave up smoking, and I didnt stop smoking because I started running. The two just seemed to happen at about the same time, and each probably fuelled the other. That, and the fact I was starting to get a bit fat.

It began on my way to work after an early round of golf. I was looking forward to an afternoon reading the sports bulletins on Radio 5 live, happened to glance down and noticed what can only be described as a spare tyre, an alarming tube of fat about an inch wide, wrapped in a yellow golf shirt and flopping over my belt. Id never considered myself to be anything other than slim before now, but suddenly realised I might need to re-evaluate. Because there it was, unmistakably. Fat.

I called my wife.

Caroline, am I getting fat? Caroline and I have been together since we were teenagers and shes usually really nice about this sort of thing. Wouldnt want to hurt my feelings. Wouldnt want to hurt anyones feelings come to that. Shes the sort of person who only sees the good stuff. So her answer came as something of a small electric shock.

Well... (awkward pause)... I still think youre great... and its completely normal to add a bit of ballast.

It was true then. I was genuinely getting fat. It was bound to happen I guess. When you hit your mid-thirties, either you eat less, exercise more or expand outwards.

Admittedly that last option was quite tempting. I remembered a conversation I had with the veteran sports journalist Steve Bunce during a late-night drive from Oxford to London. Let me tell you something Vass, he intoned in his inimitable North London bark, Im getting older, Im getting wiser, Im getting fatter... and Im getting happier. Well who doesnt want to get happier, even if it does mean buying some new, elasticated trousers? So yes, going the fat/happy route was kind of tempting. I could simply forget about that unseemly bit of flab hanging over my trousers, perhaps stop to buy a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps, and continue on my merry way to Television Centre safe in the knowledge I was merely relaxing into an older, wiser, happier middle age. And it would have involved a good deal less sweat than the route I chose.