There was a time when Paula was ordinary. Ordinary, at least, by the standards of elite athletics. Paula Radcliffe was first class of the second class, and it seemed that she would always be that way: forever found wanting at the highest level. Always just out of the medals. Then one Sunday morning in London she got up and ran straight from ordinariness to greatness. It was like seeing a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis and take wing.
She ran the London Marathon for the first time in 2002, and for the first time she found an event of which she was master. She ran faster and faster across the streets of London, the TV commentator Steve Cram imploring her to slow down. This was crazy, he said, she'd never be able to sustain this pace. He was right. She didn't sustain it. She went faster.
"I ran how I felt," she says now. "I had no plans about splits and timing. I was in control and the longer it went on the stronger I felt. And I thought: I've found my event!" She had found she had all the tools needed for the big distance: even the sprint finish that forever eluded her on the track. "I could do that and be strong."
What a joy it is to remember this moment of pure sporting drama. On Sunday Radcliffe will run the London Marathon once again and it's a kind of Frank Sinatra farewell tour in a single morning: she'll run a club-runner's time, get cheered silly and then retire as gracefully and graciously as she does most things. Even a mid-race pitstop.
Setting the marathon record in London in 2003 Michael Steele/Getty Images You can be as cynical as you like about this last run: Radcliffe gets her fee, the event gets its story. But forget all that; Radcliffe has played a wonderful part in sporting life and in British life, and it's more fun -- and it's more instructive -- to sit back and revel in this last gentle jogging celebration.
Besides, there's something about Paula that's cynicism-proof. She's naturally guile-less: more or less physically incapable of fakery. She's been doing interviews and events all week, but there she was again, pleasant, smart, helpful, decent, entertaining, behaving as if she'd never been asked a question about running before and was delighted to come up with a fresh and interesting answer.
Even about her run around the English capital in 2003, the year she improved on perfection. "London's not supposed to be the fastest course in the world, but that day it was for me," she says. "It was magic -- magic to be a British person at the head of the London Marathon."
Radcliffe had set a world record in Chicago, but in London she improved on it, almost in the manner of Bob Beamon and his impossible 1968 long-jump. She improved her own record by almost two minutes and set a time that's still almost three minutes faster than any woman has ever run. Savour those numbers: 2 hours 15 minutes 25 seconds.
She ran the last 800 metres in 2 min 25 sec - try that for yourself without running 26 miles first and see how close you can get. "I had no idea of my time until I turned into the Mall," she says, back in London for something like her last hurrah. "The crowd had been with me all the way but when I was in the Mall I couldn't hear my own breathing, and I breathe loud. I couldn't hear my own footstrike."
"This is a beautiful sport, and its needs to be protected. "
Paula Radcliffe In those last few hundred strides you could feel the love that Paula would relish and endure throughout her career. Her strange combination of fragility and toughness, failure and success was a heart-catcher, and that long moment when she completed that shatteringly-brilliant run was as fine a bit of sport as you could hope to witness.
"When you've got that crowd with you, it's a lovely feeling. And it's something you don't get in any other event: running the last mile knowing you're going to break a world record. I wanted to go even faster and set a record that that would last a long time." Well, it's a dozen years and counting and no one's close yet.
Radcliffe is a person with a generous heart, but she doesn't want to see the record broken. "I want it to stay forever, but I know it won't," she says. "I know how much hard work it took, but that's no reason why someone else can't do it. It's a matter of things coming together: a willpower that's very strong indeed and a body that can take the workload."
Throw something else in there: the ability to endure setbacks that make one doubt the basic principles of her life. For Radcliffe was a nailed-on certainty to win the marathon gold medal at the Athens Olympics of 2004 -- a run, in fact, from Marathon to Athens -- and she got injured in training two weeks before the start. She got the injury fixed in time, but the price was too much.
The anti-inflammatories gave her crippling pain in the gut at the sharp end of the race. "Even in training I'd never hit the wall," she says. "It was really scary. I wondered if I'd done lasting damage to my body. Or if I would ever run again."
Dejected after pulling out of the Athens Olympics Sean Garnsworthy/Getty Images It was a desperate time. Some of the public love turned into resentment at her failure to finish. It was a reaction that filled her with a need for redemption in her own eyes and the eyes of the world. But it's an often ignored fact of sport that the art of marathon running is to balance your body on the very edge of possibility: push it to the brink of breakdown without toppling over.
"It's a fine line," Radcliffe admits. "You have to take the risk of injury. And the injury came at the wrong time ... but would I rather have a plain boring life ..." She left the question hanging in the air, it plainly not needing an answer.
Still, drama is all very well, but the spider ... She laughs, it was ridiculous, a bite from a spider when training in the Pyrenees, and it set back her preparation for the Beijing Olympics. "I really did feel I was cursed," she says, although she managed to finish 23rd and was at least happy to have completed the course.
Olympic redemption never came: and it's the one great disappointment of Radcliffe's life. She was as good as she could possibly have been on the track, even if she never won big there. But she wasn't as good as she could possibly have been as an Olympic marathon runner; a glaring imperfection in a career that has sometimes come very close perfection, and it gives her story a massive dose of human fallibility that makes it all the more vivid.
It's why her life has been so compelling: such massive highs, such terrible disappointments, and often with a touch of farce thrown in for good measure. She won the London Marathon of 2005 despite that notorious and brief stop to defecate. It earned her a certain sort of notoriety but was the hard-nosed competitor revealed for all time: never mind the watching millions, she had a race to win.
We'll miss her, for it's been a great ride, but she'll be doing plenty of stuff, of course: telly, motherhood, perhaps work with the sport's governing body after giving herself time to focus on something else she feels passionately about. "I would love to work against drugs in sport," she says.
She has been accused herself, of course, saying recently: "I get it all the time. People say 'she couldn't have run 2-15 clean'. I know I can be totally proud but it does make you angry and it does make you think we have to put a system in place that protects those athletes.
Radcliffe is a proud Briton AP Photo/Kathy Willens "On the one hand you think people can say what they want because you know inside, but it's still not nice to have people saying that. I can't understand how other people who have cheated can stand there and look their competitors and family in the eye."
Radcliffe has always been something of a lightning conductor for injustice. She doesn't feel wrongs as some abstract thing to be discussed: she feels it personally. And so it's a job that she feels she needs to get on with.
"This is a beautiful sport, and its needs to be protected," she tells me with all the ferocity of conviction in her voice. "The athletes need to be protected, the people watching need to believe. It's not nice for an athlete to be doubted.
"My philosophy used to be that if you tried your best and lived with strong morals, then everything would always turn out right. I know better now. But that doesn't mean you don't try and do what you can.
"It's the way to be a better person, and to come out stronger. I've always been outspoken about drugs, and now I have time and energy to do more. And I plan to do just that."
But one last glory remains, and it's something no one with a heart can begrudge. The bad Achilles is now good, she said, but the good Achilles is subtly less good ... a top athlete needs to listen to her body as a conductor listens to an orchestra. And one last performance, in which she'll be cheered every step of the way. She'll run her way round the streets over which she once flew, and seeing her run we -- and she -- will remember the times when she took wing and soared over London.
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