Ian O'Riordan On Athletics: Ian, All is good to go for the Reggae Marathon in Negril, Jamaica. I have spoken with them and they will look after everything on the ground. If Jamaica for a couple of days in December is okay with you. Regards, Peter Conway, Caribbean Collection, Midleton, Co Cork.
Sometimes that sort of well-intentioned email is better left unanswered. The problem wasn't that my flight landed in Kingston instead of Montego Bay. (Long story, something to do with the plane running out of fuel). It could have been worse.
Guantanamo Bay was the next stop.
Nor that my cab driver made the 50-mile trip to Negril in an old Toyota Hiace with a beer in one hand and a reefer in the other, never once staying the right side of the white line. But he got me there. No problem, man! Nor that I spent the first two days in Negril turning away drug pushers and prostitutes, some of whom were desperate for business. At least they were friendly (Respect!) and that really wasn't a problem at all.
Nor that Negril wasn't beautiful. There's a seven-mile stretch of bright white sand and warm ocean with a soft Caribbean breeze that of all the places I've been comes closest to paradise, with the possible exception of Hawaii. Watching the sunset from the Irie Beach Bar with a cool bottle of Red Stripe felt like the end of the earth, even though the only thing between here and Cuba was 90 miles of deep water and three million sharks.
Some parts of Negril were a little edgy. There's only one ATM machine and that wasn't a place to withdraw money after dark. Some people go there for business, but not many, and only later did I find a map of the place where some parts of town appeared simply as a blank space, which is hardly a good sign.
The only problem with Jamaica was how it destroyed almost all my respect for the marathon. Someone once told me that to fully appreciate 26.2 miles of running you needed to run it at least once a year. I reckoned once every two years was enough, which meant I needed to run it before the end of this year. When a marathon in Jamaica presented itself it was useless to resist.
I would never recommend a crash course in marathon training, but it always worked for me - three weeks usually being enough. But after week one I suffered my first ever groin strain. I was always highly suspicious of groin strains, which only seemed to strike overpaid footballers with a tendency for laziness. I now know groin strains do in fact reduce you to watching television all day.
That still wasn't the problem when it came to running 26.2 miles in Jamaica. Adopting the Dr Romanov technique of pose running, I finished in three hours, 25 minutes and 54 seconds - a time I have absolutely no respect for. Yet I finished 21st. The average finishing time was four hours, 39 minutes and 32 seconds. The winner ran two hours, 31 minutes and 43 minutes - a time I also have no respect for because I once ran quicker.
That's what is wrong with the Negril marathon in Jamaica and most other town and city marathons around the world. This once great distance, made sacred by Philippides and Spiridon Louis and made famous by Emil Zatopek and Abebe Bikila, is now a phoney test of endurance, an achievement fraud. It doesn't matter anymore if you run under three hours or over six hours, but it's nice to say you ran quicker than Katie Holmes.
The people of Negril aren't to blame for this. December is low tourism season and so seven years ago they figured they'd boost things up a little by staging a marathon. Of course it wouldn't be competitive. This would be the Reggae Marathon, with reggae bands along the route and a trophy of Bob Marley for the winner. There would be a Rasta Party instead of a Pasta Party and if the marathon was too far you could always cut off early and do the half marathon, which most people did.
Clearly the marathon is now the fast food of the so-called fitness generation, and there's no going back. There was a time I would laugh at any man who told me he'd run the marathon in over three hours, and yet there I was among them, happy to take a couple of breathers along the way and listen to some reggae.
The marathon was never intended as a fun run, but that's what places like Negril have turned it into. Maybe there's no harm in that and who cares how long it takes when we can all share fresh coconut milk at the finish before moving on to the rum and Cokes.
But there's a big difference between finishing a marathon and running it, and Negril really proved that. The line between the two has somehow been blurred.
The only marathon runners I respect anymore are the ones like Martin Fagan, who is currently trying to get back into the US, where he's been training for the past five months with the intention of running the two hours and 15 minutes qualifying time for the Beijing Olympics.
Fagan was turned away at immigration in Philadelphia last Tuesday, having just represented Ireland at the European Cross Country in Spain. He told the immigration officers that he was a marathon runner, but they didn't seem to respect that a whole lot - and who could blame them?
