After a lifetime of battles, it’s finally time to stop fighting. On Sunday morning in London, in the shadow of Buckingham Palace, the marathon world will bid farewell to one of its longest-reigning queens as Paula Radcliffe tackles the distance for the final time.
Like many goodbyes, this will be painful, drawn-out and plagued by nostalgia. More than anything, though, it will arrive with an overwhelming sense of relief for Radcliffe.
There’s no easy way to do this, especially not when the connection to her beloved event has been so strong, but to do it at the London Marathon, her marathon, in front of the British people, her people, seems only fitting.
She turned 41 just before Christmas, and while Radcliffe certainly doesn’t look it, the evidence is there, manifesting itself in the form of pain—tendons that occasionally creak like a rusty gate, joints that sometimes ache like those of a woman twice her age, muscles which once flexed like rubber bands but now stretch with the rigidity of a fisherman’s rope.
“Some days you’re running along and it feels like 10 years ago,” she says. “Everything is clicking. Then other days you’re running along and it feels like your body doesn’t want to move in the same direction.”
Things are different now. She may have taken women’s marathon times into outer space, but the subsequent fall to earth has left collateral damage on her body that time alone cannot heal. In terms of Paula Radcliffe, professional athlete, the time has come to say goodbye.
It won’t be goodbye to the sport; between media work for the BBC, supporting Seb Coe on his campaign for IAAF presidency, and being an ambassador for several brands, she still plans to work in running. “I want to give back to the sport,” she says.
It won’t be a goodbye to racing, either, for she still sees an occasional 10K or half marathon jaunt in her future.
It will, however, almost certainly be her last marathon—a 26.2-mile sayonara to the daunting distance she so often pummelled over the years, never more famously than the day in 2003 when she reeled off 5:10 miles on the streets of London like they were going out of fashion and set the current world record of 2:15:25. It’s a time that still puts her three minutes ahead of everyone else in history, a vast chasm of superiority.
On Sunday, though, Radcliffe will get a taste of what it feels like to be ordinary, as this race brings the curtain down on a marathon career that was anything but. She will line up and run with the masses and, for once, carry a similar mentality to them. She wants to run fast, sure, but mostly she just wants to finish.
If she makes it to end, turns that final corner onto The Mall for the 200-meter run to the line, a thunderous, gracious applause will be waiting in store from the British public. Among the many emotions she will feel—the flood of adrenaline, the drop of sadness, the hefty dose of relief—there will be an inevitable swell of pride.
At the same time, she’s still Paula Radcliffe, and like all great performers, the gene that once made her great is the same thing that burdens her with eternal self-criticism. When she heads up that home straight and glances up at the clock under the finish line, she just won’t be able to help herself.
“I guarantee you I’ll be pissed off about the time,” she says.
Why Now?
Among the many questions for Radcliffe, this most important one was this: Why? Why now, at 41, would she put her body through the ringer again instead of just going gently into that good night? The answer: It’s personal.
Not in the sense that she keeps it to herself. Instead, it’s that these last few years, she has been waging a private war against her own left foot and its stubborn refusal to allow her run competitively again.
Three years ago, surgeons cut it open to repair a non-union stress fracture that Radcliffe had been carrying since 1994. For months after, she got around using a mobility scooter—a device built for the old, the obese or, like Radcliffe, the very injured. It took a long time before she could walk without intense pain, and it looked like she’d never run again, at least not run in the way she means.
Like most obstacles placed in her way during her career, though, Radcliffe just kept bashing away until it gave way to her persistence.
She knew in those years it was over, at least when it came to ruling the marathon world the way she once did. Still, though, she craved one last hurrah, one final 26.2-mile up-yours to the foot that said she’d never run properly again. And so, in January this year, she announced the grand finale would be in London.
To prepare, she went to Kenya, training alongside other top British athletes, many of whom were not even born when Radcliffe first announced herself on the global stage by winning the world junior cross country championships in 1992. Initially, the foot cooperated, and Radcliffe put in the longest runs she had done for three years, upward of 21 miles.
Then, her Achilles decided it would be next in line to cry surrender. She went from 90 miles a week to zero, where she pretty much stayed for six weeks. The problem, though, began to settle two weeks ago. It was as if her body was giving her one last green light but also saying: “I’m warning you, Paula, no more.”
The original goal of running under 2:30 has been discarded. Now, she just wants to get through it.
Occasionally, fellow athletes will remind Radcliffe that 41 isn’t too old to run well, and reel off examples to prove their point, but she knows different. “I’ll look at performances of Jo Pavey (41), Jen Rhines (40) and Deena Kastor (42) who are still running, and people will say to me, ‘Why can’t you do that if they are?’” Radcliffe says. “But I know my body. I just can’t do that anymore. I know my foot can never be the same as it was.”
While it’s true that Pavey, Rhines, and Kastor have careers which continue to shine brightly into their 40s, it’s also true that none of theirs could claim to match the dazzling spectacle that was Radcliffe’s at its peak, or indeed the dramatic, depressing and public lows to which it sunk on her darkest day.
Duped by Hope
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It’s not what Radcliffe does, and it’s not a story she even brings up when she’s talking about the 2004 Olympics, but it was, in fact, a group of Portuguese joyriders who set in motion the chain of events that eventually cost Radcliffe an Olympic medal.
Three weeks before the Games in Athens, Radcliffe was considered a virtual shoo-in for marathon gold. Preparation had gone perfectly and, according to her long-time physical therapist Gerard Hartmann, Radcliffe was “about a minute and a half better than when she ran 2:15:25.” That’s not a wild stab in the dark, but an assessment based on cold, hard data. Just weeks earlier, at 5,500 feet above sea level, Radcliffe ran 24.4 miles in training in 2:15, considerably faster than she managed for the same effort shortly before her world record run the previous year.
While on a 16-mile run in Portugal, however, disaster struck. A car driven by joyriders came onto the trails where Radcliffe was running and, as it sped past, a stone rocketed out from beneath one of its wheels, striking Radcliffe on the knee. “She was in trouble,” Hartmann says. “She got a blood abscess deep in her knee.”
Physical therapy could do little to speed the healing, so the next day she flew to Munich to see Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, the renowned German sports doctor, who confirmed their worst fears. This problem wasn’t going to be fixed in a week or two.
Still, she had to try. When she got to Athens, British doctors syringed more blood from the clot, injected it with cortisone, and placed Radcliffe on a heavy course of anti-inflammatories, which wreaked havoc with her digestive system. Three days before the race, she managed a 25-minute run in the Olympic village, and though she hadn’t slept right in weeks or been able to digest food for several days, she still went to the start line, duped by hope.
At 23 miles, having faded to fourth place, Radcliffe slowed to a walk, utterly exhausted, and soon stepped off the road. She sat on the pavement, buried her face in her hands, and began sobbing.
“How she even got that far, I don’t know,” Hartmann says. “If the injury had not occurred, I am convinced Paula would have won by two to three minutes. That is the tragedy; she did not get to show the world how good she really was.”
Four years earlier, at the Olympic Games in Sydney, Radcliffe finished an agonizing fourth in the 10,000m. Then, in 2008, when looking like the favorite for the women’s marathon, she sustained a stress fracture in her femur four months before the Olympics. Though she made it to the start line once again, she was a shadow of her former self, limping home in 23rd place, unwilling to surrender to the temptation to drop out after suffering severe cramps in her calf.
In 2012, Radcliffe looked likely to make it to the London Games, and even go there as a medal contender, after running 2:23:46 in the 2011 Berlin Marathon. Once again, though, her luck abandoned her just when she needed it most. The problematic left foot became increasingly painful in the months before the Games and, just weeks out from London, she was forced to admit defeat.
Nutrition - Weight Loss—and needs—this farewell to happen in London. It’s where she missed out on the one and only chance to compete at a home Olympics, a void that can never really be filled.
London is also the site of her greatest moment in a pair of running shoes, so it just feels right. It was the place where, on a in April 2003, she took the women’s marathon into the stratosphere.
Nutrition - Weight Loss
“The more it goes on,” Radcliffe says, “the more people say: ‘God, I don’t know how you ran 2:15.’ Getting ready for it this time, there are days where I go: ‘God, I don’t know how this body can even get a little bit close to it,’ but I know how much work went into it, and maybe that’s why my body can’t take the hard training anymore. I did it for so long.”
That day in London—after coming through a punishing training regimen that included 150 miles a week, three to four hours every day on Hartmann’s treatment table, and countless hours spent in the gym ironing all inefficiencies out of her stride—Radcliffe set out faster than ever before, passing three miles in 15:15. Exasperated viewers and experts alike soon confidently predicted her imminent demise, but it just never happened.
When she eventually sprinted up The Mall, almost a mile ahead of Catherine Ndereba in second place, shockwaves reverberated around the running world at the scarcely believable figures on the clock. Her winning time, 2:15:25, took almost two minutes off her previous record. After she finished, race director David Bedford said to her thatWhats a Good Beginner Marathon Time.
Radcliffe, almost indignant, felt otherwise. “I was like, ‘No, next year I’ll run faster,’” she recalls. “I think I did get myself into a little bit better shape, but then I got injured and ill before Athens, so it didn’t pan out. In that respect I was really happy I pushed as hard as I did when it was really hurting. On that day, I can say that I couldn’t have given any more.”
Of course, extraordinary performances, by their nature, carry with them a level of suspicion and even now, 12 years later, some suggest that run was simply too good to be true.
“That just makes me so mad,” Radcliffe says. “I know how hard I worked and what I put into it. You can get frustrated with what people say, but at the end of the day their opinion doesn’t really matter to me because I know I did it clean and no one can ever take that away. I can look people in the eyes and say that I ran my whole career clean, know that I did, and my family knows that, my friends know that, everybody close to me knows that, so I have to let it go.”
One of those closest to Radcliffe on the lead-up to the 2:15 was Hartmann, who spent most of his days for the two months before working with her. “I’d bet my house and all I have that Paula Radcliffe is clean,” he says. “Living with Paula in close proximity over 14 years, I’ve never seen anything but a total disregard for athletes who crossed the line.
“It would be the greatest travesty in athletics if people bandy around rumors that the 2:15 was illegally supercharged. In my view, Paula's legacy is not that she is the world record holder at the marathon, but proof that athletes can break records by abiding by the rules.”
Throughout her career, Radcliffe was one of the sport’s most vocal anti-doping voices and, at the height of her career, she wrote to the IAAF and requested that all her test samples be frozen and re-tested years later when improved methods would be better able to detect illegal substances. Due to the confidentiality of the IAAF’s procedures, she’s still unaware of whether they acted on that letter or not.
In 2001, when Russia’s Olga Yegorova was cleared on a technicality to compete at the World Championships after testing positive for the blood-boosting drug EPO, Radcliffe protested publicly in the stadium, holding up a sign reading: EPO cheats out.
Why does she feel the need to always put her head above the parapet when it comes to doping? “If you feel strongly about something, you need to stand up and be counted,” she says. “I genuinely feel athletics is a beautiful sport and it suffers at the hands of the cheats. I might move into something in anti-doping to put my money where my mouth is and work in an area I feel passionately about.
“We need to protect our sport. Even more so now, as a mother, we want our kids to get involved in a sport where they can be as good as they are naturally, by how hard they work—that’s the kind of sport I would like my kids to go into.”
Preserving What She Loves
Radcliffe’s daughter, Isla, who bears a striking resemblance to her mother, is eight years old. Her son, Raphael, is four. When they run, Radcliffe sees a little bit of herself in them, albeit in very different ways. “Raphael runs along and you can see a joy in his face that I can relate to, whereas Isla is just ultra competitive. When she’s running, she’s running just to beat everybody else.”
Much like her mother.
More and more, though, Radcliffe is having to let that competitive fire burn out and learn to listen to the voice of reason that tells her to preserve her ability to run, so she can still do the simple act she learned to love more than three decades ago.
Back when Radcliffe was eight, her mother would take her to the local forest where her dad, an avid marathoner, did his long runs. Radcliffe would run alongside, offering him a drink, and go for maybe a half mile before turning around. Back then, it was just about enjoyment and now, 33 years later, it has come full circle.
“That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to push this to breaking point,” she says. “As special as it would be to run the London Marathon in a fast time, to not be able to run with friends, or run with the kids, or run up along the coast or up in the hills when I want to, that would be terrible.
“It’s only when I didn’t have that in my life that I realized how much of an important part of me it was. I just know that my body just can’t do the marathon training anymore; I’d break my foot and it’d take away something I love for the next 10 years. I’m okay with that now.”
And so, it’s time to make peace with her career, appreciate it for all it was and try not to get hung up on the few things it wasn’t.
Radcliffe was a world cross country champion in 2001, a world champion in the marathon in 2005, a three-time winner at the London and New York City marathons, and as for her 2:15:25, it’s a performance that looks set to stand alone for years, maybe even decades, to come.
Even still, the absence of that Olympic medal remains. It’s no longer a burden, or indeed a major source regret, it’s just sort of there.
“I just never got it right in three attempts, but that’s the nature of sport,” she says. “As I get older and see things in more perspective, I don’t think I can really complain about my lot. It’s the thing that hurts the most, but there are so many other things that I never dreamed I would get.”
More than anything, what makes Radcliffe content about her career is the knowledge that she did all she could, oozed every drop of potential out of her talent in a way few other athletes have done. “I’m a perfectionist in a lot of things I do,” she says. “I worked really hard in preparation but a lot of that was thanks to the team around me.”
Radcliffe, ever the deflector of praise, then makes sure to list the names of the three men who helped her to reach such great heights during her career—her husband, Gary Lough, coach, Alex Stanton, and physical therapist, Gerard Hartmann. “I always wanted to finish my career and say I got the best out of myself and I think, generally, I was able to do that,” she says.
“I laid it all on the ground and left it all out on the course.”
Cathal Dennehy is a freelance writer based in Dublin, Ireland, who covers the sport for multiple outlets from Irish newspapers to international track websites. As an athlete, he was Irish junior cross-country champion and twice raced the European Cross Country, but since injury forced his retirement his best athletic feat has been the Irish beer mile record. He’s happiest when he’s running or writing stories about world-class athletes.
