Couch to 5k? Try couch to marathon…
Turan’s running journey in 2023
Turan, against all the odds, with her Valencia Marathon medal
For most people, the idea of running a marathon is years in the making. Ask any running coach and they will tell you to start with the shorter distances. Aim to run a 5k, build up to doing that properly and then it might be ok to start signing up to longer races. If you really enjoy it, maybe you could do a Half Marathon within a couple of years… when Turan signed up to the Valencia Marathon at a leaving party in Shanghai in April 2023, she was throwing all of that logic out of the window.
When I met Turan in September 2022, she did occasionally run. Friday night social runs along Suzhou Creek to the iconic Bund in Shanghai with local fitness community group Fitfam, designed more for the selfie-loving Instagram junkies among us than for actual runners (not a criticism - while in Shanghai I would also be mortified if I ever did a workout without getting a good picture with the group to upload to Strava😂). But with winter closing in, she stopped. As for so many people, the idea of going out in the cold just doesn’t appeal to Turan, and the next time she ran was at a Runners Hai-organised mile event in April 2023. Completing four laps of a track in 9 minutes 54 seconds saw her finish over two minutes behind the next closest girl in the ‘slow’ race, and things got worse at the same event next month, where she had to walk and finished in over 12 minutes.
“What was she thinking when she accepted the challenge to sign up to Valencia Marathon?”
So what was she thinking when she accepted the challenge of one of our friends, Amado, when he invited her to sign up to Valencia Marathon in December the same year? To this day I will never know, but the presence of a lot of other runners at this leaving party, many of whom would be in Valencia, and the quality of the red wine at Abbey Road, the expat bar on the edge of the French Concession, may have had something to do with it. Regardless, when Turan woke up the next day, she was signed up to one of the fastest marathons in the world, which has a cut off time of 5 hours 30 minutes, meaning she would have to run faster than her recent all-out effort for one mile, 26 miles in a row just to complete it.
It is testament to Turan’s courage that the thought didn’t scare her. In fact, she didn’t even think about running again until two months later, when we were reunited in Turkey after I left China first to cycle back to the UK. With only five months to go to the marathon, we had to start trying to run a little and at least the Mediterranean coast of Turkey seemed a relaxed place to do it. With a vague plan of running three times a week in a stripped-down version of my weekly training schedule (some shorter speed intervals, some longer threshold intervals and a long run), we set out on the first morning along a path next to the beach in Kemer, a town near Antalya. I had set what seemed like a conservative 3 x 5 minutes slow running, with two minutes walk to recover in between. Watching Turan labour through the intervals, running at an average pace of 8:15/km (not even fast enough to complete the Valencia Marathon even if she could hold it for five hours instead of five minutes😅), was worrying. But we both took the decision early that we weren’t going to make it about the marathon at all. We would look at it as a way to enjoy ourselves being outside together, and to enjoy the process of becoming a runner - time goals and race goals could simply be bonuses of spending that time together.
This change in outlook led to running in Turkey becoming a wonderful experience. We ran up an extremely steep hill in Bodrum to see the sunset, much to the amazement of other tourists. We ran laps in a beautiful, shaded park in Izmir, surrounded by cute kittens at every turn. And in Antalya, Turan completed her first 5km effort in a respectable 33 minutes, and even got her first Strava crown for being the fastest woman ever to run along a 600m stretch of road back from the beach in the holiday resort district of Konyaalti!
Despite not having the weather of Turkey, the UK does have some of the most beautiful places in the world for running, and a strong running community upheld by the success of the Parkrun organization, as well as more established running clubs. We took full advantage of that on moving to the UK together at the end of August, first exploring areas like the Lake District and Scotland (although Turan did forcefully tell me she would never do another Strava segment after I made her run up one particularly nasty hill in Scotland - she did get the crown though😄), and then getting into the Parkrun culture, joining hundreds of other runners and different parks around the UK to run 5k timed races on Saturday mornings. At her first event near to my hometown at Fell Foot country park in the Lake District, she loved the vibe from the other runners - people of all abilities who turned up to have fun, not caring about their times but instead wanting to be out in nature with like-minded others.
Soon after, the barrier that had in my mind been key to breaking if she was to have a chance of completing the marathon was broken at the Stratford-on-Avon Parkrun. In the home of Shakespeare, Turan ran beautifully, breaking the 30-minute barrier with aplomb, in a time of 29:25. It was just one of so many proud moments I had running with her, and felt so special because I had been with her on almost every run to this point, seeing her progress.
After moving to the UK, we wanted to meet new people, and running helped us do that. Tuesday nights running in War Memorial Park with the Coventry triathletes were always good fun, with their charismatic and easy-going run leader Mark putting everyone at ease. We also started running for Sphinx AC, enjoying their training and races, even if it seemed hard at first. We ran Coventry Half Marathon, with Turan finishing in 2 hours 32 minutes on a hilly course, giving me more belief that she might actually pull it off and complete Valencia. The start of winter saw the beginning of Cross-Country season, and Turan’s can-do attitude was in full flow. While many of our club mates complained and found excuses not to turn up on a Saturday and run around various muddy fields and parks in sometimes horrendous weather for the glory of the team’s league position, Turan embraced the challenge - even if it did take some persuasion from her older team mates for her to begrudgingly remove her puffy jacket when racing to allow the team colours on her race kit to show. As the weather got colder in Britain, convincing Turan to take off some clothes and not look like she was on an expedition to the North Pole when running was something I was never able to achieve, so sometimes peer pressure was welcome!
It wasn’t always easy to convince Turan to get out of the door and run… 😂
Two weeks before the marathon, Turan faced her toughest challenge yet. At Combe 8 trail race, she signed up for the 13km race through forests without knowing a key piece of information - there was a freezing cold, knee deep river that needed to be crossed twice during the course. On discovering this at the start line, she was all for pulling out, but after calming her down and going to see said river crossing, she reluctantly agreed to take the start, on condition she could avoid the crossing and take the nearest bridge. However, when I saw her from my race marshalling position a few hundred metres after the first crossing, her ecstatic expression said it all. ‘I did it!’ she shouted as she ran towards me. I couldn’t contain my smile - she really had progressed so much. She now wasn’t just someone who went running occasionally, but someone who actually enjoyed running. I knew she was going to be just fine - she was going to succeed at Valencia.
So on Friday 1st December we found ourselves on a plane headed to Spain. The normal excitement and trepidation ahead of a race was building, but more importantly, we were really looking forward to seeing so many of our friends from China again. We were staying in an AirBnB full of other guys aiming for sub-3 hour times, but Turan was relaxed even in this more serious runner orientated atmosphere. We also spent Saturday, the day before the race, with our friends Amado and Magalli at their seaside apartment. As Amado’s mum cooked up lunch for us on the balcony, we couldn’t help feeling like we had come full circle: seven months ago Amado had convinced Turan to be here, and despite the odds being stacked against her, she had made it.
The day of the race came, and I said goodbye to Turan in the morning before heading to the start. With 35,000 runners starting and segregated by expected finishing times, I was due to start more than an hour before her in the 2:40-2:50 starting box. The atmosphere was electric - Valencia is one of the fastest growing marathons in the world, and the marathon of choice for faster runners. On this day raucous locals, on-course entertainers and a multitude of families and friends of the runners would roar on more than 5,000 runners to sub-3 hour finishing times, a world record number for a single race. Turan loved the atmosphere, dancing on the start line as Spanish hits blasted out, and generally enjoying being around so many people emitting so much excitable yet nervous energy.
My race didn’t go to plan, as I split halfway in 1 hour 20 minutes, but then faded badly to finish in 2 hours 51 minutes. But after finishing and finding my phone again to check how Turan was doing, I was thrilled to see that she had split halfway in 2 hours 21 minutes! Barring a complete blow up, she was going to finish inside the time cut. I felt myself getting emotional, and more than once a tear rolled down my face as I thought back to everything it had taken to get here, and how hard Turan had tried to be in this position. I was so proud of her, and yet she still had half of a marathon to go.
I began walking back along the course to meet her, but as time progressed it became apparent, she really was struggling. Her splits were slowing, and as she came into view at the 37km mark it was clear it wasn’t going to be easy. She had less than 45 minutes left to complete the last 5km - easy for her at any normal time, but at the end of a marathon when she was reduced to walking many sections, it was going to take a monumental effort. Despite this, I was just so happy to see her. It didn’t matter what happened from this point onwards, I was already as proud as I could possibly be, and so happy to have had the chance to be part of this amazing journey with her. Those last 5km were a blur. We ran together, choking on emotion, and as I peeled off for the last couple of hundred metres to see her run up the finish ramp I was overcome. She really had done it.
The celebrations were magical, and it was a good job we stayed around for two days after the marathon to experience them, as the next day was spent laughing at each other as we struggled to walk up and down small flights of stairs. Most of our friends from Shanghai stayed around as well, so we had a couple of nights of catching up over tapas and al fresco dinners in the streets of the old city, recapping the race and generally enjoying being together again. Valencia was over, but it had been worth so much more than simply a race finishers shirt and a medal. It had brought Turan and I on a journey that allowed us to find another common interest that we loved to do together, as well as allow us to meet so many other people who love this crazy sport of running. That was far more meaningful than any medal.
Hamburg - shades of Shanghai in central Europe