One Day on the Run at the Manchester Marathon 2024
"I want to play only the music I myself like or no music at all." - Otto Von Bismarck
We often get tired of the familiar little ponds we find ourselves swimming around in. “Familiarity breeds contempt” and “absence makes the heart grow founder” are clichés but true nonetheless. The native Irishman often goes abroad to escape the familiarity of his day-to-day life and the overly familiar company he keeps, and yet as soon as he arrives in his destination of choice, he immediately gravitates towards an Irish pub so that he can indulge in the comfort of familiarity in an ocean that can sometimes be disconcertingly unfamiliar. One often feels the claustrophobia of being a big fish in a small pond, and longs for the ocean. But as soon as the big fish arrives in the ocean it’s not uncommon for him to feel like he is drowning. He subsequently seeks out the reassuring feeling of things that remind him of the small pond and the company of others that fancied themselves “Big Fish”. He appreciates other “Big Fish” in a way he didn’t when he was surrounded by them all day, every day in the small pond. These were musings I found myself pondering when I arrived at mile 22 at the start of the Manchester Marathon. And there is a reason I chose mile 22, and the reason is because I am painfully familiar with it.
I ran the Manchester Marathon in 2022 after two years of virtually no running, and I cramped like a motherfucker (pardon my French lol) in the miles leading up to mile 22. The Corner Café at mile 22 is what enabled me to finish my race. A healthy dose of simple table salt from one of their salt shakers helped alleviate what would otherwise have been race-ending cramps. My post on the experience is here if you want to read it. I re-read it on the way to Manchester and it struck me as somewhat manic. It’s funny reading old posts, they are like a little snapshot of your brain at a particular point in time and space. Old words seem familiar and yet also somewhat like somebody else wrote them. I sometimes read things I’ve written and posted online in the past and have had to resist a strong urge to grab a shovel and dig a big hole in the garden, stick my head in it, fill it in, and leave it there permanently. But unfortunately, I am not an ostrich.
I positioned myself at mile 22 as, from my experience of running the race in 2022, I knew that there were no barriers blocking pedestrian access to the road, as there always is in the closing miles of big city marathons. I walked there from where I was staying as I couldn’t be bothered trying to navigate public transport and didn’t want to pay £20 for an Uber. I ended up walking about 7 miles, but it was a pleasant saunter which took me over nice bridges, alongside canals with barges, and through two parks. I thought I might get an Uber on the way home, when completely spent, but about halfway through my journey to my position I realised that I’d forgotten my wallet. Ooops.
I arrived in Manchester full of beans and enthusiastic about watching the race and creating some art. But the day after I arrived, I woke up feeling like death. I thought maybe a full Irish/English and two coffees in Wetherspoons would recombobulate my brain and I’d go out and take some street photos but I ended up feeling even more ill after breakfast and couldn’t face doing anything else but going back to bed. I spent the whole day coughing and sneezing and reading The Plague by Albert Camus – it’s not a bad read. I had chills and they were multiplying as John Travolta and Olivia Newton John sang in the old movie Grease, but in my case, it wasn’t very romantic. And so, by the time it comes to do my thing at mile 22, I am feeling a little bit better, though the 7 miles walk there took far more out of me than it actually should have.
Mile 22 is also, approximately, mile 11, as it’s a looped course. The wheelchair athletes and the first runners come breezing through after a short space of time and I lift my camera to take some warmup photos to make sure I’m fully dialled in for when they come back the way at mile 22. After 10 minutes, I feel dizzy and my arms feel weak and as heavy as lead. I feel a touch of a sweat breaking out through me and feel like I should really have stayed in bed. But I’m here now, so I might as well persevere. Otherwise, it’ll have been a wasted trip. Further to that, my autofocus is super sluggish and I wonder if I’ll even manage to get any photographs that are actually in focus. I think the drenching it got at the Dublin Marathon last October may have been its death knell, even though it still works somewhat. You can read about that here if you want to.
I’ve taken a huge number of photos at marathons. Like running them, it’s kind of a disease I have that I can’t quite explain. As with running in them, I get enthusiastic about the idea when it hits me, and then when I’ve taken a few thousand pictures and my arms are destroyed from holding the camera, and my hands are cramped from gripping its body, I wonder what the hell I am doing it for. And while my legs, and entire body ache for a week after running them, my hands, arms and shoulders ache for a week after photographing them.
And sometimes, after races, my Facebook page explodes with likes and messages from people. After photographing the Dublin Marathon, I must have spent at least 10 hours replying to people to inform them that I don’t have either a number or facial recognition system to check if I have any photos of them. AI has created such expectations, I guess. I’ve been creating photo art of marathon photos recently, and some of them took me as long as an hour and a half and I had people messaging me asking me what app I used to do it. As far as I know, there is no app. There are AI aspects of Photoshop that make the process easier than it would have been a few years ago, but one arty photo in particular literally took me an hour and a half to create. Such is the world we live in. And no, I didn’t get AI to write this either LOL. I’m a REAL person even though the internet demands multiple times a day that I prove I am not a robot. What a strange world where a human has to prove to a machine that he is not a machine.
I shot the Dublin Marathon as I broke my ankle in training the month before. I had been supposed to actually run in it. I decided to take pictures and give full resolution copies of those pictures to people who wanted them to people who donated to a Simon Community fundraiser I had setup. The whole affair took me around 100 hours’ worth of work and I/We raised around €650, which was nice. I was going to do something similar in Manchester, but then decided I’d just use the occasion as an opportunity to make some art.
I’ve always had this weird feeling that I wanted to make marathon photography a kind of art form and have experimented with same in every way I can think of, and may yet think of some more ways as time goes by. And so that’s what I decided to do with my photos at the Manchester Marathon. I decided to forget about raising money for charity or taking bomb loads of pictures so as to get “likes” and follows on social media; I decided to be super selfish and use the event to take the photos I wanted to create art that I think is cool. And so that’s what I do.
I’ve been making pictures in the vein of Andy Warhol recently, using old pictures that I took at different events. And when doing them, I very quickly realised that the most dramatic pictures I had taken for said purpose were close up headshots of people at around the 20 hour mark of 24 hour ultra running events. 24 hour races always take place on 1 mile looped courses, and so it’s a good opportunity to take a variety of pictures which include headshots. It's not such a practical enterprise at marathons as you only get a split second to capture a person and typically one goes for a full body shot. A headshot of a person is difficult to frame tightly, and it’s also difficult to focus, but that’s what I decided my principal activity would be for the day. I came solely to take photos with which I could create art. As chancellor to Germany in the 19th century, Otto Von Bismarck, said: “I want to play only the music I myself like or no music at all”.
I’m fecked, and my camera is not working optimally, and so I know I’m not going to last a whole day taking pictures. But I resolve to do what I can rather than worry about what I can’t. I think I manage to capture the first 20 or so runners in full body, and so I hope to make some interesting collages with them.
After about three hours driving myself a little daft trying to take headshots of passing runners, I feel a little faint, and so resolve to call it a day, and pack up my bag. I’m a bit muddled in the head and so walk off a mile in the wrong direction towards base. I then do a U-turn back to the course and then realise I was going the right way in the first place. Ooops. I take out my Google maps and follow it religiously from hence, even when it, for some weird reason, directs me to walk through an extremely muddy and marshy field that cakes me in mud up to and above my ankles. The life of an artist is not easy, but nobody ever said it was going to be.
LOL.
Ten albums here: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13