LONDON MARATHON
Not long ago she was jogging in Liverpool’s Sefton Park, now Rachel Hodgkinson tells Simon Barnes she’s ready to mix it with the world’s best runners
HAVE YOU EVER had the pleasure of being a natural? Trying a sport for the first time and being an absolute whizz? It’s when you find something wonderful in you that you never knew you possessed: you pick up a bow and put all six arrows in the centre circle; you try pool and pot everything in sight; someone throws you a cricket ball and you’re turning it square like Shane Warne.
That’s more or less what happened to Rachel Hodgkinson, who on Sunday will compete in one of the UK’s largest – and fitting for this issue, most eco-friendly – sporting events: the London Marathon. She thought she’d give running a try and found almost at once that she was a flier. A natural. Her eureka moment came when she entered a 10k event. A half-decent runner would hope to break an hour – she finished in 46 minutes.
“Running made me happy,” she says, “and I realised I had a knack for it.” The 31-year-old from Woolton in Merseyside had always been pretty good, but childhood illnesses and periods in hospital rather took the shine off things. So she was a late blossomer, only taking up running at university despite it being something she’d always wanted to do.
Now she’s about to try to keep pace with the world’s best by competing in the elite women’s race at the London Marathon. Last year she ran with the crowd and rather stood out from it. “I’d won the Tokyo Marathon in two hours, 36 minutes the month before, and I thought I’d be fast, so I lined up at the front with the men.”
It was a bold decision, but definitely the right one, as Hodgkinson shaved a couple of minutes off her best time and was the first British woman home from the mass start. Minutes later, she discovered she was the second-fastest British female in the entire race. “I was shocked,” she says. But as a result she’s now aiming higher and on Sunday hopes to break two and a half hours.
The joy of being a natural is the feeling that you – and you alone – are excused all the hard work that sporting achievement demands. Of course, that’s a delusion, since what’s truly remarkable about Hodgkinson’s rise is not her fast start, but the steepness of her subsequent improvement. She found she had a natural talent for running – and then got to work.
“I knocked 20 minutes off my marathon time in a single season,” she says, describing how she made the classic transition from gifted amateur to tough professional – in attitude if not in income.
“I’d always coached mysel
