NEWS, VIEWS, TRENDS and ORDINARY RUNNERS doing EXTRAORDINARY THINGS
PBS AND PASTRIES p20 FRIENDLY COMPETITION? p25
LONG DISTANCE CALLING
Meet the good Samaritan who’s moving the dial on suicide prevention
DAVE LOCK IS PLANNING to run the London Marathon as slowly as possible this year. Not that the 62-year-old from Woodford Green, east London, ever does it particularly fast. This will be his 25th consecutive London race raising money for the Samaritans and, at the vast majority of these events, he’s taken part dressed up as a giant telephone.
‘I can’t lift my knees very high because the costume is restrictive at the front, so I have to do a kind of shuffling jog,’ he explains. ‘And when it’s windy, the phone acts more like a sail. One time, going over Tower Bridge, my receiver nearly blew off. A few spectators had to come and push me over to the other side.’
His slowest marathon as the phone so far was about seven and a half hours, and the fastest was 5:31. That’s still very impressive when you consider he’s carrying 5kg of foam that’s the opposite of aerodynamic, not to mention the number of high fives and autographs he gives along the way. He’ll be going even slower this time because, for his 25th anniversary, he’s team captain for the Samaritans, which has also been named as the marathon’s Charity of the Year. He’s always been an outsized beacon for others running in the organisation’s green vest. It’s easy to tell people to ‘meet by the phone’ before the start. ‘Obviously, with the costume, I’m usually one of the last Samaritans runners to finish. But this time I really want to come in with our last person,’ he explains. ‘It’s about staying out on the course for as long as possible to maximise the profile that we’re getting, and it’s also a metaphor for no one being left behind. It’s very much a Samaritans value that we are around for everyone.’
Long before the costume, Dave’s first experience with the Samaritans was as a user of its listening service. ‘I went through a fairly traumatic time in the mid-to-late 80s when I got divorced. I was drinking too much. I ended up ringing the Samaritans during a very bad crisis when I was suicidal, and it saved my life, basically.’
By 1989, following that call, some help from friends and counselling, things had started to look better – to the extent that he walked into his local branch and asked to volunteer. ‘I was so amazed by how they had helped me that I wondered if I could do it, too.
After a very demanding eight weeks of training, I started taking calls.’
He stresses that you don’t have to be in a major crisi
