How to run safely while fasting during Ramadan London Marathon might seem an unlikely match. But the boy who dreaded cross-country in school has become something of a running convert. He spoke with Runner’s World about the appeal of the ‘impossible’ challenge and his powerful motivation for wanting to run the London Marathon.
Runner’s World (RW): On the CALM website, you’re quoted as saying: ‘If you told me a couple of years ago that I’d be running a marathon, I’d have told you to f--- right off.’ So what changed?
Romesh Ranganathan (RR): ‘Running is something that people had always recommended to me. But as soon as I had a go at it, I found it unbearable. I’d go out for a run and be blowing after two minutes, then start walking, run a bit more, start blowing again. I’d come back and just feel absolutely battered.
Then somebody gave me the basic tip of just slowing down a little bit and getting on top of my breathing. That is the single most helpful tip I’ve ever had; suddenly I went from someone who couldn’t face running to seeing all of the benefits of it. That’s not to say that it suddenly became easy, because even over the past few days I’ve had nightmares.
But the real driver is doing it for CALM, which is a charity I’m the patron of. They do incredible work in terms of suicide prevention and running a marathon – specifically because I said I’d never do it – felt like an appealing challenge. It felt like an impossibility and not something people would ever imagine me doing. So why not give it a go and do something amazing for CALM?
RW: How has the training been going?
RR: I don’t think I fully appreciated how hard it was going to be. The training is difficult, there’s no getting around that. But that’s also part of it, otherwise everyone would be smashing out marathons every other week. I’ve gone through the progression that I’m sure you’ve heard many times before. At the beginning, the idea of running 5K How to run safely while fasting during Ramadan 10K seemed absolutely ridiculous. And now that’s one of my short runs. I’d never run further than 10K before I started prepping for this marathon. So the first time I ran 15K, I celebrated it because it felt incredible. And now I’m doing more than that.
RW: Any mishaps along the way?
RR: I had a ‘bonk’ [the kind where your muscles run out of fuel]. I was in Ipswich doing two shows. I did the Friday night show and on the Saturday morning I went out to do a run without really eating anything. I was listening to the Alan Partridge podcast and, 10K into the run, I felt like I could go on forever. My breathing was good, I was enjoying running around Ipswich. I felt like I could run a marathon there and then. But at 14K, my legs just went, “We’re done.” I wasn’t out of breath, I didn’t feel knackered, my legs just decided they were going to stop. I’d never felt it before so thought I’d walk for a little bit and start running again. But my legs weren’t having it and I had to walk the whole way back. I looked it up afterwards and found out it was because I hadn’t fuelled properly.
I’ll level with you: it gave me the fear. So the next time I went out for a run, The Bonk became like this monster, like the Babadook, that I was utterly terrified of. So I’ve been experimenting with different gels, trying little jelly blocks, and now feel like I know what to do.
RW: Sometimes a bad run can be a great learning experience…
RR: Yes, and it’s all part of marathon training: you encounter things you’ve never encountered before. You’re doing distance you’ve never done before. And you meet challenges you didn’t realise were involved. It’s tough but enjoyable at the same time.
The truth is, running always kicks your arse. Once you’ve mastered your breathing, it’s your legs that fail on you. And the thing I’m dealing with now is just being on my feet for that amount of time – I find the psychology of it quite hard. But so far, whenever I’ve hit a challenge, I’ve thought, “How can I get beyond this?” I’m probably the laziest person you’ve ever spoken to, but what I’ve discovered is that if I really have to do something, I will find a way to do it. You’re talking to someone who, at the moment, doesn’t fully believe they’re going to complete the marathon. I’m training for it. But have I crossed that line in my head of thinking I can definitely do it? No. But I feel like, even if I stopped now, which I’m not going to, I’ve already broken so many barriers for myself in the process of training for it.
RW: What part of training for a marathon has surprised you?
RR: I do a podcast with [fellow comedian] Tom Davis and we’ve been speaking on it about me doing the London Marathon. One of the things I’ve been surprised by is how supportive the running community is. Sometimes when you get into something that people are experts on, you think they might be a bit exclusive and be, like, “Why have you suddenly started running?” But the number of tips I’ve been given is amazing. People have even emailed long, detailed lists about how to avoid chafing. The only thing they’ve had a go at me about is referring to the London Marathon as “the Marathon” as it’s a very anti-regional thing to suggest London is the marathon.
So it’s been a pretty amazing experience. But the one thing I do want to say is that when you go on TickTock and see people smashing their running, that’s not the full picture: running is so hard.
I think it’s the simplicity of running combined with how arse-kicking it is, that makes it so addictive. It’s easy to take up; it’s really hard to master. That’s what stand-up is like: it’s easy to start, but very difficult to get really good at. And I think that’s what running is like: every time you think you’ve cracked it, the god of running goes, “I’m going to give you something else to kick your arse.”
RW: What was your experience of running at school?
RR: I wasn’t a sporty kid. My recollection of running was being forced to do the cross-country as part of PE. It was always the PE lesson that you dreaded, because you hadn’t done any running and you just dragged yourself round. I was massively overweight and not very fit, and I have memories of my PE teacher shouting, “Come on, Ranganathan! Pick your feet up!” That left me with a negative association with running. What I will say is, I’ve got three boys, and I think schools are doing it better now. My youngest son, who’s nine, just did a cross-country and he doesn’t have that negative association. I said to him, “How are you feeling about it? Are you dreading it?” And he said, “No, no, it’ll be fine.”
I’m in my 40s, and a lot of people in my generation who aren’t into running, see it as hellish. I’ve been running with my wife and she’d always said, “I just can’t do it”, and now she’s running 10Ks with me. I don’t want to give the impression she’s loving it, but for someone who said they hated running to be regularly running 10K, is a pretty amazing thing.
RW: You’re a patron of CALM. Why does the charity mean so much to you?
RR: On more than one occasion in life when I was younger, I came very close to taking my own life. I hit rock bottom. I experienced the sensation of feeling that suicide was the solution to my issues, so I can relate to people in that position.
The other reason is that a very good friend of mine took his own life a few years ago. He was somebody that had gone through a period of trauma. But I was under the impression that he’d got to the other side of it. We’d really rallied round him when he was going through this very difficult time, but then he presented as somebody that was doing okay. We thought he was now on his way up, but it was during that time that he took his own life. I realised two things: 1) that this affects a lot of people and 2) you don’t always know when someone’s going through it. For these reason, I felt like I wanted to support CALM and the life-saving work they do. One hundred and twenty-five people a week in the UK die as a result of suicide. So it felt like a no-brainer for me to get involved. I felt like I failed my friend, so I thought, what can I do? I can either feel bad about it for the rest of my life, or I can try to generate something positive from the aftermath of that – and this is what I’ve chosen to do.
If you’ve been affected by any of the issues discussed in this article, call CALM’s helplines, which is open from 5pm-midnight 365 days a year: 0800 58 58 58
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