6 hours ago
17
At 56, I am running my first marathon, an old, fat, bald dad surrounded by millennials in body-hugging Lycra and smiles that look AI-generated. But I am ahead of them. For they are only competing for positions and personal bests, and I am being chased by zombies.
The black dog of depression hit me around the time of my last birthday. I didn’t feel I had achieved anything of note for an eternity. I used to work out but, for years, work kept getting in the way. I decided to kill two circling, carcass-sniffing vultures with one stone and run my first marathon.
I started off accompanied by audiobooks, but when Ben Elton’s autobiography got a bit whiny, I remembered Zombies, Run! – an interactive running game for smartphones that came out years ago. That became my running companion.
You start in the ruins of a shot-down chopper, with the voice in your ears trying to guide you to safety through the ranks of the undead. The interaction comes via short sections where you are told to run fast rather than lope. This is a challenge because sprinting is on that list of things you just can’t or won’t do in your mid-50s, along with sleeping all night without getting up for a pee, waiting in line at funfairs and anything to do with kale.
It is a well-made audio adventure. The voice acting is superb, especially Phil Nightingale as Sam Yao, your “run operator”. His delivery is Alan Rickman-like stumbling hyperrealism, which helps to immerse you in the action – the key to the success of a game like this, because it’s trying to make you forget you are doing a fitness exercise. As you run, you pick up or lose items and resources: some are plot critical, others can be used to build out your base on the phone app.
I am doing the Hal Higdon Novice Marathon Training Program, involving three “short” runs during the week and a “long” run at weekends. The distances slowly increase over 18 weeks. For the first few weeks, I am doing three- or four-mile runs during the week and six- to 10-mile runs at the weekend. At these distances, the game works perfectly.
Unfortunately, I spent the 90s playing football on hangovers and Red Bull without stretching once. My glutes and hamstrings give me constant pain after 10km, and the story is no longer enough to distract me. Luckily, the best bit about Zombies, Run! is that you can link the game to a playlist on your phone, so you get a minute of narrative, then the music fades up for a bit before returning to the story. This is where the second part of my gaming training came in.
Genesis is a splendid EP by Myths and Monsters, using a sequencer modelled on a Game Boy to control Sega Mega Drive sound chips, resulting in gloriously bouncy techno with a gritty analogue sound. When this EP kicked in after an exciting zombie cut scene, I genuinely felt as if I were in a video game: Sonic the Zombie Escaper. I strategically slotted this batch of tunes into my race-day playlist.
With Zombies on my back and banging tunes in the 170bpm range in my ears, I tore away, breaking my PB for 1km, 5km, 10km and half marathon as my band of apocalypse surviving chums and I investigated a weird ship and rescued a bunch of kids from an undead-strewn playground.
And then, at 15 out of 26 miles … my phone died.
Suddenly, there was no distracting zombie story and no inspirational music. The assorted demands of GPS-run trackers, music and gaming had sucked my 80% iPhone battery down to zero in less than three hours.
Now I was on my own.
Every part of my body started hurting, my heart rate was up to 170, I felt as if I was going to throw up, the topography of the race changed from flat to hills, and it got 10 times harder, like going from the clear space into the underground caverns when playing that old arcade game Scramble.
I had three bouts of laser eye surgery a few years ago for a tear in my left retina. The pain of that was biblical. I still get PTSD. But those surgeries were five-minute slices of horror, and this was hours of running with the devil stabbing my butt cheeks while his demons punched my calves, knees and groin with forks. I can’t even recall my thoughts during this torture.
I got round. Eventually. But it was not Sonic the Hedgehog. It was more like Death Stranding, with your character carrying all of Swindon on his back.
I ran the first half in two hours and 10 minutes and the second half in three-and-a-half hours. Now I have to train for another one so I can try to beat five hours – because that is what dafties like me do. Luckily, Zombies, Run! is now up to season 11, and I only got as far as the end of season 2.
Gaming training makes sense, because what else is a marathon but a very long boring RPG where you grind up stats in health, dexterity, speed and stamina before taking on the end boss of the finishing line? Forget Elder Scrolls, I’m here for Elder Strolls. And maybe some Half-Dead Redemption.
