With the London Marathon having recently taken place, debate will have arisen once again about how British men’s standards over the distance compare to those decades ago, when Hugh Jones, Charlie Spedding, Steve Jones, Allister Hutton, Eamonn Martin and Mike Gratton took victory in the capital despite holding down full-time jobs and questionable fuelling strategies.
Gratton’s preparations for the third London Marathon in 1983 (see below) certainly represented the “mileage is key” school of thought, with Dave Bedford’s reputed 200-mile training weeks an inspiration, and more than 50 races a year thrown in for good measure, including plenty of cross-country racing over the winter months.
Now the owner of ‘2:09 Events’, a company which organises trips to races and training camps for athletes all over the world, the 61-year-old former teacher is hopeful that Mo Farah can emulate – and surpass – those achievements from the golden age of British distance running. He sympathises with Farah’s UK counterparts, and offers his reasoning on why they are struggling to keep up with the rest of the world.
Gratton was born in Aldershot to army parents, spending his formative years in a variety of countries, including Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Germany, before settling in Folkestone. It was at an army-run boarding school in Germany where he first showed athletic promise with a silver medal in the British Forces Schools’ 800m, clocking a useful 2:10.
Back in Kent, his PE teacher encouraged him to join Folkestone AC. Training three times a week with the club, he followed up a 144th place in his first English Schools inter boys cross-country championships with seventh in the English Schools 1500m in 4:07 and victory in the senior 5000m in 1974.
It was with Brighton & Hove where he made his first significant advances into distance running. Studying at West Sussex College, he found a formidable training partner in the college’s librarian, Rob Herron, a 2:17 marathon runner who won the London to Brighton race. The two of them trained twice a week on the track with Steve Ovett’s group for three years.
An accident on a building site in 1978 after struggling to find graduate work put him out of action for six months, but when he moved to Canterbury with a teaching job and started running with Invicta East Kent, marathons finally began to beckon.
Gratton ran his first 26-mile race in the big-city Essonne Marathon near Paris in 1979, finishing 11th in 2:21:30 having decided to run it just weeks earlier, following it up with a victory in the now defunct Polytechnic Marathon on a hot day in 2:19:53. “It was then I knew that the marathon was my distance”, he says modestly.
Within a year of entering the world of competitive marathons, the father of two was running for Great Britain, notching up yet another PB of 2:17 in Otwock, Poland, in June 1980, just one month after a 2:18 result at the AAA champs in Milton Keynes.
His prolific racing schedule shows a marked difference to British elite distance runners today, with few toeing the line of major endurance events more than 10 times a year.
By 1981, he was regularly running 120 miles a week, (see below) completing sessions on grass tracks and road circuits around Canterbury.
Although buoyed by his continuing improvements, finishing third in the AAA marathon in Rugby in another PB of 2:16:40 behind Hugh Jones, the sight of 8000 runners taking part in the first London Marathon a few weeks later on TV gave him the impetus he needed to train even harder for the following year’s event.
The year 1982 was a pivotal one in his running career, when he earned two marathon bronze medals, first in London in his fastest time yet, 2:12:30, to finish third behind Hugh Jones and the Norwegian, Oyvind Dahl, followed by the same position at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games a few months later in 2:12:06.
In an interesting reference to today’s world of elite coaching set-ups, with Farah camped out in Oregon for much of the year under the watchful eye of Alberto Salazar, Gratton wrote out all his own training plans, from his English Schools win to his marathon successes, although he was grateful for advice from his friend, The Sunday Times’ athletics writer Cliff Temple, to introduce more interval work, which resulted in his times improving dramatically.
“At the time, Athletics Weekly wrote a review, touting me as the most likely of the British runners to win. The favourites were Belgium’s Emiel Puttemans, the former 5000m world record-holder, who ran 2:10 on a difficult day in Rome, and Ethiopia’s Kebede Balcha.
His London victory coincided with the sport turning professional, enabling him to leave teaching, but injuries and subsequent operations meant his follow up race in the capital was a sub-par 2:13, and a diagnosis of Osteitis Pubis Symphysis in 1988 put him out of action for six months.
Results of 2:17 in Marrakesh and Berlin, 2:18 in Paris and 2:17 in Cleveland in 1991 followed, along with regular track races over 800m and 1500m, but a fledgling business arranging athletics trips abroad provided a natural end to his elite running career.
The once prolific racing machine and mileage king still enjoys running three times a week, recently clocking 23:30 in the Falesia 5km in Portugal and enjoying the 21km event at the Two Oceans race weekend in Cape Town, where his wife Yolanda ran the full 35-mile ultra-marathon.
Looking back on a career littered with world-class performances, one particular amusing memory stands out for the man whose 2:09:43 still ranks him 13th on the all-time British marathon rankings.
Tags: London Marathon, Mike Gratton, Photograph by Mark Shearman, Where are they now?