I’m off work on annual leave at the moment, so having left those London Ambulances behind, I promptly jumped into a St John Ambulance and headed down to the 14.5 mile mark of the London Marathon to provide first aid to weary runners. It’s the second time I’ve done this; the first, last year, was very different. Then, I was on the 21 mile mark but it was a cool, drizzly day, so we weren’t inundated with casualties and got to watch most of the runners coming past. I spent a substantial amount of time handing out Vaseline, and my favourite moment of the day was around 5pm, long after the street sweepers and pick up coaches had passed and the streets had reopened, when a lone dalek came staggering down the road.
This year was very different. It was 23C for a start, and at 14 miles the runners are all bunched together and hardly anyone has started walking instead of running. We set up our stall, enjoyed sausage sandwiches for breakfast (we’d all got up at 6am because we had to get there before the roads closed) and sat back to watch the elite runners come whooshing past. I felt really ashamed of my own fitness levels when I saw them - 14.5 miles and they hadn’t even broken a sweat. I am not a complete couch potato (I go to the gym at least once a week) but I would have difficulty walking that distance, let alone running it.
The wheelchairs came past first. I was initially expecting the wheelchair entrants to be wheeling themselves along merrily in ordinary wheelchairs, but in fact they have special sporting wheelchairs which look like miniature racing cars and go really fast - faster than the runners, in fact! Next were the Elite Women, who had a head start over the men, and finally the Elite Men. According to the Flora Clock Truck, the Elite Men came past me after 1 hour and 8 minutes! I doubt I could even run five miles in that time!
After that, there was a steady stream of serious runners, none of whom needed our help. The first person to stop was for non-medical reasons - a wheelchair entrant with a broken wheel. His wheels had cost £1,000 and had gone and broken on him. I bet he was furious, poor bloke. It took us ages to find a taxi for him, and thankfully his wheels were still working enough to get him out of the traffic free zone to get into it!
Suddenly a surge of less serious runners came past (I cannot call them ‘fun runners’, anyone who has run 14.5 miles and is still running is a world class athlete in my book). These people actually looked like they’d run half a marathon; they were puffing and panting, red in the face, their grimaces fixed, their bodies blotchy and dripping with sweat. I was full of admiration, whilst at the same time thinking they must all be crazy. Unsurprisingly, quite a few of their eyes lit up at the sight of our tent, and suddenly we were inundated with casualties.
Quite a lot felt sick/faint/dizzy and most of these just wanted a quick break before ploughing on. None had to go to hospital, but a couple couldn’t face going any further and limped off to the DLR or waited for the pick-up coach to collect them. Loads of people had cramps, so I spent a lot of time massaging sweaty/hairy/muscly calves (we had a physiotherapist come and teach us how to do this at our weekly meeting last week). Lots of people wanted their knees bandaging, which I think is more of a ‘comfort blanket’ type of thing than anything else, but bandaging is St John Ambulance’s forte so we were happy to oblige. I handed out quite a lot of Vaseline, though the hot weather meant chafing levels were down from last year. There were a few nasty cases of jogger’s nipple (which, for those who haven’t heard of it, is exactly what you think it is. Ouch!) One guy asked me to rebandage his ankle and I was horrified when I took the bandaging off — it was swollen like a balloon and bright purple. Apparently he’d tripped over a bottle at mile 5 and twisted it. I did something similar to my ankle last summer and I could barely walk, so I was astounded that he had gone 9 miles like this. I told him I really didn’t think he should be running on it, but he was having none of it, so I rebandaged it and he ran off. Ran!!!
The heat was apparently causing a lot of people to collapse, but being relatively early in the course, we missed all that. Last year we took one collapse to hospital, which was a man dressed in full army uniform who’d marched the 21 miles with a gun over his shoulder. Apparently this year there were 73 hospitalisations over all (none from our station) and 5,032 people treated. Sadly, one man died after finishing the race. Ironically, the only hospitalisation from our station was an elderly spectator who’d slipped on a water bottle and injured her hip. She really picked the wrong place to do that — finding an ambulance (St John have their own, so fortunately I didn’t have to call 999 and speak to my colleagues!) and getting her on it was a nightmare!
Things started to die down a bit after that and I went back to watching the runners. Then another problem emerged — despite having 2,600 extra water bottles each, the water stations were starting to run out, meaning people were begging us for water. Luckily, we had a big container in our mobile treatment unit, a supply of plastic cups and a extremely helpful local resident who let us use his taps!
Watching the tail end of the runners come past I saw Dawn from Eastenders (looking immaculate and fully made up), Santa Claus pulling his sleigh, several people dressed as giant fruit and some guys pulling a giant stone (who apparently didn’t finish until Sunday morning!) There were also people twice my age, twice my size, and people with serious disabilities merrily strolling past. There was one bloke with two false legs walking with the aid of crutches, a blind man (who had sighted ’supporters’ running with him in shifts - one ended at our station and told us ‘we have to do it in shifts because none of us can keep up with him’) and one man who appeared to be paralysed down one side walking along with some kind of caliper contraption helping him use his bad leg. These made me even more ashamed of my own couch potatoness than the elite runners, and I vowed to go running the very next morning. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked by the pub and didn’t quite make it, but I am definitely doing one of those 5km fun runs in the summer. 5km is plenty for me; I don’t want to end up being the one who needs treatment!!
