Water Station

In August 2021 there were no races. The pandemic had cancelled all of them, or postponed them to dates nobody believed in, and I had trained for months for something that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided to run a marathon by myself.

I want to be clear that nobody asked me to do this. There was no charity, no bet and no audience. There was just a number, 42.195, which I’d carried around in my head for two years like a stone in a shoe.

03:30. Alarm. I want to tell you I sprang out of bed. What actually happened is that I lay there for a while negotiating with myself, which is how every one of my runs begins, including the important ones. I’ve lost that argument many times. This time I won.

04:15. I drove to the Kraton, the walled palace complex in the middle of Yogyakarta, and parked. The plan was to run loops inside the walls: flat, familiar, lit by streetlamps, and short enough that I’d pass my own car every few kilometres.

This was the key innovation. My car was the water station.

I’d filled the back seat with water bottles. Volunteers at a real marathon hand you a paper cup while you’re running and cheer as if you’re doing something remarkable. At my marathon you stopped, unlocked the car, opened the door, found the bottle, drank it, put the cap back on, locked the car and set off again. I was the runner, the volunteer and the security guard, and none of us was doing a very good job.

I’d also planned to stop at home once an hour to change into a dry shirt. I’d written this down in advance. It looked very professional on paper.

05:00. First loops. Easy pace, a little over seven minutes per kilometre. If you aren’t a runner, that’s slow. If you are a runner, please don’t say anything.

The Kraton in the early morning is one of the most beautiful places I know. The streets are empty, the walls are old and white, and there are a few people sweeping and a man cooking something in a pan that smells better than anything I’ve eaten in a restaurant. You go round and round, and the same becak driver watches you go past six, seven, eight times, and on the eighth he raises his eyebrows at you very slightly, which is the closest thing I got to a crowd.

07:00. Twenty kilometres. Shirt change number two. Feeling very good. Too good. In my experience, feeling very good at twenty kilometres is the body’s way of setting up a joke.

08:30. The sun came up properly. Yogyakarta in August isn’t hot the way Jakarta is hot, but it isn’t not hot. I kept stopping at the car. The car was in the sun. The water in the car was now, technically, tea without the tea.

09:00-ish. Kilometre thirty. The legs went.

Runners talk about “the wall”, and I’d always assumed it was a metaphor. It isn’t. At kilometre thirty, something happened to the bones of my legs. The best way I can put it is that it felt as if someone had taken a pair of pliers and started, very calmly, squeezing my shins. Not a cramp, but a firm and personal objection.

I walked. I ran a little. I walked more. At kilometre thirty-one I stopped next to my car, my water station, my volunteer, and I gave up.

I sat in the driver’s seat with the door open and my feet on the road, drinking warm water, and I said out loud, to nobody, “That’s enough.”

I drove home and had a shower.

I’d like to end the story there, as a lesson about humility and the limits of the body. It would be a good story. Most good stories end where this one should have.

But I’d done thirty-one kilometres. That meant there were eleven left. It was still the same day. And I had a whole afternoon to look at the number thirty-one on my watch, and the number thirty-one began to bother me the way a picture hanging slightly crooked bothers me, which is to say completely.

Is a marathon a race, or a distance? If it’s a race, I hadn’t run one, because there wasn’t one. If it’s a distance, then it doesn’t say anywhere that you have to finish it before lunch.

I’d like to say I wrestled with this question in a serious way. I didn’t. I had lunch. I had a nap. I spent time with the kids, who were not impressed by the thirty-one kilometres, because to a four-year-old a kilometre is a made-up unit like a fortnight. Then, after dinner, I put on clean shoes, a clean shirt and, on the advice of my own notes, a generous amount of Vaseline, and went out and ran eleven more.

The evening loop was slow and fairly dark and smelled of satay. My legs felt like they belonged to an older relative. I didn’t care. At some point after nine at night my watch passed forty-two, and I stopped in the street, alone, and nobody gave me a medal, and nobody gave me a banana, and a motorbike went past and didn’t slow down.

I went home and I wrote in my journal that I’d run a marathon.

Later, people asked whether it counts.

I’ve thought about this a lot. My answer, as of today, is that it counts because I’ve decided it counts. I see now that this is also how I run a company.

In my journal at the end of that year I wrote the total: 1,123 kilometres in 2021, the most I’ve ever run. Underneath it, in Indonesian, I wrote that every good thing I got that year came from running. Then I wrote a practical note to myself about chafing, which I’ll spare you, but which I’d like future me to know I was right about.

Five years later, the water station has been replaced by software.

In 2026 my AI assistant, Musmus, which I set up myself, built me a twelve-week marathon plan, and then wrote to me in my weekly review: 🚨 Critical. 0 runs for 2 consecutive weeks. Being told off by software you configured yourself is like hiring a personal trainer and then, out of some deep wish to be punished, writing his lines.

The run I think about most isn’t the marathon. It’s one from early December 2025, a Tuesday, in my first week after leaving a job I’d held for twelve years. Everyone else in the city was at work or at school. I put my shoes on at an hour of the morning that had always belonged to someone else, and I ran a slow half-hour around the university, under the trees, past students on their way to lectures.

It wasn’t far or fast, and nobody was keeping score, not even Musmus. I wrote in my journal afterwards that I ran without guilt, which I think is the most expensive thing I own.

When I got home I drank a glass of water. It was a normal glass of water from a normal tap, filtered, at room temperature. I wrote that it was suddenly extra delicious.

I’ve run in a lot of places since then. No water station has beaten it.