Karl Twomey plans to run the London Marathon for cancer research, but in a rather unusual way, writes SHANE HEGARTY
ON SUNDAY, Karl Twomey will join the other runners at the start of his first London Marathon. He will, though, be facing the wrong way and will continue to face the wrong way for the following 42km. There will be 30,000 participants in the race. The Dubliner will be the only one running it backwards.
“My dad Tony died of cancer in 2009. I was trying to think of a way of raising money for cancer research and came across this idea,” he says. To raise money for Cancer Research UK, he began by running backwards around a football pitch in London, where he lives and works as a PE teacher. He fell into a pothole on his first day. “There were a crowd of lads watching me in fits of laughter.”
Since then, he has built up his mileage and added a couple of incidents. He ran into a tree, although he was with a group of a runners at the time and they saw it coming but were too amused to warn him. There have been collisions with bins too, but running in the same Greenwich park so often, he says he knows it so well that he can anticipate every pothole. “The only problem is people walking.”
Thankfully, the 37-year-old has had very few collisions with other people. Except during Christmas week, when I joined him for a seven-mile fun run up around Howth, Co Dublin, which led to a near disaster.
When he races, Twomey needs a guide to jog behind him (facing him) to warn him of upcoming obstructions: people, oncoming traffic and the like. We are old friends, so I offered my services and we had had a test run around our hometown of Skerries. Ignoring the stares – he is well used to them – he taught me how to guide him without saying “left” or “right”, because his left and right are always going to be different. Hand signals were the key.
You might suppose that Twomey should start a race at the back to avoid other runners, but he is quick enough even going backwards that he is better off starting towards the front and letting the better runners see him and overtake him. If he starts towards the back, his main problem is avoiding colliding with runners ahead who are slower than him.
For the Howth race, I was his guide. Which is why, early in the run, at a narrowing of the road, we ran into another runner. As I apologised to the victim, Twomey picked himself up and kept going. Having recovered and continued, he went on to run backwards up the steep hill of Howth, although his apparent comfort was occasionally betrayed by his asking, “Are we nearly at the top?”, every few minutes until I suggested he was just better off not asking.
When we reached the summit, I asked him how he felt. “It was like doing squat thrusts for 25 minutes straight,” he said. And then he hared down the hill at a fair clip. (He has since run a half marathon backwards in an impressive two hours and three minutes.)
On Sunday, he will have two guides, both of whom will be also be running their first marathons. When Twomey trained for one in 2001, his knees gave out and he was advised that he’d never be able to run one. Surprisingly, running backwards isn’t so hard on the knees although there have been problems.
“I’ve had lots of niggles. I did have problems recently when my knees went numb and I thought the whole idea was finished. It turned out that my quads were tight and pinching on a nerve. My calves can feel like they’re going to explode although it’s more my ankles and a blister on my left foot. And my shoulders get quite sore, because of the position your body is in when running backwards.”
His YouTube page is busy with videos of him running backwards in various locations, including down the aisle of a plane, around Bergen in Norway, through the snow during a race in Germany, and around Howth. The final stages of his training have included a recent 16-mile race, which he joined after running four miles beforehand.
“It’s a funny thing, but running backwards has never been easy. I thought it would be after a while. But you have to concentrate and that makes it so much harder. You can never switch off, never fully relax,” he said.
He is looking forward to the marathon, but also to finishing it. “I can’t wait to turn around again.”
To see videos of Karl Twomey running backwards, and to follow his progress, see Backwards4cancer.com
