Running the Smoke by Michael McEwan

Author:Michael McEwan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ANDY RAYNER

On 22 November 2014, Andy and Elaine Rayner’s first child, Sebastian, was born almost four months prematurely. Keen runner Andy subsequently ran the London Marathon the following April to raise money for King’s College Hospital in London, who cared for the couple’s little boy in the first few months of his life.

RUNNING has been a part of my life for almost as long as I can remember. I joined Blackheath & Bromley Harriers Athletics Club in south London when I was eleven, competed regularly in events, and reached sub-international level whilst on a running scholarship in the USA. These days, I work in the running industry in retail.

It was through the ‘Harriers’ that I met my wife, Elaine. She joined from another local club and we were properly introduced on the night of her twenty-first birthday party in 2007. She’d invited a friend of mine, who asked if I could come along too. She said yes and we hit it off more or less straight away. Not long afterwards, she started working for the London Marathon and, in 2012, I ran the race for the first time, just a few months after I turned thirty. I’d taken part in the London Mini Marathon as a kid and used to compete against people like Mo Farah and Scott Overall in my age group, so I suppose you could say it was inevitable I’d run the main race one day.

That actually proved to be quite a significant year as, in addition to turning thirty and running London, I proposed to Elaine whilst we were on holiday in Morocco. We married almost a year later in November 2013 in Kent.

We pretty much decided to do everything all at once: get married, buy a house and start a family. We just didn’t expect all three to happen in the same year. We moved house in the January of 2014 and, by November, our first child was born. The only thing was that he wasn’t due to arrive until March.

We’d always planned on having a couple of kids and so we were absolutely delighted when Elaine fell pregnant in the summer of 2014. It was the July when we found out and, as you’d expect, we were absolutely thrilled. I remember having what I’m sure are all the standard reactions to the news that you’re going to be a dad: excitement, panic, jubilation, the works.

Everything went really well at first. It was a textbook early pregnancy. Elaine had ultrasound scans at twelve weeks and twenty weeks as standard and everything appeared to be going great. We also found out at twenty weeks that we were having a boy, which was no great surprise as boys run in our family.

It was at twenty-four weeks into the pregnancy that things changed suddenly and drastically. I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was the morning of Thursday, 20 November. I woke up as normal and was getting ready to go to work when Elaine said she had a sore stomach.

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