The Finisher

In The Finisher, the half marathon known as the Other Half is entirely fictional. The real Bath Half is one of the most popular city races in Britain and takes place each March over a fast, flat course attracting almost 12,000 runners. It is always over-subscribed. There is also a full Bath Marathon usually run in August over a demanding course that includes the two railway tunnels described in the book. I couldn’t resist using the tunnel of death in my narrative. I am grateful to the management teams of both races for details of their organisation.

Many accounts of marathon-running have been written by brave people who don’t consider themselves as athletes yet attempt and achieve feats I can only dream about. I found Phil Hewitt’s Keep on Running and Outrunning the Demons particularly helpful. Alexandra Heminsley’s Running Like a Girl and Bryony Gordon’s Eat, Drink, Run give honest and fascinating insights into the challenges they overcame as women runners.

For the Bath setting and the lore of the stone quarries, I did some mining myself, of Around Combe Down, by Peter Addison and “A Brief History of the Stone Quarries at Combe Down,” by David Workman, in the Journal of the Bath Geological Society. The true story of the tunnel of death can be found in Diana White’s Stories of Bath. The map of the course at the front of this book is the work of Saffron Russell and her mother, Jacqui Lovesey. Finally I wish to thank my friends David Dell and Yury Tereshchenko for putting me right on some Russian terminology. Any flaws are my own.