His lead was approaching two minutes with only seven kilometres to run. Mark Munro, the chief executive of Scottish Athletics, was standing at the side of the road shouting his encouragement when Hawkins ran through Surfers. Munro was excited but concerned. There was something about Hawkins’ running style that perturbed him. There was a little wobble that he’d spotted that few others had spotted.
When Hawkins ran by him, Munro legged it to the beach where the giant television screen beamed out the pictures of those disturbing last minutes. There was a gasp among the onlookers when Hawkins fell for the first time. Swaying towards a kerb beside a spectator area, he went down, utterly spent, like a boxer who had taken too much punishment.
He got himself up and staggered across Sundale Bridge in Southport, just a few kilometres from the finish line at Broadwater Parklands. He swayed again and bounced off the roadside barrier. He clung to it like a fighter clings to the ropes, but his legs had gone. His head, too. Heat exhaustion had reduced him to a shell of an athlete, running on empty and then not running at all. Down he went again. This time, there was no getting back up.
“You’ve always got the conflict because part of the marathon is that you don’t listen to your body, you’ve got to push through the wall,” said Robbie Simpson, who ran on to take bronze. What a shame that his fine achievement will be so overshadowed because of what happened on the bridge.
“When you get tired you can’t just slow down. You have to fight all the way to the end. That’s obviously what Callum was doing because he’s so mentally strong. By the end, your body can only do so much.”
The rules state that a runner can only get medical assistance when he asks for it. Hawkins didn’t ask. It’s not in the DNA of a top athlete – and he really is a top athlete – to admit weakness no matter how horrendous his condition. He got up and tried to carry on. He was semi-conscious, but that’s what his instinct told him to do.
