By Simon Turnbull, Athletics Correspondent 17 April 2005
So where does a retired master of the marathon go, after crossing the final finishing line and hanging up his shoes? To Wallsend, naturally. Charlie Spedding runs a pharmacy there, in the Tyneside town at the end of the wall that Hadrian's Roman legions built across the far north of England. Not that the Gateshead Harrier ever encountered the marathon foot-soldier's "wall", the point at which the body runs out of glycogen and starts to feel, and act, like one of those toy bunnies with its batteries fully drained. Spedding strode to victory in the London Marathon in 1984, won a bronze medal in the Olympic marathon in Los Angeles later the same year, and in the London race of 1985 set an English record as runner-up to the Welshman Steve Jones. The record he set that day, 2hr 8min 33sec, still stands 20 years later. Jones, the British record-holder, has settled in the United States, so Spedding - as well as being the fastest Englishman of all time - can claim to be the fastest marathon man resident in Britain, too. He also happens to be the last British winner of a marathon medal in a global championship - the Olympic Games or the World Championships. He is the only Briton to have done so, in fact, since Basil Heatley took Olympic silver behind Abebe Bikila in Tokyo in 1964. Now 52, and back in London to work as a summariser for BBC Radio Five Live on the 2005 Flora London Marathon today, the softly spoken, affably self-effacing Spedding is more bemused and saddened about his lasting place in the record books than he is proud of it. http://sport.independent.co.uk/general/story.jsp?story=630213
