Crikey. Two entries in two days. I must be getting serious about the possibility of considering getting serious. I’ve even found myself drifting in and out of the running forums in the last couple of days.
Watching the London marathon on TV on Sunday morning must have helped to shake me up a bit. It was another magnificent run from that woman whose surname we have all now forgotten. Like Nayim, that bloke who used to play for Tottenham, and Madonna, and Prince, and Bono, Paula is now a one-word entity. In the running community, at least.
Paula sprinted from start to finish in 2 hours 15, hacking another couple of minutes or so off the world record. It was the first time she’d ever run a marathon without me in pursuit, but this didn’t seem to bother her. Apart from a couple of glances over her shoulder, she took it in her stride.
Is it just me, or do other people discover lumps in throats when Paula heads for the line?
Football drags quite different emotions out of me. Every season since 1967 has mutilated me in the Queens Park Rangers mangle. Every two or four years, with my England hat on, I’m dragged down the cheese grater of the World Cup or European Championships. These expose raw emotions too, but rarely positive ones. Fear, bitterness, disappointment, frustration, jealousy, hatred, schadenfreude. Even when something good happens, and I’m cheering, the jubilation is not really a positive thing. It’s a primeval explosion of chauvinistic triumphalism. Yeah. That’s what it is.
But running pushes different buttons. I’m still new to it. Even as a spectator I’m a novice. Yes, I watched people run marathons and sprints in Olympics past – but never with any great sense of emotional investment. Never believing that I was sharing something.
Is it just that I’m more interested in, have more knowledge of, running now? Is it the sight of records being broken? That whole personal achievement thing? Is it the waif-like Paula herself? Is it that the individual has a greater power to move the spectator than has the team? I don’t know. But whatever it is, there is something indisputably, indefinably magnificent about seeing her out on her own, flickering on the edge some new, undiscovered universe, sprinting for that line like her life depends on it. As though all our lives depend on it.
It may be the last time we see it. Her next marathon is Athens in 2004. Not a fast course. So her next record-chance marathon may be London in 2005. The bubble might have burst by then. Maybe she’ll have burnt herself out.
I’ve decided that I will go for the Dublin marathon in October. I have to do another of these damn things. I also have the Bristol Half and the Great North Run in September. Probably will do Burnham Beeches Half again in August.
The 18 week marathon training will begin Monday 23rd June. I need to get in shape by then. Sunday 22nd June, I need a race to aim for. Something to get me fittish for the start of the campaign. Well, there are half marathons in Torbay and Blackpool that day. Too far to travel perhaps? Ah, but what’s this? A half marathon in Boreham Wood? Thank you. That’ll do nicely.
It’s beginning to look like a plan.
