My running week has been a disaster. Since last Sunday’s half marathon, I’ve had two brief early morning runs of 3½ miles each. And that’s it.
Through the week, I clung onto the excuse that I was exhausted from the last two weekends, knowing that the Cranleigh 15 miler today, or the long canal run I thought I might do yesterday in its place, would let me off the hook. But I’ve done neither of those things. So be it.
Yesterday, I borrowed a friend’s season ticket to go and see Reading deservedly lose 2-0 at home to Sunderland. The Madejski Stadium is a fine venue, and it succeeds on the same yardstick that is apparently used to judge all modern buildings with tiers of seats:- can someone as fat as me squeeze past a sprawling, comatose drunk without waking him up?
I’ve watched my own team in a number of these echoey beauties: the Madejski (the MadStad as it’s called in Reading), Sunderland’s embarrassingly-named ‘Stadium of Light’, the Reebok at Bolton, Huddersfield’s McAlpine and the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. They all look great, and the facilities are superb but need to be packed to the rafters with hysterical drunks to have any atmosphere c.f. my experience at Brentford a few weeks ago, where we the men’s toilets were ankle-deep in chilled urine.
The weekend wasn’t entirely wasted. Some of it was spent starting a redesign of this website.
Onwards and upwards.
