Today I learnt an important lesson – the day you stop respecting the distance is the day you end up on a track in Buckinghamshire wishing for a swift and painless exit from this terrible world.
Burnham Beeches Half Marathon is a wonderful race. It is well organised, friendly and quite pretty. However, it is still a half-marathon and quite hilly too (running folk refer to this as undulating and I swear that the next time I hear someone utter this word I am going to jump up and pound them to death with my ASICS yelling….’it’s hilly ************). So, my lack of sleep, my overall cockiness (‘I’ll just batter this one out in under two hours…’) and those aforementioned hills really kicked the stuffing out of me. Today’s result definitely reads: Burnham Beeches 1, Blazdell 0.
I was going great guns till at eleven miles my legs decided to give up, my head went all swimmy and I had the overwhelming urge to find the nearest pub and drink my own body weight in beer. Whilst I was giving myself a stern talking to and trying to dig deep into my energy and mental reserves I was overtaken by a speed walking pensioner, a barefoot runner and three beautiful girls who looked appalled at my sweaty unattractiveness and made some, quite frankly, inappropriate accounts about my bottom. It is this side of running that I find so annoying. There I am, deep in blood and guts territory, giving it 100% and looking hugely unattractive and I get abused by a possee of young whippersnappers whose make up has not even run. It did make me wonder why they were racing on such a lovely day and not out rioting somewhere…
If it had not been for Sean who was there screaming abuse at me for the final mile, and the fact that I had friends out running still (and whom I wanted to impress) I would still probably be running now. I crossed the finish line, almost told the marshal to shove my medal where the sun don’t shine, poured a bottle of water over myself and collapsed into a messy, sweaty pile. To be honest I could have found so many better uses for 2 hours and 6 minutes (like cleaning the cat litter box, learning a new language or building a model of the Taj Mahal from beer cans) and I was more than a bit disappointed with my time. Upon further discussion with Sean (a perfectly annoying time of 1 hour 25 minutes) I decided that, all things being equal, I was happy to have survived.
Later, after some food and a long soak in the bath the enormity of what we are planning hit me and if was only the promise of frozen yoghurt from my wife did I come out of the cupboard where I had hidden. Siberia, it seems, has already given me the finger and thrown down the gauntlet…
Sunday, March 4th, 2012, Philip and Trevor will be running across the frozen ice surface of the world’s largest, oldest and deepest lake, Lake Baikal in Siberia. It's generally considered one of the 10 toughest marathons in the world. Philip and Trevor are running in support of Iain Rennie Hospice at Home, a charity offering specialist and supportive care and advice for patients with cancer and other life threatening illnesses in their homes.
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