Marathon Man

It’s Sunday morning and I have heroically overcome the desire to stay in bed, having had, I might add, only four hours of sleep the night before. The thought of paying however much Ken Livingston want to let me take the car is briefly entertained and rejected, on the grounds that this isn’t Birmingham, it’s London, therefore huge and easy to get lost in. I don’t think people appreciate just how heroic I am so I thought I’d mention having to overcome all this adversary right at the start. John seems to be the one getting all the credit for heroics …. all he has to do is run a bit!

Public Transport it is then. At least it’s sunny and the route is straight forward enough – Michelle has arranged everything and I know where I’m going and when I’m getting there …. first stop Canary Wharf.

Naturally enough, when I arrive there I find precisely no one …. no one I know anyway …. I doubt if there is anywhere left in London where you can’t find someone immediately next to you. The night before I noticed converted coal-chutes advertised by estate agents. They make great properties for first time buyers apparently.

Michelle phoned to say that they were stuck on a train and would be late. This made me nervous ….. Canary Wharf is a strangely soulless place and there weren’t too many people about yet. Maybe the place has a different feel during the week, overrun by hoards of metrosexuals running around trying to earn the down-payment for their very own coal-chute.

Anyway, here are some pointless pictures of Canary Wharf I took when I was there on my own with nothing else to do.

The first bunch of ‘runners’ I saw were in fact …. err …. not running at all. Personally, I think if you are going to compete in a marathon, using a wheeled carriage, you should at least have the decency to not do it on the same day as normal, healthy people are running, and actually using their own, none crippled legs, but what do I know.

Here is a picture to prove that athletic ability and physical perfection don’t always go hand in hand.

Michelle and Paul arrived and I felt a lot let less nervous. They had to organise the movements of whole bunch of other slackers like me so they spent a lot of time on the phone …. or they could just have been pretending so they didn’t have to talk to me …. who knows.

We waited for hours and hours as hundreds of people ran past, waiting to see John. My assumption that a tall, floppy haired, slightly Chinese looking guy would be easy to spot didn’t hold true; I’d underestimated just how many people would be taking part in this thing. In the end we did spot him but there were so many people cheering the runners that it was impossible to take a picture ….. we tried running to the other-side of the Wharf to wave as he came around again but I got lost and got nervous again ….. thank god for mobile phones.

This was taken at the 3 mile point …. that’s 3 miles to the end. Mark, Michelle and Paul, John’s Dad and Asma are waiting for John to come past.

Random picture of some freaky guy.

And here is a picture of John. Why the woman in front of him choose to wipe her nose at precisely the point when I took the picture and thereby ruining what would have been a seminal, iconic photograph of a tired athlete is beyond me. The fact that John doesn’t look like an athlete doesn’t help either.

At this point, Mark decided that a death march along the length of the river was just what we needed to build up an appetite for lunch …. I think he was hoping I’d perish from exhaustion along the way and free-up a place on the table.

Here is a pointless picture of everyone’s back near the end of the “long march”. If you ignore the fact that everyone knows everyone else in that picture, it would make a nice illustration of alienation in modern urban life … or illustrate that I need to walk faster.

Everyone is looking happy after surviving Mark’s death march across London.

Susanna is fiddling with John’s “muscle”….. big grin on John’s face not pictured.

John and his medal. I think John should become a model for Colgate. They could take a picture of my teeth and a picture of his teeth with before and after written underneath. All the kids would brush their teeth then.

Paul tries to look impressed with what Stewart has to say …. fails.

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