Training for a marathon is a solitary, sometimes lonely pursuit:
out on the road for up to four hours, only the radio and the occasional heckler for company. Still, that’s
the half the reason some of us do it. But as such it’s such a personal,
self-centred affair, it’s only interesting to other people for about two
seconds. So you want to run the marathon in la-di-da-di-such-a-time? Nobody cares. They
might be too polite to tell you so, but they really don’t. If you have a shot at
the world record, sure, go ahead, maybe talk about it for a minute or two.
But when it’s
taking up so much of our lives, we naturally want to tell people about it. Oh
sure, you know that
banging on about injuries and times is incredibly dull to anyone who isn’t
running - in fact you know it so much that you promise in blogs to never do it,
for goodness sake - but in the end you just can’t help yourself. And
sometimes, the people that we tell - like, to pick someone out of the air, my
girlfriend - make it abundantly clear they have no interest whatsoever in
hearing about the latest minor variation in the way you have managed to put one leg in
front of the other and could you please shut up so they can watch yet another
Scandinavian crime drama that isn’t as good as the last one.
So we have to
find another outlet. Luckily, in 2012, much more important than raising money
for a good cause is emptying the vacuous, splenetic contents of our minds all
over an unwilling internet. Some people haunt the runners’ forums, where
members compare times and injuries while barely acknowledging the existence of
a world outside running. Others start up blogs, and don’t care if anyone reads
them. I did that. And I also felt compelled to closely followed the fortunes of the
celebrities running marathons this year - and in particular I began to
develop a strange fascination with Ed Balls.
Before taking
up with Ed I’d briefly flirted with following someone called ‘Arg From Towie’,
who appeared to be greatly exercising the Daily Mail and its online readership.
The Mail website is not for those of faint heart, but I did go there readers,
and I did go below the line, and now my eyes have seen sights that can never
been unseen. There I discovered that Mr Arg had enraged the Mail’s readers by
entering the London Marathon with just six weeks to go, while not looking in obviously great shape.
Who does he think
he is! Was the cry from those twisted souls who haunt the bottom half
of the internet. I wondered that too, but in a different way - I genuinely
didn’t know who he was. But still I took a keen interest when Mr Arg took up
residence at somewhere called the Number One Marbella Boot Camp, from which he
entertained his Twitter followers - yes, now including me - with insightful
comments while presumably acting out whimsical detective dramas.
Ed, though. For
some reason it was the famously combative shadow chancellor whose progress I
was most drawn to following. And because I’d started paying
far too much attention, I immediately noticed when that Ed was warned by David
Miliband on Twitter not to go ‘too far or too fast’ when running the marathon.
This was of course a reference to Mr Balls’s belief in adopting a more measured,
less brutal approach to reducing the deficit, and in the world of politics
qualifies as quite the zinger.
It’s a shame,
then, that Cameron, Osborne and Clegg weren’t running, because a political
analogy would have worked just as well for them. ‘Guys, don’t forget to take
over the marathon despite a lack of popular support, implement severe cuts to
the marathon on the grounds of ideology rather than efficacy, and leave a
stripped down shambles of a marathon run only for the benefit of the most privileged
runners!’. Brilliantly done, I’m sure you’ll agree.
As time went on I
faithfully read Ed’s marathon diary on the Guardian website. I wryly smiled as Ed claimed to be the first ever top politician to have run the London Marathon, apparently unaware that Thatcher ran in 1983 in a Boy George costume. And more and more I
found Ed’s experiences chiming with mine: ‘Don't expect to lose weight. Muscle is heavier than
fat – although a little bit of redistribution is no bad thing’, reported Ed,
squeezing in yet another tortured political reference. Ed, tell me about it. And come race day he records incurring a nasty knee injury half way around, and
pondering pulling out, until ‘thankfully, a lovely guy stopped with some
ibuprofen’. This precisely echoes what happened to me in my first attempt at
running a marathon last year, ibuprofen and all. Perhaps it was even the
same lovely guy.
On the day, Ed finished in around five and a half hours,
narrowly beaten on the line by a rhinoceros and a man carrying a
full-size cello who had stopped along the route to serenade spectators.
Apparently, though, Ed was so excited to even finish the run that he celebrated by flipping three times. Still, it’s only fair to mention that Ed
was running for two charities: Whizz-Kidz and Action for Stammering Children – both of course brilliant causes. Much better
than Whizz for Stammering Children, which is an appalling organisation.
All being well, I’ll beat Ed’s time on Sunday - and if things don’t go
to plan, perhaps our mysterious painkiller angel will be on hand to save the
day once more. I won’t better Ed’s fundraising efforts, not by a long chalk,
but if you want to help me squeeze over the £300 mark you can still sponsor me
here: And as for our friend Mr Arg: six hours and one minute, which isn’t too
bad for someone who hadn’t ever run in his life six weeks ago. Now that is something worth telling people about.
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