sam and the city

No Paris, but still good

Good day faithful reader. This morning I attended the London Marathon, my second in as many weeks. On this occasion however the only time that I was forced to run was when I was doing so in order to catch the Tube.

In order to obtain a prime viewing position I had to get up quite early, and the new day brought with it the same old shitty weather. This of course is just what you want when you're going to be waiting for hours on the side of the road for an ever so brief glance of your hero's running past.

I picked out a few positions along the route that I thought would provide me with a good look at the runners and also with easy access to the Tube so that I could move between locations. Really the only time that I had to stand for any period was when I was at the first location, since I'd arrived a bit early. After that I had to move pretty quickly in order to stay ahead of the runners. The last place I watched them before going to the finish was at the 30km mark. Despite the fact that they had to run 12km while I only had to catch the tube for a handful of stops (didn't even have to change lines) and walk across a park, I only beat them to the finish by a couple of minutes.

The runner that I had really come to see was Haile Gebreselassie (the runner in the blue shirt in the top photo), many times 5,000m and 10,000m world champion. Having lost a little of the speed required to run the shorter events he's moved to marathons recently, setting a new world record for the half marathon earlier this year.

Apparently up until the 30km mark a group of 9 runners, including Haile, were on world record pace. Obviously they couldn't keep this rate up though and by the finish the group had disintegrated. First across the line were two Kenyans in a time of 2:06:39. Haile crossed in 9th place a few minutes later.

posted by sam @ 5:42 pm