There's no going back now. The costumes have been delivered. We've got our race numbers. Even Jeremy has completed a 20 mile training walk. He may never be the same again but he has done it nonetheless.
Short of something really, really major, I'm going to have to do it now.
So on Easter Monday I set off, by train to Margate. Even a grey Bank Holiday morning was not going to dispirit the throngs of people heading for one of Britain's premier seaside resorts. And as is the custom in these parts, there was a "meet and greet" party organised by the local populace eager to show visitors "dahn from London" a traditional Margate welcome. Although unwilling to miss out on this I had twenty miles to do and so set off, with 20 miles ahead of me and a spring in my step. Only one more training walk after this one.
Beyond Margate there is not a lot to divert your attention - that is to say unless you are easily held enraptured by Lawn Bowling - a local derby was about to take place and there was a certain amount of menace hanging in the air, in clear anticipation of old scores to settle. Some of the players were so obviously pumped up on cucumber sandwiches, Lapsang Souchong and Battenberg that they were undertakening quite alarming stretching exercises. The whole thing looked liked a geriatric haka. I gave it a wide berth.
The stretch between Margate and Minnis Bay is actually rather lovely. There are some stunning cliff-top properties with glorious uninterrupted views out to sea. And at Birchington there is a real curiosity - ask anyone where the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti is buried and nearly all would rightly think Highgate Cemetery - in fact its as Birchington's small and unassuming little church - about as far from Highgate's vast City of the Dead as you could possibly get. And as I swung by to pay my respects I discovered he died 127 years ago last Thursday.
After Birchington, and the small but perfectly formed Minnis Bay which is a great place to get a cup of tea, there is a monumentally long slog down to Reculver. In an effort to while away the time I invented a whole new game. You have to match the people you pass with the celebrity or historical figure they most physically resemble, but the rule is that you can only give yourself 4 seconds to do it. So I had (in no particular order) Hitler, Mussolini (barely 25 yards apart), Tom Hanks, John Major, Janis Joplin, Mr Macdougall from Magic Roundabout, Charlie Drake, and the Andrews Sisters.
Later I was to see Orlando Bloom, but since he was being pursued by adoring teenagers waving autograph books, I concurred that in fact that this really was Orlando Bloom (he comes from Canterbury and is still grounded enough not to wander round Whitstable with a comedy moustache and massive Ray Bans).
All morning there had been a metereological battle going on between the sunlit inland and a haar fog in the North Sea - as I hit the stretch between Minnis Bay and Reculver (fuelled by a cup of tea in the excellent little cafe), the fog began to flow in, so that the twin towers of Reculver looked even more Gothic and eerie than usual (even though they are Saxon..). Beyond Reculver the fog began to clear and above me I could hear skylarks as I climbed up the slope towards Beltinge. In the space of five minutes i saw a little Egret, (more at home in North Africa), a Brent Goose (more at home in the Baltic, although i think thats where he was headed) and a canary (more at home in its cage in Herne Bay probably but had obviously got out.)
And then, before I knew it, I was in Herne Bay. PG Wodehouse in his Jeeves and Wooster novellas decided that Herne Bay was the place where the inestimable Jeeves, armed with a shrimping net, took his holidays. I have always thought that this fact is something hugely underplayed, to their cost, by the local tourist authority, who choose instead to promote the claim (of fairly dubious merit) that Bob Hope (as a child) once fell off its pier.
Barely 90 minutes later and I'm home. Admittedly it is going to be a whole different ball game once i am inside a 17kg donkey costume along with jelly Babies, water and other sunbdry comforts, but I have to say, that after all this training I am really looking forward to it!
Thursday, 16 April 2009
No Chance of A Sick Note? - Simon's Training blog
Thursday, 2 April 2009
The Donkey Factory
Well you saw them first here - these are the first pics of the costumes the SPANA team will be walking the long long 26 miles of the London Marathon in. All praise to model maker extraordinaire Jonathan Saville - They will be arriving at SPANA HQ this Friday and we aim to have a litle test "run" somewhere the week before April 26 to introduce them to the wider public.
We are already having a fight over who gets to wear the brown one!
Monday, 30 March 2009
Simon's Training (and i say that without a hint of irony..) Blog
I ache all over.
So there's this clever little on-line feature which enable us Marathon runners (!) to accurately measure on a map the distance between point A and Point B. If you use it properly, you can add in all those wrong turns you took, detours, short-cuts that ended in dead ends inhabited only by demon dogs from hell (or at least the Isle of Thanet)etc etc. So after a momumental, epic, Scott of the Antarctic type march yesterday I had mentally convinced myself that the distance from Whitstable to Reculver and back simply MUST equate to well over 20 miles...
And no matter how hard I try, no matter how many twists and turns in backstreets of Herne Bay I add in, I only get to a maximum of 17.87 miles and that makes me REALLY hacked off.
I mean, I can barely walk now, and its 2 pm on Monday. Whats more, i did half that walk carrying a rucksack with 15 kilos of driftood, much to the amusement of locals out having a stroll on Sunday afternoon, just to get used to walking with a weight on my back. The donkey costumes (arriving this week!) are not only going to be heavier that that, but I've also got water to carry...I have to say i am beginning to get a bit worried.
And whats more, the helpful magazine produced for all Marathon participants plopped smugly onto my doormat last week. It says, to my horror, that in the final few weeks participants should begin to "taper" their training. Eh?! Thats when i thought I'd begin to really crack into it.....
Right now I'm facing another dilemma. With London, and in particular the City, set to be inundated with G20 protestors on Wednesday, some firms are advising their employees to "dress down" lest they be targeted for being a moneyed capitalist dog. This means I am covered, since with my battered bicycle, frayed fleece, muddy rucksack and general unkempt demeanour, there's no way anyone will suspect me of being a bank employee.
Except that means the police will inevitably arrest me as a potential anarchistic. The wardrobe dilemmas will have to wait until Wednesday...
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Training & Jordan
I thought I’d managed to wheedle out of any major effort this weekend, what with going off to Jordan on Sunday morning, but I’d reckoned without the punishment regime put in place by the camp guards.
Apparently, there is a need for some old bricks for some terrifying future project in the garden, so I was promptly told “You can run round to that pile of rubble on the other side of the airfield, and bring back a ruck-sack full of nice whole bricks. It’ll be good training for you”.
By the time I’d staggered back with a full load, I could hardly walk. So just out of interest, I weighed the pack on the bathroom scales. THIRTY BLOOMING KILOS !
Of course, I got into trouble for that as well – apparently, although the bricks are just the job for the garden, that’s where they should have stayed and not on the bathroom scales.
So it was quite a relief to get to Jordan to help with a couple of teacher-training courses, thinking I might escape further punishment for a while.
Oh, foolish me.
After the first minor cock- up, presenting the Royal Prince with an award, that I should have given to the University Dean – honestly, how was I supposed to know ?
I then found out that I’d been volunteered to escort groups of teachers round the livestock units in the university farm – in the pouring rain. It’s rained on exactly five days there this winter, and we have to pick two of them.
And if that wasn’t bad enough I had to give a demonstration of clipping sheep’s toe-nails. Not only have I not done that for twenty years but they wanted the tups or rams done. Great big, fat, horned so and sos.
They were not keen on the idea either – one of them socking me in the mouth with his head.
So frankly, it’s been a pretty grim few days . And to cap it all, Simon says the Marathon literature has just arrived, with terrible news – no alcohol whatever is allowed inthe final weeks and days of training Oh, what fun these athletes do have.
Thursday, 12 March 2009
I Only Wanted A Nice Pair of Plimsolls
The bitter March wind swirled amongst the gravestones, as three Black Watch pipers played the sad lament ‘The Flowers of the Forest’. I was charged with laying the wreath of poppies against the headstone, and then taking three paces smartly backwards and saluting.
Now, they teach you many things in the army. Marching. Saluting. Even marching and saluting at the same time. But marching backwards doesn’t seem to be in the curriculum. Added to the fact that it was the day after my latest little ‘training jaunt’, so could hardly bend my knees or move my hips – I came smartly into contact with an errant gravestone that somehow happened to be in my backwards path – and was only saved from falling by my old Company Sergeant Major. And he’s nearly eighty!
When I looked around, I was the youngest there. (We hold this little ceremony every March at the graveside of a Black Watch Victoria Cross winner, who was buried in a pauper’s grave in Chigwell Church. Something of trying to make amends, I suppose.)
At the obligatory beer-fest afterwards, all the old fogeys fell about laughing at the idea of me trying to run the Marathon.
‘We remember you, you coudnae run across the road!’, was one of the more hurtful comments, amongst many others. Very encouraging.
Then yesterday we had a marathon ‘strategy meeting’, planning the route and all that.
Silly me, I thought it was all done for us. But no, we have to decide where the ‘support team’ are going to be, what we’re all going to wear etc etc.
I was constantly chastised for not appearing to take it all seriously enough.
So, today I went to buy some running shoes. EIGHTY FIVE QUID !!
When they revived me, I said I’d only wanted a nice new pair of plimsolls – the sales assistant seemed bemused. Then they talked of special running shorts. Apparently, they have to made of something called ‘velour’* or whatever – it’s revoltingly shiny anyway. It stops ‘chafing’, they said.
Then there is another – ahem – somewhat embarrassing problem to be addressed.
Because we are likely to take around twelve hours to complete the course, there will, um, be a need to, er, ‘make oneself comfortable’.
“Doing a Paula Radcliffe” is apparently one solution.
I think that is quite enough detail for a Family Website – but I will clearly have to give it all some thought.
Jeremy Hulme
(*We think Jeremy means Lycra…but if he wants velour running shorts it can be arranged. Ed)
