6145/19075
I woke up in Newcastle, which is reassuring as that’s where I went to sleep, so I was unable to take part in the Park Run again this week (sadly we needed to get home asap so there was no time to do the local one), but I woke up early and so got to watch pretty much all of Eliud Kipchoge’s amazing and successful attempt to run the 26 and a bit miles in under two hours. He got to his last 5k pretty much exactly when Park Runners in the UK would be starting their own 5k run and I wondered how many of them would be able to beat his time over this distance. Of course, he had an advantage, being nicely warmed up having already done loads of 5ks in a row, but arguably that might have made him tired.
It turns out only 5 Park Runs in history beat his average 5k time over the Marathon (and I fancy the last 5k might have been his fastest one as he took about ten seconds off his projected time). I think at the height of my powers I might have been able to achieve a sub 4 hour marathon (though the only one I did was 4 hours 17 minutes and 50 seconds) so I wondered how for how many steps, running at my fastest, I’d have been able to keep up with Eliud. I estimated that it would be none, as not only was he going faster than my sprinting pace, I suspect that he’d be better at getting off at the start too. But maybe I could be ahead of him for one pace if I got in before the gun.
It’s an utterly incredible experience and though I didn’t watch every minute of it, I saw most of it and it was more entertaining than a group of men running very fast in a weird formation should have been. And what an achievement.
This weekend my nephew also ran his first sub 3 hour marathon. What bad timing that was for him. Who cares mate? You’ve got an hour to make up. And I still maintain that I am the better runner. I’d like to see my nephew or Eliud run at that pace for four hours and eighteen minutes. Takes a real stamina to keep going for that long. If I’d given up after two hours everyone would have said I was a loser. It’s one law for the fast and another for the staminific.
