Not the London Marathon – but the London Championship Marathon Virtual Relays!!!
Didn’t know they existed? Well they didn’t, until last weekend, when 6 somewhat frustrated locked-down Striders (Stephen J, Michaels L and M, Emma T, Corrine W and I) took to the roads, treadmills or anywhere else as deserted and flat (or ideally downward sloping) as possible, and hurtled their tired legs through exactly 1/6 of a marathon as fast as they possibly could. This varied rather amongst team members – notably Stephen Jackson and I may have differed a little in the actual outcome of running as fast as possible. Nonetheless we all got suitably exhausted from our efforts, and then added up our times to see how we fared against our natural competitors (Mo, and the likes of…).
So – we managed an awesome 2 hours and 36 minutes and a few seconds (I forget…). Which really does make you realise just how fast our friends Kipchoge and Mo are!! But hey, if we did 400m relays and had a really huge team, I’m sure we would stand a fighting chance against those giants – as long as they were doing the full marathon.
Other benefits of our version of the race included the Very Short Toilet Queues. And a really nice Zoom meeting afterwards (we had to do it by Zoom because Stephen appeared to actually have gone to London and to be sitting in the bar at St Pancras station. Or had he?? I’ll have to teach him how to set his Garmin for time and distance travel – so much easier!)
Confession – due to other pressures this race was extremely poorly advertised, i.e. not at all. This had the foreseeable consequence that we were the only team entering and therefore we came first. And, simultaneously, last…