Did my training pay off for the Nike ‘Fun’ Run on Sunday? Well, a grand total of four practice runs amounting to about 18km in total was the preparation for the 10km jaunt. A juant with bitchin steep hills, and red-faced human litter spread over the track. Saturday saw two visits to the chip shop, and a fair few pints of strong continental lager, followed by a late night to prepare for an early Sunday morning start. Fine warm-up indeed.
Arriving at Richmond station an hour before kick off was a mistake. A nice man in a RunLondon tunic advised the torrent of arriving passengers that the queue for the free shuttle buses started just outside. The looks of confusion on the face of the newly arrived athletes soon turned to dismay when they had figured out that the end of the queue, which was hard to pinpoint initially, was quite close to them. The start of the queue was about a mile away. There were no buses in sight. Not to worry, the race start line was only 40 minutes walk away, so people set off at pace, not wanting to miss the race start.
The race started around an hour late. It seems Nike can’t organise a fart in a cabbage factory, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Nike sweatshops were actually being robbed blind by the child labour they reportedly don’t employ. And Nike don’t even know how to make running shirts, despite offering to do so for the 20,000 runners in the race, emblazening each yellow plastic t-shirt with a race number on a panel at the front. I hadn’t figured this out at the start of the run though, so when I saw a sign that said “Wave If You Don’t Support Child Labour,” I waved and cheerfully exclaimed that at least the children made good t-shirts. It wasn’t until the end of the slog, when people were dribbling over the finish line with blood spurting out of the holes where their nipples used to be, that I began to question the wisdom of putting square panels on the front of the t-shirts. The top corners of the thickened, hard panel were inconveniently placed at nipple height. Ouch.
In about an hour, I tried to charge across the line, with jelly-like legs and measle like nipples. Allegedly, I am in the “I did it because you did it” Nike poster, plastered in such fine places as the (Free) Metro newspaper, next to my good buddy Raz. He’s to the right, above the last letter ‘T’. Fame at last.