Post-Boston

[El Gordo]

You can't be too hard on yourself over your performance in Boston. As is well documented here that fact you lined up at all was pretty remarkable. To get inside a half hour of your best time with such a huge chunk of training excised reflects, I'm sure others here will agree, a monumental effort and is testament to your capacity for the fight.

I like the honesty of your reportage EG. I've been sorely tempted to re-write my own hommage to the frailty of the human spirit (TOM) so as to remove the black heart of the middle/ end sections of the race, or at least inject a little more humour, not to mention some of the issues regarding cohesion and continuity. Every time I think about doing so I chide myself. The reason these anomalies crop up is they are the result of what we've gone through. My race report weaved and staggered like the ramblings of a drunkard because that's what the race did to me. The bleak sections of your own reflections tell us what Boston did to you. Ultimetely you slayed the dragon.

The honesty of how you feel after a race should where possible be preserved for all to see. It makes your piece all the more valuable, even if, as I found, it's a tough read in places for that reason. I could feel your pain, sense the fight draining from your legs as the disappointment clutched at your heart. Ultimately you survived all that and came through. You now have a medal most of us can only dream about; you paid your dues and furthermore had the courage to tell it like it was; bravo.

The travelogue is wonderful. It's great to see a place (Vegas) that you know well through another pair of eyes, although ultimately your conclusions aren't that far from my own. I've never spent more than a few hours in SFO; your piece has ensured that next chance I get I'll be tacking a couple of days on to put that right, especially as HST spent some of his formative scribbling years in that vacinity. There must be some magic in that west coast air.

Oh, you'd love San Francisco. Your kind of town, I reckon. It also struck me that it's a great place for a runner. Tons of hills if that's your thing , though pretty flat if you go crossways. Concrete of course, though there are a couple of glorious, and huge, parks where you can lose yourself, far from the CO2. And although it's on tarmac, I can't help feeling that the Big Sur marathon is one of the few road races that could satisfy a TOM vet.

I hope I've not been too hard on myself. If people ask me about it now, as of course they do, I say it was a great experience and a great event, and I'm very pleased that I did it. The first half was thoroughly enjoyable. New England on a sunny spring morning is a delight. The spectators were fantastic, though probably less numerous than London or Chicago. The trouble is, my arse can only take so much pounding . At 15 miles, I felt like someone staggering out of a Michael Barrymore party.

This was also the point when the sun switched itself off, and the afternoon became cold and grey, and it became a survival shuffle. I had to tell it how it was. But y'know. That was then. The next marathon won't be Boston, and I'll be better able to have a shot at a good PB.