Well this year was a much quieter day at the marathon compared to last year. It would seem quite that the location is quite important if you're going to get runners to come to the charity's reception. The last two years I've been in St James Park and we had a lot of runners come through. I think last year we had over 130, certainly over a 100 across the 8 or so couched we had open. This year, although the charity with whom I was working had over 150 runners, only 24 came to the reception point.
That was rather disappointing for the therapists, but you can't blame the runners for maybe not wanting to walk the extra half mile or so up towards Piccadilly after running 26.2 of them! It might have been that they just wanted to sit in the park or just hop on the tube home. It never ceases to amaze me that after running all that way, many of the participant just casually get on the tube and very people seem to take any notice.
As for me, I got to act in a supervisory role rather than a hands on therapist. That was good for me and I'm very grateful to the actual supervisor who gave me the opportunity. It 's always good to extend what you do and think about how you might lead a team should the opportunity ever arise. The one thing that can be said for supervising is that you don't have to drag your couch across the city. This year's assault course included navigating West Ham station between the C2C and Jubilee line, then changing from the Jubilee to the Piccadilly line at Green Park before dragging myself up the stairs to street level in search of my final destination.
All the runners were magnificent. Some just thrilled to have made it, some achieving or just missing out on personal bests. Mo Farah was not alone on missing his target, and like all the runners I met you would never dare to call them failures. Perhaps those who do ought to try a mile or two for themselves before offering such twaddle in judgement.
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