Yup, the 10K is over and jolly well done by all concerned too....Sunday dawned bright and sunny, humidity reaching uncomfortable levels as I wended my way northwards to the home of football. Arriving at 4pm, we ensured we were in plenty of time to dump our bags in the "limited" bagging area at Wembley Arena - admittedly, in hindsight, it should have been obvious that there would be more than enough room for anyone who wanted to deposit their stuff.
So, for 3 and a half tedious hours, we waited. And waited. And - yep, you guessed it - waited. There were momentary periods of fun as we ripped the utter piss out of drum n bass nobodies Pendulum as they tried in vain to whip the crowd into a passionate frenzy, with the opposite effect: "Come on! Where's the f***in' atmosphere?!", shouted the soon-to-be obsolete frontman. "Somewhere indoors, not having to listen to you", came the unanimous reply. But by and large, this was - as Euan repeated over and over - 3 hours of our life that Nike had stolen from us and we were never going to get back.
Needless to say, when the thunder storms arrived just as we were finally starting to get underway, it was less of a catastrophe, more of a grim acceptance that someone had obviously uttered the phrase "well, at least it's not raining" at some point when trying to put a brave face on things. We bore the downpour with remarkable British stiff upper lipped-ness.The one bonus was that it made us all the more pumped up to go out and power our way to the finish line, along a course comprising 17 180 degree turns round the car park of Wembley stadium, a straight line down a closed off access road to a neighbouring industrial estate (where there was room for no more than 5 people abreast, cuing manic sidestepping, stopping, banging into and general carnage as people tried to maintain their pace whilst avoiding everyone else trying to do the same whilst the ubiquitous fat, slow walkers did their best to break the Guinness World record for "curses received" in the space of 1000m. Powering through one of the many massive floods (they were beyond puddles) that put half of the meagre tarmac underwater in places, we rounded a corner to..... a Tesco car park. Marvellous. It soon became clear why the race was run in the dark, as Wembley and surrounding area seems to be one huge failure of ambition and creativity. A massively sweeping generalisation, but hey - forgive me for thinking that if this were untrue, surely Nike wouldn't haven't chosen it to showcase London's beautiful architecture? The remainder of the coure pretty much involved doing the entire course again but in the opposite direction, thereby proving itself good for breaking personal bests, if only because people were so desperate to just get back, get dry and get the hell out of Dodge.
All of this, of course, didn't matter jack once that finishing line was crossed, and all the usual feelings of elation washed over me. The handshakes and smiles and hugs amongst us made us almost forget what we'd been through to get there - although perhaps that was possibly Nike's grand plan all along - the personal victories felt all the sweeter given what we'd endured to get there.....
I came a creditable 39,584th in the race overall - that's across all the races across the world by the way! I don't normally even do so well in the Metro Fantasy Football league. I came home in 52 mins 14 seconds, which is just over a minute off my 'personal best' from 2006. I know it would have been better had it not been for the sheep run at the start of the course, so I am more than satisfied!
All the others - Jen, Euan, Murray, Gav, Im and Simon did excellently as well, and you can check out all the times and things here: Human Race
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