My wife Bev and I ran the Barcelona Marathon on Sunday, our second of this year, following upon Seville last month and as part of our Year of the Sixes fundraising challenge for Pipal Tree. I was placed 23,802 out of the 31,784 runners all of whom seemed to be MUCH younger than me and, unlike in London, there wasn’t a rhino or any other fancy dress costume in sight; everyone seemed to be taking the event like a race. My time was 5 hours, 12 minutes which is the worst time out of the nine marathons I have run for my charity, but there were good reasons for that apart from Father Time catching up with me (I turned 66 in the week before the event). After Seville, I had two colds almost back to back and was running with a residual chest infection. And I was running against my doctor’s advice for other medical reasons that may mean this has to be my last marathon. Let’s see how my doctor’s appointment tomorrow goes. For now, I am still scheduled to run Milan next month.
As for Bev, she was flying, placed well ahead of me at 22,810, completing the marathon in a blistering (literally) time of 4 hours 54! But, I console myself that times aren’t everything – it’s taking part, or better still, finishing that matters. One reason (excuse) for my slow finish is that four kilometres from the finish I caught up with a young Spanish woman who was limping and crying her eyes out – marathons can be as taxing emotionally as they are physically. When I asked what was wrong she pointed at her right knee and I think tried to tell me that she was cramping. So, I said that I would stay with her to the finish line and we ran-walked together while I jollied her along with my non-existent Spanish (she seemed to speak even less English!). But it was incredible how her mood changed and she gave me a big hug at the end of it all. As Bev said to me afterwards, empathy is all about joining someone under their cloud, and that is a very powerful motivator.
Thank you very much if you sponsored us in this marathon; if you didn’t you still can – and encourage us to the next one – through the link below:
