A month to go

Getting closer now and I'm getting excited. Still a little worried about injuries and aches and pains but I'm feeling a lot more confident.

Nike Human Race 10K

On Sunday I took part in the Nike 10K Human Race. It started inside Wembley Stadium then followed a less than glamorous route through car parks and the back end of Ikea before ending on Wembley Way. It was great fun running with so many people (20,000+) in torrential rain and also very weird. Everyone had to wear identical red tops and had to endure two live bands inside the stadium before the races started - no one was into the music at all and it all felt strangely hollow (the last time I was there was to see the Foo Fighters and there were over 90,000) so the best bit was when half the crowd just disappeared midway through Moby's set to start their race (they set people free in four seperate waves, I was in wave three so had to watch all of Moby). Earlier a nu-rave band called Pendulum attempted to whip everyone into a pogo-ing frenzy but the audience were having none of it aside from the occasional keen person jogging on the spot in time. The keyboardist had a hilarious square beard though so that was nice.

I was Billy no-mates but that was OK because everyone else was too and I was glad I hadn't been responsible for making anyone endure the saddest corporate gig of all time. 

The race itself was brilliant. Dashing about with loads of people is really uplifting and because we'd been released herd like (all the T-shirts had seperate numbers for an extra dimension of branding) from the stadium it felt like we were escaping captivity. I was surprised how much energy I had and how easy I found it and convinced myself I'd done some heroic record breaking time - as I crossed the line one of the clocks said 45:08 and for a second I thought that was my time but the reality was a more pedestrian 58 minutes - I'm blaming the puddles and the fact that my ipod went weird in the first mile and I had to run to a soundtrack of Neil Young.