On and on and on it goes, yard after yard, mile after mile, minute after insufferable minute, the boredom relentless, the pain remorseless, every
split second an ordeal by excruciation. To any of you who ran yesterday, heartfelt and sincere congratulations. Whether it was for the masochistic pleasure or for charity, or both, yours was a splendid feat. This was such torture that long before halfway I caught myself fantasising about choosing between any more of this and a session in Lawrence Olivier’s Marathon Man dentist chair. Narrowly, I plumped for the Beeb. Had the imbecilic interviews with facetiously dressed charity runners been conducted by Garth Crooks, it would have gone the other way. If the vision of Gordon hitting the wall was the clear highlight, there were other consolations. It was also a delight to hear Katie Price, whose husband Peter Andre had touchingly printed ‘JADE’ in felt tip on his arm, inform Sue Barker “I need all the support I can get”. Whoever thought to hear those words from Jordan in a non-mammary context Lastly on the plus side, there was something undeniably stirring about the vision of that vividly multicoloured mass of runners joyously setting out on the 26 and a bit mile journey.
Even so, the words that came to mind, as always when exposed to a big city marathon, belong to Jerry Seinfeld.