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I had a really bad night’s sleep: I don’t know if it was nerves about the run or because I had eaten too much food to give me lots of energy, but all through the night questions were being asked as to whether Me2 was mentally ready for this race. If he couldn’t even get to sleep then what chance did he have.
After the training runs I was pretty sure he would be beating last year’s abysmal 2 hours 37 minutes and 41 seconds running time, but was he capable of getting below two hours. Surely he couldn’t take out my own personal best of 1hr55mins08 which I had achieved as a 36 year old. Me2, like me and Me1 is 47. And with just four hours sleep and the vestiges of a cold still hanging on….
It was a perfect day for the run, bright but not too hot, but dry. My tiredness drifted away as the race approached. As usual there was a “celebrity” photo shoot at the start line before the race, though I wasn’t sure who anyone was, including myself, who I thought might be Charlie Boorman. But one of them was wearing a tiara, so that might have been the queen. As we posed for the photographers I felt my arm hit quite firmly from behind. A man on a Boris Bike had somehow got on to the race track (which to be fair, is usually a pathway in the park). I loved the fact that he was so determined not to have his usual route disturbed that he just kept cycling along on here, in spite of the thousands of people behind us and the unbroken line of people. Rather than finding another way through or stopping or asking us to get out the way he decided to just cycle through, hitting me and the other celebrity woman (no idea who she was) in the process. But then I wondered if he was a hit man, sent by Me1 in a last minute attempt to get the spot in the race. If he was a hit man, he’d chosen the worst possible time to attempt to hobble me, given there were a dozen photographers snapping away. My wife got a good shot of the inefficient assassin.
Before the race I chatted with fellow “celebrity", Andy Goldstein (seriously, did they just pick names out of a hat and confer celebrity status on them?) and told him of my poor time last year, but that I hoped to be sub 2 hours. He was aiming for under 1 hour 50. I didn’t think I’d see him again. The elite runners went first, but then I got to duck into the gap behind them, meaning I had a very clear run for the first mile or so. And Me2 set off at a blistering pace. After five minutes Runkeeper told me we were going at a mile pace of 7min22. That was stupidly quick. We couldn’t keep that up. And we arrived at the 2 mile sign in fifteen and a half minutes. I was heading for a time of under 1 hour 40 if things carried on this way. But was fearful that I would feel the effects later. Last year at the two mile spot (just approaching Big Ben) I had felt terrible, tired, ill and like I’d never finish, but this year I felt like I had boundless energy. I had made a playlist of upbeat and funny music last night and this really buoyed me along. Usually I just have my phone on shuffle and end up listening to a lot of stuff that is weird or not very inspiring for running, but this time every tune made me smile and pushed me onwards. My pace according to Runkeeper was still under 8min miles (although was just over according the the mile markers - but you always end up running a bit further than the distance on these things) and amazingly the sleep-deprived Me2 kept things pretty consistent. I was on a high from the start, but maybe the whole thing felt a bit like a dream. Maybe sleeping during the run is the key to all of this.
It wasn’t until about mile 11 that my legs started to ache a little bit, but it was surprisingly easy to keep up the pace. Me2 was justifying the faith that the selectors had put in him. I realised I was heading comfortably for a sub one hour 50 time. Even Me1 had to accept that the right man had been chosen for the job, which was very gallant of him after all his attempts at sabotage. Annoyingly my iPhone ran out of juice at about 11 and a half minutes, meaning I was deprived of tunes and Runkeeper updates (and never got to find out what happened in the second half of Sk8erboi, which I had been delighted to discover I had put on the playlist for a joke, having exactly the desired effect. But it meant that I could hear people cheering me on. My wife had put my name on my running top (as her handwriting and art skills are mud h better than mine - it would just have looked like a bum if I’d done it) but I had written Me2 on the side in smaller lettering. No one cheered for Me2. But he didn’t need the cheers. He was driven by the will to succeed. To beat Me1 and to beat the 36 year old me.
It struck me as I went by 12 miles that I had got this far in an hour’s less time than it took me to do the whole thing last year. That is just crazy. It’s much easier if you go quickly. And check out those split times. How consistent was that?
I passed the point where last year I had heard a man wailing like a wounded animal as medics treated him for some awful injury or medical emergency. I worried that what I had heard was the time travelling ghost of the future me and that some calamity would affect me in the same place, but no, Me2 kept on striding. He wasn’t getting faster, as I had hoped he might and he wasn’t going to get a sub 1 hour 45 time, but definitely under 110 minutes.
As I approached the line, Andy Goldstein finally caught up with me without about 20 metres to go. He overtook me and I said, “Come on then” and we sprinted for the line. He thought he’d beaten me, slowed, but I pushed on and he had one more spurt in him (running is very homoerotic) and took the line first, having been in front of me for just a few seconds of the race. But I was just delighted to have thrashed my personal best and the useless 36 year old me. Though in fairness I hadn’t done that. Me2 had.
It turned out that my time was one hour, forty-seven minutes and nine seconds, just shy of eight minutes better than my PB and over 50 minutes better than last year. Which must surely rank as one of the best year on year improvements for anyone in this race. And I wasn’t even tired, not even after the “sprint” finish. Other runners were collapsing around me or hobbling away. I just walked back to the tent and my disbelieving wife. I wasn’t out of breath and not even sweating that much. But then I hadn’t done any of the running.
But I was proud of me, myself and the other me. We’d done an amazing thing this year. I was at leaf 10kg lighter than I’d been in the 2013 travesty (and I was also sluggish due to illness then), but ten months of mainly healthy living and regular exercise and the patented Me Vs Me training system and I had turned things around.
I felt like I could have carried on for several more miles at the same pace and my thoughts even turned to the possibility of doing the full marathon again. It’s rare that I feel proud of myself, but this felt like a proper achievement. It was surreal too as the race had passed in a blur of positive endorphins and I didn’t even feel like I’d just run that far. We looked around a few of the stalls and said hi to the brilliant Scope team of volunteers and then with a slight sense of anticlimax we just went home.
My legs stiffened up a bit later and I spent the afternoon in bed watching the overlong film “The Wolf of Wall Street” about a group of highly unpleasant men who act selfishly and appallingly and largely get away with it. The message seems to be that greed and a luxury lifestyle are our ultimate aspiration. You’ll probably get caught, but if you carry on being selfish and rich even that won’t ultimately matter. And then you’ll make more money by writing a book and a film about it.These people are so stupid they don’t even know how to eat sherbet. You eat it with your mouth, maybe sucking it up with a liquorice pipe. You don’t eat it with your nose off a woman’s bottom. That is very unhygienic.
It wasn’t a terrible film, just disagreeable and much too long and full of horrible cunts. And the worst werewolf movie I have ever seen. When’s the Wolf of Wall Street going to turn up to decimate these pricks? The tension was palpable and they were really building up our desire to see that happen. But then they didn’t follow through. I guess they couldn’t afford the special effects and then just thought they’d put out the movie anyway and hope no one noticed. But without the brokers being horribly mutilated and torn apart by a werebeast there is no movie.
