run skinny boy, run
Apparently, the marathon is a little like sex and death, in that you don’t really know what it’s like until you’ve done it. Well, having done it a few times (the marathon, not sex of course) I feel both suitably qualified and suitably smug enough to be able to comment on Britain’s running national treasure, Mo Farah’s effort last week. And what on earth was he thinking? The double Olympic champion finished a disappointing eighth in his first marathon, a good four minutes behind Kenyon victor, Wilson Kipsang.
Watching Mo painfully drag himself around the London course was like watching a different athlete from the one who continually captivated the nation during recent years. Relatively speaking and in the rarefied level he would want to be judged, poor Mo wasn’t fast, he wasn’t graceful, he wasn’t joyous and he certainly wasn’t enjoying himself. Having blown up in the half distance a month ago the writing was perhaps on the wall but nonetheless his race strategy, of running the first half slow and the second half quick, seemed a bit odd. Rather than staying with the front-runners, he ceded control of the race from the onset and fell in with a bunch of (relative) joggers. After five kilometres he was already half a minute behind and it was, metaphorically speaking, downhill from hereon in!
All in all, a bad day at the office. And for the record, Mo did still finish almost 90 minutes ahead of me!
