It's Amelie at the halfway point of the Brighton Marathon!
It's important to stop after thirteen miles to do a few stretches. And just look at the load-bearing capabilities of that right arm. There'll be no child protection cases in this family, thank you very much.
Any self-respecting marathon runner also needs to support a charity...
Amelie's delighted to be associated with Leonard Cheshire Disability. Well, she likes their balloons. It amounts to the same thing.
Anyhoo, my daughter and I spent most of yesterday morning, and part of the afternoon, down at the marathon. At 11am, the dual carriageway on the seafront was awash with runners, some of whom were dressed as toilets (they were raising money for Water Aid), but by 1pm this afternoon, the road looked like this...
It was like something out of '28 Days Later'. That's a zombie hoving into view on the right. Well, she probably felt like one. And she wasn't even half way round at that point.
I must admit, I was a little disappointed by the low number of people in ridiculous costumes. Aside from the running toilets, we only really saw a Sponge Bob Squarepants and a couple of fairies. Everyone else seemed to have come dressed as a marathon runner. But just as we were about to give up, we met a superhero...
Those legs have run right around the world. It's no wonder they need a sit down.
Amelie and I were making our way home along the seafront at about 1:15pm when a yellow submarine on wheels came beetling along the road, and a lady cried Help! Not one to ignore a woman in a harness, I made my way over to the kerb, where she immediately said "Hello Baby". Unfortunately she was talking to Amelie. She then explained that she needed a shoulder to lean on. Quite literally. She wanted to hold on to someone while she stretched her calf muscles.
I was tempted to offer her Amelie, but I didn't want to end up in A & E again, so instead I took the responsibility onto my own shoulders.
However, as she freed herself from her shackles, another man came along and said he'd seen her on TV the night before. Which made me think I should read the side of her wagon. It turned out that the lady I was about to man-handle was none other than Rosie Swale-Pope, author, adventurer, and the first woman to sail single-handed across the Atlantic in a small boat. She's also ridden 3,000 miles across Chile on a horse, but that's probably just because she didn't know the Spanish word for "Woah!".
Unfortunately, being the clueless ones standing next to a super-fan, Amelie and I were immediately rejected, and Rosie took the arm of the bloke who actually knew who she was. At the time I was annoyed, but thirty seconds later, she'd asked him to go to Superdrug for some supplies and meet her further down the course. Frankly it was a lucky escape. Another minute, and we'd have been running the marathon with her.
Monday, April 19, 2010
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I think one of your advertisements caused my internet browser to resize, you might want to put that on your blacklist.
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