Dear Blog,
Fantastic news ...unbelievable. I went out for my usual long trudge yesterday; forgoing the excitement of viewing the Great North Run on the television set, and what happened???? I got a blister. A real blister. A blister affording me some little pain. Oh Joy!!! It’s my first blister for a decade; ten years. Does this mean I qualify now as a jogger, Blog? Have I graduated to a higher level of athletic endeavour? Am I to trudge no more? Trudging is no longer an option? Trudging has gone forever? Does my blister mean I have to look around in the athletic literature to find a competition to test my new found status? I must confess that the blister is not 100% caused because of the friction of trudging. That is, there are extenuating circumstances for its appearance, but it is still a blister caused by running, I hasten to add. Why the doubt? Well underneath my foot where the blister has appeared, is a length of scar tissue which has always and regularly blistered when I was running when I was a young lad. Many years ago, before you started jogging Blog, sorry, running, I had a couple of bones removed from my foot. Admittedly they were small bones, tidgy bones, but bones nevertheless; they had to be if they were removed from my foot? You don’t get bones the size of a femur in your foot do you Blog? Well, I had these bones extracted from my foot and I was left with a scar is where the knife went in and the bones came out. I suppose with hind sight, from an athletic point of view, it would have been far more convenient for me to have the bones taken out from the topside of my foot rather than the underneath part, thereby avoiding the repeated blistering over the years. Because it was a top London surgeon who performed the operation, I never thought to question the wisdom of creating scar tissue in such a sensitive part of my athletic anatomy. I never foresaw the problems I was stacking up for myself in the future. I am surprised that a surgeon au fait with athletics did not anticipate the consequences of his surgery. However, I was still able to churn out 2:15s, 2:16s and 2:17s marathon times post operation, even if the last few miles were always more painful than they might have been. So, Jogger am I, Blog?? Answer on a cheque for a quids or two for my children’s charity Tiny Tims Children’s Centre. I have already told you Blog, that both my daughters are running the Coventry Half Marathon in a couple of weeks time, the elder raising money for the charity.
Another amazing thing happened during the week. The local paper printed three quarters of a page of athletic news. Some of your actual LOCAL athletic news. What is so special you might ask yourself, Blog. Well, the local paper does not do athletics for some reason. Not for the last year or so anyway. That other well know Olympic speciality, Pentaque, yes; column inches of the stuff. But athletics? No, with a capital ‘N’. If you neglect all the information distributed to newspapers by the Avia publicity machine, then, since Christmas, local athletic clubs have had 7, SEVEN, reports only. This despite reports, comments, photographs being submitted. This despite athletic road races, track competition, trail races. Material that only had to be downloaded for printing. No sweat for the editorial staff. And what was this three quarters page you are desperate to ask me, Blog. It was a brief report of a 5 mile race in the local park promoted by my club which took place 23 [TWENTY THREE] days ago, most of the page occupied by tiny print with the names of the 201 finishers. A NEWS paper. Next week’s headlines will no doubt be about, the ending of the War ... the Boar War! And the proprietors wonder why circulation is dropping. I suspect that the only reason that athletics was given the coverage was because the local football team did not have a fixture. Mind you, if a letter is set to the editor, the subeditors mess with the contents to such an extent as to lose the point of the letter, or as was the case last week of a friend’s letter, make it complete gibberish. Two weeks ago I had cause to question the sincerity of one of the paper’s feature writers. A valid comment by me after the feature decried the lack of ‘true’ athletic competition at his child’s schools sports day. He finished his feature by acknowledging his relief at not having to take part in a fathers’ race. I pointed out that if he was relieved at not having to compete, then perhaps the reason for a non competitive sports day for the children was so that they did not have to suffer from the same anxiety that he had expressed!!! My letter was subedited so much, as to be unrecognisable. Note, dear Blog, it was an Infants school sports day to boot. I attended the same event as my granddaughter was taking part. I give up with that paper. They haven’t a clue.
Colin
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