Still catching up

There's a lot of catching up to do, but I'll pause for a moment on a pleasant Sunday in May 1986 for Sports Aid. I'm living in Hackney with two small children, teaching full time, but holding this altogether with the help of Wetherall Day Nursery, on the edge of Victoria Park.

The staff at the nursery gave me some sort of life outside of work, they were my support, my extended family. When Sport Aid came along I suggested we did our own Run the World on the athletics track in Victoria Park, so with a minimum of organisation and very little permission from anyone, we did exactly that. The children from the nursery plus assorted brothers and sisters walked, ran or were pushed round the track. They all got a certificate for their efforts. It was like a very early version of a Junior Parkrun.

Then I left Joel and Nathan with the nursery staff, who had kindly turned up on their day off, and with no training whatsoever I ran the 10km out from Vicky Park, around Hackney and back to the Park. I've no idea how long it took me, but I remember thinking it was quite a long way as I came down the Leabridge Road. When I entered the Park I was a bit disappointed not to see the boys waiting to cheer me home. I got back a bit quicker than the staff expected. It never occurred to me at the time that I wouldn't be able to run it. I would have liked the children to see me doing something sporty, I had already accepted that I wasn't going to be able to play team sports any more, it seemed my sport would be something I talked about and watched, but didn't do any more. But that was our first experience of mass participation running. It would be a very long time before I tried to repeat that experience.

Joel with Chris Brasher, a lucky celebrity spot by his mother who remembered him as both an athlete and the man who more recently master minded the London Marathon. 

It all starts here

Since I'm prone to go on a bit about recycling, I might as well not waste a resource and recycle this blog. Strange to find the my bits of writing lurking like scraps of old correspondence in an old handbag. Some a bit shocking, some a bit frightening, but all familiar.

I had this bright idea to write my London Marathon blog, and indeed this might be it, but things have not turned out as I hoped. Indeed things so rarely do, the discovery of a draft from six years ago when I was visiting my partner in intensive care wasn't exactly what I expected to find either, but we all have to start somewhere.

So let's start in 1981, because in London Marathon terms, that's exactly where it started. In order to rewind to that, I will need to find words to explain who I was in 1981, as the time gap would make it clear that that particular Penelope Wiles was a very different one from today's.
in April 1981, I was a 33 year old Drama teacher in Hackney, living alone in a high rise Council flat. I also played Netball for the Polytechnic Netball club, and coached young women for football and netball. I loved teaching, I loved sport. I think I was aware that the first London Marathon was taking place through the television. I had no idea what a marathon looked like, just a vague memory of a rather exciting and romantic Greek Myth that resulted in Pheidippides dying tragically when he completed the distance. The distance itself seemed impossibly long to me, so it seemed only right to take myself down to the Tower of London to see what was happening.
Anyone who watches live sport knows there is the magic of being in a crowd when something special is happening. And something special was happening that day. that was the day that the two "winners" crossed the line holding hands. The marathon was never a race, it's a celebration of human endeavour.
Like hundreds of other people watching that day, I thought,
"I'm going to do that."
But a lot of things happened between April 1981 and April 1982, and by the time I was watching my second London Marathon, I was watching it with a tree month old baby son, Joel.
I continued to watch nearly every London Marathon live, and those I missed I watched additively on television. I took both my sons to watch too. I saw friends participate. People said,
"You always said that you were going to run it."
I said,
"I am."
I said,
"I was going to, but I've left it too late."
Like thousands upon thousands of people who have tasted the intoxicating thrill of sport, I thought I was destined to live out my sporting life in Memoryland, one of those awful people who haven't put on a pair of trainers in years, but feel duty bound to tell you of their amazing achievements when they were fourteen.
I always thought I could have done it, I wasn't certain how you went about it, I was a bit busy, I'd missed my chance.