the marathon and TV don’t mix
I was flicking through the channels last night, trying not to watch Australia losing the Ashes, when I was pleasantly surprised to come across the women’s marathon from the Berlin IAAF World Championships. What’s more, the leaders were about 30km into the race, meaning I had an hour or so of good, if sweaty, competition to take in.
It didn’t take me long, however, to remember just why I don’t like watching marathons on TV. Don’t get me wrong, it was quite a good race and the women were doing well. But the coverage! How irritating.
It didn’t help that the German TV kept interrupting the telecast with “educational” inserts showing the local uni, statues and a sequence apparently showing a German chorus line girl getting dressed up (or down?) to go on stage.
That last one caused a great deal of sniggering between the adolescent male dickheads they had doing the commentary. “Ooooh, this one’s my favourite (snigger, snigger).” “I’m going to the Jamaican party tonight, I hope she’ll be there!”.
Whatever….
Then they seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about Kara Goucher. She’s quite a good runner, and ended up coming 10th, but she never really looked like winning. She did, however, look quite attractive, or at least as attractive as you can 35km into a marathon….

Then there was the endless oh-so-amusing and not-at-all-patronising talk about people from Bhutan and other small countries who were way behind. Geez! They were all running sub-3 hour marathons. Have some respect!
With about 5km to go, the commentators finally, and with a note of disappointment in their voices, conceded the lovely Kara wasn’t going to make a heroic sprint to the lead, and decided they had better concentrate on a pack of 4 who were going to win. They were being led by a Russian woman, followed by runners from Japan, China and Ethiopia.
The stage was set for a good finish. Cue ad-break.
When we got back from the ad-break, the Russian leader was nowhere to be seen. Literally. She had been dropped and was fading fast. What a time to take a bloody ad-break!
What made it worse was that every ad seemed to be from some people exhorting me to “Go veg, save the planet”. No thanks. I’ll only go veg if I’m allowed to eat pork chops.
Running
No time for a long run over the weekend, so I did shorter runs on Saturday and Sunday. About 27km all up.






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