29 November 2004.
Inspired by .
My legs. My god, my legs. At about 24 km into the marathon (a marathon is a little over 42, British reader), my dodgy knee made a sudden lurch in a way it never has before (and never should again). If the esteemed Charles Brewer esq hadn't come by at that moment and offered running accompaniment, it might all have been over at the 25km rest stop.
But it wasn't. Alternating between limping and running, and sometimes both, I made it all the way to the finish. At around 29km, a fellow runner told me I should stop, because her friend had forced an injury like that and hadn't been able to walk for three months.
I contemplated that thought, and also contemplated having made it so far and not getting the medal at the end. Three months out of action. A lifetime with a medal. Thanks for the advice, but I'm keeping going.
From 28km onwards, I couldn't run an entire kilometre without stopping for a straight-legged hobble. Slowly the numbers kept on ticking over. As I passed the 20 Mile signifier, I knew I would somehow make it to the end.
There were lots of tiny moments that made such huge differences. The moment around 22km when I said "vale, gracias chicas" to the cheering Spaniards (and they whooped me on my way); the moment on the 17km marker when the band stopped tuning up and screamed "Well shake it all baby, now!" just as I passed them; the small kids holding out their hands for us to slap; the marshalls cojoling me in Italian to stop walking and to run just around the next corner; dodging disinterested tourists on a sidestreet and then the Duomo looming out at the end of it; the really really dull sections and the hideously cruel steep-sided underpass. This was not a fantastically supported marathon but in those small sections that were, it was like a pit-stop for the legs.
For those who count such things, my final time was 4 hours 31 minutes. But that's not the point. I've run a marathon. I may walk like a comedy tin man, I may be in pain when I put weight on my left leg, I may have a real problem with stairs right now and I may even be using crutches for three months.
Three months ago I was training for a marathon. Today, tomorrow, in three years, in thirty years - I'm someone who's run one. As long as the damage isn't permanent, it was worth every aching, blister-building and, as I discovered when I removed my shoes afterwards, bloody step. I've run a marathon. And that feeling that's still tingling my cerebellum, that moment when I finally saw the finish line and a mixture of strangers and friends cheered me home - well, it's the best pain-reliever there is.
And a massive "thank you" to everyone who sponsored me over on this website here. It really did make a difference. If you meant to and didn't, you still can on that website as a way of saying 'well done' - Medicins Sans Frontieres will forgive your forgetfulness.
We all finished, by the way. They counted us all out and they counted us all back in again.
24 November 2004.
Inspired by .
Spam email subject of the week:
"why aren't you vishnu?"
I never thought about it before, but yeah, why aren't I?
24 November 2004.
Inspired by .
J.L. Hunter ''Red" Rountree was in his 80s when he became a bank robber.
Sometimes an opening line is just too good not to read more.
22 November 2004.
Inspired by .
On the Malka Awa pass in the Azmar mountains, shepherd Abdool Haj Ahmed was making slow progress along the road with his sheep, in the company of a donkey laden with his belongings.
He has tried to get rid of his donkey a number of times, he said, but the loyal animal won’t take the hint.
“If you want my donkey, I’ll give you him for free,” he said. “I’ve left him more than once, but he always comes back to me.”
Ahmed planned to buy a looted car when he reached the town of Shahrazoore, leaving his former constant companion to an uncertain fate by the side of the road.
22 November 2004.
Inspired by .
A few years ago, I spent a mercifully (disappointingly) quiet couple of days with the Tube's Emergency Response Unit. In more than 20 hours in each others' company, nothing happened. At one point they got on the road towards an incident, but were then told they wouldn't be needed and so turned back. Apart from that, it was cups of tea, tabloid newspapers, chat, weight-lifting.
The boredom was as revealing as excitement would have been. To give themselves something to do, they took us to their training unit and let us take some photos. And, of course, they shared some of their stories (and their spag bol). For my part, it felt a bit like what I imagine being embedded is like, except that these people were trained in saving lives rather than taking them (and, as long as they didn't do anything silly, their own lives weren't at risk either).
The stories they talked about most, the ones that haunted them of course, were the suicides. The Tube wanted to downplay that aspect in the piece, and to be fair it's not a huge part of their working day, but of course it's the one thing above all else that justifies their higher pay scale. "You never forget your first one," said one of the newer members. "And mine was particularly nasty." The average across the network is one a week, though there's much greater frequency at this time of year.
At some point I'll do something with the unused material I collected that day, but in the meantime, LMG points out that this month's Prospect has a very good article about it from a Tube worker, and the piece is currently not behind the archive paywall so read it while it's available over here. My article's over here by the way, with some excellent photos by the rather talented Mike Abrahams.
There's one part I don't agree with in the Prospect piece though, and that's the line "How the Tube got its reputation as a good spot for suicides is a mystery." Of course it isn't. Anyone who has stood at the platform edge, gazed at the electric lines below, felt aware of people pushing and shoving around them and then been forced back suddenly by the heavy rush of several thousand tons of metal screeching to a halt in front of their nose will have had that dizzy sense of mortality, the same one that comes over you unexpectedly when faced with extreme heights, grinding machinery without guard rails, innocuous-looking live wires. Perhaps, by dint of working on the Tube, Dan Kuper isn't so aware of these moments. But at least 50 depressed Londoners a year certainly are.
15 November 2004.
Inspired by .
"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that." - Ernest Hemingway
Interviewer: "How do you name your characters?"
Dorothy Parker: "The telephone book and from the obituary columns."
For a particular essay (which I titled "Building an orange*") written for one of my courses in the final year of my degree, I spent hours - much longer than I did writing the thing, in fact - reading through the interviews in The Paris Review. Not once, during the days I spent by those university library shelves, did a single other person ever so much as pick up one of the volumes.
I was amazed, and still am, at the quality of the interviewees - and also by that of the interviews themselves. If you really want to study creative writing, or at least creative writers, just go read those and have done with it.
And now MeFi has revealed that, thanks to the (American) National Endowment of the Arts, they're gradually appearing online, and in their original form too, including scans of the highly revealing 'page of working manuscript'.
You're waiting for what, exactly? Go, download, read, share.
* the title, by the way, was taken from a quote from this interview with Truman Capote.
15 November 2004.
Inspired by .
Sadly, unlike many of my favourite bloggers, I wasn't at the Design Engaged conference, but I'm enjoying them talking about it on their websites.
The mighty Matt Webb, for example, who has mentioned how good it was and also how random his own talk was. He's very kindly placed his slides online here (pdf download). The only thing is, I found it tricky at first to work out the details of his presentation. Fortunately, for those of us who missed the event, I think I've pieced it together pretty much as it must have been.
Download the PDF, open it and click MORE... to read a slide-by-slide breakdown of his interesting and illuminating talk on Neuroscience and Interaction Design.
More...
06 November 2004.
Inspired by .
You people are forgiven. The rest of you still have some explaining to do.
01 November 2004.
Inspired by .
One for the bookshelves, or indeed to construct bookshelves from:
Bhutan: A Visual Odessey is on sale from Amazon.com here but don't expect the postie to bring it in his sack. At five feet by seven feet, it's considerably bigger than the postie.
It does, however, look absolutely wonderful (imagine those photos seven foot wide) and would be a fine edition to add alongside your $3,000 book on Muhammed Ali.
UPDATE: Here's much more info on the book and it's part of the excellent Friendly Planet initiative created by MIT's Michael Hawley. The man bought his mother a Cambodian school for her birthday through these people. This is a man with class.