Half-Marathon Man

What on earth am I doing running long distances in this heat and humidity?  I'm an old man for God's sake!  After fifteen minutes of jogging you are bathed in sweat to the extent that your socks start squelching inside your running shoes and everything is ringing wet.  In these conditions the body behaves  like the engine of a car when the air conditioning is going full belt.  Because the air is so humid the sweat doesn't evaporate, but drips uselessly out of your pores making your heart work hard just pumping blood to your extremities to keep your temperature down and diverting more and more effort away from actually running, so you get slower and slower and wetter and wetter.

Anyway defying old age and common sense I ran the Sibu half marathon on Sunday in two hours and nine minutes.  It's an interesting place Sibu, our nearest largish town with maybe a couple of hundred thousand inhabitants and shopping centres and supermarkets that wouldn't look too out of place in Oswaldtwistle or Totnes, for example.  The population are predominantly Chinese Christians, descended from families who fled to Borneo during the days of the White Rajahs, when they were being persecuted in mainland China.  The run itself started from Jubilee Park on the outskirts of the town.  The park encompasses a site sacred to local Iban tribespeople, who go there to sacrifice chickens, as Sue discovered when she took a stroll around the sacred hill while waiting for me to stagger home.

Sue's fellow mentor Grace came too, to do the seven kilometre fun run.  I came fifty second in the main run, narrowly missing a £10 prize for fiftieth place.  There must have been several hundred people taking part in the two events and I even got featured in the Borneo post the next day for no other reason than I was the biggest pinkest finisher.

I've just put my name down for the London Marathon, but if I am "lucky" enough to win a place it won't be half as much fun.