Still Running (weakly). Issue 82

PAST – inspiration – For past inspiration, I want to tell you about a gentleman called Mark Pickard, with whom I was fortunate enough to rub shoulders in a few marathons in the 80s and 90s, and Graham Peddie’s Sport for All weekend at Tanners Hatch Youth Hostel.

Mark ran something like 200 consecutive sub 3-hour marathons, held the UK 24-hour record for a while, and demonstrated inhuman powers of recovery during his career. He once ran a 10-miler in 50:03 on a Saturday afternoon before coming a close second in the London to Brighton the next morning! (He won that race in 1988.)

He did come a cropper, though, after his first attempt at the 24-hour challenge, a race which ran from Saturday to Sunday. He had also entered a 20-miler for that Sunday afternoon (!!), but found that beyond even him, as he could not walk properly anyway!

PRESENT – perspiration – I guess SPOTY correctly identified Keely Hodgkinson and Alex Yee as the two standout performers in our area of interest.

Their stories were all about not giving up, which seems to be a recurring theme of mine! In Keely’s case, it was over a number of years. After silvers in the 2020 (held 2021) Olympics, 2022 Commonwealth and 2022 and 2023 World Championships, she struck gold when it mattered most. I sound like David Coleman!

In Alex’s case, it was not giving up in the agonising context of the last minutes of a race. Deep into the last lap of the last discipline of the men’s triathlon, Yee was trailing Hayden Wilde of New Zealand by a significant margin – and two Frenchmen looked as if they might catch the Brit for the other medals too.

Fortunately, Alistair Brownlee, British winner of the event in 2012 and 2016, was standing by the road and shouted, “Anything can happen, mate,” which was, “A moment of belief,” said Yee later. Even more fortunately, Yee is a world-class runner and a great finisher, who then recovered from the bad patch that let Wilde get away, and amazingly powered past the Kiwi, who was extremely gracious in defeat, to take gold.

FUTURE – suggestion – But perhaps the most exciting talent to have emerged in 2024 is Gout Gout (his first name should be Guot, apparently, but for a paperwork mix-up), a 16-year-old Australian sprinting sensation, who this month broke Peter Norman’s 200 metres national record, which had stood since the 1968 Olympics!

Norman (silver medallist), you will remember, stood on the same victory podium as Americans, Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze), and supported their Black Power Salute. For this, he was ostracised in his home country, which had a “White Australia” policy at the time, but when he died in 2006, Smith and Carlos were among his pallbearers.

It is appropriate, then, that Gout is the son of parents who fled Sudan the year before the young man was born.

He is faster at 16 than Usain Bolt was!

In January he travels to Florida to work with Noah Lyles, the Olympic 100 champ, and his coach, Lance Brauman. What will that lead to?

And how far could YOU progress if you joined that slightly faster training group, or took up your mate’s offer of some more intensive training? I’ll just leave that thought with you for a happier – but initially slightly more knackered – new year.