Just wanted to say thanks for all the generous donations to Mind, much appreciated and will help support a very valuable service 
3 Likes
Well done!
1 Like
Brilliant Wayne!
1 Like
Congratulations Wayne and very well done. Scandalous that the half-marathon is not an Olympic sport, otherwise with a bit more work you’d definitely be in with a shout .
I’m reminded of the great Hunter S’s words concerning the Hawaii marathon
… this is the angle - this is the story: Why do these buggers run? What kind of sick instinct, stroked by countless hours of brutal training, would cause intelligent people to get up at 4 in the morning and stagger through the streets of Honolulu for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have any chance of winning? This is the question we have come to Hawaii to answer - again. They do not enter to win. They enter to survive, and go home with a T-shirt. That was the test and the only ones who failed were those who dropped out.
There is no special T-shirt for the winner, but there is a $40,000 check. In the end, the Kenyan men swept the first four spots and it was all East Africans until the Japanese placed eight through 15. Hussein held off Jimmy Muindi to win by four seconds at 2:12:29 - a pace of 5:03.2 per mile. Muindi ran at a pace of 5:03.4 per mile. To lose a 26-mile race by 4 seconds would be more than most of us could bear, but these men simply pack up and get ready for the next race. On the women’s side, the top three places were Russians. The winner was Svetlana Zakharova, who surged past Albina Ivanova, the Russian national record holder, in the 25th mile to win in 2:29:08.0. I do not know the connection between Kenyan men and Russian women.
At the post-race awards dinner at the Outrigger Canoe Club, one of the Ethiopian women was offering around a blue plastic gasoline jug of special homemade Ethiopian liquor. It was an iffy proposition. It tasted recently distilled. I recognized the taste as being very close to white lightning, Kentucky mountain moonshine, what we used to call thunder road whiskey.
It is not really the most logical thing to do - akin to accepting cocaine in an airport bathroom from a stranger - but in the scale of things, drinking it seemed like the most normal thing to do.
VB
5 Likes
Well done Wayne.
I would have liked to have seen your socks pulled up slightly higher but other than that a sterling effort wor kid.
1 Like
Good look …
1 Like