Its a Friday and I have a half day off, because we are off to the Olympic Stadium to watch the Anniversary Games tonight!!!!
The run therefore was taken at a steady pace and with care, as I will be behind the wheel of the truck for quite some time today. I chose to start with a downhill section first and head into Ham green and down to the Penny Brohn centre. You can tell the school holidays are now in full flow as the lack of cars, on what would be the school run, is noticeable. All the better for me as even though I don't run on the road, the reduction in fumes and noise is a pleasant bonus. I am still hobbling a bit and on the return leg up the hill everything starts to ache again, but it is within tolerances and it is only 5K.
This is our first visit to the stadium, so we are all very excited. The journey though does seem to take for ever, especially as we have to skirt around the congestion charge zone and there has been and accident on the North circular causing everything to slow to a crawl. Not to worry though we arrive in plenty of time as planned and park the truck, allegedly only 15 minutes from the stadium! This is not quite true and we also don't really know what entrance we need to get to, so we set off in the general direction of the Stadium, its quite big you cant really miss it. Only to find out that the majority of bridges into the park are now closed and the Docklands Light Railway is having a major overhaul. We therefore end up walking back on ourselves more than once. With temperatures climbing and blood sugars dropping this isn't the best start, however 1 hour later we get in the park! Once in its very impressive and sad at the same time, the Stadium is awesome, but the park is being dismantled and it just looks sad. We grab some food and then find our seats, to our delight we are right at the start of the 200m, right next to the Pole vault (Jess's new favourite sport) and by the side of the Triple Jump. Once the events start they come thick and fast (excuse the pun) and being only 3 rows from the trackside you get a real sense of how fast the track athletes are going, breathtaking.
We scream, we shout and we encourage every athlete, with the highlights being the women's 400m hurdles, women's 4x100m relay (GBR winners), the mens high jump (with a world record attempt) and of course the men's 100m. The biggest athletic star on the planet arrived in style and also closed out the day job with as much flamboyance, it was a truly fantastic night inside the stadium.
The only downside was getting home, the park emptied after the 100m and thereafter the organisation was poor, it took us 35 minutes to go 500 yards as the exits were funnelled across the bridges from 50 people wide to gates that were only 20 wide. Once out of the park though we knew our way back to the car and it took about 30 minutes. By now time really had moved on and by the time we have got through London via the City and down the M4 to Bristol, its 2:10am before we reach home. Now that's a long day, but one filled with photo's and smiles. Lets see how tomorrow's run goes?
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Big Kev
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