Every year for the last however many years I decide running a half marathon at 6am on Christmas morning is a good idea and every year when I get up at 4am to get ready I think what. the actual. fuck? I promise myself I won’t be so stupid to do it again the following year and yet here we fucking are.
This year because of some thing called Covid you may have heard of, it’s decided the start time will be anywhere between 5:30am and 6:00am based on whenever the fuck you feel like going. Why it couldn’t have been between 6:00am and about 9:00am is beyond me but whatever, I’m a pretty traditional guy so decide I’m running at 6am no matter what.
I get there and as is often the case, despite my best efforts to be ready to go, I decide I need to go to the toilet first so I jog over to the nearby toilet block and it’s a genuine Christmas fucking miracle because they’re already unlocked and thank fuck for that.
I quickly take care of business and excitedly, and a little lighter, run back to the start line in time to ask Rod if we’ll all be singing the usual Christmas Carol “Oh come all ye faithful’ at the start. Not that I particularly like Christmas Carols, especially ones with god in them, and not that I can sing a note, but there’s something kinda nice about a bunch of runners standing outside Woolworths at dawn singing the first few lines of a carol before it descends into vague murmurs a bit like when you get to the second verse of the National Anthem and things get very sketchy very fast.
Sadly, Rod advises me that because there’s less people than usual and some of them have already started, there’ll be no singing this year and you remember when the NRL said they weren’t gonna sing the national anthem before the State of Origin game and all hell broke loose so they backflipped? Yeah, that. But also not that, because there was no hell loosing, or backflipping, just a few people who said fuck it, let’s sing it anyway and so we do.
Most people take off but I’m waiting for 6am because I fucking love rules, and off I go. Thankfully there’s a few injured people so I manage to catch them up which is always nice, and have a pretty decent first 10kms.
At one point I overtake a female runner and as I go past I tell her she has a really good running style. Because she does. She says thanks and seems genuinely OK with it, but I also wonder if I was just that creepy guy and I agonise that for the next hour or so wondering if it’s OK to say that or not because who even knows anymore.
I run past Footy Park/AAMI Stadium and well bugger me, it’s an entire fucking suburb now and I don’t remember any of that being there this time last year although maybe it was and I was just too busy gabbing on or something. I wonder if the house that’s in what used to be the goal square has any specific markings or a goal post in the driveway. Because that would be super cool, albeit more than a bit inconvenient.
AAMI Stadium is now a suburb.
I don’t take as many photos as I usually do because, well, there’s fuck all people around because most of them started at different times and/or before me so whatever.
Because I’m a forward thinker, on my way to the run I took a detour and hid a bottle of gatorade in some bushes at about the 15km mark and so for the next 5kms I focus on getting to that and hoping someone hasn’t found it and pissed in it by the time I get there.
I get to the intersection where I’ve stashed it, grab it, it seems piss-free, so I crack the lid, have a few sips, and promptly trip over literally absolutely fuck all and go down like a sack of spuds. I’m talking full arse over tit, with blood coming out of my palm, knuckles, elbow and knee. Because if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly and fuck that hurt.
Thankfully it’s still quite early, probably about 7:30am, so there’s no one around to see me. Unless you count the car that’s stopped at the lights facing directly towards me about 20 metres away staring at me wondering if I’m just a drunk guy on my way home and at this stage, I’d probably much rather go with that story.
I get up off the footpath as casually as you can with blood spurting out of various limbs and go to take another sip of my Gatorade as if falling was all part of my regular hydration strategy only to spill it all down my top. It takes me a few seconds to realise that when I hit the ground I obviously cracked the bottom of the bottle and I spend the next few minutes holding the bottle upside down and trying to drink out of it without it all just pouring out everywhere and, unlike simple one foot in front of the other walking, apparently I can now perform this manoeuvre just fine without tripping over nothing.
I run/hobble the last 5kms to the finish line and someone asks if I’ve taken a spill and I say yes, and then someone else asks the same question and I give the same answer and after about the tenth person asks, I wonder if I should just make a sign or something. Or maybe they should just shut the fuck up because I have blood all over me and seriously, what else do they think happened? Did I maybe get mauled by a couger? Of course I fucking fell over. It happens. When you’re a knobhead.
Unlike usual there’s not much of a gathering at the end because everyone just sort of leaves, so I do too and that was the Fanatics Half Marathon.
After burning what Strava reliably informs me is 1,758 calories, I then head off and eat about 12 times that amount in Christmas lunch and chocolate and cakes and drinks and fuck I’m such a pig sometimes.
Merry fucking Christmas.
