This year after crewing at Spartathlon and completing the Frankfurt marathon I have been re-energized and really want to get back to top fitness. I even went back and updated my race log of races and found to my surprise that I have entered 78 races and only DNF 12. These area mixture of marathons and ultras and covered a total distance of 7020 km.
I feel it is important to note that running, although a solitary activity, is a matter of nonhierarchical teamwork. I wrote about the need to ditch the hierarchy here and I believe this is the future of work. Regarding running, one cannot train without the support of others. I could not have achieved the amount I have, without the support and assistance of my family and friends. The best thing on last Sunday's marathon was four kilometers from the end when I head the cry of "Rob" and saw Chrissy who had come down to see the end. She videoed the meeting and although I don't seem it, just seeing her lifted my spirits. Her support over the years has been amazing. Anyone that can put up with my mood swings over the years is really special.
The last ten years of helping to run the British Spartathlon Team (BST), where each year we ensure all British runners and their crew have sponsored team shirts free charge, really does show that we can make a difference. It is a combined effort, with each performing to the best of their abilities and no real leader. Russell does the shirts; James does the advertising; Dave does the website. It is a good example of a nonhierarchical team and I like to think of us as an anarcho-syndicalist committee.
Although it is a long time since I have qualified for the race, I have kept involved and helped ensure that the ethos of the British crew being there, being visible and ready to help all runners is something that I am particularly proud of.
At Spartathlon, the Sparta Photography Club provide an excellent free service publishing all the photos on Flickr here. My favourite photo from this year, outranking this one of me with my friend Kostis, the former President of the International Spartathlon Association, is the one below it, as it shows the non-hierarchical team ethos I am referring to.
This was taken at the 80km HellasCan support point, showing part the British Spartathlon team crew. There are five members of the BST team there, all the act of helping each other. From the left Jonni is in the green and black shirt on the left have done 80km of 246km. His sister Sasha, in the white vest can be seen trying to attract my attention, as I post a photo of Jonni on the BST twitter. Sue is at the table with Jonni and her husband's Mark equipment searching for the specialized ultra-nutrition. Nathan and Jamie are in crew shirts with their backs to us as they wait for their runner Allan Anderson to, come in. As the twenty or so runners all take different times to reach this checkpoint, we all muck in. To quote the great Bill Shanley "The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."
This leads me to my next point and rather the point of this blog. Being a child of punk, I have always been somewhat, in the modern parlance, "woke" although I predate not only woke but also political correctness. It was " ideological sound" in my day. I have lost count of the amount of protest marches I went on in the 70s &80s and volunteered for the Miners groups and Terence Higgins trust back then. Nowadays I merely wear rainbow laces and the more eagle eye will be able to spot them in the video above.
It has always irked me that the British Spartathlon tends to be older white males. We, however, have a history of LGBTQ representation, but not many women or non-white runners. Thus, one of our goals for next year is to increase the diversity in the team. Being one of those old white males I have no expertise in the area and am at bit of loss as how to increase this engagement. If there any of my followers who know something about increasing diversity engagement, please do get in touch and teach this old dog some new tricks.
#fitness #ultrarunning #marathon #marathonrunner #mentalhealth #bame #lgbtq #diversity #team #teamwork #teambuilding
