Keep On Running

What a great week. Working with Michael Palin, Lyse Doucet and Alan Johnston and now running with Seb (Lord) Coe and Kelly Holmes. We took the kids and went up to Victoria Embankment for the Sport Relief Mile.

The weather was atrocious, rain and wind and cold.

But we all agreed that we had to do it, especially after seeing some of the reports on the telly about conditions that children live in. Places like the townships in South Africa where children the same age as my own play on railway tracks that are right next to their houses, of course the inevitable happens and children get killed. it feels right to try and do something to help these children and give them better conditions to live and grow up in. The wind and rain here are small change considering what others in the world have to put up with.

We started out at 315pm thinking that we would run a little and walk a lot but Eli got it into his head that it was a race and that we needed to beat the little girl in the Snow White dress and the boy in the Superman outfit who was dressed the same as his dad. So we started out with great gusto after a warm up session and half a mile came up really quickly and Eli is still running and Connie is still running so of course the grown-ups had no choice, we had to keep running.

At three quarters of a mile Eli fell over and he was a little upset, not because he had bashed his knee but because Snow White was now in front of us and we were not going to win the race.

So off we go again and my wife and Eli are nearly at the finish line, I am finding that Connie has
a tendency to slow if I let her (I know she would rather walk) but Eli and my wife cross the finish line and this gives Connie and me the extra push we need to get in the sprint finish and a chance to do the Kevin Keegan dive over the line like he did in Superstars.

We all did a mile and found it relatively easy not stiff or sore, mind you we had been practising up and down the lane. I think we all hope that we made a difference no matter how small.