Michael Hutchinson

I’m watching the London Marathon over the top of my laptop screen. We’re three hours in now, so it’s all about men in dog suits, women on stilts, and Gordon Ramsey. The winners are back in the hotel, no doubt leafing through a Mercedes-Benz catalogue.

I did the London Marathon, years ago. I entered the ballot on a whim after watching the previous year’s race, and a few months later, to my horror, got a letter telling me I’d been ‘lucky’. Clearly a rather marginal use of the word.

I knew nothing at all about distance running. I looked up the world record for the race, and decided that three hours would be a nice comfortable target. It was, in truth, wildly optimistic.

I bought a new pair of trainers, and got busy. Looking back at it now, the training was pretty basic. I just went on a few runs. About the only clever thing I did was a longer run once a week – but even then, only up to about 15 miles.

I more or less made the three hours – I missed by only a couple of minutes.  But boy did I suffer for it.  I exploded somewhere around Tower Bridge on the way back from Docklands. The last five miles lasted for decades. I remember passing an 800m to go sign, where a woman shouted ‘nearly there!’ to me. I stopped to point out that I still had 800 sodding meters to go. I swore I’d never do another marathon. And I have every intention of sticking to this.

The only thing that ever made me feel better about my marathon experience was a friend, a much better runner, who on one occasion passed mile 23 in 2.18 – heading for a comfortable sub 2.40. At this point he hit the wall to end all walls.  He covered the remaining distance in a dazed 45 minutes – with runners going more than twice as fast as he was strobing past on both sides.

I bring all this pain up for purposes of handy comparison. I went to see Bob Dylan at the O2 Arena last night.  The marathon was more fun. It wasn’t nearly as good as this review makes it sound.  And the review doesn’t make it sound good.

One of my more significant pleasures in life is watching golf on television. I’m not really quite sure why. My partner thinks it’s simply that I find the colour soothing. She has developed an unkind theory that I’d be just as happy watching a rectangular bit of green cardboard.

I’ve never played golf, not beyond the mini variety. I did have one lesson on a driving range when I was about 11 – but it ended badly. In one of the little concrete pens, the instructor put a ball on the tee, handed me a club, and invited me to take a swipe at it. I did so, with much enthusiasm.

I hit the ball with the toe of the club. It took off at 90 degrees to the intended direction. It ricocheted off the wall of the pen, off the ceiling, off the opposite wall, and generally behaved like a firework in a phone box.

When he’d got up from his prone position on the Astroturf, the instructor snatched the club back, retuned to me the fee for the lesson, and told me never to return.

I think part of the appeal of watching it on TV is that I don’t really want to do it, because I know I’d be dreadful at it. And I love watching (not in an unkind way) some of the best sportsmen in the world making mistakes that don’t need a commentator to explain them. There is something very satisfying about watching Ernie Els hitting his drive into a tree, or Tiger Woods chipping straight over the 18^th green into the crowd, and sending spectators scattering in every direction.

And I don’t think I’d get that from a bit of card.

I rode my first bike race of the year on Saturday last, the snappily titled VTTA East Anglian Open 25. It was near Newmarket, so just down the road from home. That, of course, didn’t stop me being late, nor did it mean it didn’t take me three goes to find the headquarters.

When I got there, well honestly you would think I’d never been to a bike race before. I collected my number, but forgot to sign on. I went back to sign on, but this time I forgot to take my racing kit in with me so I could get changed. When I finally sorted myself out, got my kit, and got changed, I discovered that the skinsuit I’d chucked into my bag was the one with the broken zip that I had meant to throw out last August. And after I’d finally teased the zip up, tooth-by-agonising-tooth, I remembered I’d forgotten to put the strap for my heart-rate monitor on first.

For a final flourish, I put my helmet on before I took off my warm up top, and the then tried to pull the top off over the helmet, got the whole lot hopelessly tangled up, and ended up staggering blindly round the car park like a monster Russell T. Davis had rejected from Dr Who for just being too damn silly looking.

Apart from that it was just fine.