It's all over now

There's a song there somewhere.

The 10k was on Sunday. It pished down. It was raining when I opened the curtains at 05.30 and it didn't stop until about Monday. Race day was a bit fraught. The whole thing has been difficult for months due to tragic circumstances that you already know about. Got off to a bad start when the 'man with a van' didn't turn up until about an hour after we thought he should. He just happened to have loads of stuff needed for course set-up, finish set-up..... Then all our faithful club members decided to stay in bed so we were dreadfully short of marshals. Even the 'usual' on-the-day-entry team was depleted for no apparent reason. Anyway, it happened. We had a race, the winning time was 30.51 and no-one hurt themselves at the roadworks. Mind you, it seems that one or two of our runners decided to have fisticuffs with the driver of a Chelsea tractor. Hmmmmmm, not sure we want our race associated with that sort of behaviour. And, before you jump to conclusions, apparently the runner concerned was more the antagonist than the driver!!!! We've had reasonable feedback, so that's good.

Decided to have several glasses of lemonade after the race so retired to my bed after Leon had gone to work (thanks for feeding me!). Was finally getting round to doing some work on finessing the results when journalist doing input to Athletics Weekly rings me and asks how I'm doing with them. Was very tempted to say "I've only just sobered up so I may be some time" but I didn't. Sent him the first cut at about half past midnight, and he hasn't even said thank you.

Monday was spent doing lots of post-race admin and turning the 'results' into 'Results'. I don't see the point in releasing a dodgy listing only to receive lots of abusive e-mails when, for the sake of half a day, I can produce pretty damn good results. And if you've ever wondered why it's so tricky..... think cold people in the rain, recording times of runners, race numbers of runners (except "it fell off on the way round/I couldn't be arsed to collect it from Race HQ/my cat ate it/oh I haven't paid my entry fee yet"), recording race numbers and times as a cross-check, six people crossing the line at the same time, runners not staying in order in the funnels....... So, I sit here, meticulously going through all the recording sheets, comparing them with each other and also with the photos of people approaching the finish line. My piece de resistance was working out that possibly a chap hadn't run even though his number had been recorded. I rang him up and I was right! You get a feel for these things.

So, today, nothing. Well, it's Valentine's Day but not much time for the nice romantic details when one of you is working 12.5 hour night shifts. The race hotdesk is now a bit cooler and a lot tidier. I started trying to clear up 'stuff' that landed in our house recently which has been sitting around cluttering the place up. The reality of unemployment is starting to stress me. I've not been in this situation before. It's a completely unnerving experience. Years back I was on a women's management development course when I was in BT. We did a 'career anchors' analysis and my key anchor was 'security'. Harumpf.