Fun-run craze comes to London

Press, 28 March 1981, Page 23

Fun-run craze comes to London

N'ZPA-Reuter London Greenwich Park and Buckingham Palace are separated by barely 11km of central London, but for more than 7000 men and women there -will be almost 50 tortured kilometres between them on Sunday. The two landmarks provide the start and finish points for London's first venture into the big-city craze for staging people's marathons, turning over one of sports most demanding events to the postman and housewife as well as the serious athlete. Such events have pandered to man's unfathomable desire to run himself into oblivion in other big cities: the only surprise is that London has taken so long to stage one of its own. Chris Brasher, who won the steeplechase gold medal for Britain at the 1956 Olympics, has been the driving force behind the enterprise. Through his weekly articles in a Sunday newspaper Brasher has long exhorted the British people to rise from their armchairs, and more than 21.000 would-be competitors responded to his announcement that the marathon would take place. The first 7500 entries were accepted. Brasher's enthusiasm has inevitably provoked a reaction among those who ridicule exercise, notably the top sports columnist, lan Woolridge, an unashamed apostle of slothfulnesss.

After recently touring the marathon course with Brasher in the back of a Rolls-Royce Corniche, Woolridge triumphantly disclosed that runners could slice 19 km off

the distance by using a 600 m passageway under the Thames. He urged them to do so. . The first problem the runners will have to overcome on the day of the race is getting out of bed in time. They are being treated to a pasta meal — two tons of the stuff will be laid on — the night before, and having wrestled with the resultant indigestion, the 9 am. start could account for the first casualties.

The start is the meridian line, the point from which Greenwich Mean Time is calculated. From there the course, in its early stages, winds through some of London's duller scenery — "tedious and rather squalid," one critic called it -- but later it emerges into the heart of sightseeing territory before coming to a halt close by the Queen's London residence, Buckingham Palace.

The organisers have made much of the marathon's sightseeing potential. which seems a bit like asking a man being burned at the stake to admire the pretty flames. But for those runner’s who do have the time and energy to look around, the first famous landmark will be the Cutty Sark, a nine-teenth-century British merchant ship which now stands high and dry on the banks of the Thames at Greenwich.

Then comes Tower Bridge, an unmistakable twin-towered structure which a group of American businessmen once thought they had bought but found instead that they had purchased the unremarkable London Bridge. Also on the route are St Pauls. Cathedral, which

Hitler's bombers somehow managed to miss, and the Houses of Parliament, which many people wish they would come back and hit.

There has been a disappointing response from the world's top marathon runners, but the winner should arrive at the gates of Buckingham Palace by 11.15 am. The rest of the super-fit starters, including the first woman, will finish in the next 45 minutes, followed by the not-quite-so-fit, the fairly fit. the unfit, and those who should have stayed at home. For the statistically minded, the London marathon is a big event. In addition to the two tonnes of pasta, the word is out that there will be 75 portable lavatories at the start for women competitors, and that the men can line up side by side for 50m in a vast cabin to relieve themselves.

The event is also made to measure for those with an eye for publicity. After Alberto Salazar, winner of the latest New York marathon, it was the man who ran the course backwards who reaped the greatest publicity, and the media will be looking for someone to hop it, crawl it, or even cartwheel it this time. The London marathon has attracted enormous local interest and provoked endless comment, much of it cynical. But even the waspish Woolbridge felt inclined to wish Brasher's venture well. "It is hard not to wish him a successful London marathon," he wrote. "It was men like Brasher who won ma-chine-gun outposts and half continents single-handed.