"What I deserve, I earn" - discuss

Louis Smith won a medal at the Olympics at the weekend on the pommel horse.  It is the first time in over 70 years that a Brit has won a medal in anything involving a horse and a pommel at the same time.  He is designed specifically for the event with long oversized arms and 'ickle legs and someone said that he was grown in a jar somewhere south of Coventry.

Across his shoulders he has tattooed "What I deserve, I earn".

Now I rather fancied doing this half marathon in under two hours.  Training went well, then I had a number of set backs - knees, hips, shoulder thing, followed by a hacking cough and finally a blister, which essentially won't heal (b-doom, tish) before the race and it will accompany me on every step of every training run and every step of the race itself, causing discomfort.  I might give it a name, like "Pest" or something. I think that I deserve to be able to run the whole thing, but I need a bit of luck to keep sickness and injury at bay to enable me to continue the work to do this.

This morning I was driving to work in the dark and the rain - proper Geordie rain that gets you wet, cancels the cricket, stops summer in it's tracks and sends it scurrying off to somewhere in Europe. At 0554, I saw a bloke out running, wearing a Great North Run 2008 t-shirt!  I wanted to shout "courage!" like they do in Geneva, but I wasn't sure if he would understand.  I thought about "Gan on meeaaate" but I thought he might think I was taking the piss, so I said nothing and drove past.  He was out there doing it and it was miserable.

Then my thoughts turned to poor old Paula who soldiered on in bits to finish the marathon. She poured herself into training for Beijing and she picked up an injury and got bitten by a spider in France (which sounds like an excuse for not handing in your homework if you ask me) and she sadly, despite an enormous effort to win the marathon - well, she failed.

Or did she?  When I'm feeling cream crackered at the 11 mile mark somewhere south of the river,  I might just think of poor Paula hobbling and wobbling her head and find something from somewhere to nail the last few miles, just as she did.  That would keep me going.  

Louis and his tattoo seems a bit nicey-nicey to me, but Paula?  She was out there doing it, in pain, not going to win, not going to get what she wanted, not going to get what she worked for and deserved.

So as has been said before, no matter what, finish the damn race.