Thursday, April 14, 2011

Ready, Steady

Go, nutters, go! On Sunday, like every spring, the London Marathon starts a couple of miles from me, on Blackheath. For the whole week leading up to the event, the Heath is gradually covered in the necessaries for a major sporting event.

This ad hoc archway bears the London Marathon logo,

but I have no idea what it's for.



Large tents and marquees have burgeoned everywhere.



As well as platforms for the media, there are lots of towers

with tannoy speakers to make sure all the runners can

hear the announcements.



The green and grey boxes in the distance are just some

of the hundreds of Port-a-loos.

Bet they are nice by the time everyone has started on their way.


I have never watched the start of the race either live (behind these thousands of crowd barriers) or on TV, 'cos I don't actually give a stuff, but I thought folks might like to see what happens behind the scenes of such a massive event.
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9 comments:

  1. sixtwosue3:11 pm

    Your guess about the Port-a-lets is very accurate. I run races, and while I have smelled plenty of disgusting things in my life, nothing compares to the those things within 15 minutes of a race. Everyone hits them at the same time. Thanks for the pictures; wish I could try the course.

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  2. sixtwosue3:12 pm

    Oh, and perhaps that archway is the finish chute?

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  3. Unknown4:48 pm

    I'm impressed by athletes because I'm not sports. I'm lazy!

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  4. JoJo5:10 pm

    You wanna see a nasty set of Portajohns, try the ones outside of a Grateful Dead show in the middle of a hot, humid east coast summer. lol

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  5. val8:55 pm

    It would make sense yo have something like that at the finish, disrepair, bit this is the start, so i just.don't know.

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  6. Laura9:08 pm

    Not sure what the arch is..could be a muster point or something? We watch it every year..it's got to be a tradition now. The elite athletes bore me, but I quite like watching the so-called fun runners, although whats fun about it is a mystery

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  7. Eliza9:09 pm

    OK, Laura was me, she was signed in to youtube and I forgot to check, sorry

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  8. Jane11:07 pm

    I can't imagine trying to run a marathon..(Oxygen please!)

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  9. sixtwosue1:39 am

    Well, the buildup can be fun; I trained for mine by doing long runs to "L&O: CI" DVDs on the treadmill. It would have been nice to have VDO to chase on the actual course, of course. And JoJo, if you can believe it, running event portojohns are worse than concert ones thanks to the runners' fast metabolisms, if you get my drift.

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