The photo that attaches to this blog is from Sunday 21st May at the finish line of the Outlaw half in Nottingham. The guy on the left is a great friend of mine and is an epic runner. The guy on the right is me and the guy in the middle is Louis (Dunne). This story continues to run in my life and for anyone who has followed it a little bit in these pages you understand who Louis is and if you don’t then you can click here to read who Louis’s Dad was.
When we had to say goodbye to Tim Louis and I agreed to set a target of 4,900 miles on our bikes in a year, because Tim was 49. But also in the middle of that I decided to try to manufacturer a situation were Louis would be able to compete to a certain degree at the Outlaw triathlon and Outlaw half in Nottingham. This was something very close to Tim’s heart and in fact he had competed and finished the half this time last year. So the essence of this story is about disagreeability. Its not possible to get Louis into the Outlaw triathlon because he is “too young” so the rules say. But I had met the owner and race director of these events at Tim’s funeral and we had discussed the possibility of something like this. I emailed him afterwards and he has been nothing short of fantastic, understanding how important this could be to one little guy, to bring some sunshine. And so on Sunday, we lined up, coach Simon (McCarthy) that swam for us at short notice and was epic, he’s not in the picture but thanks Simon for stepping in and thoroughly intimidating us with an enormously brilliant swim. I rode the bike in a particularly average way and then handed over to Mike who ran an amazing 1:36 half marathon. But with 2 miles to go, he pitched up with Louis and they both ran the last 2 miles together down the finishing shoot that Tim ran down in the same race last year.
At the end of the race we wanted to get that photograph done that you get at the Outlaw half with the big glass of alcohol free beer but Louis wasn’t allowed because Louis didn’t have the correct wrist band on. So it was time to be disagreeable again and ask that on this occasion if they would radio the control room and get the sign off from Ian the race director that its ok for Louis to enter that part of the post race village. Of course they did, and this photograph is a result of that.
What we did yesterday was epic despite the fact that for the second half of the bike, 20 and 30 something alpha males scorched past me on £10,000 bikes leaving me in their wake, but for us, for our little group, it was huge. It would not have been possible without people accepting that sometimes, just sometimes, the rules that are applied to the lower denominator, just need to be stretched just a little bit. Thank you so much to everyone that went a step and beyond in the Outlaw half, you guys were absolutely amazing.
We do it all again one last time at the full Outlaw on the 23rd July.
Blog Post Number - 1293
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