My little brother, @benjiboyw, completed the Brighton marathon in a rather eye-watering time of 2:57 yesterday, coming in 45th overall in the process.
I remember when it started running, it wasn’t that long ago either. He was living in our spare bedroom in our house on the Cottonmill Estate in St Albans, eating lots of pork pies and processed sausage meat, battling with gout and jogging fairly slowly around the locale.
Fast forward 8 years and he’s now tagging on to the elite women’s running equivilent of the peloton and staring at boney bottom for a couple of hours.
I’m not entirely sure where this massive divergence in levels of fitness happened. Back at school we both used to walk home daily and I was a keen cyclist. On reflection, it was probably university, where I developed more of a love of the pint that my brother did that began to see the chasm opening. Either that or post university employment. Whilst my bro’ worked for large multinationals like Glaxo and Roche, who had their own sports facilities and gyms, I’ve worked for smaller employees who tend to encourage exercise by refusing to let you park in the office car park.
Whatever the reason though, he’s definitely very fit and I’m definitely not. Finding the time to devote to serious exercise is pretty diffcult with 3 kids 5 and under but perhaps it is time I stopped finding excuses (they’re not too hard to find, I normally find them next to the Semilon Chardonnay in the fridge) and got my jog on.
Still, I reckon if you added us up and averaged it out, we’d be two averagely fit thirty something blokes :)