red tee shirt with a very long number

We all had to wear red tee shirts for this one.

A bit of a race around the streets of London. Part of the Human Race 10k with allegedly a million runners around the world. I'd crossed London to Wembley, despite the closed Victoria line and to others' amusement wore the red tee-shirt inside out on the way having remembered to cut out the two 15 cm long care labels.

The inside outness was supposed to help me keep a lower profile on the tube but I suppose bright red is bright, however you look at it, plus compulsory telemetry gleaming from one running shoe.

Jeans dropped at the 'baggage' area at Wembley Arena and then into the shiny main stadium for the warmup by the fashionable Pendulum (who played a jarring industrial metal version of drum n bass) and then Moby with a band doing O Lordy greatest hits, whilst the 'waves' of runners were instructed about how to turn sharp right when leaving the stadium.

I'd wondered if anyone would turn up for this actually, because (eg) John had been offered loads of spectator tickets late last week.

In fact, it was mainly runners present in very large quantities 20,000? 30,000? very hard to guess. We listened to the music, listened to the warm ups and then it was time to hit the dusky streets to the car-wash proportions of rain that started to fall. I'd brought a baseball cap which did a surprisingly good deflection job and the red layer with the blue layer underneath seemed to keep me moderately cosy as I joined the runners many of whom were going about the whole run as if it was a sprint.

My tactics were somewhat different, with a view to be both visible at the start and the end. It seemed to pay off, even if my time is pretty unremarkable.