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Friday, 23 July 2010

Measuring (and splashing) up

People often reflect on how lucky we are in the Isle of Man to go running in the hills just a few minutes away from our homes.

Another great benefit of living within Manx shores, which I have overlooked for years, is to run on the beach. I didn’t feel like raising myself above a jog this morning and didn’t want to run around my usual courses. Within minutes of leaving my house I was running on Douglas beach. The tide was like Mick Jaggar on a high (far out man) and I reflected on how some people would pay a fortune to run along side the gentle tide on a deserted sandy beach with the sun rising.

It is hard to measure the value to our souls, as opposed to our soles, of such runs but it did the former a lot of good for me, although the latter brought sand to our house afterwards.

By contrast, the great thing about track and field athletics is that we can be entirely objective - especially when we come to championships.

The Döhle Isle of Man Championships this weekend will determine who is the fastest, longest or highest within these tide surrounded shores and the European Championships, which open in Barcelona on Tuesday, will determine the best from a much bigger land mass.

In much the same way as I started the campaign for real country sports and then missed every opportunity to attend, I am not going to see any of the action on Saturday and will probably see very little on Sunday. I shall have to rely on the www.iomaa.info website, produced by David and Cheryl Pryke, for my news.

Track and field championships bring a level playing field to the sport but they can be uplifting too.

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