25th to 26th March - The Hague

Had to spend the week in the Hague and got lucky! Graham, Karen and David joined me there from the Wednesday night. David and I had entered the City-Pier-City Half Marathon on the Saturday but I was feeling a bit mizzy because I didn't think that I was going to run but thought that we could all still have some fun in Den Haag and it would be quite an experience to watch the race and cheer David on by shouting rude things at him as he went past and perhaps Karen and I could even sneak a flash at him to see if he would disown us.

Well, what a week... when we weren't stuffing our faces, we were on our way to guzzle large quantities of food, or were rolling home after having shovelled barrowloads of grub down our gullets.....we started with Spare Ribs on the Wed night, moved on to an Argentinian Steakhouse (where we were served by a small Spaniard and a big bald Pakistani), then did Italian and ended on a Middle eastern note with a belly dancer and a hubbly-bubbly.

Whilst I slaved away at my desk trying to focus on grey screens and red error messages, the 3
of them explored the 'village' (apparently The Hague has never become a city so is Europe's biggest billage?). We had one lovely sunny day so they took themselves off to Scheveningen beachfront and settled into big comfy beanbags in a bright yellow bus (which doubled as a bar come tapas restaurant) and watched the North Sea rocking back and forth.

Graham did do some work of course! He brought his laptop and could log on to the Stock Exchange through wi-fi so he was bedroom ridden for most of the remaining days. Karen and David took themselves off to Amsterdam on the Friday and partook of some of the more interesting delicacies offered by some of the street cafes....so you can see how seriously David was taking this Half marathon..... his preparation was eating lots of rich food, carbo loading in creative ways and trying some new Dutch pastries.

Along the way he somehow persuaded me that I should start the Half marathon with him so that he would not start out too fast. It sounded like a reasonable idea, so I said yes, even though this was probably done somewhere between a few ribs, beers and a steak. The idea was that I would stop at 10km unless I got sore of course, in which case I would bale anyway.

Saturday dawned and we were held up at the start by someone being hit by a tram just after the starting line and then when they cleared that, some guy drove into a lamppost along the route so we had to wait for the Dutch police to clean up the flying Dutchmen! I reckon they were probably just perving all the lycra clad bodies bounding and bouncing along the roads and pavements.

We set off together and then David revved his engine up a bit and took off whilst I wobbled and snorted onto the 5km mark where I decided I felt fine enough to continue to the 10km mark, but when I got there, it was in the middle of nowhere and the only path out of the dunes was on the course, so I thought I would carry on until I found the main road where I could catch a tram back to Graham and Karen at the finish where we could cheer David home. But by the time I realised that I was at the tram spot, I had done 15km so thought I might as well finish the darn course so I hobbled onwards looking like a drunk pregant ostrich would probably look like if it ran backwards and didn't wear feathers in strategic places.

David was waiting with Karen and Graham and he had run a fantastic race where his last 5km were done in the shortest time out of all his splits. I think he is going to sell his special tapering plan to Runners World. hee hee...you had to be there...

Can you believe that none of us had remembered the camera so we had to rely on the official finish photies... The Lees did have a video camera but ...er...we thought we would post the feeneesh fottos instead. But they not workee now...mebbe tomorrow...