Warming Up

A nice man in Kenya called Justin tweeted the good news story that "A woman runs a marathon personal best time at 62yrs”

Of course, me being me and seeing Twitter as a place to role out shit jokes I tweeted "62 yrs seems a pretty slow PB marathon time, but should be able to shave a few minutes off that next time.”

And Twitter being what

It is, someone then tweeted "Bit harsh. If everyone in the world could just try to be better than they were yesterday in everything they do the world would be a better place.”

I stuck to my guns and tweeted, "Agree. How long was her previous PB if her new one is 62 years? And how old must she be? At least 124 and that’s presuming that she started her first marathon as soon as she was born, which seems unlikely. Well done to her for trying again.”

Someone else pointed out that a PB can be made on the first run so I acknowledged

That gave a decent chance of beating the time if she got going straight away.

Justin then replied saying, "Yes, everyone can run a marathon PB it doesn't matter how long they take and how old they are! This 62yr old runner ran sub 3hrs. @Herring1967 , what's your PB?”

I told him, "4 hrs 17 mins 50 seconds. Bit better than 62 years if I do say so myself.”

Justin came back with “You are awesome! Finishing a marathon in itself is a great achievement, you are just slightly over 2hrs 30 minutes slower than some of the fastest runners!”

I came back with "So I can run for 150 mins longer than those lightweights! Who’s the real winner?”

And Justin, the penny maybe finally dropping, but he’d been a cool guy all the way and obviously didn’t know I was a comedian and came from a different country and culture said “The woman who can run for 62 years, then you...Eliud Kipchoge comes last by lasting only 2hrs!”

We had made friends. He even offered to give me some long-distance marathon training advice. Long-distance, get it?

Twitter can be a nasty place, but it can connect you to people all over the world who you would never otherwise have met. Admittedly in this case it was to mainly waste his time with a joke that wasn’t worth the effort. But when everyone else was mining the Matt Hancock thing you really had to admire me.

Retro RHLSTP with Adam Buxton is now up here.