Cultureshock

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Video transcript

This is a story about how I became involved with running, athletics and the Great North Run and how the Great North Run still has an affect on my life all the year round. I currently live in Redcar but before that I lived at New Marske which is about 3 miles inland. I wasn’t sporty at school but was always involved in organising things. At New Marske I was secretary of the cricket club. One day they didn’t have enough players so I stepped in, ran around the field and at the end of the match felt really unfit. I therefore started running to get fit. Running to get fit soon moved on to running to be a little bit more competitive. I joined New Marske Harriers and in 1991 ran the first of my Great North Runs. I soon got involved in the organisation of New Marske Harriers. All races including the Great North Run, if they are run over a specified distance, need to be measured using a bicycle fitted with a Jones counter and before each measure the bike has to calibrated. This is how I met Max Colby, course measurer, former top class marathon runner and one of the original five that met to create the Great North Run. Incidentally, I am now a fully qualified course measurer myself. Not long after this Max asked if I could recruit 50 volunteers from the club to man a water station at the beginning of John Reid Road in South Shields. Every year since members of the club have travelled from Teesside to hand out water at John Reid Road. One of the first competitors passed our water station was Tanni Gray Thompson, multi Paralympic gold medallist, who I have since become friends with. And now that Tanni is no longer competing she joins us on the water station. One of my abiding memories was about 1993, we ran out of water because it was a very, very hot day. We had a hose pipe that we’d used to fill up the sponge buckets. I took this hose pipe and got on top of the Northumberland water van and used it to spray the desperate runners as they ran by. Every year since this there have been official showers in the Great North Run. By this time I’d moved to my new home in Redcar and met Michelle and Simon from across the road. They adopted me as this crazy bloke who went running. Soon after, they joined the club and I ran, in 1994, my last Great North Run with their mother Dianne. In 2002 Dianne and I got married. Michelle is now married to another member of the Harriers and they have a six year old daughter, Bethany. Around 1993, before the National Lottery started, I got involved with the New Marske Harriers quest to establish an athletics track in the borough. The local authority link officer was Max Colby and through Max and the club’s involvement with the Great North Run we got a donation from the Great North Run’s charitable trust. The £5000 we got eventually levered funding from the National Lottery for a £650,000 athletics track where I coach runners of all abilities two or three times a week. I am often joined at the track with my granddaughter Bethany.