Jeremy Jaffacake's double black garbage bag ninja idea was a genius one. Take a binbag, turn it upside-down, scissor out holes in the corners and the very top, then burrow into it and use it like a very cheap rain jacket. Rip open the second bin-bag, fold it in on itself, put it over your head like a flappy plastic snood, unfold front bit over your mouth and the back bit over the top of your head and, voila, a tight hood with a letterbox you could see through, and now not only was most of you going to withstand the rain, but nobody could tell that the ridiculously dressed person was actually you, and it helpfully hide the name on your bib.
He walked from the hotel to the start-finish line and decided that this eighty cent disposable ninja rain jacket was the best idea he'd had in weeks, not least because of the amount of people around him who looked to be getting soaked to the bone while he stayed dry, but because it was the only good idea he'd had in weeks. Since agreeing to this whole thing anyway.
Marathons are stupid. He'd always believed that to be true. The first refuge of the mid-life crisis for anyone not rich enough for an open-top sports car or not desperate enough to pretend any attractive woman under 25 was worth spending a week's wages on every Friday night. In Jeremy's view, anyone south of the half-your-age-plus-seven rule wasn't worth five minutes of his time, and hadn't been since around the time he'd turned about fifty, some decades ago.
Of all the big, worthy sporting achievements - the triathlon, the mountain, the black belt, the gold medal, the 147, the 300 and the full-206 Downhill Coo-Runnings - a marathon was the easiest to attain. Start off jogging four hundred and twenty two metres without stopping, and find a way to add 10% to that every week until you can keep jogging for thirty or so without stopping, then buy a vest, shorts, socks and shoes in colours that aren't even on speaking terms, let alone complimentary, strap a number to your chest, rub yourself in lube and pretend doing four days worth of steps in one morning is something worth even telling a friend about, let alone newsworthy enough to broadcast via t-shirt at an otherwise enjoyable barbecue. If you'd told Jeremy Jaffacake, last year, that he'd be doing one himself, he'd likely have told you to 'do one' too. He would have even balked at the idea of attending. Standing and watching ten thousand smug forty-something prematurely wrinkly chartered surveyors wearing four hundred dollars worth of last year's olympians' wardrobe was hardly his idea of a fun, coming somewhere below both Having a Hangover and Not Having a Hangover as an utter waste of a Sunday morning.
As he neared the line, the crowd of scrawny try-hards thickened. They all clearly needed about five square metres each to do their outlandish warm-up routines, and each was making do with less than half that. Jeremy made his way through the elbows and knees to the dilapidated phone box he'd agreed to meet Rubio at, and saw his erstwhile friend huddled in a thick hoodie holding in one hand an umbrella and in the other a small plastic bag full of brightly coloured objects.
"You look ridiculous" said Rubio, as Jeremy approached.
"How did you know it was me?" Said Jeremy, his voice flapping through his plastic ninja headgear.
"Namaste" said Rubio. "My soul recognises yours". He held the palm of his hand to face Jeremy. Jeremy responded by holding the palm of his own hand up at Rubio, only with two fingers kept down.
"Yamumste" said Jeremy, in response. "These fingers smell of your m.."
"I brought you your froot shoots" said Rubio, interrupting.
"They're gels" said Jeremy
"Your little snack things" said Rubio
"It's called 'fuel' I think" said Jeremy. "I'm supposed to shove one of these into my face every five kilometres and then, so I gather from training, spend the next five kilometres trying to wipe the goo off my hand before the wasps find me"
"Okay" said Rubio. "Anyway I'm going to keep hold of them"
"What"
"Rather than you carrying them I figured, y'know" said Rubio, glancing to his left.
"Is that a bike" said Jeremy
"I figured I'd find you every few kilometres or so, give you some "fuel", advice, encouragement, it's a long way, and carrying this shit with you it just going to weigh you down"
"You sure you can keep up?" Said Jeremy, with a wink. "You said it yourself, everyone you know who does a running race, no matter how fast they go, always gets overtaken by some skinny-ass old boy who has access to, what did you call it?"
"Fogey Speed" said Rubio. "And yeah, that's a whole thing, but only with those seventy year-olds who, you know, have been doing this for the last sixty years, probably ran track in college, all that stuff, not three-hundred year-olds who, until recently, considered his most athletic feat to be his ability to eat an entire vindaloo without needing a sip of lager"
"That absolutely *should* be an olympic sport." retorted Jeremy. "Mate I don't even sweat during a fahl these days. I'm like that RL States pervert prince you like so much. Except I wouldn't associated with anyone who claimed "Ghislaine" was a perfectly reasonable name a human might have"
"Look, I'll see you every few kilometres, all right? Make sure you're still, y'know, alive. And, y'know, 'looking your best'"
"You find out where the cameras are?" Asked Jeremy
"More or less. They move, but they're stationed in all the places you'd expect. Look. If you see me, stop, walk, have a bite of whatever I'm holding, then you can saunter past the camera looking relaxed and, y'know, electable"
"Got it" said Jeremy, who was beginning his warm-up routine. Rubio watched as Jeremy began to make outlandish shapes with his arms and legs. He looked like a heron who particularly sucked at charades trying to mime the abstract concept of 'tenacity' to a horse, only the heron didn't know what tenacity was and assumed it was a brand of suppository.
"Are you sure this is the only way to do this?" Asked Rubio, looking down the road, seeing a brief glimpse of the river in the distance. "It's... a bloody long way. 42 kilometres. Six hours. One side of Cathair to the other."
"Still faster than taking the bus along the same route" said Jeremy. "And it's like you said, if I want the job, I need to get my name out there"
"Jeremy Jaffacake, you're Jeremy sodding Jaffacake, your name is already "out there""
"Yeah but in a good way, Breakfast TV kind of way"
"And you're sure you want the job?" Asked Rubio. "The Project Museum is going well, you've got the podcast, all the cushy jobs at the Herald still go your way, TV work when you can be bothered. You've tried, y'know..." Rubio leaned in towards Jeremy, conspiratorially, "..politics.. before"
"You don't fancy me a politician" said Jeremy, doing a forwards lunge, wrapped in two black plastic bags, orange running-shoe clad feet either side of a slowly expanding puddle, turquoise split shorts rippling in the breeze.
"I don't fancy you at all" said Rubio
"It's not really politics though, is it?" said Jeremy, rhetorically. "FFA President, that was politics. WCC president, that was politics. Being a president of a country, a prime minister, that'd be politics. This? This is just dressing up like a twat and announcing the beginning of something stupid" said Jeremy.
"The Mayorship of Cathair is exactly like starting to run a marathon, in that respect" said Rubio
"Exactly" said Jeremy. "And like you said. A good photo here, raising money for a charity, being an inspiration for people because I can put one leg in front of the other for entirely too fucking long, all while annoying the kind of motorist who thinks he deserves to be able to drive through the centre of a major city, it's win win win win win."
"Apart from you have to actually run a marathon"
"It'll be fine" said Jeremy. "I did almost most of my training"
"Look" said Rubio. "Either way. Me. Bike. Carrying your 'fuel'. I'll see you just before each camera guy. Are you wearing your narf top?"
Jeremy pulled up his bin-bag to show a bright yellow vest with a picture of a friendly dog shouting "NARF" at nothing in particular, with "National Animal Rescue Fund" written just below. "Raising a few grand for them. Turns out people were quite keen on me to run really far away from them if it meant a few PTSD dogs got better food"
"Well at least some good may come from this" said Rubio. "And I suspect you needn't even have told them about the dogs"
An annoyingly loud DJ garbled the phrase '...in exactly one minute's time!' at the end of a sentence neither were listening to. The throng piled closer towards the start-finish line, still a hundred metres away from where Jeremy was standing.
"Wish me luck" said Jeremy
"I do honestly wish you luck" said Rubio, wheeling his bike around to face the opposite direction. "But I tell you, I still think this is a stupid idea"
"We'll see who's laughing when we get rid of that bypass and use the concrete to build a statue of me punching Rami Niblick in his stupid face"
"A noble cause" said Rubio. "But you're aware that if you're photographed wheezing next to an aid station with shit down your legs it might have the opposite effect to what you were intending"
"Why would I have shit down my legs" said Jeremy. "Weird mind, you've got"
"Happens" said Rubio. "You went before you came out, right?" asked Rubio. "You weren't too busy knotting together than bin-bag cagoule to do a pre-race poop, right?"
Rubio noted Jeremy's face fade slightly from confident to worried as the old hack disappeared into the throng of lycra and headbands. A hundred yards away, the incumbent Mayor of Cathair fired a starting pistol into the air.
It would cause one runner to abruptly drop out of the race when it landed.
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