Am currently participating in a half marathon.
By that I mean, I’m watching it from the comfort of my armchair while drinking my morning coffee.
I’ve actually had a bit of trouble following sporting fixtures lately. For the T20 cricket semi final, I sat down to watch it on the TV but three balls in, after Finn Allen had been given out twice for LBW, I started to feel anxious and sick and had to take the dogs for a walk instead. After that I just went straight to bed, not wanting to even get an update on how it had gone until the following morning where I caught up with the news on my iPad with my morning coffee. It was as if, as with the famous cat, all options of the result were still possible if I didn’t actually check. (Yes, I realise that this attitude owes more to magical thinking than quantum theory.) I could talk intelligently about the game to my fellow cricket tragics at work, but only because I’d read about what happened, so I felt a bit of a fraud.
And it was the same again last night, with the women’s rugby World Cup final. I checked the score fifteen minutes in, saw that we were doing as badly as expected, and then went back to my movie. I didn’t check again until I was just about to start watching an episode of The Witcher. We’d amazingly come from behind and had a precarious lead with only four minutes to go. Once again my heart started pounding sickeningly and I had to force myself to keep following it, desperately refreshing the iPad screen every few seconds until the final whistle blew. I felt a great relief then, but are you not a true supporter if you don’t watch an entire game? And it sounds like it was a game for the ages. It seems I’m just not constitutionally suited to watching sport these days if I care about the outcome. Is it an age thing? My husband says I need to inure myself to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by following a sports team that is habitually unreliable, like the Hurricanes. It’s funny, because I know intellectually that sporting results don’t matter in the scheme of things. So why get so het up? I have no answer.