“Is he still alive,” asked the woman next to my wife.

“I think so,” said my wife, “otherwise this would be the Jimmy Irvine Memorial Bella 10k.”

Good point.

I’ve written about Jimmy before – see here – but what I missed then and my research pick up now was that as well as being a brilliant runner and volunteer for the club, he was also its founder. I can’t believe I missed that in my original entry. It’s a bit like writing a biography about Elon Musk and not mentioning that he is a massive bellend. It should be the first thing you mention.

This year my wife and daughter joined the spectators to watch the race, which was handy as it turned out to be surprisingly warm after a cold and damp start to the day. I wore a running jacket but decided to take it off after the first kilometre and throw it to my wife. Which was fine in theory. But in practice she was surprised to get a rolled up sweaty jacket thrown at her face.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeekkkk!” she screamed.

“Sorry!” I said as I ran on.

The race has now used the same route for the last few years and seems to have settled into the idea that it should start with a several hundred metres of climbing. A tough start but not as tough as then running it a second and third time as the race loops round Bellahouston Park.

The Jimmy Irvine Bella 10K remains an enjoyable, albeit hilly, race to end the year.

“Headshot!” shouted the Stormtrooper from Star Wars before squirting a water pistol in the face of a runner racing towards him.

“Hee hee hee hee!”

I only saw a handful of runners in fancy dress at this year’s Great Scottish Run. This was a surprise as it was also the largest ever event with nearly 30,000 runners. I thought in proportion the number of runners in fancy dress would also increase but, other than the stormtrooper committing unwanted liquid assaults across the course (though to be fair, it’s not like Stormtroopers are ‘good guys’!), the only other person in fancy dress was Batman. Which is to say that a runner was dressed as Batman, not that Batman was in fancy dress as a rhino or a deep water diver.

Not the the Stormtrooper was the strangest sight on the course. Around mile five I saw a man jogging while juggling three balls. I assume he must have been juggling them from the start. It would have been strange for him to get to mile five and then think “Wait! I’ve got three balls in my pocket, I could juggle them!”.

I assume there’s a real skill in juggling while jogging. For a start you need to throw the balls forward to run and catch them while moving forward. There’s no point throwing them straight up when you would just run under and passed them.

But why juggle? At what point in their juggling career did they think: “this is no longer a challenge, I should jog too!”. Or, in what point of their running career, did they think: “Running half marathon is easy, I need a challenge: I could juggle!”.

And did they build up to this? Did they juggle a 5k, a 10k and finally the Great Scottish Run? Are they building up to a marathon or an ultra? Or are they going to add more balls until eventually they’re juggling 10 balls and spinning a plate on their head?

And then, after writing that paragraph, I goggled jogging and juggling and discovered that, yes, it was a case of adding a challenge to a run: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-68451536

And it’s an actual sport. Well, I say sport. According to this report there are 600 jogglers competing around the world. More people take part in Chess Boxing, which is less a sport and more a sport based on a random word generator.

I didn’t juggle but I did have a self imposed restriction too: I ran with Iain TwinBikerun!

Iain was recovering from COVID so I ran with him for the first nine miles until he started to get too slow, and then, good brother that I am, I left him and ran to the finish line.

The route felt a bit more open this year, and I think that may be as a result of the large number of runners taking part. The race was split into several waves, and some of the large crowds from last year were better dispersed around the course. However, due to the number of people taking part, the start was severely delayed as it took nearly 25 mins to reach the start line.

The end was equally busy and we had to queue for a finish photo with the finisher’s bell. As we queued the man in front of us, an American, asked if we could take his photo as he didn’t have a camera and could we then email him the results later. We did but it was only in the evening that I realised we’d missed a golden opportunity: we should have photoshopped his photos!

Overall, the Great Scottish Run is extremely well organised, with plenty of water stations, good support throughout the course and exactly the same complaint I had as last year as they used the same course: it’s still one of the least scenic routes you can design through Glasgow. But it is almost flat and therefore perfect for jogging. And juggling.