“Some of the runners crumple like wobbly colts”

MY INTEREST in sport — which doesn’t extend beyond egg and spoon events — has never once, in the 25 years of being married, encompassed standing as I do now, in a cordoned-off area next to the finishing line of a half-iron man race, in which my husband is taking part.

Though he’s crossed many finishing lines in his time, I haven’t seen him do it. Not until now.

This act of standing in the rain without an umbrella is one of atonement, a redemptive gesture for having been for years the sort of wife to congratulate her husband on the phone just after he’d run the Dublin Marathon thus: “That’s great. Can you get olives when you come through town? Green, remember, not black.”