9,000 miles - Pendulum

Lyric:- 'It's 9,000 miles back to you, I still feel like home is in your arms' - Swire Thompson

Song Choice:- I just love EVERYTHING about this Pendulum song. I love it that much it's my ringtone and every time I get a call, I get a small fix of it's magic. Sometimes, I leave it ringing a little longer than I should before picking up.

My neighbour Pauline must wonder at the thumping sub-woofer throbbing pulsation that rattles her ornaments on her mantle piece some days. Luckily for me, she's really deaf. It makes me wonder if she thinks Cardiff has somehow mystically been moved to sit directly on the San Andreas earthquake fault-line.

I hope you get how much I love this song, with its false endings, reprises and thorough lack of lyrics.

Anyway, it's the 9,000 miles I find most interesting to me and I often wonder why Swire-Thompson chose that number. 

• Maybe it was just a random number. 
• Maybe its was and it really mattered to him.
• Maybe I'll never know.
• Maybe it doesn't matter...and should I even care?

Thing is, numbers accompany my world and it's got me thinking about the 9,000 miles bit.

So instead of wondering, I thought I'd look at what the 9,000 miles mean to me. I DO know one thing for sure that it's a f*cking long way. It's 343.51 marathons for instance, about a third of where I am with my count, Cardiff to London 57 times (No wonder my Car has high mileage) or 2,903.23 Saturday Morning parkruns. Then with the 'Yikes' of parkruns in mind I've just calculated that if I divide my 28,000 of marathon miles run by 3.1 and I get, 9,000.

Gosh, numbers are ace. And on further investigation and with the help of Google, I see that Perth to London is 8991 miles - so that's possibly an indication of what the 9,000 miles link really is and then hey presto, in Wiki, I see that Swire-Thompson was born, yep you guessed it, in Perth.

So I reckon it's a love song...although it was never going to be anything else, really! And it is for me too as I suppose every 9,000 miles I run makes and keeps me safe in it's arms.

And probably that's all any of us really needs.

What are you 9,000 miles from?

Rory Coleman - 961 Marathons - 239 Ultras

12 Marathon des Sables - 9 Guinness World Records - 8064 Days' Alcohol Free.

Location: Caerdydd