Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

On January 13th, a leader in The Times and Kevin Watkins in The Guardian attacked the development policies of the UK Conservative Party, from opposite sides of the political spectrum.  The Times Leader says that the Conservatives are wrong to commit themselves to increase aid to 0.7% of GNI; and Kevin Watkins says that the Conservatives are wrong to want to reform the way aid is given.   Both attacks appear to be bone-headed efforts to make political mischief by undermining not just Conservative party policies but the mainstream consensus on development. Neither attack does credit to its perpetrator.

The Times criticizes the Conservative Party for their commitment to maintain the planned increases in development spending. The leader recycles discredited assertions about the negative effects of aid rather than offering solid analysis.  There isn’t a single reputable econometric study showing that aid causes harm through  exchange rate appreciations, corruption or slowing progress to democracy.   Peter Bauer, whom the leader article quotes, was criticising Cold War foreign assistance programmes which bear little resemblance to aid programmes today. Aid today is increasingly practical, targeted and measurable, just as The Times says it should be, and it works.

Britain was one of 147 countries which pledged we would “spare no effort” to meet the Millennium Development Goals. As The Times implies, we should not be judged on what we spend but on what we achieve. On this basis we are not yet doing enough to achieve the goals to which we are committed.  That is why it is important that Britain should continue to increase its world-class development programme, and press other nations to increase their spending too.  To resist this on the grounds that 0.7% is an arbitrary figure is a clever-sounding point for a debating society, not a reasoned argument against the commitment of all the main political parties to meet Britain’s international promises, and to press other countries to do the same.

From the other end of the political spectrum, Kevin Watkins in The Guardian seems to be determined to use development to score party political points – and to do so he has had to put himself in the strange position of arguing against the country-led approach to development which is supported by all main UK political parties.

Under the Labour Government Britain has helped build an international consensus that aid works best in support of a country’s own development strategy; that policies imposed from outside rarely work; and that governments should be accountable to their own citizens for their policies and actions.  Kevin Watkins rightly supports these points in other contexts. Yet he apparently won’t entertain the idea that other countries may have different views from his (and mine) about the best way to organise and fund public services.

I’ve read the Conservative Green Paper and it does not call for state services to be rolled back in developing countries. It says that governments should guarantee access to education for all their people; and that donors should fund that guarantee and support and encourage governments to choose whatever path enables them to expand education provision fast and effectively.  It does not propose or advocate market-based solutions in education: it says explicitly that the Conservatives would work with the public, not-for-profit and private sectors.

Kevin Watkins quotes the Green Paper saying “We bring a natural scepticism about government schemes“; this is the entire basis of his claim that “the Conservatives will use aid to roll back the state in key services“.  But it is clear when you read this sentence in context that the Conservatives are questioning the role of the government in aid, not planning to tell other countries how they should manage their public services.

There is now a valuable cross-party consensus on the need to use aid money to support countries’ own development priorities and programmes.  The challenge today is how to bring public sector reform to the aid business – including the possibility of some market-like disciplines to make aid more effective and accountable.  There are proposals in both the Government White Paper and the Conservative Green Paper to make aid more transparent and accountable and to link it more closely to results. Kevin Watkins might have used his space to tell us what he thinks about these ideas instead of trying to score party political points on development.

(By the way, I admire Kevin Watkins, but I’m not comfortable with the fact that a UNESCO official, paid from public funds, is using his position to make highly partisan and inaccurate attacks in the newspapers on the main UK opposition party. )

I’ve got no party political axe to grind: my interest is in supporting the best possible policies to accelerate development, so that the world is a fairer, happier and safer place for everyone.  It seems odd that the Conservatives should be attacked from both left and right for articulating development policies which seem to me squarely in the mainstream of development thinking.

The cross-party consensus that the UK’s development budget should continue to increase, and that British development policy is amongst the most effective in the world but nonetheless there is room for improvement, should be a matter of shared national pride, not scorn and sniping from whichever direction.  Let’s sustain that consensus, and not allow development policy to be used as a political football even in the heat of an election campaign.

Update: see Kevin’s reply in the comments.

My new working paper, Beyond Planning: Markets and Networks for Better Aid is on the Center for Global Development website in the innovations in aid series.

In the paper I argue that more planning and coordiation among donors will not overcome the political constraints that prevent better aid.  The aid system is in a political equilibrium which we need to try to change; we won’t solve aid’s problems by trying to move away from the equilibrium.  This means making more use of market and network mechanisms to change incentives within the aid system. We need to stop thinking of grand new designs of the aid system and start putting in place mechanisms that force evolution in the right direction.

I’ve listed a set of measures, from the commonplace (untying aid, for example) to the unusual (tradable missions permits, or a tax on proliferation pollution) to illustrate the ideas.

I’ll be discussing the paper at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) on Friday, and on a forthcoming episode of Development Drums.

I’m looking forward to comments and feedback.

George Osborne told the Conservative Party Conference eight times:

we are all in this together.

This is a powerful message.

When 15 million people  face starvation in East Africa this Christmas, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When twenty thousand children die tomorrow from easily preventable and treatable diseases, purely because they don’t have enough money to buy drugs that cost cents to produce but for which we charge rich world prices, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the developing world demands proper compensation for their part of the atmosphere, which we have filled up with carbon emissions far beyond our share, resulting in the risk of destruction to entire nations, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the people of the Niger Delta demand a share of the wealth lying beneath their ground, and an end to the environmental destruction caused by our oil companies so that we can drive our cars and cool our houses, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When we complain about corruption in the developing world, forgetting that all the money that pays for those bribes comes from us, and then choose not to prosecute our own companies that pay the bribes, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When we continue to be one of the largest manufacturers and exporters of arms in the world, fuelling conflict all around the world, but are more concerned about a hundred jobs on the Isle of Wight, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When people are forced to leave their homes, their family and their country because they lack freedom or face persecution, or because they cannot find work that pays them enough to support their family, and they look for a new beginning in rich countries, and we decide how we will treat asylum seekers and immigrants, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the world’s poor demand fair payment for their coffee, cocoa, and minerals, and for their labour which provides us with the cheap clothes and electronics which we take for granted, let us say:

we are all in this together.

When the world economy recovers, companies of the rich world begin to prosper, when bankers get their bonuses again and the rich start to become richer, and we decide how to share the proceeds of that growth within and between nations, let us say:

we are all in this together.

It worries me that people who are interested in reducing world poverty leap so readily on the Tobin Tax bandwagon.

There are three questions to answer:

• should we spend more on reducing global poverty?
  (my answer: yes, if we have to)
• should we tax transactions in financial markets?
  (my answer: maybe, though I am not persuaded)
• should we link aid budgets to revenues from such a tax?
  (my answer: definitely not)

My answers are explained below the fold.

I can see why some people are attracted by a combination of extra money for the world’s poor and a poke in the eye for the unacceptable face of capitalism.  But to support the Tobin Tax on these grounds is at best opportunism, and at worst reveals a hostility to the functioning of markets which will, in the end, not serve the poor.

Read the rest of this entry »

Danny Finkelstein in The Times sticks up for Special Advisers.  Alex Evans, who was a Special Adviser in DFID, tells a funny story about being put at the end of a corridor

I returned from leave to discover that my office had halved in size: the wall had been moved six feet.  To create a new meeting room for the Permanent Secretary on the other side.

For the first time I can remember, I agree with Danny Finkelstein (and, less unusually, with Alex).  We need special advisers; and if anything we need more of them, not fewer; and we need to give them proper power and authority.

I say this partly for the reasons that Danny gives: we should be glad to have a diversity of ideas and advice to Ministers.  If civil servants can’t stand that heat of competition, they should get out the kitchen.  And as Danny says, the special adviser network can actally enhance effective Cabinet Government, by maintaining political conversations between government departments that do not work as well through the civil service networks.

But there is one other reason why civil servants should be in favour of having more special advisers: they help to prevent politicisation of the civil service.  For as long as we have sufficient, high qality special advisers, they can write speeches, brief journalists, write political strategies, liaise with MPs and the more political lobby groups – which prevents Ministers from having to ask civil servants to perform tasks which brings them into the gray areas at the margins of political neutrality.  So a greater number of Special Advisers does not imply an increasing politicisation of the civil service, as is sometimes claimed, but rather a protection against it.

I have worked closely with many special advisers, some of whom are now quite well known (whatever happened to David Cameron, John Bercow, David Milliband and James Purnell, I wonder?) and I found most of them to be extremely smart, productive, and responsible. Working with special advisers helps civil servants to understand the political context of their advice better.  A good partnership between civil servants and special advisers enables them to design policies and explain them in ways that are politically attractive, helping to introduce better policies which might otherwise be ruled out on political grounds.

I’d like to think that the Yes, Minister days are behind us, but Alex’s recollections suggest that, at least unconsciously, those civil service attitudes are not yet entirely in the past.

The BBC reports Gordon Brown’s speech at the TED conference today:

The power of technology – such as blogs – meant that the world could no longer be run by “elites”, Mr Brown said.

Policies must instead be formed by listening to the opinions of people “who are blogging and communicating with people around the world”, he said.

Mr Brown’s comments came during a surprise appearance at TED Global.

“That in my view gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.

“Foreign Policy can never be the same again.”

I agree with that.  I’m very proud of my team’s work to develop and promote open data standards for aid and other resources for poverty reduction, to enable everyone in the world to engage on how resources for poverty reduction are used.   It ensures that the world is not run by elites, whether in developing countries or donors.

I fear I may be turning in to Bernard, the Private Secretary in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.  Bernard is the slightly naiive, pedantic character who corrects mixed metaphors and challenges figures of speech.  (I once had a job in No.10 a bit like Bernard’s job).

Nick Robinson – the BBC Political Editor – should know better than this:

The fate of nations, of monarchs and of the British people have been sealed in the Commons.  Yet now the reputation of the mother of all parliaments has been brought low by rules written and exploited here by claims for a kitkat, a tin of pet food and a bottle of shampoo.

England, not the House of Commons, is the “mother of Parliaments”.  This phrase was coined by John Bright, in a speech in 1865, in which Bright was advocating an extension of the right to vote.  His campaign led to the Reform Act of 1867 which gave the vote to the (male) urban working class.  Bright said:

We may be proud that England is the ancient country of Parliaments. With scarcely any intervening period, Parliaments have met constantly for 600 years, and there was something of a Parliament before the Conquest. England is the mother of Parliaments.

I realise that this is pedantry. But I would expect the BBC Political Editor, of all people, to understand the resonance of this phrase and to know what it means.

From John Naughton:

The most satisfactory sight yesterday was that of Dick Cheney, looking for all the world like Dr Strangelove, being wheeled off the scene in a wheelchair. The only problem is that he was then helped into a limousine rather than a police van.

The Ethiopian Government passed a new law on Tuesday that limits the activities of foreign-funded organisations. The law prevents organizations that receive more than 10% of their funding from abroad from involvement in human rights, gender equality and conflict resolution.  It has been greeted with howls of protest by international organisations.

I’m going to make myself very unpopular with  lots of the ferenj here in Addis Ababa, many of whom make a good living working for NGOs with foreign funding and are up in arms about this. But I see where the Ethiopian Government is coming from, and I don’t think the law is completely unreasonable.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I would not have brought in this law. I think 15 years imprisonment (that was in the draft bill) for breaking this law is draconian. I do not think that government officials should have the right to attend internal meetings of civil society organisations.

But it is not unreasonable for the Ethiopian Government to say that foreign-funded organisations should not be able to use their funding to buy political influence and change in Ethiopia. Foreign donations to political parties are illegal in the UK – that is why there has been such a fuss about the allegations that George Osborne may have solicited donations from Russian oligarchs on a yacht. We are uncomfortable with the idea that very wealthy people should buy political power – that is why we have spending limits and caps on political donations – and in the UK we look rather pityingly at the United States, where funding by rich companies and individuals seems to dominate political life.  Think what this must feel like in a very poor country, where even quite modestly wealthy organisations and individuals overseas have undreamt of wealth by comparison with Ethiopians, and try to use that disparity of wealth to buy change.

So why shouldn’t a very poor country be concerned to avoid having its politics shaped by foreign funding?

There are about 3,800 NGOs here in Addis, with a total budget of $1.5 billion a year. (That is a lot of money in a country in which the annual government budget is about $4 billion a year. The government health budget is less than $300 million a year.) The money going to NGOs could make a huge difference if it were used to improve government services directly, rather that to fund a motley collection of advocacy organisations and fragmented small scale delivery organisations.

It is important to note that the new law does not forbid civil society organisations from being involved in advocacy for human rights. It forbids organisations from being involved in political advocacy if they get more than 10% of their funding from abroad.

So while this law isn’t one that I would have introduced myself, I see where the Government is coming from. It is not completely mad. The hysterical over-reaction from donors, often under political pressure from international NGOs at home, is out of all proportion.

Let me be the 10th person to link to The aspiring dictator’s guide from the Mail & Guardian Online. Here’s an extract.

Rule 3. Make America or China happy. Make Israel and Saudi Arabia very happy. Become a Muslim, like Idi Amin. Visit Moammar Gadaffi often. He likes African leaders. We do not know why. Pray with George Bush and let him see your soul. Make your country’s leading supermodel the ambassador to France and Italy. Ask her to wear a mini when presenting her papers to Nicholas Sarkozy.

From Ethan Zuckerman, FP

On his first day in office in 2001, President George W. Bush  reinstated the so-called Mexico City Policy — known to critics as the global gag rule. It prevents the US government from giving money to organizations that provide counseling and referral for abortion, lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country, or perform abortions except in cases of a threat to the woman’s life, rape or incest (even if those activities are funded by somebody else).

On Development Drums this week, we heard about the impact of the global gag rule on women in Africa, in an interview with Dana Hovig from Marie Stopes International. (Full disclosure: my partner works for MSI.)  My expert guests were sceptical that Barack Obama would give priority to reversing the global gag rule any time soon.

But this weekend, we have heard that Obama is preparing to reverse some key decisions that President Bush took using executive authority, including on stem cell research, oil and gas drilling and – according to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Bloomberg – the global gag rule:

President-elect Barack Obama will reverse U.S. family-planning and AIDS-prevention strategies that have long linked global funding to anti-abortion and abstinence education, a public-health adviser said. Obama “is committed to looking at all this and changing the policies so that family-planning services — both in the U.S. and the developing world — reflect what works, what helps prevent unintended pregnancy, reduce maternal and infant mortality, prevent the spread of disease,” Wood said.

These seems like a good time to raise the profile of this important issue, to make sure that reversing the global gag rule is on the list of decisions for President Obama to take in his first day in office.  The Center for Reproductive Rights has written to Barack Obama calling for the repeal of the global gag rule.  Now is the time to make as much noise as possible about this to generate political support for an early decision to reverse this policy.

For more information about the global gag rule, listen to the interview with Dana Hovig in Episode 6 of Development Drums (about 30 minutes in to the podcast).

As a West Wing junkie, I’m thrilled that Rahm Emmanuel may become President Obama’s Chief of Staff.

Emmanuel is apparently the model for the character of Josh Lyman (played by Bradley Whitford – pictured right) from his days in the Clinton White House.

Lyman has always been my hero in West Wing (except for that are-they-aren’t-they thing with Donna, his assistant).

Of course the West Wing scriptwriters foresaw that Emmanuel would become Chief of Staff: in Series 7, Lyman becomes Chief of Staff to Matt Santos, the first non-white President of the United States (played by Jimmy Smits).

To the managers of the banks

Every time I have suggested things you might do differently, I have been told that this is impossible as you are under an obligation to pursue the interests of your shareholders.

Now that I am – unexpectedly – one of your shareholders, I expect you’d like to know what I would like you to do.  Here are seven new instructions to be getting on with.

1.  Short-term profits are not important: what is important is long-term value.  I would like you to stop chasing short term arbitrage opportunities and overnight trading and focus on identifying and investing in the best-run, most productive and valuable enterprises.  There will be no trading in derivatives or other purely financial products.

2.  Cut executive pay immediately.  From now on, nobody in the bank will get paid more than four times the salary of the lowest-paid employee.  If you want to award yourself a pay rise, you’ll have to increase the salaries at the bottom.

3. All our branches and subsidiaries overseas will pay local taxes, in full. There will be no clever arrangements to transfer profits to tax havens to avoid tax.

4. No more junk mail trying to persuade people to take out new credit.

5. It is no longer our objective to inflate house prices.  An increase in house prices is not an increase in net wealth: it is a transfer from those who do not own houses to those that do.  We will try to dampen the housing market, not reinvigorate it.

6. Every bank that is “too big to fail” will be split up into smaller banks.  We are going to reverse the cycle of mergers and takeovers that has created these monolithic institutions that have held us all to ransom.

7.  There will be no lending for businesses or individuals involved in industries that are harmful to our society and planet.  That means no lending to any of the following: the arms trade, advertising and marketing, tobacco, extracting or burning fossil fuels, or the motor industry.   Instead, please invest more in clean technologies, technologies appropriate for developing countries, non-profit organisations and community groups.

I know that you have many new shareholders, and it will take time for you to get to know us all.  My views won’t necessarily be shared by all your new bosses, but you can be pretty sure that lots of your new bosses  think more along these lines than the old lot.

I was a bit hesitant about becoming a bank-owner, but now that it has happened, I think I’m going to enjoy it.

Work hard – but not too hard.

Yours,

Owen

I’ve never liked the name of the FT’s lifestyle section, “How To Spend It“.  But with financial markets as they are now, it seems particularly ludicrous.  How to spend what, exactly?

Sitting in the airport lounge in Washington DC today, I was a bit surprised to find a “bonus issue” of How To Spend It in today’s paper.

I expect that there are lots of investors whose main concerns today include “whether the perfect sound system exists”, “the demure allure of autumn’s flattering longer skirts” (the Cavalli skirt is a snip at £3000), and “whether corporate gifts can ever truly be objects of desire”.

I know this is all very immature, but I thought this was a funny idea (via):

when you make a donation to Planned Parenthood in her name, they’ll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here’s the link to the Planned Parenthood website:

https://secure.ga0.org/02/pp10000_inhonor

You’ll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the “in Sarah Palin’s honor” card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:

McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202

PS make sure you use that link above or choose the pulldown of Donate–Honorary or Memorial Donations, not the regular “Donate Online”

I know that it isn’t nice to laugh at the misfortune of others, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at this.

First the religious right were asked to pray for rain during the Denver Democratic National Convention:

Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family, one of America’s leading evangelical groups, was shown in a video filmed at Denver’s Invesco Field, where 75,000 are expected to cheer Mr Obama on Aug 28, asking Christians to pray for “torrential” rain.

“I’m talking ‘umbrella-ain’t-going-to-help-you rain,” the former pastor and television meteorologist said. He explained on the video: “I’m still pro life, and I’m still in favour of marriage as being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree.”

Did it rain on Mr Obama’s parade? Did it heck.

But what’s this? Hurricane Gustav has prompted a rethink over the Republican convention. John McCain said:

“But you know it just wouldn’t be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster. So we’re monitoring it from day to day and I’m saying a few prayers too.”

If the Big Guy is sending rain according to which side he’s on, then He seems to be a Democrat.

Al Gore (reported in the NY times)

“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”

The Cabinet Office has now published guidance for civil servants for blogging and participation in online sites.

How the Civil Service Code applies to online participation

The Civil Service Code applies to your participation online as a civil servant or when discussing government business. You should participate in the same way as you would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences.

Disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as a potential threat to personal security. Never give out personal details like home address and phone numbers.

Always remember that participation online results in your comments being permanently available and open to being republished in other media. Stay within the legal framework and be aware that libel, defamation, copyright and data protection laws apply. This means that you should not disclose information, make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of Government unless you are authorised to do so. This authority may already be delegated or may be explicitly granted depending on your organisation.

Also be aware that this may attract media interest in you as an individual, so proceed with care whether you are participating in an official or a personal capacity. If you have any doubts, take advice from your line manager.

Good luck to civil servants as they try to implement this. I had rather a torrid time when the Mail on Sunday chose to attack me for my previous blog.

Simon Dickson has more.

One of Tony Blair’s blind spots – as I think he would be among the first to admit – is that he has tended to underestimate the importance and value of effective and lasting institutions. As he contemplates his legacy he seems now to be coming round to understanding this.

Looking back at the successes of previous governments, we remember mainly the institutions they built as their lasting legacies. Lloyd George gave us national insurance; Clem Attlee gave us the National Health Service. We don’t remember Andrew Bonar Law much, because he built nothing. Harold Wilson famously cited the creation of the Open University as his greatest achievement.

This Government’s most notable institutional changes have been devolution, the independence of the Bank of England and the partial reform of the House of Lords: planned in opposition and implemented soon after the 1997 election. In Government, the PM has taken the view that the priority is to put in place the right people to take the right decisions. I think this is a manifestation of New Labour’s philosophy that they would go with “what works”. They would govern with pragmatism, not ideology; and that meant appointing the right people and getting on with it rather than constructing effective and long-lasting institutions that might limit their discretion.

In that context, the Prime Minister’s speech on 27 January in Davos made interesting reading, because it is all about the need for more effective international institutions:

This is my major reflection on 10 years of trying to meet these challenges, 10 years in which, as a deliberate policy, Britain has been at the forefront, for better or worse, of each of these major global issues. Interdependence is an accepted fact. It is giving rise to a great yearning for a sense of global purpose, underpinned by global values, to overcome challenges, global in nature.

But we are woefully short of the instruments to make multilateral action effective. We acknowledge the interdependent reality. We can sketch the purpose and describe the values. What we lack is capacity, capability, the concerted means to act. We need a multilateralism that is muscular. Instead, too often, it is disjointed, imbued with the right ideas but the wrong or inadequate methods of achieving them.

None of this should make us underestimate what has been done. But there is too often a yawning gap between our description of an issue’s importance and the matching capability to determine it. … Global purpose, underpinned by global values requires global instruments of effective multilateral action.

This emphasis on the need for more effective multilateral institutions is both right and important. As the world become more interdependent, there are more and more choices that we need to make collectively. These include the provision of global public goods, collective security, and mechanisms to ensure that the benefits of globalisation are fairly shared so that progress can be sustained. As I think the Prime Minister is now saying, if we do not have legitimate and effective institutions to take these decisions, we will find that we have no way to meet these needs and aspirations, nor to resolve the world’s tensions.

Britain has quite a specific long-term interest in this too. We are witnessing the rise of new world powers such as China, India and Brazil. I personally welcome this, though there is a lot of angst around about what it means for us. One thing it almost certainly means is that in 20 years time, Britain will no longer be a major world power with the same amount strategic influence at the most important forums such as the G8 and the Security Council. If and when that happens, we will depend on the existence of effective multilateral institutions to protect our interests, and those of other middle-ranking powers. It seems to me that we should be using the power that we have today, while we still have it, to put in place those institutions and build them up so that they are effective and legitimate in the future. That is a legacy for which future generations in Britain may well thank us.

G and I both ran the London Marathon yesterday, on a beautiful warm day.  G had a good run – starting at a sensible pace, running even splits, and finishing in 3:28:01.  I ran like an idiot – going off way too fast at the start, and (inevitably) hobbling home after my wheels came off at about 18 miles, for a total time of 3:04:09.

I learned some lessons again that I should have learned before:

• You can’t run a marathon well without training for it.   G and I both relied on our background fitness. But really we needed a tailored combination of long runs, speedwork, aerobic fitness, and strength.  Getting the right mixture is much more important than running in the park every day.
• If you go off too fast at the start, you will pay for it later.  It is much better to go off slowly and then speed up.  It is claimed that every 10 seconds a mile you run too fast in the first half will cost you a minute a mile in the second half.  And it is much more fun to be overtaking people in the last ten miles than to be overtaken.
• You can’t run as fast when it is hot.
• You’ll go through some rough patches in any marathon.  Don’t quit: they will pass.  I had a stitch twice, and several segments when I had to walk, and I still ran fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon.