Marathon DONE!

MARATHON DONE


After 5 months training in the wind, rain and too often snow  marathon day finally came sneaking up on us.

Unfortunately the road to Edinburgh was not as stress free as one might have hoped! 6pm departure from London Kings X, very slowly turned into a 4am Edinburgh arrival....

This seems to happen to me A LOT.  I can't remember the last time  I actually paid for a train. 'delay and repay' refund vouchers seem to be my preferred currency. The lure of the 'luxury' easyjet option periodically rears its head, only to be quashed by another voucher landing on my doorstep...

Why is it so difficult to get to Scotland! There is definitely a hole in Hadrian's Wall now... No wonder so few people head north when you can get to mainland Europe in an hour! Saying that - without even a smidgen of bias it is worth the trip I promise!

After we successfully slept off the train lag from the 'night' before we rose to a sunny and hot (yes you heard me right) Edinburgh. Not wanting to strain ourselves before the big day we took a leisurely stroll through town and I forced the sights upon Ellie - my running partner in crime. I have to admit I got a bit snap happy, as it's not often I get to be the tourist in my home city. 

Ellie finally managed to drag me away and we went home to overdose on carbs. Two large plates of pasta later and we still felt peckish. Better have some cake just to seal the deal. It's fair to say my mother was pretty horrified at the ease it went down!

Bed time arrived and I dropped off surprisingly easily considering what lay ahead...

I woke up not quite so at ease with a pounding headache and ready to vomit! The nerves had got the better of me. Either that or the cheeky glass of bubbly we had with dinner was not quite such a good idea!

When we got to the start line, everything seemed to calm down and thankfully adrenalin took over. With a panic toilet stop just before we began- we crossed the start line by ourselves! Not quite the atmosphere we needed to gee us on! But in the end, being able to speed past the slowcoaches now in front of made us kick up the pace we needed.

So I won't go into too much detail. It was mentally and physically knackering, but somehow we kept exactly to our 10min/mile pace and happily hit target @ 4 hours 22 minutes.

It's not the fastest in the world, but that was never the aim! We kept running and we more importantly wefinished! Hurraahhhhhh I highly recommend the thrill so go for it!* 

*please note that if asked at mile 20 my response might have not been quite so keen ;)

Here we are at the finish line with our medals!

Uh ohhhhhh I've got the BUG...when's the next one ;)