I nearly fainted. I got through the finish line and almost fell down. A freakishly young first aid boy asked me if I was ok, with a very concerned look on his face. I must have looked a mess, I definitely felt it. But, I managed to get round without walking, and I achieved the impossible and beat my sister! Two goals ticked off makes Lou a very happy runner!
Everything started horribly early in the morning. The alarm went off at 4am, which I obviously snoozed! I did manage to drag myself up and dressed to go sit out in the corridor to eat my breakfast (I was under instructions not to wake up my boyfriend until half an hour before we left), then suddenly it was time to go. Walking from the hotel to the start was kind of cool - it was dark, quiet, no cars, just lots and lots of people all walking in the same direction. Most people were wearing the (quite nasty) race shirt too, which made it extra weirder. At the starting pen people started doing very vigorous warm-up routines (lots of bounding around and bouncing stretches, silly people!), which looked far too energetic, so I just concentrated on standing around for a bit! The first few km were very crowded and slow, but then the race went onto big, very busy roads where everyone was trying to fit in one lane, and also dodge the people stopping randomly all over the place. I've never been in a race where so many people walked, and so early! It felt like most people walked more than they ran, especially at the end. At that point my knees were on fire, my quads had turned to rock and all I wanted to do was stop and have a nice cup of tea. Or a big, cold beer. Seeing all these people running about 100m then stopping to walk made it really hard to keep going, especially when the course merged with the 10k course about 1km towards the end - ALL of those guys were walking! Thankfully, the last stretch was downhill, and I managed to weave (slowly) through the (very slow) walkers to haul myself over the line. The clock said 2:26:something about 20m from the line, but I didn't see it when I crossed, I was concentrating so much on staying upright! I started at 2:24, so my net time should be 2:24:36ish. I realised the next day that I had attached the instructions instead of the timer to my shoe, so I'll never know. Idiot me.
I've had a nice week off giving my legs time to recover, and I'm going to concentrate on short and fast for a while to change things up a bit, and give my knees a rest. Only 4 months to the next one!
