Having secured our places in the Marathon, Davie and I travelled to London with Caroline and Elaine, our last run before the race on Sunday was a wee jog round Hyde Park on Saturday morning with Caroline in tow.
The race started for us at 9:45 am which meant we had to be up and fed and watered and out for 7:30 am to catch the subway and train across London to Blackheath, we then had a 20 minute walk to the holding area at the start where we milled about for an hour taking in the atmosphere. We were in stage 6 of the Blue section so it took us a good 10 minutes to cross the line after the “Gun” then we were off, Davie then shook my hand and disappeared from view, and I settled in behind Scooby Doo and Wonder woman to follow my strategy and goal, of taking it easy with no heroics and completing the run without walking.
The course was absolutely packed with spectators and appeared five deep in places, there was also live bands and music blaring from pubs which added to the tremendous atmosphere. The only downside if there was one was the amount of runners (35,000 app) which caused a bit of congestion at certain points where the course narrowed, and in general with runners in front slowing down not giving you much room to manoeuvre.
After the first two miles there were water stations at every mile, lucozade stations popped up periodically and gel stations at mile 14 and 20, there was also Vaseline stations towards the end of the race which I gratefully made use of.
For me the race went pretty smoothly and as planned, I felt really good up to mile 20 then had to dig in a wee bit towards the end, but that’s only to be expected , I saw Caroline and Elaine at mile 22 which gave me a boost and the crowd carried me home the rest of the way. Davie had started pretty well too and was going great till the middle of the second half when he developed pains in the soles of his feet causing him to slow considerably in the latter stages. We met up at the finish and exchanged war stories and left the finishers compound where it was like a football crowd outside with nowhere to rest or settle down to have a drink, the upshot being an hour after the race after meeting the girls and putting on my clothes I took a “Dizzy” and ended up recovering in an ambulance unit for 20 minutes as my blood pressure had dropped, but I soon recovered and was right as rain.
In summary it was a fantastic experience with a tremendous atmosphere and very well organised, but I probably wouldn’t rush to do it again as it was too busy for my liking.
David McLenaghan 4hrs 3m 42s
Chris Hever 4hrs 12m 11s
