50% of the Marathon Men can walk again

It's been a while since the last post so I figured I'd better put fingers to keys and get another blog post written. But what to say first?


Of course there is the fact that The Wannabe (me) is in the lead with the points, The Guru has steadily been increasing his mileage and The Old Hand has toyed with the idea of retiring from running.


There's also the fact that The Guru has signed up to the Luton Marathon and has desires to get a time that indicates he is "good for his age" and will therefore get automatic entry into the London Marathon.


But probably the most noteworthy news is that The Wannabe (me) and The Old Hand have completed the London Marathon and are walking normally again. Well, almost.... unfortunately The Old Hand had a slight accident in the first 10 minutes which meant that he had to travel, I won't use the word run, the final 25 miles/6+hours with a sprained ankle. He's been signed off work for the last two weeks so hopefully he'll be walking around next week.

Back to the London Marathon though, it was a great day with plenty of sunshine and no rain, at least for those who finished in a semi-reasonable time. As you can see by the picture of The Old Hand, right, he was ready for anything, apart from a pesky drain. He had his iphone on one arm tweeting out his progress every three miles, his ipod on the other arm giving him vital tunes to pound the streets to and a whole wristful of potential pace times.

Then there was me, left, with my pockets full of carb gels to give that well needed boost and an ipod, as well as my phone to hand, ready for those moments of boredom.

 

We both started the day in high spirits as there wasn't a cloud in the sky, we had our painters overalls on, a tip given to us by The Guru, and we had filled our bellies with as much free lucozade as humanly possible.

My game plan for this 26.2 mile run was to start off nice and slow, 11min/miles, in order to be able to last the course. I also figured that in order to relieve some of the boredom of running I could take photos en-route and send out to all my faithful followers.

 

As I'm sure you can imagine, it was certainly quite a challenge to run, take these photos and tweet them all at the same time but I managed it and it certainly helped me to keep a good pace and not get bored. When tweeting and taking photos my pace definitely dropped but then I was able to focus and get back on time again. The only problem came when I started to get a little tired and somehow managed to switch my camera to take photos with a blue tint! This was around the 13 mile mark just before I had a beer with a school colleague at the water station.

After the first half of the marathon everything still seemed fine but by 20 miles I had the first twinges of cramp in one of my legs. My running mantra of "Be strong, Be bold" helped me through this and I carried on running albeit slightly slower now. This pattern continued and my pace was steadily decreasing, I hadn't done enough training! Thankfully I was determined not to stop and continued on regardless of the cramp, which kept coming and going like the wind.

 

The last few miles are a bit of a blur, I remember just wanting to finish and looking at my watch to see exactly how far I had run. I remember wishing that I had trained harder and I remember thinking I wanted another beer. The battery on my phone was close to dying and although I had another one to hand I didn't want to waste any time swapping them over... I really just wanted to finish the race.

Before too long though it was all over, I had missed my photo opportunities with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament but I did not mind. It was over and I had one more marathon under my belt.

So...what is next. The Old Hand has informed me that Mersea has a half marathon on the cards and The Guru has signed up to Luton marathon. 

I may have to do both!

The Wannabe