Edinburgh Marathon

When I started writing this blog I was very keen that it would be about Kilimanjaro and not be covering things in my general life, unfortunately the closer I get to going (now only 115 days!) the lines between things I am doing for me and things I am doing towards Kili seem to be getting more and more blurred.

Anyway I ran the Edinburgh Marathon on 23rd May and completed it in 5 hours 1 minute and 30 seconds, not the greatest time ever set (the winner was under 2 and a half hours!) but I have at least completed a marathon!
I’ve wanted to complete a marathon for a long time. I’m not sure if it was one of those pipe dreams that I would never really complete and just continually dream about or if one day I would do all the training and complete it. Anyway I have got to the point now where I registered for the marathon and had a hotel booked so I at least had to go. Plus Darina had ran the Edinburgh marathon the previous year and said it was the UK’s easiest marathon (flat, it was still 26.2 miles) as well as being a fantastic city to see.

Edinburgh is a beautiful city and well worth visiting, seems strange that I am 37 years old and my only trip to Scotland previously was when I was a kid going on a Hoseasons holiday with my parents.

We drove up on the Friday morning and got there at around 1.30pm, after dumping the car at the hotel we took a walk in to town. The weather was around 24 degrees which was perfect for sightseeing and over the Friday afternoon and Saturday we managed to cover a lot of the town without doing anything too strenuous that would jeopardise our waking up fresh for the marathon, the only problem in the whole town was that at bus stops people waiting do their best to obstruct as much of the pavement as possible then tut and complain when you push past them or ask them to move! After a completely sober Saturday night with a pasta meal we headed off to bed to prepare for the next day……

On Sunday morning we woke up at around 7am to find a beautiful grey sky with light rain. Everyone in the hotel was down for breakfast at 8am and even though the hotel was only offering croissants and toast for breakfast he was still a little overrun. We left at around 8.30 to grab a bus to the start point, this was all quite well organised and after leaving our bags with a dedicated truck we made our way to the start point. There were different areas to start and we were pretty much at the back based on our expected finish time.

The marathon was due to start at 10am and duly at around 9.50am the sun that had been present for the previous week came out and all of the clouds dispersed, great! A little too late to worry too much about the temperature or applying sunscreen now though!

I’m not really sure how the marathon started whether it was a gunshot or a whistle but eventually we were all suddenly trudging slowly forward through all the different start areas until we eventually crossed the line and started to run. The first water station was located just after mile 3 and quite near our hotel, I grabbed a bottle and carried on running, after a couple of drinks from the bottle I tipped the rest over my head in an attempt to cool down, this felt fantastic and cooled my head instantly and as the water ran down and soaked my t-shirt the rest of me cooled down quickly. Unfortunately as I carried on running with a wet t-shirt this began to rub my nipples after only 5 miles, by 26.2 miles and after various other soakings they were raw.

I’d like to say a massive thank you to the people of Edinburgh. Most of the roads we ran on were completely closed off and had signs requesting people to not park on the street from around 5am until 6pm so they had been massively inconvenienced yet they were still there to continually clap and shout for every single runner over several hours (It took me a couple of miles to realise that the people on the side didn’t know the names of everyone but were just shouting encouragement based on the name on the running gear, duh!), offer orange segments and jelly babies and even some of them to soak us with hosepipes which was greatly appreciated!

The route that we were running started in the city centre but finished in a separate area called Musselburgh, as part of the run it looped back on itself so on one side of the road I was doing mile 12 while I could see the race leader completing mile 23 on the other side of the road, he would be finished in around 20 minutes and I wasn’t even half way around! That kind of knocked my motivation a little!

I managed to run continually until around mile 16, I then stopped to walk for a few hundred yards and then started to run again, but from this point on it was very much a hobbling run and walk. I’m not sure if it was down to exhaustion or anything else but by about mile 19 though I had also become an emotional blubbering wreck! A family had come to wave and cheer the guy in front of me and as he stopped to hug his daughter I was near tears. A small boy on the beach was offering some raisins to runners and then running back to his mom to get some more and then coming back to offer them to runners and an elderly man that was wearing a leg cast and playing bagpipes that I saw at mile 6, 14 and 22 also had me in tears!

As the miles counted down and I eventually saw the 25 mile mark I started to run more again, there were more people on the side cheering on at this point and it really is incredibly motivating to make you run when random people are cheering you on to the finish line, so I ran a large chunk of the last 1.2 miles and eventually crossed the finish line and collected my medal, goody bag and a final bottle of Lucozade sport that was finished within seconds of me receiving it!

When we eventually met up at the end (and after I had waved desperately trying to attract the attention of some random woman that I thought was Darina crossing the finish line when the real Darina tapped me on the shoulder) we made our way to the shuttle bus area back to the city centre. Although the marathon had been impeccably organised until this point the buses were terrible, after completing a marathon we then had a 2 mile walk to the point where the buses were! Come on Edinburgh, we’ve just ran 26.2 miles give us a break!

We caught the bus back to the hotel and then went for a shower where we compared the various sunburn patches that we had along with the other various aches and pains. Then we headed off for a well earned trip to Pizza Hut and a few beers in a Czech bar that we had found on the Saturday (Darina (who is originally from Czech in case you didn’t know)) asked the barman of he was from Czech which he replied no in a very Scottish accent and she then launched in to several sentences of Czech where he just stared at her!).

To cap a fantastic day the Czech republic also won the Ice Hockey world cup tournament beating Russia (the winners of the previous 2 tournaments – I didn’t know that either), which we celebrated with a few Czech beers in the Czech bar with no other people who cared whatsoever!

As a summary lessons to learn for anyone who decides to do a marathon
1 – Wear sunscreen (was that by Baz Luhrman?) regardless of the weather at the start.

2 – Take a binbag to keep you warm at the start, you may look silly but it will keep you warm.

3 – Stick your name in big letters on you somewhere!

4 – Try wetting the top you plan to use for the race and running in it in advance, you may look silly when you try it but believe me you will thank me on this one more than any of the others!

5 – Try to choose a route that doesn’t loop back on its self.