I am alive

Thank goodness. It wasn't a certainty by any means, but I made it through the run alive. I got up at 5am, left the house at 5:30am, drove downtown and spent half an hour trying to get into the car park, then got hassled by some scary squeegee begging person and found out that the pay and display machine wasn't working. You were meant to ring the number provided and type in your credit card details, and it paid electronically for you. But as I cunningly hadn't brought my credit card (I was running a damn race after all) I couldn't do this. So I found a traffic cop and asked him what to do, then just wrote a note and stuck it on my dashboard saying the machine wouldn't accept my credit card and I had to go and race so couldn't pay. It seemed to work - my car was still there when I came out, sans ticket.

So the race wasn't too bad, or at least I don't remember it as too bad now the pain has subsided. I was following the 2hr pace bunny (girl from the Running Room sports store here, with bunny ears on and a suggested time written on them) until about 4.5 miles, when my feet decided to get blisters in a rather unexpected place - think inside of feet, about 2 inches below the big toes, on the side of your foot. This slowed me down considerably, and I dropped off the pace. However, I was still with the main pack, so I wasn't too bothered, until 9.5 miles when my digestive system decided that it had had enough and would like to expel everything possible from inside my body. Cue ten minutes inside a porta-loo, and I dropped even further off the pace. So I struggled through the last 3.5 miles determined that I wasn't going to allow myself the indignity of finishing in over three hours, and finally made it through in 2:54. The good side was that the actual running was quite easy, once I got into it, which gave me hope that without the blisters and the stomach upset, I would have done quite well. Or well by my standards. The scariest thing was that when I was on the last mile, coming into the stadium, the guy who won the marathon ran past me, having started half an hour later than the half-marathoners and done twice as many miles. His time was 2:15 - for 26 miles! That's just over 5 minutes per mile - ouch.

Anyway, I survived (though there were moments in the porta-loo where even this was uncertain) and I am still just about walking, or hobbling. I came home, had a shower, and then went shopping with Denise, Christie and Emily, since keeping active seemed a better bet than stiffening up by sleeping. And I feel ok today, if slightly achey and about 60 years older than in reality. Hoorah!!