Monday, 26th April – The day after/364 days to go

Having hardly been able to move the evening before, some sort of healing miracle has happened overnight and I’m pretty mobile again. Not jumping and dancing mobile and definitely not running mobile, but no longer in danger of being carted off in a wheelchair.

We leave the hotel and head for the tube station. Get off the tube early and head for a large Waterstones as we’ve got time to kill and a bit of a walk will do me good.

Get the train in the afternoon and take an uneventful trip home. The boys went under their own steam yesterday evening as they have school/college today. On the trip home I try and organise my thoughts. People I know will have three questions. How did it go? Was I happy with my time? Will I do it again? None of these questions is as straightforward as they might be. Or am I overcomplicating things? It was a wonderful experience, I was happy with my time and I would do it again. But all answers have reservations.

I had a Plan B for if I didn’t make it to the start line and I had a Plan B for if I blew up towards the end of the race. I didn’t have a Plan B for it going wrong at the start of the race.

Most of my pre-race knowledge came from really good runners who start from the “Good For Age” pen. They’re coming through the start line 20 seconds after the start and are running with a bunch of other fast runners with a limited number of equally fast runners ahead of them. When they talk about London or Berlin being “fast” they mean fast for runners who can get on with it.

I finished 4,610th. I started at the back of pen 4 at the blue start. I don’t have the stats or the wherewithal to work it out, but I must have gone through the blue start with 10,000 runners ahead of me. When I got to the three mile mark, another 5,000 runners from the red start hit the tarmac ahead of me. That’s an awful lot of concentrating on overtaking to drain the mental energies with the changes of pace depleting the physical batteries. When I got some clear(ish) space in the last third of the race I didn’t have enough left to really go for it, but I was still going past people at the end of the race.

Stats are these:

5K 00:26:42
10K 00:23:56
15K 00:24:47
20K 00:24:36
25K 00:24:52
30K 00:24:56
35K 00:25:35
40K 00:25:02
2k Finish 00:10:54

1st HALF 01:45:18
2nd HALF 01:46:02

place (total) 4,610 out of 36,522
place (gender) 4,052 out of 24,423
place (M50 - M54) 302 out of 1,850

I didn’t quite manage a negative split, but got closer than anyone I know except Tom.

I note from the results that Rachel and Mark crossed the timing mat 15 minutes after the start. This must have been a planned move as Rachel has done London twice before so it will be interesting to hear their experiences.

The reality is it was unlikely that I’d give of my best in my first marathon, particularly a Big City marathon. I’m told it’s a day recovery for every mile so I guess I won’t be pulling up any trees for the next few weeks. But 5ks, 10ks and anything up to 10 miles all sound good to me.

So Chris has done London or maybe London has done Chris. I seem to recall Tom saying that statistically “serial” marathon runners achieve their best times on marathon eight or nine. At my age that’s a bit too much for me but I’ll look around for a less busy autumn marathon that fits with my current running commitments. If not I may have to visit the most awful place in England and run the Blackpool marathon next April. Either way this is blog complete …… but I may be back.