Are you brave enough to run a marathon?
It’s a common misconception that you have to be sporty to run a marathon. I’m probably one of the most unsporty people in the entire uni, never played college sport and only recently learned where Maiden Castle is – yet I somehow managed to complete the Paris marathon in under 6 hours and didn’t even have any serious injuries to show for it!
I signed up on a whim with 3 friends from college, and once we’d managed to sort our fundraising (£1000 is no easy feat – something that didn’t really occur to me when signing up!), I vaguely turned my mind to training, thinking if I was planning on running 26 miles, I should probably aim to try and start being able to run more than 5 without getting a horrendous stich and horrible blisters.
I’ll admit I didn’t train amazingly (my training attitude was the equivalent to those procrastinators you see wandering round and round Billy B – endlessly putting it off, and repeating to themselves that “it’ll all be fine in the end”).
However, the big day came, and armed with my running pouch and marathon bib, I entered my “running zone.”
I have to say, the first 10k was one of the most amazing feelings of my life – the adrenaline was amazing and made us feel like we were barely moving at all. The support on the side was immense – hundreds and hundreds of people screaming support at us all the way through, pretty much. And there is nothing like running through Paris on such a beautiful day, literally being part of a world event.
Obviously it wasn’t all like that. I soon started feeling the blisters, and it’s true what they say – the 16 mile stage was definitely a low point. There’s a slight feeling of indignation at the thought that you’ve just run 16 miles – more than you’ve ever run in your life – and they expect you to run another 10?! It didn’t help that we crossed the 16 mile boundary in some tunnel in the outskirts of Paris, with a ridiculously low ceiling and an overpowering smell of sweat, and blaring rock music being blasted out from both sides – yes, this was definitely the point when I thought “I just can’t go on!”
But I did, and crossing the finish line was as exhilarating as everyone said it would be. It was even better crossing the finish line with one of my best friends (shout out to Danae Constantine) and the muscle pain for the rest of the day was definitely a small price to pay for being able to say “I ran the Paris marathon!”
We ended the day with a well desrved Haagen-Dazs on the Champs-Elysee.