marathonmummy

I’m taking part in the Ultimate Blog Party! This is my welcome post – come in and say hello. It’ll be lovely to meet you.

As an introduction, here are some little-known facts about me:

1: As a child I lived in St Kilda in Melbourne, Australia (with Mrs Hall)*. I loved it. We went to the beach after school, we had pie for lunch, we had suntans, wore sandals and had skinned knees.

St Kilda Beach, Melbourne, Australia

2: One of my ambitions (besides running the London Marathon) is to compete in the Tevis Cup, an endurance ride which covers 100 miles across the Sierra Nevada in one day. The motto of endurance riders worldwide is To Finish is to Win. I like that.

©The New Albion Stud, CA, USA.

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Easter Sunday. You were probably eating chocolate and reading the papers, weren’t you?

I was running (and walking) 18 miles with Zoe, the final long run of our training.

The whole point of the famous long run is that it prepares you, mentally and physically, for the completely lunatic 26.2 miles of the marathon itself.

The other point of the long run is to iron out the little problems you might otherwise not discover until the day, most of which you’ll have heard about. Black toenails, bleeding feet, skin rubbed raw by seams on t-shirts, and of course hitting the wall. I’m making it sound like loads of fun, aren’t I?

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I said earlier that I was dreading the moment, but the magic number is here and suddenly I can’t wait.

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I could come on here and pretend everything is lovely and that I’ve had a fabulous week. But I’d be lying.

I’m only human. I’m a mother of four children, I’m self employed, and there isn’t enough of me to go round at the moment.
I’m fundraising like mad.
Oh yes, and I’m trying to persuade my reluctant body to run 26.2 miles.
And arranging a fundraising quiz night.
And sorting out a bake sale at school.
And trying to persuade people to give me prizes for a raffle.
And organising printed t-shirts for Marathon Day.
And doing a Body Shop/Phoenix Cards party.

This week has been hard. K, my husband, has been working away, and he’s not home until tonight. Then he’s working again tomorrow.

I had to tell no3′s teacher that it was my fault he hadn’t done his homework.
I had to tell no4′s teacher that he was wearing wellies to preschool because his shoes had disappeared in the chaos of our house.
I had to tell no2′s teacher that the printer wasn’t working and I couldn’t fix it, so his homework would have to wait till Daddy got home.
I had to tell no1 that the letter she absolutely must have back to school, Mummy, fell off the top of the microwave and caught fire on the hob.

The dog hasn’t been walked.
I impulse bought a new chicken (don’t ask) and the other two are being Mean Girls to her.
There is an ironing pile in the garage with clothes in it I dont even remember buying.
The allotment police are going to arrest us for neglect.
I owe about seven hundred emails.
I have done so little work that I’m probably going to get the elbow.

But you know what?
It’s Friday.
Saying all my troubles out loud doesn’t make them go away, but it makes them a little bit less scary.
It’s okay to have a bad week, isn’t it?

Tomorrow I’m going to put on my trainers, and go for a 15 mile run.
That’ll cheer me up.

(I’ve added a new comment system to the blog, so if you want to tell me how you plan to cheer yourself up this weekend, or if you want to make me smile, just click on the little ‘comments’ tag at the side there. Oh, and the comment seems to take a moment to appear, so don’t worry if it doesn’t turn up at first. Technology, eh? One of these days I’ll just leave a post it note on the blog and you can scribble on it instead.)

Me. Because I ran 13.3 miles today.

Thank you, Milton Keynes Half Marathon, for telling me that you didn’t want any fat lazy back markers taking up time and road space. I got up today, ate a sample bowl of Kellogg’s Start (the cereal designed to make porridge seem like a pleasant option) downloaded some songs onto my ever-growing and imaginatively-titled ‘running songs’ playlist and hit the road. I decided that I’d run my own half marathon.

After the first 3.7 miles of my figure 8 loop, I stopped in at home to go to the loo. Oh, it was hard going back out again. I seriously thought about just giving up and having a bacon sandwich instead. But I ploughed on, and on, and on. The roads look like this:

and whilst I shouldn’t complain because it was a gorgeous, cold, crispy, sunshiny day, they really don’t vary. Trees, bare hedgerows, road. Road, hedgerows, trees.

I reached 7 miles and sat on a wall. I sent a message to Twitter and drank some Lucozade and had an energy gel. I realised I needed the loo again. I may have availed of a handy hedge. I was actually having quite a nice time, despite being the slowest runwalker in the history of the world. Then this happened:

It’s a song that reminds me of the time just after Dad died and it gets me every time. I sat on the ground and cried. Huge, howling, messy crying. Luckily I was on a road to nowhere so nobody saw me sitting there, and once it was over I could feel my Dad telling me to pull myself together. Stiff upper lip, old girl.

Nobody had stolen my secret stash of Lucozade, so I refilled my lovely new carrying bottle at each rescue stop.

It was really up-and-down, the run. Sometimes I was running and my feet were just boinging along and I didn’t even have to think about it, even on hills. Other times I looked at my Garmin and realised I was running slower than I can walk. I felt a bit sick at one point, which I think was my body trying a new ‘please stop this nonsense’ strategy. I had the usual chorus of grumbles from the body parts who don’t like running, but the amazing ankle support and new socks (actual running socks! who knew?) meant that my feet were floating along. Even when I was walking, and there was a LOT of walking, I was doing it at over 4mph so I can tell I’m getting fitter and better at covering longer distances.

The last mile was amazing – I felt sick, I was exhausted, but I had a sudden burst of energy and was doing much faster jogging with a huge smile on my face.

I walked in to ‘mummycanIhavesomecrisps’ and ‘canweplayoutside’ and ‘wheresmybubblemixture’. Such is the life of a marathonmummy. I escaped upstairs and did my final Paula Radcliffe impression of the day.

Yes, that’s a ice bath. Eddie Izzard swore in his programme the other day that they were the secret to surviving the long runs. He’s made of strong stuff, that man. I got in the bath full of cold water, speaking to Zoe on the phone for a bit of moral support, then poured in the whole bag of ice. There are no words to describe what that felt like, but I’ve given birth four times without pain relief, and I was using every single technique to get me through the first minute of that bath. After that it actually felt quite nice, although nothing compared to the heavenly hot bath with a magazine and delicious bath oil from Maia Skincare. I feel human again now.

At the risk of having a Gwyneth Paltrow moment, I want to say that training for a marathon is incredibly time consuming. There’s an advert which says ‘because we know 26.2 is the easy part’ and it’s so true. I spend so much time blogging, fundraising, running and thinking about running. Meanwhile we still have a house, four children, and a whole menagerie of animals to look after. My lovely husband is doing more than his fair share at the moment, and he deserves a medal. Thank you, K. xxx

PS – results are now in for the Milton Keynes Half Marathon and I’m comforted to see that if I’d entered there would have been 80 people slower than me!