The good news is, I finished the marathon! wahey! the bad news is as follows...
It was all going well until around mile 13. I was keeping to my planned pace and was enjoying the race when my back started to twinge a little. I pulled off to the side of the race and stretched and whatnot, started running again and it was fine for a little while, but then I had to keep repeating the stretches and the pain was getting worse and wasn't going away with stretches, so when I got to mile 17, I found a first aider and asked if they had deep heat or painkillers or something. They didn't. They could, however, offer me an ice pack, so I accepted, except it wasn't all that cold. Then they wanted my details and everything I said, the woman wrote down incorrectly. I gave phone numbers that she wrote down in the wrong order, I spelt my name "F-A-Y-E" and she wrote "Fayi," this was exceptionally stupid behaviour since I had 'FAYE' written across my t-shirt in 6 inch high letters! I appreciate that she was probably a volunteer and all, but all I wanted to do at this point was get moving again, and in all fairness, I could have filled the damn form out myself! All this tallied up to a total time of 22 minutes wasted with first-aiders who actually didn't help me in the slightest.
When I finally got away, I had to pretty much limp the rest of the way, with the occasional jog followed by realisation that I was walking because I was injured, not because I was lazy, and that it hadn't improved much in the last 5 minutes.
I got chatting to some lovely people on my way round though, and to look on the bright side, if I had been in that much pain and wasn't running for charity, I wouldn't have completed the marathon. I'd have gone to the pub.
I looked up the symptoms, and although I think the problem mostly stems from the car accident that I was in last year, I also think that my legs are a lot stronger than my back which is great until your legs start to tire and you need to use the rest of your body, so I will try and do some exercises to balance me out a bit.
My next challenge is Juneathon! It's a nice way to ease back into exercise and I like the way that it gently bullys one into exercising, through the feeling of failure if you don't. After that, I think that my next race will be the Wolves half marathon. Even if my back does play up in that one, it lasted 13 miles in this one until it started playing up, so I'd only have .1 mile left to do anyway! For more info, click here.
I was hoping to go for a run today, but had to get up early and wait for a sofa to be delivered at my parents' house, and you can guarantee that if I leave the house, it will turn up. So I wont. Maybe this evening though.
