Sunday, April 17, 2005

Because of serious problems at work and because of the flat fire David's marathon training during the last few weeks has been erratic to say the least so I think both of us where pretty unsure about how he was going to do in the London Marathon. Over the last couple of weeks he's managed to squeeze in two small runs; which isn't ideal when you have over 26 miles of London hardtop to pound around.

But with the big day upon us there was nothing any of us could do about the lack of training. All David could do was give it his best shot and all I could do was to try and cheer him on from as many roadside vantage points as possible. David, incidentally, did better at his side of the bargain than I did, as it was a lot harder moving around London off the course than on it.

In all our friend Pat and I planned to cheer on David from a total of five vantage points around the route and we hoped to hook-up with friends in a couple of locations as we went round. The marvels of mobile telephony meant David could send regular progress reports by mobile so at pretty much any time we knew where he would be. We started our roadside vigil at Surrey Quay in South London (7 miles), which we got to in plenty of time and were shouting and cheering as David flew past; looking in far better shape after seven miles than we did after two tube trips.

Traveling between our planned vantage points proved to be much harder than we had planned because of the huge number of people attempting to do exactly the same. We missed David at our second base, Rotherhithe, and had absolutely no chance of catching him at our third one either, Westferry, because we were stuck on the DLR. Luckily we managed to get to Limehouse in plenty of time to see a much more subdued David pass us by. We decided not to bother trying to catch him at the Tower of London, as there was a pretty good chance he would have passed us by before we got there ourselves; deciding instead to head straight for the end of the route.

We made it back to St James Park in time to see David making slow but steady progress for the last half mile. He was so tired he only just managed to wave at us as he passed by. A few minutes later he crossed the finish line doing a sprint clocking in just under five and a half hours; and nearly 8,000 people from the back. Pretty impressive for a first attempt.

Posted by Antz at 11:11 PM | Permalink | | |

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