Tara runs 8 in 8
8 marathons. 8 days.
Day 4: Mayfield to Eastbourne
Date: Wednesday 29th April 2015
Miles: 26.2
Time spent running: 4:25
On Wednesday morning I awoke so hungry that I could have eaten Christmas Dinner with all the trimmings, for a family of four. We didn’t have any, so I made do with a bowl of porridge and a hot chocolate, another bowl of porridge and another hot chocolate, a flapjack and a packet of chocolate buttons.
Today’s run was to set off from Mayfield School, where I work and where both Lucy and I went to school. The PE department (notably my friend Jules from Day 2) had organised the first 2 miles of the marathon to be run around the school grounds, and then to run past the main building during morning break to a great big send off!
As I pulled up in the school car park, polishing off the last of my buttons, I caught sight of a crew of keen and rather cold looking runners sheltering from the rain… It wasn’t a very nice day! We decided to set off straight away, and flanked by Pippa, David, Judith and a few Sixth Formers, we plodded around the sports fields, tennis courts and athletics track a few times, before setting off up the hill to the crowds waiting in front of the main building!
The running crew escorted me out of the school gates, and then I was on my own. I plodded down the high street, down towards Newick Lane, and cursing the fact that I’d forgotten to charge my ipod (AGAIN) I told my foot to shut up and hobbled off towards Heathfield. I can, in all honesty, say that this was the hardest run of the lot. It was cold, raining and windy, my own company wasn’t so inspiring after the buzz of the night before, and I simply did not have any energy reserves left in my muscles. Running two marathons within 24 hours is really a very challenging thing to do, and I should have foreseen that I wouldn’t have enough time in between to refuel properly. Anyhow, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I did have a large (LARGE) supply of jelly babies and chia flapjacks and so on, so it wasn’t all bad, just quite boring. At Heathfield I joined the Cuckoo Trail, and knew I just had to follow that down to Eastbourne. I had calculated that I would reach Shinewater Park (where the Eastbourne parkrun is held) at approximately 24 miles, so I was anticipating a lap of the park to finish the last 2 miles.
The Cuckoo Trail is pretty flat. I do a lot of my long training runs on it, so I am very familiar with it, and there is not a lot to look at, and not a lot to distract from painful feet! Anyway, the miles passed, as they do, and I was soon at Shinewater. Only horror of horrors, I had not run 24 miles. I had run 21. ARGH! It was cold. I was cold. It was raining. I was soaked through. The park is not big enough to run a 5 mile loop so I just ran backwards and forwards, and round and round the park until, after an eternity, the garmin beeped and I reached the magic 26.2.
Then, like a mirage, a blue umbrella appeared in the distance. It was my mummy and daddy, who had come, with Leo to pick me up and take me to Wes’s Tempo Run Shop in Eastbourne for tea and a recovery flapjack.
Tempo is great, we drank tea, ate flapjacks (WHICH WERE REALLY REALLY GOOD) and talked about running a bit while Leo threw a small ball around, he was very happy! Then it was time to go home.
It was when I stopped running on Wednesday that my left leg started complaining. Seeing as ignoring injury seemed to have served me well so far, I decided to follow the same policy, and went home to stuff my face with a very large serving of lasagne (kindly supplied by Mary and Peter), cake and lasagne for pudding.