"Only 26.2 miles to go!" - so says the banner as you leave the London Marathon Running Show at ExCeL in London. Only.
Most of my blog posts end up forcing some slightly tortured metaphor into a comment on living with diabetes, but not today. Diabetes is shit, hard work and makes nearly everything more complicated that it could possibly need to be. There endeth that lesson for today.
The beginning
Training for the marathon has been a rollercoaster and then some. Having put aside the shock of actually getting through the ballot in the first place, I vaguely rediscovered my love of running, only to end up with pain in my knee that slowed me down quite a lot. Having managed that, I found some of my old rhythm, but pulled a calf muscle at the start of what ended up being a 10 mile run and took most of December off.
It's fair to say training was as up and down as most of the routes you can find to run around Sheffield.
January came and brought with it new trainers that immediately fixed the burning pain in my shins, and then training got pretty serious. I had a plan (of sorts) though I daren't write in down for fear of jinxing myself further. I'd not opened the London Marathon magazine I got in October because it felt too scary to properly face up to it. Instead I stuck to three runs each week, trying to find routes around London (and Taunton and Liverpool) while I was away with work and sticking to a long run on my old routes while I was at home.
The middle
I think the sweet spot will always be training up to about 16 miles. It's over half-marathon distance, but it's not so ridiculously far that you dread lacing your shoes up to train. Once I got to 18, 20 and 22 miles, I'd pretty much fallen out of love with it, and that sense of self-righteousness/smugness that came from doing 12, 14 or 16 miles was replaced with a mix of loathing and nausea.
But something unexpected had happened... I'd somehow managed to do those long distances, up hills and through the countryside at a pace faster than my best time over a marathon course. By blind luck, will power and some sense of training, I'd actually done something pretty positive. Doing it, and doing it well seemed like a real possibility!
But nothing is really that straightforward and it all fell on it's arse pretty soon after that. The start of my first full week of tapering began with a pleasant 8 mile stretch along the Norfolk coastline. I'd picked up my fifth and sixth blister by this point so was managing pain and discomfort in a variety of ways already. A couple of days later I went out to repeat the same route - after all it's rare you get to run by the beach in Sheffield. And then something went. Not with a bang or crash, but with a twinge and a "ah bastard" muttered under my breath.
I walked/limped the last three miles home, convinced that I'd blown it, that six months of training, pain and sacrifice had been washed away like the tide on the beach. The last three weeks have been filled with ibuprofen, Deep Heat, massage, phyio and acupuncture - anything to get me ready. What's been missing is running, and with that comes doubt.
The end
The marathon is three days away and the build up to race day is like the build up to your exams at school. "Have I done enough?", "What if I just tried a bit more?", "I don't think I'm ready" - all that stuff floods your mind and really it becomes a battle of your own mental state, not your physical one. I've been preparing myself for the worst because I'm a glass-half-empty person a lot of the time. It's easier to imagine the bad stuff than the good stuff. It's easier to think that my leg will give way inside the first mile, rather than think that if I get to Tower Bridge and the halfway point, I've done the worst of it and it's running home from there.
The physio has narrowed my pain down to tight hamstring in my right leg, but is supremely confident that if I'm sensible and leave Mo Farah to run his own race, I'll get round mine. And she's right. Of course she is. No it won't be pain free, but it wasn't going to be anyway. It'll hurt, but I can make it from start to finish.
This is me
What's been hardest to stomach is that fact that I'd put myself into an improbable position that at a month before my 38th birthday I could have run a personal best for a distance I'd not seriously considered until six months ago, didn't really start training for until four months ago, and that I last did 5 years ago. That's gone now - I know that - but as we're all our own worst critics, I can't stop beating myself up for it, even though it's completely out of my control.
Too many people have put their faith in me for me to not make it round. Too many people have donated their money to a cause and a charity I care so desperately about for me not to finish. Too many of my colleagues will be around the course on the day to cheer me, the other 145 Diabetes UK runners, and the other 40,000 people for me to fail. I might fall a little short of my own standards or expectations, but theirs are the ones that count the most.
Only 26.2 miles to go...
I'm raising money for Diabetes UK because I've lived with Type 1 diabetes for something like 17 years and it's crap. I manage it pretty well, but it's devastating condition that can lead to sight lost, lower limb amputation and a whole host of other dreadful things that nobody should have to live with. If you'd like to donate to them, you can do so via my fundraising page, and please believe me that every pound makes a massive difference. While I work for Diabetes UK, I have no control over how your donation is spent.
If you want to follow my progress on the day, you can download the London Marathon app and track me using bib number 10850, or look out for updates before, during and after on my Twitter
