One Mile at a Time: A Mum's journey from the school run to hopefully the Parish Walk finish line: Sub 4 Club

Lee and I travelled over Saturday afternoon, we had a lovely child free meal on Saturday night, before catching the train to Runcorn where we were staying.

Our friends Hayley and Dave picked us up at 7 am and we drove to Manchester, we found a park straight away and started walking to the starting area.

Dave was supporting us all so we all said our goodbyes, wished each other luck and went off to find our respective pens ! Lee went off to the front, and Hayley and I set off to find ours. We decided we would just start together, as we were in different pens, Hayley moved forward to mine. Time went really quickly and we were soon moving over the line.

Hayley and I separated when the run started as we hadn’t planned to run together, we didn’t see each other again until about the halfway point when Hayley took over me!

The run was very busy, in training I found it easy to stick to a pace but it was much harder on the day as I found you were either speeding up to get round people or getting stuck behind people. The first half went pretty quickly for me, but I did hit a wall around the half way point, I felt I needed something so took an extra gel!

I found the second half quite tough, my legs felt heavy and I was craving something sweet like Lucozade. I wondered if my legs were heavy after having a bit of rest period, due to injury in the 3 weeks leading up to the marathon? But who knows.
At around 19.5 miles I had started to talk to a guy and I pointed to him there was £10 on the floor. You could tell we were both struggling as neither of us could be bothered to pick it up! Not long after this he told me where he was from not that I can remember, but he also said he had forgotten his wallet and was hoping the petrol station would take Apple Pay. I laughed and said he should of picked the £10 up as it would of got him home.

Soon after I caught up to Nelson (Sarah Curphey) and she was struggling. Like me, she had been ill the night before and hadn't been able to take anything apart from water on board. It was great to see her, she was the first friend I met when I moved to the Island in 1998. She was Sarah Nelson back then, hence why I call her Nelson. We ran 4 miles together, she managed to take a little of one of my energy gels on, and an ice pop that a lovely lady was handing out - it was the most refreshing thing I had during the run! Nelson told me to run on at 24 miles as she knew I had my target of under 4 hours in sight.

At mile 25 I was over the moon to see Kathy and Michael ! It was the second time I had seen them on course, and each time it has lifted my spirits (I had missed them once). Our other supporter Dave I only saw once despite him being in 3 places too! It’s hard to explain how much it means to see a friendly face, mixed in with the millions of other spectators, but they definitely made my day!

The last mile went fairly quickly. I could see that, unless I had a massive issue, I was going to get my “sub 4” marathon time! Which I did crossing the line in 3 hours 52 minutes and 52 seconds .!! Such a big achievement for me, knocking 23 minutes off last years marathon and over an hour off my first marathon.!

We had arranged a place to meet at the end and Lee and Hayley were waiting for me. I asked them how they had done and Hayley casually said 3.52..! I thought she was joking I said no I did 3.52 ! She actually did it in 3.52.35 I couldn’t believe we were only 23 seconds apart at the finish line yet didn’t see each other. Lee did and incredible time of 3.17 !! People kept asking me when they were tracking lee what his number was as there were two Lee Johnson’s running - turns out it didn’t matter which Lee they were tracking as they finished less than 1 minute apart !