Inexperienced runner-London Marathon 2010- Am I crazy?? by sophia9187

So, today was the day i have been dreading, the grim challenge! We met up nice and early and shared a minibus up to aldershot. It started off a sunny day which lifted our spirits a bit. It was organised by my partners work, half of whom are serious runners and the other half are pe teachers so was pretty much expecting to be left for dust. The race started and tge very first hill made me need my inhaler so embarrassingly i had to stop (not even a mile in at this stage but it was a STEEP hill). Imagine my delight and suprise when i got to the top and two of the girls from the group had waited for me! At first i felt bad but they insisted it was just a fun run and they weren't worried about a time. Feeling quite uplifted i set off agaon with my supporters. we got to the first big puddle and instead of balancing round the edge like many others we decided to relish the puddles and run straight through. I immediately fell over pretty spectacularly and went right underneath in the process. We carried on stopping when we (pretty much just me) needed to stop. we had lots of fun on the way round what with putting camo mud on our faces and various falls ourselves and others were taking. At mile 7 my knee started to hurt and it became a real effort to get round. The girls grabbed my hands and eventually managed to drag me over the finish line. Our time was 2 hours and 6 minutes. I was actually pretty chuffed with this as it was really tough terrain and i am only used to roads. Also found out the course was actually 8.7 miles! am obviously really grateful to my new pals as dont think without them i could have finished in that time-and definitely not with the massive smile on my face. found out when we were getting changed the reason my knee was hurting-remember my fall in mile one? I had cut my knee open and it was pouring with blood-obviously the cold had numbed it. overall it was a really fun day and i will be doing it again next year. Did anyone else do it this weekend? Looking forward to getting back to familiar roads!