On Sunday 21st April one of our Senior road running members - Emily Varley - ran a PB at the Manchester marathon and broke the Biggleswade AC senior women marathon club record with a time of 2 hours 59 mins, a superb effort! Here's Emily's view on how race day went:
I travelled up to Manchester a week in advance of the marathon to a) see my family, but more importantly b) to acquaint myself with the cool and wet conditions of the north. In the lead up to the event, it did rain every single day, and I was dreading it! All those hours on the track to be scuppered by poor weather conditions! Not to mention it would ruin my new trainers. Luckily on the day of the race my prayers were answered and the rain and wind cleared to leave cool conditions with a gentle breeze. Perfect.
My least favourite part of a race is the morning of it - getting stressed, not knowing what to eat, over thinking everything, regretting all the life choices that brought you to this moment. However, on the start line everything becomes calm, it's just you and the pain cave. I was aiming for sub 3 hours, and I knew what I needed to do.
The first part of the race went brilliantly, I enjoyed running alongside the men at about 6:45 mins per mile, feeling like a badass chick. I had a gel every half an hour and felt surprisingly good. The crowds were friendly and running out of the city centre and down to Altringham went well. They say that a marathon is actually just a 10k race with a long warm up, and I would absolutely agree with this assessment. At 20 miles I started to feel tired... manageable... but I knew the next 40 minutes were going to be very trying.
At 23 miles the wheels started coming off... I was getting very tired, but also feeling quite sick... I had the choice of really bonking, or having another gel and risk actually being sick! I decided to try a bit of gel but disaster struck, MY FINAL GEL FELL TO THE FLOOR AND WAS GONE ! What was I to do?! Luckily some people around me had spares and as I weakly started to try and eat the gel the people around me started slowly pulling away. I tried my best to keep the pace up as I knew that I had probably only accrued a minute of spare time over the course of the entire race in order to get my sub 3 goal. I knew I would be so disappointed if I didn't go sub 3, and powered through.
As we came into Manchester, I started to recognise the roads and saw some familiar faces on the streets. Thinking I was hallucinating, mile 25 marker finally came into view, and then the final straight down to the finish banners appeared. A "sprint" finish to the line finished me off and I collapsed across the line.
I'd done it though; 2:59:12 and a new club record. I managed to hobble (and I really mean hobble! ) back to the event village which was in Old Trafford and then back to the house for a very needed drink and a wash. Huge thanks to the BAC Seniors, particularly Rob, for keeping me motivated during the winter, and believing in me. Special shout out to Tim (who's helpful mantras of "if it gets too hard just give up" pulled me through) and Nick (who assists greatly in my nutrition; mainly liquid based)".