Virgin London Marathon: The Post Mortem

Unsurprisingly for anyone who knows what happened to me on Sunday this post has taken a long time to come and to be honest there was question and doubt as to whether I should write it at all. Sadly there are no photo’s of me crossing the finishing line or with a big grin and a finishers medal and in just a few paragraphs I’m going to say what happened (or what I know of it…).

The day started off as planned, the clothes sorted the night before, breakfast eaten and Laura and I set off for the tube at 7am. Heading into London I got to Greenwich DLR and made the Green Start by 9am. Plenty of time to get prepared and relaxed, we had been allocated a tent to stand in so when the rain came we were sheltered.

At 9:45 the race started and off we went, I deliberately knew to hold back on my pace so this year I made a conservative effort to get my pace in around the 8:35 pace and all of my splits give or take hovered around this marker. Sadly – what I didn’t pay attention to is the Heart Rate…

As with last year – the first half was still tough, something about 13miles of a real marathon is so much tougher than 13miles on a training run…anyway, this is a marathon – it’s supposed to be tough. Onwards I pushed, 14miles – check, 15,16,17 all within reaching point of my ideal pace so all was going fine…this is when things go a little hazy and to marathon story comes to its devastating end for me. At some point around the 18 Mile point I collapsed. I don’t remember much…what I do remember is:

• struggling to breath a bit, but nothing I would worry about if I wasn’t running a marathon
• someone talking to me as I seemed to be on the floor sitting (don’t remember getting to the floor)
• me telling them to carry on – “i would be fine soon”
• waking up in st johns ambulance tent
• throwing up
• finding it difficult to talk
• throwing up more
• sweating immensely

After an hour or so, following standing, then sitting back down again twice I eventually got out of the tent – St Johns told me I couldn’t continue so I had the task of working out whether I could make it home…Fortunately an hour or so I made it home but the next drink I took in came back out again.

Four months of training almost to the book and sadly the race was over and to be honest 3 days later I’m still not sure why. I could spend hours analysing my Garmin stats, my heart rate was phenomenally high from the start (170bpm) and by 10miles it was where i would have been on a threshold run (I finally topped the reading at 188bpm). When I was taken in my blood sugar levels were through the roof and my blood pressure was low…

Obviously its a huge dent to my pride and also makes me question what I do and how I move on. I’m sure my readers may think a little less but this time I don’t know what happened – I want to work out what went wrong on this day and how I can progress on. I want to spend the next few months running with friends I have met over the last few months and forgetting about this one day – VLM 2010 wasn’t for me but no doubt there will be another run some time and another race which I will do…

Cheers for reading

Neil