Ultra Endurance Athletes.

Grumps and I have our numbers - yippee!!!

We headed out to the Excel centre last night (on that note,what is with the crazy little DLR toy train thing? Very bizarre invention!) to register for the marathon and pick up our numbers and ChampionChip timers for our laces. Annoyingly, we have discovered that we are in Pen 9 of 9, which means that not only will it probably take us ages to get to the start line, but we will be with all the craziest fancy dress people as well... Never mind, not much we can do about that now!

At the marathon expo we also picked up LOTS of freebies (most random of which was cranberry sauce) and bought lots of useful running things. We each bought a snaztastic number belt which we can load up with our number as well as wine gums and energy gel sachets like an ammo belt.

I was slightly nervous because having read the marathon magazine, on pretty much every other page it mentions this condition called hyper-ponotami-a-somthing-or-other which means drinking too much and which caused the death of a marathoner in 2007. Terrifying! Luckily the lucozade man told me that the chances of that actually happening were very slim. He also kindly gave us a wrist band telling us exactly when to drink / have gel / wine gums etc...

More importantly, he also told us that if you run for over 4 hours you are classed as an ultra endurance athlete!!!! We were very happy to hear this and will now procede to tell everyone we meet. Although, as Grumps pointed out, this seems a little unfair to those who are actually very good runners and do a really good time and as a result come in at under 4 hours...

It was very exciting going to the expo and made it all seem very real. I am definately getting nervous excitement at the prospect of Sunday. Unfortunately I also now have a cold - the Gods are against me for this run obviously...

I thought I would add that in because what with 5 weeks of missed training, a gammy leg and a cold, it is unlikely that I will be anywhere near the target time (Grumps may well be with me but I am still thinking she should run on)... It is important that I point out all these difficulties, then either way I am a winner... If by some freak energy explosion I manage to do it in under 4 1/2 you will all be even more impressed. If however I don't then I can profusley blame the pre-commencement conditions you were all aware of and they won't sound like made up excuses...

Sly plan I know but it's good to be prepared...

(Another cracking motto I heard: Pain is the weakness trying to escape... Loving these mottos; what kind of crazy head case says something like that anyway???)