Hola !!!!!!!!!! Thankyou very much for visiting my charity page for the Barcelona Marathon last sunday. 

Well I did it!!! We flew from Bristol and on friday and saturday Emma, Mark and I did the tourist trail. A great city with lots of culture and fabulous food! I partly regretted the walking as my feet were sore saturday evening and I had to ice them a lot. Silly Boy. And to make matters worse by Saturday evening I had a storming case of Man Flu as well. Then up at 5.45am on sunday to eat my cereal, bagel and lucozade and a walk to the Placa Espanya for the start for 8.30am. 12000 people entered and it was a very international field, but noticeably the majority of entrants were very experienced runners (resembling racing snakes) who had T shirts with at least 6 marathons completed!.

All was going OK  for the first section, past Barcelona FC's  Nou Camp stadium and the cathedrals and then at Mile 11 my foot started to ache. This was a first as in the past it has been my knee that was a problem so I was really worried. The pain got increasingly worse until I had to maintain a run/walk strategy after Mile 17. The foot by now was very painful at each step but with so much to lose I carried on. Emma and Mark were brilliant, racing around the city via the metro, being one step ahead of me and saw me 5 times around the course screaming at me and scaring the locals.

At last at Mile 26 at what seemed an eternity, I could see the finish line and saw Emma and Mark screaming at me 150m from the line. I stuck my head down, gritted my teeth and sprinted/hobbled to the finish. 4hrs 15mins 01 seconds. I had made my target exactly. What I could have run without the injury, one can only guess. Then back to the hotel, filled the bath up with ice and I jumped in!! We caught the plane back that evening and now I am feeling the soreness fellow marathon friends like Jane, Rich, Janet, Alan, Nick, Tim, Cousins Emma, Sarah and Liam warned me about!

Today I visited my GP and had an X-ray of my foot with a scan planned for later in the week. They suspect I have a small stress fracture in my metatarsals and so spent 15miles running with it! It was very ,very painful!

Anyway hope you enjoy the story and I will put more photos up soon. Thankyou all for your support, it helped me when I was at my lowest in the final part of the race and spurred me on.

Cheers

Rob

 

 

 

BUT WHY? Well I have wanted to do a marathon for a  long time after doing many halfs and seeing friends achievements. With the dreaded 40 coming up and after 4 applications to London without a place I decided to go to Barcelona which Emma and I had never visited. Moreover I decided to try to raise money for the National Search and Rescue Dog Association, a voluntary organisation who train rescue dog teams across the UK to find missing people .

As a keen mountain walker I know from experience how quickly the weather can turn when you're out on the hills and you can suddenly get into trouble. The volunteers of mountain rescue across the UK do an amazing job, often putting their own lives at risk and with their specially trained search dogs can make a huge difference in saving lives.

After my Mum (Carol) passed away suddenly in December, I wanted to run for a charity that she would have appreciated. Mum loved walking her dogs with family and friends, dog training and was very interested in true life stories of dogs that had helped improve peoples lives.  

Thanks again for reading this and if you can donate a few quid to help the search and rescue teams and their furry friends I would be really grateful.

Cheers