Day 1 of the Great Barrow challenge

Our first marathon of the four. I arrived at the start about 7.15 am; it is situated at a very small and old sports club in a town called Barrow. There are people cycling, walking, and of course running the marathon. This really is unlike most marathons that people see and hear about. For example the most famous marathon in England is of course the London marathon, where I believe around 100,000 people take part and huge crowds cheer and encourage the participants on all of the way around. It really is fantastic. But this is different! There is about 30-40 of us running. And as I learnt today as we started the course, there is NO ONE watching! Each day the race we are doing is a different course and today we were told our course would be 85 percent off road. Almost straight away we were taken off the path and straight into a field. As the race continued we ran through fields, forest and total wilderness...not seeing other runners for what seemed like hours at a time.

Off road running is something I have quite a lot of experience with as I love to run in the beautiful Epping Forest, but that's normally over short distances. This however was a whole marathon and nearly all of it was off road. My god it was tough!! My legs started to feel heavy after about 8 miles and just continued to get progressively worse throughout the course. The uneven tracks, the thick mud on our trainers and the very hilly course really took its toll on me. At the 16th mile mark at our second water stop we met Charlie’s Mum and Dad and Ian’s girlfriend Claire as we briefly stopped to re-fill our bottles and collect some much needed energy gels and sweets. We only stayed a few minutes and then we were straight back into it. This is when the course took us deep into the forest and at mile 20 it’s fair to say all of our legs were really feeling it.

I should also mention we had to navigate our own way around the course. This was quite easy as we had directions and the course was very well signposted but it adds to the challenge. At mile 22 we again caught up with Claire and Charlie’s Mum and Dad but this stop was even shorter than the first as we just wanted to get day one over with. The course now took us back onto the paths but we faced some very steep hills and some of the roads seemed to go on forever! Finally we hit the 26 mile mark....but the end was nowhere in sight!!! We knew we hadn't gone the wrong way as we were still following the signs... my heart sank as we came to yet another huge hill! Finally as we got to the top the end was in sight...at 27.2 miles instead of 26!!

 We finished in a time of 4hrs 50 minutes which I am very happy with as it was a very tough course. We are now back at our base and tucking into some well needed food and getting some sleep ready to do it all again tomorrow!!