The Great South Run

Today was the annual Great South Run in Portsmouth.

It was a VERY chilly wait for the start gun (about 2 degrees I think); however once we were underway I quickly warmed up.

Was a fun 10 mile route going past the Nelson's ship "Victory" in the dockyard and the Spinnaker Tower...

I managed to finish in a time of 1 hour 2 minutes and 22 seconds which placed me 122nd out of about 25,000.

Chuffed with my result as it is about 3 minutes quicker than my time last year (plus I managed to beat two former Olympians...Sally Gunnell and Iwan Thomas!)

Picture from the end below:

Some nice Team GB support:

Next stop...Istanbul in two weeks time!

Gutted...no running for me today

Not quite sure how I managed this but have scratched my eye and now am only able to see out of one eye!

Am very tempted to run in Windsor today but think it is probably not wise running as a real life cyclops plus the fact I have to put drops in my eye every hour (hence during the run and also throughout the night = severe lack of sleep since Friday!)

Am gutted as I don't like missing out on races but I will enter the race again at some point in the future.

Good luck to all running the half marathon today!

Olympic fact about Windsor:

The Internationl Olympic Committee agreed in 1907 that the distance for the 1908 London Olympic marathon would be about 25 miles or 40 kilometres. The organisers decided on a course of 26 miles from Windsor Castle to the royal entrance to the White City Stadium. The standard distance for the marathon race was set by the IAAF in May 1921 at a distance of 42.195 kilometres. This seemingly arbitrary distance was the metric conversion of the 26 miles and 385 yard distance that was used for the marathon at the 1908 summer Olympics in London.

A week or so after the race my eyesight has now come back (except for 3%) but I am sure I can live without that!