Marathon #5: April 2020 – NOT The Manchester Marathon – The one in the field

I ran this marathon for Claudia, Ben and Matthew. Claudia was born a few weeks before Emily but spent a bit longer in the unit and in hospital. I have happy memories of hanging out with her mum, Karen, in hospital.

By April the nation was in full lockdown, nobody was allowed anywhere unless essential and exercise was limited to once per day. Needless to say, Manchester marathon was not happening. Even though there was no official limit for how far away from our houses we could roam, I was keen not to venture too far and started considering laps of my garden. There were lots of stories of people running marathons in their gardens – I have quite a large garden so I mapped it out… it is 0.07 of a mile – so a marathon would have been 367 laps. I’m mad but not quite that mad! So, the field next to my house became the next plan (we did get permission from the farmer!), it is about 1.12 miles round so 23 laps for a marathon:

The ever supportive Tracey agreed to run “with” me via FaceTime, although she planned to do her run mostly on her treadmill with a wee bit outside. We entered the virtual lockdown ultra to give us the race feeling, which meant we had to start at 8am and check in via the app, then there would be a live leader board throughout the day. It was very nice to start a “race” two metres from my front door and there was no queue for the loo!

Now, you might think that 23 laps of a field would be interminably boring, but I genuinely loved it! I changed direction every five laps to mix things up and every third lap either Ali or one of the kids joined me. At the end of every lap I came right past my house where I had lined up snacks to have, sometimes putting in a request to Ali to have ready at the end of the next lap. The route passes one other house and the lady who lives there sat in her garden and we had a little chat each time I passed. I had several lovely chats with Tracey and more lovely chats with another friend, Jo, who was also out for her long run. My neighbours were out in their gardens too so cheered me on. In what felt like no time at all (but was actually quite a long time!) I had reached my last lap and the whole family joined me:

At the end of lap 23, I had about 0.15miles to go so I nipped off to do a very short out and back and came back to find this awesome finish banner:

Another marathon in the bag! And I was in the bath within about 15 minutes of finishing, perhaps I should do all my marathons around the field!

During lockdown we challenged the kids to also run a marathon by running a minimum of a mile a day, some days they ran 2 or 3 miles. Oli had finished his a few days previously but Emily had three miles to go which she did by running three laps with me. She was super proud to finish her mileage log: