Marathon #7: June 2020 – The Virtual West Highland Way

I ran this marathon for Owen and Tyler, two brothers who both spent time in the unit, but eleven years apart.

By now I had pretty much lost track of what race I was supposed to be running and whilst looking for a new challenge (because apparently running 12 marathons in 12 months is not quite challemge enough!), along came the virtual West Highland Way race. This is an iconic event in the Scottish ultra marathon calendar, it’s always a brilliant weekend, but I have never run it, so I jumped at the chance to join in the virtual version of the race which meant 95 miles in 9.5 days. Obviously I kicked it off with a marathon and naturally, Tracey joined me!

This time we decided to do a coastal route from St Cyrus and the weather was, well there is only one word for this type of weather….

We blethered our way from St Cyrus down to Marykirk then up to Inverbervie before stopping for a well needed chocolate eclair. We then headed back along the coast, on beaches and very overgrown paths, leaving our legs quite tingly! And when we got back to the van we made it up to 27 miles for ease of counting WHW miles! And Rhona and Michael wrote another limerick!

The hardest part about this marathon was that when I had finished it, I still had 64 more miles to run over the next 7 days, but at least I got to enjoy it with friends (one family at a time!), even virtually with Rebecca in France and I persuaded Oli to join me too. Tracey and I hooked up again one week later to finish the job off (except we accidentally overshot the “finish line” by 3 miles!):

Despite the awesome t-shirt and buff I got for the race, I needed a medal for my 12in12 rack so I also entered a virtual race raising money for the NHS.