The Cotswold Way 100k Challenge pt1

I was completely unaware The Cotswold Way 100k Challenge even existed until I came home from a night shift in October last year and saw some source material about the event on the kitchen side that had been left there by Barry, my father in law.

Barry has run the London Marathon twice, as well as countless other races over the years but after a tough couple of years suffering from niggling injuries he was looking for a challenge that would inspire him to push himself to his limits and also wanted to do it for charity. I am always up for a challenge and while I don’t think he was necessarily expecting me to want to join him, I was definitely interested.

So, after agreeing on our charity of choice, MacMillan Cancer Support, we signed up to the biggest physical test of our lives.

The pic that made our local website

Fast forward 9 months and the day itself was upon us. Neither of us had, had the kind of training programs that we’d have liked with Barry suffering with calf and hamstring issues while I also had a slight calf issue to contend with along with some lovely eye ulcers that kept me out of action for over a week.

Never the less we were there ready or not so on Saturday 1st July 2017 we were at the start of the event in Bath Royal Crescent full of mixed emotions. I didn’t really feel too nervous about what was ahead of us but then I guess that’s the beauty of stepping into the great unknown right?!

Ready and raring to go

The event had various start times and ours was 09:00. As we got there nice and early we got to see a lot of the other entrants set off on their journeys. They had the typical Zumba style warm up which was entertaining to watch and after a few nervous trips to the toilet, (like I said above, I didn’t really feel nervous but my bowels seemed to disagree haha! Come on fellow runners, we all know this is a thing!), we made our way to the starting pen.

It was here that we were interviewed by the events MC and I did a ridiculously cheesy double thumbs up to the camera! We joined in with the Zumba warm up, personally they do nothing for me but it was a good laugh at least and released a bit of the tension.

And then the count down came, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and we were off…………