Countdown to
Gold Coast
Page 2
At 10km and
41:35 I reflected "why is this feeling so easy? Maybe the
culmination of 15 months of training under the guidance of
mentor / coach Pat Carroll was going to pay off today. Maybe
today is my day! This euphoria continued right through to the
30km mark. Up until this point, every few kilometres I would
say to one of the competitors around me "Ou est les ballons
rouge?" (Where are the red balloons) - the airborne markers
carried by each of the 3 hour "rabbits" or pace setters.
The four French rabbits
There were
four of them - Jean Paul, Phillipe, Claude and Francois and I
did not even spot one of them for the first 32 km. I kept
trying to slow down so that I could nestle safely into onto one
of their packs but no matter how hard I tried to slow, they
still seemed to be way behind - "trios cent metres" came back
the response from a French runner at around the 25km mark (They
are 300 metres behind us).
It seemed so
long ago that I was back at home in Brisbane opening my blood
test results, to reveal the dreaded words "Iron deficiency".
"How can this be?" I remembered my cry of disbelief. "This is
unbelievable - 8 days to go and I find out I am low in iron".
Over the remaining days leading up to the marathon I consumed
about 9 steaks, six bunches of spinach, a kilo of chicken liver
pate and a 250 ml bottle of Fe-Fol (a natural iron
supplement). This was all washed down with about 10 litres of
orange juice (vitamin C to help my body absorb the iron).
Don't know if it all helped iron levels but it certainly caused
a different collection of problems I won't go into right now.
The
registration process had been a marathon in itself - Quelle
horreur!
I missed the cut-off date for entries
By mid May
(heaps of time!) I had everything organised. At least that's
what I thought. My flights were aligned and booked, and my
accommodation was confirmed for a quaint French apartment in the
Marais district (great fashion, fabulous restaurants, bars,
cafes). Only one small hitch. When I went to register for
the race on-line, to my horror I discovered that the field of
35,000 had already filled! Oh La La !! What was I to
do?!! From that point, with only three weeks to go, I became
obsessive in my pursuit of a registration number.
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