The Thames Path 100

Well this was it, the morning of my first 100 mile race and boy what a snow storm to wake up to.

We (myself and bro-in law Phil, my crew man) stayed in a hotel the night before and noticed at breakfast that Mimi Anderson was just heading off so I quickly introduced myself ,i feel as if I have known her for ages, reading her blogs and chatting on facebook etc so was nice to actually meet in the flesh(so to speak).

Got to the registration and was starting to feel very nervous especially looking around at all the experienced faces in the crowd. Had I done enough training, was I indeed ready for this,i knew deep down I had trained very hard and put many miles in, but was 6 fifty mile training runs going to see me through this . Well it was time to find out as the countdown to the start had begun .

Due to the flooding the race had to be re-organised and what a fantastic effort from the Centurion team to even get this race on.

I purposely started as far back as possible mainly because I always seem to go off to fast at most races.My aim was to run 10 minute miling for as far as i could or at least get to 50 miles in 10 hours giving me 14 hours to get the one day buckle,which as it was, worked out perfect hitting 50 miles in about 9:30 and on the plus side I felt great although the conditions were very grim and getting worse by the hour.I made my first mistake here changing kit ,clothing was fine but changing shoes from my Salomon Speedcross to Adidas Kanadia was a massive blunder as my feet had swollen quite a bit .Dont get me wrong the Kanadia shoes have been perfect in training along the muddy South Coast Path all winter but they just couldnt cope with the Thames Path mud.So lesson number 1 is to have 2 pairs of identical shoes or not to change them.

So on into the night and this is where I was in uncharted territory for me ,52 miles was the furthest I had ever run and that was on my 52^nd birthday (what a treat ), but incredibly I still felt great .

I had an achilles tendon worry for a couple of months beforehand but it seemed to be holding up ok .Through the night I put my ipod on(unusual for me) but really think this helped (David Bowie you are awesome).

Also ran straight past one of the aid stations and ended up doing 1 mile up a road before realising what I had done and heading back (lesson number 2 concentrate more)

I got to mile 82 in 17:02 hours which I was amazed at and so happy and was still feeling great,but that didnt last long.After I left the Windsor aid station I tripped over for the 3^rd time in the race and felt the Achilles really stretch badly and from there on it was just a really painful walk ,run shuffle to the finish.The last stretch from Windsor to Cookham and back to Windsor took me 6 hours 20 minutes which is still niggling at me in the back of my head ,but i will have to try and forget that and be pleased with my finish time of 23:22:10 . The actual mileage for me ended up 106 miles.

A massive thank-you to Phil for crewing me in freezing conditions and doing a great job looking after me .

Another massive thank-you to all the volunteers ,we really could not have done this without you you are all amazing.

Finally congratulations to the Centurion Running team for all your hard work to get this race on it was fantastic.

Chris Edmonds