Pictures!

Here are a few of the pictures from the half marathon we ran on Sunday in Nice.

 

In the beginning it was smiles all round.

The run!

WE DID IT! This morning we woke up bright and early at 7 o'clock and put on our bright orange tops and our running shoes for the half-marathon. We went down to breakfast and ate as much as possible to energise us (and to make the most of the free food...) and I drank a silly amount of coffee to try and keep me going. With 10 minutes to go till the time we were told to be at the start we left and headed in the general direction we thought we had to go in. We were an hour early so we passed the time by people watching and dancing to Duke Dumont to warm up, before joining in with the proper warm up routine led by an overly enthusiastic man who was thrusting rather ferociously.

Pre-run chic in orange.

WE'RE HERE (Nice day 1)

 Heaven. (picture taken on our tour of the city)

Yesterday, at 2pm, Ellie and I hopped on the train and 5 hours of coastal scenery later we arrived at our destination... Nice! After walking round what seemed like half the city, we finally found our hostel and were directed to our dorm, which is a mixed dorm of 16 people. Quite the experience, needless to say. We (obviously) went straight to the bar where we bought a cocktail each for 4 euros to help us unwind after our long and arduous journey and were offered free pasta for dinner with it. Absolute bargain! As we both have a fair share of course work to do we wolfed down our pasta and rushed upstairs to do some work before going out to experience the night life. While working hard we got chatting to some American boys in our dorm who were absolutely charming and invited us out with them, so after doing a little more work we went on our way to a bar called "Wayne's bar". It is brilliant! There was an extremely good live band performing covers of popular songs and everyone was dancing like mad on the tables. British health and safety would have gone mad! One of our new friends got a group photo taken, so once I have the opportunity to steal it I will do so and upload it on here.

Hurdle #10000

When my brother, Franck, decided to run two half marathons at the beginning of the year, all he had to do was sign up, train, turn up on the day and have fun. So you would think the same would apply in France. But no. This is France, where even the simple is not, in fact, simple.

How I imagine most French people react when naïve foreigners think things will be simple in France.

Firsts all round

So this is my (Ellie) first post for the blog, and today Marie and I accomplished our first 5 mile run!

Tough is an understatement, naively I thought an extra mile would not be too strenuous but going from 4 miles to 5 is actually upping the distance by 2 km and by George, did we feel it. My legs reached the point of no return; I was unable to stop running, even at the traffic lights (we really are getting quite serious now). Marie seemed on top form, that’s my girl! 

4 mile improvement

This is now our third week of training and we have realised that Ellie is so much better at running than I am. Yesterday I woke up from a light afternoon slumber to missed calls and texts from Ellie asking if I was going to run. Needless to say no running was done by me yesterday, though Ellie trooped through. Today, I was too scared to run alone (so many weirdos in the French wilderness...), so I made Ellie come running with me. We hit four miles without too much hardship though tomorrow we have to up it to 5 miles. It's going to be interesting. Ellie and I think that this will be when we hit the 'wall' and want to quit, but we WILL NOT! WE WILL PERSEVERE! I nearly lagged today after around 20 minutes, but then when I realised we had reached our university campus (a 15 minute tram journey away!) I suddenly felt like superwoman. It's things like that that keep running interesting!

Marie x