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.

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.

We're back!

My oh my it has been a while! Ellie and I have really been slacking! I can't believe how quickly the last few weeks have gone. We now only have 21 days till the half marathon. That's THREE WEEKS TODAY! Excuse me while I go and hyperventilate in panic...

Ellie and I have booked our train tickets and our (surprisingly nice looking) hostel for the trip, now all we need to do is get our bums into gear and start training again! We (quite obviously) took some time off for various reasons I shan't go into, but now we need to hoik it up a gear so that we don't suffer too much when it comes to the actual event.

Sadly this is how I have started to feel...

7 miles is no small feat

If you couldn't guess by the imaginative title, we've hit the 7 mile mark! Yes, week 5 of the training programme and we’re halfway through a half marathon!

The run itself was nothing short of dramatic, we started slow, my legs felt stiff, Marie had a stitch and we had 4 miles of river to run before we could even contemplate turning back. So, we expected a slow and steady 7 miler and when we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere aka Gières, a suburb of Grenoble, with a unappealing view of a motorway we were overjoyed to turn around and run the 3 miles back home. Neither of us could really handle stopping, the pain and the loss of rhythm is all too much to bear these days, so we just kept running.

Incredibly, our pace increased from 11 minutes per mile to around 9 minutes a mile and as it turns out, it was our fastest run, completing 7 miles in 1 hour 9 minutes and 58 seconds!

But such grand achievements don’t come without sacrifice, I had to submerge myself in a cold bath afterwards which was truly truly horrible. In the words of Kate Bush « If I only could, be running up that hill, with no problems ».

Ellie x

Glam Pams hit the slopes

Ellie and I have clearly been slacking on our blog posting, it's been a while! After our run last Monday Ellie's shins were causing here a lot of pain, which we believe to have been shin splints. Not ideal during half-marathon training! Dr Allen (aka Molly) prescribed rest, so on Wednesday I ran solo. I am TERRIBLE at running alone, and my GPS on my phone went haywire and told me I'd ran 2.5 miles when I was 100% sure I had only reached 1, so that threw me off track a little. Anyway, as I ran the same path as usual I have calculated that I ran about 5.8 miles, which is very impressive considering I usually need Ellie there to spur me on, and only a few months ago a 1km run would absolutely floor me. But it is week 4 of training so I'd be very disappointed if I was still so unfit. As I ran the sun was setting and I had some cheeky breaks to take some photos. It's always nice to be reminded just how beautiful nature can be.

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