We blinking well did it!!!!

Today was the day of our first big race - 10k along the seafront in Hove!

As we had 30 people coming for lunch afterwards to celebrate Sam & Carl's birthday, Saturday and first thing Sunday was manic but that was a good thing as I was very nervous about this race. Cala and I have talked about this for a few weeks now and all our friends and family know about it and I wanted not only to finish it but finish it in one and a half hours! So how did we do?

Cala and I set off at 10am, we parked at Tesco's and walked down to the starting line (just under a mile). The sky was clear, the sun was out and the heat was on! The place was packed and I didnt realise but it was a mixed race i.e girls and boys, there was 1,800 of us in all. As we are becoming real runners we thought we had better do the warm up. Thankfully we then bumped into mum, she took the very important before race photos and we gave her our blue t-shirts to hold.

They devided everyone up, those to complete in 45mins, in an hour, etc and we were off! We started off on the grass heading towards the king alfred, then it was back up to the Angel (on the grass) where Jo and Murphy were to cheer us on and then thankfully onto tarmac which is what we are used to running on. It seemed to get easier from here (I always find the first 500metres hard work when running).

Then it happened, we were running behind... Jordan, her brother and the cage fighter and we over took her and ran straight into the lenses of the paps! Yes that's right we over took someone that had done a marathon - wey hay!

We made our way down to the lagoon and I saw Daisy across the bowling green as she was jumping up and down waving. We ran on, round the lagoon, pass the steel band which I must say was very uplifting to hear and put a spring in my step. It was then back up to the Angel and on the way we passed mum and also Jo and Murphy who supplied us with water - big Thank you.

We were doing ok, it was hard at times as the sun was beating down with no breeze and it was nearing midday so it was hot. We managed to keep a good pace although at times we sped up but we knew that to keep going without stopping we had to keep at a slow pace.

It was then back on grass at the Angel and back down to the King Alfred... and finally the home stretch to the finish. At this point I would like to add that we sprinted the last 100 metres.

We had done it! We crossed the finishing line without stopping during any part of the course, received our medal, a bottle of water, a disgusting green energy bar and was greeted by my lovely family.

Our time: 58 minutes 07 seconds

THANK YOU to my mum, my lovely husband Tim, my little people Daisy and Samuel, Jo and Murphy for supporting us in our training and for coming along to cheer us on and take photos.

Also thank you to Martin and Andy for coming along to cheer us on.