Fee Docherty's London race report

After a stress fracture scare, a volcano going off and a last minute call saying I couldn’t leave the country due to unfinished business on my green card, I considered myself very lucky to have even made the start line at all.

I arrived at London Heathrow airport after a safe 10 hour flight – I was met by some of the wonderful Virgin marathon team and escorted to a hotel close to the London Bridge. They really looked after the elite athletes and I had a lovely couple of days relaxing before the big day.

The elite athletes caught a double decker bus which was escorted by police down to the start of the Virgin London Marathon. The weather was perfect, cool and cloudy. I knew I wanted to do sub 2:37:00 if I had any chance of qualifying for the NZ Commonwealth Games team. I did not let this stress me out, with my main aim to stay with the pace maker who was meant to sit on 2:35 pace and run with us to 30km. I felt great, but unfortunately the pace maker went too quick, blew up at 19km and pulled out leaving us on our own. I managed to latch on to a group of British girls who pulled me through to do a time of 2:37:55. Unfortunately I missed the qualifying by 55 seconds, however I did do another PB of 3 minutes on my 3rd ever marathon!

I am now back in New Zealand and loving the down time, catching up with family and friends. I have started back easy jogging and am planning on doing the Chicago marathon in October and take another 3 plus minutes of this time.