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Hi everyone hope you’ve had an amazing weekend! I apologise if this post is very hyper, I’ve eaten a full bag of cinder toffee followed up with a packet of energy bites, you could peel me off the ceiling!

Today I joined 54,000 other people and ran the greatest half marathon on Earth and it was bloody awesome! I completed it in 1hr 52 minutes and 11 seconds, and considering that I’ve been dealing with an injury for the last month and have only run a few miles I am utterly elated! That time is also 15 minutes faster than my time last year!

Last night I got in some quality carb loading with this huge bowl of whole wheat spaghetti and courgette noodles in some of my Roasted Tomato and Red Pepper sauce with some brown noodles mixed in served on top of steamed savoy cabbage and topped with nutritional yeast and fresh basil:

Nom!

This morning I fuelled up with my favourite pre race breakfast of banana porridge with nut butter:

I went for some drippy almond butter and added some coconut nectar as a sweetener and for extra energy!

My work colleague helps to run a youth football team and some of the parents were running the race to raise money for them so we ended up being able to get a lift on their mini bus. James accompanied me as my official supporter bless him!

On my way to the start having just got off the bus

After a long wait at the toilets and eating some dates, aka my rocket fuel, I made my way to my starting area. Last year I ended up right at the back as I’d missed the gates closing so I made sure I went with plenty of time to spare. This year I was placed much further up the field so I was hoping that I would miss a lot of the congestion I’d experienced last year (unfortunately it made no difference, I spent the whole race dodging people!)

We were really lucky with the weather too, it was a perfect bright autumn morning! The gun went off and it took about 10 minutes to cross the starting line. I was so happy to wave to the amazing Mo Farah!

I was happily running along just about to get onto the Tyne Bridge when someone tripped me up. I went flying on to my face and hit my injured knee pretty badly.

Can’t believe my fave running pants are ruined. Good job I was wearing my knee support as that fall could have been a lot worse without it to cushion the blow!

If I hadn’t been wearing my gloves (I have terrible cold hands) I would have had very badly scraped hands too. Some lovely woman helped me up, and for a fleeting second I wondered if I should continue. But when you get knocked down, sometimes you just have to get back up and keep on going!

Obviously with my injured knee I was really worried that I was going to get the bad pain and tightness back, but I’m very happy to report that apart from a painful stinging from my fall, I didn’t even get a single twinge!

I managed to keep to a pretty solid pace for the whole race and when I checked my pace at 7 miles I knew that only a serious problem would prevent me from finishing in under 2 hours. The rest of the race just flew by, I enjoyed it so much! We did get some heavy rain but it had been getting quite warm so the rain was lovely and refreshing!

Crossing the finish line in the time I did, after dealing with my injury and having that fall at the start was just amazing. I felt invincible!

Cheesy pic alert!

After the race we waited with the guys from the football club for all the other runners to come in. I downed a carton of coconut water, more dates and a Clif Bar but when I was still hungry I had only one thing on my mind – chips! I also got a bag of my old favourite sweet treat, cinder toffee. It was delicious although I feel like all my teeth might fall out ;-)

I’ve just eaten this delicious Thai Red Tofu and Vegetable Curry with whole wheat noodles (none of my usual greens as I just didn’t fancy them for a change):

I’ve also has this amazing and very tasty smoothie:

This contained a frozen banana, frozen strawberries, vanilla rice milk, vanilla sun warrior, a lot of peanut butter and for toppings some PB&Co White Choc Wonderful and chopped Reece’s Dark Chocolate Miniature cups. Since I’m already high as a kite off the sugar I’d might as well enjoy it!

I’ve had an absolutely amazing day, I never thought I’d be able to top last years race but I think the fact that I’ve had a few obstacles to over come has made this years race even more special to me.

I’m off to soak in the bath now and have a lovely early night (plus eat more chocolate!) Hope you have a great week ahead :-)

The Red Arrows display was amazing, I loved this so much!