Melanie Feldman runs the London Marathon
Huge congratulations to Melanie Feldman who ran the London Marathon in April. She completed the 26.2 mile race in an impressive 5 hours and 41 minutes. We are very grateful for her hard work raising funds along the way.
Melanie shares her story below:
“The London Marathon is an iconic event and it was a great privilege to be able to take part with international champions and 42,000 other heroes. I’ve learned a great deal through 6 months of training and had fantastic support from my family and friends & colleagues at work. I was part of a Facebook support group for novice marathon runners and that made a huge difference to my preparation with tips and confidence building from a 7000-strong online family. Thanks go to Helen Phillips (The Cheesecake Runner)!
I feel the cold and having spent three hours at Blackheath in the blue start zone I was shivering by the time I got going 45 minutes later. The first half went well; I had been aiming to finish in around 5 hours. Seeing my family at mile 11 was a huge boost. In the second half though I started to get sore and feel sick. The mind remained excited and willing but the legs got stiffer and stiffer. I was desperate for the boost of seeing the family at mile 18 in Canary Wharf… that was the toughest section. From mile 20 I found it was more painful to walk than to carry on my slow jog. By then it looked more like a cyberman shuffle than any sort of running but I was still loving every moment of the day. I crossed over the line in 5:41.
It has been a great experience. Something completely different to my usual life as a colorectal surgeon and mother of three. Raising money for The David Nott Foundation and Bowel Cancer UK has been very important to me. The fundraising has revolved around food – cakes piled up at work with a donation box, fundraising dinners, lastly cake sales at my daughter’s school every day in the week before the marathon.
At the end of the day I felt that 26.2 miles is hard – hard training, time away from the family, the weariness if running whilst working and still being part of a family. Half marathons should be enough from now on. But then I entered the ballot once more, so who knows? Maybe there will be another opportunity to experience it once more.”
Well done Melanie. Words cannot do justice to how proud of you we feel.