Marathon Paul

Sponsored by CTWLK, our marathon man – Paul Bennet – did it again. This time as Eddie the Eagle in … snowboots. The charity he ran for this year; the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers. They are raising money to start ‘Café Project’ at the DMRC Stanford Hall military hospital to help injured soldiers and their families.

A few words of our Marathon man;

Marathon day was incredibly warm and first few miles I struggled to get on top of hydration, drinking around 1-1.5 litres of water between each of the mile markers, and regrettably from the 4^th mile my feet were already having several blister hot spots, which was not a good sign!

The support on the streets of London was as amazing as ever, getting shouts out of go “Eddie the Eagle” and go “ski boot man” although there were a lot more expletives once people realised that I was actually wearing ski boots and not moon boots!  Oddly it was the other runners whom gave me the most support as they could see me running in the boots and really gave me huge words of encouragement to keep me going.

I was lucky enough to have BBC sport stop me and have a short tv interview, although I almost forgot to mention what I was running for due to feet pain!

Had a slight issue with a faulty watch at mile 21 where I thought I only had 5.2 miles to go where actually I was at mile 19, so had to stop the watch forget the time and just focus on keeping on going.  I called my brother at mile 23 and asked him if I was on target for the record, he confirmed that I was 1 minute 37 seconds down on time and it was looking like it was not going to happen for me, so had to dig deep and it hurt!

Knowing that it was still possible and the fact that I didn’t want to let anybody down on achieving the goal I moved from fast walking to a run/ walk strategy for 1 mile, then hit mile 24 and felt that if this was going to happen I had to give everything I could and decided to shut out the pain and run as fast as my ski boots would allow me.  As you come into the Mall, signs show 800’s metres then 600 and finally 200 and I was pushing my body as much as I could and crossed the line……….

The current Guinness World Record for Fastest Marathon in Ski Boots is 5.30.27 seconds, I got the record by 0.00034% or 15.14 metres