Iceland day 4: Marathon day part 2

We knew this marathon would be challenging but it was challenging in ways I could not imagine. I think the daylight helped a little but we could have used the sunshine. It was so cold. Colder than I expected, legs cramped up fairly early in. Once photos were out of the way the jackets were done up, as the night progressed, more layers were retrieved from the support bus, gloves, buffs, still cold! At least it kept the infamous midgies at bay.

We were walking through open wilderness, road stretched ahead of us with no buildings, no landmarks, nothing to give a sense of progression and that Lake! Always there on our right hand side. The other marathons had people, other walkers, public, volunteers every few hundred metres all cheering you on. Here we were lucky to see a few walkers up ahead of us. There were support buses going along the route, stopping to ensure we were ok, shouting encouragement and tooting their horns but we maybe saw them once an hour, less towards the end.

Being in a country that uses kilometres rather than miles we were doing just over 42 rather than 26.2. Even though they were shorter, psychologically it made it harder. The last 10k were hard. I was in pain, exhausted and wondering how I was going to finish. With the support of The Boy though I kept going, hand in hand we walked, as we did for the entire 78.6 miles of the challenge, not needing to resort to my music to distract myself from the exhaustion and pain.

It was hard, really hard but there were positives to it too. The landscape was beautiful, desolate but beautiful. There were no queues for stinking portaloos, our portaloos were whatever rock formation you could find to go behind. There were birds, horses, sheep, we even had a tiny little gosling try and join the walk, cheeping along the road until a support bus came and rescued him. The daylight helped too, it's far easier to believe you should be awake when there is light.

The last few miles kilometres I stopped feeling anything which was good because it allowed us to pick up our pace but bad because of what it was doing to my body. As we reached the finish line there was a sign with the temperature, +1'C at about 7:20am, it must have been below 0'C during the night! Brrrrrr!

We stumbled over the finish line at 7:25am, cold, tired, hungry but unbelievably proud of what we had achieved. Medals, breakfast and then into the nature baths to relax and soak away the aches... well that was the plan.

After about an hour in the baths, we went to get out. As I stood up pain shot through my ankle, radiating up my leg. I hobbled to the changing rooms. By the time I'd got dressed and up to the main part of the building I could barely walk, tears streaming down my face. I was taken to the first aid room, I was given the choice of going to get it checked out or going back to the hotel, getting some sleep and then seeing if it needed checked out. About 30 hours since any proper sleep, I chose the latter.

Sleep was fitful. We made it over to the other hotel for the awards ceremony (thanks to The Boy being good at piggy backs). We received our Iceland medals at the finish line but we were still due our 3 Land Challenge ones. I was so proud to receive my medal but so distracted by the pain. After a call to the doctor and on advice from a nurse and radiographer in our team it was suggested I get it checked out. Rural Iceland on a weekend, the local doctor wouldn't be able to x-ray so I was sent on an hours drive to Akureyri, where it turns out, they can't do x-rays on the weekend. Pumped full of drugs and hooked up to an IV drip to help rehydrate me, being in a hospital where you don't speak the language is quite scary. They would come in, speak at length with our Icelandic guide and then say a few words in English to me. They even suggested I try and sleep whilst I had a needle in my arm, sleep? I could barely stop myself from having a panic attack. Finally a kind nurse gave me something for that too. Unsure what was wrong and unable to xray I was told to keep the weight off it until we reached the UK.

We arrived back at the hotel around midnight, the staff kindly made us some dinner before we headed to bed, exhausted, emotional and high on painkillers.