Thank-you to everyone for your generous support!
My wife Alison and I spent the last Bank Holiday in May in Edinburgh for the Edinburgh Marathon Festival. Early on the morning of Sunday 27th, I set off through the cold sea fret (technically a haar) from our AirB&B to find the start of the Half Marathon. The buses were full, so I walked the couple of miles with a nice group of Portuguese who didn't have exact change for the bus, and we talked.
Wow it was crowded! Start time was 8am (still pretty chilly!), so I pulled off my shoes, shoved them in my bag and put it on the baggage bus, thought that it would be a bit easier to jump on the bus myself, and went to the start of the race to "warm up".
There must have been 4000 people ahead of me at the start, it took a little while to cross the line, which made guessing my time a little difficult, but I was aiming for 2 hours. Edinburgh is steep and beautiful, and after winding through the streets discussing barefoot running, we set out along the coast to Musselburgh. The mile counters helpfully counted up the miles as i got more and more tired, and i could feel the stones on the soles of my feet. B12 deficiency is a bit of a drag for trying to run half marathons, especially when you then ignore all the warnings about sensitive feet (because of demyelination) and run barefoot. Then, less than 2 miles from the end, the mile marker said "25 miles". Yes - it felt like it (no, it wasn't true - the half marathon and marathon have the same finish line so this was the marker for real people who really run 26.2 miles - we were only at mile 12!).
At about that point Andrea McPhee shouted out encouragement and took photos.
Final time 1:57 and 57 seconds - quite a tight squeeze getting in below 2 hrs!
Many of our beneficiaries will know that we've been unable to get hydroxocobalamin at the bulk buy price we usually obtain. As a result of your generousity with sponsorship, i could find another supplier and afford to pay a higher price, so 200 boxes of hydroxocobalamin arrived a couple of days ago and Alison has been packing them ever since. 30 boxes of methylcobalamin arrived this morning so that will be the next job! They should start to go out from Tuesday onwards