Dumfries runners join 50,000 participants in London Marathon

Dumfries Running Club's Danielle Gibson and Michael McKean and Dumfries Harrier Carol Elliot joined the 50,000 participants in the London Marathon on Sunday morning.

Danielle was proud to have qualified to represent DRC in the UK Championship race held within the marathon and Michael had the designated club place awarded by the organisers.

Danielle was delighted that training for this event had raised £1,785 for Alzheimer’s Research, in memory of Janet Mattinson and Anne Crawford, and she was incredibly grateful for all the donations.

In the race itself Danielle showed superb pace judgement. She set herself an ambitious target to run under seven minutes for each mile and unusually the first few miles were her slowest as she felt her stomach was cramping.

She reached 5k in under 21 minutes and got to half-way in 88.57. She grew in confidence as the race went on and realised she had a very strong chance to break the three hour mark.

She kept even paced running mile after mile and remarkably was able to keep the same pace to the second all the way to the finish.

She crossed the line in 2 hours 58 minutes and was 187th woman in the entire race and her position of 3,127th meant that she was in the top five per cent for the whole field.

Michael was running his debut marathon and was very much aware that he had not been able to train as hard as he would have liked.

He had been bothered by an Achilles injury and had missed five to six weeks of solid training as a result.

In the race itself, he started very carefully at over eight minutes a mile for the first nine to 10 miles, but from then on in his injury hampered his progress and he was forced to walk several times which slowed him down.

He crossed the